Shortly afterward, Green visited Hunter in his office. The meeting went well, and as the months passed, they talked more and more. Their occasional meetings would last for an hour or so. Green gave his direct phone numbers to both Wise and Hunter and agreed to contact them more often when checking the accuracy of his columns.
The following month, Wise and his wife, Diane, bumped into Boyles and his wife, Kathleen, at the July Fourth Cherry Creek Arts Festival. Wise made Boyles the same offer he’d made to Green. Boyles agreed to listen to what Wise had to say. In the coming months, the two couples met for dinner and became friends. Afterward, Boyles’s coverage of Hunter’s office became far less aggressive. Wise told a reporter covering the story that he hadn’t tried to put Boyles and Green in his pocket. All he’d wanted to do was curtail the unwarranted criticism of the DA’s office. One writer who met with Hunter felt that the DA wanted to be portrayed as a guy on a white horse defending justice.
CITY OF BOULDER NEWS FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE JUNE 17, 1997
Members of the Boulder Police Benefit Association executive board met on Monday, June 16, with Boulder Police Chief Tom Koby to discuss issues raised during the membership’s recent vote of no confidence. A list of four general concerns were presented to Chief Koby.
Leadership/management issues
Direction and philosophy of the Boulder Police Department
Boulder Regional Communication Center issues
Hiring/promotion policies
The BPBA executive board and Chief Koby agreed to additional meetings to be held throughout July.
—Boulder Police Benefit Association
Press Release
Sheriff Epp didn’t like the union’s press release, especially because it was issued on city letterhead. That same week, Epp asked Steve Ainsworth, who had been working with Hunter’s people for just over three months, to brief him on the status of the Ramsey case. Ainsworth told his boss that Koby continued to insist Eller was the right man for the job. Yet Eller hadn’t assigned anyone in the police department to read the entire investigation file, Ainsworth said. How do you run a case you haven’t read? he wanted to know. At least Hunter had instructed Trip DeMuth, Lou Smit, and himself to read everything they’d been given by the police. Also, the police refused to seriously consider any suspects besides the Ramseys. All he and Smit could do was run down possible suspects the police had missed or discarded, because Hunter had guaranteed Koby that he and Smit wouldn’t backseat-drive the police investigation. The only real lead they’d uncovered so far was the stun gun.
Epp became more and more frustrated as he listened to Ainsworth, and he assumed he was no different from the majority of Boulder’s taxpayers on that score. Eventually, Epp knew, the union would force Koby out of his job, especially now that city manager Tim Honey had left. Epp began to hear from his officers that Koby was being called Dead Man Walking. It was a cruel but accurate description.
Epp didn’t know what to do.
No matter which direction the police went in the Ramsey case, Alex Hunter and Pete Hofstrom told their staff that they themselves had to consider every possibility in the case. It wasn’t likely that John and Patsy weren’t involved, but it was still possible.
Lou Smit always found it useful to reread the police files. He was getting an overview of the case that no one else had. His partner in that was Trip DeMuth, who, like Smit, read every document as they cross-indexed the files with the help of a new computer program. Working side by side, the two men bonded. Smit admired DeMuth for his objectivity and fairness, and DeMuth looked upon Smit’s experience as an invaluable tool.
Meanwhile, Steve Ainsworth met with Detective Jane Harmer to discuss several possible suspects the police might want to look at again. The Ramseys’ gardener, Brian Scott, came up. Detective Arndt had interviewed him in February, but she was no longer working on the case. Ainsworth thought Scott’s alibi should be rechecked and that he might be able to describe the condition of the grate covering the broken basement window. Harmer reinterviewed Scott, showing him two photographs taken just after the murder. One was of a bushel basket with some weeds in it, and the other was of the window grate. To the police, the ground cover around the grate looked as if it had been disturbed—perhaps because the grate was lifted up. Looking at the photographs, Scott said it looked as if the ground cover had grown underneath the grate, which indicated that it had been lifted, but he couldn’t tell when. It could have been in September-October, when Ramsey said he entered the house by that broken window, or as late as December, when JonBenét was murdered.
After Harmer left, Scott remembered an encounter with Patsy that he hadn’t mentioned.
I remember Patsy running out of the house, outraged at what had happened. It was October 3, 1995. O. J. Simpson had been acquitted. And I just happened to be there. You could see she was upset over it.
“He’s getting away with murder.”
I thought to myself, He could be innocent. He’s been acquitted.
“It’s a bad system, full of flaws,” was what she was saying. It seemed to her he was getting away with it because he had money.
—Brian Scott
Two weeks later, Harmer spoke to Scott’s girlfriend, Ann Preston, to reconfirm when Scott had left her place on Christmas night. She said it was around 12:30 A.M. Scott’s saliva, hair, and handwriting samples would have to be analyzed before he was cleared.
On June 24, Paula Woodward, an investigative reporter for KUSA, NBC’s Denver affiliate, was standing in line at a Boulder grocery store when she overheard a casual conversation between a customer and the checkout clerk. Fearing she might be recognized, Woodward turned her face away.
The customer told her friend that the Boulder police had visited Reverend Hoverstock to clarify the meaning of several passages in Psalm 118.
That evening Woodward called two sources she had cultivated during the investigation. One of them, an attorney for the Ramseys, told her that they had already considered Psalm 118 because of the $118,000 ransom demand. They had also discovered a passage in verse 27: “God is the Lord, which hath shewed us light: bind the sacrifice with cords, even unto the horns of the altar.” Then Woodward’s police source confirmed that the detectives had visited Hoverstock. What the source did not reveal was that they had found John Ramsey’s Bible open to Psalm 118 during their initial search of the house beginning December 26.
The next day, Woodward aired her scoop that the police were investigating a link between the passage in Psalm 118 and the murder of JonBenét. The morning after Jeff Shapiro heard the news broadcast, he went down to the TV studio and paid for a videotape copy of Woodward’s report. Then he called Frank Coffman.
“Turn to Psalm 118 in your Bible,” Shapiro said.
Coffman read verse 27 in his King James version: “Bind the sacrifice with cords, even unto the horns of the altar.”
“That’s interesting,” Coffman said, “but you need to find something that Patsy once said or some book she read in order for this to mean anything.”
That afternoon, Shapiro was struck by something he had heard from the Ramseys’ friend Judith Phillips. Several years earlier, in an interview in Colorado Woman News, Patsy had mentioned reading and relying on a book called Healed of Cancer. In that book, the author, Dodie Osteen, refers to Psalm 118, but to verse 17, not 27: “I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord.”
Shapiro wrote a story for the following week’s edition of the Globe.
One week later, Charlie Brennan heard from a colleague about the Globe story linking the ransom note to Psalm 118. In Brennan’s Rocky Mountain News story, published on July 8, the day after Shapiro’s Globe story hit the supermarket stands, he reported that “a confidante of Pasty Ramsey reportedly told the Globe that ‘Patsy didn’t let a day go by without reading (Osteen’s) book, and she took Psalm 118 to heart, using it as a force to help her beat the cancer.’” The next day, Brennan reported the missing link that Paula Woodw
ard’s source had not revealed to her: in the Ramsey’s house the police had found a Bible opened to Psalm 118. What Brennan didn’t know was that it was on John Ramsey’s desk.
Dr. Henry Lee: Well, to solve a case is like building a table. A table has four legs. You need good investigation—good investigation team. You need good forensic evidence. In addition, you need witnesses and public support. Right this moment you don’t have the four legs yet.
Larry King: How many legs of the table do we have?
Dr. Henry Lee: So far, I would say I have only one and a half, maybe.
—Larry King Live, June 26, 1997
On Monday morning, June 30, the police searched the Ramseys’ fifteen-room house yet again. The couple had signed their consent on June 13. Jeff Shapiro was one of the few members of the press who showed up.
Pete Hofstrom, Trip DeMuth, Lou Smit, and Rob Pudim, an architectural draftsman, were the first to arrive from the DA’s office. Joe Clayton, a criminologist from the CBI, arrived soon afterward. Steve Thomas pulled up in a Blue GT Mustang, wearing overalls and a dust mask. Gosage and several other officers soon followed. Before long, plumbers arrived to remove the boiler from the basement. The police used fiber-optic technology to look behind walls and inside the crawl spaces. They were looking for the roll of duct tape and the remainder of the cord, but found nothing. Reporters saw Detective Tom Trujillo attempt to climb through the broken basement window. Steve Ainsworth arrived to collect more fibers to compare with those found on JonBenét’s body. If fibers had been transferred from any upstairs room to the wine cellar, the police would know where JonBenét might have been before her death or where the killer had been before the murder.
Jeff Shapiro was soon bored and left to visit Hunter at the Justice Center. The DA told Shapiro that the cops were planning to knock down a basement wall. “They’re looking for the roll of duct tape,” he said. “I don’t think they’re going to find it.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
Then Hunter told Shapiro that as far as they could tell from one police report, John Ramsey could have left the house for as long as fifty minutes the morning JonBenét’s body was found (information that later proved untrue). “I think John may have taken all that stuff out of the house,” Hunter said. “Someone got rid of it.”
I asked Hunter what time the ransom note said the ransom was supposed to be picked up.
“Hmm. Let me check. Where’s my copy of the note?” Hunter said, teasing me.
Hunter told me there was to be a call between 8:00 and 10:00 A.M. No one outside the investigation had been told that at the time.
“Can I just see what the handwriting looks like?” I asked.
He opened a spiral binder, took out some loose pages, and held them up real close to my eyes—so close that I couldn’t read anything. Then he quickly pulled the pages back, put them away, and went, “Ha, ha, ha.”
“Don’t tell anyone I did that,” Hunter said.
“OK.”
That’s when I got the feeling Hunter must know deep down that the Ramseys did it. All this other stuff was just talk.
That night I left Thomas a message on his voice mail: “I knew you had to drive a cool car. I’m proud of you, man.”
—Jeff Shapiro
Stephen Singular knew that Hunter was talking to the tabloids—Jeff Shapiro had told him. Hunter had to know that the tabs were a driving force in shaping public opinion and that they were committed to the idea that the Ramseys had killed their daughter.
Earlier in the month, Hunter had told Singular it was difficult for the DA’s office to do certain things that needed to be done in the investigation. When Singular gave him the idea of delving into the world of pageants, Hunter suggested, Why don’t you go to the tabloids? They have money, they have freedom, they don’t play by the rules. Then he suggested tracing what people were downloading from the Internet, although it might be an invasion of privacy.
Singular was taken aback. The DA was suggesting doing things that Singular himself considered legally tenuous.
“There are highly qualified people that you could involve who wouldn’t have to worry about breaking the law,” Singular told him.
Hunter didn’t answer.
Singular understood that the DA was talking to many journalists and possibly enlisting their help too. He wondered if maybe Alex Hunter was dancing with the devil.
On July 2, Steve Thomas called Jeff Shapiro. “Some of the guys and I are going to sleep in the house tonight,” he said. “We’re trying to get a feel for the place.”
“That’s cool.”
“I thought you might want to know,” Thomas continued. “We’re going to reenact some scenarios. If you want to come by—just by accident, like, walk by—feel free.” Then Thomas added, “I’ll try to help you out little by little. But be cool about it. Be careful.”
“I will, and thanks a lot.”
“Jeff, I know Patsy killed that girl.”
It was the first time Shapiro felt that Thomas trusted him.
Later that evening, Shapiro went to the Ramseys’ house. He climbed a tree on the next-door property at about 8:30 P.M. From there, he could watch the cops through binoculars.
Inside the house, the detectives spent hours running through different scenarios of what might have happened on December 26.* Sometimes with the lights on, sometimes with the lights off, they ran the scenarios, starting in JonBenét’s bedroom, either just before or just after she went to sleep. In each scenario they took it for granted that either the killer or JonBenét, or perhaps both, knew the route from her bedroom to the wine cellar.
From JonBenét’s second-floor bedroom, it was less than four full paces to the top of the carpeted spiral staircase that led down to the ground floor. The thirteen steps of the staircase could have been maneuvered in the dark by someone who knew them. A visitor—or an intruder—would need a light, the detectives reasoned, even if they did not have to control a struggling child. A parent or the child would not need a light. The flashlight found on the kitchen counter on December 26, which was normally kept near the kitchen, could have been used either as a light or as a weapon—in the kitchen or in another room. By now the CBI had determined that both the outside of the flashlight and the batteries inside held no fingerprints. Most likely they had been wiped clean. This was highly unusual. An intruder would probably have taken the flashlight with him when he left. A perpetrator who lived in the house might have removed his prints from the flashlight and the batteries in a moment of panic, though it would have been more natural to leave them.
Continuing with the scenario, the detectives saw that once they were down the staircase, there were several likely directions to the basement—none of them allowing for quickness or ease of movement.
A logical direction for the killer—or for a terrified JonBenét who was running away—would be down another short flight of stairs toward what the Ramseys called the butler’s kitchen. There, a door to the left allowed a quick escape into the narrow side yard on the home’s north side—but no access to the garage or basement.
Or, coming from the spiral staircase, someone might head straight for the door that led directly to the brick patio at the southwest corner of the ground floor and then to freedom down the back alley.
However, to reach the basement from the spiral stairs, where the ransom note was discovered, a perpetrator or a fleeing JonBenét would be forced into a more circuitous route.
Once down the stairs to the butler’s kitchen, the detectives realized, the perpetrator could only reach the basement stairs by crossing that room, climbing yet another short flight of stairs, then turning to the right to reach the door to the basement. The problem was that the door swung out into that narrow hallway. It became an obstacle that would force you to sidestep or squeeze around it to get past for anyone who knew the house, and a stranger wouldn’t have known the door was there.
The second route to the basement from the spiral
staircase would first lead toward the patio doors, then veer left, right by where the flashlight was kept, through a 25-foot-long kitchen, where a fleeing JonBenét or an intruder would past an island counter and three high chairs.
At the end of the kitchen was a short hallway, into which they would have to make a left turn, and there, immediately to the right, was the door to the basement. Opening that door, however, the detectives discovered that they were in total darkness. There was no light switch on either wall at the top of the stairs or immediately outside the basement door. Any stranger would grope in vain for a light. Eventually, he might discover it set high on the wall behind his back, inconveniently located opposite the door.
Once in the basement, a stranger would find no fewer than four closets, two storage rooms, and a hobby room. The wine cellar, where the Ramseys typically kept construction materials and their Christmas trees, was at the end of one basement corridor—past a utility sink, past the boiler room, and behind a door.
The investigators considered the possibility that JonBenét fled from her bedroom to this remote hideaway in the middle of the night to elude someone. If so, she would have run a straight path from the bottom of the basement stairs directly to the boiler room, winding up in front of the latched wine cellar door. Only someone who knew the house intimately could make this journey quickly. Or, as one officer suggested, a mischievous JonBenét may have been playing a game of catch-me-if-you-can and led her killer to the spot outside the wine cellar.
Perfect Murder, Perfect Town Page 42