July 28, 1999, Jefferson County Detention Center: William Lee Neal walks in with a grin on his face and his hand extended. “I’m Cody Neal,” he says, shaking hands like a used-car salesman, warm and ingratiating. “Cody’s a nickname…My friends call me Cody.” He glances through the glass partition to…

Jimmy Myers was eighteen the night he rolled the car with the body of Geoffrey Hobin inside. Eighteen months later, in March 1999, he stood before Judge R. Brooke Jackson to be sentenced — not for murder, but for burglary. Now that a jury had acquitted Myers’s friend and co-defendant,…

The young man in the tailored gray suit stands behind the defense table and waggles his finger at Judge R. Brooke Jackson. He’s pretty full of himself, and he occasionally looks back at the gallery to see if his audience is equally impressed with his courtroom presence and vocabulary. Except…

She climbed up into the back of the pickup and looked down at dozens of anxious faces. They could hear the sirens screaming several blocks away, where dust still hung in the air above the shattered building. That’s where these doctors, nurses and medical workers needed to be right now…

May 10, 1999 “Now that the facts have been determined, the presumption of innocence is gone, and Francisco Martinez Jr. sits before you a convicted rapist and murderer.” Deputy District Attorney Ingrid Bakke catches the people gathered in the courtroom in mid-murmur, like a play’s narrator just before the curtain…

Hal Sargent takes a last glance at his notes before looking up at the panel of judges. Two years of prosecuting members of the Deuce-Seven Bloods gang for the May 1997 rape and murder of fourteen-year-old Brandy DuVall are nearly at an end. This is not the time to falter…

In the end, it wasn’t so easy to kill Robert Lee Riggan Jr. after all. The 39-year-old drifter from Iowa was convicted last fall of the May 1997 murder of 21-year-old prostitute Anita Paley, the mother of two little girls. Riggan had taken Paley up to the mountains outside of…

Antonio Martinez has some last-minute Christmas shopping to do. He buzzes through Kmart, picking out a serving bowl for his grandmother, a video game for a cousin. In Denver just for the holidays, he shivers as he steps outside. He got rid of his winter clothes when he moved west…

Antonio Martinez negotiates his way through a maze of boxes scattered across the living room of his small apartment as a massive stereo system pulsates with gangsta rap. Except for the stereo, he’s almost packed–and ready to get the hell out of Denver. The night before, his mother threw him…

Theresa Swinton looks at the simple two-story house at 2727 California without much affection. An uncle she never knew purchased it for his parents, her grandparents, shortly before he died in action during World War II. It was the childhood home of her mother, aunts and uncles. The address is…

Three days after Christmas 1998, there are few reminders of the holidays in Theresa Swinton’s Denver apartment. Although her faith remains strong, she doesn’t feel like celebrating. Her son Danny is sitting in a Jefferson County jail cell, awaiting trial for the gang rape and murder of a fourteen-year-old girl…

Death is different,” fellow jurists told District Judge Frank Plaut as he prepared for his first capital murder case, the trial of Robert Riggan Jr. on charges of first-degree murder in Jefferson County. But how different, even they couldn’t have predicted. In mid-October, Riggan went on trial for the murder…

Amy Johnson and her fiance, Jason Sosebe, left their home shortly after six on the morning of May 17, 1997, heading down Old Hughesville Road toward Highway 119. As their truck rounded a corner, they saw a blue minivan with Wyoming plates parked on the wrong side of the road,…

Conversations stopped and heads turned as Joanne Cordova walked a along the fifth-floor corridor of the Jefferson County courthouse. She smiled at those who met her gaze, though she was trembling inside. She’d seen them nudge each other, thought she knew what they whispered as she passed. Used to be…

Those waiting to see Colorado’s new death-penalty tag team in action will have to wait even longer than expected. The first test of a two-year-old law that takes the death-penalty decision out of the hands of a jury and places it before a three-judge panel has been put on hold…

The two police officers met for coffee, as they often did, at the Homestead Restaurant in Idaho Springs one cold afternoon in November 1992. Gary Cunningham, who’d worked for the town’s police department for two years, had recently married his fifth wife, Michele. She worked at the Homestead, and he…

Further proof that gardening can be hazardous to your health–or at least leave you digitally impaired–can be found in a nasty little weed that, along with its cousins, is threatening to take over the American West. Like many of its fellow noxious weeds, Russian knapweed is particularly adept at killing…

The woman picked up the leg bone of Dr. Evgeny Botkin, the last physician for the last czar, and sniffed. Her Russian hosts couldn’t have looked more shocked if she’d started gnawing on the royal femur of Czar Nicholas II, which lay near at hand. Noticing their expressions, Diane France…

Janice didn’t know why she tried to kill the other girl. “She just pissed me off,” she told counselor Adolph Montana. So Janice had lain in wait, and when the girl approached, she stabbed her and kept stabbing her until the knife broke. Montana knew what lay at the roots…

Even indoors, the young blond woman keeps her dark glasses on–the better to disguise, along with pancake makeup, the bruises on the right side of her face where her common-law husband hit her the night before. Or maybe it’s to hide the humiliation of being in a room inside the…

Patricia Ann Burns had finally taken all she was going to from her husband, Clarence. One day in August 1982, the 38-year-old elementary-school teacher, who’d been beaten twice by Clarence in recent months, told her husband that she was through with the hitting and yelling and through with the marriage…

Domestic violence has a way of reaching out and touching the rest of society, sometimes with fatal consequences. The cases that get the headlines are those in which someone dies. A man shoots his wife in a fit of obsession and rage. A woman uses an ax on her sleeping…