The story of Scott Howard, who endured extortion and rape by an inmate gang in Colorado’s prison system, was told in detail for the first time in my feature “The Devil’s Playground” three months ago. But our account quickly went viral — and Howard, now free to speak out about…
The acclaimed artist Christo (rendered here by Kenny Be) has a talent for subduing vast landscapes, charming financial backers and reassuring locals about the economic and aesthetic value of his unique projects. But he hasn’t managed to friend anybody over at the Colorado Wildlife Commission…
Attorneys for Sir Mario Owens, sentenced to death for the 2005 murders of Vivian Wolfe and Javad Marshall-Fields, claim that Eighteenth Judicial District Attorney Carol Chambers and her prosecutors made several unusual deals with witnesses in the secrecy-shrouded case — including donating a car to one witness and paying for…
As the state’s legislative session draws to a close, a group of parents involved in grim custody battles are celebrating a quiet victory — the passage of a bill that strips court-appointed child/family investigators, or CFIs, of their long-running immunity from state oversight and regulations that apply to other mental-health…
The Department of the Interior’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue recently announced that Shell Oil and related companies have agreed to pay the goverment $2.2 million to resolve claims that the companies underpaid royalties from natural gas wells on federal and Indian tribal lands. Barely mentioned, though, is how this…
Posthumous vindication has its drawbacks, to be sure. But the novels of John Williams, who died in 1994, are drawing more acclaim and readers now than the irascible University of Denver professor ever imagined he’d have. The latest laurel to come his way? A piece last week on National Public…
There’s nothing quite like the transition from doing hard time to looking for a job in hard times. Every year, Colorado’s prison system sends about 10,000 felons back to society — and roughly two-thirds of them end up back in prison within three years. In most cases, their return is…
Charlie Sheen’s recent visits to Colorado have involved more errors than hits. There was all that domestic drama in Aspen, and some critics view his Violent Torpedo of Truth tour as a crime in itself. But last week, Sheen showed he still has some of that Major League stuff left…
It took Keenu Tiyme five agonizing days to end the life of his ex-wife Kauri, as one exit plan after another — pills, suffocation, strangulation, wrist-cutting, even attempts to buy a gun or jump off the bridge spanning the Royal Gorge — failed miserably. It took a Denver jury just…
The death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of an elite American strike team sure put a crimp in the travel plans of Gary Faulkner, the Greeley man detained on the Pakistan-Afghan border last June. Armed with sword and pistol, Faulkner told authorities he’d been hunting the terrorist leader…
A grand jury has concluded that a lethal combination of bad calls, poor training and inadequate supervision led to the death of a patient in restraints at the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo last year. But the probe found no criminal misconduct by employees in the incident — one…
When homicide detectives questioned him in 2008, shortly after the discovery of his ex-wife’s battered and slashed corpse in a hotel room, Keenu Tiyme had trouble recalling his phone number and address. This afternoon, a Denver jury will be asked to decide where he’ll reside in the future — in…
This week’s cover story, “A Dam Shame,” looks into the controversy generated by a state dam inspector named John Redding, who raised concerns about ethical violations inside the Colorado Department of Natural Resources–and ended up paying a high price for his concern. People who speak out about possible wrongdoing in…
Dramatic statements don’t come cheap, but what Denver needs may be less drama. After spending upwards of $40 million in the past few years imagining — make that “visioning” — a great makeover, DIA manager Kim Day has decided the city really can’t afford the “signature” designer bridge proposed by…
Over the years, we’ve written frequently about the breakdowns in Colorado’s parole system — how heaping mandatory parole on top of prison sentences and making ill-prepared felons jump through multiple hoops drives up prison costs. Now there finally seems to be some serious efforts among lawmakers to do something about…
The fliers arrived last January, during a balmy interval between subzero cold snaps. They were tucked under windshield wipers in strip-mall parking lots in Parker and Westminster, stuck into screen doors of canyon homes above Boulder. The print was tiny and grim, and right away you could tell this was…
There are, no doubt, saner ways to film the Cordillera Blanca of Peru than paragliding a few feet above jagged glaciers, vertiginous cliffs and freezing lakes, camera and breathing and life itself neatly suspended — but that wouldn’t be the path chosen by Sweetgrass Productions, a backcountry film crew bred…
Barring a last-minute deal, attorneys will be picking a jury Monday morning in Denver District Court to decide the fate of Keenu Tiyme — more than two-and-a-half years after the body piercer was arrested and charged with the gruesome death of his ex-wife, 39-year-old tattoo artist Kauri Tiyme, in what…
Amid mounting evidence of wild horses being mistreated during government roundups and suffering in poorly tended holding facilities, a federal judge in California is allowing a key legal challenge by horse advocates to move forward — one that could end up ordering captured horses released back to the open range…
Less than seven years after Teresa Lynn shot her husband in the face as he slept, killed her mother-in-law and considered drowning her eight-month-old son, an Arapahoe County judge has ordered her release from the state hospital, starting with unsupervised off-grounds trips and eventually leading to community placement. The decision…
In seventeen years of avid snowboarding, Ace King has heard all the bright ideas about how to fix the weekend traffic logjam on I-70. Monorail, zipper lanes, double-decker lanes — all costly, all dubious as hell, and none of them right around the corner. What King lusts for is a…
News that Eighteenth Judicial District Attorney Carol Chambers is paying bonuses to prosecutors who achieve a certain percentage of felony convictions at trial may be raising eyebrows among other DAs, but it’s hardly a shocker to anyone who’s followed Chambers’ other efforts to turn her office into a conviction machine…
