Crime Desk

The Crime Desk maintains a record of violent and criminal events documented in southern Colorado from the 1870s forward. Southern Colorado was, for several decades, an intersection of competing jurisdictions — Spanish land grant administrators, territorial marshals, railroad company security forces, and county sheriffs operating under laws that had not yet settled into coherence with one another. Into that gap went a category of event that is still imperfectly resolved by the historical record.

The archive divides crime reports into two columns. The left holds cases sourced from contemporary newspapers, court transcripts, coroner's inquest files, and county records — events with a fixed date, a named victim or accused, and at least a partial accounting of what occurred. The right column carries current reports from Pueblo County and regional sources, rendered in archival style. Not every event in the current column has been resolved; not every event in the archive column was ever fully explained.

Eleven cases are maintained in the archive column. The oldest is the Telluride bank robbery of June 24, 1889 — Butch Cassidy's first documented bank job, twenty thousand dollars taken from the San Miguel Valley Bank in under ten minutes, no pursuit mounted that day. The most recent in the archive's fixed collection is the Ludlow Massacre of April 20, 1914, in which Colorado National Guard troops opened fire on a tent colony of striking miners on the eastern slope of the Trinidad coalfield. Twenty-one people died. Eleven of them were children found suffocated in a pit beneath a tent after the fire. No member of the National Guard was ever charged. The archive notes the finding without editorial comment.