Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (65 page)

When the cops played the tape of Patsy’s 911 call, Alex Hunter wrote on his legal pad, “Doesn’t sound as upset as I thought.” But others on his team had the opposite reaction. Then John and Patsy’s statement that Burke had been asleep and knew nothing about the events of that morning was called into question when what sounded like Burke’s voice could be heard on the tape—if you could be sure it was a voice, said one listener.

The police discussed the Ramseys’ demeanor both before and after JonBenét’s body was found. They had seemed distant from each other the entire morning, had never tried to comfort each other, and had remained physically separate. Patsy was looking around, peeking through the fingers covering her face, one police report said, while John was off by himself much of the time, out of Arndt’s sight. He had even gone alone into the basement at midmorning, after which time he had become despondent, sitting alone. The Ramseys’ refusal to grant formal interviews until four months after the murder was also highly suspicious, the police said.

The physical layout of the house was reviewed. It appeared that all the doors were locked that night, yet it shouldn’t be forgotten that there were still several keys missing as of June 1998. There had been no indication of forced entry. The pry marks discovered on two doors had not produced evidence of splintering on the ground below, and Barbara Fernie, a close friend of Patsy’s, had told the police that she had seen the pry marks before the murder and at that time they were already old.

Mike Everett discussed the spiderwebs found on outside windows and particulary the one on the grate in front of the broken basement window. Spiders didn’t build new webs
during winter, he told the audience. He explained how little force it would take to break the partial web that had been found across the window grate.

Deliberately, it seemed, the police had organized the information to negate an intruder theory. Would an intruder have tied the cord so loosely on JonBenét’s arm? Would an intruder cover her with a blanket? Would an intruder wipe off her body and redress her? Would an intruder have used Patsy’s paintbrush to tighten the noose? Wouldn’t an intruder have written a ransom note in advance? If he intended to write a note, wouldn’t he bring paper? His own pen? Would an intruder travel easily and freely through a mazelike house? One observer later said he could almost imagine this intruder saying, “Oh, fuck! My comrades and I, in our small foreign faction, forgot to bring a pad and a pen. Shit! We forgot to bring a garrote, some rope, and duct tape. What else did we forget?”

The police listed twenty-five indications that pointed away from an intruder: Lab tests showed that the fine-line Sharpie pen with which the note was written was one that Patsy had used before. Also, the pad, the note, and the flashlight were all discovered in close proximity of each other. The pen in a cup with other Sharpies right beside the phone in the kitchen where Patsy always kept them. The detectives admitted that even though the handwriting analysis did not show definitively that Patsy had written the note, the evidence indicated that Patsy couldn’t be eliminated as the author. Moreover, the police said, Donald Foster had determined—although not scientifically—that she had written and may have composed the note. Comparisons of phraseology and punctuation were shown to the audience. Of everyone interviewed, Patsy was the only one who was not eliminated as the author of the ransom note.

Possible scenarios, speculation, and conjecture about what
might have taken place Christmas night in the Ramsey home came up during breaks in the presentation. The police had presented no motive or theory, but almost everyone agreed it was unlikely that a mysterious intruder, heretofore unknown, would emerge as the killer. There was speculation that perhaps JonBenét had wet her bed or soiled her clothes and that Patsy had reacted violently but had not intended to kill her. Then perhaps she and her husband had conspired to cover it up and make it look like something else.

The police listed all the reasons why the case should be presented to a grand jury. They mentioned sixteen people who should be questioned under oath on twenty different topics. Some of them had so far been uncooperative. In other cases they simply didn’t know what real information, if any, people had, as with Fleet White. Also, some school, phone, and credit card records that were necessary could be obtained at this late date only by order of a grand jury.

Finally, in closing, Steve Thomas listed over a dozen reasons, in no particular order, why the police suspected the Ramseys. Some of them had been mentioned during the discussion of other categories.

A question-and-answer session followed the presentation. All the detectives sat at a table at the front of the room. Beckner was to one side, behind the lectern. Dr. Lee maintained his usual professional demeanor, but his frustration was clear nonetheless. He would pose a question and then add, “I asked you a year ago for this information. I still don’t have it.” DAs Bob Grant and Bill Ritter also remarked to each other that despite their best efforts, the police investigation seemed to have fallen short.

By the time Barry Scheck had to leave, Hunter’s group was saying that there wasn’t a filable case. Ritter, Peters, Grant, Lee, Scheck, and Hunter agreed. Not even close, was their verdict: 95 percent of what they had heard was already public knowledge, the remaining 5 percent wasn’t enough even for a runaway grand jury to indict. They all agreed that the intruder theory, given the existing evidence, was unten
able.

Daniel Hoffman, one of the lawyers working pro bono for the police, remarked to Bill Ritter during an earlier break, “Looks like they got it.”

“Got what?” Ritter countered.

“Felony murder,” Hoffman said confidently.

Ritter didn’t see it. The felony-murder statute in Colorado allowed for a murder conviction even when the intent to kill couldn’t be proved, if it could be shown that the death occurred during the commission of a felony such as arson, burglary, or sexual assault. Ritter knew that none of those secondary felonies could be proved in the Ramsey case—not even sexual assault. If JonBenét was penetrated after death, it wasn’t a sexual assault; it was abuse of a corpse. But that wasn’t Ritter’s main reservation about Hoffman’s suggestion. Even if the evidence someday proved that a sexual assault had preceded the child’s death, the prosecution would still have to prove which parent was responsible for the assault. That left prosecutors with the troubling question of which parent—if indeed either parent—had knowingly caused the child’s death. Until investigators could identify each parent’s individual actions, two suspects meant no suspects.

After Henry Lee and Barry Scheck had left, Beckner, accompanied by the detectives who had brought the case to this juncture—Thomas, Gosage, Trujillo, Harmer, Weinheimer, Everett, and Wickman—faced the press. Standing behind the microphones, Beckner reviewed where they had been: 590 people had been formally interviewed, 1,058 pieces of physical evidence investigated, some thirty thousand pages written up for the case file, twenty-two thousand man-hours spent on the investigation, seventeen states visited, sixty-eight people studied as possible suspects, and thirty different reasons given for why the depart
ment was justified in asking that a grand jury be convened.

Then Beckner answered a reporter’s question: “I have an idea who did it, yes.” Nothing in his body language or words suggested that he had a mystery suspect in mind. Reporters felt they heard a door slam shut on the intruder theory.

Someone reminded Beckner that six months earlier, he had said the Ramseys were under the “umbrella of suspicion.” In what way, if at all, had that changed?

“There are certainly fewer people under the umbrella of suspicion now than there were in October,” Beckner said. “The umbrella is not quite so big.”

Another reporter asked Beckner if the case could now be considered Alex Hunter’s. Had the baton been passed? Beckner conceded that the biggest decision—whether or not to take the case to a grand jury—was now in the DA’s hands. The commander pointed out that his detectives would still be working on various details of the case.

At the same time, inside the Events Center, Hunter was holding a meeting with his staff, the FBI, and the police department’s pro bono attorneys.

“Now that the case is ours,” Hunter told the group, “we are moving ahead with interviewing the Ramseys.” He wanted to plan strategy. “The Ramseys need to fish or cut bait,” Hunter said. Dan Schuler said he was going to interview Burke “properly,” which seemed to some like a jab at the detectives’ prior work. The FBI objected to the interviews, saying it was time to put the Ramseys under oath before a grand jury, let the threat of perjury hang over their heads. Hofstrom said that the Ramseys were cooperating; the interviews were going to take place. Most likely he thought there was no alternative but to question the Ramseys, since he didn’t see a case worthy of going to the grand jury. One FBI agent said it was insane to question them now, in the presence of their lawyers, who would easily figure out
what the prosecutors knew by the questions being asked. In a grand jury proceeding, the Ramseys’ attorneys would not be allowed to cross-examine or raise objections. The Ramseys had been protected by their attorneys long enough.

Hunter didn’t want to hear it. He was going to rely on his “trusted advisers” on this, he said.

“With no disrespect to your position as DA,” said Bill Hagmaier of the FBI, “I know the grand jury is your call—”

“Yes, it’s my call,” Hunter said, cutting him off. “And I’ll make that decision after I’ve considered all the alternatives—”

“But this little girl has been dead and buried for over eighteen months,” Hagmaier continued in a firm voice.

Hunter turned red. “This is a political decision,” he said. “It is not a police decision.”

Pro bono attorney Bob Miller said to Hofstrom that the DA’s office had an obligation to listen to the FBI. Trip DeMuth shouted at Miller that they
were
going to interview the Ramseys. They had made the commitment. “Don’t ever raise your voice to me,” Miller said pointedly.

“We’ve always wanted to help,” Hagmaier put in, “but considering what is going on here in Boulder, there’s no purpose in continuing here today.”

At that point the FBI agents left. Minutes later, Pete Hofstrom walked alone to his car.

When Beckner’s press conference was over, Hunter strode toward the cluster of microphones. His tough-guy expression was evident, but only briefly.

“This is the kind of weather that brings us all here,” he began cheerily, gesturing toward the cloud-free skies, the brilliant late afternoon sun. “How many of you are here from out of state?”

Clutching a legal pad with his notes, Hunter told the press that he thought it made sense to take the case to a
grand jury. But, he added, no final decision had been made. People should make no assumptions about what was going to happen next. Even his rough timetable—that there would be a public decision within thirty days—could change, he warned.

“We do not have enough to file a case, and we have a lot of work to do,” he said. He was choosing his words much more carefully now than when he held his first press conference in February 1997.

“I will go back to my people and analyze what we heard and make sure it is sensible to ask Boulder citizens to spend the time it takes to run a grand jury.”

Two days after the presentation, New York radio commentator Don Imus was talking about the first game of the NBA finals between the Chicago Bulls and Utah Jazz and said that the Bulls would have been better off to have “pulled Michael Jordan and substituted for him with Alex Hunter.” A friend told Hunter he was on the verge of becoming as well known as Kenneth Starr.