A few days later, Eller rejected the offer. In a letter to Morgan, he said that an interview under the specified conditions would not be helpful. “The time for interviewing John and Patsy as witnesses who could provide critical information that would be helpful in the initial stages of our investigation has passed,” Eller wrote. He offered a counterproposal: he wanted to interview the Ramseys separately on Friday, January 24, at 6:00 P.M., and he would not consider any restrictions on the length or the place of the interviews. Eller waited for a reply.
On January 10, the day after Chief Koby’s press conference, Alex Hunter and Bill Wise met to discuss how the DA’s office should handle the media. They agreed that Koby’s stonewalling had backfired.
“It’s shoot yourself in the foot,” Wise told Hunter, “then before you get it Band-Aided, you shoot yourself in the foot again.” Wise wasn’t about to let the police chief destroy his office’s carefully cultivated twenty-five-year relationship with the press.
Hunter decided that he would make himself more available to reporters. His office would try to be helpful—not to pass on information about the case, but to stay in touch. The idea was to say to reporters when appropriate, “You’re wasting time if you go down that road.” That approach, Wise knew, wouldn’t entirely satisfy the hungry media, but it might take some of the edge off reporters’ antagonism.
It wasn’t long before bookers for ABC’s 20/20, the Today show, Larry King Live, and NBC Nightly News all started to call Hunter. He chatted on the phone with the producers but declined invitations to appear on their shows. When he was ready to speak publicly, he said, he would hold a press conference.
My first memory of death was my father shooting a BB gun and killing a robin. I was about ten at the time and I didn’t know very much about death. He started crying, and so did I. To this day I don’t know why he cried, because it was his choice to kill the robin.
My father died of a stroke in 1983, when he was in his early seventies. It was hard for me. I loved him a lot, but we had grown apart and hadn’t seen each other since I went to the University of Colorado in 1955. In those days I wasn’t prepared for death.
My father had been active in local small-time politics in Briarcliff Manor, New York, where I grew up. He was a Republican. Never swore, was kind, and just a good guy. Indirectly, he prepared me for public service. My present wife’s father, a former FBI agent, DA, and judge from California, later became a second father to me.
I remember driving west in September of 1955 and coming across the plains, watching the Rocky Mountains rise up before me. Then I reached a mesa just outside of Boulder and saw this little town sitting at the foot of the Front Range of the Rockies. I was looking at a very special place. It was completely different from New York, and I was just eighteen.
In the East, family means a lot, but I soon discovered there was no sense of that in Boulder.
—Alex Hunter
Alex Hunter and Bill Wise met at the University of Colorado School of Law in 1960. Hunter, two years ahead of Wise in school, was already winning top awards in national and international moot court competitions when he made Law Review. Hunter graduated near the top of his class; Wise, near the bottom of his. After graduating in 1963, Hunter became a clerk for Leonard Sutton, chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, and traveled around the state working on Sutton’s reelection campaign, at a time when justices were elected by popular vote. This got Hunter thinking about public service. In the spring of 1965, he became a part-time deputy DA in Boulder under Rex Scott.
After his graduation, Bill Wise hung out his shingle as a sole practitioner, but in 1967 he traded in his “typewriter and card table” office for a law partnership with Hunter and Richard Hopkins, another friend. Around that time, Hunter and Wise began to buy property in Boulder County. Neither had much money, but both had little to lose. “One dollar down and a dollar forever” was their motto.
They bought a nine-acre parcel in an industrial park for $120,000. They borrowed the down payment and then borrowed the balance—at a time when they didn’t have a thousand dollars between them. Soon they were able to buy a residential block zoned for business in downtown Boulder; they planned to put up an office building. Wise told a friend that while they were sleeping one night, the city council rezoned the land to residential and they never made the money they’d anticipated.
In 1972 Hunter started thinking about making a run for governor. Even though he had been more politically conservative than most of his Boulder contemporaries in the late sixties, he became chairman of the Democratic Party in Boulder County. He knew that a traditional first stop on the road to the capital was the DA’s office in Boulder, so that’s where he decided to begin, though he knew that his first election wouldn’t be easy. Wise and Hunter gave up their law practice in June 1972 and sold half of the eleven hundred acres they owned in Lyons, Colorado, for $150,000. The citizens of Boulder contributed $500, and Wise and Hunter put $30,000 of their own money into the campaign. Wise became Hunter’s campaign manager. His philosophy was “Bad ink is better than no ink.”
Hunter ran against Stan Johnson, an ex-FBI agent and a good DA. Hunter’s campaign ads said: “Stanley Johnson has never even tried a case in 3½ years.” Wise and Hunter assumed that the voters didn’t know that most DAs don’t try cases.
In September 1972, Alex Hunter won the primary by fewer than 300 votes. With that victory under his belt, he and Wise targeted University of Colorado students, since this would be the first year that eighteen-year-olds were allowed to vote in Boulder County. Among other things, Hunter called for reclassifying marijuana possession as a misdemeanor, while Johnson took a law-and-order stance, saying that marijuana use leads to heroin addiction.
Although The Denver Post came out against Hunter, he profited from having positioned himself in an emerging liberal community. He was elected by 687 votes out of some 68,000.
CU students voted en masse, and Hunter’s percentages from the campus precincts were enormous. That same year, liberals who advocated controlling the growth of Boulder and protecting the environment won a number of local races and formed a new establishment. Boulder had survived transient hippies and the antiwar movement and was coming into its own. The city elected a black mayor and issued its first same-sex marriage license. Soon some would call it the People’s Republic of Boulder.
When Alex Hunter became DA, he named Bill Wise his first assistant. Wise had no desire to try cases, so instead he worked as press liaison and administrator, preparing budgets and signing payroll vouchers, while Hunter tried cases. Wise and Hunter soon learned that the DA’s office couldn’t fool the press. “If we made a mistake, we admitted it,” Wise said.
Hunter had intended to stay in the DA job for four years, then move on, he hoped, to the Colorado attorney general’s office, the rung just below governor on the political ladder. Busy with his job, Hunter’s land investments failed and he found himself overleveraged. It wasn’t long before he had to file for bankruptcy under Chapter 11.
But at the same time he was enjoying the DA’s job. He started a Consumer Unit and a Victim Witness Unit—community services that didn’t exist elsewhere in Colorado at the time. At his request, the county commissioners budgeted $5,000 to compensate crime victims. Hunter began to build a relationship with local citizens. Before long he was attracting good people to his office, too, including Pete Hofstrom from the sheriff’s department.
Whenever Wise and Hunter heard that someone was interested in running for DA, they would sit down and talk that person out of running, pointing out that with Hunter’s record of community services and low crime, no one could unseat him. Hunter also created the impression that he had the money to run a tough campaign, though in fact he didn’t.
By 1976 Hunter found himself enjoying being a big fish in a small pond. He ran—unopposed—and was reelected.
In subsequent years, he would put down roots. After the dissolution of his first marriage, which produced
three children, Hunter married Margie, a gynecologist, and the couple had two children together. They moved into a ranch-style house with a sunroom that overlooked a small stream. Beyond was a view of the Flatirons and the Indian Peaks. Like most Boulderites, Hunter was physically active. He liked to work up a sweat on the squash court and on his Schwinn exercycle.
After Koby’s press conference, Hunter asked his chief deputy, Bill Nagel, to contact out-of-town DAs who had handled two recent high-profile cases—Jeffery Dahmer and Polly Klaas—for any advice they could give. Michael Meese, of the Sonoma County DA’s office in California, sent to Boulder a complete report of what they had learned from the Polly Klaas kidnap-homicide case. It included strategies for investigative teams, data processing, and press control. Hunter was particularly interested in the reports on media guidelines.
Bill Wise and his wife, Diane Balkin, a Denver chief trial deputy DA, suggested—independently—that Hunter retain Barry Scheck, a well-respected DNA specialist from New York, as a consultant.* Then Wise thought of hiring Dr. Henry Lee, a Connecticut criminologist who had gained national prominence in the Simpson trial. Because the media made no clear distinction between police work and the DA’s job, Hunter knew that the presence of Lee and Scheck might help his friend Tom Koby present a better image of Boulder’s investigative efforts. It might also change what Hunter feared was the small-town image Koby had given the case.
Scheck usually worked for the defense.* He had destroyed the credibility of a police criminalist, Dennis Fung, on the witness stand in the Simpson criminal case. So it might prove tricky to convince Koby to accept Scheck’s role in the case. On the other hand, when law enforcement retained experts like Lee and Scheck, they became unavailable to the defense.
Bill Wise spoke to Henry Lee, who said he liked the idea of working with Barry Scheck again. He didn’t know if his schedule would permit him to sign onto the case, though. The two men agreed they’d talk after Wise spoke to Scheck.
John Meyer understood that his written autopsy report would be the official record of his findings. As coroner, he was the collector of objective evidence. Though JonBenét’s autopsy was only one of the 140 or so he did in a year, Meyer understood its importance and was in no rush to finish the report.
Under Colorado law, there is no provision for public access to autopsy findings until the reports are completed, so no one could legally obtain access until Meyer was ready to file his report. As he worked on it, the Boulder County District Attorney’s office prepared for a battle with the media, and by the end of the month, deputy county attorney Madeline Mason, on behalf of Meyer, would argue against release of the report. Meanwhile, Meyer took his time, knowing that the moment it was released, forensic pathologists and the press alike would scrutinize it.
As he wrote, Meyer prepared for the questions that would be asked when he appeared as a witness. Both the prosecution and the defense would be relying on his report, not on his memory, so he knew he had to be extremely thorough in the details.
The report Meyer was preparing stated that on the right side of JonBenét’s chin, he had spotted a superficial abrasion measuring about 3/16 by 1/8 inch. There was another abrasion on the back of her right shoulder and also several linear hemorrhages across her left shoulder. On the left side of her lower back were two very small dried abrasions, which Meyer planned to describe in his report as “rust-colored to slightly purple in color.”
On the back of JonBenét’s left leg, roughly 4 inches above her heel, Meyer had seen two more scratchlike abrasions, between 1/8 and 1/16 inch in size. For his report, Meyer wrote, “The examination of the extremities is otherwise unremarkable. On the middle finger of the right hand is a yellow metal band. Around the right wrist is a yellow metal identification bracelet with the name JonBenét on one side and the date 12/25/96 on the other side. A red ink line drawing in the form of a heart is located on the palm of the left hand.”
The coroner noted that JonBenét’s fingernails had been clipped and sealed in envelopes for further examination and that after examining JonBenét’s genitals, he had swabbed her thighs and taken several swabs each from her vagina, anus, and mouth.
Meyer remembered what the police had done during the autopsy. Detective Arndt had stepped away to call Detective James Byfield, who was drafting an addendum to the original search warrant so that the police could obtain additional evidence from the Ramseys’ home. Arndt told Byfield that fibers had been found on JonBenét’s shirt and that similar material had been discovered in her pubic area. She also reported the green fibers in the child’s hair.
At the same time, Detective Trujillo had called the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to ask about the feasibility of lifting fingerprints from JonBenét’s skin. It was a long shot, Trujillo learned, because of the skin’s comparatively rough texture. Meyer had suspended the autopsy while a CBI technician walked Trujillo through the process. The best approach would be to tent or otherwise encapsulate the body, then to “fume” the remains with Super Glue. The glue vapor would adhere to any prints on the skin and enhance them enough to make them visible under a fluorescent light source. Trujillo ended up using a different, simpler method and lifted one partial print.
Meyer decided not to make note of those events in his report. Afterward, he had continued with an internal examination of the body. He had seen no sternal or rib fractures. He noted that he had found some scattered petechial hemorrhages on the surface of each lung and on the front surface of the heart. These suggested death by suffocation. The bladder, he noted, had been contracted and held no urine. The esophagus was empty. The small intestine had contained fragments of a yellow to light-greenish-tan material, apparently remnants of a fruit or vegetable—possibly pineapple.
The next thing Meyer noted in his report was a fracture of the skull that had not been visible before he removed part of the skull. There was subdural hemorrhaging over the surface of the right cerebral hemisphere and a thin film of subarachnoid hemorrhaging over the whole right cerebral hemisphere. In the report, he wrote about an extensive purple bruise, about 8 by 1¾ inches in area, underlying the skull fracture, as well as a bruise at the tip of the right temporal lobe measuring about ¼ inch square. The tip of the left temporal lobe, Meyer noted, showed only very minimal bruising.
After writing about the brain, Meyer moved on to the upper body. Examining the thyroid cartilage, cricoid cartilage, and hyoid bone, he had found no signs of hemorrhages or fractures.
Meyer remembered that shortly before he completed the autopsy, Arndt had called Byfield again to tell him there was a skull fracture and hemorrhaging of the brain, which were consistent with a blow to the head. She had sounded surprised because when the body was lying near the Christmas tree, there had been no external indication that the child had sustained a head injury.
His report nearly finished, the coroner locked it away in his office safe, where it would await the outcome of the legal battle to keep it from the public.
On Friday afternoon, January 10, a few minutes after Meyer gave an interview to CNN to answer some technical questions about the case, a phone message caught his eye: it was from Tom Brokaw.
Brokaw’s producer told Meyer that NBC had an advance copy of the Globe tabloid, which featured photographs from the autopsy and crime scene. Were they authentic?
“I can’t tell you without seeing them,” Meyer replied.
“I’ll fax them to you, “the producer said.
Meyer studied the faxed images and saw that the photographs were genuine. Some of them had been taken by his staff. Minutes later, Meyer was in Sheriff George Epp’s office, one floor above his in the Justice Center. The coroner was shaking.
“George, I’ve got a problem. I need your help.”
Wordlessly, Meyer showed Epp the fax he had just received and his set of original photographs. Then Meyer called Bryan Morgan and told him about the call from NBC and what to expect.
When Meyer left, the sheriff assembled three of his
top investigators, Detective Steve Ainsworth, Sgt. George Dunphy, and Lt. Steve Prentup. Step one: interview Meyer and his staff and get them polygraphed. Step two: contact Photo Craft, the lab that had handled the photos, and interview everyone who might have touched either the film or the finished prints. It surprised Detective Ainsworth that the coroner had sent this highly sensitive material to the most ordinary little shop with no special security and no extra precautions. “We take our film to K-Mart to get the two-for-one deal,” Ainsworth said half aloud. “I need to go to school on this one.” That afternoon, one by one, Meyer’s staff was questioned. Everyone agreed to be polygraphed.
It was 9:00 P.M. when Roy McCutcheon, the owner of Photo Craft, told the sheriff’s detectives about Shawn Smith, who ran the minilab and personally handled all the coroner’s work. The Late Show with David Letterman was still on when the officers showed up at Smith’s home, a short way up Four Mile Canyon.
“You must know something about this,” Lt. Prentup said to him.
Smith told the officers he had no idea how the pictures had been obtained by the tabloid. He agreed to take a polygraph the next day.
The next morning, January 11, the coroner’s staff and Shawn Smith were taken to Amich & Jenks, a polygraph firm in Wheat Ridge, just west of Denver. Everyone on Meyer’s staff passed except for Patricia Dunn, who had shot some of the photos. Her polygraph results were inconclusive.
Shawn Smith was next.
“Did you arrange with anyone to give or sell those JonBenét photographs to the media?”
“No.”
Jeff Jenks, the examiner, had Smith hooked up to the polygraph in an 8-by-10-foot windowless room. Smith’s respiration, sweat output, blood pressure, and heart rate readings were fed into a briefcase-size machine.
“Did you give or sell any of those JonBenét photos to anyone outside of Photo Craft?”
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