Patricia Ann Burns had been dead less than six years when her killer was paroled from prison. Today, Clarence Burns, who walked out of a state penitentiary on April 2, 1988, is alive and living in Denver. He is 62 years old and reportedly in ill health. Alvin Lichtenstein, the…
Domestic violence doesn’t affect just the two people involved in an abusive relationship: It also hurts their children. And those children, the most vulnerable of victims, can’t afford to wait for the system to right itself. This month, Westword is donating $10,000 to Denver CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates), a…
Therapist Nancy Lantz asks Gary to recite the rules for men who attend her domestic-violence treatment group. “You have to be on time,” Gary says. “No missing classes. No violence, no drugs, no firearms, no alcohol. You got to pay. And if you call your wife a bitch”–he nods at…
Eleven men sit in a circle, giving each other the feather. Three feathers, to be exact–stiff, brightly colored plumes that are passed from hand to hand, twirled and talked about. Each man says something about the person who is to receive the feather and then passes it on, until it…
Essential seating: Now that Denver Post editor Dennis Britton is back from his bus tour of the state, the out-of-focus “Snapshot of Colorado,” he’s got a clear picture of priorities. Britton recently issued a micro-managing memo (shown above) detailing a suggested seating plan for the paper’s daily page-one meetings but…
Call it the fence from hell. A Denver man has spent thousands of dollars fighting a city board’s ruling that a ten-foot-high fence between his house and garage must be lowered to eight feet. Despite receiving no objections to the 24-foot-long fence from neighbors, the city is insisting that Jay…
In his storied playing career with the Denver Nuggets, Dan Issel amassed 16,589 points and pulled down 6,630 rebounds–both club records. Now his daunting task is to score a few points with the fans. And any kind of Nuggets rebound will be welcome. As the new vice president, general manager…
Bringing a paring knife to school accidentally. Giving an elementary-school classmate a vitamin C tablet. Signing a yearbook “Have a kick-ass summer.” Distributing an “unknown substance”–organic lemon drops. From Longmont to Colorado Springs, schools, neighborhoods, police and prosecutors are cracking down on juvenile crime. And as the dragnet is cast,…
Domestic Abyss Westword has provided a very valuable public service with its June 11 report on domestic violence, “Hitting Them Where They Live.” But you didn’t stop there: The domestic-violence stories were also good (if depressing) reading, told with the usual Westword flair. Congratulations are in order to all involved…
Forgive Dave Thomas if he brings a private perspective on domestic violence to work with him. He lives with a small reminder of its devastation every day: his six-year-old niece. As the district attorney for Jefferson County, Thomas says he was already “pretty involved” in the issue from a professional…
Despite the efforts made to streamline Colorado’s domestic-violence system, it can still move dangerously slowly for some victims. Afraid and frustrated, some reach out to the extreme end of the victim-services spectrum: They call Mike Newell. Newell, a former Denver cop, teaches women how to work the system–keeping a journal…
Given his immediate charm, it wasn’t surprising that Christopher Lance Johnson sold cars for a living. In fact, that was how he and Betty got together. She wanted a black Mustang convertible. Chris, a good-looking, smooth-talking 21-year-old she met through a friend, found her one. The romance was soon off…
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…
On hot summer nights, when her children were sleeping, she would open her windows wide and listen to the sounds of Capitol Hill–the sirens, the screams. “Ambulances and fire trucks were going all night long,” Clarissa Pinkola Estes remembers. “You’d hear angry voices. You’d hear a great big slap, and…
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…
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…
If you were to speculate about the people who do business in the downtown US West office building based on the cars parked immediately around it, you’d think that 64 percent of them were physically disabled. On a recent business day, an average of 14 of the 22 available metered…
Is that a radio in your pocket? Departing congressman David Skaggs is crowing that the feds will review security at Rocky Flats, as he requested over a year ago when reports surfaced concerning inadequate security and safeguards at the decommissioned nuclear-weapons plant. When he visited the facility on Friday, departing…
Is there any way to prevent the Front Range from becoming a nonstop city that stretches from Wyoming to New Mexico? A state senator and a group of local activists, frustrated by legislative inaction, may try a direct appeal to the voters to fight sprawl. They’re about to issue a…
When it was all over, rider Kent Desormeaux said he felt sick to his stomach. Then proved it. He had asked his mount for winning speed too soon, he said gloomily, then let the horse’s attention wander with a furlong to go. Down in the jockeys’ room, Chris McCarron draped…
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…
Can We Be Frank? Westword has sunk to a new low with Dewey Webb’s “Final Episode” Killer Curse, in the June 4 issue. At last you look like the sleazy tabloid you really are. Ray Brown Denver The connection between the last episode of Seinfeld and the death of Frank…
