Remembering Stephen Singular

Stephen Singular, a native of Kansas and a University of Kansas graduate, was a successful freelance writer in New York City when he decided to come to Denver for a job at Empire, the now-defunct Sunday magazine of the Denver Post. A 1984 Rolling Stone article about the murder of local talk-show host Alan Berg by neo-Nazis led to his first book, Talked to Death, and set a new path for Singular's journalistic career.

He went on to publish 24 more nonfiction books, many of them about high-profile criminal cases — including Presumed Guilty: An Investigation Into the JonBenet Ramsey Case, the Media, and the Culture of Pornography — though he also wrote about sports and business figures, as well as social commentary. Singular's latest book, The Heart of Violence, was just published by Pegasus in London; The Wichita Divide, a 2011 book about the assassination of abortion doctor George Tiller, was recently optioned for a limited series.

And more projects are in the works, according to his wife and partner, Joyce Jacques Singular.

Last year, Singular also began writing feature stories for Westword. On August 15, we published "The Carbon Cowboy," his profile of Berthoud-based entrepreneur James Gaspard, who's using biochar as a tool to fight climate change. "Blowback," his September 19 cover story, detailed the efforts of Boulder scientist Steve Wolf to fight wildfires with hurricane-force winds.

Singular returned to true crime with "Paying the Price," his November 14 story on private investigator Ellis Armistead, who's taken on cases ranging from JonBenét to Columbine. And in "Testing the Waters," he told how Nederland's Terence "Tez" Steinberg planned to row from Hawaii to Australia to raise awareness about the plague of plastic in the oceans.

Despite suffering from a long, debilitating illness, Singular kept writing. He passed away on February 11, shortly after he submitted his final article to Westword; you can now read that piece, a profile of lawyer Mari Newman, here.

Joyce Singular will post additional news of projects stemming from his work at stephensingular.com.