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Eagle is the kind of Colorado town that people in less scenic places dream about. For decades it survived as a supply center for the ranches that were the mainstay of Eagle County. The downtown streets — wide enough to maneuver a horse and wagon — are lined with century-old…

Stephen Elliott’s five-year-old daughter, Isabel, wanted hamburgers for dinner, and so on April 17 last year, a little after 5 p.m., they headed for Alfalfa’s grocery store in Capitol Hill. The two had spent the warm Saturday afternoon at a birthday party near Sloan Lake. Isabel was still wearing her…

You are not the kind of person who settles for easy answers. You never swallowed the Warren Report. You think the Church Committee’s investigation of the CIA lacked balls. You just know they pulled the plug on the Iran-Contra hearings and the Vince Foster affair before they got to the…

This is what City of Aurora employee Anita Burkhart told the Aurora police in 1997 about Becky Beckler, the acting manager of Original Aurora Renewal, a department in the city’s Office of Community Development: “Becky was stalking him. At work, Becky was just Becky. Her personality would change when it…

The sign taped to the back of the display case reads “fo-cosh-uh,” and Terry Williams glances nervously at it as the next customer walks up. She smiles when he points to a sandwich that’s been made with focaccia and says, slowly and carefully, “So you like that fo-cosh-uh, huh?” He…

The JonBenét Ramsey movie Perfect Murder, Perfect Town may have been mostly filmed in Utah, and the John Denver movie airing this Sunday, Take Me Home: The John Denver Story, may have been shot in Vancouver, but that doesn’t mean that everybody thinks Colorado is a bad location for moviemaking…

Kim Chlumsky was returning from lunch when her mom heard the shots echo in the backyard garden. As Kim approached the school, which is only a few blocks from her Littleton home, the streets were already blocked off by police. She thought it was a car wreck until her mom…

What if they gave a media event and only the media showed up? That’s not quite how things worked out on April 20, the one-year anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School, but it was closer to the truth than the press reporting about the would-be spectacle let on…

Paper Trail Now that both dailies have their Pulitzers (as Michael Roberts predicted and then recapped in his April 13 Message), maybe they’ll quit forcing Columbine onto Page 1 day by day, month by month. And since the local and national media, the jocks-rule administrators, some parents and students and…

The days tick by slowly for Wen Ho Lee, the scientist who has been accused of downloading and transferring onto portable tapes virtually every nuclear-weapon secret in the United States arsenal. In late February, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver agreed with a federal judge in New Mexico…

The phone rang. It was a Littleton woman who said her kids’ candy had been disappearing. Jack Murphy smelled a rat. He fired up the Dodge van and headed over. “I get under the sink and look under there, and there was really no place where the rat could go,”…

They flowed into the streets, shouting and waving signs, angry at Denver police. Mostly they were young teens and college kids, more than a thousand of them, demanding justice for two boys they say were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the protesters weren’t in Denver. They…

In charging a petty thief who attempted to rob a Safeway with felony murder, Denver District Attorney Bill Ritter is making use of one of a DA’s handiest tools. He’s also stretching the definition of felony murder as far as it will go — and possibly further. In March, Kenneth…

When five slow-growth advocates decided to take on town hall in Erie’s April 4 election, they had grand plans for establishing a new order in this old mining community, where particle-board homes have been popping up as quickly as prairie dogs in an open field. But the result is not…

It’s not offered at any of your finer acting schools, and it certainly won’t be found in the theater section of the New York Times, but performing along with the Rocky Horror Picture Show — a tradition carried out at movie houses nationwide by cultish followers of the 1975 flick…

At 8 p.m. one Friday every month, it is Officer Dean Abeyta’s solemn duty to administer a form of juvenile justice that has been called everything from “groundbreaking” to “cruel and unusual.” Entering the single courtroom of the Fort Lupton municipal building, he sets up rows of chairs, drags a…

It’s 12:45 a.m., and the spacious new Clear Channel headquarters, located in the vicinity of the Denver Tech Center, isn’t exactly hopping. Aside from a mysterious-looking man who’s sitting behind the wheel of an older model car in the building’s parking lot as if he’s waiting for Alan Berg to…

They Sought the SheriffRegarding Alan Prendergast’s “Stonewalled,” in the April 13 issue: Kudos to Westword for a story that finally puts Columbine in perspective. While the rest of the media continues to tell us everything we do not want to know, Westword and Alan Prendergast ask some hard questions about…

Away to Go Regarding Michael Roberts’s “The Making of a Media Event,” his April 6 Message: Even if the Columbine anniversary “event” attracts “only” 10,000, that’s still insane. The only people who should be anywhere near the school and park on April 20 are Columbine students and staff, their families,…