Perfect Murder, Perfect Town

by Lawrence Schiller

  Then I passed some bad checks, was given a felony summons, and given a court date. I’d found the checks in a jacket, walked into a bank at Broadway and Canyon, and got some cash.

  Then I asked my lawyer why the cops were looking for me. He found out my file was in Hunter’s office with the guys working on the Ramsey case. I was in shock. My lawyer looked at me kind of weird. I’m a convicted felon, you know?

  I got tired waiting for my court date, so in July I just got on a bus for Knoxville to see my friend Eric. I’m a football fan, and I like the university’s football team. It wasn’t hard to get a job, right off Cumberland and Kingston Pike. Right down from the campus.

  Then on September 1, I was reading a newspaper and a cop drives by, looks at me strange, and I start walking. He pulled over and said I looked suspicious. I gave him my name, he checks on his car computer, and my warrant came up. They arrested me on a felony warrant for my check forgery and missed court date. The next day they said someone was coming from Boulder to pick me up.

  That’s when I realized they weren’t coming all the way to get me on a check charge. On September 11, they came up for me in a sheriff’s plane. Something was wrong. I’d known Gerry Leverentz in Boulder, and he had this guy Lou Smit with him. Smit told me he was working on the Ramsey case. Smit said he was just doing a background check on me. I told them I had a paid attorney and couldn’t talk to them without him. Smit just said fine, OK.

  On the way back, Smit helped turn the sports pages of the newspaper I was reading, since I was in handcuffs.

  When I was booked in Boulder, I got a public defender, Cary Lacklen. He said to me, “You know something or you know somebody.”

  “I know nothing,” I told him. “They ain’t got nothing on me. I got my felony and my bike theft.”

  On October 20, Harmer and Weinheimer came to see me in jail. Then on the twenty-second Lou Smit and Harmer came back. There was a court reporter and my attorney. Smit wanted to know everything about Christmas night. They knew about Juanita’s, the day I was there, December 26. But they wanted to know about the night before. I told them I was at my mom’s house.

  “I’m a thief,” I said. “I’m not a killer.”

  Harmer wanted to know if I could have left the house that night. I told them if you open a window, the alarm goes off. If you open the front door, it beeps for a few seconds, so you can turn the alarm off if you know the code. If you don’t know the code, which I didn’t, the alarm goes off.

  Smit asked if I’d been convicted of any sexual offenses. I said no. Asked if I’d gone into an adult bookstore in Boulder. I said yeah. After twenty minutes they were done. I just asked them to leave my family alone.

  Then they took blood, hair, and handwriting samples.

  Never heard from them again. Guess they figured out I didn’t do it.

  —Kevin Raburn

  Charlie Russell, a Ramsey press representative, began telling some reporters that the police were at least seriously pursuing the possibility of other suspects in the case. He told one journalist that solid leads had come from the Ramseys’ July and August advertising campaign. One of them pertained to a member of St. John’s church, he said. He also noted that Janet and Bill McReynolds were still suspects. Some new facts about the McReynoldses had just come to light, and the Ramseys had hired investigators to stake out the couple’s home in the mountains, waiting for the couple to return home from a trip East. They believed the police were wrong to discount McReynolds because of his infirmity at the time of the murder. The Ramseys were also still interested in Randy Simons and Chris Wolf as possible suspects, Russell said.

  Several of their attorneys believed that Simons had the opportunity to commit the crime and had access to JonBenét. He also had no real alibi for that night. The police, they felt, hadn’t investigated him thoroughly. If the case ever went to trial, the attorneys thought, Simons’ background and bizarre behavior after the crime might be enough to sway a jury to reasonable doubt about the Ramseys’ guilt.

  Then there was Fleet White. The Ramseys’ team hadn’t spent a lot of time investigating him as a possible suspect, but they thought the police had manipulated White by telling him that Ramsey had named him as a possible suspect. The police had used this strategy with several witnesses—told them that the Ramseys were accusing them, which caused the witnesses to turn on the Ramseys.

  Around this time, Trip DeMuth discovered that many of the police interviews with possible suspects had never been transcribed because detectives hadn’t considered them important enough. Hofstrom wanted all of them transcribed. Who knew if some bit of information that had seemed inconsequential ten months ago wouldn’t now provide an answer to important questions. Beckner agreed. He ordered all the tapes transcribed.

  Now that Eller was no longer leading the Ramsey investigation, the police union took sides on Larry Mason’s claims against Eller and the department. Earlier in the year, Mason had asked for financial assistance in his lawsuit, in which he claimed he had been wrongly discharged from the Ramsey case. Since Eller’s allegation of Mason’s misconduct was without any merit, the union had voted in January to give Mason the money. Now Marc Colin, Mason’s attorney, said that he wouldn’t settle until Eller had resigned from the Boulder PD.

  Since the vote of no confidence against Koby earlier in the year, the chief had met with union leaders on five occasions to discuss their grievances. He conceded that the department “was maxed-out and worn-out.” He admitted he never should have gone into the crowd of students during the Hill riots and begged them to go home. “I was wrong,” Koby said. “I have learned from it. I’m ready to move on.” However, those were not the only problems between management and the rank and file. There were also promotion and hiring issues that couldn’t be resolved overnight. Union leaders gave Koby notice that another vote would be taken within a month. With the November elections less than a month away, candidates for the city council were calling for Koby to account to the citizens of Boulder.

  When the union vote was taken in November, the results were as predicted—no confidence. But before the union could even digest the vote, Koby announced his resignation. I’m out of here by next year, he said. Start looking for someone else.

  As if Eller’s dismissal and Koby’s problems with the union weren’t enough, on October 20, Brooke Jackson, Detective Linda Arndt’s attorney, wrote a letter to the police chief. News stories in the Globe and Vanity Fair, among others, had falsely defamed his client, he said. She had maintained her silence as ordered, but the Boulder PD had made no effort to defend her. “She has been allowed to become a scapegoat,” Jackson wrote, “if not the primary scapegoat, by a continuous series of statements about one thing or another that she supposedly did that are simply false.” Three days later, Koby called Jackson and indicated that indeed the statements circulated about Arndt were false and unjust. But according to Jackson, Koby said that neither he nor the police department would take any action to correct them. Jackson said that the Boulder PD had a responsibility to correct the public record on Arndt’s behalf.

  By February 2, 1998, the police had cleared only Detective Larry Mason. Linda Arndt filed a claim on May 19, 1998, demanding a jury trial, against Koby personally and professionally and against the city of Boulder. It alleged that Koby, knowing that information published about Arndt was false, had caused “acute embarrassment to Detective Arndt and irreparable harm to her reputation.” Arndt sought $150,000 in damages.

  Though by the end of October 1997 most Boulderites were trying to forget the Ramsey case, the national media were still laying siege to the city. Alex Hunter wondered if the Ramsey case was a sideshow to America or if the media had become a sideshow to the investigation. Either way, the DA knew that once the police presented the case to his office, he would have to decide what the evidence said. If there was evidence exculpatory to the Ramseys, he would have to make it known and take the beating from his critics—or he could let a grand jury deal with the
evidence and the critics, as Koby had once suggested. But if there wasn’t sufficient evidence to charge someone, he knew that Pete Hofstrom would be dead-set against convening a grand jury.

  Hunter was reminded of the Manning case, in which a dead child’s mother had confessed and implicated her live-in boyfriend, Danny Arevalo, in the crime. A writer covering the Ramsey case was told by a jurist that in the Arevalo trial, Hunter had urged Hofstrom to put a key witness on the stand though Hofstrom didn’t believe the person’s information. Hofstrom, never one to cast ethics aside, was so troubled by what he’d done that in open court he asked the judge to strike the testimony of the witness as not credible.

  Hunter didn’t want another “Manning problem” with his chief trial deputy. If Hofstrom couldn’t file charges in the Ramsey case as a matter of conscience, the DA knew he could not order Pete to act against his beliefs.

  9

  On October 24, John Ramsey’s attorneys hosted their annual Halloween party. Hal Haddon and Lee Foreman showed up in drag. At another party, held at the Boulder Elks Club, Patsy’s attorney Pat Furman showed up as Gary Davis, a convicted killer who had been executed on October 13—the first execution in Colorado since 1967. Taped to each of Furman’s forearms, as part of his costume, was a large syringe. Furman had briefly represented Davis. James Aber, a public defender in Jefferson County, came dressed in a cowgirl outfit similar to one JonBenét had worn in a pageant; duct tape covered his mouth.

  That evening, Aber discussed holding a murder mystery party with JonBenét’s death to be solved by the guests. One of the Ramsey attorneys joked that the perpetrator would be Koby.

  RAMSEY EXIT TO FOLLOW TRADE OF BOULDER FIRM

  Lockheed Martin Corp. said Monday that it has reached an agreement to trade Boulder-based Access Graphics Inc. and certain other assets to General Electric Co. for $2.8 billion in stock and that Access President John Ramsey will leave the computer distribution firm.

  Daily Camera, November 4, 1997

  A couple of days before the Daily Camera reported the sale of Access Graphics to General Electric, John Ramsey’s attorneys visited Alex Hunter. They complained that Ramsey was going to take a financial hit in the stock trade between Lockheed Martin and GE. Not only had Ramsey’s contract not been picked up by GE; he had been terminated before the sale was made. Laurie Wagner was the only Access Graphics employee from the Ramsey camp who was moving over to GE.

  Hunter understood what the attorneys were suggesting: that John Ramsey might choose to seek financial restitution from the city of Boulder because the police had leaked information to the media that he was responsible for his daughter’s death. They would claim that this had damaged his reputation and credibility, which in turn had curtailed his advancement as an executive. Hunter told Ramsey’s lawyers to save their breath.

  A few days later, Access Graphics held its quarterly “What’s Happening Meeting,” at the Boulder Theater on 14th Street. John Ramsey was to introduce Perry Monych, the new president of Access Graphics. In a short statement, Ramsey said that the sale of the company had been a strategic decision between two of the largest companies in the world and had nothing to do with the death of his daughter. Ramsey was restrained and unemotional, but Laurie Wagner could see that he was hurting.

  Although GE didn’t pick up his contract, Ramsey would stay with Lockheed Martin for six months after the sale to GE. Gary Mann, his boss at Lockheed, had wanted to keep Ramsey, but he wanted to keep his family in Atlanta, and the company didn’t have a management opening in the area.

  In the first week of November, Hunter met with Boulder County commissioner Paul Danish, who had recently lost his mother.

  Danish told Hunter that he had cleared out his mother’s apartment and found her diary of the period when she divorced his father. Danish was having a hard time mourning his mother’s death, and it made Hunter think about how everyone grieves differently. He remembered that when his own mother had died, less than two months after JonBenét was murdered, he hadn’t been able to lament properly.

  Hunter had recently heard something Patsy Ramsey told a friend—that John often put himself in situations that didn’t allow for venting of emotion. But he woke up in the middle of the night sobbing and crying, she said. That was his time to grieve; then in the morning, he would be ready to meet the challenges of the new day. It was ironic, because Ramsey’s apparent stoicism in the face of JonBenét’s death was exactly what made some people believe that he had murdered his daughter.

  In the second week of November, Cordwainer Bird, a reporter for the Daily Camera, got a call from one of John Ramsey’s lawyers. Ramsey wanted an off-the-record conversation with Bird; one attorney would be present.

  Bird was not to tell anyone about the meeting—not even his editor. He wasn’t allowed to use a tape recorder, and he could not take notes. He could not ask any specific questions about the forty-eight hours before and after JonBenét’s death. Bird asked how many other reporters had been given the same opportunity. A handful, he was told, and everyone had been given the same conditions. He didn’t know that Lisa Ryckman of the Rocky Mountain News and her editors had turned down the same offer.

  Bird believed that a reporter should never shut the door on information. Here, he knew he’d be dealing with someone who was less than forthcoming and who had an agenda. Nevertheless, it would be interesting to hear Ramsey out, he thought. And maybe he could get something useful out of him.

  Late in the afternoon of November 20, in crisp weather, Bird arrived at a house in Boulder where Ramsey greeted him at the door. The two men shook hands and made some small talk, then sat down a few feet apart. Bird’s first impression of the fifty-four-year-old John Ramsey was of a poised, mild-mannered man—not gregarious and not a performer. Bird saw JonBenét’s father as an ordinary man caught in far-out-of-the-ordinary circumstances.

  Bird asked Ramsey what he had been like as a young man. Was he a drinker? Did he go out and screw girls? Did he think he was well endowed? Ramsey blushed, obviously embarrassed by the question. He thought he was fine, he said, but he was not King Kong. He had been kind of a boring kid, he said. He didn’t take drugs. Didn’t even like sports.

  Sensing Ramsey’s discomfort, Bird said he’d been told he could ask anything, so he plowed on: What about your sex life? Any kinks? With an embarrassed smile, Ramsey said he wasn’t creative enough to be very wild sexually. Bird believed him. Ramsey came off as an all-American guy who did what all-American guys do—bed their wives a couple of times a week or, if they’re really unlucky, once a month. Asking questions, Bird was more interested in Ramsey’s reactions to his questions than in his answers.

  Their conversation turned to other topics—politics, money, children. Had JonBenét ever pissed him off? Bird asked. How did he react? What had she done to irritate him? Of course she’d made him angry, Ramsey said. She was a little girl and sometimes bratty. He had scolded her the way any father would. Ramsey’s love for his daughter was audible in his voice. As they talked, Ramsey’s attorney, who had been silent throughout the interview, shifted in his seat; Bird saw he had tears in his eyes.

  Bird got the impression that the marriage of John and Patsy was loving but not passionate or exciting. Ramsey was settled into the marriage and comfortable in it.

  Politically, he was a conservative, Ramsey said, but over the years he had learned to be both more tolerant and more compassionate. For example, he was uncomfortable with homosexuality but would not endorse antihomosexual legal or social measures. The strident public debate on abortion made him uncomfortable. Ramsey believed in God, he said. God would know if someone had done something that he hadn’t admitted to, Ramsey said. Yes, God would know.

  When the interview was over, Bird felt he’d learned nothing. Ramsey seemed earnest and sincere, but was bland and seemed never to allow his emotions to get the better of him. Only one thing stood out about him: John Ramsey hadn’t dodged any of the questions. Bird hoped he wouldn’t have to writ
e up his interview. There wouldn’t be much to say about JonBenét’s father.

  While John Ramsey was talking off the record to journalists, Michael Tracey, a professor in the school of General Mass Communications at the University of Colorado in Boulder, was talking to Bryan Morgan about making a documentary for British television about the media coverage of the Ramsey case.

  Earlier in the year, Tracey, who had never met the Ramseys, had heard Chuck Green of The Denver Post say that “the Ramsey case was entertainment and that was why it was such a big story.” That started the educator thinking, and by August, Tracey was expressing his own views on national TV: that the American public “knew” the Ramseys had killed their daughter just as every white jury in Mississippi of the 1950s “knew” that a given black boy standing before them was guilty. Having read Dan Glick and Sherry Keene-Osborn’s coverage of the case in Newsweek, Tracey realized that many media outlets were reporting the story incorrectly, or only partially, and thereby depriving the Ramseys of the presumption of innocence. Several weeks before the death of Princess Diana, the professor started to write an article on the subject for the Daily Camera. It was published a few days after the Princess of Wales’s funeral: “Media-Saturated Culture Quick to Judge Ramseys.” Tracey drew parallels to the 1983 McMartin day care center case in California, in which, he said, a family had been wrongfully tried and ultimately exonerated, and to the climate in Great Britain in the wake of a series of IRA bombings in the 1970s. Tracey wrote about the corruption of journalistic values and the now-hazy line between the tabloid press and the mainstream media. He raised a question: Why did the public want the Ramseys to be guilty?