Temporary solution
The temporary solution shown here requires a small patch to one of the CherryPy source files. I want to thank Felix Bonkoski who told me about it. I did some google searches and found references to it at bitbucket.org/cherrypy/cherrypy/issue/895/.
Here are the instructions:
Locate and edit the file static.py (In my Ubuntu machine it was located at /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/cherrypy/lib/static.py). Within the function staticdir(), locate the lines below. They are at the end of that function.
if handled:
request.is_index = filename[-1] in (r"\/") <--- Line in question
Edit the line in question so it looks like this:
if handled:
request.is_index = True
and save the file.
At this point I rebooted the computer and CherryPy is now working as I think it should work.