Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (38 page)

I started as a secretary in the sheriff’s office, detective division, in 1971—just two detectives and me. I’m from Lincoln, Nebraska, a very conservative state, and I was real straight. Back then, the sheriff’s department didn’t have a height requirement. My husband is 6-feet-4. Brad was, like, 5-feet-5. Pete Hofstrom was a little shorter, and the fingerprint guy was maybe 5-feet-6. Hopper, who’s still here, is, like, 5-feet-3. We had some terrific people.

To know Pete Hofstrom is almost to love him, even though he’s the most eccentric person I’ve ever met in my life. Considering all the years I’ve lived in Boulder, that’s a pretty profound statement.

Pete had his eye on being a DA.

As the department grew, Alex Hunter started hiring and Pete was a known commodity. If you have the opportunity to grab a known commodity, you grab it.

I’m you-do-the-crime-you-do-the-time. I have a real issue with extenuating circumstances—that everybody’s behavior is excused in some way or another. We’ve created a society full of excuses. Three strikes and you’re out. I don’t care if it’s a freaking doughnut that you stole on the third
strike. Now Boulder people just look at me and shake their heads. I’m from the old school.

Hofstrom is even older. But he’s liberal. Pete is very good at seeing the overall picture. Cops are always looking at the 95 percent that is OK in a case. He’s going for the 5 percent that’s a potential problem. It’s one thing to look at a case from probable cause. Pete considers what’s necessary to prosecute someone.

I’d always say to Pete, “This is not for us to decide. It’s for a jury to decide. Or for a judge to decide.”

—Sandy Long

Moses Schanfield, a DNA expert and forensic scientist, was now consulting with the Ramseys’ attorneys, who notified Cellmark Diagnostics that they no longer required one of their experts to be present during the DNA testing procedures. Cellmark’s work could proceed without them, as far as the Ramseys were concerned. Presumably, the lawyers had decided that if the test results implicated their clients while their own representative was present, it would be extremely difficult for them to challenge Cellmark’s methods. Better to position themselves so that a legal challenge could be made against both the science and Cellmark’s findings.

Kary Mullis, the primary developer of PCR typing and a Nobel laureate, had often said that this testing was never intended for police forensic work because it was too vulnerable to contamination. In the Simpson criminal case, Mullis had told Barry Scheck that the process was too delicate to be reliable when blood and other fluids were collected from crime scenes. But now Scheck was on the prosecution’s side in the Ramsey case. He could play devil’s advocate and, per
haps more important, advise the DA on how to combat a possible challenge to incriminating DNA test results.

At every opportunity, the Ramseys insisted that an intruder had entered their house, citing publicly the missing home keys, pry marks on the doors, and the broken window in the basement. The police felt strongly, however, that none of these points of access had been used. During their initial inspection of the exterior of the house on the day JonBenét’s body was found, detectives had noticed several strands of a spiderweb on the grate covering the window well in front of the broken basement window. It extended from the edge of the grate to some nearby rocks, and this seemed to confirm that nobody had entered through that window recently.

If the police could prove that the partial spiderweb found on the grate had been present before nightfall on December 25 and had not been disturbed during the night, they could rule out the possibility that somebody had used the broken window to enter the house. They also had to know whether it was possible for a partial web to be spun in the time between possible entry by an intruder on December 25 and discovery of the strands by police on December 26. If that was possible, they would have to consider that the window was a likely point of entry for an intruder.

On April 2, Detective Michael Everett of the Boulder PD called entomologist Dr. Brent Opell of the Virginia State University Department of Biology, who was known as Mr. Spider Man. Opell told the police that there are two general types of spiderwebs. The first, which are called cob or funnel webs, once established are constantly reworked and added to by the spider. The second, manufactured by orb-weaving spiders, is regularly replaced by the spiders and can be completed at any hour of the day, in less than
twelve hours. The police also learned that if the grate covering the window well had simply been lifted and the web damaged, the type of web would be hard to identify, but if something the size of a man had passed through the web, it would have been destroyed. Everett sent Dr. Opell an enlarged photo of the type of web in question. The entomologist said it appeared to be of the funnel type.

Six months later, on October 25, Everett traveled to Vancouver Island and met with another expert, Dr. Robert Bennett of the British Columbia Ministry of Forests. The detective had with him a newly enlarged and enhanced photograph of a the strands of the web that had covered part of the window grate. Bennett confirmed that it was a funnel web.

Photographs of spiderwebs and spiders have been used as evidence in court cases. Different types of spiders build different types of webs. The varieties of design and the behaviors associated with web-building are well understood.

Spiders hibernate in the winter in temperate zones. Boulder is definitely a temperate zone. Therefore, during winter, there is markedly less or no activity at all by the spiders normally found in Boulder.

If a spiderweb is destroyed in winter, a spider will emerge if it’s warm enough. This often happens on a warm day, particularly if the spider is in a spot with southerly exposure. Indoors, spiders are active all winter. Heat or rising temperatures produce activity. Some species are active at very low temperatures, only slightly above freezing, while others need higher temperatures to become active.

In your situation—Boulder, winter snow falling, then melting away, then falling, the weather warm enough—the spider would definitely be out.

If a web is disturbed, a spider would drop out of the
web on a silk dragline, wait, climb back up the dragline, and be back where he first started from.

Again in your case, a web was broken one night when someone came by. The temperature rose the next day, and that day or thereafter, a new web could have been spun. Let me tell you a true story about a spiderweb.

In the 1600s, Robert the Bruce, one of Scotland’s national heroes, was injured and being pursued by the British. The Bruce crawled into a cave to hide. The next day the British came upon the cave, saw a spiderweb across its mouth, and figured that nobody was there. In fact, a spider had spun the web overnight. Robert the Bruce lived to fight another day.

—Robert Bennett

Dr. Bennett confirmed that if the temperature rises sufficiently, spiders can come out of hibernation. In Boulder, on Christmas night 1996, the temperature reached a low of 6 degrees, but it rose the next day to a high of 51. And the grate faced southwest—toward the sun. Perfect conditions for a hibernating spider to wake up and repair a damaged web. In October 1997 Detective Everett would learn from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration that it was impossible to determine the condition of the dew frost or snow cover on the ground around the Ramsey residence during the night of December 25 and into the morning of December 26.

In Boulder on April 2, Detective Steve Thomas spoke to Sergeant Tom Athey of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg (North Carolina) Police Department. Athey told Thomas that they had a suspect in custody who might have been involved in the murder of JonBenét. On March 21, John Brewer Eustace had allegedly kidnapped a two-year-old child from
a ground-level apartment. The child had then been violently sexually molested and found with a cloth in her mouth. Entry to the apartment had been made through a small ground-level window that was covered with a screen while a baby-sitter was within earshot of the baby’s crib.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg police had found in Eustace’s residence a kind of shrine full of JonBenét’s photos carefully cut from newspapers and magazines. Eustace admitted to masturbating while viewing the photographs. Within two days Steve Thomas and Ron Gosage were on a plane to North Carolina to interview Eustace, now a suspect in the death of JonBenét.

At 2:20
P
.
M
. on April 5, Thomas and Gosage arrived at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department and met with Detective Chris Fish. Gosage, who had a two-year-old, became ill when he saw the photographs of the toddler. At 7:30 that evening, the detectives met John Eustace. After two hours of refusing to answer questions, he waived his rights and agreed to be interviewed by the Boulder detectives. Eustace said he wasn’t in Colorado on Christmas night and had never killed anyone. He even pulled hairs from his head and gave them to Thomas and Gosage. He also gave them a handwriting sample. When asked for a pubic hair sample, however, he refused. Later, while Eustace and the detectives took a break to visit the prison toilet, Thomas again asked him for a pubic hair. Again Eustace refused. Gosage pointed out to Eustace that he’d agreed to cooperate. Finally, the prisoner lowered his pants—to show Thomas and Gosage that he
couldn’t
give them the sample they wanted: he was clean-shaven not only around his penis but throughout his lower extremities. He said, “I know all about pubic hair and DNA. I’m too smart to leave anything behind.”

The next day Thomas and Gosage discovered that at midnight on December 26, Eustace had been working at the Qualex Plant in Charlotte. Between midnight and six in the
morning, a coworker remembered talking to him. At 9:37 Eustace clocked out and left for the day.

John Eustace, with his airtight alibi, was just another of the forty-three possible suspects the Boulder PD would interview within the first four months of the investigation. It would take almost a year to check on another fourteen.

While Lou Smit and Steve Ainsworth were trying to locate Kevin Raburn, the released convict who seemed to have disappeared, they continued to search for new leads. Daily, Smit looked at the crime scene and autopsy photographs and read police reports, hoping to discover overlooked clues. He had solved several cases simply by reading and rereading old police files.

On Wednesday, April 9, as Smit was looking at the autopsy photographs yet again, he noticed something unusual about several marks on JonBenét’s body. In one photograph, he noticed two dried rust-colored abrasions on her lower back; in a second photograph, just below her right ear and at a right angle to her cheek, he saw another set of rust-colored abrasions; and a third photograph showed two marks that looked like scratches on her lower leg. Smit asked Trip DeMuth and Ainsworth to look at the photos. They agreed with him that the three sets of abrasions appeared to be identical. In the final coroner’s report, they would be described as “rust-colored to slightly purple” discolorations of unequal size. The investigators agreed that there was about the same distance between the symmetrical marks.

To Smit the marks looked as if they had been made by the two electrodes of a stun gun. Stun guns, about the size of a TV remote control, are used primarily by police and security officers to immobilize people with a charge of electricity. In 1991 the LAPD’s officers had been caught on videotape trying to incapacitate Rodney King with a stun gun.

On Friday, April 11, Smit, DeMuth, and Ainsworth went to the coroner’s office and laid out the photographs for John Meyer. “Are these abrasions consistent with a stun gun or taser?” they asked. Meyer wouldn’t commit himself to a definite answer. DeMuth asked Meyer for a complete set of autopsy photographs and had some of them enlarged to life size.

Someone might have used a stun gun to subdue JonBenét during the crime. It was also possible, however, that Patsy or John or some third party had used such a device on their daughter for perverse reasons. Either way, the detectives now had to investigate the possibility that a stun gun had been used on the child.

Five days later, on April 16, Lou Smit drove to Lakewood, just outside Denver, to see CBI inspector Pete Mang, who had begun his career at the FBI. Mang suggested that Smit talk to Sue Kitchen, another CBI investigator, who had worked on a murder case in Steamboat Springs in which a stun gun was used. Two days later, Kitchen told the investigators that in her opinion, the small abrasions could have been made by a stun gun. She referred them to Arapahoe County coroner Mike Dobersen, who had solved a murder involving a stun gun in 1993. The device had been found in a suspect’s car, and the body of the victim was exhumed eight months after burial. Tissue from the corpse was tested for evidence of electric shock, and it proved positive. The suspect and her boyfriend were later charged and convicted.

After viewing the photos, Dobersen told the investigators that the abrasions on JonBenét’s body could have come from a stun-gun injury but that there was no way to know for sure without checking the skin tissue under a microscope. Before taking the extreme step of exhuming JonBenét’s body, Dobersen advised them to find a stun gun or taser with prongs spaced the same distance apart as the
marks on JonBenét’s body and compare them to a life-size photograph.

By the end of the month, Smit had tracked down several Air Taser stun guns whose measurements and characteristics were consistent with the marks in the photos. He had even discovered a local distributor, Upper Edge, in Greeley, northeast of Boulder. There Ainsworth and DeMuth photographed different types of Air Tasers.

When the investigators had collected enough information on the subject, they decided to inform the police. Eller’s detectives derided Smit’s theory as “hogwash,” perhaps because it presupposed an intruder. Hunter thought the police might have rejected the idea because it would be hard to convince a jury that the Ramseys had used such a device on their daughter.

Nevertheless, Smit wanted to ask the Ramseys and their family if any of them had ever owned, borrowed, or seen anyone with a stun gun.

By April 11, Hofstrom thought that his attempt to broker a deal for the Ramseys’ formal interviews with the police had progressed far enough, and he suggested a meeting. Patsy and John Ramsey, their attorneys, and Tom Wickman of the Boulder police met to see if the deadlock could be broken. Wickman, representing Eller, was a far less adversarial presence than the commander. Hofstrom began by saying that they all had to work together to move the investigation onto a new track. Wickman agreed, telling the Ramseys
they had been treated unfairly in the past and that the police needed their help to solve JonBenét’s murder.

The attorneys suggested conditions under which their clients would grant interviews to the police: John and Patsy would be interviewed separately, each for no more than two hours. There would be a two-hour lunch break between their interviews, when the Ramseys could consult with their attorneys, advisers, and experts. Under the law, they could have their attorneys present, and the questioning would take place in the office of a neutral Boulder attorney. The most important condition was that the Ramseys’ attorneys be given copies of all written police reports that contained statements made by their clients between December 26 and December 28.

After the meeting, Hofstrom and Hunter discussed the conditions. The DA told Eller and Wickman that he saw little point in withholding the documents that had been requested. If the Ramseys were charged, Hofstrom told the police, they would obtain the documents anyway, as part of the discovery process.
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