Feature Stories

Plus, HEN CITY: Clubs, classes, and more resources for backyard chicken farmers.

Christie Wahlert of SoBro Egg Factory: “We are in egg overload at the moment and have even begun selling them to friends and giving them away. My hairstylist got a six-pack of eggs along with her normal tip the last time I went in.”

Having a backyard chicken coop is no flight of fancy. Here’s everything you need to know to keep your flock happy and healthy—and all of your eggs in one basket.

“At the end of the day, I have to make some very tough decisions that will not sit well with people. But they’ll understand why I made the decision and what my thinking was.”

“I marveled at the evidence of Jacob’s precocity, but in truth, the new normal was still hard. In particular, we weren’t making much progress on real conversation. … Simply put, social skills are far more important than academics in kindergarten.”

Millennials are the largest generation in U.S. history—and Indy’s suburbs realize they have to attract them to thrive.

Editor’s Note, March 27, 2013: This article originally appeared in the July 2004 issue of IM alongside this feature story. In 2009, actor Johnny Depp played Dillinger in the movie Public Enemies, about the Indiana desperado’s notorious Depression-era crime spree. Earlier this month, the Indianapolis International Airport announced plans to display Dillinger’s 1933 Essex Terraplane. […]

His knees cracked down onto the cold, hard concrete floor. Jarhead followed him with the still-warm barrel of the gun. Touched the rear of Dote’s skull. … Jarhead was restless and a bit worried. He hadn’t beat on a bag since the robbery. He needed to expand his lungs. Feel some flesh give.

With all the noise surrounding new Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz, will her agenda of slowing down reforms advance? Or is her voice—and those of her supporters—bound to get drowned out?

Inside Crooked Creek Elementary School’s cafeteria, Glenda Ritz wielded a scalpel, in-structing about 100 fourth-graders in the art of dissecting a spiny dogfish shark. The smell of the dead specimens, spread out on metal trays on top of blue table covers, filled the air. It was a lesson she had delivered—and a procedure she’d performed—more than a dozen times throughout her 33-year teaching career.

These are the shocking, headline-grabbing crimes from the 10 most notable killers, kidnappers, and thieves ever to prowl the underbelly of Indianapolis.

What turned a simple robbery into a triple homicide remains an open question. If Raymond Adams indeed killed all three victims, why would the small-potatoes con man engage in such senseless savagery?

Co-author Bettie Cadou was a longtime reporter for The Indianapolis News and taught journalism at Butler University and IUPUI. After her death in 2002, she was inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame. Brian D. Smith is a former IM senior editor.

Something just wasn’t right, and Connie Ballard knew it. Three weeks earlier, one of her best patrons, a kind, elderly man named Milt Lindgren, had come into her automotive-repair shop to tell her that he was planning a roadtrip, and that he wanted the oil changed in his van before he left. But he never returned to have the work done.

Deborah Provisor doesn’t fit the stereotype of a child molester.