She calls him the Anne Frank of the trailer park. When she drives him home from school, her son has to duck down in the seat. When he’s in the yard, he has to watch over his shoulder for the park manager. He’s not a thief. Or a drug dealer…

Chivington, Colorado: The air is restless here, always stirring, rustling the stalks of dried buffalo grass and sage, whistling endlessly through miles of rusted barbed wire. For many years, this was a dead place. Cheyenne and Arapaho stayed away. But each November for over a decade now, Laird Cometsevah has…

1. INSPIRATION You could say Morey Davolt owes his big idea to a man who used goat glands to make guys horny. The man was Doc John Brinkley, and he thought impotent men could rise to the occasion with transplanted goat testicles. It worked well–for Doc Brinkley, anyway–and the Kansas…

This was his first big tag. So he lied and told his parents he was sleeping at a buddy’s, when instead he drove to a field off Speer Boulevard. There he and three friends unloaded a few dozen spray cans and some forty-ounce bottles of beer. Then they went to…

He can almost see her. Henry Johns stands in the back of his mother’s house on Monroe Street and pictures her kneeling beside the fence, turning soil, planting seeds. She liked to grow things. The smell of wet dirt, the way flowers unfolded to the sun. Hollyhocks and tiger lilies…

Who knows what compelled the man–if indeed it was a man. Clues are few. One day about ten years ago, someone walked into the First National Bank in Cortez and rented safe-deposit box number 509. Inside it, he placed a battered 1979 Durango phone book, an empty 89-cent box of…

Squirrels were dying. Lucky didn’t know what was killing them off, but there they were, collecting in his Park Hill neighborhood like fallen leaves. Never one to let anything go to waste, Lucky tossed the tiny carcasses into the back of his pickup. They’d make a good meal for the…

Even after five months, he can feel the chill. “There’s definitely something about the place,” Doug Gradisar says, looking up the side of an abandoned flour mill northwest of Coors Field. “It gives you the creeps.” Gradisar is an outreach worker for homeless teens. The last time he was here,…

It was a small thing, really, just a signature on the back of a plain manila application card. At the time she endorsed it, in 1942, she had no way of knowing it would get her fired, arrested, thrown in jail and forced into hiding. But on the day she…

Nita Gonzales has shot her mouth off so many times–and gotten in trouble for it so many times–that she doesn’t know where to start. But there was this one time at Annunciation School when she first got a taste of what lay ahead for her as one of Denver’s most…

John Horan has handled a thousand bodies, but even now, after 25 years, the forgotten ones still touch him.”This was an eleven-year-old child,” he says, examining a green cardboard package no larger than a deck of cards. “I can’t imagine how anyone could abandon the remains of an eleven-year-old child…