Special Projects

Oklahoma-based indie wrestler Aaron Anders attempts to escape the Tulsa wrestling scene and go pro as he nears retiring age.

In January 2016, a transgender woman — a student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee — was asked to leave the women’s locker room at the fitness center. When she filed a complaint, UW-Milwaukee’s provost said she was welcome to use the locker room, but only if she covered up her “non-conforming genitalia.” LGBTQ experts say the […]

She was 14. She was dirty, she was hungry, she’d been running away from home for about a year, and she was 14. There came a time when she hadn’t eaten anything or slept at all in three days when a man who had taken her out to dinner in the past approached her. He […]

Wisconsin rocked out to air guitar riffs in the 1960s when Sgt. Glenn Fredrick Dean and his band played the taverns around Washington County. At just 20 years of age, Dean left his family, friends and fans heartbroken when the news broke about his death. Writing Dean’s biography in 2015 came easier than expected for […]

As Pfc. Robert G. Mueller was leaving his home, he looked back at the farm where he grew up and said he would never see the place again. It was as if he knew his fate was to never return home. Mueller was the third child of eight children in the two-story red farmhouse with […]

James Vielbaum grew up in Hartford, Wisconsin, raised in a tight-knit family, as one of five children. His father, Louis, was a machinist in West Allis. His mother, Dorothy, helped maintain a hospital. He enjoyed a typical childhood in Wisconsin. James enjoyed spending his free time outdoors, including frequent visits to Pike Lake to swim. […]

As authorities launched an aggressive search for the killers of Laylah Petersen, the 5-year-old Milwaukee girl who was shot twice in the head while sitting on her grandfather’s lap inside her own home, one of the alleged murderers was already in gun court: For another shooting that occurred the month before Laylah was slain. Carl […]

Roughly a year after his 1966 graduation from Lakeside Lutheran High School, Paul Kuehl volunteered for the United States Army. The tall, athletic and handsome 19-year-old was sent from Hartford, Wisconsin to Fort Campbell in Kentucky for basic training and then to a military police platoon in Fort Gordon, Georgia. Members of Paul’s Platoon were […]

Read the Media Milwaukee investigative report into Milwaukee’s gun court here. Meet our investigative team (click on their names to obtain more information, including how to contact our journalists): Pakou Lee: I am a multimedia journalist at UW-Milwaukee. My interest in journalism derived from watching television. Television was my window view to the world when I […]

A police car raced through the outskirts of 60’s Germantown, in hot pursuit of a ‘64 Chevy Impala. But it wasn’t anything sinister, only the fast-paced hobby shared between an officer with a secret, and a high school car buff. John North had a passion for hot rods, commanding the Impala and a ‘48 Mercury […]

On an unseasonably mild, rainy, Sunday December afternoon, Nancy Wichert revisits her hometown and stops by the former corner drug store she would frequent as a kid, which is now the Coffee Corner Bistro. She reminisces about her brother Jim’s upbeat personality and his passions in life, like the outdoors, athletics and flying. Wichert was […]