Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (55 page)

“Who knows about things like Eller?” I asked Thomas.

“Me, Gosage, Wick. Koby. Whatever.”

“Fuck! You shouldn’t have told anyone about that.”

I called Koby.

“I think we’ve had all the conversations we’re going to have,” he said before I could open my mouth. Then he hung up.

—Jeff Shapiro

It wasn’t long afterward that Shapiro found Melody Stanton, the Ramseys’ neighbor who had heard the scream the night JonBenét was killed. Unaware of how important her memory of that night was to the police, she told Shapiro what she’d told the police on December 26. Also buried in his
Globe
story was the fact that Stanton’s husband had heard a crashing sound—the sound of metal on concrete—sometime after the scream. This suggested that someone—possibly an intruder—had left the house. The story, which made headlines, was a scoop for Shapiro. His editor brought him back from banishment after the Hunter fiasco. Stanton was inundated by the media, however. Like Fleet White, she abhorred the intrusion and
eventually moved. She would become a reluctant witness for the police.

Several months later, Steve Thomas talked to Shapiro again, despite Koby’s warning. Thomas told him that Dr. Henry Lee thought the blow to JonBenét’s head had been an accident. For Shapiro, that was a letdown. If the girl’s death turned out to be an accident, how could anyone ever explain all the pain it had caused the families, the authorities, the people of Boulder, and the nation at large? “At least when this is over, you’ll go on to the next big story,” Thomas told him. “Once this is over, I’m back to some local robbery case.”

On October 8, Hunter and Koby met again. This time the chief told the DA that the next day he would announce not just Mark Beckner’s replacement of John Eller but also the withdrawal of his officers from the war room. This didn’t surprise Hunter. He hadn’t seen the police detectives in their joint room for months. Koby said he would tell the media that the relationship between their departments would continue along more traditional lines. Hunter asked the chief not to make both announcements at the same time, because it would appear as if they were no longer working together in the search for JonBenét’s killer. Koby heard him out but rejected his suggestion.

It was evident to Hunter from the way the chief referred to Eller that he was devastated by his decision to replace the commander. Hunter, who had always blamed Eller for the failure in communication with Hofstrom, said he hoped that his deputy and Mark Beckner would find a way to cooperate. Koby said he’d spoken to some of his detectives and was sure the animosity would be put aside. Hunter thought this was naïve, but he understood that it was what Koby wanted to believe.

Notwithstanding Koby’s hopes, Eller’s removal would be generally perceived as a victory for Hunter. Still, Hunter
hoped it would become clear eventually that what had prevailed was the broader approach to the investigation that his office had advocated from the start.

SUPERVISOR OF J
ON
B
ENÉT
INQUIRY IS REMOVED FROM CASE

On Friday morning, October 10, Koby appeared before the press for the first time since his joint conference with Hunter on February 13, eight months earlier. Koby announced that Eller was out and Beckner was in and that he was adding three detectives to the case—Kim Stewart, Carey Weinheimer, and Michael Everett, who had been involved in the investigation earlier.

“I am relocating the investigation back to the Public Safety Building,” Koby announced, “…where the staff of the district attorney are available to advise us but are not involved in the day-to-day investigation of the case.”

Then the chief addressed his department’s relationship with the DA’s office. “Our relationship is strained,” Koby said. “One side of the investigation [the police] has favored a hard line on pursuing this matter. The other [the DA] has been supportive of a less antagonistic approach.” On media management, Koby noted, “My position…has been to be very closed with information. The district attorney has felt a need to be more communicative. Our difference of opinion on this matter has added to the strain.”

After reading his prepared statement, Koby took questions.

Would the investigators look into local pedophiles or sex offenders, as reported in that morning’s newspaper? “That’s the problem with reading the papers,” the chief replied. “Next question.”

Could you tell us specifically what work needs to be done before the case is ready for prosecution? “I don’t choose to,” Koby said. “I could, but I don’t choose to.”

Could you give more details about why you decided to pull your team from the war room? “One of the things that has happened to us is you guys,” Koby responded. He and Hunter would continue to do whatever was necessary to complete the investigation, he said, “in spite of what you are doing to us.”

“Why is the media being blamed for your not completing this case?” a CBS reporter asked. “I mean, you keep throwing barbs at us, but does that change the evidence that you’ve gathered and the investigation that you’re doing?”

“Have you read this?” Koby said, pulling out a pamphlet and holding it up. “It’s the Constitution. How many of you in here have read the Constitution? Let me see a show of hands.” He told the press their role was protected and their rights preserved by the First Amendment.

“With that awesome freedom comes an awesome responsibility,” Koby lectured. “I think the responsibility is lacking in this case. I see a significant lack of leadership. I think that what’s missing is the recognition that the reason you have so much freedom is [the duty] to uphold the rest of the parts of that Constitution.”

“I heard you didn’t like it,” Koby said later to Kevin McCullen of the
Rocky Mountain News
, referring to his mentioning the Constitution.

“This wasn’t the forum for those feelings,” the reporter replied. Koby laughed.

Mark Beckner would no longer allow the detectives to be in limbo as they had been under Eller. For too long they had been unfocused, changing tack in the middle of something and never following up. Overnight, it seemed, Beckner gave them a sense of direction and forward momentum. He quickly instilled in the detectives a feeling that neither the media nor the DA would destroy them. With Beckner in the lead, they saw the opportunity to complete their investigation. One detective told Carol McKinley that it was as if Beckner had grabbed an unraveling ball of yarn and started to wind it back up.

On October 13, Beckner called Hofstrom and requested a meeting. During their conversation, Beckner casually asked whether it would help sway jurors if they knew that the Ramseys had “lawyered up” within days of the murder and had given official statements only after a long delay. Hofstrom was alarmed by the question, which was exactly the kind of prejudicial information that would not be admissible in court, he thought. He hoped it was not an indication of Beckner’s understanding of fundamental legal procedure, because if it was, Hofstrom saw a rough road ahead for
them.
*
But he decided to give the new commander some time. Beckner also told Hofstrom that the police needed some of the Ramseys’ records. And there was the issue of reinterviewing them. Since April, a lot of information had been developed, and the police wanted John and Patsy to answer some new questions. Hofstrom suggested that Beckner call Bryan Morgan directly, which the commander did. The lawyer sent him some of the documentation he had requested. Morgan also told Beckner he’d get back to him about another interview with the Ramseys. Hofstrom was encouraged that Beckner had taken matters into his own hands. He told Hunter that his relationship with Beckner looked promising.

Hofstrom may have been happy with Beckner, but the CBI wasn’t pleased with how he was handling things. Chet Ubowski, the CBI’s handwriting expert, learned from Detective Trujillo that Beckner had requested—and the DA’s office had authorized—another handwriting analysis of the ransom note. Hofstrom and the police had looked for an expert who would testify that Patsy had written the note. They turned to the U.S. Secret Service and got an opinion less conclusive than Ubowski’s. The upshot was that the CBI’s conclusions were now compromised. Under the process of discovery, the Ramseys would have the right to use the second analysis in the defense. The police had never bothered to ask Ubowski if he had put his entire analysis of
the ransom note into his report and whether it was his final report. Either way, Ubowski was prepared to say, “Patsy wrote the note.” The CBI saw this as one more example of the missed opportunities in the investigation.

District attorney Bob Grant, a member of Alex Hunter’s task force, had now became the unofficial spokesperson for the Boulder DA. Grant had earned a Purple Heart for saving a man’s life in Vietnam; Hunter had always admired him.

Bob Grant had a gift for speaking intelligently about the Ramsey case without mentioning specific evidentiary issues. He could explain the different roles and responsibilities of the police and the DA’s office and clarify what was feasible as opposed to what the public thought should be happening. He wasn’t afraid to take a poke at the media. He gave great sound bites and was a natural on TV, much more at ease than Alex Hunter could be. He was just the man to help restore Hunter’s credibility.

Behind the scenes, Hunter had begun a series of getting-to-know-you off-the-record meetings with producers for network news anchors Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw and for Larry King. He’d even met with Tony Frost, the editor-in-chief of the
Globe
. Determined to put the
Vanity Fair
article behind him, Hunter was laying the groundwork for making his own TV appearances. He wanted to show that he could win in court, no matter what people might have heard about “his bunglegate and conflict of interest baggage,” as he called it. He talked about his twenty-three-year relationship with Pete Hofstrom, his “felony man,” who personally handled over four hundred cases a year. He said that his “tell-the-truth” dealings with public defenders had paid off, proving that advocates and adversaries can be truthful and still advance their agendas. It was one reason why the justice system in Boulder worked so well, he said.

While acknowledging the shadow hanging over him, Hunter stressed that he was a lawyer as much as a politician. He stated that there was no favoritism or selective enforcement in his office, there were only truth-seekers. The goal of his staff was to get “as close to justice as you can.”

While Hunter may have been winning some of his battles in the war over public opinion, he was candid when dealing with DAs Bob Grant and Bill Ritter of his task force. He admitted that his staff was inexperienced. What does this type of evidence really mean? he would ask. When and why should a grand jury be convened? How do you stop the investigation from going in too many directions at the same time? What’s the downside of this? What’s the upside of that? They had many conversations about police-prosecutor relations and, of course, about how the DA’s office should communicate with the Ramseys’ attorneys. The task force DAs had supported Hunter, but now they told him what he was unable to admit to himself.

“You don’t have the horsepower in your office to take this case to trial,” Bob Grant said. To Grant, horsepower was attorneys who had been through a case like this before. “You don’t even have someone who has done twenty homicides,” Grant said, “let alone an attorney who has tried two or three child-victim homicides.”

Alex Hunter got the message: it was time to think about bringing in some help. If the case went to a grand jury, he would need experienced prosecutors.

Earlier in October, Detectives Stewart and Gosage began reviewing the 180 videotapes that had been removed from
the Ramsey home and booked into evidence during their first search, between December 26 and January 4. It would take them until October 23 to finish this task. Detective Gosage reviewed eighteen videos that had been shot at JonBenét’s beauty pageants. Another had been filmed at her sixth birthday party. There was also a tape of a family Easter egg hunt, part of which had been shot in the wine cellar. The detectives also screened the Spy World self-defense video that John Ramsey had referred to during his July 12 interview with Lou Smit.

During this period, the detectives interviewed Burke Ramsey’s teachers and followed up the information they’d been given about JonBenét’s habit of asking adults to wipe her when she was on the toilet. Several experts told them that the age of modesty in girls was about seven or eight. Until that age, it wasn’t uncommon for a child to ask for help from anyone around—a dad, a mom, a baby-sitter or a grandparent. It was just as common for a child not to ask for help and simply pull up her pants, producing a different problem for the parents. There were no statistics to indicate whether a child who asked for help on the toilet might also somehow invite sexual contact. To their surprise, the detectives also learned that bed-wetting was not unusual in children up to that same age. Some of the officers had their own child-rearing experiences but still consulted casually with friends. The opinion of those parents was that the age of modesty was much lower, maybe five.

During this time, the detectives also contacted the first of more than twenty locally registered sex offenders and checked the alibis of all of them.

Slowly, the police chipped away at the to-do list.

Meanwhile, Lou Smit met with Ramsey investigators Jennifer Gedde and John Foster to discuss several suspects who had turned up as a result of the newspaper ads. Smit now worked only with Trip DeMuth. The police detectives
quoted in the
Vanity Fair
article had made such unkind remarks about him that he didn’t feel like involving them in his work. Smit still thought about Kevin Raburn as a suspect.

My name is Kevin Raburn. I was raised in Boulder County, grew up in Louisville. High school in Lafayette. That’s when I broke a window, in something like a milk truck. The judge gave me forty-five days in the Boulder County jail. That ruined my school totally. My mom worked to support my sister and me. She was a single parent.

In ’87 Boulder was laid-back. I lived there when I was nineteen. Worked in Burger King, rode my ten-speed bike. Then I got a job cooking at Bennigans, 26th and Canyon. The rent was always high, especially for people who had to work. Everyone has a job and a half, two jobs, unless they have parents helping with the rent, which I didn’t. Everything I needed I could walk to, even the foothills. The mountains are nice.

Then I started stealing bikes. That’s something they don’t like in Boulder. Bike theft is taken seriously. By 1990 I was sentenced to a halfway house, and I started violating their rules—walking away—and they put me back in jail. In ’93 I did another bike theft. I like to ride bikes. Another theft, another felony, prison at Arrowhead, another halfway house. In ’94 the mandatory parole kicked in, and I got a four-year sentence. While I was working full-time at Rafferty’s, cooking, in ’96, I failed my Breathalyzers and they sent me back to prison.

On December 26, the day JonBenét was murdered, I went to Juanita’s near the mall in Boulder, looking for a second job. Got a job. Worked days at Rafferty’s, nights at Juanita’s. That’s when the TV crews would come in and talk about the killing of JonBenét. It was on TV a lot, but I didn’t think much about it. Lots of police around—Channel 7, Channel 4.

Then one night in February I stole some AA batteries for my Walkman. I don’t even know why. I already had some. Next thing, I’m in jail again on a misdemeanor charge. Being jailed for battery theft when I should have been given a ticket. I just freaked out. My bond was $1,500. That night I lost both my jobs. Went to court and got one year of unsupervised probation. Had to pay off the batteries, court costs, do some community service. I was out of a job and penniless. While I was in jail, I found out that these guys Ainsworth and Smit were asking my mom and sister about me. Didn’t say anything about JonBenét Ramsey. Didn’t say what case they were working on.

Then I passed some bad checks, was given a felony summons, and given a court date. I’d found the checks in a jacket, walked into a bank at Broadway and Canyon, and got some cash.

Then I asked my lawyer why the cops were looking for me. He found out my file was in Hunter’s office with the guys working on the Ramsey case. I was in shock. My lawyer looked at me kind of weird. I’m a convicted felon, you know?

I got tired waiting for my court date, so in July I just got on a bus for Knoxville to see my friend Eric. I’m a football fan, and I like the university’s football team. It wasn’t hard to get a job, right off Cumberland and Kingston Pike. Right down from the campus.

Then on September 1, I was reading a newspaper and a cop drives by, looks at me strange, and I start walking. He pulled over and said I looked suspicious. I gave him my name, he checks on his car computer, and my warrant came up. They arrested me on a felony warrant for my check forgery and missed court date. The next day they said someone was coming from Boulder to pick me up.

That’s when I realized they weren’t coming all the way to get me on a check charge. On September 11, they came
up for me in a sheriff’s plane. Something was wrong. I’d known Gerry Leverentz in Boulder, and he had this guy Lou Smit with him. Smit told me he was working on the Ramsey case. Smit said he was just doing a background check on me. I told them I had a paid attorney and couldn’t talk to them without him. Smit just said fine, OK.

On the way back, Smit helped turn the sports pages of the newspaper I was reading, since I was in handcuffs.

When I was booked in Boulder, I got a public defender, Cary Lacklen. He said to me, “You know something or you know somebody.”

“I know nothing,” I told him. “They ain’t got nothing on me. I got my felony and my bike theft.”

On October 20, Harmer and Weinheimer came to see me in jail. Then on the twenty-second Lou Smit and Harmer came back. There was a court reporter and my attorney. Smit wanted to know everything about Christmas night. They knew about Juanita’s, the day I was there, December 26. But they wanted to know about the night before. I told them I was at my mom’s house.

“I’m a thief,” I said. “I’m not a killer.”

Harmer wanted to know if I could have left the house that night. I told them if you open a window, the alarm goes off. If you open the front door, it beeps for a few seconds, so you can turn the alarm off if you know the code. If you don’t know the code, which I didn’t, the alarm goes off.

Smit asked if I’d been convicted of any sexual offenses. I said no. Asked if I’d gone into an adult bookstore in Boulder. I said yeah. After twenty minutes they were done. I just asked them to leave my family alone.

Then they took blood, hair, and handwriting samples.

Never heard from them again. Guess they figured out I didn’t do it.

—Kevin Raburn

Charlie Russell, a Ramsey press representative, began telling some reporters that the police were at least seriously pursuing the possibility of other suspects in the case. He told one journalist that solid leads had come from the Ramseys’ July and August advertising campaign. One of them pertained to a member of St. John’s church, he said. He also noted that Janet and Bill McReynolds were still suspects. Some new facts about the McReynoldses had just come to light, and the Ramseys had hired investigators to stake out the couple’s home in the mountains, waiting for the couple to return home from a trip East. They believed the police were wrong to discount McReynolds because of his infirmity at the time of the murder. The Ramseys were also still interested in Randy Simons and Chris Wolf as possible suspects, Russell said.

Several of their attorneys believed that Simons had the opportunity to commit the crime and had access to JonBenét. He also had no real alibi for that night. The police, they felt, hadn’t investigated him thoroughly. If the case ever went to trial, the attorneys thought, Simons’ background and bizarre behavior after the crime might be enough to sway a jury to reasonable doubt about the Ramseys’ guilt.

Then there was Fleet White. The Ramseys’ team hadn’t spent a lot of time investigating him as a possible suspect, but they thought the police had manipulated White by telling him that Ramsey had named him as a possible suspect. The police had used this strategy with several witnesses—told them that the Ramseys were accusing them, which caused the witnesses to turn on the Ramseys.

Around this time, Trip DeMuth discovered that many of the police interviews with possible suspects had never been transcribed because detectives hadn’t considered them
important enough. Hofstrom wanted all of them transcribed. Who knew if some bit of information that had seemed inconsequential ten months ago wouldn’t now provide an answer to important questions. Beckner agreed. He ordered all the tapes transcribed.

Now that Eller was no longer leading the Ramsey investigation, the police union took sides on Larry Mason’s claims against Eller and the department. Earlier in the year, Mason had asked for financial assistance in his lawsuit, in which he claimed he had been wrongly discharged from the Ramsey case. Since Eller’s allegation of Mason’s misconduct was without any merit, the union had voted in January to give Mason the money. Now Marc Colin, Mason’s attorney, said that he wouldn’t settle until Eller had resigned from the Boulder PD.

Since the vote of no confidence against Koby earlier in the year, the chief had met with union leaders on five occasions to discuss their grievances. He conceded that the department “was maxed-out and worn-out.” He admitted he never should have gone into the crowd of students during the Hill riots and begged them to go home. “I was wrong,” Koby said. “I have learned from it. I’m ready to move on.” However, those were not the only problems between management and the rank and file. There were also promotion and hiring issues that couldn’t be resolved overnight. Union leaders gave Koby notice that another vote would be taken within a month. With the November elections less than a month away, candidates for the city council were calling for Koby to account to the citizens of Boulder.

When the union vote was taken in November, the results were as predicted—no confidence. But before the union could even digest the vote, Koby announced his resignation. I’m out of here by next year, he said. Start looking for someone else.

As if Eller’s dismissal and Koby’s problems with the union weren’t enough, on October 20, Brooke Jackson, Detective Linda Arndt’s attorney, wrote a letter to the police chief. News stories in the
Globe
and
Vanity Fair
, among others, had falsely defamed his client, he said. She had maintained her silence as ordered, but the Boulder PD had made no effort to defend her. “She has been allowed to become a scapegoat,” Jackson wrote, “if not the primary scapegoat, by a continuous series of statements about one thing or another that she supposedly did that are simply false.” Three days later, Koby called Jackson and indicated that indeed the statements circulated about Arndt were false and unjust. But according to Jackson, Koby said that neither he nor the police department would take any action to correct them. Jackson said that the Boulder PD had a responsibility to correct the public record on Arndt’s behalf.

By February 2, 1998, the police had cleared only Detective Larry Mason. Linda Arndt filed a claim on May 19, 1998, demanding a jury trial, against Koby personally and professionally and against the city of Boulder. It alleged that Koby, knowing that information published about Arndt was false, had caused “acute embarrassment to Detective Arndt and irreparable harm to her reputation.” Arndt sought $150,000 in damages.

Though by the end of October 1997 most Boulderites were trying to forget the Ramsey case, the national media were still laying siege to the city. Alex Hunter wondered if the Ramsey case was a sideshow to America or if the media had become a sideshow to the investigation. Either way, the DA knew that once the police presented the case to his office, he would have to decide what the evidence said. If there was evidence exculpatory to the Ramseys, he would have to
make it known and take the beating from his critics—or he could let a grand jury deal with the evidence and the critics, as Koby had once suggested. But if there wasn’t sufficient evidence to charge someone, he knew that Pete Hofstrom would be dead-set against convening a grand jury.

Hunter was reminded of the Manning case, in which a dead child’s mother had confessed and implicated her live-in boyfriend, Danny Arevalo, in the crime. A writer covering the Ramsey case was told by a jurist that in the Arevalo trial, Hunter had urged Hofstrom to put a key witness on the stand though Hofstrom didn’t believe the person’s information. Hofstrom, never one to cast ethics aside, was so troubled by what he’d done that in open court he asked the judge to strike the testimony of the witness as not credible.

Hunter didn’t want another “Manning problem” with his chief trial deputy. If Hofstrom couldn’t file charges in the Ramsey case as a matter of conscience, the DA knew he could not order Pete to act against his beliefs.