Getting in tune with Ritter

He's leader to some, unknown to others

Todd Hartman, Rocky Mountain News

Published October 14, 2006 at midnight

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Bill Ritter wakes up singing.

Country western. Johnny Cash. Merle Haggard. Willie Nelson. A lot of it more obscure.

Many a morning he strolls through the house, crooning, waking up the kids. It used to drive his son August crazy, especially as a teenager on sleep-in Saturdays.

To hear August, now 20, tell it, the music died in 2004, the same time that term limits turned Ritter out of his job after 12 years as Denver's district attorney. His career in public life finished, so were the morning serenades.But now, Ritter is back on the campaign trail, and the crooner's making a comeback.Ritter wants to be Colorado's next governor, taking a life of service to a higher level in a state where he sees government as a force for good, one that can invigorate education, health care, the economy and the search for new energy sources.

While it's a pro-government pitch one might expect from a Democratic candidate, Ritter's pro-life views, strong Catholic faith and prosecutorial background make him a trickier political target for opponents. And indeed, Ritter's backers say, he is a man driven more by a problem-solving pragmatism than by any party agenda.

Ritter doesn't electrify on the stump, but his enthusiasm and optimism can work up a room, even as he strings together wonkish sentences about solar power in the San Luis Valley, or the potential of early childhood education on cutting high school dropout rates.

"The governor of Colorado has the ability to make a difference in people's lives," Ritter likes to say. It's something friends, family and a legion of supporters say Ritter has been doing much of his life.

For Ritter it's also about giving back. As a child, his family received government aid after Ritter's alcoholic father, Bill Sr., left home when Ritter was 13. Ritter received scholarship assistance in Catholic school and student loans helped him through college and law school.

The giving back started soon after.

In the late 1980s, Ritter and his wife Jeannie, with 1-year-old Augie in tow, jettisoned a comfortable life and promising careers in Denver to run a nutrition center in Zambia for three years. Later, the couple, already with four kids of their own, took in the 8-year-old child of a crack-addicted mother, raising him for nearly three years.

As a prosecutor, Ritter set up innovative and widely praised programs designed to give nonviolent offenders a second chance. At the same time, he was twice re-elected as Denver DA, suggesting public approval for an office that went after gangs and white-collar crooks alike.

But those accomplishments came alongside tragedy, adversity and controversy for Ritter.

During his time in Africa, Ritter was at the wheel of a supply truck when he hit and killed an elderly man wandering along a potholed Zambian road, an accident that still upsets him nearly 20 years later.

For decades, Ritter rode the emotional ups and downs of rebuilding a relationship with his father.

And through much of his career as Denver's DA, Ritter faced criticism from minority activists and elected officials upset that he wouldn't file charges against police when there were serious questions about the use of lethal force against suspects.

A political opponent for the DA's job in the mid-1990s also criticized Ritter for operating too many "social programs" at the DA's office, such as drug court. That same opponent, lawyer and radio talk show host Craig Silverman, now endorses him for governor.

And as the heat rises in the race against Republican opponent Bob Beauprez, Ritter, 50, finds his work as DA under a new political attack.

This time he's been slammed for relying too heavily on plea bargains to move defendants through the system as well as striking plea deals with immigrants that, in some cases, made it less likely they'd be deported. Ritter, along with some DAs from both major parties, calls the charges unfair.

But Ritter's candidacy also raises a broader, if less pointed question: Is a man whose entire public life has been rooted in law enforcement ready for the rigors of governing a state, shepherding its economy, guarding its environment and tackling seemingly everlasting crises in health care and public education?

His backers say yes - undoubtedly.

"I do think Bill Ritter will be one hell of a governor," said former Denver City Councilwoman Susan Barnes-Gelt, who at times disputed Ritter's views on high-profile police shooting cases but admired his leadership, "because he's not narcissistic, he's not power hungry. He cares about people, he cares about Colorado."Others aren't as sure.

"Bill Ritter is a big unknown," said state Senate minority leader Andy McElhany, a Colorado Springs Republican, "and has chosen to stay unknown throughout his campaign, which should make everybody nervous." McElhany said Ritter is masking an anti-business bent with a moderate face, and wondered whether his background as a prosecutor is sufficient to be governor. "Outside of the fact he was a prosecutor, I'd prefer to refer to him as just another liberal Denver lawyer."

Upbeat outlook put to test

The nasty political environment developing in the last weeks of the campaign may be the perfect test for a man with an upbeat outlook and a steady nature that backers cite as the right match for the stream of crises, pressures and demands for decisions flowing through the governor's office.

From his days growing up on a 5-acre farm east of Aurora, family members describe Bill Ritter as a practical joker with a relentless sense of humor. At the same time, Ritter, the sixth of 12 children, would leap to the defense of a sibling in hot water. "Whenever anybody was in a bad spot," recalled Ritter's 81-year-old mother, Ethel, "it seems he spoke up for them."

Ritter was a hungry reader growing up in a house where the TV was rarely on, said one of his sisters, Susie Boyd. He learned tough lessons about compassion and, as he put it, "the intrinsic value of life," helping his mother and siblings care for a disabled brother, Danny, who, born with a serious brain disability, lived just six years.

Ritter's devout Catholicism developed during childhood, when mom and dad hauled the entire family to church each Sunday.

His interest in religion grew and, as a ninth grader, Ritter surprised his family when, after visiting a Catholic high school seminary on a trip to Texas with a friend, he decided to enroll, moving away from Colorado for two years. "He always had a bigger view of the world than the rest of us did," Boyd said.He worked a variety of jobs from a young age, first helping out on the farm for his father, then, at 14, taking up construction jobs, including roofing and laying pipe.

The work helped him through college and law school and gave him a foundation in the role of labor unions, physical work and the role government can play, via $5,000 in student loans, in obtaining a higher education.

Rising through the ranks

Ritter started at the Denver DA's office as a second-year law school intern in the summer of 1980, rising steadily through the ranks.

One of his biggest cases came early, when he secured the murder conviction of Ronald Garner in a 1982 killing. Ritter calls it a "lifetime case" because Garner had benefitted from legal barriers to avoid murder convictions in two other killings.But in 1985, Ritter convinced a judge to allow evidence from the two other murders into the trial on the 1982 case, and won a first-degree murder verdict.

"I put on three murder cases in one, and we held a serial murderer accountable," with a life sentence, Ritter said.

Perhaps as revealing was a lesser known case in southeastern Colorado's Baca County in 1984.

A founder of the American Agriculture Movement, a movement born in the late 1970s as farmers were struggling to stay afloat, was about to lose his Springfield property at a tax sale on the courthouse steps.

A fracas broke out. Three men were charged with assaulting local law enforcement officials. With Baca County in need of a special prosecutor, then-Denver DA Norm Early sent Ritter, figuring his farming background could help.

With farm activists agitated over the case, the local sheriff couldn't guarantee Ritter's safety, so he housed him a jail cell for three weeks during the trial.

Ritter convicted one attacker of a felony and two others of misdemeanors. But, in the end, with the agreement of the three assailed lawmen who had escaped serious injury, he sought, and won, probation for the attackers - a resolution he believed helped the divided community recover.

Giving something back

In 1986, as a promising law enforcement career unfolded, Ritter and Jeannie stunned friends, family and colleagues.

"(Bill) called me out of the clear blue and said, 'This is Bill Ritter. Do you remember me?" recalled Bill Morell, a priest who met Ritter during his days at seminary school.

" 'I'm married and have a kid and don't-stop-me-from-talking-because-I- want-to-get-this-out. Jeannie and I would like to volunteer to be lay missionaries in your new mission in Zambia,' " Morell recalled.

From there, the Ritters spent a year preparing for challenges of running a nutrition center in Mongu, a provincial capital in eastern Zambia, a rural setting Morell described as desperately poor and backward with poor phone service and only intermittent electricity.

Morell said it was unusual work for couples. More routinely, single men took the job, complete with exotic diseases, dangerous wildlife, poor roads and little access to medical care. Morell knew of two priests who had gone to Zambia and died, and of missionaries who lost children there.

Once there, however, Bill and Jeannie thrived, introducing numerous innovations to help feed locals, and help locals feed themselves.

Ritter, calling on his farming days as a boy, raised chickens and eggs to provide villagers with more protein, helped fishermen get their fish to larger markets, set up mills where locals could grind their maize and sorghum, and introduced rice strains that grew well in the local climate.

Jeannie, though she tries to downplay her contribution, played a major role too, helping with women on health issues, including prenatal care, and gently pushing through cultural barriers to try and get them to try new foods in their diet, according to Brian Wallace, a former Catholic priest who served in Zambia at the same time as Ritter.

"You develop this sense of how graceful and hopeful people can be under what appears to us as backbreaking adversity," Ritter said about his Africa experience. "That's the most profound lesson I took away from that."

But it was also in Zambia where Ritter suffered one of his worst ordeals. Heading back to the nutrition center in Mongu, on a road with potholes the size of kitchen tables, an elderly man walking alongside the road stepped into the path of his truck.

"Bill swerved to miss him, and probably would have missed him if the old man did not run," said Billy Fuller, a passenger in Ritter's truck who provided a written account of the event. "We slid a little sideways (the road had dirt and gravel on the pavement) and hit (the man) at the right rear panel of the truck, the section right behind the rear tire."

Ritter stopped the truck - against the advice of local police who urge people to drive on and report such accidents instead of risk harm from potentially angry locals - and put the man inside and drove him to a local hospital. But by the next morning, the man had died.

Though police ruled the death an accident, Ritter calls it an "awful" experience, a terrible strike on what was otherwise one of the most fulfilling periods of his life.

"Bill was just really shaken to his core," Wallace said, adding that such accidents in rural Zambia are common, and that he himself had numerous close calls.

Taking stand as district attorney

It was the African experience that played heavily into then-Gov. Roy Romer's decision to appoint Ritter to run the Denver District Attorney's office in 1993, after Early's departure to the private sector.

Headlines at the time announced Romer appointing a dark-horse candidate with few political ties, but one Romer complimented for "a personal value system and a very interesting innate leadership skill."

Ritter went to work quickly, opening one of the country's first drug courts, designed to salvage addicts' lives by steering nonviolent drug offenders to treatment instead of jail, yet bring swift consequences to those who rejected rehab.

The drug court model has since been adopted nationwide, with over 1,200 across the country, though it remains controversial. Some critics have said it has little impact on offenders, most of whom offend again. In Denver, drug court was eliminated with little fanfare in 2002, as some judges grew weary of handling the huge caseload. But now, efforts are afoot to revive it here.

Ritter also developed restorative justice programs to give young offenders a chance to avoid a criminal record and make amends in other ways, such as volunteering, working with adult mentors and taking classes to help them cope with life's demands.

At the same time, Ritter found success in the grittier side of the job, taking on gangs after the infamous Summer of Violence in 1993, expanding prosecution of domestic and sexual abuse, creating programs to aid victims of crime, all of it while overseeing prosecution of numerous high-profile murder and rape cases.

But the flash point of his DA career - the controversies that even his backers acknowledge can blind the public to the successes - came when he repeatedly declined to bring charges in 70 police-involved shooting cases, including several high-profile cases where community activists believed officers used excessive force.

The notorious string of cases included that of Jeff Truax, an Aurora man who died when two Denver police officers, working off duty, killed him in a 25-bullet barrage outside a Broadway bar in 1996. Police said the officers acted in self-defense after Truax nearly ran them over as he was backing out of a parking lot. Prosecutors said they couldn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the two officers weren't protecting themselves and others.

In another memorable case, Ismael Mena was fatally shot after he allegedly pointed a gun at Denver officers when they burst into his home in 1999 in the execution of a no-knock search warrant. The officers were looking for drugs, found none, and it was later discovered the warrant contained the wrong address.

In the Mena shooting, a Jefferson County investigator brought in to review the case found no criminal wrongdoing on the part of the officers, ruling the SWAT team didn't know the search warrant was wrong, and that conditions were sufficiently threatening to justify the use of force.

In these and other cases, including one in 2003 that saw a Denver officer shoot a developmentally disabled boy wielding a knife as he exited his home, Ritter concluded it would have been unethical to take cases to trial as the evidence failed to support proof beyond a reasonable doubt of guilt.

"It might have been politically helpful (to bring charges against the police)," Ritter said, "but it wouldn't have been the right thing to do."

Former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb disagreed.

Webb said Ritter should have tried some of the police-shooting cases, if only to emphasize that community leaders took seriously allegations of police misconduct. It's also possible, he said, that Ritter was wrong and a jury would convict the officers.

Even so, he praised Ritter for explaining "to all who would listen" how he arrived at his decision, including putting his explanation in writing and making the information public.

"So, unlike with previous DAs, where the decision was reached but you really weren't sure why . . . he laid it out and sent it to everybody so people had an opportunity for a basis with disagreement with him," Webb said.

Drawing energy from family

While Ritter steered through such controversies, friends say, on the strength of his personal convictions, and his diligence in understanding the facts of each case, it's clear Ritter also derives enormous sustenance from family.

It's those ties, too, that appear to keep him grounded - ties with his siblings, his mother, and, most of all, his deep connections with his wife and four kids.

Over many years, Ritter worked to reconcile with his father. In the 1970s, Ritter traveled to Oregon twice to visit Bill Ritter Sr. In 1982, his dad returned to Colorado, where he moved in with Ritter and stayed for two and a half years, including for several months after Ritter married Jeannie.

Ritter worked hard to stay close to his dad. He'd even spend time at the Salvation Army playing cards with his father and his father's friends, as they tried to dry up their habit, all part of what proved to be successful efforts to repair the relationship.

"We had so many laughs together and we shared many great times. But I also saw firsthand this wrestling match he would undertake periodically with his demons," Ritter wrote in his father's eulogy in March 2005. "It took an awful toll on him and a further toll on his relationships."

Ritter's father and the extended Ritter family did a lot of bonding in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, when Bill Sr. and his third wife traveled to spend time with various family members.

"I don't pretend that this healing happened perfectly, it never does," Ritter wrote in the eulogy. "It is just that it was such a dramatic difference, a dramatic improvement from earlier times."

For his 75th birthday, the Ritter family rented a bus and packed it with Bill Sr.'s kids, grandkids and great grandkids, as well as Ethel, and went to visit him in Utah. They called the trip the "Forgiveness Tour."

It's this part of the story - the family's reconciliation with his father - that Ritter said doesn't get told enough in accounts that focus on his dad's desertion. "It's the redemption part," he said.

The saga of Ritter's father undoubtedly plays into Ritter's sympathetic view of the fragility of human nature, and his desire to help others.

Flossy Aston, Ritter's longtime administrative assistant at the DA's office and now part of his campaign, recalls how weary she grew of the imbalanced, drug-addicted and pathetic people who found their way to Ritter's office, where she sat right outside the door.

After she groused about them, wishing aloud they'd take their medication, Ritter often served her a gentle reminder: "Flossy," he'd say, "we're all broken people."

Strong influence on his children

In his own family, the relationships appear deeply knit despite the demands of public life.

His oldest son, August, is spending the fall working on his dad's campaign and taking a break from school at Colorado State University. Abe, his second-oldest, attends Gonzaga in Washington state. Sam, 15, and Tally, 13, still live in Denver's Platt Park neighborhood with Ritter and Jeannie, a substitute teacher in Denver Public Schools with an ebullient personality that puts strangers at ease and whose good works in Africa and the Peace Corps, friends say, are worth a story of their own.

Jeannie, 50, and Bill, friends say, run one of those homes where visitors constantly stream in and out, where there's always enough food for one more and teens come for advice. Ritter even cuts the neighborhood kids' hair.

All the activity makes for a messy house. "We aren't big on housekeeping," Ritter told a Denver legal newsletter. "We want to write a book called, 'When Messy People Breed.' "

Amid the clutter, he helped one boy write his high school valedictory speech. He talked to another about avoiding the temptation to overcelebrate after graduating. But, Jeannie said, Ritter is careful to picks his spots, aware too much advice from an adult falls on deaf ears.

Those close to the family say Ritter's influence on his kids - and their loyalty to him - is remarkable. Among telling anecdotes: a July letter from an Iowa man, a self-described "life-long conservative Republican" who was so impressed with Abe after the boy caddied for him at a Castle Pines golf tournament that he sent Ritter a campaign contribution.

Perhaps the best summary of Ritter family life came in a letter from Morell, the priest, after his most recent visit in early August:

"Life at (the Ritter house) has always been full-throttle and scatter-shot, and principled. What house around is as magnetic, what yard or living room in your neighborhood can generate such energy, diversity, honesty? What table can so easily host antsy neighborhood kids and befuddled acquaintances, church princes and lowly religious friends and neighbors? The house I visited last weekend was the same as always. I loved it."

Measured response to attacks

It was Ritter's family that gave him the blessing to run for governor, after he gathered them around early last year, laid out the pros and cons and asked what they thought.

He warned them it wouldn't be pretty. He was right.

For starters, he's a pro-life Democrat, a position that, at least in the early going, put him at odds with liberal activists who feared he'd carve away at the pro-choice views at the heart of party principles.

He's since assuaged nervous Dems, repeatedly assuring them he respects the law. And, while personally opposed to abortion, he said he won't make it a part of his political agenda at the Capitol.

On the stump, Ritter appears relaxed as he darts between as many as five or six events a day. He's a master at conserving energy, never getting too high or too low, even when events might warrant it.

In the car, he sits quietly, often reading news clips or information packets, or discussing a new development with this staff. Given the opportunity, he'll spin a funny story, such as the time - in keeping with his love of practical jokes - he and some buddies convinced a clerk at a Florida sporting goods shop to require that they all take a test to get a "salt water fishing license." The victim of the joke, another friend, cursed as he perused a test with questions such as, "What's the Latin word for manatee?"

On one recent trip, he started the morning learning of a major newspaper endorsement but ended the day with news of a potentially damaging story in another paper. He took both developments in stride.

He laughed when the right-leaning editorial page of the Rocky Mountain News began a piece endorsing him for governor with the phrase, "It could be a major mistake."

"That's what my wife was thinking when we got married," he deadpanned.

At one point late in the same day, with pressure building on Ritter to start attacking after Beauprez suggested Ritter was soft on criminal immigrants, Ritter resisted. He felt that the attacks were unfair, but was leery of overreacting, and turning the conversation over to his opponent. He told his staff to back off.

It seems a long time since those quieter days, after Ritter left the DA's job to work at Hogan & Hartson, one of the city's most prestigious law firms. Ritter has nothing but praise for the firm, but acknowledges he wasn't in love with the work.

August said he knew things were really looking up again about the time his dad called the family together to talk about a big political campaign.

You could hear the change. It sounded something like a song. A country western tune, in fact.

"When he got the glimmer in his eye to run for governor," August said, "that's when he started singing again."

Snapshot of Bill Ritter

Age: 50

Residence: Denver

Education: Colorado State University, bachelor's degree, political science, 1978; Grade point average: 3.485

University of Colorado, College of Law, law degree, 1981; Class rank: 26th out of 150

Military service: None. Ritter was 18 when the American presence in Vietnam ended on April 30, 1975.

Work history:

• Deputy district attorney and chief deputy DA, Denver, 1981 to 1987

• Volunteer director and Catholic lay missionary, Mongu (Zambia) Nutrition Center, 1987 to 1990

• Assistant U.S. Attorney 1990 to 1992

• Chief deputy DA, Denver, 1992 to June 1993

• District Attorney, Denver, June 1993 to January 2005

• Partner, Hogan & Hartson, 2005 to 2006

Family: Wife Jeannie, 50; son August, 20; son Abe, 18; son Sam, 15; daughter Tally, 13

Biggest regret: Not taking the time to write a book about his experiences in Africa

Favorite book: Lonesome Dove

Three things you could not live without: Faith, family and fishing

Hero: Vaclav Havel; mother Ethel Ritter

Next Saturday

•Bob Beauprez's business success, conservative style and head-on approach to confronting challenges make him an ideal GOPcandidate for governor, his backers say, in a profile in next Saturday's News.

hartmant@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5048

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