Judge Glowinsky ruled on May 15 that all but six brief sections of the report would be released on May 21; the entire document, on August 20. On May 20 Mason appealed the ruling, and on June 2 the Colorado Court of Appeals rejected the appeal. However, the appeals court gave Mason time to file for another hearing of the issue. Eventually the court denied Mason the rehearing but allowed her to take her request to the Colorado Supreme Court, which ordered the seal on the balance of the coroner’s report to remain in place, pending its decision on whether to hear her last-resort petition.
On May 28, Detectives Thomas and Gosage finished their investigation of who had called McGuckin in January to request copies of Patsy’s bills. The detectives were told by an informant that the calls had been made by an employee of Touch Tone, Inc., who had impersonated John Ramsey. The police were told that the employee had photocopied Ramsey’s signature for the faxed authorization he’d sent to the hardware store.
Touch Tone employed several “investigators.” Some of them had obtained various records belonging to John, Patsy, and John Andrew Ramsey, including bank account signatures, bank statements, and credit card receipts. In addition, they had obtained telephone records and banking information regarding the Ramseys’ housekeeper, Linda Hoffmann-Pugh. Touch Tone employees had also obtained the names, addresses, home phone numbers, and toll records of the Boulder detectives working the Ramsey case.
The informant was an investigator for Touch Tone. He told the police it was common practice at the company to assume the identity of the person being investigated, which made it easier to obtain copies of personal and confidential records.
On May 29, Judge Morris Sandstead signed Detective Thomas’s request to search the offices of Touch Tone. There the police found personal records relating not only to the Ramseys but to Jay Elowsky; to John Ramsey’s first wife, Lucinda; and even to the Ramseys’ chief investigator, Ellis Armistead. No one was ever prosecuted, for fear that rights to discovery in a court trial would force the DA’s office to turn over a large part of the police file in the Ramsey case.
What the police didn’t know was that Touch Tone’s services had been paid for by a private investigator in California, who in turn had been retained by a tabloid TV program.
Also on May 29, Ann Louise Bardach, known for her investigative reporting, called Suzanne Laurion to introduce herself. She was coming to town to do a ten-thousand-word article for Vanity Fair on “this dreadful story,” she said. Laurion called back an hour later and said that Hunter would meet with Bardach for a few minutes on June 2.
During the last week of May, Hunter, DeMuth, Ainsworth, Smit, and Detectives Trujillo, Harmer, Thomas, and Gosage met with Dr. Henry Lee to review a list of items that would need additional attention if the Ramseys’ house were ever searched again. Lee also thought it was important to gauge the timing of JonBenét’s head injury and strangulation and the injury to her hymen, to learn whether it had occurred before or after the blow to her head. Lee said that forensic pathologists should be consulted and recommended several.
By now the police were receiving forensic test results almost daily but withholding some of them from Hunter’s office for fear of leaks to the Ramseys or the media. Over four dozen people had given blood, hair, and handwriting samples, all of which were tested, but none of them matched the forensic evidence from the crime scene.
Several pieces of evidence matched John and Patsy’s samples, but that was logical and to be expected, since they lived in the house and had constant, lengthy contact with their daughter. Without semen or some other hard evidence, the incest theory went nowhere. A careful review of Dr. Beuf’s medical records had given no indication of prior abuse. Nor could the police find any indication of prior suspicious behavior on the part of JonBenét’s parents.
The police had hung their hat on the Ramseys as culprits, but they were still unable to provide the DA’s office with enough evidence to warrant an arrest. Neither Alex Hunter nor the police were ready to admit that the case was unsolvable, however. Knowing that the ransom note was the best piece of evidence they had, Hunter hoped that the CBI’s handwriting experts would find something solid, but Chet Ubowski would not take the leap and say that Patsy had written the note. The CBI expert refused to tailor his conclusions to the needs of the police and the DA.
To say that Patsy hadn’t been excluded as the author of the note was only “soft evidence,” as Hunter called it, and it might not be enough to charge her as an accessory. In addition, the DA believed that under Colorado law an accessory could be charged only when a principal was charged.* Harder evidence would be needed to charge a perpetrator.
Hunter called his old friend Bob Kupperman, formerly of the Institute for Strategic and International Studies, who recommended using a psychological linguist, Donald Foster, a professor of dramatic literature at Vassar. Foster studied grammar, syntax, punctuation, style, and vocabulary to track down the authors of texts. He had accurately identified for the FBI source material for parts of Theodore Kaczynski’s Unabomber manifesto. He had also identified the writer Joe Klein as the anonymous author of the novel Primary Colors and had discovered William Shakespeare was the author of a previously anonymous Elizabethan funeral eulogy.
Hunter thought that Foster might be helpful in the Ramsey case. Just before the July Fourth weekend, he called Foster, who told the DA that he had once written a letter to Patsy Ramsey and another to her son, John Andrew, while following the case on the Internet. He said he had wanted to lend them some support. Hunter saw no conflict of interest.
Foster agreed to analyze the ransom note for the DA’s office. He would also be sent Janet McReynolds’s play Hey, Rube, Christmas letters and articles written by both Janet and Bill McReynolds, some of Patsy Ramsey’s writings, and transcripts of the Ramseys’ January 1 and May 1 press conferences. Not long after speaking to Foster, Hunter said that “this case will come down to linguistics.”
U.S. district judge Richard Matsch, who was presiding over the first Oklahoma city bombing trial at the time, had noted that handwriting analysis was not a science and wasn’t subject to peer review and was therefore not verifiable. But the Colorado state courts felt differently. In many cases, state judges had allowed handwriting experts to testify about comparisons and to draw conclusions from them.
For months the Boulder police had been collecting Patsy’s handwriting samples: beauty-pageant entry forms, school documents, applications, and business letters. They had recently visited the offices of Hayes Micro Computer in Norcross, Georgia, where Patsy had worked before marrying John. There they found more handwriting samples. This material was relevant for handwriting analysis but was of limited value to Donald Foster. He needed lengthy texts and examples of Patsy’s prepared and extemporaneous speeches. These would take time to find and even longer to analyze.
If the CBI were to state definitively that Patsy had written the note and Foster were to confirm that finding, Hunter would have something. He worried, however, that even with such positive findings, his staff might be unable to arrest Patsy. Linguistic analysis had never been used by experts in Colorado courts, so there was a question about whether Foster’s findings would be admissible. The professor had never before testified in a criminal trial.
Meanwhile, Eller and his detectives were slowly coming to the realization that without a break in the case, Hunter would not arrest the Ramseys. One detective was sure that if the DA had charged them earlier, Patsy would have broken down and confessed. When that didn’t happen, he suggested to his superiors that a grand jury be used to compel the Ramseys to talk. Hunter rejected the idea, saying it was premature. When immunity was discussed, he said he didn’t want to give someone protection in exchange for testifying. Most of Eller’s detectives believed that the moment had been lost forever. They didn’t much care if the Ramseys suffered the shame of public condemnation for the rest of their lives.
Bill Wise, like the detectives, had been sure earlier in the year that th
e Ramseys were guilty. But that was before the alleged semen turned out to be something else. By May 1997 he was far less sure that a case against them could be proved. Wise hadn’t lost hope entirely, but as his certainty diminished, he continued to think that if the Ramseys had killed their daughter, they deserved to suffer.
PART THREE
Stories within Stories
1
Late in the morning of Monday, June 2, Suzanne Laurion greeted Ann Bardach of Vanity Fair and escorted her to Alex Hunter’s private office, where the journalist and the DA were scheduled for a fifteen-minute interview. Sitting down in one of the four old leather chairs that encircled a wood table, Bardach noticed a pencil sketch of President Kennedy hanging above Hunter’s antique rolltop desk. Sitting atop the desk was a black three-ring binder, on its cover a color photograph of JonBenét Ramsey.
Bardach’s fifteen minutes of interview time became half an hour before Hunter said they’d have to take a break. Oklahoma City bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh’s verdict was to be announced. At 1:15 P.M. Hunter turned on his TV. Phil Miller, Jim Atherton, Pete Hofstrom, Susan Ingraham, Trip DeMuth, Bill Nagel, and several other staff members came in to watch. After it was announced that McVeigh was found guilty of the bombing and the murder of eight federal agents, Bardach stayed in Hunter’s office and soaked up the conversation.
In his interview, Hunter had told her his impressions of the Ramseys and their attorneys and referred to John Ramsey as “Ice Man.” When the DA talked about his team of investigators, he called Lou Smit “the ace” and “the fox.” By the time she left the Justice Center, Bardach had over two hours’ worth of tape-recorded material. A few days later, she called the DA’s office with follow-up questions. When Hunter heard them, he replied that the statements Bardach was referring to had been given “off the record” and therefore didn’t require a response. Afterward, Suzanne Laurion tried to clarify with Bardach which parts of her conversation with Hunter were off the record. Bardach argued that her tape recorder offered evidence of what was “on the record.”
By then, Bardach had already spoken with several friends and neighbors of the Ramseys. She had shown up at John and Barbara Fernie’s house uninvited. John Fernie would later tell a reporter covering the story that when he and his wife arrived home, Bardach was waiting for them. When they refused her an interview, she became pushy, said Fernie.
Not everyone reacted to the journalist the same way, however. In time, she would meet with two police detectives to hear the cops’ side of the story. It’s possible that after all those months of talking to local media and the tabloids, the police and Alex Hunter both talked freely to Bardach because they felt they had reached the epitome of celebrity when this national publication sought them out.
Meanwhile, Bardach kept in touch with Suzanne Laurion. “The Ramseys are in a full-court campaign; they’re doing a spin on Alex too,” the journalist told Hunter’s press rep. The DA should know about it, she added. Another time, she asked Laurion, “What is wrong with this town? In any other city, the Ramseys would have been behind bars long ago.” Bill Wise was concerned because he had heard that Bardach was looking for dirt on Hunter and his staff.
At the end of June, Bardach asked for another interview with Hunter. She told Laurion she had conducted over a hundred interviews. She said there was some “serious stuff” being leveled against Hofstrom and Hunter and that most of it was coming from Hunter’s usual allies. Hunter said that any such accusations were ludicrous; he had full confidence in the way his staff was handling the case. Laurion tried to get Bardach to submit her follow-up questions in writing, since the DA refused another interview.
Laurion became concerned that Hunter and his staff didn’t understand the distinction between “on the record” and “off the record.” She could see disaster looming on the horizon with Vanity Fair, and hoping to avoid further catastrophes, she sent a memo to Hunter, Wise, and Phil Miller. She warned them that not all journalists play by the rules, that not all journalists clarify the rules of an interview in advance—because that sort of talk makes sources nervous—and that some journalists are also careless about protecting their sources, even in off-the-record situations. “When they use what source #1 says to get the information from source #2,” Laurion noted in her memo, “they ‘inadvertently’ reveal the identity of source #1 to source #2.” The bottom line, she said, was that the DA’s name might not show up in print or on TV, but it almost certainly would show up on the notepad of some source #2. Her memo continued:
When I was a reporter, I rarely went off the record because most of my sources loved to talk and they would eventually blab stuff to me anyway…ON THE RECORD.
Now that I’m working this case, I never go off the record. No way! As author/journalist Jay Crouse says, “Off the record conferences are subterfuges which stifle the voice of the press and deprive the people of their right to know.”
The warning was tactful but plain. Laurion also sent Hunter and his staff the published definitions of on the record, off the record, not for attribution, background, and deep background.
The same day Hunter met with Bardach, June 2, Frank Coffman, a local writer and new friend of Jeff Shapiro’s, dropped by the DA’s office to leave a note for Lou Smit. Coffman was surprised when Smit came out to the reception area and suggested they have a chat. Over coffee at the Canyon Café in the Justice Center, Coffman told Smit he’d heard a rumor that the acronym SBTC, which had been mentioned in the ransom note, might stand for “saved by the cross.”
The detective said he had to admit that there were “lots of wild things in this case.” He asked if Coffman knew what movies had been playing in Boulder right before JonBenét was murdered.
Ransom was one, Coffman said.
“Well, what do you think that means?” Smit asked.
“Could JonBenét’s death have been premeditated?”
“You’re the one who used the word premeditated,” Smit answered—as if confirming that he too thought the murder had been planned.
“This guy’s going to be caught,” Smit added.
That was odd, Coffman thought. The police didn’t have to catch John or Patsy Ramsey—all they had to do was arrest or indict them. Coffman surmised that Smit was exploring an intruder theory.
“I’ve studied the whole thing, I’ve read everything,” Smit said in a matter-of-fact—and somewhat superior—way. “Other people have a piece of the picture. I have all the information right up here,” he said, pointing to his head.
Some weeks later, Coffman met Steve Thomas for the first time at police headquarters. “Do you think the crime was premeditated?” he asked the detective.
Thomas assumed that Coffman was referring to an intruder theory.
“That’s not the way we think. That sounds like Lou Smit,” he replied. “They’re going by a different theory over there.”
Smit and Steve Ainsworth were still investigating the possible use of a stun gun. By now they had learned that Air Tasers were sold locally by Boulder Security, and that another stun gun, called the Muscle Man, had the same characteristics as the Air Taser.
When they had gathered sufficient information, Ainsworth, Pete Hofstrom, Trip DeMuth, and Detective Sgt. Wickman met with the coroner, John Meyer. After reviewing the photos and this new information, Meyer concluded that the injuries on JonBenét’s face and back were, in fact, consistent with those produced by a stun gun.
Soon after, Ainsworth learned of a 1988 Larimer County murder in which a stun gun had been used on a thirteen-month-old girl, Michaela Hughes, who had been sexually assaulted and killed. Ainsworth met with Dr. Robert Deters, the pathologist on the case, and showed him the autopsy photos of JonBenét. Deters agreed that the marks were consistent with a stun-gun injury, but he didn’t think the body had to be exhumed. Nothing more would be learned by examining the skin tissue. Ainsworth asked Deters if a child of six would be immobilized by a stun-gun’s electrical shock. Not only would the child be pa
ralyzed, the coroner said, but she would have been unable to scream. That raised the question of whether JonBenét had screamed before the stun gun was used on her—if one was used.
In her June 3 column, Cindy Adams of the New York Post wrote that Commander Eller had applied for the job of police chief in Cocoa Beach, Florida. The next day, Charlie Brennan of the Rocky Mountain News obtained a copy of Eller’s résumé from Florida. Brennan told Bill Wise that he had Eller’s curriculum vita, and Wise asked for a copy. Since Hunter’s staff could also obtain the document, Brennan saw no reason not to fax him a copy.
A few days later, Hunter spoke to Brennan. “Charlie, you might want to do a little digging into the time Eller spent with the community policing consortium,” Hunter said. Brennan could tell that the DA was choosing his words carefully. “Apparently things didn’t go so well for him there,” Hunter told the reporter. “There might have been a charge of sexual harassment, or something to that effect.”
On page four of Eller’s résumé, it said that he had been a “loaned executive” from January to August 1995, serving as director of the Colorado Consortium of Community Policing.
Perfect Murder, Perfect Town Page 40