They were going nowhere fast. After almost two full days of jury selection–sifting through questionnaires, quizzing prospective jurors about their feelings regarding the media, suicide, alcohol, bad art–the opening arguments in the Peter Schmitz trial began late Tuesday. At this rate, the jurors who survived the cut (although Denver County…
Caught Dead to Writes Kudos to Patricia Calhoun. Her “Sealed Fates,” in the February 27 issue, pointed up the continuing hypocrisy regarding “victims’ rights.” If only our legislature paid attention to children when they were alive rather than waiting until they are dead. Joy Frankel Denver Ever since Westword’s Patricia…
Suppose you’re the mother of the bride. You have a role to play and you want to dress the part, but you just can’t surrender to the Barbara Bush mold from which the typical Mother-of-the-Bride dress is cast. Well, how about slipping into this stretch-lace number with panels of petticoating,…
Capital punishment cases are always fought aggressively in Colorado, but the legal battle to save Jon Morris turned nasty early on. The 38-year-old Morris’s life will be on the line when he goes to trial in Denver on March 3 for the 1995 rape and murder of five-year-old Ashley Gray…
Around the world in eighty days has been reduced to eighty seconds. That’s about the time it takes to call up a Boulder company’s Web site and take a peek at any one of the hundreds of real-time images it offers from Bourbon Street to Buenos Aires. Digital Camera Network,…
A “tribal knife” being advertised in a Sunday newspaper supplement distributed around the country as the artwork of U.S. Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell is about as genuine as its faux-turquoise pommel. Campbell, who acknowledges creating the basic design of “The Cheyenne Buffalo Knife” several years ago for the Franklin Mint,…
On the walls of Henry Pohs’s basement are more than 1,000 underground mining artifacts, as precisely arranged as any museum collection. Here you’ll find everything from clay lamps used in the Roman catacombs to rare pieces from a 1917 St. Louis mining convention. This well-lit subterranean space–a contrast from the…
January 15 was a big day at the Salud Family Health Center in Commerce City, one of the government-funded, front-line primary-care clinics that treat more than a third of the state’s poor and indigent medical patients. After months of planning, the clinic was opening a new office. The expansion, which…
Limp noodles: Stymied in his attempts to broadcast live from Pasta Jay’s restaurant, Geraldo Rivera nonetheless showed up right on schedule in Boulder, where on Monday he interviewed Ramsey family spokesman Pat Korten–his clients are “up there at the top of the potential suspect list,” the full-time flack allowed–and hosted…
That hint of springtime you feel in the air can mean only one thing. The attention of red-blooded sports fans in these parts will soon turn to the fluid dynamics of air flow, plausible stress-strain cycles at fixed impact velocities and (everybody’s favorite up in the Rockpile) the Navier-Stokes Equation…
She’ll Vouch for That Regarding Stuart Steers’s “Readin’, Writin’ and Rabble-Rousin’,” in the February 20 issue: The panic of Boulder parents when confronted by the middle-school philosophy is understandable when one looks at Dean Damon’s previous adventures in Denver Public Schools. He engineered the middle-school model in Denver first. Despite…
Not so very long ago, a Colorado kindergartner was murdered, her body violated in the most awful, intimate way before it was discarded. Her name was not JonBenet Ramsey. Under a peculiar Colorado statute, you might not know her name at all–except that the disappearance of Ashley Gray from her…
Stephanie Hult, 1960s feminist and anti-war activist, says she’s misunderstood. Her numerous enemies portray Hult, now the president of the Boulder Valley school board, as the spiteful leader of a band of right-wing elitists who want to destroy the Boulder Valley school system. But Hult says she’s every bit the…
Now that NBC’s Asteroid has leveled much of Denver (which stood in for Dallas and Kansas City), it’s time to sift through the smoking rubble and unearth some more of our state’s memorable celluloid moments. Hollywood fat cats come here because they like the mountains and because it’s cheaper to…
The City Park Golf Course has long been a jewel of Denver’s parks system. These days it’s looking more like a political sand trap. Most of the attention surrounding the city’s beleaguered municipal golf system in recent weeks has focused on the dispute over whether to raise greens fees for…
The sound and the furry: It wasn’t just that Boulder police chief Tom Koby’s uniform looked so unused that mothballs might have fallen out of his pockets during last week’s news conference on the JonBenet Ramsey case. Something else didn’t quite fit the picture of a metro police chief. The…
When you’re working 24-hour shifts on an ambulance crew, there’s always plenty of time to kill while waiting for someone to almost get killed. Upstairs at Columbine Ambulance headquarters in Littleton, the restless paramedics hang out in a day room that resembles a college dorm. On a typical morning, near…
Denver may be about to lose an art collection that was a fixture in the Capitol Hill neighborhood for nearly twenty years. The Turner Museum was housed in a home at 773 Downing Street until last year. Its founder, Douglas Graham, owns hundreds of lithographs and other works by the…
He doesn’t remember much from that night at the Bossert Hotel, except that someone kept refilling his glass with champagne, and he could see from the windows that the whole length of Montague Street was clogged with delirious people. “We had to take turns going outside and waving to them,”…
What did Boulder do to deserve this? That’s a stupid question. Next question. Okay. So why did Boulder call a rare news conference last Thursday, introduce it as a “briefing” and then let Boulder County District Attorney Alex Hunter launch into a half-hour, Mayberry-meets-Naropa soliloquy that covered everything from his…
Fetal Attraction I just finished reading Steve Jackson’s February 13 feature, “The Fight of Their Lives,” on Dr. Warren Hern, and felt compelled to comment on it. I first encountered this amazing man in his anthropology class last fall at the University of Colorado-Boulder. I was fascinated by his account…
The plainclothes cops, their shoulder holsters bulging beneath suit coats, confer quietly with a knot of uniformed state troopers outside the old Supreme Court chambers. Here on the second floor of the State Capitol, the air is as heavy as the moment before a summer thunderstorm. Mike Newell, Denver detective-turned-security-consultant,…
