Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (47 page)

I knew John Ramsey had been stationed at Subic Bay in the Philippines, and he must have known about the role garroting played in the history of the islands.

I started to freak out.

I called Steve Thomas. Soon after that, he and Detective Jane Harmer saw me. I read them the material about the Philippines.

“I really want to help,” I told Thomas.

“It seems like you’ve got the right intentions,” Thomas said. “You care about this little girl—you seem to want justice for JonBenét. I’m committed to that, and as long as you are too, I’ll be more than happy to continue these conversations.”

I looked into Thomas’s eyes and knew I was doing
something right. That was when I started to look up to him like a big brother.

Several days after I met with Thomas and Harmer, Pam Griffin told Frank Coffman that Patsy Ramsey wrote the words Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey on the same lined pad that the ransom note was written on. Pam said Patsy had told her that it was the beginning of an invitation she was writing: “Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey…invite you…” By then there was a rumor that the cops believed this writing was a false start on the ransom note. If what Pam said was true, it was important to the police.

Moments after I heard what Coffman had learned, I left a message for Thomas on his voice mail. He called me back from his car, and I told him what Coffman had learned. I literally heard Thomas hit the brakes.

“Jeff, that’s no fuckin’ invitation.”

The next day, the police asked Coffman and me to come down to headquarters so that Coffman could get Griffin on the phone and have her restate what she’d said. The police would tape-record the conversation. At first all we got was Pam’s answering machine.

While we were hanging around, Coffman told Thomas that I was having conversations with Alex Hunter and that he was confiding in me. I’d told that to Coffman, but I would never have wanted the police to know—as I would never want Hunter to know I was talking to Thomas.

A moment later, Thomas took me with him into a small interview room. Before he said a word, I started to talk.

“Can we talk off the record?” I asked.

“OK.”

I figured that if I didn’t make a deal with Thomas right then and there, he’d go straight to Eller, tell him what Coffman had said, and that it would be used against Hunter. For sure I would be fucked.

“Nothing we talk about leaves this room,” I said to Thomas.

Again he said, “OK.”

“I spend a great deal of time with Hunter,” I said, “like four fuckin’ hours a day—sometimes in his office and sometimes on the phone. I’ve learned a lot.”

Thomas just listened for a while. Then he asked if I knew Trip DeMuth or Pete Hofstrom. I told him I didn’t even know who else worked in the DA’s office.

“You really know Hunter?” Thomas continued. “I can’t even talk to him. How can you?”

“Steve, all I can tell you is he likes me a lot.”

“Jeff, if you’ve got Hunter’s ear,” he said, “do us both a favor—get him off the intruder path.”

“I’ll try,” I told Thomas.

“We’ve got more evidence in here to nail these people to the wall right now,” Thomas said, “and Hunter’s office is looking for intruders.”

Finally we reached Pam Griffin. As the police listened in on her conversation with Coffman, she told him it was Alex Hunter who, in a phone conversation with her, had suggested that the words Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey might be the beginning of an invitation.

—Jeff Shapiro

CITY OF BOULDER NEWS FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE J
UNE
12, 1997

When Carol McKinley read the police department’s press release, she paged her police source, who told her the break-in was proof that Hunter’s office was after the material in the police files. Tom Trujillo had turned on the computer in the war room, and when the start-up program didn’t ask for his six-character password, he knew the computer had been tampered with. The room was supposed to be secure, yet the system date in the computer suggested that a break-in had taken place at about 1:00
A
.
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. on June 7.

Later that afternoon, McKinley spoke to Hunter. He was furious because Eller had personally accused him of the crime. “I think you or Bill Wise broke into the war room,” Eller had said to him. “And a Zip drive is also missing.” According to Hunter, Eller had acted like a raving maniac when the two men met behind the Justice Center near Boulder Creek.

Carl Whiteside, the CBI director, was attending a meeting in Breckenridge when the Boulder PD’s press release was issued. When Whiteside was told about Eller’s statement, he asked to meet with the commander. Whiteside worried that his agency would be dragged into the ongoing battle between Hunter and Eller.

“I don’t know who exactly did it,” Eller told Whiteside the next day, “but just look into it.” Whiteside could see that Eller wanted to implicate the DA’s office.

The computer in question was taken to the CBI. Whiteside asked Chuck Davis, his computer expert, to handle the technical side of the investigation. Whiteside didn’t know at the time that two days earlier, Detective Sgt. Wickman had asked Davis to help with a computer that the Boulder police thought someone had broken into. When he arrived, Davis discovered that the police hadn’t fingerprinted the computer, which by then had been handled by a half-dozen people without the precaution of wearing gloves.

Mark Wilson, head of the CBI’s criminal investigation unit, and five investigators were assigned to the case. Hofstrom, Smit, Ainsworth, DeMuth, Wickman, Thomas, Harmer, Trujillo, and Gosage, all of whom had access to the war room, were interviewed. So were Hunter and Wise, though neither of them had access cards. Everyone provided the CBI with an alibi for 1:00
A
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. on June 7. Then Trujillo found the missing Zip drive in the trunk of his car.

The CBI team fingerprinted the entire war room and checked the records of the computer-controlled locks: there had been no entry at or about 1:00
A
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. on June 7. They examined the ceiling, the floor, the walls, the dust patterns, and anything else that might give them a clue. They concluded that only a ghost could have entered the room without proper access.

Meanwhile, Davis’s investigation of the Compaq computer revealed that it had no modem or network connection. Only one fingerprint was found inside the unit, in a region where only an assembly-line worker could have touched it during the manufacturing process. Davis knew it was possible for someone to take the unit apart and pull out the plastic jumper cable beneath the BIOS chip that stores the password and completes the start-up circuit, and that
would have erased the password. But Davis assumed that if someone knew enough to pull the jumper cable, he’d also be smart enough to enter a fake password and cover his tracks. Of course, a professional could have done the job and tried to make it look as if an amateur had done it.

Davis discovered that the computer’s internal clock and calendar didn’t work properly. The clock was losing almost ten minutes every two and a half hours. The next time he checked, it lost fifteen minutes in three hours. There was no discernable pattern to the time loss, but he discovered that when the chip was cleared, it didn’t always reset to 00:00 hours, January 1, 1980, as it was supposed to.

Since the clock was malfunctioning, the time of the alleged break-in—1:00
A
.
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. on Saturday—was meaningless and therefore useless in the investigation.

Davis believed that the computer was defective. He tested another computer of the same model, purchased and installed in Boulder at the same time, and it turned out to have the same clock and chip problems.

The CBI concluded that the alleged break-in never happened. There had simply been an equipment failure. When Eller, Hunter, and Koby met with Davis and Mark Wilson, Davis explained that there had been no breach of security.

The next day, Hunter extracted a promise from Koby that Hunter and Wise would receive a letter of apology from Eller for his false accusations. But when the detectives working the Ramsey case heard about Koby’s promise, they were outraged about what they felt was another instance of their chief not backing them. Eller never sent the letter.

Bill Wise was astounded at the level of distrust that Eller and the detectives had developed. He considered the majority of them level-headed, but now if something went wrong, Hunter was the easy target.

Wise asked himself, What was happening to Boulder?

Steve Thomas called me one evening. I couldn’t tell if he’d had a beer or two.

“Jeff, I’m ready to fuckin’ throw down my badge. I’ll go on national TV, I’ll go back to mowing fuckin’ lawns if I have to, to get justice for this little girl.”

That’s when I realized that Thomas, who to me represented someone strong, had the courage to express his deep emotions.

“God chooses a path for all of us,” I answered. “I think mine has been chosen. That’s why I’m here to help.”

“We can do this together,” Thomas replied. “You have a role in this. Your relationship with Hunter is important—you don’t understand how important.” Then he added, “We do God’s work.”

That night, I understood that Thomas and I would devote our lives to getting justice for JonBenét.

Later that night I was having dinner with Frank Coffman when I got a page from a number I didn’t recognize.

“Jeff, I’m kind of nervous,” Steve Thomas said when I returned his page. “Are you going to keep it all cool?” I assured him I would. Then he gave me his home number.

We started talking at night. He’d tell me stuff about when he was a narc cop. We discussed the Simpson case. We talked about our love of cars. I told him I drove around just looking for a used Camaro. He liked Camaros too.

—Jeff Shapiro

Ever since JonBenét’s murder, Peter Boyles, a top morning radio talk-show host in Denver, had been critical of the investigation. Bill Wise paid close attention to Boyles each morning as he drove the 26 miles from his home in Denver to the Justice Center. Most of the time, Boyles took shots at the police and at the
Daily Camera
, comparing it to
Pravda
. He often suggested that the Ramseys had killed their daughter. Then, as Chuck Green’s columns in
The Denver Post
became more strident against Hunter in March and April, Boyles, a friend of Green’s, joined in the attack on the DA’s office. Now, in June, Boyles commented on the police withholding evidence from Hunter’s office and on the computer break-in.

Listening in, Wise thought that much of Boyles’s commentary was speculative—probably based on sources not connected with the investigation. Hunter and Wise felt that Boyles was farther off base than most reporters. He made it sound as if Hofstrom had chatted over coffee with Patsy Ramsey in his kitchen when she gave her second handwriting sample at his house—which at the time was neutral territory. Chuck Green was almost as bad. In one of his columns, Wise found what he considered to be seven major inaccuracies.

Wise talked to Hunter, who decided he wanted to put a stop to the flow of inaccurate information about his office. Hunter decided Green should be contacted first, then Boyles. Wise was apprehensive, afraid that Green would compound the problem by writing a column about Hunter’s complaints. Nevertheless, he left a voice mail message for Green, saying he’d like to sit down with him—not to give new information, but to correct some misinformation.

Green not only returned his call, he listened intently. Green had reported that the Ramseys were “allowed” to leave Boulder after JonBenét’s body was found. Wise said that was wrong. They had not been charged with any crime, so they were free to travel at will. Green had also written that the “police and prosecutors” had given the Ramseys written questions prior to their face-to-face interviews on April 30. Wrong again, Wise said. Hunter’s office had not directed the police to submit the questions in January, and no questions had been submitted by anyone in April. Only the Ramseys’ statements from police reports, written just before and just after the body was found, had been given to the Ramseys’ attorneys. Green had also published that the DA’s office provided the Ramseys with a copy of the ransom note. Wrong again. The cops had done that, not Hunter’s office. Green’s claim that the police had briefed the Ramseys on the details of the autopsy was also wrong. In fact, the coroner’s office had given them an oral report, which is what any parent of a dead child would get. Wise’s list went on and on.

Shortly afterward, Green visited Hunter in his office. The meeting went well, and as the months passed, they talked more and more. Their occasional meetings would last for an hour or so. Green gave his direct phone numbers to both Wise and Hunter and agreed to contact them more often when checking the accuracy of his columns.

The following month, Wise and his wife, Diane, bumped into Boyles and his wife, Kathleen, at the July Fourth Cherry Creek Arts Festival. Wise made Boyles the same offer he’d made to Green. Boyles agreed to listen to what Wise had to say. In the coming months, the two couples met for dinner and became friends. Afterward, Boyles’s coverage of Hunter’s office became far less aggressive. Wise told a reporter covering the story that he hadn’t tried to put Boyles and Green in his pocket. All he’d
wanted to do was curtail the unwarranted criticism of the DA’s office. One writer who met with Hunter felt that the DA wanted to be portrayed as a guy on a white horse defending justice.

Sheriff Epp didn’t like the union’s press release, especially because it was issued on city letterhead. That same week,
Epp asked Steve Ainsworth, who had been working with Hunter’s people for just over three months, to brief him on the status of the Ramsey case. Ainsworth told his boss that Koby continued to insist Eller was the right man for the job. Yet Eller hadn’t assigned anyone in the police department to read the entire investigation file, Ainsworth said. How do you run a case you haven’t read? he wanted to know. At least Hunter had instructed Trip DeMuth, Lou Smit, and himself to read everything they’d been given by the police. Also, the police refused to seriously consider any suspects besides the Ramseys. All he and Smit could do was run down possible suspects the police had missed or discarded, because Hunter had guaranteed Koby that he and Smit wouldn’t backseat-drive the police investigation. The only real lead they’d uncovered so far was the stun gun.

Epp became more and more frustrated as he listened to Ainsworth, and he assumed he was no different from the majority of Boulder’s taxpayers on that score. Eventually, Epp knew, the union would force Koby out of his job, especially now that city manager Tim Honey had left. Epp began to hear from his officers that Koby was being called Dead Man Walking. It was a cruel but accurate description.

Epp didn’t know what to do.

No matter which direction the police went in the Ramsey case, Alex Hunter and Pete Hofstrom told their staff that they themselves had to consider every possibility in the case. It wasn’t likely that John and Patsy weren’t involved, but it was still possible.

Lou Smit always found it useful to reread the police files. He was getting an overview of the case that no one else had. His partner in that was Trip DeMuth, who, like Smit, read every document as they cross-indexed the files with the help of a new computer program. Working side by side, the two men bonded. Smit admired DeMuth for his
objectivity and fairness, and DeMuth looked upon Smit’s experience as an invaluable tool.

Meanwhile, Steve Ainsworth met with Detective Jane Harmer to discuss several possible suspects the police might want to look at again. The Ramseys’ gardener, Brian Scott, came up. Detective Arndt had interviewed him in February, but she was no longer working on the case. Ainsworth thought Scott’s alibi should be rechecked and that he might be able to describe the condition of the grate covering the broken basement window. Harmer reinterviewed Scott, showing him two photographs taken just after the murder. One was of a bushel basket with some weeds in it, and the other was of the window grate. To the police, the ground cover around the grate looked as if it had been disturbed—perhaps because the grate was lifted up. Looking at the photographs, Scott said it looked as if the ground cover had grown underneath the grate, which indicated that it had been lifted, but he couldn’t tell when. It could have been in September-October, when Ramsey said he entered the house by that broken window, or as late as December, when JonBenét was murdered.

After Harmer left, Scott remembered an encounter with Patsy that he hadn’t mentioned.

I remember Patsy running out of the house, outraged at what had happened. It was October 3, 1995. O. J. Simpson had been acquitted. And I just happened to be there. You could see she was upset over it.

“He’s getting away with murder.”

I thought to myself, He could be innocent. He’s been acquitted.

“It’s a bad system, full of flaws,” was what she was saying. It seemed to her he was getting away with it because he had money.

—Brian Scott

Two weeks later, Harmer spoke to Scott’s girlfriend, Ann Preston, to reconfirm when Scott had left her place on Christmas night. She said it was around 12:30
A
.
M
. Scott’s saliva, hair, and handwriting samples would have to be analyzed before he was cleared.

On June 24, Paula Woodward, an investigative reporter for KUSA, NBC’s Denver affiliate, was standing in line at a Boulder grocery store when she overheard a casual conversation between a customer and the checkout clerk. Fearing she might be recognized, Woodward turned her face away.

The customer told her friend that the Boulder police had visited Reverend Hoverstock to clarify the meaning of several passages in Psalm 118.

That evening Woodward called two sources she had cultivated during the investigation. One of them, an attorney for the Ramseys, told her that they had already considered Psalm 118 because of the $118,000 ransom demand. They had also discovered a passage in verse 27: “God is the Lord, which hath shewed us light: bind the sacrifice with cords, even unto the horns of the altar.” Then Woodward’s police source confirmed that the detectives had visited Hoverstock. What the source did not reveal was that they had found John Ramsey’s Bible open to Psalm 118 during their initial search of the house beginning December 26.

The next day, Woodward aired her scoop that the police were investigating a link between the passage in Psalm 118 and the murder of JonBenét. The morning after Jeff Shapiro heard the news broadcast, he went down to the TV studio and paid for a videotape copy of Woodward’s report. Then he called Frank Coffman.

“Turn to Psalm 118 in your Bible,” Shapiro said.

Coffman read verse 27 in his King James version: “Bind the sacrifice with cords, even unto the horns of the altar.”

“That’s interesting,” Coffman said, “but you need to find something that Patsy once said or some book she read in order for this to mean anything.”

That afternoon, Shapiro was struck by something he had heard from the Ramseys’ friend Judith Phillips. Several years earlier, in an interview in
Colorado Woman News,
Patsy had mentioned reading and relying on a book called
Healed of Cancer
. In that book, the author, Dodie Osteen, refers to Psalm 118, but to verse 17, not 27: “I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord.”

Shapiro wrote a story for the following week’s edition of the
Globe
.

One week later, Charlie Brennan heard from a colleague about the
Globe
story linking the ransom note to Psalm 118. In Brennan’s
Rocky Mountain News
story, published on July 8, the day after Shapiro’s
Globe
story hit the supermarket stands, he reported that “a confidante of Pasty Ramsey reportedly told the
Globe
that ‘Patsy didn’t let a day go by without reading (Osteen’s) book, and she took Psalm 118 to heart, using it as a force to help her beat the cancer.’” The next day, Brennan reported the missing link that Paula Woodward’s source had not revealed to her: in the Ramsey’s house the police had found a Bible opened to Psalm 118. What Brennan didn’t know was that it was on John Ramsey’s desk.

On Monday morning, June 30, the police searched the Ramseys’ fifteen-room house yet again. The couple had signed their consent on June 13. Jeff Shapiro was one of the few members of the press who showed up.

Pete Hofstrom, Trip DeMuth, Lou Smit, and Rob Pudim, an architectural draftsman, were the first to arrive from the DA’s office. Joe Clayton, a criminologist from the CBI, arrived soon afterward. Steve Thomas pulled up in a Blue GT Mustang, wearing overalls and a dust mask. Gosage and several other officers soon followed. Before long, plumbers arrived to remove the boiler from the basement. The police used fiber-optic technology to look behind walls and inside the crawl spaces. They were looking for the roll of duct tape and the remainder of the cord, but found nothing. Reporters saw Detective Tom Trujillo attempt to climb through the broken basement window. Steve Ainsworth arrived to collect more fibers to compare with those found on JonBenét’s body. If fibers had been transferred from any upstairs room to the wine cellar, the police would know where JonBenét might have been before her death or where the killer had been before the murder.

Jeff Shapiro was soon bored and left to visit Hunter at the Justice Center. The DA told Shapiro that the cops were planning to knock down a basement wall. “They’re looking for the roll of duct tape,” he said. “I don’t think they’re going to find it.”

“You don’t?”

“No.”

Then Hunter told Shapiro that as far as they could tell from one police report, John Ramsey could have left the house for as long as fifty minutes the morning JonBenét’s body was found (information that later proved untrue). “I think John may have taken all that stuff out of the house,” Hunter said. “Someone got rid of it.”

I asked Hunter what time the ransom note said the ransom was supposed to be picked up.

“Hmm. Let me check. Where’s my copy of the note?” Hunter said, teasing me.

Hunter told me there was to be a call between 8:00 and 10:00
A
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M
.
No one outside the investigation had been told that at the time.

“Can I just see what the handwriting looks like?” I asked.

He opened a spiral binder, took out some loose pages, and held them up real close to my eyes—so close that I couldn’t read anything. Then he quickly pulled the pages back, put them away, and went, “Ha, ha, ha.”