Single mother Dana Gonzales moved five times around the Denver metro area with her young son Nathan between 1993 and 1995. With each move, says Gonzales, she was trying to provide a better life for herself and her son. But Nathan’s father, Anthony Wetmore, saw something else in Gonzales’s itinerant…
When Boeing acquired a division of Rockwell International last year, it also acquired Rockwell’s controversial 1992 plea agreement that settled a lengthy investigation into environmental crimes at the Rocky Flats nuclear-weapons plant. But now Boeing executives are considering withdrawing that guilty plea–if the judge will let them. Late last month,…
The Adams County Sheriff’s Department has put together a manual to help landlords spot potential troublemakers–did you know that Asian gangsters like Japanese vehicles?–and is trying to spread the word on the Front Range about gangs and drugs. But after deputies took their “Landlord Training Program” up to Georgetown, a…
It was funds while it lasted: The RTD board was so proud of its hastily adopted (and sadly unconstitutional) Resolution 15, “‘Guide the Ride’ is NOT for sale,” that in late August it sent a hurried notice to potential RTD bidders, warning them that if they wanted to bid on…
Baseball’s ghost of honor this season was Jackie Robinson, and the hundreds of uplifting things the scores of speechmakers said in ballparks from coast to coast about his courage were long overdue. But they told only part of the story. Half a century after Robinson broke baseball’s color line, he…
Dead to Writes After reading her October 2 column, “Father Knows Best,” here’s what I want to know: If Patricia Calhoun is ever found murdered in Boulder, what do you think the cops will call it? The answer to their prayers, maybe? Art Berg Denver Face it: Justice will never…
Moments after a sobbing Gene Sanchez staggers out of Denver County Courtroom 303-W, having just lost custody of his four kids, Judge Lawrence Manzanares bursts out of the adjoining clerk’s office in pursuit. At first, the people lingering outside the courtroom don’t recognize the judge out of his robes–he looks…
For several years, Rudy Reveles, a young attorney with the state’s public defenders’ office, represented the indigent and the criminally accused of Trinidad, a city of 9,700 in Las Animas County, from an office in Pueblo. But by September 1995, the business of defending Trinidad’s poor had become so big…
Charlatan’s web: Boulder is big, big, big in the national news again, and the murder of JonBenet Ramsey is just one of the subjects being scrutinized–albeit a major one. Hard on the heels of Ann Louise Bardach’s Ramsey article in Vanity Fair comes the current People cover, with a picture…
When Philip Morris tells a politician it wants to make a contribution, it’s not just blowing smoke. A recent Los Angeles Times report pegs the maker of Marlboro cigarettes as the single largest contributor to politicians. And, according to a pile of internal Philip Morris documents obtained by Westword, Coloradans…
It was a gay activist’s dream come true: Will Perkins, leader of the anti-gay-rights Amendment 2 campaign, being arrested in the middle of a speech, handcuffed and hustled off stage for speaking ill of homosexuals. Well, dream on. Perkins himself staged the “arrest” during an appearance in late August at…
Does the next Dawn Staley go to kindergarten in Brooklyn? Is the Rebecca Lobo of 2008 shooting jumpers right now on her driveway in Des Moines? Is a whole gym-load of pint-sized Cynthia Coopers and Debbie Blacks playing zone defense somewhere in Texas? Could be. In their rookie seasons, the…
He could never forget his daughter, but six years after her death, Frank Baley was getting on with his life. Then a Boulder police officer called, and the pain cut deep once again. Detective Thomas Wickman wanted to reopen the file on Susan Baley, who’d died in Boulder in 1982…
The Martian Chronicles In response to Steve Jackson’s “Mars or Bust,” in the September 18 issue, without sounding Amish or like a Luddite, I would like to say the following: Has it occurred to anyone that the exploration of our solar system without a code of ethics that respects The…
The last time Denver super-developer-turned-S&L-deadbeat Bill Walters was heard from, he was lying low in his wife’s California condo, ducking calls from the press and hoping not to hear a knock on the door from the G-men assigned to mop up the nation’s thrift crisis. Walters had a lot to…
Prisoner No. 21-052-013 walks stiffly into a small meeting room at the federal prison in Jefferson County. John Gable’s jet-black hair is slicked back and neatly combed, belying his 69 years. He has the solid build and resolute gaze of a Kansas farmer, the life he was born to, but…
After more than a year of living on the streets of Denver, time was running out for Michael Allen Wells. The 29-year-old drifter may have sensed something bad heading his way when he called his mother in a state of near-panic, jabbering about a dead girl and two “bad guys.”…
Keeping a breast of the news: John Elway has a nipple ring! Monday’s revelation was the Denver Post’s biggest scoop in months, uncovered when Elway’s towel slipped and a nosy reporter started asking questions. “That’s not anybody’s business,” replied the quarterback-cum-car-peddler. “But if you have to know, it was a…
When cabbies started complaining at Denver International Airport this summer, it was strictly from hunger. Something was rotten at DIA’s ground-transportation area, they said, and all too often it was the food in the vending machines–not to mention the contract that had awarded the concession. “You have to understand–this is…
The only thing standing between Paul Fox and his seven-year quest to open a topless club is a mobile home parked across the street from his property. Last week the Adams County Board of Adjustments upheld a previous ruling that determined that Fox’s property at 6000 Pecos failed to meet…
Since the bombastic and curious 1997 baseball season got under way last April Fool’s Day, Mark McGwire has hit 54 home runs for two different teams in two different leagues. Larry Walker has put indisputable (but hypo-oxygenated) MVP numbers into the book that will probably fail to win him anything…
Gary Davis was ready to die in 1990. Mark Thomas had just come to town as the director of the Colorado Press Association when he got a call from the Colorado Department of Corrections. Davis, convicted in 1987 of the brutal rape and murder of Virginia May, was suspending any…
