Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (61 page)

D.A. RESPONSE TO MEDIA
RE: FLEET WHITE LETTER

On January 17, Hunter and Wise attended the scheduled meeting of the metro DAs who were consulting with Hunter on the case. Since Eller would soon be out and Koby was leaving, Wise was now back in the loop.

At the meeting, Fleet White’s letter and the effect of
The New Yorker
article were discussed. Hunter explained that the presumption of innocence for the Ramseys had been foremost in his thinking and that he had wanted to offer a counterweight to the media’s condemnation of the Ramseys, which he considered a result of Commander Eller’s view. The Ramseys’ constitutional rights had to be protected, he repeated. He left the meeting with the impression that the other DAs agreed that the public was better served by the publication of his views on the matter.

Later that afternoon, Tom Koby suggested to Hunter that in the coming weeks some overture should be made to Fleet White—maybe a meeting between them, the police department, and Hunter. The DA agreed.

In their dealings with the police, the Ramseys’ attorneys had always taken the position that their clients were in fact defendants, not simply suspects, and as such should have the rights of every defendant—full access to discovery.

In the department’s press release, Beckner denied the Ramseys’ request to review the evidence before agreeing to more interviews. The commander said it would hamper the effectiveness of the investigation and compromise the information provided by other witnesses and potential suspects. It was also contrary to accepted investigative procedures and had not been permitted to any other person involved in the case. Chief Koby told one journalist, “The bottom line is these are people whose daughter has been killed, and we’re trying to find the killer. The fact that they keep handcuffing us hinders us from successfully resolving this investigation.”

The Ramseys’ attorneys responded on January 23 with an open letter to Beckner, which was given to the media. They complained that the commander was negotiating through the media and that, like Eller, Beckner was after an “elimination of defenses” rather than an “objective search for the real killer.” The attorneys said that the leaks about the shoe imprint and the stun gun had taken place on Beckner’s watch, implying that the police had been the source. On this matter, the attorneys were disingenuous. They were the ones who had responded to the
Los Angeles Times
story about the stun gun, whose source, the article stated, was a Ramsey neighbor who had been interviewed by the police. The source of an early December
Rocky Mountain News
story about the shoe imprint was not a member of law enforcement either. More to the point, however, was something that
the attorneys failed to point out in their letter: during their investigation, detectives often failed to admonish possible witnesses not to discuss their interviews with anyone.

The attorneys’ letter concluded on an ominous note: “We will no longer deal with the Boulder Police Department, except to honor our previous commitments.”

With John and Patsy Ramsey now living in Atlanta, it was unclear to the police whether their attorneys were consulting with the couple or acting independently. Frustrated by this, Beckner authorized Steve Thomas to approach Rev. Hoverstock and ask if he would act as a liaison between the family and the police. Hoverstock agreed, and within a few days he told the police that the Ramseys would meet with Beckner at their home in Atlanta. Beckner clarified that the meeting would be all business—he didn’t “want to chat about the weather.” Negotiations broke down over the scope of the questions Beckner would be allowed to ask. The police assumed that the Ramseys’ attorneys had intervened.

Meanwhile, Beckner called Hunter to say that he was looking at the first week of March as a likely time for the DA to issue an arrest warrant or to convene a grand jury. Beckner had not mentioned in whose name the warrant would be written. Hunter replied that he was open to convening the grand jury but not to a fishing expedition.

Bob Grant had told Hunter he didn’t have the horsepower to handle this case before a jury, and now Hunter called Bill Ritter, another member of his task force, for advice about a grand jury specialist with Colorado experience. Ritter recommended Michael Kane, a former assistant U.S. attorney now living in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and working for the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue. Ritter said he was one of the finest grand jury experts he’d ever worked with.

In mid-January, Beckner told Hunter that Donald Foster, the Vassar linguistics expert who had been working on the case with them, at Hunter’s suggestion, was making some headway with his analysis. Beckner was eager to hear from Foster.

Steve Thomas had visited Foster earlier in the month, taking along hundreds of pages of writing from many different suspects, including Patsy and John Ramsey. Foster had followed the case on the Internet long before he was sought out to work on it. He had even entered some of the chat rooms and discussed the case with people like Jameson.

Foster was impressed with the detective. “I can’t tell you what our theories or the evidence are,” Thomas had said. “And I’m not going to prejudice your thinking.” Foster found that kind of commitment to justice unusual. He had heard the same thing from Hunter when they first talked on the phone. To the professor, both men seemed dedicated to finding JonBenét’s killer.

In his work, Foster always began with the assumption that no detail, however small, is irrelevant. Something as seemingly trivial as a period after the abbreviation
Mr
. can be a vitally important clue. In this example, it could suggest someone’s nationality: Americans use a period after the abbreviation but British writers do not. In one murder case, Foster identified the author of a document as someone educated in India. Among other clues was the misspelling of the name Rhonda as
Rondha
. In addition to such minutiae, Foster tracked down source material such as books, TV shows, movies, or music lyrics that might have influenced the writers whose documents he analyzed.

Beckner hoped Foster would name Patsy Ramsey as the author of the ransom note, and he asked Hunter if he would consider filing a motion to admit linguistic evidence
when he filed charges against Patsy. It was the first time Hunter had heard Beckner name a suspect in connection with the death of JonBenét.

The commander also suggested that if the motion was denied, the DA could dismiss the charges and jeopardy would not be attached. The DA would have lost nothing, and the police could continue the investigation, or Hunter could take the case to a grand jury. Beckner was suggesting something known as a motion in limine. If the court ruled Foster’s evidence inadmissible, the DA could petition the court to dismiss the charges, a perfectly routine procedure.

Hunter told Beckner he wouldn’t want to handle it that way. He considered linguistics a good investigative tool, but he did not think it would be deemed admissible in a Colorado court.
*
Also, Foster had never testified in a criminal trial. They could use linguistics testimony with the grand jury, Hunter assured Beckner, since the rules of admissibility were much broader—even hearsay evidence could be heard by a grand jury. The DA told the commander he would send him Colorado’s evidentiary rules concerning scientific evidence. The two men agreed to wait for Donald Foster’s written report.

However, Beckner seemed deflated the next day when he told Hofstrom they “might not have it.” Hofstrom told Hunter he saw a grand jury request coming.

John Ramsey knew there was no position for him at Lockheed Martin in the Atlanta area and that time was running out on his contract, so he looked into the ever-expanding computer business. Computers were becoming smaller and faster, but programming hadn’t changed much.

In early January Ramsey traveled to Spain, to meet with José Martin, cofounder of Jaleo Software and Communicacion Integral Consultores, which controlled the rights to a program that integrated editing and high-end compositing for TV. CBC, CNN, Spain’s TVE, Australia’s Channels 9 and 7, and Germany’s and Argentina’s networks were all using the Jaleo program. In the coming months, Ramsey and his Spanish partners agreed that Ramsey would head Jaleo Technologies in the United States and sell the firm’s products through dealers in Mexico, Canada, and the United States. Glen Stine, a close friend of the Ramseys, who was vice president for budget and finance at CU, would leave his job in Boulder and move his family to Atlanta to join Ramsey’s new company.

A day after Ramsey left for his first meeting with his future partners in Spain, Craig Lewis of the
Globe
was tipped off to the trip. He followed the family, tailing them around Madrid. He witnessed Patsy crying before a painting in the Prado museum that resembled JonBenét. When Lewis discovered that Spain might not have an extradition treaty with the United States, he found the hook for his
Globe
story. The headline read
RAMSEYS FLEE TO SPAIN
. The story said that the
Globe
had learned the family had plans to flee the country before a grand jury forced testimony from their son, Burke.

PARENTS TURN IN CLOTHES

When the police inspected the clothes they had received—and there were more items than were reported in the press—they noticed that a red blouse of Patsy’s looked brand-new, as if it had just come off the rack. The detectives were also interested in Patsy’s red-and-black checkerboard-design jacket. Four fibers had been found attached to the duct tape, and they were red and black. The police lost no time in sending the clothing to the CBI for fiber analysis.

In the first week of February, Detectives Jane Harmer and Steve Thomas tried to patch up relations between Hunter’s office and Fleet and Priscilla White. Thomas felt it was important to keep White happy since he was a material wit
ness, and he also thought Hunter’s office should not have let the situation deteriorate to the point of the Whites’ campaigning for the DA’s dismissal. The couple agreed to meet with Hunter, Beckner, and the detectives, and Priscilla suggested their house. A few hours before the meeting, however, Beckner told Thomas that Hunter would send Pete Hofstrom in his place. Hunter had given no explanation. Thomas broke the news to the Whites. Predictably, Fleet White wasn’t happy, but he agreed to meet with Hofstrom and Beckner nonetheless. For forty-five minutes the group sat in the Whites’ kitchen. Hofstrom chatted about his years as a prison guard at San Quentin. But since he couldn’t speak for Hunter, nothing was resolved. Soon afterward, Thomas heard that White was now as angry with Commander Beckner as he was with Hunter. He persisted in trying to obtain the statements he had made to the police, and no one would release them to him.

Alex Hunter was wrestling with the inevitability of a grand jury. In the past, Hunter had enjoyed meeting with groups of Boulderites to ask what the public wanted from its DA. Now, while giving a talk to a group of Louisville residents, he asked how many of them had formed opinions on the Ramsey case and on what basis. All but one person said that the Ramseys were guilty, and even the holdout, Hunter felt, had an opinion about the case but pretended otherwise. Driving back to his office, Hunter wondered how he would find twelve impartial county residents for a grand jury.

On February 5, Lockheed Martin, which had bought the Ramseys’ house under its employment agreement with Ramsey, sold it for $650,000 to a limited liability company owned by some friends of the Ramseys. Attorney Michael Bynum said that when the house was eventually sold, the profits would go to the JonBenét Ramsey Children’s Foundation.

While the police and the DA believed that the ransom note was the most important piece of evidence against the Ramseys, the couple’s attorneys believed that the house was the most important piece of evidence for a potential criminal defense of their clients. It was their position that the house should be kept in its original state so that grand jurors or trial jurors could tour it and see how an intruder might have entered and made his way through it. By July 1997, the DA’s office had begun making architectural drawings of the house so that a large-scale model could be built for use during legal proceedings. Both sides knew the house would play an important role in determining who had killed JonBenét.

RAMSEY FRIENDS’ PALMS CHECKED

Carol McKinley, who had gone to work for Fox TV in January, called Dr. Henry Lee to ask how he would rate the chances that the case would ever be solved. On a scale of 1
to 10, Lee gave it a 2. It will never be solved, he said. Then he added, “I’m coming to Boulder. Alex Hunter is making my life hard. He wants me to meet with police again.”

Hunter had been trying to get the police and Dr. Lee together for months. The detectives were reluctant, but the DA was insistent. Now that the police investigation was winding down, he wanted to make sure nothing had been overlooked. Lee said he’d make himself available during a layover at the Denver airport. Hunter told Beckner that if his detectives would attend, there would be no press conference and no grandstanding. If the story leaked, he’d tell the press that Lee was consulting with the Boulder PD and not with his staff. Beckner agreed. When Carol McKinley’s report aired, Hunter discovered that only the local press was interested. He was pleased that interest in the case seemed to be abating.

The meeting took place on February 13. Hunter wanted Pete Hofstrom to come along, but the deputy would not give up his customary Friday court responsibilities. He had invested months in determining the just punishment for felons about to be sentenced, and he wanted to be the one to present his findings to the court. The Ramsey case was not yet on his docket. If Hunter was frustrated by Hofstrom’s decision, he didn’t show it. That kind of dedication was what he admired in Pete.

Lee met for almost six hours with Hunter, Smit, DeMuth, Beckner, and Detectives Wickman and Trujillo. Afterward, the group hastily called a press briefing for the small media contingent that had assembled at the airport.

“I need to state that I’m disappointed,” Hunter said, “that we have not had more cooperation from the Ramseys in helping us get to the truth. We need to have that in order to answer questions that remain that are critical to finding out what happened in this case.”

This was the first time Hunter had criticized the Ram
seys in public. During the meeting with Lee, the police and the DA realized that the Ramseys’ refusal to grant additional police interviews had brought the investigation to a standstill. The detectives had completed almost all the items on their to-do list. Now they needed answers that only JonBenét’s parents could provide. Hunter’s remark, possibly made in frustration, was a turning point in his relations with the police. The DA had now supported the department in public. It would make a big difference in his dealings with Beckner.

When Dr. Lee took his turn at the microphone, he said that after the meeting, he now gave the case a 50-50 chance of being solved.

After the airport meeting, Hunter met with Tom Koby.

“I need to look at what we have,” Koby said, referring to the evidence. “It may be that I will stand up and say the case needs to be put on the shelf, or I may recommend to you that you take it to a grand jury.” Koby told the DA that he wanted some witness testimony legally preserved as soon as possible. A grand jury was the only solution Koby saw.
*
Melody Stanton, the neighbor of the Ramseys who had heard the scream, was a case in point. Her interview wasn’t signed or given under oath, and since the
Globe
had published her story, she’d become more and more frightened and reluctant to testify. Then there were the Ramseys’ close friends—the Fernies, the Stines, and the Walkers. Some of them refused to talk to the police, and more than one detective wanted them charged with obstruction of jus
tice. Koby and Hunter discussed granting them “use immunity” before a grand jury to get them to talk.
*
Finally, they wanted Burke Ramsey’s testimony preserved. He was now eleven, and his memories of the events surrounding his sister’s death were sure to be fading. Hunter discussed all this with the chief, though in his opinion it was not the proper use of a grand jury. If a grand jury was to be considered, he told Koby firmly, they would have to go all the way and ask for an indictment.
**
The grand jury could not become simply another investigative body.

TOM KOBY DEFENDS POLICE DEPARTMENT

Commander Beckner was in discussions with Jim Jenkins, an Atlanta attorney who had represented Melinda and John Andrew Ramsey since March 1997 and was now counsel for Burke Ramsey. The police were hoping to conduct a formal interview of Burke and to do it before the media got wind of it. By mid-February, Beckner and Jenkins had agreed that the interview would take place in Atlanta, at a neutral location, and that it would be videotaped and conducted by a police officer rather than a child psychologist. Most important to the police was the stipulation that John and Patsy would not be present and that neither they nor their attorneys would be provided with information about the interview. The day after they agreed, Marilyn Robinson of
The Denver Post
called Jenkins, detailed for him the position he’d taken in his discussions with Beckner, and asked for a comment on the pending interviews. Jenkins was livid. Not only had someone leaked the fact that he was talking
to Beckner, but they knew everything he had said. Jenkins now believed he saw Beckner’s hidden agenda—to use Burke as a weapon in the police-backed media campaign against his parents. Beckner denied Jenkins’s charges. Nevertheless, that same afternoon, the lawyer called off the interview between the Boulder PD and Burke Ramsey.

FORMER RAMSEY CASE CHIEF QUITS

That week, twenty-four Boulder detectives took John Eller out to lunch at Dolan’s restaurant. It was more like a wake
than a retirement celebration. The officers had a group picture taken of themselves to make into a plaque. Eller took the floor and gave the detectives an inspirational speech of the sort Knute Rockne used to give his players before they took the field.

A week later, Steve Thomas and Eller’s brother, who had come from Florida, helped Eller load two Ryder trucks with his life’s belongings. On February 28, with Eller’s brother in one truck and Thomas and Eller in the other, they began the four-day drive to Florida. Within a few months, Eller would return to the police academy for night courses to get his Florida law enforcement credentials.

The cross-country trip was tiring for Thomas. He couldn’t understand why he needed so much coffee to keep awake during the drive east. He had also been having headaches for months. He knew he needed to see a doctor, but he couldn’t fit an appointment into his tight schedule.

BECKNER TO TAKE COMMAND OF DETECTIVE BUREAU

On Monday, February 23, a detective on the Ramsey case returned a phone call from a writer covering the story. The writer wasn’t in, so the detective left the following message:

By the first of March, some members of Hunter’s staff
thought that Lou Smit and Trip DeMuth had become fixated on the intruder theory, almost to the point of ignoring evidence that ran against it—much the same way they had accused the police of obsessively focusing on the Ramseys as the guilty parties. Hofstrom was noncommittal; he said he would only give his opinion after reviewing the entire case file. For his part, Hunter had said for months that he wanted to see convincing evidence before anyone was charged. He claimed that so far only 40 percent of the evidence he had seen pointed to the Ramseys. Since the case would soon be coming his way and his team was sure to expand, he renewed the lease on the war room for the rest of the year. They would need a secure place to work.