Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (15 page)

The results were inconclusive. Burke gave the police little information about the night of JonBenét’s death that they did not already have. And when they screened the videotape, it was hard to tell if Burke might be hiding anything.

Also on January 8, Detectives Thomas and Gosage interviewed Laurie Wagner, a vice president at Access Graphics. She had been John Ramsey’s employee for over ten years. The detectives wanted to find out more about the company and about the relationships among the various employees,
including Wagner’s relationship with the Ramsey family. They gave no hint that they considered Ramsey a suspect.

At the time, Wagner was not asked for a blood or handwriting sample. A year later, however, in January 1998, the police told her that there was an unidentified print on the ransom note. They asked her to provide palm prints and fingerprints, which she did.

I went to work for John Ramsey in Atlanta in 1986 and came to Boulder in 1990 with a dozen or so other employees. The simplest way to explain Access Graphics is that we are a wholesale distributor of high-end PC computers. We don’t manufacture products—we sell the products made by other companies to resellers. We offer support services, consulting services, and teaching. We sell all over the world.

John started Advanced Products Group in Atlanta and merged with Eric Crod of CAD Sources Inc., in Piscataway, New Jersey, and Jim Hudson of CAD Distributors in Boulder to get a competitive edge in the marketplace. The three companies became Access Graphics, with corporate headquarters in Boulder.

CalComp, a subsidiary of Lockheed, acquired 20 percent equity in the new company. Access soon surpassed CalComp in both size and profits. When Access showed rapid sales and profit growth, Lockheed picked up its option to acquire the company.

In 1991 John became president. He recruited young employees and gave them a relaxed, exciting work environment—no dress code, an open-door policy, with everyone on a first-name basis. There were lots of opportunities for advancement. We had very little employee turnover. The average employee age is the mid-twenties.

Then Lockheed merged with Martin Marietta. Now Access Graphics has more than six hundred employees worldwide—over four hundred people working in 70,000 square feet of offices on the Pearl Street Mall. You can sit outside, relax, discuss creative ideas, and listen to the musicians on the Mall. Who wants to be in an industrial park? Boulder is a good place for entertaining clients.

When JonBenét was murdered, we, as a company, got attention that nobody anticipated.

At first the media was looking for some connection with the company. Could there be a disgruntled employee? The sophistication of the reporters differed considerably—the
Today
show to
Geraldo
to you name it. Larry King never gave up.

One day a tabloid contacted my ex-husband. That’s when I knew they were looking at me. When the
Star
showed up at my front door, I wasn’t shocked. The reporter had this little camera he sort of flipped out from behind his back. They said I was in the Ramseys’ home the night of the murder. They said John and I were involved. “We know it, the police know it. People have sworn to this.”

I said nothing. I wanted to hear where they were going with all this. “We know you traveled with John Ramsey.”

Of course I did. He was my boss. Why lie? I just closed the door.

—Laurie Wagner

GRAND JURY IN RAMSEY CASE?

On January 9, a radio station reported a rumor that John Ramsey had confessed. Access Graphics was flooded with calls. Karen Howard, director of worldwide communications, was in her office trying to come to grips with the possibility that the report might be true. When a local station made the announcement, her boss, Laurie Wagner, went white. Still, Wagner waited, not wanting to compound the problem by acting too quickly. Nevertheless, Howard began to prepare an e-mail to employees, just in case the rumor was true. When it proved unfounded, Howard sent out an e-mail saying that this was an example of how the media should not be considered a reliable source of information.

Detectives Thomas and Gosage were at the Access Graphics office that day, conducting interviews. Among others,
they talked to Patsy’s father. Don Paugh, who had helped get the company off the ground in Atlanta, continued to work with his son-in-law when John made the move to Boulder in 1991. At the time of JonBenét’s murder, Paugh owned a condominium in Boulder, where he spent most of his time, and a home in Roswell, Georgia, with his wife, Nedra, who would often come to Boulder to visit. Paugh’s Boulder home was just down the street from a restaurant called Pasta Jay’s in which John Ramsey happened to be an investor. When the detectives interviewed Paugh on January 9, he said that on December 18, Jeff Merrick and his wife, Kathy, Jason Perkins, Cameron Hindson, Tom Carson, and Mike Glynn had eaten together at Pasta Jay’s. Paugh thought it strange that former Access Graphics employees were dining with a current employee like Carson.

The next day, Thomas and Gosage would follow up and interview Tom Carson at the Access Graphics office. They asked him where he’d been on Christmas night. Carson said that on December 24 he’d taken a United Airlines flight to Chicago and then gone on to Paris, where he spent Christmas Day. Later Thomas was able to confirm that Carson had indeed been on the transatlantic flight at the time JonBenét was murdered.

By the evening of January 9, the national press, as well as journalists from England and the Far East, were swarming on the front lawn of the Boulder Public Library, which also houses the studio of Channel 8. The parking lot along nearby Boulder Creek was packed with satellite trucks. That afternoon an arctic cold front had settled on Boulder, and the weather contributed to everyone’s foul mood.

The media were indignant. In scheduling his roundtable, Chief Koby had not only snubbed all the national press, which had advised his office of their presence in Boulder, but also seemed to be avoiding local writers who
were breaking important stories on the case. It was obvious that Koby had invited only reporters he thought would go easy on him.

When Kevin McCullen of the
Rocky Mountain News
walked into the library’s foyer, he was astounded to see more than a hundred reporters who hadn’t been invited. Though they weren’t admitted, they had gathered in the lobby nevertheless, where rows of chairs were arranged in a semicircle in front of a large TV. Koby and his invited panel were 40 feet away, behind the TV studio door.

“This has to be a joke, right?” one reporter said. To get a shot of Koby, television cameramen and still photographers had to photograph the TV screen.

In the studio McCullen, seated next to Koby, noticed that the chief seemed nervous as he looked over his prepared speech.

Tom Koby was known for a couple of things in Boulder—his hard stand against underage drinking and his firm endorsement of community policing: His officers were expected to know the people in the neighborhoods, listen to their concerns, and educate them on how to prevent crime before it happens. He also took an unusual position for a police chief: he refused to work with the Boy Scouts’ Explorer program on law enforcement because the national organization refused to allow gays to participate in scouting programs. Koby rarely wore his uniform, and people who didn’t know him would never suspect that he was a cop.

“It is the best judgment of the Boulder Police Department that this is a one-time occurrence…. We do not believe we have a serial situation,” Koby said at the outset of the roundtable in his Texas drawl. He drew most of his syllables out for an extra beat or two, which gave the impression of a man not in a big hurry. Even tonight he seemed laid-back.

“There have been many stories and much speculation
about who killed JonBenét. Prejudging and media hype have never solved a crime. The reality of the situation is that often these types of investigations take time. Again, it is unfortunate those who have anointed themselves as experts have seized the opportunity to offer criticism which has no basis in fact. Over the last five years, from 1990 through 1995, we have had fifteen homicides in Boulder. We have solved thirteen of them. We will not lose the focus of this investigation to respond to meaningless and unfounded remarks.” The reporters in the foyer exchanged smirks.

According to Koby, a rumor had sprung up earlier in the day—even surfacing on a Denver radio station—that a Ramsey family member had confessed. It was totally false, he said, and it was an example of how the media were making his department’s job harder.

“So I am just here to tell you that one of the most helpful things—if you and your colleagues would like to help—would be to back off a little bit, give us some room to do our jobs,” Koby told his audience.

Koby confirmed that in their initial search of the Ramseys’ house, it didn’t “appear” that his officers had looked in the room where JonBenét’s body was later found. He explained that “this house is a large mansion” and that the officers hadn’t reached the so-called wine cellar that morning. Moments later, he insisted, “Most legal experts will tell you, police officials and legal experts will tell you, we’ve done it just right.”

Most of the reporters felt that Koby knew mistakes had been made, but what struck Kevin McCullen was that Koby seemed to believe what he was saying. The chief really
was
convinced the police had done everything right.

“Three things can happen in any investigation like this one,” Koby continued. “One,…you show up and the person responsible is waiting for you. Second, you never solve the case. Third, it takes a while to work things out. This case
[is] an investigation that is complex and complicated and it will take some time to work out.”

Mike McPhee of
The Denver Post
asked if the Ramseys had been interviewed.

“We were with the family for quite a period of time during the first day,” Koby replied. “There is no way to interview parents at that point in time. It’s impossible. So, were we communicating with John and Patsy? We were. Were we interviewing John and Patsy? No. That would have been totally unreasonable.”

Then Alli Krupski, from the
Daily Camera
, asked why the police seemed to be responding with more intensity to the Ramsey case than they had to the death of a poor Latino a few weeks earlier.

“I think that is also a media question,” Koby answered. “Why has the media given so much attention to this case and literally no attention to the case you just described? I have never, in the twenty-eight years I have been in this business, seen such media focus on an event. It is intrusive, and making it much more difficult to work through this situation.”

Earlier in the week, Koby had told McCullen, “It’s not OJ and it’s not LA here in Boulder. Our guy won’t walk.” Now McCullen asked Koby to expand on that. “The reference,” Koby answered, “is that we are not going to have this case tried in the media.”

Someone asked Koby whether John Ramsey’s picking up his daughter and bringing her upstairs had contaminated the crime scene.

“No, we didn’t lose anything,” Koby replied. “We feel pretty confident that we did it right.” Again it didn’t seem to McCullen that Koby was covering up. He seemed to mean exactly what he was saying.

Jim Burrus from the
Boulder Planet
asked, “How much experience do you, as chief, and does John Eller, as commander of the detective division, have in investigating
homicides?”

“I have no experience running a homicide investigation,” Koby replied, “but I have twenty-eight years in the business, with a lot of investigation experience…. I don’t have John’s résumé in front of me. [We do] have [people] who are involved in homicide investigations that we have [conducted] over the last several years.”

Alli Krupski asked why Koby didn’t believe in the public’s right to know more about the status of the case. Koby pointed out that the evening’s briefing was meant for the people of Boulder because the investigation meant “a great deal” to the local community. “But the reality is this situation is a curiosity to the rest of the country,” Koby said. “And quite frankly, it is a sick curiosity in some ways.”

To many of the reporters, the police seemed to be saying that there was something dirty about their profession and his office wasn’t going to keep them informed.

The criticism from reporters in the foyer was immediate. The verdict was that nobody had really interviewed the chief. “If I had been there, I would have beaten him up,” one TV reporter told a local journalist.

Stephen Singular, author of the book on the life and death of Alan Berg that became Oliver Stone’s film
Talk Radio
, had been watching Koby on TV in the foyer. When the police chief commented, “The less you know, the easier it is to give advice,” Singular wondered whether the case was really so complex that the police weren’t going to solve it for a long time. Had they botched it so badly in those first hours that it would never be solved? What were the hidden facts that made the secrecy of the police so imperative?