Given his immediate charm, it wasn’t surprising that Christopher Lance Johnson sold cars for a living. In fact, that was how he and Betty got together. She wanted a black Mustang convertible. Chris, a good-looking, smooth-talking 21-year-old she met through a friend, found her one. The romance was soon off…
Domestic violence has a way of reaching out and touching the rest of society, sometimes with fatal consequences. The cases that get the headlines are those in which someone dies. A man shoots his wife in a fit of obsession and rage. A woman uses an ax on her sleeping…
On hot summer nights, when her children were sleeping, she would open her windows wide and listen to the sounds of Capitol Hill–the sirens, the screams. “Ambulances and fire trucks were going all night long,” Clarissa Pinkola Estes remembers. “You’d hear angry voices. You’d hear a great big slap, and…
Patricia Ann Burns had finally taken all she was going to from her husband, Clarence. One day in August 1982, the 38-year-old elementary-school teacher, who’d been beaten twice by Clarence in recent months, told her husband that she was through with the hitting and yelling and through with the marriage…
Even indoors, the young blond woman keeps her dark glasses on–the better to disguise, along with pancake makeup, the bruises on the right side of her face where her common-law husband hit her the night before. Or maybe it’s to hide the humiliation of being in a room inside the…
If you were to speculate about the people who do business in the downtown US West office building based on the cars parked immediately around it, you’d think that 64 percent of them were physically disabled. On a recent business day, an average of 14 of the 22 available metered…
Is that a radio in your pocket? Departing congressman David Skaggs is crowing that the feds will review security at Rocky Flats, as he requested over a year ago when reports surfaced concerning inadequate security and safeguards at the decommissioned nuclear-weapons plant. When he visited the facility on Friday, departing…
Is there any way to prevent the Front Range from becoming a nonstop city that stretches from Wyoming to New Mexico? A state senator and a group of local activists, frustrated by legislative inaction, may try a direct appeal to the voters to fight sprawl. They’re about to issue a…
When it was all over, rider Kent Desormeaux said he felt sick to his stomach. Then proved it. He had asked his mount for winning speed too soon, he said gloomily, then let the horse’s attention wander with a furlong to go. Down in the jockeys’ room, Chris McCarron draped…
She calls him the Anne Frank of the trailer park. When she drives him home from school, her son has to duck down in the seat. When he’s in the yard, he has to watch over his shoulder for the park manager. He’s not a thief. Or a drug dealer…
Can We Be Frank? Westword has sunk to a new low with Dewey Webb’s “Final Episode” Killer Curse, in the June 4 issue. At last you look like the sleazy tabloid you really are. Ray Brown Denver The connection between the last episode of Seinfeld and the death of Frank…
Longmont’s Main Street still reflects its farm-town roots, with mom-and-pop diners serving homemade pie and realtors posting notices for “horse property” in storefront windows. But like so much of Colorado, Longmont is changing. An influx of high-tech firms has sparked an economic boom. Subdivisions are going up on all sides…
Welton Street isn’t the only maintenance district facing problems. But while Welton Street’s battles are internal, the major threat to other districts is coming from the outside. Specifically, from the Denver Water Board, which is contemplating charging a retroactive “tap fee” for water lines that were installed years ago. Those…
Crayton Jones surveys Welton Street, the spine of Five Points. Outside his C&B Cleaners at 2748 Welton, he spots four barren trees. “The trees are dead,” he says. “He’s supposed to maintain ’em all.” He’s talking about James Parker, former American Legion commander and longtime Points activist. Over the past…
“Seinfeld”/Sinatra Death Link Exclusive! “TV shows don’t kill people . . . but final episodes sure do!” That’s the shocking claim from experts who insist that legendary entertainer Frank Sinatra’s fatal heart attack was actually a result of the Final Episode Curse–a bizarre jinx that strikes a death blow whenever…
Let’s say you earn a decent salary–on paper, at least. But each payday, your employer deducts a couple hundred bucks to tip your secretary, the payroll director and the guy who cleans your office. After all, your employer explains, those people are your support staff–you couldn’t get your job done…
Mildred Bennett won’t get her home back, or anything close to the full market value of the two-story Victorian in the Baker neighborhood from which she was evicted eighteen months ago. But under a settlement agreement reached late on Friday, May 22, the 72-year-old blind and mentally disabled woman will…
Blade runners: The battle of the TV news choppers continues down at Speer Boulevard and Logan Street, where KUSA-TV/Channel 9 is finally poised to begin flying in and out of its inner-city digs sometime in mid-July. The station, which backed away from the use of copters after suffering six Sky9…
Last Wednesday night, Michael Jordan threw a little outside fake, stopped short and rose from the floor of the United Center like an ascending saint. The soft jumper hit dead center, of course, and just like that, His Airness had the 34,999th and 35,000th points of his storied career. Even…
Underground Railroad After reading Patricia Calhoun’s “Up From the Underground,” in the May 21 issue, I wonder if anywhere in this city is safe–above ground or below. Thanks for the alert. Mae Powers via the Internet “Up From the Underground” was a great article with the inclusion of some Colorado…
There is one point of fact upon which Ron Siegfried and the City of Lakewood agree. Here it is: When code-enforcement officer John Holmes came to tell Siegfried that his grass was too long and neighbors had complained, Siegfried was indignant and unrepentant. “I’m an American,” both parties agree he…
Chivington, Colorado: The air is restless here, always stirring, rustling the stalks of dried buffalo grass and sage, whistling endlessly through miles of rusted barbed wire. For many years, this was a dead place. Cheyenne and Arapaho stayed away. But each November for over a decade now, Laird Cometsevah has…
