William E. (Bill) Potts, a trailblazing Denver sculptor who used salvaged wood, house paint and sometimes crude tools to create vivid figures and tableaux prized by celebrities and schoolkids alike, died last week at the age of eighty.
News that Rocky Mountain National Park’s visitor numbers are headed for another record-busting year may be a cause for celebration in some quarters, but it’s also an occasion for groans and trepidation among those who wonder if the park’s most precious features can survive its ever-growing popularity.
Here are some of the most notable stories that Westword has run over the years dealing with Colorado’s most infamous unsolved homicide.
A new documentary screening on local television this weekend takes a fresh look at what was once the most powerful corporation in Colorado — a company that played a crucial role in the deadliest labor struggle in American history.
Through an open records request, Westword obtained records for fifteen years (2001-2016) on causes of death that the Colorado Department of Corrections submits to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Close to twenty percent of the deaths during that period were attributed to “end stage liver disease” or related illnesses.
Books make great gifts for the holidays. It helps, of course, to find books that address your particular recipient’s passions and obsessions — and while you’re at it, why not throw in a few titles by local authors?
Attorneys who sued the U.S. Bureau of Prisons over alleged abuses of mentally ill inmates have reached a tentative settlement that could have a profound effect on how solitary confinement is used at the nation’s highest-security prison.
At least one cable channel is betting that the glut of JonBenét Ramsey specials three months ago hasn’t exhausted the public fascination with one of the nation’s most infamous unsolved homicides.
In Colorado, hepatitis C has long been one of the leading causes of death inside state prisons. But because of the enormous costs involved, only a lucky few inmates, around twenty a year, have actually received treatment for the disease since wonder drugs that can eradicate the virus became available a couple of years ago.
In Scott Pruitt, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, we have a particular breed of twenty-first century conservative, a champion of states’ rights (when it suits him) and poor, beleaguered industries, including poor little Big Oil and much-maligned King Coal.
A long-running battle over efforts to develop 130 acres of land at the southwest edge of the sprawling Denver metroplex is headed for a showdown in the next few weeks.
A new video makes a case that the campaigns to “Ditch the Ditch” and re-examine Denver’s stormwater plan, which have been fought separately and piecemeal for the most part, may have more in common than most people realize.
The role of education, or lack of same, in a person’s eventual incarceration has been the subject of much hand-wringing over the years, but a new documentary looks at a program that is actually trying to do something about the problem.
For a guy who’s vowed not to load his administration with the usual corporate lobbyists and Washington insiders, Trump has stacked his transition team with energy moguls, climate deniers, anti-EPA crusaders, and other highly vested interests. His short list of Interior nominees reportedly includes such wild cards as Sarah Palin and multimillionaire Forrest Lucas, founder of Lucas Oil Products. Whoever gets the job, it’s likely that his appointee will be ideologically inclined to the drill-baby-drill mantra.
In the twilight of the Obama administration, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell came to Denver yesterday to announce the adoption of long-range plans to protect the Roan Plateau and the Thompson Divide — two spectacularly scenic and environmentally fragile areas on the Western Slope — from oil and gas drilling.
Denver’s $300-million stormwater diversion project has already generated significant community resistance, but opponents of the Platte to Park Hill Stormwater Systems are increasingly focusing on a little-discussed aspect of the project: the decision to direct storm runoff to the South Platte River through a heavily polluted Superfund site.
A halfway house operation in Colorado Springs, where two men died from suspected drug overdoses last month, has also been sharply criticized by state and county officials for bungling two separate investigations into sexual misconduct among its residents. The same company recently fired an employee who was suspected of “assisting clients in altering urine samples” that are required as part of mandatory drug-testing for felons making a transition from prison to the community.
The alley between Champa and Curtis streets is closed. A sign on a barrier warns that only people making deliveries or employees of local businesses are allowed, that trespassing is prohibited under penalty of law — part of the ongoing police effort to keep the homeless from setting up camp…
On Halloween, the scariest day of the year, Aspen officials filed legal paperwork preserving the resort town’s conditional rights to make use of water from two of the last free-flowing creeks in the Roaring Fork watershed. A mundane matter for most municipalities, perhaps, but not in Aspen, where the move…
A new report by two of Colorado’s premiere investigative reporters indicates that former Boulder District Attorney Mary Lacy misrepresented DNA evidence in the JonBenét Ramsey investigation in order to clear her parents and her brother of any suspicion in the six-year-old’s 1996 murder. That revelation is unsettling enough, but it also…
In what is certainly the most divisive and hideous election season in modern memory, it’s good to know that the Powers That Be in Colorado can still rely on one civic leader to be the voice of reason and fair play, to gently guide the voters through the murk to…
Just in time for Halloween, two novels dealing with eerie Colorado themes are haunting local bookstores. One is a fictionalized channeling of one of the state’s most celebrated and puzzling historical figures, while the other is a semi-comic mystery dealing with seances, Riverside Cemetery, cab driving and other scary topics. …
