Harry MacLean’s vindication arrived on April 4 from San Francisco–a federal district judge overturned the 1990 conviction of George Franklin, who’d been found guilty of a twenty-year-old murder based solely on his daughter’s recovered memory. The judge ruled that Franklin had not received a fair trial. That’s something MacLean, a…
It’s been more than two years since little Alexis Storkson witnessed the murders of her half-sister, her mother and the man she knew as her father. Now seven, she’s been at the center of a cross-country custody battle for almost as long (“Little Girl Lost,” October 12, 1994). Thanks to…
Mayor Wellington Webb’s administration is poised to give the Winter Park Recreational Association unprecedented control over development at the city-owned mountain resort–including handing over clear title to ninety acres of land that now belong to Denver taxpayers. But top administration officials admit they know almost nothing about the one development…
Sludge Match Regarding Richard Fleming’s April 19 article, “Don’t Spread on Me,” on the dispute between the City of Boulder and the Somerset housing development over the spreading of sludge bio-waste on rural land: I hope that the residents of Somerset each have their own septic systems and drainage fields…
Just nine months ago, it seemed, King Harris could do no wrong. After the politically connected businessman had already won almost $20 million worth of work at Denver International Airport, the City of Denver went ahead and awarded him almost $2 million more in additional airport contracts last summer. But…
Mary P.’s kids think it’s a pager. And at the community newspaper in metro Denver where she works as an assistant to the publisher, they kid her about how it complements her clothes. At this point, she thinks of it as her “buddy” and says, “It’s with me night and…
With the city’s attention riveted on this year’s high-profile race for mayor, few are paying any heed to the five candidates vying for the auditor’s job. The campaign, however, isn’t the dull-as-dishwater affair it may appear to be on the surface. In fact, while nobody was looking, it got downright…
Blowing up in their faces: Now we know why Dr. Norm Resnick, the manic voice of the Colorado-based USA Patriot Network, called Mark Koernke “a legend”–the FBI has been investigating whether Koernke, known to talk-radio kooks as the disembodied voice of doom “Mark from Michigan,” was a mentor to Oklahoma…
Last Thursday night, the wet flags on the high rim of the stadium flapped at half mast for the dead in Oklahoma. A chill wind whistled through the lower box seats, and periodic drizzle slanted down onto players, clots of fans and the guys struggling to sell cold beer. You…
Idiot’s Delight Patricia Calhoun’s column in the April 19 issue, “The Parent Trap,” really aroused my ire. I am beginning to think Ms. Calhoun is an arch manipulator of public opinion and wondering if her articles are a form of perverse psychology. It appears that she is out of step…
All Swanee Hunt, Denver philanthropist and U.S. ambassador to Austria, wanted to do was write a newspaper column about her newest musical creation: “The Witness Cantata.” Then she used the word “suffering” in a closing paragraph. Now she’s suffering for it. As Newsweek reported it, Hunt’s March 24 column in…
Melinda Kassen was known as a hard-hitting critic of Rocky Flats when she worked as an attorney for the Boulder branch of the Environmental Defense Fund from 1986 to 1992. Now she’s switched sides, some of her former allies are grumbling. Kassen began work in February as environmental counsel for…
They’ve promised to end crime. They’ve vowed to balance the budget. Make our classrooms safe for learning. Map out a blueprint for the millennium. Blah blah blah. Frankly, it begins to blur. We knew what voters really wanted to learn about Denver’s next mayor. So we asked. Bob Crider Mary…
The problem, as Gregg Greenstein sees it, is fourfold: It’s too noisy and it will lower property values. And along the way, he adds, the environment will suffer. So will education. The quality-of-life scourge that Greenstein, a Westminster lawyer, is talking about is the prospect of commercial passenger flights at…
Three former supervisors at the Salvation Army’s Denver drug and alcohol rehabilitation center say the center’s directors blatantly discriminate against blacks and gays–and that people who have spoken out against the “outrageous racial hostility” have been fired, demoted or expelled from the center. Epithets such as “boy” and “nigger” are…
It was last September when Debbie Quackenbush asked a person on the staff of Boulder’s wastewater treatment plant whether it was true that the city was dumping sewage not far from the dream house she and her husband were building in Somerset, a high-end development in Niwot just east of…
In good form: Now that you’ve filed your tax returns, maybe you can even the score with the government by trying to win local gadfly Bill Conklin’s $50,000 anti-tax reward. All you have to do is prove to Conklin that a person can file tax returns without waiving Fifth Amendment…
Image is not everything. That’s a lesson the world’s best tennis player has learned the hard way. On the slick grass rectangle that is Wimbledon’s storied center court–a mystical place where he feared even to tread for three years–he learned in 1987 that you can smash flashy, Kevlar-powered rocket shots…
Colorado Springs-based rocker Mark Junglen is still amazed that a Russian symphony orchestra will be performing his initial foray into classical music. And he’s not the only one. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he says. “I just wish somebody would believe it’s actually happening.” What’s happening revolves around “Stalingrad–A Rock…
David Triska has been fooling around with radios for more than four decades, ever since he got an old-fashioned crystal set when he was nine years old. Now, though, the King Soopers truck driver’s lifelong hobby has landed him in hot water with the Denver Police Department, which says he…
Trauma is the kind of injury that can kill you. It’s the scene from ER that starts with flying gurneys, lots of blood and a doctor shouting a laundry list of incomprehensible instructions. That’s if you’re lucky. Because the fictitious hospital in ER is indeed a “trauma center.” There is…
The Naked Truth It seems to me that Patricia Calhoun is the one who should be sent to the showers to cool off, rather than Coach VanderMolen (“Coach Turns Into Pumpkinhead,” April 12). What is so bad about the coach standing up for the rights of female students? If they…
