Kreck, Dick

views updated

Kreck, Dick

PERSONAL:

Male.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Denver, CO. Office—Denver Post, 1560 Broadway, Denver, CO 80202. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Journalist. Formerly with the San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco, CA, and Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, CA; Denver Post, Denver, CO, journalist, beginning c. 1975, city columnist, beginning c. 1990.

WRITINGS:

Colorado's Scenic Railroads, photography by Bruce Nall, Westcliffe Publishers (Englewood, CO), 1997.

Denver in Flames: Forging a New Mile High City, Fulcrum Publishing (Golden, CO), 2000.

Murder at the Brown Palace: A True Story of Seduction and Betrayal, Fulcrum Publishing (Golden, CO), 2003.

Anton Woode: The Boy Murderer, Fulcrum Publishing (Golden, CO), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Journalist Dick Kreck has spent most of his career with the Denver Post, and has written a number of books about Colorado history, including a study of an actual murder that occurred in 1892. Anton Woode: The Boy Murderer tells of the eleven-yearold who killed for a pocket watch and who was released after serving less than half of his twenty-five-year sentence. The uneducated Woode became an avid reader while in prison, learned to speak German and French, and became interested in art. He wrote an impassioned plea to the governor, begging for his release, and because of intervention on his behalf by the wife of an oil company executive, he was released after twelve years and pardoned in 1906.

Kreck uses this case to compare the criminal justice system's treatment of children—harsh at that time, then becoming more lenient, then harsher again in the post-Columbine world. He profiles Judge Benjamin B. Lindsey, the founder of the juvenile court in Denver who was an advocate for poor and neglected young people who turned to crime. A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote: "Kreck offers an inviting but small historical window on the still burning issue of how to treat juvenile criminals."