Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (23 page)

Hofstrom, Patsy, Hendry, Parker, and Patrick Burke were all squeezed into Hofstrom’s modest office, which was neutral territory for this high-profile witness. Parker sat on one side of Hofstrom’s desk, and Patsy took a guest chair on the other side. Her lawyer, Burke, sat on the edge of the credenza.

With her sunglasses off, Patsy looked drawn and medicated, Parker thought. He knew that Patsy had lived in Atlanta, but she didn’t know that he was from Marietta. He began by telling her what had happened: Jay was in jail. Parker said he had to know what had happened before Jay left the house. He asked if she’d seen any media people outside the house.

Patsy said she didn’t like the press and started to cry. She said that she hated being followed and photographed through the window blinds at Jay’s house. She couldn’t go to a store without being photographed. Enough is enough,
she kept saying.

To Parker it was clear that Patsy couldn’t deal with the interview, and he let her know that he was there to help with her problems.

Burke, her attorney, was silent and let Patsy talk.

Patsy told Parker that Jay had left the house to take a box of sandwiches to a homeless shelter. She didn’t see him take a bat. Later when she heard police cars and saw Jay’s car being towed away, she called her attorney.

Hendry could see that Parker was working Patsy well. She was talking freely.

Then she told Parker that someone had broken into her house and killed her daughter. “There is still a murderer loose in the city,” she said. “You know, my little girl was murdered. All these people are hounding us instead of trying to find the murderer. Somebody broke into our house, you know, killed my little girl,” she repeated.

Burke seemed nervous, but he let Patsy continue. Hendry noticed that she cried when she talked about the media but not when she talked about her child’s killer. Patsy kept going back to JonBenét’s death. “Somebody breaks into my house, kills my little girl.” Then she said it again in a flat, matter-of-fact way, as if by rote, Hendry thought. If Patsy wanted to talk, Parker and Hendry certainly weren’t going to stop her.

Suddenly, Burke got up and placed himself between Parker and Patsy. He didn’t say a word, just looked hard at Patsy while she pulled herself together. That ended the interview.

Burke had been there to make sure that Patsy didn’t say too much, and Hendry had been there to make sure that Parker couldn’t be accused of overreaching. Patsy was being interviewed as a witness, not as a suspect. They accepted that whatever she had said about JonBenét that afternoon could not be used against her if she were put on trial.
*

During the interview, Hendry felt that Patsy had knowledge of the crime and wanted to talk. He thought John and Patsy were responsible for their daughter’s death somehow, but which one killed her and which one was covering for the other—that, he didn’t know.

It would be Hofstrom’s job to charge Elowsky. John Stavely, a Boulder attorney, represented him. During the precharging negotiations, Stavely laid out all the mitigating factors: he began with a story of the poor guy besieged by the media.

Hendry had heard this kind of thing before, and he knew that only rarely was someone in Boulder charged with what he had really done. As for how often a criminal was convicted for what he had really done…well, that was even more rare. Hendry was a cop. He believed that if you broke the law, you should be punished, and without that—well, according to Hendry, without that, you have Boulder.

Two months later, the
Daily Camera
published an editorial on Elowsky.

PASTA JAY AND THE LAW

Elowsky received a year’s probation and was required to spend two weekends on a Boulder County Jail work crew performing community service.

Back in ’90, I met CU’s football coach, Bill McCartney. I
knew he was a religious man. I’d read his book, and I went and heard him speak. He was talking about men who give up their souls for financial gain. That sounded like me. I had been raised a Lutheran, but I was still living an immoral life while trying to find something. What do they say? I was burning the candle at both ends. Then one day I dropped to my knees. My heart literally gave out. I’d had a heart attack.

Coach Mac was there when I needed him. He made a vow to me that he would see me once a week to guide me to Christian maturity. And he kept his promise. Nothing happens overnight. It took years for me to change. I always knew about God, but I never pursued a relationship with Him. Mac was somebody who could teach me how to do that. Mac was Moses to me. He sought God’s heart and commands and taught those to me. He taught them to a lot of football teams. Now, through the Promise Keepers, he’s teaching them to men all over the world.

Earlier in 1992, I met John Ramsey. He was moving his business to Boulder and came into the restaurant quite often. He became interested in my place. Said he’d like to open a restaurant like mine in Atlanta. Something that could be franchised. I said to myself, Boy, that is exactly what I want to do. I want to be the next McDonald’s! I showed him the kitchen. Took him to my other place, in Breckenridge.

John is a gentle man, very soft-spoken. Very smart. He started an operation in his basement in Atlanta and built it into a billion-dollar business in less than ten years. I was, like, thirty when I met him. And someone like him was
interested
in what I was doing. Blew me away. I said, Holy cow, this is someone I can learn from. When I had my heart attack, after my surgery he flew me to Michigan so I could recover at the home of my par
ents.

John’s a great family guy. And we talked about that. “The second time around,” he said, “you know, it’s great. It’s really great.” He enjoyed his kids. It was never rush here or rush there or the kids are taking too long to get ready, the kids are taking too long to eat. None of that. He was just enjoying the moment. He is a man with a lot of patience.

He was also, like, a business consultant to me. We’d discuss how to plan and structure growth. Ramsey gave me a lot of time, and he wasn’t even a partner. Then John and Mike Bynum set up an advisory board for me, which included eight high-powered businesspeople. Our mission was to make Pasta Jay’s grow.

I started to try to be like them. I knew I had a good product. The sauce was the key. You could put my sauce on dog food and people would eat it.

In 1996 my lease ended; I had to move. For a while, I scrambled. By then I’d opened four other places, and the Boulder place was carrying them, supplying all the expansion money. But I had to close Boulder, and I had to pay vendors and meet payroll. I had a sense of impending doom.

John and Mike stepped up and said, “We’ll loan you the money. We’ll invest in you for a portion of the business.” And I was able to open a new place at the foot of the Pearl Street Mall.

That was a relief. I’m not alone now. I’d been making decisions alone for nine years, standing or falling by them. Now I have partners. We have a game plan. We’re going to sink or swim together.

And by then I had my religion. That was one common bond between John Ramsey and myself.

After JonBenét died, the Ramseys stayed in my home for almost eight weeks. It was a difficult time for
all of us.

—Jay Elowsky

INTERVIEW SITE AT ISSUE

When
The Denver Post
reported that negotiations were taking place for the Ramseys to be interviewed, John Eller immediately told Pete Hofstrom that he suspected leaks to the media were coming from the DA’s staff. The cord tied loosely around JonBenét’s right wrist, the near-perfect match of Ramsey’s bonus to the ransom amount demanded, the inclusion of the acronym SBTC in the ransom note, and the fact that the killer seemed to have wiped JonBenét’s body with a cloth—all this confidential information had ended up in print. The police, Eller insisted, hadn’t leaked anything.

When the press heard about Eller’s accusations, they weren’t surprised. In mid-January, Charlie Brennan of the
Rocky Mountain News
had discovered from an Access Graphics employee that people close to Ramsey were being asked to give handwriting samples containing the acronym SBTC. It was significant because when Ramsey was in the military, he was stationed at Subic Bay in the Philippines. Some investigators thought that SBTC might
be a reference to Subic Bay Training Center, although that was not the name the facility was known by.

Still, Brennan had a hunch that the ransom note might contain the acronym, and he asked Hunter’s office for a confirmation before publishing the story. A member of the DA’s staff confirmed the fact. By John Eller’s standards, that was a leak.

COPS ASK RAMSEY ‘SANTA’ FOR HAIR SAMPLE

On February 12, Detectives Thomas and Gosage began an investigation into the death of John Ramsey’s oldest daughter, Beth. She had died in a car accident near Chicago in 1992, and the death had changed Ramsey’s life in many ways. Immediately afterward, he immersed himself in books on how to deal with the loss of a child. He turned introspective. To many of his friends and associates, the change in him was noticeable.

The police wanted to find out if there had been a history of child or sexual abuse involving Beth. They were convinced that what Beth had confided to her girlfriends would give them insight into John Ramsey’s conduct with JonBenét. The detectives began by interviewing Natalie Geroli, who had
been Beth’s closest friend. Two days later they saw her former teacher Elizabeth Bouis before visiting two more of her friends, Laura Foster and Lanie Bartlett. By February 21, Thomas and Gosage had completed a four-state trip and had also interviewed Tim Farrell and Marty Desantis, who were acquaintances of Beth. In the end, the detectives found no indication of inappropriate conduct by Ramsey toward Beth.

The investigation into Beth Ramsey was not the first trip to Georgia that Steve Thomas had made. In early January, he and Tom Trujillo had visited John and Patsy’s former home on Northridge Road in Dunwoody, Georgia, where the family had lived when JonBenét was a baby.

Late one afternoon, Thomas and Trujillo had knocked on the front door of the Northridge house. The detectives introduced themselves, and the current owners let them into the house to look around. They had just wanted to get a feel for the place. In the backyard, Thomas and Trujillo stopped short. There, embedded in the cement of the patio, were JonBenét’s and Burke’s infant footprints—tiny but perfect.

The next night, the detectives went back to the house. It was raining, and they didn’t want to disturb the owner. They walked to the backyard and again looked down at the tiny imprints, which glistened in the chilly drizzle.

Thomas began to weep.

Trujillo remained silent, waiting for Thomas to regain his composure.

From there, the detectives went to visit JonBenét’s grave site.

Steve Thomas knew that no matter what lay ahead, he had to do the right thing. That was the credo his father had instilled in him, and now his father, who had devoted much of his life to raising money for the March of Dimes, was sick. His mother had died back in Arkansas when he was just seven. Thomas had gone to college at CU, studied sociology and criminology, and become a cop in 1986. Four
years later, he was hired by the Boulder police as a patrol officer. Shortly afterward he was involved in two shootings, the second one as a member of the SWAT team. Both cases were deemed justified by a police review board. During that period, Thomas and Commander Eller became friends. By 1996, Thomas was working as a detective in a specialized narcotics unit. Just six months before JonBenét was murdered, he married Karena Jesaitis, a certified public accountant.