Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (71 page)

Finally, Kane showed her a picture of the Bible that John kept on his bedroom desk. Hoffmann-Pugh knew it was always open to Psalm 118. Every time she dusted, she saw it open to the same page. She told them she often read the verse. She didn’t sit down to read it, just read it standing up. Hoffmann-Pugh started to cry. She remembered that the amount of the ransom demand was $118,000, and thought about JonBenét being dead.

“That’s OK,” Michael Kane said, patting her on the hand. “Don’t worry about it.”

“We’ll see you in court,” said Bruce Levin.

That same Sunday, Lou Smit thought about the tunnel vision that, he believed, had set in at Hunter’s office. Now that Levin and Morrissey were up to speed, they were thinking just like Kane—they wanted the grand jury to return an indictment. Smit understood that it was their job—they hadn’t been brought in to evaluate the case: they were there to present it. They were hired guns. Though it wouldn’t be known to the public for several weeks, Trip DeMuth had been removed from the case.

Smit gave it one last crack. He asked Hunter to wait with the grand jury, came close to begging him. Smit could
see that Hunter felt the evidence wasn’t quite there yet, but at the same time it was clear to him that the DA was not exactly in charge—he had been told what to do.

On Tuesday, September 15, the grand jury convened at the Justice Center to hear the Ramsey case. It had been 628 days since JonBenét was found murdered in her parents’ basement.

The sky was cloudless and postcard-perfect as reporters and photographers gathered once again. There were representatives from all the Denver and Boulder news outlets, from TV networks—NBC, ABC, CBS, and their affiliates—and from the
National Enquirer
,
Globe
, and
Extra
. Few of the participants would talk, so members of the media chatted with each other as they waited for something to happen.

The grand jurors arrived shortly after 8:00
A
.
M
., and a Boulder County sheriff escorted each one up the sidewalk, past television camera crews and still photographers, to the entrance. None of the jurors seemed upset by the photographers. As they passed the newspaper vending machines by the entrance of the building, they could see that the morning edition of the
Daily Camera
had published their Department of Motor Vehicle photos on the front page. The mug shots made them look like criminals.

On the left side of the grand jury room, with its tight-pile pale blue carpet, stood the jury box, with two tiers of high-backed, cushioned purple chairs, seven in the back row and six in the front. On the front railing of the box sat a white plastic water pitcher and two stacks of paper cups.
Arranged in front of the jury box were nine royal blue, cushioned armchairs. The witness box was on the spectators’ far right, at the judge’s side. Behind the raised area where the judge would sit were two flags, the American flag on one side and the Colorado flag on the other. White paper was taped over the panes of glass on the door so that no one could see in.

Outside the courtroom, no fewer than four sheriff’s deputies were on hand, to keep the press at a distance. There were enough casual exchanges between reporters and grand jurors—“How are you?” “Good morning,” and the like—that a judge ordered the reporters to stand back.

The DA’s position was clear: They would say as little as possible. Bill Wise told
Daily Camera
reporter Matt Sebastian, “I’m not answering any questions except to say that it’s a beautiful day in Boulder.” Alex Hunter—carrying a legal pad and an orthopedic seat for his back condition—also said to reporters, “It’s a beautiful day.”

Michael Kane’s plan was to present the case in the classic way—in the order in which the police had discovered the various elements, without first presenting a history of the family or suggesting possible motives. There was none of that in this case anyway. There were only the crime, the evidence, and the targets. The grand jury would follow the events through the reports and recollections of every officer who had come into contact with the Ramseys, starting just after 5:52
A
.
M
. on December 26,1996, when Patsy called 911.

After a day of introduction, the grand jury began hearing from Rick French, Karl Veitch, Paul Reichenbach, Bob Whitson, Linda Arndt, Barry Weiss, and Larry Mason. Pete Hofstrom, in sweater-vest, tie, and tweed jacket, would walk briskly past the grand jury room, making an exaggerated grimace to a reporter he recognized but never pausing to comment as he headed off to litigate cases that no one would ever read about in the newspaper.

In his thirty-two years as a law enforcement officer, Lou Smit had worked enough grand juries to know that “you can indict a ham sandwich if you present only one side of the case.” What about all the evidence that had been found of an intruder? Smit asked himself. If Michael Kane was planning to introduce any exculpatory evidence, Smit hadn’t yet seen any signs of it. He was sure the Ramseys were going to be indicted.

Smit didn’t want his name associated with the case anymore. On September 19, he finished writing his letter of resignation and showed it to Pete Hofstrom and Trip DeMuth before leaving it for Hunter on September 20. He knew it wouldn’t be long before the media got word of it, but it surprised him that Hunter didn’t call him until three days later—to say that
The Denver Post
knew he’d resigned and wanted a copy of his letter. Hunter was calling to ask Smit’s permission to release it to the press. Smit first said yes, then called Hunter back and asked him to wait a few days.

Smit’s had already received a phone call from Sherry Keene-Osborn of
Newsweek
. She also asked for permission to print his letter. Smit said no. Keene-Osborn then drove all the way from Denver to Colorado Springs, where Smit lived on the west side of town, just below majestic Pikes Peak, on a tree-lined street right out of Norman Rockwell’s America. Beside the door to his lovingly maintained duplex hung a wooden shingle: “The Smits—Founded 1958.”

“This is the greatest case I ever worked,” Smit told the
Newsweek
reporter. “For a detective it’s a real puzzle—a whodunit.” Keene-Osborn talked the retired detective into giving her an unsigned copy of his resignation letter. She sensed that by the time she arrived at his door, Smit’s attitude was, Why quit if nobody is going to know the reasons behind it? When
Newsweek
decided not to print it in the magazine, she shared the letter with the AP, which released it on September 25, the same day that
Newsweek
put it up on its Web site.
*

When Bill Wise read Smit’s letter, he saw it as an invitation to
a defense attorney to call Smit as a star witness. Wise could not understand what evidence of an intruder Smit was talking about, but of course he wasn’t a detective. Still, it was one thing to say that there was insufficient evidence to go after the Ramseys. It was quite another to conclude that the parents couldn’t have done it. That really astounded Wise.

When Tom Haney read the letter, he thought the intruder theory had gotten the best of Smit and that the veteran detective had lost his objectivity. Haney knew that in every case, there was something that didn’t fit. In this case, it was the tone of the ransom note, the strands of a spiderweb partially attached to the open basement window, the shoe imprint and the palm print on the wine cellar door. Haney had debated every aspect of the case with Smit, and with all the evidence that also pointed to the Ramseys, it didn’t make sense for Smit to say that they were innocent.

For his part, Bob Grant saw a fundamental difference between Thomas’s letter and Smit’s. Thomas had intended his to be made public; he’d had an agenda. Smit, on the other hand, had meant his letter to be private; only as an afterthought did he release it to the media. That made Smit’s message weightier. If the case reached trial, no matter who the defendant was, any defense attorney would have to try to get Lou Smit as a defense witness. Not doing so would be tantamount to malpractice.

The two letters showed exactly how complicated the case was. Two experienced detectives, both with full knowledge of all the evidence, had come to opposite conclusions. That raised a question: If these two disagreed, could a grand jury ever agree on who killed JonBenét?

Hal Haddon told
The Denver Post
, “I would hope the authorities in charge of the investigation will take note of what Lou Smit said, and will devote some significant resources to finding the real killer.”

“Lou Smit has been on this case for how many months
now,” Mark Beckner told the same paper, “and I don’t recall him ever presenting any arrest warrants to the DA’s office.”

On the evening of September 27, Smit’s letter spread like wildfire on the Internet, and
20/20
broadcast a one-hour special, hosted by Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer. Correspondent Elizabeth Vargas pointed out: “We emphasize there may be evidence to the contrary [to what we are reporting] not available to us or different conclusions that might be drawn [from what we are reporting]. And a reminder—in law, and in fairness, all people are considered innocent until proven guilty.” The report detailed Donald Foster’s conclusions about Patsy’s authorship of the ransom note; the enhanced 911 call with Burke’s voice in the background; the four fibers found on the duct tape that seemed to match Patsy’s jacket; and a time study prepared by the police, that showed how long it would take for someone to complete the murder and the cover-up while the family slept, unaware.

Vincent Bugliosi, a former Los Angeles prosecutor, told Vargas, “The strongest evidence against the Ramseys in this case is nothing that directly implicates them. [It is] the implausibility that anyone else committed these murders. But paradoxically, the strongest evidence that I’ve just pointed to, by its very nature, is the weakest evidence against the Ramseys.” Vargas asked, “Why?” Bugliosi continued, “If we come to the conclusion that JonBenét was not murdered by an intruder, the inevitable question presents itself: which [parent] did it? A prosecutor can’t argue to a jury, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the evidence is very clear here that either Mr. or Mrs. Ramsey committed this murder and the other one covered it up…’ There is no case to take to the jury unless [the DA] could prove beyond a reasonable doubt which one [of them] did it.” Later in the
show, Bugliosi told Vargas, “Even if you could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Patsy Ramsey wrote the ransom note, that doesn’t mean that she committed the murder.”

Alex Hunter had watched
20/20
fearing the worst. The attack on him wasn’t as bad as he had expected. But listening to Foster’s conclusions regarding Patsy and the ransom note, he knew there was another side to that story, which the Ramseys’ attorneys were sure to make public. Several months earlier, Bryan Morgan had given Hunter a copy of a letter that Foster had written to Patsy Ramsey in the spring of 1997, before he agreed to work for Hunter. The DA was aware that Foster had followed the case on the Internet from February 1997 and that he had also written to Patsy. But when Morgan told him about the second communiqué, which Foster sent to Jameson, who ran an information Web site on the Internet, Hunter was dismayed. It seemed that at first Foster believed that Jameson was in fact John Andrew. Foster, after e-mailing Jameson/John Andrew a series of Internet communiqués, was told by Jameson that she was Sue Bennett and not John Andrew. Foster soon after asked Bennett to turn herself in to the police for her part as an accessory to the crime of murder. In the same communiqué to Jameson/Bennett, Foster said John Andrew and Jameson were one person and indicated that he believed that John Andrew was involved in the death of JonBenét.

In Foster’s letter to Patsy, he had written, “I know you are innocent—know it absolutely and unequivocally. I will stake my professional reputation on it, indeed my faith in my humanity.” He also said that his analysis of the note [at the time] “leads me to believe you did not write it and the police are wasting their time by trying to prove that you did.” Even though Foster’s spring 1997 conclusions were based only on the fragments of the ransom note that were available at the
time, there was a powerful contradiction between his conclusion at the time and what he said in 1998.

“Did you think the Ramseys were going to forget about his letter?” Wise said to a reporter when word of it leaked. In his final report, Foster used strong language to state that Patsy Ramsey had written the ransom note. In the letter to Patsy claiming he was sure she didn’t write it, Foster had used almost the same language.

The
20/20
broadcast also caused problems for the prosecution. Hunter had so far been able to isolate Kane, Levin, and Morrissey from the media. In fact, his entire office had been avoiding the press and there were no leaks from the grand jury room. But now
20/20
had put the case in the news again. This, combined with Lou Smit’s resignation, discouraged the prosecutors. The grand jurors had to be advised again not to read the papers or watch TV—not forbidden, simply advised. They were told that their decisions should be based only on what they heard in the courtroom, no matter how difficult it might be to block out what they heard or read elsewhere.