Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (50 page)

At 5:00
P
.
M
. on July 31, McKinley called Eller. “I know about the lawyers,” she said. “Do you have a comment?”

“I knew you guys would get this sooner or later,” Eller replied.

He said he had no comment.

Next she called Dan Caplis, a talk-show host at her radio station, who was also an attorney. Caplis said he would call someone he knew in the Boulder DA’s office to find out whatever he could. Caplis called Bill Wise to warn him about McKinley’s story but just as important, to tell Wise something else—that he was the one who had brokered the deal between the police and their new lawyers, a fact Caplis hadn’t told McKinley. When Wise found out, he was shocked.

In mid-July, knowing that the Boulder police had lost confidence in Hunter’s office, Caplis had approached Richard Baer, a former New York homicide detective and prosecutor who was now an attorney in Denver, and asked if Baer would volunteer his services to the police. Caplis knew that powerful lawyers were representing the Ramseys, and he felt that equally high-powered attorneys should be advising the police. When Baer agreed, Caplis called several people at the Boulder PD, one of whom was Steve Thomas. The detectives liked the idea. Baer then recruited Robert Miller, a former U.S. attorney from Colorado, and Dan Hoffman, former dean of the University of Denver Law School. On July 24, the three attorneys met with Eller and the detectives working the Ramsey case. They discussed an arrangement in which the lawyers would work pro bono.
*

It was a relief to the police to have their own attorneys. Like Caplis, these attorneys had no agenda of their own. The police could now get an objective opinion about whether they had a case against the Ramseys or should move on. The FBI had told the detectives that they had enough evidence for probable cause, but now Eller, like Hunter, wanted to know if they had enough to convict beyond a reasonable doubt. He and his detectives didn’t
trust Hunter and Hofstrom to tell them the truth. If they didn’t have a case, they wanted to hear it from a neutral source. They were prepared for bad news.

Hearing all this from Dan Caplis, Bill Wise worried about how it would reflect on the DA’s office. He called Hunter, who knew nothing about it. Within minutes, Hunter had Koby on the phone. The chief was more upset that Eller hadn’t told Hunter, than that the news had leaked. The DA told Koby that he didn’t want the story to air until an official announcement was made, because it would look as if the police were blindsiding the DA.

Carol McKinley called Hunter at home, and he agreed to go on the air live the next morning at 5:00
A
.
M
., August 1. It was a face-saving maneuver. He couldn’t afford to let his office look incompetent. On the radio, he said he endorsed the police department’s hiring of attorneys.

In fact, Hunter knew the reputation of the three attorneys, and he hoped their input would work to his advantage. Baer and Miller had a great deal of experience with juries and the rules of evidence. Let the police department hear from its own handpicked consultants that the investigation was flawed. It would take some of the pressure off him.

That afternoon, Hunter issued a press release: “There is no question that outside lawyers providing assistance to a police department is unusual in a criminal investigation. But almost everything about this case is unusual.”

When Steve Thomas interviewed Patsy’s sister Pam in Atlanta, she told him that one summer in Charlevoix, JonBenét was standing on the dock barefoot. Worried that she might get a splinter, Pam ran after her.

“You need to put shoes on,” she told JonBenét.

“I don’t want to,” the child answered. “I want to feel the earth’s life under my feet. I want to know what it’s like to walk on something that is alive.”

When the kids are in kindergarten, they only go to school for a half day. So we moms would pick the kids up, and while we waited, we would just chat. My youngest child, a boy, was a year older than JonBenét. My middle one, a daughter, was Burke’s age. And my oldest, who was fourteen, would sometimes baby-sit JonBenét when Patsy had some activity at St. John’s.

That’s how I really met Patsy—through church.

When I first met JonBenét, she was two years old and had a discernible personality. She could walk into a room and everybody would stop and look—not just at her face. She was beautiful, but it was something else. She had confidence, and you had to take a second look. You’d ask yourself, Who is this kid?

On some Sundays after church, Patsy would take off with JonBenét and go to some pageant. The family was prepping all the time during the week. With that amount of participation, it wasn’t just a couple of Sundays. And when she’d say, “I’ve got to go now,” and “We’re doing such and such,” my eyebrows went up just a little, like everybody else’s.

I mean, when Patsy said on TV that the pageants were just a couple of Sundays—give me a break.

—Patty Novack

During the first week of August, Jeff Shapiro called Patty Novack, who had cared for Patsy in the first days after the murder. He wanted to interview her about “anything,” he said. Novack told him she had no comment. Shapiro continued to talk—about himself. He said he was young and looking for a story.

He thought he was playing to some bored housewife. That, I am not. I wasn’t going to fall for his line. Again I said, “I have no comment,” and hung up.

A second later the phone rang again. “Patty, Patty, you hung up on me,” he said. “That wasn’t nice.”

Once again I said I had no comment.

“Surely you must think about what’s going on,” he continued.

“Of course I think about it. I’ve had discussions with my husband. But I don’t have discussions with strangers.”

“We could meet and have coffee, and then we wouldn’t be strangers anymore.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, and hung up.

A couple of weeks later, about six o’clock in the evening, Shapiro showed up on my doorstep with some flowers. He wasn’t the first reporter to use that trick. Someone had tried that on Valentine’s Day.

He just kept ringing my bell. I didn’t answer. Then he walked over to the window. I could see him using his cell phone. Then our phone rang. I had to tell the children not to answer. They got scared.

Shapiro started calling through the window, trying to get my children to answer the door. That scared them more. Finally he put the flowers down and left. There was a note: “Dear Patty,” it said. There was a peace sign and the word offering. He signed his name.

I called the police and asked what our rights were. They said they would issue a trespass ticket and charge Shapiro with harassment, since I had previously told him I had no comment.

I know he’s trying to earn a living and pay his bills, but he can’t do that at my expense.

—Patty Novack

When Carol McKinley first met Jeff Shapiro, she was working for KOA AM Radio in Denver. He simply walked up to her one day at the Justice Center and said he worked for the Globe. The next day she met him for breakfast, thinking they might compare notes.

Then he started calling her regularly, trying to get her to reveal her sources.

“I think we’re talking to the same person,” Shapiro said.

McKinley told him she wouldn’t discuss her sources.

When he saw he was getting nowhere, Shapiro talked to her about his family. He said his mother had always been mean to him, didn’t really think he was good enough. Shapiro told McKinley he needed somebody to be his big brother, like
his
source.

McKinley never revealed to Shapiro or anyone who her police source was. But when she compared notes with other reporters, it was obvious to her that there were only one or two detectives at the most who were talking to the media.

On Sunday, August 3, the Ramseys ran their second full-page advertisement in the
Daily Camera
. They had previously asked the police to release the entire ransom note to the public but had been refused. The ad now sought the public’s help in locating the writer of the note. In late April, before the Ramseys’ experts were allowed to review the original note, their attorneys had made an agreement with the police not to release it as a condition of being allowed to keep photocopies of it. Now the ad reproduced the capital letters
D
along with
Do
,
M
, and
W
and the lower-case letters
k
,
r
,
u
,
th
,
of
, and
f
from the note, along with the same general profile of the killer that had been published the week before.

Also listed in the ad was a phone number for caller responses, which belonged to the Ramseys’ private investigators. Television viewers were told by one ex-FBI profiler to call the police with information, since they were the ones gathering the evidence and running the case.

That same day, Denver morning talk-show host Peter Boyles, whose ratings were climbing as a result of his coverage of the case, took out his own full-page ad in the
Daily Camera
. It was addressed to Patsy and John Ramsey. He called their plea laughable and said they were not behaving like the parents of similar victims. He commented, “Fred Goldman’s behavior exemplifies the true victim parent of a child who has been murdered.
*
You, on the other hand, have led Colorado and the nation on a seven month, low speed, white Bronco chase.” Boyles stopped short of saying the Ramseys had killed their daughter.

Alex Hunter hoped that the information the Ramseys were publishing in their advertisements—a third and fourth ad displayed some phrases from the ransom note—combined with the $500,000 reward the
Globe
had offered in June might just produce something. Hunter’s official position was that the Ramseys’ ads weren’t helpful, that it was unprofessional to release information that only the killer was likely to know—especially in a case like this, when all you had was a ransom note. Privately, however, Hunter understood the counterargument: that if you do release some information, someone might come forward and identify a suspect. Hunter was thinking of how the Unabomber had been caught when his brother saw some phrases in the manifesto published in the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times
and recognized them from Ted Kaczynski’s let
ters to his family. Hunter would have wanted the entire ransom note published, but it wasn’t his case yet, and he couldn’t go up against the Boulder police in public.

Lou Smit and Steve Ainsworth’s list of people who had to be reinterviewed grew ever longer. By now Smit was all but certain that someone other than the Ramseys had murdered JonBenét. Nobody had been able to find any motive for them to kill their daughter. Nor had the police uncovered any indications of previous cruelty or perversity in either parent. Smit had to admit that the writing pad—and possibly the ransom note—was damaging evidence. But it was mitigated by the evidence that he thought pointed to an intruder.

In mid-July, on the same day that Smit asked the Ramseys about the stun gun and the Hi-Tec shoes, he spoke on the telephone to Sue Bennett, more widely known as Jameson. Under that name, she maintained a Web site that provided a detailed timeline of events connected with JonBenét’s death, culled from various unofficial sources and public documents. She had contacted Smit at the suggestion of a journalist and provided him with information she thought he might not know.

Since February the police had been interested in Jameson, who lived in Hickory, North Carolina. They wanted to know how she got some of the information posted on her Web page—some information that had never been released to the public, including facts that even the police were originally unaware of. When the police learned that Jameson’s real name was Bennett—which was John Ramsey’s mother’s maiden name—they became even more conscious of her.

I used to go on-line to chat about home schooling. That’s how I teach my kids.

After the murder of JonBenét, I spent more time on-line. I followed the case. My first instinct was that the parents were going to be blamed for this, and I didn’t think they were guilty. It didn’t sound like something a parent would do. Then I read that JonBenét had an older half-brother. I went into one of the chat rooms to see if people were talking about him.

After I chatted a short time, someone called me a name. I was attacked. At the time, I was talking about what happened to JonBenét physically—in a blunt way. And of course that was why I was harassed. Someone even called me a pervert.

Then someone said that I was John Andrew—and that I was also the killer. I received one letter from a college professor suggesting I confess. I was even turned in to the police. I thought, This is ridiculous. I’m a middle-aged housewife with a bunch of kids. Later I learned I was actually considered a suspect.

I knew the authorities had to look at everyone. But it shocked me when I discovered the police were even reading conversations on the Internet.

—Jameson

Jameson told Lou Smit her theory of the murder: While the Ramseys were at the Whites’ house on Christmas night, an intruder had entered their house and hid in the basement. The intruder was young and a friend of John Andrew’s and might have had a history of pedophilia. Jameson said that after the intruder entered the house, he fantasized about kidnapping JonBenét for sex, while always knowing he would kill her. While waiting for the family to get home, he wrote the ransom note. When they returned and JonBenét was put to bed, the intruder took her from her room and inadvertently killed her, sooner than he had planned.

For his part, Lou Smit listened to Jameson and tried to reconcile what she said with what he knew. He encouraged
her to deal directly with the Boulder police and gave her no investigative details about the case, but he couldn’t dismiss her out of hand.

It was hard for Steve Ainsworth to wait in the wings. He and Smit hadn’t been authorized to do too much. On August 7, he drove out to the Dakota Spa, the New Age retreat and meeting center in Lyons where Jacqueline Dilson worked. It was Dilson who had suggested to the police and the DA in January that her ex-boyfriend, part-time reporter Chris Wolf, had behaved oddly after JonBenét’s death. Ainsworth had read the police reports about both Dilson and Wolf and felt that further follow-up was needed. Now, Dilson told Ainsworth that on February 13, the day Koby and Hunter had first appeared on TV for a press conference, Chris Wolf “freaked out.” She and her daughter, Mara, had both seen Wolf biting his nails when Hunter, looking into the camera, said, “We will get you.” After the broadcast, Wolf left, Dilson said. She added that Wolf had threatened to kill her in April. “I should just strangle you” were his words.

A month later, the Ramseys’ investigators suggested that the DA should look at Wolf, not knowing that Ainsworth had already opened a file on him. Ellis Armistead, John Ramsey’s chief investigator, faxed Ainsworth additional background information about Wolf. By the end of September, Smit and Ainsworth had received two more communiqués from the Ramseys’ investigators suggesting that they continue to look at Wolf. It wasn’t until February 1998 that Wolf was again contacted by the Boulder police. He was then working for the
Louisville Times
as a reporter. He agreed to give the police a sample of his saliva. Then he provided them with his palm prints and fingerprints and spent an hour supplying a handwriting sample. Wolf wondered if he would ever be cleared, since he believed the murder would never be solved.

The same day that Ainsworth interviewed Dilson, Bill Hagmaier of the FBI called Alex Hunter. Now that the trip to FBI headquarters in Quantico had been firmed up by the police, Hagmaier didn’t want the DA and his staff to come east and be disappointed. The Bureau, he said, was not going to say that the Ramseys had killed their daughter. They were prepared to say that there was probable cause, but as of this date, the threshold of reasonable doubt had not been crossed.

Even though he now knew that there wasn’t enough evidence for an arrest, Hunter told Hagmaier that he would still make the trip. He wanted to hear firsthand what the FBI experts had to say.

On August 13, the full, uncensored autopsy report, including six brief sections that had been held back from the public since May 15, was released.

The details previously not disclosed to the public were that a Colorado Avalanche sweatshirt had been draped over JonBenét’s body after she was brought upstairs; that a red heart was found drawn on her left palm; that there was a sequined star on the front of her knit nightshirt; that she wore a gold cross necklace; that blue ties held her hair in ponytails; that the word
Wednesday
was sewn on her panties; and that a gold bracelet hung on her right wrist, bearing the inscriptions “JonBenét” and “12/25/96.”

The public also learned that the possible murder weapon was something like a garrote made from a stick “irregularly broken at both ends and there are several colors of paint and apparent glistening varnish on the surface…Printed in gold letters on one end of the wooden stick is the word ‘Korea.’”