News & Opinion

As you hold the redesigned Indianapolis Monthly in your hands this month, you can clearly see change is afoot—and I couldn’t be more thrilled.

Chris Carlson left Indianapolis with his three grandsons for a male-bonding adventure in the Grand Canyon. Then he went to prison.

Anderson says she wants to focus on the future, one that now looks glamorous. But her liabilities, brought on by years of financial missteps, keep her tethered to the past—and to Central Indiana.

Jimmy’s parents sent him to live at Muscatatuck in 1952. It was a state-run institution for people with developmental disabilities, a place where parents sent children with nowhere else to go.

“We are all defined by our fathers,” says Bishop T. Garrett Benjamin of Mmoja Ajabu. “Everything we do in life is either in honor of, or in reaction to them.”

Phil Ferguson pulled off one of the biggest frauds in Indiana history, duping clients out of millions of dollars and staying one step ahead of the law.

Although she is one of 238,000 truckers living in Indiana, a state with more drivers than almost any other, Charci is easy to pick out at a crowded truck stop. Only 5 percent of drivers are women.

David Gundlach died suddenly and left his fortune to the struggling Indiana town. But three years after Gundlach’s death, the picture of Elkhart’s mystery benefactor remains just a sketch.

After one son died in a house fire, Kristine Bunch of Greensburg did 16 years for murder and arson while separated from her other child. Eventually she won a grueling fight for freedom and a chance to be a mother again. But some things, she discovered, were lost forever.

My old neighborhood used to be a nice little place to live. But since I moved back, rampant crime has made it a desperate, dangerous wasteland. It just took a botched burglary at a friend’s house for me to wake up and see it.