Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (40 page)

Ever since watching Tom Koby’s January 9 press conference
from the lobby of the Boulder Public Library, Stephen Singular had often thought about the peculiar nature of the Ramsey case. He had spent fifteen years writing true-crime books, and of course JonBenét’s murder interested him. Soon he began to talk to some of the Ramseys’ acquaintances. During one conversation Pam Griffin talked to him about Fleet White, whom she met while she was caring for Patsy on December 27 at the Fernies’. Pam understood how distraught Patsy and John must be, but it was White’s behavior that caught her attention. She got the impression that White was trying to control and manage things that day, and he seemed not to want Pam to be alone with Patsy. Of course White didn’t know who Pam was or how close she was to Patsy; nor did she know at the time how close the Whites were to the Ramseys. Still, she had an uneasy feeling about Fleet White. For his part, Stephen Singular couldn’t stop thinking about White as he drove from Denver, where he lived, to Boulder for a meeting with Alex Hunter. He had read the
National Enquirer
that morning, but he was apprehensive about bringing up White’s name at this first meeting with the DA.

Like most Americans who were following the case, Singular thought the Boulder police had little homicide experience. He surmised that so far the cops had dealt only with the surface, that they hadn’t gone deep.

In his own investigations, Singular had learned that inevitably the perpetrator’s prior behavior foreshadows the crime. Though there seemed to be no sign of aberrant behavior in either John’s or Patsy’s background, Singular understood that seemingly good people can sometimes do terrible things.

As he followed the story, he saw that during the first weeks, the media implied that John Ramsey was a child molester who had killed his own daughter. Then Patsy was put in the hot seat, portrayed as a religious fanatic who read the Bible compulsively. To Singular, it was obvious that the media were
considering only two possibilities—that one or both parents had killed their child or that an intruder had entered the house and killed JonBenét. Singular believed there were numerous other possibilities, which was why he had contacted Hunter. On TV the DA seemed reasonable, bright, and sensitive—not like most prosecutors, who tend to swagger. Singular had sent Hunter a fax, saying that he was the author of a book about talk-show host Alan Berg, who had been murdered in Denver, and Hunter had asked him to come in and talk.

The meeting with Hunter and Bill Wise took place on April 15. Hunter was more open and friendly than Singular had expected him to be, and Singular told them what he had learned about people on the periphery of the Ramseys’ life—acquaintances connected to the world of pageants.

“Have you looked at the Internet?” Singular asked. “What do you know about the pageant world?” Hunter admitted he knew very little. Singular gave Hunter the names of Pam Griffin, Randy Simons, Trish Danpier, a former Miss Colorado, and pageant director LaDonna Griego, among others. Hunter knew about Griffin and Simons from police reports.

Singular suggested that JonBenét’s murder might have originated outside the family, in the pageant world, which was a mixture of children, sexuality, and business opportunities. The exploitation of children for economic gain was at the underbelly of America, Singular said, and JonBenét Ramsey could have been one of the victims.

As a pageant participant, JonBenét had been photographed many times in her life. Singular wondered if maybe the child had been taken from her home on Christmas night to be photographed again, without one parent’s knowledge, and been brought home dead. He intimated that one of “Boulder’s public officials” might possibly be involved in child pornography with one of John Ramsey’s friends.

“It’s a federal issue. I’ll speak to the FBI,” Hunter said. “I am not going to give this to the cops. I don’t want them to screw
it up. I know work needs to be done in that area.” Singular got the impression that Hunter was giving him an assignment: look into the child pornography business and get back to me.

While he saw that Hunter was trying to keep an open mind about who had killed JonBenét, Singular also couldn’t help but notice that the DA was overwhelmed. He was receiving an enormous amount of attention, and that could be very seductive.

On April 18, Hunter gave Jennifer Mears of the Associated Press an interview. It was the first time the DA had publicly acknowledged that the Ramseys were at the center of the investigation.

DA CONCEDES RAMSEYS ARE “THE FOCUS” OF INVESTIGATION

The story became front-page news. Hunter, who so far had been careful not to go on the record about his interest in the Ramseys, called the AP within hours of the story’s publication.

“I’m not upset with the story,” he said. “It’s the quotes.
They make me sound stupid.” It was the first time a public official had ever called Mears to discuss the way his quotes portrayed him.

INSIDE THE “WAR ROOM”

By mid-April, the war room on the first floor of the Justice Center had been outfitted with a large conference table, computers, and cubicles. There was a small adjacent room and lots of wall space for charts, and even a toaster oven where you could bake a small cake. No matter how well appointed it was, however, Steve Thomas knew that the war room wasn’t going to work out. Lou Smit, the police, and the prosecutors each had different roles in the case, and each group saw the same data differently. There were ongo
ing personality clashes. It wasn’t long before Smit was telling the detectives that he wasn’t so sure the evidence against the Ramseys was strong. As he reviewed the officers’ reports and compared their contents, he could see there was a strong possibility that an intruder could have entered the house and killed JonBenét.

The police detectives were particularly irritated at Ainsworth, who was acting as Hunter’s devil’s advocate, looking at the evidence from a defense perspective. He was supposed to be a cop—on
their
side.

To break the deadlock, Koby suggested to Hunter that they use a professional mediator to explain to his officers that the way lawyers operate doesn’t damage the integrity of police work. Hunter, who had used mediators in the past to iron out policy conflicts, was all for it. Hofstrom felt it was a waste of time. Nevertheless, they turned to Richard Rianoshek, who had been a cop in Chicago and a detective and police chief in Aspen. He specialized in helping organizations work more effectively. Rianoshek knew that all DAs and police departments face essentially the same problem. It was endemic to law enforcement: prosecutors were often at odds, and the police were frustrated by legal hair-splitting. Throw some controversy into the mix, and the problems would be magnified. In the Ramsey case, given the enormous pressure from the media, Rianoshek knew it would be a miracle if anything worked.

The mediators first met with each side separately, in a small conference room on neutral ground at the University of Colorado. Then there were two meetings with both sides. Hunter, Hofstrom, DeMuth, and Smit attended these meetings, as did all the police detectives plus Wickman, Eller, and Koby. Each session lasted four hours.

Many grievances came to the surface. For example, the cops couldn’t get past Hofstrom’s four breakfasts with Bryan Morgan. Consorting with the enemy! It was like
Hofstrom’s notorious precharging negotiations, which were just one step away from plea bargaining. Hofstrom could have accomplished his job with simple phone calls, a detective said. Steve Thomas repeated that Hunter’s staff was interested only in proving that an intruder had killed JonBenét. Hunter’s staff, on the other hand, was convinced that the police were determined to build a case against the Ramseys and refused to look elsewhere.

Rianoshek painstakingly showed both sides that their perceptions were inaccurate. He clarified what the police had said: they might be leaning toward the Ramseys, but if evidence appeared pointing to someone other than the couple, the evidence would prevail. Rianoshek repeated the DA’s position: they weren’t fixated on an intruder. They also thought the Ramseys had committed the crime, but they wanted the police to investigate every possibility. Nevertheless, the meetings deteriorated into mutual accusations, and in the end nothing changed. The inhabitants of the war room were never going to be friends.

When Lou Smit reflected on what he’d been observing, he saw one of the roots of the problem. Over the years, the DA’s office had never bonded with the police. Where he came from, and in most jurisdictions, the DA’s investigators were ex-cops. The detectives on the police force were their buddies. They played softball, drank beer, and went to sports events together. By contrast, Alex Hunter hired a former police officer only once in a great while. These days, the closest was Tom Wickman’s ex-wife, who was now one of Hunter’s investigators.

It wasn’t long before the daily status meeting, where each detective and deputy DA brought the group up-to-date, fell apart. Nobody wanted to reveal anything for fear of leaks by the other side. The daily reports became monotonous: “Haven’t done anything. Nothing on tap for today.” Some detectives were even afraid to use the phones in the
war room for fear the DAs would hear who they were talking to—the pay phones in the halls of the Justice Center were in constant use.

The media made this not only a police case but the DA’s case. Hunter was no longer in a peripheral position. The case was thrown into disarray by the fact that there were three cameras and four tape recorders operating every time anybody opened his mouth.

The war room became a liability when it acquired a media life. It had been designed as a setting for open communication, but suddenly the media depicted it as the setting for potential breakthroughs—a place from which truth would emanate. It became a liability.

—Bob Grant

On April 22 the FBI’s Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit heard about the terms for the Ramseys’ scheduled interviews. They told the police that “the conditions would not likely lead to a productive investigative interview.” The FBI proposed open-ended interviews for Patsy and John and no breaks between the sessions for the Ramseys to consult each other or their attorneys. The venue should be a bare room in a law enforcement establishment, not an attorney’s office. Providing the Ramseys’ attorneys with police reports was also a mistake, the FBI said, but it was too late to do anything about that because they had been delivered the day before. Convinced that the FBI was right, Eller canceled the interviews one day before the agreed-upon date. Patrick Burke was informed by phone. Both Hunter and Koby foresaw disaster—not only for the investigation but in terms of public relations.

The next day, April 23, attorneys Haddon and Burke
wrote the following letter to Hunter on behalf of their clients and released it to the media with several pages of supporting documents.

The letter went on to chastise the police, and then restated almost the entire lengthy history of Ramsey/police negotiations from the Ramseys’ point of view. The lawyers revealed that the police had tried to withhold JonBenét’s body in return for interviews with the Ramseys—the first of many insensitive and incomprehensible actions, the attorneys said. By addressing this letter to Hunter, the Ramseys drew a line in the sand. The last paragraph made it clear how they would proceed in the future.