John Hellner waited five years for his day in court. Last week it took less than two hours for a Fort Collins jury to decide that Hellner and eight other parents hadn’t defamed a local elementary-school counselor whom they’d accused of abusing their children. For Hellner, the verdict was grim…
There are a few things Danielle Marie Dixon doesn’t like about her east Denver apartment. There’s the toilet on the sagging floor that she worries is about to collapse into the apartment below. There’s the crumbling tilework in the shower, so powdery she has to rinse her hair three times…
Joanne and Manny Salzman don’t really mind the sounds of city life–the trains rolling through Union Station across Wynkoop Street, the power-lunchers pouring into the brewpubs, the thousands of Rockies fans marching past their front door on their way to Coors Field. It’s all part of living in lower downtown,…
Forget Eugene O’Neill. Never mind Tennessee Williams. To hell with Miller, Albee, Shepard, Mamet. If you’re looking for intricate, incomprehensible scenes of bickering family members engaged in acts of twisted loyalty and stark betrayal, head on down to the Regional Transportation District’s headquarters in LoDo. Admission to the meetings of…
First, a pop quiz. The Guide the Ride transit plan, which metro-area voters are being asked to fund with a sales-tax increase, is: a) A terrific deal that, for mere pennies per day, will ease traffic congestion and pollution in major traffic corridors and provide commuters with badly needed alternatives…
With all its bureaucratic ritual and live, up-to-the-minute news bursts, Monday’s execution of Gary Davis was a collective wallowing in death by media injection. Not having carried out an execution in thirty years, officials at the Colorado Department of Corrections were determined to get it right. Not having covered one,…
Like hundreds of other men on death rows across America, Gary Lee Davis paid attention when Ted Bundy took the juice in Florida’s electric chair in 1989. Just hours before his execution, while the hecklers gathered outside sang “On Top of Old Sparky,” Bundy granted his last interview to psychologist…
After more than a year of living on the streets of Denver, time was running out for Michael Allen Wells. The 29-year-old drifter may have sensed something bad heading his way when he called his mother in a state of near-panic, jabbering about a dead girl and two “bad guys.”…
Nearly two years after it began, a federal lawsuit filed by a Denver police captain against Mayor Wellington Webb and other city officials has been all but buried in a blizzard of paperwork and legal maneuvering, with no end in sight. The suit, which alleges sexual discrimination and political retaliation…
Marshall “Slim” Hopkins stands on a windswept precipice in southern Teller County, a couple of miles outside the town of Victor. It is a place he comes to often, to take in what may be the most sobering view in all of Colorado. Looking west, Hopkins can see rolling hills…
After more than seventeen years of litigation, Lawrence Wollersheim knows that talk isn’t cheap–not when you’re talking to lawyers and your life’s work happens to involve badmouthing the Church of Scientology. But the price of silence is even higher. Too high, in Wollersheim’s estimation, which is why he says he…
The defining moment in the history of Denver’s Greek Town passed unnoticed a few months ago, when Takis Dadiotis went to city officials to complain about the sidewalk. The sidewalk was all wrong. Dadiotis, proprietor of a Greek restaurant on East Colfax Avenue, had already managed to coax one block…
Shortly before six on a Wednesday evening, the first wave of derailers arrives at the charmless offices of the Independence Institute, the conservative think tank in Golden (sign in the window: “Will do public policy for food”). Stragglers come in over the next half-hour. There are eleven of them in…
Charles Dudley Martin was just starting his law career when he came across the Thomas Gaddis book Birdman of Alcatraz. The Springfield, Missouri, attorney was so impressed by the story of Robert Stroud, convicted murderer turned bird researcher, that he wrote to a committee of Stroud’s associates that was campaigning…
James Carey is in the hole again. He moves slowly into the visitors’ room, hands cuffed and tethered to his waist, his stride reduced to a shuffle by the shackles around his ankles. He sports a full head of hair, whiter than a new pair of Keds. A grin flashes…
Twenty years ago, Fidel Ramos found the living conditions in Canon City’s “Old Max” penitentiary so appalling that he sued the state, charging that the Department of Corrections was inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on its inmates. A federal judge agreed with him, and Ramos’s lawsuit changed the entire Colorado…
The town of Laporte sits on the edge of the Roosevelt National Forest, its back turned to the interstate a few miles away, and that’s how it should be. Fewer than ten miles from the heart of Fort Collins, Laporte is the kind of nostalgic refuge from the big city…
You’ve got to hand it to Charles E. Blair. Thousands of people did, to their everlasting regret. This Sunday, June 8, Blair will celebrate fifty years as the pastor and guiding light of Calvary Temple, which, under his stewardship, has become one of the largest and most successful non-denominational churches…
Bill Potts gets along with just about everybody. Still, there was a woman at an art show in Boulder who managed to curl his lip. A sculptor who carves vivid, exaggerated figures and tableaux out of wood–athletes, jazz musicians, street scenes, historic events, dinosaurs, you name it–Potts isn’t entirely comfortable…
In the fall of 1995, Kenneth Allen Coleman made the mistake of his life. Flush with cash from an insurance settlement, the 28-year-old parolee got mixed up with a flashy dope peddler named Andrew Chambers, who was eager to sell him a kilo of cocaine for $16,500. When Coleman showed…
Like a lot of residents of southeast Denver, Judy LaMar has come to embrace the High Line Canal trail as a refuge from the urban madness. Joggers and strollers, horseback riders and bicyclists all flock to the cottonwood-shaded trail, which offers a weathered asphalt path flanked by what LaMar calls…
From the moment he flew into town early last year, Dennis Britton noticed something strange about Denver’s daily newspapers. A former editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, soon to become the Denver Post’s editor-in-chief, Britton knew all about the inexorable dynamics of newspaper wars; in the white-heat of competition, dailies often…
