It would probably be quicker to list what we didn’t find strewn along the McCommas Bluff on Wednesday, above a raging, rain-swollen Trinity River. Like, there wasn’t a body. But there was plenty of drywall, clothes, bricks, tires, stuffed animals, two-by-fours, plastic wrapping for stone countertops, shingles, DVDs, nails, empty bags of concrete, football card wrappers. There was even a sink buried beneath the charred, rank ruins spread across the landscape, covering the white limestone cliffs, spilling into the river. A recreational vehicle, too.
There were men out there from Dallas Water Utilities when a photographer and I pulled into the mist and muck of the Great Trinity Forest. They were searching for an illegal tap into the city’s water lines.
“Ever see anything like this?” I said to one, waving at the endless vista of godawful. He laughed.
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“All the time,” he said. “On the Trinity.” He shrugged. Which is what most people do whenever they catch wind and whiff of garbage consuming the shoreline of the river without which there would be no Dallas.
“McCommas Bluff is the only place in Dallas where you can stand on an 80-million-year-old limestone bluff and look at the 100-year-old dream of a navigable river,” Ben Sandifer told me this week. He’s the accountant and naturalist who has long served as the river and forest’s guardian and poet laureate.
Trash and debris, some of it recently set ablaze, spills into the Trinity River off the McCommas Bluff. Local, state and federal authorities have been investigating this site since at least January.
Angela Piazza/The Dallas Morning News
Sandifer first brought me to this spot in 2019, to see the Lock and Dam No. 1 in the Trinity River and the Lock Keeper’s house, each built more than a century ago. As far as I can tell, he was also the first person to notify City Hall that someone had bespoiled this landscape, when he complained to 311 on Jan. 16 about illegal dumping. At the time, he was told that his “code concern has been closed” because inspectors — somehow — could find no violations.
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“When I go down there and see the sheer volume of debris, I realize: This isn’t an accident,” Sandifer said. “This is an economy of convenience built on the destruction of one of the most unique wild places we have in Dallas. This is a cathedral of our history. But now, instead of it being a place we should be celebrating, tying old Dallas into the new, we treat it as a landfill. And it’s awful to think about.”
Within the span of three years, this majestic overlook became a crime scene. This is not hyperbole.
Wednesday afternoon I began calling the cell phone belonging to the man who, according to a Dallas County judge, forged a deed to steal much of this land, including the remnants of the Lock Keeper’s Victorian manse mysteriously burned to the ground in the summer of 2023. The man I was calling, 59-year-old Kyle Boyd, did not pick up.
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Shortly thereafter, I discovered why: He had been booked into the Dallas County jail at 3:20 p.m. Wednesday on three state jail felony charges of illegal commercial dumping. Each charge involves the dumping of more than 200 pounds or 200 cubic feet of garbage, and carries a potential sentence of up to two years in jail and a fine up to $10,000.
When I called Sandifer later that evening to tell him the news, he said he was “shocked, absolutely stunned, blown away.” He long ago lost count of the times he’s complained about the messes left in the forest, the garbage drowned in the river; he’s lost count, too, of all the times he’s been ignored. He could not believe that maybe, just maybe, someone will be held to account this time.
“This is where the land gets a fair shake for the transgressions brought upon it,” he said before we hung up. “The river, too.”
An illegal dump has been growing for three years along the McCommas Bluff overlooking the Trinity River, seen here on Wednesday.
Angela Piazza/The Dallas Morning News
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Riverwood Road is a mile-long stretch of countryside 11 miles southeast of downtown, off C.F. Hawn Freeway. There are still horses out here, behind barbed wire, alongside tumbledown homes more rural than just rustic. Until a year or so ago, Riverwood wasn’t even much of a road; more of a desiccated asphalt slab that dead-ended into dirt trails leading into the Great Trinity Forest.
But in the last year or so, new homes have started to take root in this verdant nowhere. They’re sleek, modern, small, affordable. A neighborhood sprung from nowhere, thanks to people like Jackie Davila, who bought land here last year to give homebuilding a shot, and just finished construction on the house closest to the forest.
I stopped her as she backed out of a recently poured driveway and asked if she knew about the dump on the cliff, overflowing with the vestiges of old homes and the remnants of materials used to build new ones. She said she didn’t even know it was there, just around the corner, but that she had doorbell camera footage “of trucks constantly going into the forest.”
“It’s been a mess,” she said. “It’s gotten better since some of the houses have sold. But it was bad.”
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As recently as the spring of 2023, the McCommas Bluff was as scenic a spot as it had been in the late 1800s, when the steamboat Harvey ferried downtown dwellers to the Trinity’s bend for afternoon lunches. The beginning of the end appears to have been April 13, 2023.
Court records show that on that day, quitclaim deeds were filed with the Dallas County clerk purporting that William Wesley Thompson, the owner and resident of the old Lock Keeper’s House adjacent to the dump site, had conveyed his interest in the house and the surrounding 11 acres to something called the 1201 Riverwood Trust, with Kyle Scott Boyd listed as the trustee.
Seventeen days later, Thompson died in a nursing home after a stroke, unaware that the land along the Trinity was no longer his.
At 1:08 a.m. on July 15, Dallas firefighters were dispatched to a fire in the forest. According to the original statement issued by Dallas Fire-Rescue spokesperson Jason Evans, firefighters arrived to find the Lock Keeper’s House engulfed in flames. But they couldn’t reach it. “There were concrete barriers blocking access to the location, which slowed DFR’s response.” And so the house collapsed. The only thing left standing was the chimney, the sole proof the house ever stood atop the McCommas Bluff.
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Dallas Water Utility workers searched Wednesday for an illegal tap in the vestiges of the Lock Keeper’s House, which survived for more than a century before catching fire and collapsing in July 2023.
Angela Piazza/The Dallas Morning News
In his report, Evans noted that “homeless individuals were known to reside in the house.” But firefighters saw no one when they arrived. And without any witnesses, Dallas Fire-Rescue investigators were unable to determine what caused the fire.
Google Earth maps show that shortly thereafter, McCommas Bluff’s landscape began evolving. Turns out, it was being carved up with bulldozers. Trash begins appearing, too, spread across previously unspoiled land.
In June 2024, Thompson’s granddaughter and the administrator of his estate, Shannon Mitchell Bleau, sued Boyd, alleging he had forged the three deeds that gave him this land. Last March, Judge Brenda Hull Thompson, presiding judge of the county’s probate court, concurred. As a result, the land would be returned to Thompson’s estate, which hasn’t yet happened, and Boyd owes $20,000 in attorney’s fees, which haven’t been paid.
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Earlier this month, Bleau and her lawyers finally went to visit the property for the first time. And they weren’t alone. Attorney James Zoys said they were accompanied by community prosecutors, Dallas marshals, DFR employees and code enforcement officers.
“The first thing we saw was all that trash,” Zoys said. “It was unbelievable. And while we were out there, two commercial dump trucks showed up! Police held them for questioning. Meanwhile we were just looking at this mess, and it was just a shock. It was horrifying.”
City officials will not talk about the damage done to the McCommas Bluff, except to say the locals are working with state and federal agencies to deal with the mess.
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Laura Lopez, a spokesperson for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, told me this week that the agency received “a complaint alleging the dumping of unauthorized waste for profit at a property” on March 16. She said TCEQ referred it to the Environmental Crimes Unit in the city Marshal’s Office.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees the Trinity, its tributaries and the floodplain, had far more to say on the subject. Chad Eller, a spokesperson in the Corps’ Fort Worth District, said canoeists tipped off the Corps about trash spilling into the river in January 2026. Eventually, the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department and the Environmental Protection Agency got involved, as the dumping likely violated numerous federal laws, including the Clean Water Act.
Sure enough, Eller said, “Our regulatory division has noted this as a violation, involving debris or sediment put into the waterway, and they are currently working with the EPA’s criminal investigator on this dump.”
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Calls to the EPA weren’t returned. But Eller said “whoever is responsible will be required to remove the material and restore the area to its original state.”
Though if there’s a happy ending, it’s buried somewhere deep, deep beneath all this garbage.
It’s unclear how long this illegal dump will remain on the McCommas Bluff overlooking the Trinity River, because it’s unclear who will be held responsible for remediating the land and making it disappear.
Angela Piazza/The Dallas Morning News
According to the arrest warrant affidavits obtained by The Dallas Morning News, Boyd is accused of allowing commercial dumping on the property — and of burning and disposing of that waste in the river. One affidavit says an investigating officer “received photographs of a large pile of construction wood debris that had been pushed over the bank into the Trinity River.”
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According to one affidavit, marshals encountered several truck drivers who entered the property with trailers full of trash, only to exit with empty trucks. The affidavit says drivers paid Boyd via Venmo — between $10 and $40 per load, according to one driver. At least one driver was arrested, and according to the affidavit, word about the dumpsite had spread “through various truck drivers.”
Boyd bonded out of jail by Thursday morning — for $3,000, total — and he couldn’t be reached. It’s not clear if he has an attorney, as he represented himself in the deed dispute.
Even if he’s found culpable, though, the land will soon be back in the hands of Thompson’s estate. Zoys said they’re already getting notices of code violations from City Hall, accompanied by threats of possible lawsuits.
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Zoys said this land is all the estate has — this foul, fetid land. I asked the attorney what happens when the city tries to make his client remediate it.
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“It’s gonna be a total s—show,” Zoys said.
But it’s the Trinity River, and it always is.