Last week, Anderson Cooper interviewed Willow the Cat. On Monday, he featured two more Coloradans on his new show, Anderson -- but the story of Kristen and Will Stillman, which first appeared on the cover of Westword a year ago, isn't nearly as warm and fuzzy.

When the twins were eight years old, their mother, Karen, dropped them off at a house in northwest Denver, where the head of the household, Eric Torrez, held them hostage for a dozen years, subjecting them to incredible psychological and physical tortures. By the time she was twenty, Kristen had given birth to four children -- all the result of rapes by Torrez.

Will, too, suffered unimaginable horrors -- horrors he spoke about on yesterday's show, in hopes that the next adult who hears a child's plea for help will do something.

Oh, and there was one mention of cats yesterday: When Karen -- who appeared from prison -- was sent to jail for sixteen years, she was more worried about what would happen to her kitty than what she'd done to her children, the children she'd given to a monster when they were just eight. That cat, she was, was "defenseless."

Here's more from yesterday's Anderson show.

Patricia Calhoun's original piece on Kristen Stillman just won the best non-daily feature story award from the national Society of Professional Journalists. Read "Spreading Her Wings" here.

• Calhoun: Wake-Up Call