Dial Mutt for Murder The paws that refreshes: Patricia Calhoun’s “Barking Up the Wrong Tree,” in the June 8 issue, was absolutely the best damn Ramsey article I have read over the past three and a half years. I am from West Virginia (no joke), and I have followed this…
Looking back, Ernie Ferguson can see the deception. It’s all there in the photographs, as thick and smooth as the makeup on the con man’s face. But when Ferguson met the model now called Storme Shannon Aerison, he wanted to believe. He wanted the blonde in the red dress, black…
Traffic starts stuffing up at the corner of Alameda Avenue and Quebec Street at about 7:30 a.m. The cars leaving the former Lowry Air Force Base stream into a double line of shiny luxury sedans and caravans of SUVs. The cars heading north, onto the base, are driven by construction…
Having a gold mine next door can be a wonderful thing, bringing wealth and jobs to the community. Or it can be an environmental nightmare just waiting to happen, a stockpile of hazardous waste that could poison the water, kill wildlife and blight the landscape for generations to come. It…
Five months after Jay Schlaks was sentenced to prison for conning more than 200 people out of $3.2 million in a land-investment scam, his wife and partner in crime, Rebecca Ann Romero, will also face punishment. Romero returned from a thirteen-year self-imposed exile in New Zealand on May 9 but…
In the weeks following the January 27 decision by the Boulder Valley Board of Education to consolidate five elementary schools, it was hard to find a parent in South Boulder who wasn’t calling for boardmembers’ heads to roll. But as the school year wound down, a petition to recall three…
The radio ad begins innocently enough with the sound of chirping crickets. “You’re listening to the Kleins camping out under the stars,” a happy voice says. “The Klein family are lottery winners. Not because they won the top prize in a scratch game or matched any numbers in a Lotto…
In the month or so since the announcement of a proposed joint operating agreement pairing the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, staffers opposed to the plan have seldom voiced their objections in the press, to absolutely no one’s surprise. Privately, though, many remain plenty pissed off, ranting that…
Size Matters Fashion victims: Thanks for Michael Roberts’s great article on SUVs, “A Sporting Chance,” in the June 1 issue. It should be required reading for all those considering purchasing one of those Stupid Useless Vehicles, as well as for those lemmings who have already followed the latest fashion by…
Since moving to Alma, Colorado, a scenic mountain community not far from Fairplay, Amy Majikas hadn’t gotten to see her mother, Janet, nearly as often as she would have liked. After all, Janet lived on the eastern end of the continent, in Fallsington, Pennsylvania, a lovely historic village near Levittown…
The Colorado Department of Transportation’s repository of accident reports fills an entire room. Row after row of shelving units that reach up to the ceiling support hundreds of folders packed with paperwork submitted by law-enforcement agencies across the state. (No, they’re not computerized; they’re on old-fashioned paper.) The documents are…
Marilyn Forrest managed the Bradley Petroleum filling station at 8875 Washington Street in Thornton for almost three years. She only made $6.50 an hour, but she was a conscientious person who often worked more than sixty hours a week without a day off to cover for employees who missed their…
Denver Bronco wide receiver Rod Smith is asking that a domestic-violence assault charge be dropped because Douglas County prosecutors tried to bribe the victim — his common-law wife, Jami Mourglia — into testifying against him. Smith and Mourglia also claim that the prosecutors and/or the Parker Police Department’s victim’s advocate…
Ron Norris’s family eked out a living as sharecroppers in Scotch Ridge, Iowa. They lived simply, decades behind progress, tilling the fields with draft horses and drawing water with a hand pump. On Saturday evenings they’d sit around the battery-powered radio and listen to the tinny strains of Roy Acuff…
Hundreds of people attending the Rocky Mountain Children’s Law Center fundraiser on Thursday went home disappointed. It seems that Thunder, the white Arabian stallion, isn’t well. According to the brochure that went along with the event, Sharon Magness, socialite, benefactress and widow of cable magnate Bill Magness, was supposed to…
When you’re sniffing around a perfumer’s house, your descriptions of smells had better be particular, so here: The backyard is lilacs before, as opposed to after, a quick afternoon rain in Colorado. The kitchen is cloves with a faint note of rosemary. The perfumer herself, Kerry Ott, does not smell…
There are things you know — and then there are things you know. The difference is everything. In 1969, while he was in Germany attending his first international track-and-field competition, Frank Shorter roomed with a hammer-thrower, a man of immense proportions. One night the roommate began bouncing off the walls,…
Every Second Counts Mark his words: In “Marked for Death,” in the May 25 issue, Alan Prendergast stated that there have been eight inmate homicides at Florence federal penitentiary since it opened seven years ago. This means 1.1 homicides per year. He also wrote that 94 assaults means “roughly one…
Jeremy Garcia was the first to see the Special Forces commandos. Well, they said they were Special Forces. But the two men didn’t look like any commandos Garcia had seen before. Their heads were covered by camouflage hoods studded with pieces of red sponge. They wore thick green canvas breastplates…
When Colorado First Assistant Attorney General David Kaye was handcuffed and arrested three weeks ago for breaking into his ex-wife’s garage, allegedly injuring her in the process, he was charged with felony trespass and misdemeanor criminal mischief. When his ex-wife, Irene, was handcuffed and arrested after she kicked his truck…
As recently as last year, Denver officials pushing for a sweeping renovation of Red Rocks Amphitheatre and Friends of Red Rocks, a group of public citizens fearful that the city’s plans went too far, were singing very different tunes. But the announcement earlier this year of a less ambitious restorative…
On November 19, Junior Seau and the rest of the listless San Diego Chargers will file their way onto a chartered airplane and fly to Denver for their yearly faceoff against the Denver Broncos. The owners of the team, 76-year-old Alex Spanos and his son, Dean Spanos, will probably join…
