Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (25 page)

“And I think you could hear in Alex’s voice, and I think for those of you who know me, you know that when I say this, I mean this: I truly love the people in my organization, and what they have been able to produce and what they have been able to withstand.” Koby had taken just four minutes—much less time than Hunter.

The first question was addressed to Hunter: If the pool of suspects was narrowing, who still remained?

“I’m not going to get into whether it’s ten people or a hundred. It’s narrowed….
Significant progress
is being made.”

Then, inevitably, Hunter was asked about his David-and-Goliath analogy, his contention that his team wouldn’t be overpowered. Who was Goliath in this case?

Hunter avoided naming an adversary. “Who is Goliath?” someone repeated. “Who is your opposition?”

Hunter wouldn’t budge. “There is no formal opposition.”

“What kind of opponent is anticipated? Someone with lots of money?”

Hunter hesitated, unsure of himself for the first time. “The question’s loaded…. I don’t care who, ultimately, I come down on, but I’m going to be ready to match the resources of anyone because I think the case deserves that. So let me just put it simply: This case…deserves that we do the very best we can, bring in the best people. And that’s what we’re going to do.”

Koby was asked about the DNA evidence.

“Next question,” he said.

“Is the police focus inside or outside the Ramsey family?”

Koby again replied, “Next question.”

When he was asked if this case put his professional future on the line, the chief’s aide terminated the press conference. But Koby decided to speak further: “I was raised as a chief under the tutelage of Lee P. Brown, who was the chief in Atlanta, the Houston commissioner, and the New York drug czar, and Lee taught me three things about media management. One of them was, Don’t answer stupid questions. Professional media people should ask you good questions. You don’t have an obligation to reach down to the level of a dumb question.

“The second thing is, Don’t answer questions that lead to speculation. Many careers and lives have been ruined by media speculation. And you have an obligation, I have an obligation, not to contribute to that phenomenon.

“And thirdly, Lee taught me, Don’t answer questions that compromise your objective, particularly in a criminal case. So when we have questions that we don’t respond to, what I am using is those criteria that Lee Brown drove into me long and hard over the years that I worked with him.”

There was laughter in the audience—some nervous, some exasperated. At the end of the conference the consensus was that Koby had not handled the press well.

Later that evening, a reporter called Bill Wise to chat informally about Alex Hunter’s performance.

“Yeah, I just talked to Hunter a few minutes ago,” Wise said. “I told him, ‘Gee, you must know something I don’t know to have sounded so confident.’ Hunter then gives me one of these sheepish looks and says, ‘Well, I might have gotten a little carried away.’”

The members of the press had seen some posturing, some play-acting from Hunter. Nevertheless, when the reporter who spoke to Wise talked with a friend later, he was caught up in Hunter’s enthusiasm. “I think they’re going to get this guy after all,” he said, not sure whether “this guy” was John Ramsey or a mystery intruder. “They’re going to get him.” For the moment, at least, he had bought into Hunter’s bravado.

The next morning, Patsy Ramsey called Hunter. She thanked him for what he’d said about getting the killer of her daughter. She only wished the police understood that she and John had nothing to do with JonBenét’s death. There was still a killer on the loose, she said.

In his second-floor office at the Justice Center, Sheriff Epp caught the press conference on TV and found it hard to watch. He felt that he no longer knew his colleagues, that they had become puppets whose strings were being pulled by the media. Maybe they were more like protoplasm in a petri dish with an electrical charge going through them.

Epp had known Alex Hunter for twenty-five years, and for the first time he was embarrassed for him. Alex was falling all over himself apologizing for the cops—even covering up for them. Epp thought it was a mistake.

Afterward, Epp went downstairs to see Hunter and told him flat-out that he was placing his loyalty to Koby above his loyalty to the people who had elected him. Epp knew that Hunter got the point, but he had no reply. Epp could see how hard it was for his friend to hear the truth. Hunter thanked Epp for his honesty.

Then Epp tried to reach Koby, only to find that the chief and his wife had left for a long weekend in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with city manager Tim Honey and his wife.

While Koby and Hunter were holding their press conference, Bill Wise was at the old courthouse at Pearl and 13th Streets asking the county commissioners for more money for the Ramsey investigation.

Hofstrom had asked Hunter for an experienced homicide detective and a full-time deputy DA. In addition, they needed money for Lee and Scheck and for a forensic psychiatrist, plus funds to support the joint war room with its computer equipment and paper shredders.

Wise brought the commissioners up to date on the anticipated costs for his department. He was surprised when they asked him if Pete Hofstrom would be doing the investigative work.

That’s part of the problem, Wise replied. He’d like to do a lot of that and the Boulder Police Department says, Get out of our business. They don’t want lawyers sticking their noses into their investigation…so we’ve told Pete to back off a little bit.

Commissioner Jana Mendez asked, Doesn’t Tom Koby realize that an investigation that isn’t done for prosecution purposes…? Her voice trailed off.

I’m not going to criticize the Boulder Police Department, but I’d sure like to, Wise told the commissioners. Under the law, we don’t control these investigations. If not for Alex Hunter’s close relationship with Tom Koby, we wouldn’t be in the case at all.

As he spoke, Wise knew he’d put his foot in it. The police certainly deserved criticism, but denouncing them in public was not his job. So far neither the Boulder police nor the DA’s office had publicly acknowledged any problems between them.

The commissioners approved an additional $124,000 for his department.

Later that afternoon, Kevin McCullen, a reporter for the
Rocky Mountain News
who had been at the press briefing, stopped in as usual at the council chambers to listen to the official tape recording of the budget session. Taking notes, he heard his next headline.

After McCullen left, Jana Petersen, the commissioners’ press representative, called Wise and told him she was sure McCullen would publish what Wise had said about the police. Wise knew immediately that he was in trouble.

Back at the office, he told Hunter what he’d said to the commissioners. For a moment they joked about whether the tape could be destroyed. Then Wise said that all he could do now was mop up after himself.

Calling McCullen, Wise admitted that his comments had been careless and pointed out that a story on his views of the Boulder police wouldn’t help solve the Ramsey case. McCullen refused to bury the remarks.

Having been turned down flat, Wise decided to appeal to McCullen’s editor, Deborah Goeken. She heard him out and said she would consider deleting his comments about the police in her reporter’s budget story. An hour later, however, Wise discovered that the local NBC affiliate, Channel 9, had learned about his remarks from a commissioner and was going to air them. Knowing that his request to Goeken would only compound his difficulties, Wise called her to withdraw the request, but the story had gone to press without his comments in Friday’s edition of the paper. The fol
lowing day, the paper published Wise’s inflammatory remarks together with his apology for criticizing the police.

Koby returned from Santa Fe on Monday and asked Hunter to take Wise off the Ramsey case. Hunter knew that if he let Wise stay, Eller would use it as an excuse to push the DA’s office further out of the investigation. There was nothing to do but comply with Koby’s wishes.

“Pig’s ass,” was all that Bill Wise had to say until Koby asked Hunter if he was going to discipline Wise.

“They should take some of those cops and beat them within an inch of their lives for the way they bungled this case,” Wise told Hunter. “That’s where the disciplining should be.”

If the purpose of the press conference was to reduce the number of calls from the media, it was a failure. During the briefing, unhappy TV viewers called the Boulder DA’s office to complain that their local station had preempted their soap operas, but by midafternoon, Hunter and Koby had calls from the
Detroit News
, the
Connecticut Post
, the
Today
show,
Good Morning America
, CNN,
Time
, and
Newsweek
. Producers at one network said that they would stay in town until the case was solved. ABC was already spending $150,000 a month to keep five producers in Boulder. CNN had an entire studio, a library of hundreds of videotapes, and an editing room set up at the Residence Inn.

Before the week was out, Hunter had received 170 calls from the media. Before long, he and Bill Wise were spending five hours a day talking to reporters.

While the press was chasing Hunter and Koby for sound bites, at police headquarters Detectives Jane Harmer and Melissa Hickman were interviewing Linda Hoffmann-Pugh and her husband, Merv, for a third time. The detectives went over the housekeeper’s story again and collected
additional blood, hair, and saliva samples. They wanted to know when Linda had last changed JonBenét’s sheets. The Monday before Christmas, she told them. When they told Linda that John Ramsey had said he’d broken the basement widow to enter his home, she found it odd. She said that Ramsey always came in through the garage door, which he opened with a remote-control device, then through a door to the house that was never locked except when Nedra was home alone at night with her grandchildren.

Hoffmann-Pugh was then asked to make a list of everyone she knew who frequented the house and a list of those who had keys. After two hours of intense questioning, she was so upset that for a moment she couldn’t find her own key. Months later, the police asked her about scuff marks they found on the wall below the broken basement window and near John Andrew’s suitcase. Maybe someone had climbed in that night and left the marks. Had she ever seen the marks? No, she told them.

The police theorized that if someone other than the Ramseys had killed JonBenét, he or she might have used a key to get in, since there was no clear sign of forced entry. On December 26 John Ramsey had told the police there weren’t any keys “hidden under rocks” in the yard and that only John Andrew, Nedra, and Linda had extra keys. But three weeks later, on January 21, Patsy’s attorney told the police that the Whites, the Fernies, and Joe Barnhill also had keys. In April 1997, Ellis Armistead, an investigator hired by the Ramseys, would tell the police that there were twenty more extra keys outstanding. In the end, however, the detectives could find only nine people who said they had keys. Six of the keys were returned. Three were missing.

The police soon learned that the front door locked automatically when it was closed. The police were told that
Patsy, possibly without her husband’s knowledge, had hidden a key outdoors near the front door because whenever she went out front for something, she got locked out. Now that key was also missing.

I was born in Lyons, Kansas, and my dad was a poor wheat farmer. I had three brothers and one sister. I’m the youngest, and one of my brothers is twenty years older than me. He’s a welder, with his own construction business in Fort Morgan, Colorado.

When I was thirteen we moved to Fort Morgan because my dad wasn’t doing well. He went to work for my brother as a ditch digger. My dad was an alcoholic. He died in 1986. My mother was forty-one when she had me. I have six living kids. Ten grandchildren. And a paper route.

I have my ladies, the women I work for. I have a doctor’s wife in Greeley, and a lawyer. I was working for a bonded agency called Merry Maids when I met Patsy. I started with her one day a week. I was dumbfounded, the place was so huge. It was too much for one person. Soon we had four people, once a week.

Patsy was warm and kind. Just a sweet person. But she had a hard time keeping up with the laundry. She was doing lots of charity work and was involved with her children’s schooling.

Then I went to work for her three days a week, $72 a day. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I’d get there at 9:00 in the morning and be gone by 3:00. That’s when my daughter Ariana gets out of school. Sometimes I worked for Patsy on Saturdays and holidays. She gave me a $300 bonus at the end of my first year. That was October 27, 1996.

Patsy was afraid she wasn’t going to live, that her cancer would come back and she’d never live to see the children grow up. She read a lot about illness and healing.
Every three months she had a checkup. She believed if she prayed, everything would be all right.

Patsy admired John. He accomplished a lot. She told me that when they started out they had nothing, and they worked themselves up to where they were now.

I first met JonBenét when she was in preschool. She was home, like, half a day. Patsy called her Jonnie B. I spent half my time picking up after her. She and her brother would just leave everything on the floor—their socks, their shoes, toys, books, just everything. They were never trained to put things away properly.

I always came in the side door, and I’d walk right into the kitchen and not know where to start. Dishes all over. If they had Ovaltine, the jar would still be open. I always had to wipe the peanut butter off the counter.

“I think we ought to get a hamper,” I told Patsy.