From its early days, Texas Monthly has proved a pioneer in the true-crime genre, and former editor in chief Greg Curtis’s massive feature “The Girl, the Con Man, and the Massage Parlor King” remains both an icon and a staple of the Texan true-crime story—which is to say, the story is absurd, folksy, and horrifying.
For Texas Monthly, it’s also an origin story. When Greg Curtis first met Sam Corey, the massage parlor king, Curtis had not yet become editor in chief of the magazine—and Sam Corey had not yet become a murderer. This was the beginning of the seventies, and Curtis was brand spanking new to reporting. Before starting as a staff writer at Texas Monthly, Curtis had never held a journalism job. “I had never published a word in a real publication,” he told me recently (and he was hardly the only journalism newcomer among TM’s founders). It was in these early years of his career that Curtis went to San Antonio to interview Corey, a boisterous massage parlor owner running for mayor—that is, running a creative PR stunt. Curtis interviewed the candidate as a team of masseuses gave him a massage. What Curtis didn’t know, as he worked on his colorful human interest piece, was that Corey was about to meet his future coconspirator. In a room next door, Claudius James Giesick—the…
