Perfect Murder, Perfect Town

by Lawrence Schiller

  Brennan decided to look into the matter. The media were well aware of the tensions between the DA’s office and the police, and Brennan knew that this story would serve Hunter’s purpose of discrediting Eller. Brennan had no interest in helping Hunter, but a charge of harassment against Eller would be legitimate news.

  Brennan soon learned that indeed Eller had been loaned out to the community policing consortium for a year and that he had returned to the Boulder PD earlier than expected. Those Brennan spoke to praised Eller for the most part. A few confided that there may have been “personality conflicts” resulting in Eller’s early departure from the consortium. Brennan could find no evidence of the charge and dropped the story. John Eller didn’t get the job in Cocoa Beach.

  If Hunter wasn’t happy with Eller, Pete Hofstrom wasn’t any happier with Tom Wickman, who was running the investigation for the commander. Hofstrom suspected that the police were not sharing all their information with the DA’s office. He felt that Wickman hadn’t been candid with him about whether a particular DNA report had been received. Hunter confronted Koby about it, and the chief admitted that his detectives were withholding information. Koby seemed to be more upset that Wickman had not been forthcoming than that Hofstrom had been deceived.

  Hofstrom was also angry that the police still hadn’t given him a printout of all the physical evidence. Without such a list, Smit and Ainsworth couldn’t complete the organization of the files they had been hired to do. The two detectives were reduced to rechecking the police reports and pursuing a few independent leads. Their time and skill were being wasted.

  BOULDER PROSECUTOR OUT OF LOOP

  Police detectives investigating the murder of JonBenét Ramsey refuse to share the results of DNA analysis with the district attorney’s office…. Test results from Cellmark Diagnostics Laboratory, received by Boulder detectives May 13, remain a secret to Boulder County District Attorney Alex Hunter and his staff.

  The relationship between the two offices has been stormy at several points in the Ramsey case.

  —Charlie Brennan and Kevin McCullen

  Rocky Mountain News, June 7, 1997

  After the Rocky Mountain News published “Boulder Prosecutor Out of Loop,” Hunter called Jeff Shapiro from his car phone. The headline, not the facts of the story, seemed to have embarrassed the DA.

  “God, I hate that fucker,” Hunter said. He meant John Eller, who was probably responsible for holding back the DNA results.

  “Should we look into him?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I think so,” Hunter answered. “I think it’s his turn”—meaning that Eller should get ripped in the tabloids.

  “I can get you Eller’s résumé,” Hunter told me, “and I can get you the letter Larry Mason’s attorney just wrote to the Boulder PD. He’s suing Eller.”

  Hunter suggested we meet in his office. Later in the day, he started the conversation by discussing different ways I could dig up dirt on Eller. He handed me Eller’s résumé from his recent job application in Florida and pointed to something on the fourth page.

  “I think if you look far enough, you may find a sexual harassment charge somewhere here.”

  “Really,” I said.

  “When do you think this could come out?” Hunter asked. “I hate that fucker!”

  We both started to laugh.

  In my mind, Eller was the bad guy. He’s the asshole. Then it hit me. I was reacting to Hunter’s perception of Eller. Hunter said the police detectives were the good guys and Eller was the problem.

  I asked him about Eller’s claims that Larry Mason had leaked information to the media.

  “It was someone in Bryan Morgan’s office who really leaked that, not Larry Mason,” Hunter said.

  “What was leaked?” I asked.

  Alex picked up the phone and said he was calling Bryan Morgan to get the facts.

  “Did you ever dig that up for me?” Hunter asked Morgan a moment later.

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The DA was calling Ramsey’s criminal defense lawyer right in front of me to get information I had asked for.

  I mean, would Chris Darden call Johnnie Cochran and say, “Did you check on that date I need for this Enquirer guy?”

  It was bizarre.

  —Jeff Shapiro

  During the second week in June, Jeff Shapiro visited the Boulder public library to research garrotes. He learned that the Spanish conquistadors who colonized the Philippines had executed native revolutionaries by strangling them with a garrote in the same manner the media believed JonBenét had been murdered. Shapiro discovered that the garrote became the symbol of the Philippine revolution of 1872 and that every Filipino schoolchild learned that the revolutionaries had been garroted to death in public. José Rizal, who inspired the revolution, was himself sentenced to death on December 26, the same day of the year that JonBenét Ramsey died.

  I knew John Ramsey had been stationed at Subic Bay in the Philippines, and he must have known about the role garroting played in the history of the islands.

  I started to freak out.

  I called Steve Thomas. Soon after that, he and Detective Jane Harmer saw me. I read them the material about the Philippines.

  “I really want to help,” I told Thomas.

  “It seems like you’ve got the right intentions,” Thomas said. “You care about this little girl—you seem to want justice for JonBenét. I’m committed to that, and as long as you are too, I’ll be more than happy to continue these conversations.”

  I looked into Thomas’s eyes and knew I was doing something right. That was when I started to look up to him like a big brother.

  Several days after I met with Thomas and Harmer, Pam Griffin told Frank Coffman that Patsy Ramsey wrote the words Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey on the same lined pad that the ransom note was written on. Pam said Patsy had told her that it was the beginning of an invitation she was writing: “Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey…invite you…” By then there was a rumor that the cops believed this writing was a false start on the ransom note. If what Pam said was true, it was important to the police.

  Moments after I heard what Coffman had learned, I left a message for Thomas on his voice mail. He called me back from his car, and I told him what Coffman had learned. I literally heard Thomas hit the brakes.

  “Jeff, that’s no fuckin’ invitation.”

  The next day, the police asked Coffman and me to come down to headquarters so that Coffman could get Griffin on the phone and have her restate what she’d said. The police would tape-record the conversation. At first all we got was Pam’s answering machine.

  While we were hanging around, Coffman told Thomas that I was having conversations with Alex Hunter and that he was confiding in me. I’d told that to Coffman, but I would never have wanted the police to know—as I would never want Hunter to know I was talking to Thomas.

  A moment later, Thomas took me with him into a small interview room. Before he said a word, I started to talk.

  “Can we talk off the record?” I asked.

  “OK.”

  I figured that if I didn’t make a deal with Thomas right then and there, he’d go straight to Eller, tell him what Coffman had said, and that it would be used against Hunter. For sure I would be fucked.

  “Nothing we talk about leaves this room,” I said to Thomas.

  Again he said, “OK.”

  “I spend a great deal of time with Hunter,” I said, “like four fuckin’ hours a day—sometimes in his office and sometimes on the phone. I’ve learned a lot.”

  Thomas just listened for a while. Then he asked if I knew Trip DeMuth or Pete Hofstrom. I told him I didn’t even know who else worked in the DA’s office.

  “You really know Hunter?” Thomas continued. “I can’t even talk to him. How can you?”

  “Steve, all I can tell you is he likes me a lot.”

  “Jeff, if you’ve got Hunter’s ear,” he said, “do us both a favor—get him off the intruder path.”

  “I’ll
try,” I told Thomas.

  “We’ve got more evidence in here to nail these people to the wall right now,” Thomas said, “and Hunter’s office is looking for intruders.”

  Finally we reached Pam Griffin. As the police listened in on her conversation with Coffman, she told him it was Alex Hunter who, in a phone conversation with her, had suggested that the words Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey might be the beginning of an invitation.

  —Jeff Shapiro

  CITY OF BOULDER NEWS FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE JUNE 12, 1997

  BOULDER POLICE ASK FOR INVESTIGATION OF POSSIBLE THEFT OF COMPUTER DOCUMENTS

  Boulder Police have asked for an investigation by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation into a possible theft of computer documents from the police department computer located in the combined offices of the Boulder County District Attorney and the Boulder Police Department. This is the “war room” used by investigators assigned to the JonBenét Ramsey murder.

  The police department has confirmed that someone gained access to a computer containing Ramsey case information at approximately 1 A.M. on Saturday, June 7.

  —Boulder Police Department Press Release

  When Carol McKinley read the police department’s press release, she paged her police source, who told her the break-in was proof that Hunter’s office was after the material in the police files. Tom Trujillo had turned on the computer in the war room, and when the start-up program didn’t ask for his six-character password, he knew the computer had been tampered with. The room was supposed to be secure, yet the system date in the computer suggested that a break-in had taken place at about 1:00 A.M. on June 7.

  Later that afternoon, McKinley spoke to Hunter. He was furious because Eller had personally accused him of the crime. “I think you or Bill Wise broke into the war room,” Eller had said to him. “And a Zip drive is also missing.” According to Hunter, Eller had acted like a raving maniac when the two men met behind the Justice Center near Boulder Creek.

  Carl Whiteside, the CBI director, was attending a meeting in Breckenridge when the Boulder PD’s press release was issued. When Whiteside was told about Eller’s statement, he asked to meet with the commander. Whiteside worried that his agency would be dragged into the ongoing battle between Hunter and Eller.

  “I don’t know who exactly did it,” Eller told Whiteside the next day, “but just look into it.” Whiteside could see that Eller wanted to implicate the DA’s office.

  The computer in question was taken to the CBI. Whiteside asked Chuck Davis, his computer expert, to handle the technical side of the investigation. Whiteside didn’t know at the time that two days earlier, Detective Sgt. Wickman had asked Davis to help with a computer that the Boulder police thought someone had broken into. When he arrived, Davis discovered that the police hadn’t fingerprinted the computer, which by then had been handled by a half-dozen people without the precaution of wearing gloves.

  Mark Wilson, head of the CBI’s criminal investigation unit, and five investigators were assigned to the case. Hofstrom, Smit, Ainsworth, DeMuth, Wickman, Thomas, Harmer, Trujillo, and Gosage, all of whom had access to the war room, were interviewed. So were Hunter and Wise, though neither of them had access cards. Everyone provided the CBI with an alibi for 1:00 A.M. on June 7. Then Trujillo found the missing Zip drive in the trunk of his car.

  The CBI team fingerprinted the entire war room and checked the records of the computer-controlled locks: there had been no entry at or about 1:00 A.M. on June 7. They examined the ceiling, the floor, the walls, the dust patterns, and anything else that might give them a clue. They concluded that only a ghost could have entered the room without proper access.

  Meanwhile, Davis’s investigation of the Compaq computer revealed that it had no modem or network connection. Only one fingerprint was found inside the unit, in a region where only an assembly-line worker could have touched it during the manufacturing process. Davis knew it was possible for someone to take the unit apart and pull out the plastic jumper cable beneath the BIOS chip that stores the password and completes the start-up circuit, and that would have erased the password. But Davis assumed that if someone knew enough to pull the jumper cable, he’d also be smart enough to enter a fake password and cover his tracks. Of course, a professional could have done the job and tried to make it look as if an amateur had done it.

  Davis discovered that the computer’s internal clock and calendar didn’t work properly. The clock was losing almost ten minutes every two and a half hours. The next time he checked, it lost fifteen minutes in three hours. There was no discernable pattern to the time loss, but he discovered that when the chip was cleared, it didn’t always reset to 00:00 hours, January 1, 1980, as it was supposed to.

  Since the clock was malfunctioning, the time of the alleged break-in—1:00 A.M. on Saturday—was meaningless and therefore useless in the investigation.

  Davis believed that the computer was defective. He tested another computer of the same model, purchased and installed in Boulder at the same time, and it turned out to have the same clock and chip problems.

  The CBI concluded that the alleged break-in never happened. There had simply been an equipment failure. When Eller, Hunter, and Koby met with Davis and Mark Wilson, Davis explained that there had been no breach of security.

  The next day, Hunter extracted a promise from Koby that Hunter and Wise would receive a letter of apology from Eller for his false accusations. But when the detectives working the Ramsey case heard about Koby’s promise, they were outraged about what they felt was another instance of their chief not backing them. Eller never sent the letter.

  Bill Wise was astounded at the level of distrust that Eller and the detectives had developed. He considered the majority of them level-headed, but now if something went wrong, Hunter was the easy target.

  Wise asked himself, What was happening to Boulder?

  Steve Thomas called me one evening. I couldn’t tell if he’d had a beer or two.

  “Jeff, I’m ready to fuckin’ throw down my badge. I’ll go on national TV, I’ll go back to mowing fuckin’ lawns if I have to, to get justice for this little girl.”

  That’s when I realized that Thomas, who to me represented someone strong, had the courage to express his deep emotions.

  “God chooses a path for all of us,” I answered. “I think mine has been chosen. That’s why I’m here to help.”

  “We can do this together,” Thomas replied. “You have a role in this. Your relationship with Hunter is important—you don’t understand how important.” Then he added, “We do God’s work.”

  That night, I understood that Thomas and I would devote our lives to getting justice for JonBenét.

  Later that night I was having dinner with Frank Coffman when I got a page from a number I didn’t recognize.

  “Jeff, I’m kind of nervous,” Steve Thomas said when I returned his page. “Are you going to keep it all cool?” I assured him I would. Then he gave me his home number.

  We started talking at night. He’d tell me stuff about when he was a narc cop. We discussed the Simpson case. We talked about our love of cars. I told him I drove around just looking for a used Camaro. He liked Camaros too.

  —Jeff Shapiro

  2

  Ever since JonBenét’s murder, Peter Boyles, a top morning radio talk-show host in Denver, had been critical of the investigation. Bill Wise paid close attention to Boyles each morning as he drove the 26 miles from his home in Denver to the Justice Center. Most of the time, Boyles took shots at the police and at the Daily Camera, comparing it to Pravda. He often suggested that the Ramseys had killed their daughter. Then, as Chuck Green’s columns in The Denver Post became more strident against Hunter in March and April, Boyles, a friend of Green’s, joined in the attack on the DA’s office. Now, in June, Boyles commented on the police withholding evidence from Hunter’s office and on the computer break-in.

  Listening in, Wise thought that much of Boyles’s commentary was speculative—probably based on s
ources not connected with the investigation. Hunter and Wise felt that Boyles was farther off base than most reporters. He made it sound as if Hofstrom had chatted over coffee with Patsy Ramsey in his kitchen when she gave her second handwriting sample at his house—which at the time was neutral territory. Chuck Green was almost as bad. In one of his columns, Wise found what he considered to be seven major inaccuracies.

  Wise talked to Hunter, who decided he wanted to put a stop to the flow of inaccurate information about his office. Hunter decided Green should be contacted first, then Boyles. Wise was apprehensive, afraid that Green would compound the problem by writing a column about Hunter’s complaints. Nevertheless, he left a voice mail message for Green, saying he’d like to sit down with him—not to give new information, but to correct some misinformation.

  Green not only returned his call, he listened intently. Green had reported that the Ramseys were “allowed” to leave Boulder after JonBenét’s body was found. Wise said that was wrong. They had not been charged with any crime, so they were free to travel at will. Green had also written that the “police and prosecutors” had given the Ramseys written questions prior to their face-to-face interviews on April 30. Wrong again, Wise said. Hunter’s office had not directed the police to submit the questions in January, and no questions had been submitted by anyone in April. Only the Ramseys’ statements from police reports, written just before and just after the body was found, had been given to the Ramseys’ attorneys. Green had also published that the DA’s office provided the Ramseys with a copy of the ransom note. Wrong again. The cops had done that, not Hunter’s office. Green’s claim that the police had briefed the Ramseys on the details of the autopsy was also wrong. In fact, the coroner’s office had given them an oral report, which is what any parent of a dead child would get. Wise’s list went on and on.