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Last week, Anderson Cooper interviewed Willow the Cat. On Monday, he featured two more Coloradans on his new show, Anderson — but the story of Kristen and Will Stillman, which first appeared on the cover of Westword a year ago, isn’t nearly as warm and fuzzy.
When the twins were eight years old, their mother, Karen, dropped them off at a house in northwest Denver, where the head of the household, Eric Torrez, held them hostage for a dozen years, subjecting them to incredible psychological and physical tortures. By the time she was twenty, Kristen had given birth to four children — all the result of rapes by Torrez.
Will, too, suffered unimaginable horrors — horrors he spoke about on yesterday’s show, in hopes that the next adult who hears a child’s plea for help will do something.
Oh, and there was one mention of cats yesterday: When Karen — who appeared from prison — was sent to jail for sixteen years, she was more worried about what would happen to her kitty than what she’d done to her children, the children she’d given to a monster when they were just eight. That cat, she was, was “defenseless.”
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Here’s more from yesterday’s Anderson show.
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Patricia Calhoun’s original piece on Kristen Stillman just won the best non-daily feature story award from the national Society of Professional Journalists. Read “Spreading Her Wings” here.
