Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (52 page)

On the other hand, the killer cared about the victim and wanted her found. He or she didn’t want JonBenét outside in the dead of winter in the middle of the night. The child had been wrapped in a white blanket, her Barbie nightgown found lying next to her. Such caring and solicitude were not usually associated with a malevolent criminal.

Neither the behavioral nor the technical experts had ever seen a parental killing of a child that involved both a fatal injury and garroting, but that was a statistical detail, not evidence, they pointed out. And after reviewing what was known about the points of entry to the house, the open window, the shoe imprint, the palm print on the wine cellar
door and the partial palm print on the ransom note—neither of which could be dated with certainty—the FBI told the visitors from Boulder that there was no hard evidence to indicate that an intruder had entered the house that night.

This was their best assessment of the crime scene, the FBI said. Where the Ramseys might or might not fit into it was up to the Boulder PD to determine. The circumstances seemed to rule out the involvement of a stranger. Nevertheless, it was a possibility, however remote.

The police then mentioned the Ramseys’ behavior immediately after the body was found: the fact that John Ramsey was ready to fly to Atlanta with his wife and son and leave his daughter’s body—and the investigation into her murder—behind; the refusal to cooperate with the police; and the hiring of criminal attorneys. In reply, the FBI experts pointed out that no two people respond to trauma and grief the same way, and that the police should not overanalyze what they had observed. Most of the time, the parents of a victim are all over the police. “Why the hell haven’t you caught my child’s killer?” “What’s going on? I want to know everything.” In this case, the police had to acknowledge that it was their own commander’s actions that had led to the long postponement of the parents’ interviews.

The police also mentioned that the Ramseys had separate attorneys. Did this imply separate liabilities? They wondered aloud if one parent had knowledge of the crime before the fact, and the other had knowledge after the fact. The FBI had no answers to these speculations.

After the Quantico meetings, Detectives Thomas and Gosage visited Shurford Mills in Hickory, North Carolina, the country’s largest manufacture of adhesives. The FBI had determined that the tape allegedly removed from JonBenét’s mouth had first been manufactured in November
1996 under the brand name Suretape. The tape had a 40 percent calcium filler in the adhesive, and its yarn/scrim count of 20/10 helped pinpoint that Bron was the tape’s distributor. The black duct tape Thomas purchased from McGuckin in May for the same price that appeared on Patsy Ramsey’s sales slip carried the names Suretape and Bron.

Meanwhile, back in Boulder, Eller and Koby met to discuss how to deal with the
Vanity Fair
article. They knew that Bardach would never reveal her police source, and they doubted that he would come forward on his own. They discussed using polygraph tests to flush out the culprit, but Koby knew that without a hard lead, he didn’t have the legal right to polygraph his officers. Eller and Koby understood they had to do something, but decided against a formal investigation. The department had already initiated two investigations relating to the case: an internal affairs inquiry into Larry Mason’s charges against Eller, and the inquiry into the war-room computer break-in. Nevertheless, Koby announced that he was going to polygraph his officers, hoping the source might give himself up. This also seemed to be the right move for the department to make from a PR perspective.

When Greg Perry, the president of the police union, heard that Koby would be ordering polygraphs, he reminded the chief about a rock-solid provision in the union contract: until a suspect was named, no officer had to take a polygraph. Furthermore, the department was not allowed to discipline anyone for refusing to cooperate with an investigation. The purpose of a polygraph was to pressure a suspect and get him to confess. No one expected the test to reveal the truth. Still, an inconclusive result might be
damaging: Officer X “failed” a polygraph. The union would not allow something like that to happen to one of their members because of the media—and they didn’t care if it was
Vanity Fair
or the
Globe
.

Upon his return from Boston, Koby told his officers, “If you talk to the press, you’re fired.”

In New York City, Ann Bardach got a call from one of her two police sources. He told her that people thought John Eller was her source. He didn’t mind that Eller was under suspicion: it would take the heat off the detectives, he said. Hunter will use the rumor against the him, the officer said, and it might cost Eller his position in the investigation. Bardach knew her sources, and Eller wasn’t one of them—she had never even met the commander. She asked her source what she could do for the commander. Nothing, the officer replied.

Bardach, troubled by the conversation, talked to her editor. She asked
Vanity Fair
to call Tom Koby and set the record straight. The magazine refused. Eller was Koby’s problem, they said, not theirs.

When Steve Thomas returned from the East Coast, he left a message on Jeff Shapiro’s voice mail. Shapiro could tell he was still upset about the
Vanity Fair
article.

“I’m still disappointed in the department’s leadership,” Thomas said. “All the detectives are going to be polygraphed, maybe even prosecuted for leaking evidence. The Ramseys never had to take a polygraph, so why should we?” Then he added that three of the five detectives working the case were already consulting attorneys.

Shapiro then called Bruce Hagan, a producer for NBC’s
Dateline
, and told him about the pending polygraphs and the possible prosecution of
Vanity Fair
’s police source. “I know a detective who might want to talk. Just listen to his story,” he said, not revealing Thomas’s name or that he was calling
without the detective’s permission. Hagan replied that he could have plane tickets waiting at Denver International Airport whenever they were ready to fly to New York.

Shortly afterward, Thomas called Shapiro. “I just got a voice mail from someone asking me to confirm that a guy named Jeff Shapiro is talking to some big East Coast media about the cops taking polygraphs. Just tell me the truth and we’ll get past it.”

“Absolutely,” Shapiro told Thomas. “I talked to
Dateline
. It was supposed to be between me and them.” Then he added, “I have this all set up if one day you want to go on the air.”

“OK, that’s no problem,” Thomas said. “I understand.”

I called Hunter and asked him if he was going to prosecute the detectives.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“About the Vanity Fair leaks.”

“No. You’re talking about this as if I’m going to press charges, and I’m not,” Hunter said. “Tell them Koby has canceled the polygraphs. There’s nothing more important in my entire life than seeing this thing move forward.”

Then I called Steve Thomas. “Hunter’s not pressing charges.”

“That’s fuckin’ bullshit,” Steve responded.

I had the feeling Eller was telling the detectives some things about the DA’s office that weren’t true, saying whatever he had to, to get everyone all worked up.

Now Hunter knew I had to be talking to Thomas, Wickman, or Gosage.

—Jeff Shapiro

By now, despite the lip service paid to it, preserving the integrity of the investigation was a distant memory. The
infighting between the DA’s office and the police department was being played out in the press through leaks. Some of the detectives understood that the leaks from the police suggested that the Boulder PD was more interested in saving face than in solving the murder. Of course, the Ramseys had been playing the image game in the press for quite a while. To that end, they would continue to provide leaks.

In the weeks to come, they would give out stories that pointed to an intruder. For example, Carol McKinley’s Ramsey source told her that something had been found in the snow outside the house near the basement window grate on December 26. McKinley called Charlie Russell, one of their press representatives.

“What’s in the snow?” she asked.

“A knee print.”

“What else?” she asked. “Is that all you have?”

McKinley followed up with her CBI source, the DA’s office, and police sources, but she came up empty. She was told that without a hand or finger imprint, toe print, or shoe print, there was no way to positively identify a knee print. McKinley believed that Russell may have led her astray.

In the preceding months, the Ramseys had launched a public campaign through advertisements, fliers, and direct mail. Now they were ready to present their case on national TV and in
Newsweek
magazine. Michael Bynum spoke to Dan Glick of
Newsweek
in late August to tell the writer that he could now publish a story about his July visit to the Ramseys’ house. In a September 7
Newsweek
piece, Glick and Sherry Keene-Osborn challenged the thoroughness of the police investigation and claimed that many presumed “facts” about the case—allegedly leaked by the cops and incriminating to the Ramseys—were simply wrong. A photocopy of the ransom note that Keene-Osborn had had access to for over a month was included in the article—its
first appearance in print. It was likely that one of the Ramseys’ attorneys provided her with the photocopy.

In writing about his visit to the house, Glick said that an intruder could have climbed through the broken basement window—an accurate observation that challenged what Ann Bardach had reported in
Vanity Fair
just days before. The
Newsweek
writers also attempted to correct several other misleading observations in Bardach’s article. For example, she had given little weight to John Ramsey’s attempt to collect the $118,000 needed for the ransom. In
Newsweek
, the writers outlined some of the steps Ramsey had taken on December 26 to obtain the funds. Glick and Keene-Osborn were getting their information directly from the Ramsey camp, and to some the story read like a defense brief for the couple.

There were others lobbying more directly for the Ramseys. In August, Alex Hunter had declined to be interviewed by ABC’s Diane Sawyer, and Koby’s office didn’t even return Sawyer’s personal calls. But while working on the
Newsweek
article, Sherry Keene-Osborn told Hunter that Michael Bynum had granted Diane Sawyer an interview and a tour of the Ramseys’ house.

On September 10, just three days after the
Newsweek
story was published,
Prime Time Live
devoted a full hour to the Ramsey case.

“This is Mike Bynum,” Sawyer told her audience, “a former prosecutor and close friend of the Ramseys. Since the murder, he has been by their side, and is now speaking for the first time.”

“The Ramseys, in my opinion, based on everything I know,” Bynum said, “are absolutely incapable of murder and incapable of harming that child.”

“You’re saying there has never, for a moment, been a flicker of…even doubt in your mind?” Sawyer asked.

“In my mind, that is absolutely correct.”

Bynum told Sawyer about the Ramseys’ most familiar complaint—that the police had tried to withhold JonBenét’s body in exchange for interviews. He didn’t know whether or not it was illegal, Bynum said, but he was sure it was immoral and unethical. “Hell no, you’re not getting an interview,” he had personally told the police, said Bynum.

Sawyer asked why the Ramseys had acted the way they had—with a seemingly unnatural restraint and concern for how they appeared to the public. She implied that innocent parents would not only give police an interview but most likely camp out at police headquarters and refuse to leave until the case was solved.

“In the circumstances that John and Patsy Ramsey were in,” Bynum said, “you go ahead and do that, and pick up the pieces later, because you’re going to be shredded.”

“Innocent or not?”

“Absolutely,” Bynum replied. “Absolutely.”

“Polygraphs,” Sawyer asked. “Have they taken a lie detector?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Should they? Will they?”

“Not if I ever have anything to say about it.”

“Why?”

“Oh, that’s Ouija board science, number one,” Bynum responded. “And I will also tell you, to my knowledge, that that request has not been made of John and Patsy.”

Later Sawyer asked, “Who do the Ramseys think killed their daughter?”

“They don’t know,” Bynum replied. Then he said that the Ramseys had passed on leads to the police.

Sawyer asked if they were “real leads” or “serious leads.”

“Very much so,” Bynum told Sawyer. “We know absolutely that there is evidence of an intruder. But that information, interestingly enough, hasn’t leaked out.”

Together, Sawyer and Bynum walked through the now-vacant Ramsey home. Standing in the basement at the train-room window, Bynum demonstrated how the entire frame of the three-section, multipaned window could swing open, enabling a man of his size—“5-10 and 175”—to get through. He showed how a perpetrator could have reached the window merely by hoisting himself up, using an object such as the suitcase that police found beneath the window.

For the first time, the entrance to the wine cellar was shown on TV. Sawyer’s voice-over described a windowless concrete room that was not as hidden as some press reports had suggested.

“Doesn’t it almost have to be someone who at least knew where the wine cellar was,” Sawyer asked Bynum, “or had a kind of map in their head of the house?”

“Well, I don’t know that for sure, but that’s certainly a possibility,” Bynum replied. “I don’t think that that house is one that is too difficult to describe, at least in terms of getting in and around the house.”

Sawyer pressed Bynum about the evidence of the intruder that he’d alluded to earlier. “There’s no fiber sample, there’s no DNA,” she said. “There’s no sign of forced entry.”

“Well, you know a lot more about the evidence, apparently, than I do,” Bynum replied. “I don’t think it’s known what there is or is not. I think that there are things in terms of the actions of this individual in that house, the note that was left, that really have been kept very, very secret from the public.” Bynum refused to elaborate about the details, however, to support his position that there was an intruder. Sawyer told her audience that over two thousand people had visited the Ramseys’ house the previous Christmas for Boulder’s holiday season tour of homes.

Another question raised by the case, said Sawyer, was whether JonBenét had been sexually abused. She pre
sented Dr. Francesco Beuf, JonBenét’s pediatrician, on the telephone. He had reviewed his medical records, the doctor said, and told the ABC audience that there was no history of sexual abuse.

Sawyer’s broadcast marked the first time a network TV show had mentioned the possibility of an intruder.

Alex Hunter and Suzanne Laurion had different opinions about how the DA’s office should respond in the wake of the
Vanity Fair
article. Laurion wanted the DA to stop talking to the press, including
The New Yorker
and Chuck Green of
The Denver Post
. She told Hunter that his involvement with the media would backfire. All he could think about, however, was how to restore his credibility. For the time being, he told Laurion, he’d follow his instincts. He approached Sherry Keene-Osborn to do a profile of him for
Newsweek
. The magazine declined her suggestion, so she prepared a profile of the DA for the
Colorado Statesman
instead.

By now the media frenzy surrounding Princess Diana’s death was subsiding, and Ann Bardach was making the rounds of the talk shows to promote her article. One afternoon, Hunter assembled all fifty-five members of his staff and ordered pizza and soda for them. Everyone had felt the impact of Bardach’s story, with its strong criticism of the DA’s office. They should not take the broadsides personally, Hunter told them. Don’t feel beleaguered, he said, and urged everyone to get on with the important work they were doing and to be proud of their efforts.

Hunter asked for questions, and for the first time, Pete Hofstrom talked about the case. Clearly, he was hurt. Bardach’s accusations against him had been particularly unfair, considering Hofstrom’s dedication and commitment to his work. Hunter’s pep talk had come not a moment too soon. Nothing was more symbolic of his staff’s feelings of perse
cution than Pete Hofstrom’s having taken a day off from work—the first in twenty-three years.