She would have been sixteen now. A boy-crazy cheerleader, maybe, or the dorky president of the debate team. A wobbly-voiced contestant on America’s Got Talent. Or just another girl in narrow-legged jeans at the mall — diamond stud in nostril, cell phone clamped to ear. Who can say? Instead, she’s…
Most special elections are humdrum affairs involving bond issues and tax questions, but the one currently facing the citizens of Lakewood promises to be special indeed. At stake are two parcels of land on the southwestern edge of the city totaling less than fifty acres — and a bitter debate…
When Jack Grynberg breezes through the doors of the Grynberg Petroleum Company, attention must be paid. Wearing a dark-blue pinstripe suit, dark glasses and a well-traveled Stetson, an unlit cigar scissored between the fingers of one hand, he seems like a shorter, Greenwood Village-CEO version of the Lone Ranger, come…
Forty-three states regulate private investigators in one way or another. Colorado isn’t one of them, and state officials aren’t inclined to do anything about it — despite efforts by local private eyes to push for some kind of licensing requirements. “It’s crazy,” says Rick Johnson, a Denver P.I. and president…
Swarmed by reporters outside the Boulder Justice Center this past August, Michael Tracey was in his element. After a long hiatus, the national media was back on the case, the unsolved 1996 murder of six-year-old beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey. It’s a case that Tracey, a University of Colorado journalism professor…
Talk all you want about bad men and madmen. The truly scary ones are those who know rage so well that they scare themselves. The anger pours out of them without warning, like floodwater surging through crumbling earthworks, rolling and roaring over everything in its path. They become howling bedlamites,…
Federal Boulevard stretches almost thirty miles down the spine of the metro area, from Bowles Boulevard in Littleton, where the Southglenn Luncheon Optimist Club keeps the last mile litter-free, to north of 120th in Westminster, where the Belger family handles clean-up duties as the road loses its U.S. Highway 287…
When private investigators make the nightly news in Colorado, it’s usually for the wrong reasons. Almost every local P.I. has a story about some other P.I. who’s given the racket a bad name. The trail of slime stretches back a generation, as long as the state has been without any…
“My best chance of clearing myself of the trouble you’re trying to make for me is by bringing in the murderers — all tied up. And my only chance of ever catching them and tying them up and bringing them in is by keeping away from you and the police,…
Four years ago, Paul Lambert built one of the biggest luxury houses in Douglas County, a 9,100-square-foot tribute to Vegas excess that was the buzz of the 2002 Parade of Homes. Despite lawsuits and other setbacks, he’s even managed to live in his dream house, the Villa Bellagio, following a…
Galileo got crosswise with Pope Urban VIII. Robert Oppenheimer didn’t see eye-to-eye with Edward Teller. Every original thinker has a bête noire who torments and goads him. For William Gray, a lean, six-foot-five emeritus professor at Colorado State University and one of the world’s leading experts on tropical storms, the…
A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that sharply limits the rights of whistleblowers could change the landscape for a number of workplace battles in Colorado — including a case alleging heart-transplant fraud and retaliation at the University of Colorado Hospital that was filed just days before the high court’s deeply…
The ghost of Ronald Wilson Reagan haunts the Marc Holtzman for Governor campaign headquarters on South Broadway. Images of the nation’s fortieth president beam from brochures, and framed photos of him hang on the walls. In most of the pictures, hovering somewhere near the Great Communicator is a mop-haired, bespectacled…
The University of Colorado wants you to know that it “remains committed to promoting and maintaining an environment free from sexual harassment.” CU is so committed, in fact, that in 2004 it fired Igor Gamow, a controversial professor and inventor who’d been a fixture on the Boulder campus for nearly…
When he was ten years old and clowning around, Shea Sweeney did something incredibly stupid with a cardboard box and a pack of matches. It left his neighbors feeling burned, and little Shea saddled with a debt his allowance couldn’t begin to cover, even if he lived to be as…
Cradling a sawed-off shotgun in his lap, Eric Harris glares into the video camera. He takes a pull from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and winces. Then he talks smack about the pathetic losers involved in school shootings in Oregon and Kentucky. “Do not think we’re trying to copy anyone,”…
Having been deep in it most of his life, John “Jake” Johnson can smell trouble coming. So last year, when the fifty-year-old inmate found out he would be paroling from a private prison in Trinidad to a homeless shelter in downtown Denver, the news smelled very bad indeed. “I told…
Tony Shane Francis had his share of breaks. He pulled off bank robberies in Oregon and Idaho, escaped from jail in Arizona, made the scene on America’s Most Wanted and the FBI’s list of top fugitives, and dodged the wrath of the Aryan Brotherhood and black gangs in one of…
Here’s how you get from the center of Denver — the intersection of Colfax and Broadway — to the center of the mapping universe: Start out going SOUTH on Broadway. Turn RIGHT onto West Colfax Avenue. Proceed less than one-tenth of a mile. Turn RIGHT onto 15th Street. Turn RIGHT…
That was a crazy game of poker I lost it all But someday I’ll be back again And I’m never to fall Never to fall never to fall. ‘Crazy Game of Poker,’ OAR The Messenger Billy Flores had just finished dinner with his grandparents in California when he checked his…
It was only late October, but a kind of holiday excitement coursed through the Altvater household in southeast Aurora. Kaeleigh had called. Kaeleigh was coming home. Her mother, DeEtte, was thrilled. She and her younger daughter had been locked in conflict for years — over school, chores, house rules, all…
What passes for life inside the Colorado State Penitentiary didn’t suit Kevin Fears and Timothy Russell. So both inmates put an abrupt end to their long sentences — by killing themselves. At the state’s supermax prison, prisoners spend 23 hours a day in their cells and are shackled when escorted…
