Net Gains Regarding Alan Prendergast’s “Nightmare on the Net,” in the March 6 issue: I have been following the heavy-handed tactics of the Church of Scientology, in general and on the Internet, since 1993. I took Scientology courses and escaped with relatively little damage way back in 1974. Your article…
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…
“Leather, it lasts,” says Manuel Montoya, who runs the repair shop at Colorado Saddlery. “A Western saddle is a beautiful thing.” It is also a remarkably durable thing. A true Western saddle’s tree is still made of Ponderosa pine covered with sewn-on rawhide; its most basic parts–horn, stirrups, cantle–are all…
In the old days, buying a house in the mountain town of Black Hawk was like moving to Appalachia. Residents lined the cracked windows of their miners’ shacks with quilts to keep out the cold. Living-room floors were made of bare dirt. Porches sagged and chimneys crumbled, and many of…
A brush with fame: In opening arguments in the criminal case resulting from the death of Greg Lopez, defense attorney Walter Gerash compared the artistic aptitude of his client, Peter Schmitz, to that of Picasso and Diego Rivera. But the appraisal of Spicer Breeden’s estate offered a more objective view…
Jim and Jamie Nesmith are grieving over the death of David Polreis, a little boy they never met but who, under different circumstances, could have become their son. They had hoped to adopt the two-year-old Russian orphan when the woman who’d brought him to this country decided, after just seven…
Richard Frajola was a bigwig in the world of stamp and coin memorabilia and an expert on Western postal history, so when he moved to Colorado from Connecticut in 1990, local dealers gave him due respect. “Richard is one of the most knowledgeable stamp experts in the country,” says dealer…
Saving already broken ground on an expansion of Denver’s light-rail line south to Littleton, the Regional Transportation District now has its sights set on another ten-mile route from downtown to the western suburbs. But some of the residents in the path of the project say they don’t want it in…
Bill Clinton, the new night clerk at Motel 6, decreed last week that for the foreseeable future, not one federal nickel will be spent on human cloning research. And he asked privately funded geneticists to voluntarily stop such tinkering down in the lab. What can the man be thinking? Just…
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…
Murder, Ink Westword, I’m very impressed. Karen Bowers’s stories on two Colorado death-penalty cases (“A Trust Betrayed,” February 27, and “A Fight to the Death,” March 6) were excellent pieces of reporting and writing. While Bowers’s descriptions of the murders of Ashley Gray and Lorraine Martelli were as chilling as…
Last week Karen Bowers wrote about the capital murder case of Jon Morris, a crack addict and small-time hood who prosecutors say savagely raped and killed five-year-old Ashley Gray. Morris’s trial, scheduled to begin March 3, has been postponed until May 19; it’s the first of what are likely to…
Strange things happen around Lawrence Wollersheim. His businesses collapse. His Boulder apartment gets raided by federal marshals, his computers seized. When college students offer to help him rebuild his computer bulletin-board system, they receive threatening phone calls–anonymous voices urging them to stay away from Larry. A California judge who presided…
You’re an ordinary person in Aspen, which is to say that at times your 15,000-square-foot rustic mountain cabin feels a little inadequate. Sadly, if you want to slap on a small addition–say, double the size of the place–you’re at the mercy of the Pitkin County Planning and Zoning Commission, a…
Steal this story!: During a rambling press conference Monday, Timothy McVeigh defense attorney Stephen Jones talked about everything from the lasagna he’d eaten to the delay he’d need now that the Dallas Morning News had published a story by Pete Slover based on confidential–and fake, by the by–materials taken from…
Business owner Ron Partridge is feeling pretty good these days, which is a bit surprising. His Internet startup company, Pear Tree Communications, and its showpiece Web site, Gay Colorado Online, are currently sailing the rough waters common to many new online businesses: cash-flow problems, internal conflicts, and a lack of…
Perhaps you weren’t listening to Focus on the Family’s weekday radio show one day last November when James Dobson, the sixtyish head of the religious right’s media giant, dropped broad hints about what a wonderful president of the United States he would make. Millions of other people were. And don’t…
If the lords of baseball really want to clean up the awful mess they’ve made, they probably won’t be asking stormy Albert Belle to double as the game’s official spokesman. Mark McGwire, either. A huge slab of muscle who’s proven as fragile as a china figurine, McGwire has turned into…
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…
Caught Dead to Writes Kudos to Patricia Calhoun. Her “Sealed Fates,” in the February 27 issue, pointed up the continuing hypocrisy regarding “victims’ rights.” If only our legislature paid attention to children when they were alive rather than waiting until they are dead. Joy Frankel Denver Ever since Westword’s Patricia…
Suppose you’re the mother of the bride. You have a role to play and you want to dress the part, but you just can’t surrender to the Barbara Bush mold from which the typical Mother-of-the-Bride dress is cast. Well, how about slipping into this stretch-lace number with panels of petticoating,…
Capital punishment cases are always fought aggressively in Colorado, but the legal battle to save Jon Morris turned nasty early on. The 38-year-old Morris’s life will be on the line when he goes to trial in Denver on March 3 for the 1995 rape and murder of five-year-old Ashley Gray…
