From wowtown to cowtown. Just a week ago, Denver was recovering from the largest collective hangover on record. On Super Bowl Sunday, in a wannabe major-league “riot,” crazed Broncos fans fueled by Jell-O shots looted an athletic-goods store. (This is Denver, after all.) On Monday, thousands of slightly more sober…

Depending on how you measure these things, Westword was born late one night in a college newspaper office, when starting a weekly seemed like a much better idea than typing a resume and finding a real job, or at a rugby game in Washington Park, where the vigor of the…

Clarissa Pinkola Estes is thinking about what story she would tell to residents of Denver in 1998. She settles on “Stone Soup,” an ancient tale–but not an ancient idea. The people are starving–for soulfulness, for spirit–and they shut their doors and live behind them, and what little they have they…

Friday night, and the Wazee Supper Club is packed–as it has been for Friday night after Friday night since long before LoDo was the center of Denver’s universe, since before LoDo was even called LoDo. But although the Wazee is packed, as always, the space seems oddly empty. Something is…

Was it good for you? A year ago, Colorado was barely a blip on the political map, a handy way station where national candidates could drop in to stuff their pockets on cross-country junkets, a state more notable for Monkey Business than real money business. But that was before Colorado…

One day in mid-November, a San Francisco radio station called my office. “We hear Denver’s overrun by skinheads,” a reporter said. “Can we get a quote?” How about: “Baloney.” On the last day of November, a cabbie heading downtown from DIA reported that the skinhead violence had spread to a…

That airplane banner flying overhead Monday, proclaiming the unfairness of Denver Post management to all of downtown Denver, wasn’t the only sign that Denver Newspaper Guild negotiations are under way. The stickiness of those negotiations, which affect up to half the employees of Denver’s two daily newspapers, also explains the…

Let us now give thanks. It was one big, dysfunctional family reunited in U.S. District Judge John Kane’s courtroom last week, picking at the carcass of this year’s biggest turkey: Guide the Ride. The $3.5 billion, or $8 billion, or $16 billion, or $20 billion (depending on who’s counting) mass-transit…

The best argument against the death penalty may be a death-penalty trial. Four weeks after opening arguments in the People v. Jon Morris, the prosecution is still trying to put out all its evidence against Morris, who is on trial for the brutal rape and murder of five-year-old Ashley Gray…

I was holding my sister’s one-month-old son in Framingham, Massachusetts, a mile away from the women’s prison, when a jury found its most famous resident, Louise Woodward, guilty of killing eight-month-old Matthew Eappen. Around Framingham–if not in England, the nanny’s native country–people were cheering. I could only hope that somewhere,…

Johnnie’s Market is closed. Cerrado. For the first time in over sixty years, Johnnie’s is not open for business. “Closed because of illness,” the sign on the door reads, although people walk right in anyway. They cannot imagine Larimer Street without Johnnie’s. Ed Maestas, who’s owned Johnnie’s for over two…

He could never forget his daughter, but six years after her death, Frank Baley was getting on with his life. Then a Boulder police officer called, and the pain cut deep once again. Detective Thomas Wickman wanted to reopen the file on Susan Baley, who’d died in Boulder in 1982…

Gary Davis was ready to die in 1990. Mark Thomas had just come to town as the director of the Colorado Press Association when he got a call from the Colorado Department of Corrections. Davis, convicted in 1987 of the brutal rape and murder of Virginia May, was suspending any…

The war between the sexes takes no prisoners–except children, who often earn their purple hearts during custody battles. Even after Anthony Roszel won the court fight to be named custodial parent of his daughter (won it twice, in fact), the war with his ex-wife, Keleigh Kasteile, wasn’t over. Not by…

Princess Diana’s body was barely back on British soil when the most unlikely people began acting like royal pains, comparing their own plights to that of the deceased princess. On September 2, Larry King’s live show got a surprise call from none other than Patsy Ramsey, who wanted to pop…

Since I last visited the Lace House, back on Memorial Day, an entire tourist season has come and gone–without one tourist touring through what was once Black Hawk’s top (and arguably only) attraction. But that was in the days when people enjoyed the ramshackle charms of the old mining town…

Leroy Jones does not play the game by the rules. Not when he believes the game is fixed. As a driver for Yellow Cab when it went into receivership, he quickly recognized that the court-appointed receiver was taking everyone for a ride. And so Jones started protesting–loudly and often–that the…

On Monday morning, Keith Weinman’s voice oozed out of the radio, delivering a pitch about how much “we” enjoy a certain brand of mattress. It was slightly nauseating. And not just because the alleged “business editor” of KOA-AM’s “Business for Breakfast” show has no business shilling for clients. That’s a…

In cyberspace, no one can hear you scream. But that’s not stopping Robert Lewis. The Web publisher has been howling bloody murder since Monday, when he learned that the Colorado Rockies have gone to court seeking a preliminary injunction that would essentially throw him out at home. Home page, that…

It wasn’t so very long ago that Governor Roy Romer wanted to promote Colorado as the “best place to raise a child.” Just a few murders ago, in fact. The state couldn’t buy the attention that’s been focused on Colorado children lately–but it’s hardly the promotional coup that Romer envisioned…

The Rocky Flats grand jurors are about to get their day in court. Two days, actually: Courtroom C-159 at the federal courthouse, the building that recently hosted the trial of Tim McVeigh, has been reserved for two days this week for a “confidential, closed proceeding.” The grand jurors are about…

Everything is going according to plan in Boulder. Not according to the “plan” cited by police chief Tom Koby back in January–back when it seemed like there might actually be an arrest in the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, Boulder’s only official homicide of 1996. And not according to the plan…