Lights flashing, the vehicle sped toward the intersection, hurrying to an emergency call. But approaching fast from a side street came another car, this one driven by a seventeen-year-old about to run a stop sign. The two vehicles collided not in Denver, but in Grand Junction on December 28, 1993…

Roy Romer doesn’t know who Martha Stewart is–and it’s a good thing, too. The high priestess of high-class living is a menace to women everywhere, and particularly here. That by-the-book (her book) lifestyle is precisely what people move to Colorado to avoid. After all, hydrangeas are not xeriscape-approved. And how…

Memo to Denver: With all the national media in town for, and already bored by, the Oklahoma City bombing trial, this is no time to misbehave. For example, no matter how peeved you might be after some seventeen-year-old punk in a stolen car broadsides your buddy–your cop buddy on only…

In U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch’s courtroom, the Oklahoma City bombing trial moves as slowly as a kept secret. Lawyers from both sides ask potential jurors their views on religion, their feelings about the death penalty, their recent reading habits. So far, the runaway favorite is John Grisham’s The Runaway…

John Yelenick was raising his family on a farm in Henderson when he had his water tested in 1985. He wasn’t looking for nerve gas. But a few years later, after the nearby Rocky Mountain Arsenal made the Environmental Protection Agency’s first Superfund list, Yelenick and the rest of the…

The town is lousy with lawyers and journalists–the two professions have a sick, symbiotic relationship–and no matter how peeved the public gets, the infestation won’t clear up anytime soon. Not given U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch’s ruling Monday. “The trial will proceed as scheduled,” Matsch announced, in response to attorney…

So I was talking with Peter Schmitz the other night after he left the courthouse, and we traded some hair-styling tips. Has anyone else noticed how, in the early days of the trial, his ponytail was slicked back with gel and looked kind of dark, but now that a witness…

They were going nowhere fast. After almost two full days of jury selection–sifting through questionnaires, quizzing prospective jurors about their feelings regarding the media, suicide, alcohol, bad art–the opening arguments in the Peter Schmitz trial began late Tuesday. At this rate, the jurors who survived the cut (although Denver County…

Not so very long ago, a Colorado kindergartner was murdered, her body violated in the most awful, intimate way before it was discarded. Her name was not JonBenet Ramsey. Under a peculiar Colorado statute, you might not know her name at all–except that the disappearance of Ashley Gray from her…

What did Boulder do to deserve this? That’s a stupid question. Next question. Okay. So why did Boulder call a rare news conference last Thursday, introduce it as a “briefing” and then let Boulder County District Attorney Alex Hunter launch into a half-hour, Mayberry-meets-Naropa soliloquy that covered everything from his…

Four years ago this month, Richard Boulware flew into heavy turbulence. His life has yet to straighten out. On February 22, 1993, Boulware–who in 1984 had beaten out hundreds of candidates to become Stapleton Airport’s public-affairs officer, a job that nine years later carried increased responsibilities and the impressive title…

The natives–and even the ex-Californians–were getting restless. Four weeks after the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, the case was still the talk of the town, the state, the country–but there were so few new developments to talk about. Reporters kept rehashing the same old stories, chewing over the same old facts…

The body was found at the bottom of a six-foot-deep pit at a construction site near a Boulder public-housing project. The hole was covered with particle board, marked with cones and blocked by construction equipment. Two weeks later, on December 19, Boulder County Coroner John Meyer ruled the death of…

What’s wrong with this picture? Compared with the beauty-pageant clips of JonBenet Ramsey that keep popping up on television, the crime-scene photos published in Monday’s issue of the Globe look like something from Mother Goose. Night after night, the ghost of six-year-old JonBenet parades across the news, imitating a Las…

Deep in a corner of my conscience is a wad of unfinished sweaters–one for every Bronco Super Bowl bust. Somehow, in the agony of defeat–or, perhaps more accurately, the discomfort brought on by excessive consumption of both crow and alcohol–lifting the South Stands would have been easier than hoisting those…

Newt Gingrich is still hunting that giraffe. Three hours each week, the smug Speaker of the House pops up on Knowledge TV–the former Mind Extension University on cable–touting his own peculiar view of history in what is surely the country’s most tedious infomercial (no miracle car wax, no hair extensions,…

When last we heard from Marshall Kaplan, the embattled dean of the Graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado at Denver was hinting that the public might not have him to kick around for much longer. No more big community confabs, no more big community controversies fueled…

As homeless go, the folks living along the banks of the South Platte River just west of downtown were never going to be poster children inspiring donations of holiday turkeys. They were hardly the stuff of weepy newspaper columns or wrenching TV news footage, far from the sad families trotted…

Beverly Beuster thought she was set for life. Transferred by Martin Marietta Corp.–now Lockheed Martin–from her hometown of New Orleans to Colorado in 1984, “I planned to be with them until I decided to retire at sixty-five or seventy years of age,” Beuster says. That was another twenty years or…

Get real: If Channel 7 had given it some thought–a commodity as rare as a newscast without a promotional puff piece–the station wouldn’t have mentioned that “pitbull” tag so proudly worn by its new mascot, Natalie Pujo. After all, the last time a local television reporter tangled with pitbulls, she…

Enough. By the time he was on the homestretch of his 1,200-mile tour of the Fourth Congressional District, independent candidate Wes McKinley had had enough of Marvin the mule. Especially since the Greeley Tribune had passed over both the name-party candidates–Democrat Guy Kelley and Republican victor Bob Schaefer–in order to…

Be careful what you wish for. You may get it. On October 1, five years to the day after gambling became legal in three Colorado mining towns whose finances were as shaky as the abandoned houses that dotted their hillsides, the city council of Central City convened in its new…