Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (43 page)

This was not the first time there had been a ruckus on the Hill, a few blocks from the Ramseys’ house. The Hill was a lot like San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district of the 1960s. Since that so-called psychedelic revolution, recognizable hippie types had been camping out on University Hill’s sidewalks in front of coffee shops and clubs, while Boulderites and students from the CU campus, a few blocks away, hung out in the bars, record shops, and movie
theater. The mixture of street people, students out for a good time, and alcohol was often combustible, and the Boulder police had opened a substation in the area.

Now Tom Koby, whose detectives were resentful that he hadn’t spoken up for them against the media attack on their handling of the Ramsey investigation, faced outrage from the rank and file. His officers were furious that Koby refused to let them respond as
they
saw fit to the rioters on May 2. At first he ordered them to stay out of sight. Then they were pelted with rocks.

There had been confrontations between the police and students over their underage and public drinking throughout the winter of 1996–97 and into the spring. In July 1990 the drinking age had been raised from eighteen to twenty-one because the governor believed it could save ten to fifteen lives a year and because the federal government threatened to withhold $27 million in highway funds if the age limit was not raised. In 1992 five hundred people had been involved in an incident where bottles, rocks, and burning branches were tossed at firefighters. More near-riots broke out in 1994, when three hundred people threw furniture and street signs into a bonfire and tossed bottles and rocks at police.

A week after the May 2 riots, the
Boulder Planet
, a weekly newspaper, quoted Koby as saying, “My officers would have been justified killing some of these young people.” Koby hailed the restraint of his officers during the riots and said that a lack of education about alcohol abuse was one cause of the disturbance. Two weeks later, the
Rocky Mountain News
took him to task in an editorial.

RIOTERS EARN EXPULSION

At the end of May, the rank and file raised their grievances
against Koby at a special union meeting. Regardless of his praising them in the newspaper, officers felt he had shown dismal leadership during the Hill riots. “Community policing” was the hot topic at the meeting. Officers claimed they were spending more time serving ice cream to kids than arresting criminals. It was an exaggeration, but they felt hampered in their ability to respond to the public’s needs.

As Steve Thomas listened to the arguments, he remembered an incident that spoke to the cops’ underlying resentment. In the hot summer of 1993, Boulder’s undercover narcotics detectives worked in stakeout vans videotaping the drug deals at Boulder’s San Juan Del Centro low-income housing units. At the same time, Koby was trying to clean up the city’s drug problem through education and meetings with community leaders.

Todd Sears, the lead detective, had edited down tens of hours of video into a catalog of San Juan’s dealers, which he planned to use in court. On a Friday, when the department was poised to arrest the some thirty dealers, none of them showed up. The street had cleaned itself up overnight. As Sears tried to figure out what had gone wrong, his supervising officer dropped on his desk the edited videotape he’d made. Eventually Sears discovered that Koby had, without his knowledge, shown it to police liaison Ron Brambila, a member of the minority issues coalition. For Sears, Koby’s action not only subverted the arrest of the drug dealers but violated police and union procedure, which stipulated that evidence cannot be made public during an ongoing investigation. According to Sears Koby may even have been involved in obstruction of justice. Sears filed charges against the chief with the department’s internal affairs sergeant, Mark Beckner. After an investigation, Sears’ allegations were sustained, and Koby’s boss and friend, city manager Tim Honey, was required to discipline him. In typical Boulder style, Honey ordered Koby to attend counseling with Honey and to explain his actions to the department’s officers. When the narcotics team eventually arrested the drug dealers, Ron Brambila, to
whom Koby had originally shown the videotape, appeared in court to support one of the dealers.
*
Sears resigned from the Boulder PD shortly afterward.

The May 2 riots had brought long-simmering resentments to a boil. The rank and file were so fed up that no one attempted to defend the chief’s policies. One union official later said that the Boulder officers had turned into a lynch mob.

Though they didn’t want to ask for Koby’s dismissal, the police did want to take a vote by secret ballot. Seventy-eight members voted no confidence, thirty-one opposed, and six abstained. The no-confidence vote had passed by two to one. Though union officials didn’t understand how their vote would be interpreted, the Boulder City Council would see it as a sign that the rank and file wanted Koby removed.

Within days of the meeting, the press reported that city manager Tim Honey was on his way out. According to the
Rocky Mountain News
: “Honey’s performance recently has been criticized by at least four of Boulder’s nine council members…. Honey’s critics on the council have voiced concern about personnel issues. Honey also had defended police chief Tom Koby, who this week lost a vote of confidence conducted by the Boulder Police Benefit Association.”

For six years, Tim Honey, with a master’s degree in political science from Georgetown University, had seemed to be the perfect city manager for politically progressive Boulder. Its leaders thought of themselves as innovators, looking for solutions to the complex issues facing local governments. Honey was hired to bring stability, vision, and direction to what some local residents called Utopia.

When he arrived in February 1991, he found a priority list of 104 items. Most issues in Boulder centered around the city’s growth: Should there be more or less? What would be the impact of growth? In a style endemic to Boul
der, combatants argued and fought long after a vote was taken, the losers trying to find a way to save whatever they had lost.

Seven months after he took the job, Honey hired Tom Koby as chief of police. Honey felt that Koby’s twenty-five years in law enforcement had given him a real understanding of the relationship between public safety and other community issues. Within a year, Koby told the city council that police resources were inadequate. With the approval of Honey and the city council, he restructured the department, removing several layers of bureaucracy and creating management teams in their place. Once that system was in effect, he started his push for community policing, where civilians would work with the police to fight crime.

A week after the
Rocky Mountain News
published its story about Tim Honey’s problems, he resigned. The police union was moving against Tom Koby, and the media were criticizing every move the police made in the Ramsey case. At the same time, Mayor Leslie Durgin told the press that she would not seek reelection. For unrelated reasons, the city’s planning director left his post, and so did Boulder’s superintendent of schools.

The official face of paradise began to collapse. Boulder would soon find itself without the stable day-to-day leadership it had taken for granted for seven years.

I got elected to the Boulder City Council in November of 1987 and I stayed until 1996. I was even deputy mayor for a while. The council hires the city manager, and he hires the fire chief and police chief. The council can’t direct either of them to do anything, but we can certainly make our feelings known to the city manager—and there is nothing wrong with that.

The whole region north of Denver has boomed. There is now traffic congestion. People are getting short-tempered. And wealthier. That’s always a bad sign. Wealthy people are
very impatient.

Boulder became a city for people whose lives are not dependent on where they live. They can afford to live anywhere. You have to keep in mind that this place isn’t real life. This is dreamland.

Before long, almost everyone that worked for the city of Boulder was forced to live outside the city because it became so expensive to live here. Like the cops. They live outside the city they are protecting, and they don’t like that. Tom Koby was unable to give the rank and file the type of police department they wanted, and that wasn’t good, either.

When I read in the Daily Camera that this little girl was killed, I would never have predicted that the world was going to descend on Boulder. What surprised me is that as a city, we never got together to protect ourselves. The police, the city council, the mayor, and the district attorney never sat down together and said, “Look, we’ve got something that is snowballing. And the snowball is running down the hill.” We do that for every other problem we have to solve. I’m not talking about solving the case. I’m talking about how to deal with the snowball when it hits Boulder.

—Matt Appelbaum

JOHN RAMSEY TARGET OF PRANK POSTER

The police told Alex Hunter’s office that a quick review by the FBI of the transcripts of the Ramseys’ police interviews and videos of their May 1 press conference and January 1 CNN interview had produced significant insights about how each parent dealt with the death of their daughter but nothing that would break the case open. There were few inconsistent statements between Patsy’s and John’s stories but many discrepancies between their stories and the facts surrounding the events of December 26. The police believed the Ramseys had been coached to protect their rights rather than feeling free to cooperate in finding the killer of JonBenét.

The Ramseys renewed their advertising campaign and again offered a $100,000 reward for the arrest and indictment of the killer of their daughter. Clearly implied in the move was that they would no longer wait for the police to solve the crime.

The advertisement, which appeared in the
Daily Camera
on Sunday, May 11, sought help in locating “an adult male approaching young children in Boulder in late 1996.” On Friday, May 9, a reporter for the Associated Press heard that the advertisement would refer to a suspect and asked Hunter’s office for a statement, since this was the first time a description—no matter how sketchy—had been published. Suzanne Laurion responded in what the AP journalist considered her professorial voice: “Why would we have a comment? It’s not our ad.” This led the reporter to believe that the lead had been uncovered by the Ramseys’ investigators and that the
DA’s office had nothing to do with the ad. On May 10, the day before the ad was to be published, Alex Hunter bumped into Bryan Morgan at a children’s soccer game. The attorney for the Ramseys told the DA that his deputy, Trip DeMuth, had approved the ad. This put the DA’s office in a precarious position. Now not only was Hunter’s staff consulting with the Ramseys, they were acknowledging leads the police were investigating and giving them more credibility than was warranted. When Hunter confronted him, DeMuth apologized to his furious boss, but it was too late. By Monday, the day after the ad appeared, the Ramseys were publicly thanking Alex Hunter for acknowledging the involvement of his office in the ad campaign. Now the public knew for sure that the Ramseys had developed a dialogue with the DA’s office while they kept the police at arm’s length.

Within hours of the Ramseys’ appearance before the media on May 1, several of the tabloids sent new reporters to Boulder hoping to get interviews with the couple or their friends. Ken Harrell, a
Globe
writer from Florida, was one of the first to arrive. On May 11, the same day the Ramseys’ advertisement appeared in the
Daily Camera
, Ken Harrell and Jeff Shapiro went to services at St. John’s. Ken, an Episcopalian, even took along his Bible.

Unknown to Harrell, Steve Thomas was in church that day too, and seated next to him. Thomas, of course, didn’t know Harrell. The two men shook hands when the congregation took the Peace.

When the service was over, Rev. Hoverstock asked Shapiro to step into his office. Harrell waited outside.

When I went into Rol’s office, he said, “People are saying things about you. I just want to know the truth. Don’t bullshit me. They say you’re undercover, that you’re working on
the case.”