Looking back, Sharon Kratze says, she should have asked more questions. When she decided to run for the board of the Cedar Pointe Condominium Association, she thought she was simply campaigning for “constructive change” in the way her community was managed and maintained. Nobody told her that she was also…

It isn’t that the governor of Colorado hates you soccer moms out there. He just thinks you people shouldn’t have the right, when some drunk driver plows into the family Aerostar, to dun your hardworking, premium-gouging insurance company for your medical expenses and still be able to go after the…

The night her roommate was raped, Angel Castro says, she had a ringside seat. She was in the upper bunk when the bed below her began to shake. The man who came into their room that night had no worries about locks or the law. He didn’t seem to care…

At first glance, the Golden Corral on the north side of Colorado Springs doesn’t seem to be the right place to be talking about tightening the ol’ belt a few notches. Patrons make trip after trip to the restaurant’s all-you-can-eat buffet, piling their plates high with steaks, chicken, salads, soups,…

Stabbings and beatings are common. Drugs are plentiful — although ingesting them sometimes has unforeseen results. A restraint chair comes in handy, as does the occasional warning shot from Tower III. And whatever you do, don’t mess with inmate Ramirez. Those are some of the impressions of the Limon Correctional…

Last April, Alvin Jones got the message on his answering machine: a prison chaplain, telling him to call a certain nurse. That’s how he found out that his brother Nathan had died. The story of his death, as found in public records, would scarcely fill a paragraph: Nathan Earl Jones,…

Bleeding from his behind, Fidel Ramos had this crazy notion that he should be taken to a hospital. Not a prison infirmary, but a real hospital, with an emergency room and doctors and such. His keepers at the Denver Reception and Diagnostic Center, a maximum security prison on Smith Road,…

After prosecuting cases for the City of Denver for thirteen years, Toya Dawson thought she knew the rules. And the most important rule was also the most basic one: innocent until proven guilty. But then Dawson discovered that the city attorney’s office has a different set of rules for its…

The office is locked and dark. Notices about unclaimed packages and unpaid rent and fees festoon the front door. The company Web site hasn’t been updated in eighteen months. Most telling of all, the phone has been disconnected. This could be how the world ends for the Center for the…

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold weren’t the only ones engaged in a shooting spree at Columbine on April 20, 1999. Denver police officers were generous with their own ammunition that day, firing at phantoms and pumping rounds into a school full of trapped students long after the killers were dead…

On the evening of June 8, 2001, Delores and Charles Gates received the kind of phone call every parent dreads: Their nineteen-year-old son was calling from jail. They barely had time to absorb that information when the news got much worse. “Get me out of here,” John Gates told his…

Suppose, for a moment, that you’re in the market for a seven-figure custom house. Nothing fancy, mind you. Just a little something for the missus and the wee tykes, now that you’ve outgrown that quaint pied-à-terre downtown. Something different, something fresh. Something to make your friends weep with envy. Seeking…

As an aspiring 26-year-old writer with a dark past, Mark Jordan figures he has plenty to tell the world. He has stories about bank robberies, for instance, and the many episodes of violence he’s seen in eight years of prison life. And how federal authorities have been trying to coerce…

She tried to tell them about Michael Garrett. But nobody listened. She tried to tell them how it was, the threats and the cocaine and all that. How he broke into her house one night after she’d kicked him out for good. How she’d lived in fear ever since, wondering…

Jonna Cohen and Michael Sobol knew they were taking a risk when they joined thousands of other protesters at the gates of an Army base in Georgia last November. With the nation spluttering in patriotic fervor and the bombing of Afghanistan under way, it wasn’t the ideal time for a…

Last fall was a particularly trying time for Kelly Grizzell. Emotionally devastated by the murder of her sixteen-year-old daughter, Stephanie, she was dreading the approach of October 28, 2001 — the day that would have been Stephanie’s eighteenth birthday. She didn’t think her life could get much worse. She was…

An epic court battle over Colorado’s most troubled piece of real estate has reached a historic turning point — and none too soon. Many of the original parties in the dispute over the 77,000-acre Taylor Ranch are no longer alive, and those who survive have waited decades for some resolution…

Some calamities begin with a letter, others with a phone call. An argument. A drink. A wrong turn. In the case of Sunserea McClelland, catastrophe comes at her from behind one snowy spring morning. She never sees it coming. Seconds later, her whole world turns upside down. All changed, changed…

Colorado now has five murderers marking time on death row. Several hundred other violent criminals are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole, and more than one member of that group has suggested that execution might be a more merciful fate than decades of isolation behind bars. But out…

A 22-year legal battle came to an abrupt end last week when the Church of Scientology paid $8.67 million to one of its harshest critics: a former member who claimed the church had harassed him for years and driven him “to the brink of insanity.” The settlement between the church’s…

The battle to overhaul Colorado’s civil forfeiture law provided a few sparks in an otherwise dull legislative session. It was a classic clash of principles, pitting law-and-order types who view forfeiture as a powerful weapon in the war on drugs against defenders of constitutional rights and the sanctity of private…