Sinister Strolls leads true crime tours throughout Downtown, Bishop Arts expansion coming soon

It could be a sweltering summer night or the chill of winter in the air on a Saturday morning. Either way, it starts with Jesse Slaughter and Frank Romero standing below the spinning red neon lights of the Pegasus on South Lamar Street.

The pair host true crime tours through Sinister Strolls, which shines a light on the dark history of Dallas, hitting on a variety of spots throughout two hours spent walking through Downtown. Depending on the audience, they also tie in a more paranormal side with the potential of vampires and poltergeists haunting historic sites.

Some of the locations and stories include what Jackie Kennedy went through leading up to that fateful trip to Dallas as you stand in JFK Memorial, or staring at the very window of the Dallas County Courthouse that Allen Brooks was taken out of before his lynching.

The two say that corporate tours in Dallas didn’t have all truths told. With Sinister Strolls, they highlight who these people were beyond one moment in history, how their lives and how these crimes have shaped the city “from almost a social justice frame point.”

Sinister Strolls is based in Oak Cliff, with Slaughter living in the Wynnewood North area and Romero having roots in our neighborhood. Currently, they offer the Downtown Dallas and Pick Your Poison tours, which allows attendees to plan a custom true crime trek based on what intrigues them.

This fall, they hope to launch their Bishop Arts tour.

How did you get into tourism, and why did you decide to pursue this type of tour?

Slaughter: I fell into this work, kind of honestly. I’ve always loved ghost stories and tours and things like that. I’m from New Orleans originally, so all of that’s kind of ingrained in our culture, but the reason I started this particular thing is I was part of a ghost tour in Dallas.

We were hosting ghost tours, that’s how me and Frank met, actually. And when we started doing a little bit of deeper dives into the actual stories we were telling, we realized there was a lot of untruths, and then when we started actually doing the research and finding the real stories behind them, we realized that we had enough content to start our own tour telling the real story, not necessarily just the story that they want you to know.

Romero: Well, it was rather just random, honestly, because I was a paranormal investigator from about 20 to 25 years old. It was like a short span. Really, really loved it. So, ghosts were already a big thing for me in the beginning. However, when I got into tourism, which is a bad economy, it was 2020, and you know, pandemic hit. Things were not moving as well as I like, and I just happened to see this thing on Indeed for the ghost tour, and I realized very, very quickly I had a knack for it. It was actually something that was quite fun for me. It wasn’t just a job. My biggest competitor, however, was Jesse. I mean, I couldn’t believe I finally got somebody on there that was like going toe-to-toe with me. It was really wonderful, but also brought out that competitive edge in me. And then one day we did a tour together. And in that, Sinister Strolls was born from that.

Have you always worked in tourism? What’s the difference between corporate tourism and what you do with Sinister Strolls?

Slaughter: I’ve always been a performer; I’ve always loved acting and everything else. I’ve never been great at it, but I have always been able to tell a story. So, what originally brought me to Dallas was architecture and interior design. I was an interior designer for years. During the pandemic, interior design got wild and crazy, and I felt like I burnt completely out. So, I was looking for an outlet, just to kind of do something after work to where I could exercise and be part of something, that’s when I found the ghost tours.

But then we started realizing that the routes that were being planned and the stories that were being proposed and basically dictated to us were either all AI or they were written by people who lived in Boston. They don’t live in Dallas. I don’t know if they’ve ever even been to Dallas. We started realizing the homegrown aspect was not there. The respect for the people that came before, they were being turned into ghost stories. Their truths weren’t being told, and so we decided to step back. We need to talk about who these people were, how their lives and the crimes that happened against them shaped the face of our city. So we’re kind of coming through it from almost a social justice frame point. We want to make sure that their stories and their truths are actually told; they’re not just a punchline and a ghost story.

Romero:  We feel ours is more, way, way more, historically accurate than what’s being written. We’re trying to show the empathy and just give them a voice, these victims that we’re talking about that they’ve never been given before. Yeah, they get a sign. That’s all well and good, but having that voice and somebody willing to speak out against it and getting people a different side of Dallas’s history is what we really wanted altogether.

Without revealing too much, how would you summarize your current Downtown tour?

Slaughter: From the decades, I say from the very beginning because our first story starts at the dawn of the City of Dallas, when Dallas was officially incorporated as a city, and our most recent is 2016. We have stories from the ’70s. We have stories from the olden times, from the 1910s. As we approach each neighborhood in each part of Downtown at the current moment, we talk about what the neighborhood was like, what the lives of the people of Dallas were like at that point in time, and then how the crime either impacted or changed the way people saw Dallas at that point in time. It’s a history tour with true crime kind of thrown in, so if people don’t necessarily like the true crime aspect, they can come and learn a lot about our city.

What about with the Bishop Arts tour you’re developing?

Slaughter: We’re still in the trial stages, if we want to do a pub crawl-type situation where we tell a couple of stories, how long it’s going to be. We’ve uncovered there are so many stories in and around the Bishop Arts area, particularly with the history of Jefferson being right there. It’s kind of hard to keep it under an hour. That was our original goal, if we can do it in under an hour, that would be great. And now, we’re looking at it going, “It’s probably going to be an hour and a half to two hours,” and then we’re trying to figure out, do we incorporate the liveliness of the neighborhood with the businesses and everything around us? Do we bring people into the ice cream shops and do we have an ice cream sundae stroll? We’re trying to figure out what we want to do to make this tour different. The neighborhood alone is different. It’s more homey, there’s more people. It feels a little bit more welcoming than Downtown. Downtown has a very sinister outlook to begin with. It kind of feels that the doors are closed to a lot of people, but the Bishop Arts area is a lot different. It’s sunnier, it’s more welcoming. There’s more people, so we’re trying to keep the vibe of the neighborhood within the tour.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.