Since I last visited the Lace House, back on Memorial Day, an entire tourist season has come and gone–without one tourist touring through what was once Black Hawk’s top (and arguably only) attraction. But that was in the days when people enjoyed the ramshackle charms of the old mining town…
Leroy Jones does not play the game by the rules. Not when he believes the game is fixed. As a driver for Yellow Cab when it went into receivership, he quickly recognized that the court-appointed receiver was taking everyone for a ride. And so Jones started protesting–loudly and often–that the…
On Monday morning, Keith Weinman’s voice oozed out of the radio, delivering a pitch about how much “we” enjoy a certain brand of mattress. It was slightly nauseating. And not just because the alleged “business editor” of KOA-AM’s “Business for Breakfast” show has no business shilling for clients. That’s a…
In cyberspace, no one can hear you scream. But that’s not stopping Robert Lewis. The Web publisher has been howling bloody murder since Monday, when he learned that the Colorado Rockies have gone to court seeking a preliminary injunction that would essentially throw him out at home. Home page, that…
It wasn’t so very long ago that Governor Roy Romer wanted to promote Colorado as the “best place to raise a child.” Just a few murders ago, in fact. The state couldn’t buy the attention that’s been focused on Colorado children lately–but it’s hardly the promotional coup that Romer envisioned…
The Rocky Flats grand jurors are about to get their day in court. Two days, actually: Courtroom C-159 at the federal courthouse, the building that recently hosted the trial of Tim McVeigh, has been reserved for two days this week for a “confidential, closed proceeding.” The grand jurors are about…
Everything is going according to plan in Boulder. Not according to the “plan” cited by police chief Tom Koby back in January–back when it seemed like there might actually be an arrest in the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, Boulder’s only official homicide of 1996. And not according to the plan…
When the world last heard from Robert Eaton Jr., he was being bundled into the back of a Denver squad car by a handful of uniformed officers. His crime? Mentioning Waco outside the federal courthouse Monday, just as the coverage of Tim McVeigh’s conviction kicked into high gear. The media…
Memorial Day once marked the start of the summer tourist season at the Lace House. But on this Memorial Day, it was difficult to remember what the historic landmark looked like back in the olden days. Back, say, in the olden days of six years ago, when the renovated Victorian…
One day this spring, J.T. Colfax crossed the line. He’s been on the edge before. The time he papered a New York City wall with stock shots of actors who’d been cut at an audition and labeled them “rejects.” Colfax made the New York news with that one. The time…
Lights flashing, the vehicle sped toward the intersection, hurrying to an emergency call. But approaching fast from a side street came another car, this one driven by a seventeen-year-old about to run a stop sign. The two vehicles collided not in Denver, but in Grand Junction on December 28, 1993…
Roy Romer doesn’t know who Martha Stewart is–and it’s a good thing, too. The high priestess of high-class living is a menace to women everywhere, and particularly here. That by-the-book (her book) lifestyle is precisely what people move to Colorado to avoid. After all, hydrangeas are not xeriscape-approved. And how…
Memo to Denver: With all the national media in town for, and already bored by, the Oklahoma City bombing trial, this is no time to misbehave. For example, no matter how peeved you might be after some seventeen-year-old punk in a stolen car broadsides your buddy–your cop buddy on only…
In U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch’s courtroom, the Oklahoma City bombing trial moves as slowly as a kept secret. Lawyers from both sides ask potential jurors their views on religion, their feelings about the death penalty, their recent reading habits. So far, the runaway favorite is John Grisham’s The Runaway…
John Yelenick was raising his family on a farm in Henderson when he had his water tested in 1985. He wasn’t looking for nerve gas. But a few years later, after the nearby Rocky Mountain Arsenal made the Environmental Protection Agency’s first Superfund list, Yelenick and the rest of the…
The town is lousy with lawyers and journalists–the two professions have a sick, symbiotic relationship–and no matter how peeved the public gets, the infestation won’t clear up anytime soon. Not given U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch’s ruling Monday. “The trial will proceed as scheduled,” Matsch announced, in response to attorney…
So I was talking with Peter Schmitz the other night after he left the courthouse, and we traded some hair-styling tips. Has anyone else noticed how, in the early days of the trial, his ponytail was slicked back with gel and looked kind of dark, but now that a witness…
They were going nowhere fast. After almost two full days of jury selection–sifting through questionnaires, quizzing prospective jurors about their feelings regarding the media, suicide, alcohol, bad art–the opening arguments in the Peter Schmitz trial began late Tuesday. At this rate, the jurors who survived the cut (although Denver County…
Not so very long ago, a Colorado kindergartner was murdered, her body violated in the most awful, intimate way before it was discarded. Her name was not JonBenet Ramsey. Under a peculiar Colorado statute, you might not know her name at all–except that the disappearance of Ashley Gray from her…
What did Boulder do to deserve this? That’s a stupid question. Next question. Okay. So why did Boulder call a rare news conference last Thursday, introduce it as a “briefing” and then let Boulder County District Attorney Alex Hunter launch into a half-hour, Mayberry-meets-Naropa soliloquy that covered everything from his…
Four years ago this month, Richard Boulware flew into heavy turbulence. His life has yet to straighten out. On February 22, 1993, Boulware–who in 1984 had beaten out hundreds of candidates to become Stapleton Airport’s public-affairs officer, a job that nine years later carried increased responsibilities and the impressive title…
The natives–and even the ex-Californians–were getting restless. Four weeks after the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, the case was still the talk of the town, the state, the country–but there were so few new developments to talk about. Reporters kept rehashing the same old stories, chewing over the same old facts…
