3. There appears to be an atmosphere of distrust and non-cooperation between the Boulder County District Attorney and the Boulder Police Department.
4. There is a strong impression that the Boulder County District Attorney has acted improperly by sharing evidence and other information with the attorneys and other parties not officially involved in the investigation.
5. There is a strong impression that Alex Hunter and members of his staff have acted inappropriately by giving their opinions and information regarding the investigation to various news media organizations. This impression has been strengthened recently by the statements made by District Attorney Alex Hunter appearing in the Jan. 19, 1998 issue of New Yorker magazine. What public service did Mr. Hunter envision when he made such statements and revealed details of the investigation over a period of five months to a noted journalist who had publicly announced his intention to write a book about the investigation?
At a minimum, these considerations have created the strong appearance of impropriety, professional incompetence and a lack of objectivity.
The idea of waiting for the case to be “completed” and to be “referred” to the Boulder County District Attorney presupposes that the negative effect of the presence of the Boulder County District Attorney in the investigation will somehow be mitigated in the future. It ignores the practical problem that the Boulder Police Department and relevant witnesses have no confidence in the ability of the Boulder County District Attorney to prudently handle evidence and to professionally and impartially consider a case presented to it.
We request that Governor Romer immediately intervene and remove the Boulder County District Attorney and its offices from the investigation and appoint a competent and completely independent special prosecutor who is capable of establishing and maintaining the confidence and the trust of the Boulder Police Department, witnesses to the case, and the public, whereby to maximize the likelihood of a successful conclusion to this case.
—Fleet Russell White, Jr.
Priscilla Brown White
D.A. RESPONSE TO MEDIA
RE: FLEET WHITE LETTER
We have known for some time of Mr. and Mrs. White’s concerns. We understand the difficulty of being so closely linked to an investigation of such extreme complexity and duration. Unfortunately, because of Mr. and Mrs. White’s status as witnesses in the case, we are unable to share with them the information and insights that might provide them the reassurance they seek. Of course Mr. and Mrs. White are well within their rights to contact the Governor’s office, the Attorney General’s Office, the Boulder Police Department and the media as often as they wish to share their concerns.
—The Office of the District Attorney
On January 17, Hunter and Wise attended the scheduled meeting of the metro DAs who were consulting with Hunter on the case. Since Eller would soon be out and Koby was leaving, Wise was now back in the loop.
At the meeting, Fleet White’s letter and the effect of The New Yorker article were discussed. Hunter explained that the presumption of innocence for the Ramseys had been foremost in his thinking and that he had wanted to offer a counterweight to the media’s condemnation of the Ramseys, which he considered a result of Commander Eller’s view. The Ramseys’ constitutional rights had to be protected, he repeated. He left the meeting with the impression that the other DAs agreed that the public was better served by the publication of his views on the matter.
Later that afternoon, Tom Koby suggested to Hunter that in the coming weeks some overture should be made to Fleet White—maybe a meeting between them, the police department, and Hunter. The DA agreed.
CITY OF BOULDER
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
JANUARY 17, 1998
BOULDER PRESS RELEASE #63
The Boulder Police Department has received written communication through John and Patsy Ramsey’s counsel that John and Patsy will not submit to a second interview with investigators under the reasonable conditions set by investigators. The Boulder Police Department’s position in requesting the second interviews has been clear and straightforward. There are questions the police have that are related to clarifications of previous statements and questions related to information that was not available during the first interviews.
The police are still waiting to receive clothing requested from the Ramseys in Nov., 1997, and for a final decision on whether they will be allowed to interview Burke Ramsey.
In their dealings with the police, the Ramseys’ attorneys had always taken the position that their clients were in fact defendants, not simply suspects, and as such should have the rights of every defendant—full access to discovery.
In the department’s press release, Beckner denied the Ramseys’ request to review the evidence before agreeing to more interviews. The commander said it would hamper the effectiveness of the investigation and compromise the information provided by other witnesses and potential suspects. It was also contrary to accepted investigative procedures and had not been permitted to any other person involved in the case. Chief Koby told one journalist, “The bottom line is these are people whose daughter has been killed, and we’re trying to find the killer. The fact that they keep handcuffing us hinders us from successfully resolving this investigation.”
The Ramseys’ attorneys responded on January 23 with an open letter to Beckner, which was given to the media. They complained that the commander was negotiating through the media and that, like Eller, Beckner was after an “elimination of defenses” rather than an “objective search for the real killer.” The attorneys said that the leaks about the shoe imprint and the stun gun had taken place on Beckner’s watch, implying that the police had been the source. On this matter, the attorneys were disingenuous. They were the ones who had responded to the Los Angeles Times story about the stun gun, whose source, the article stated, was a Ramsey neighbor who had been interviewed by the police. The source of an early December Rocky Mountain News story about the shoe imprint was not a member of law enforcement either. More to the point, however, was something that the attorneys failed to point out in their letter: during their investigation, detectives often failed to admonish possible witnesses not to discuss their interviews with anyone.
The attorneys’ letter concluded on an ominous note: “We will no longer deal with the Boulder Police Department, except to honor our previous commitments.”
With John and Patsy Ramsey now living in Atlanta, it was unclear to the police whether their attorneys were consulting with the couple or acting independently. Frustrated by this, Beckner authorized Steve Thomas to approach Rev. Hoverstock and ask if he would act as a liaison between the family and the police. Hoverstock agreed, and within a few days he told the police that the Ramseys would meet with Beckner at their home in Atlanta. Beckner clarified that the meeting would be all business—he didn’t “want to chat about the weather.” Negotiations broke down over the scope of the questions Beckner would be allowed to ask. The police assumed that the Ramseys’ attorneys had intervened.
Meanwhile, Beckner called Hunter to say that he was looking at the first week of March as a likely time for the DA to issue an arrest warrant or to convene a grand jury. Beckner had not mentioned in whose name the warrant would be written. Hunter replied that he was open to convening the grand jury but not to a fishing expedition.
Bob Grant had told Hunter he didn’t have the horsepower to handle this case before a jury, and now Hunter called Bill Ritter, another member of his task force, for advice about a grand jury specialist with Colorado experience. Ritter recommended Michael Kane, a former assistant U.S. attorney now living in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and working for the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue. Ritter said he was one of the finest grand jury experts he’d ever worked with.
In mid-January, Beckner told Hunter that Donald Foster, the Vassar linguistics expert who had been working on the case with them, at Hunter’s suggestion, was making some headway with his analysis. Beckner was eager to hear f
rom Foster.
Steve Thomas had visited Foster earlier in the month, taking along hundreds of pages of writing from many different suspects, including Patsy and John Ramsey. Foster had followed the case on the Internet long before he was sought out to work on it. He had even entered some of the chat rooms and discussed the case with people like Jameson.
Foster was impressed with the detective. “I can’t tell you what our theories or the evidence are,” Thomas had said. “And I’m not going to prejudice your thinking.” Foster found that kind of commitment to justice unusual. He had heard the same thing from Hunter when they first talked on the phone. To the professor, both men seemed dedicated to finding JonBenét’s killer.
In his work, Foster always began with the assumption that no detail, however small, is irrelevant. Something as seemingly trivial as a period after the abbreviation Mr. can be a vitally important clue. In this example, it could suggest someone’s nationality: Americans use a period after the abbreviation but British writers do not. In one murder case, Foster identified the author of a document as someone educated in India. Among other clues was the misspelling of the name Rhonda as Rondha. In addition to such minutiae, Foster tracked down source material such as books, TV shows, movies, or music lyrics that might have influenced the writers whose documents he analyzed.
Beckner hoped Foster would name Patsy Ramsey as the author of the ransom note, and he asked Hunter if he would consider filing a motion to admit linguistic evidence when he filed charges against Patsy. It was the first time Hunter had heard Beckner name a suspect in connection with the death of JonBenét.
The commander also suggested that if the motion was denied, the DA could dismiss the charges and jeopardy would not be attached. The DA would have lost nothing, and the police could continue the investigation, or Hunter could take the case to a grand jury. Beckner was suggesting something known as a motion in limine. If the court ruled Foster’s evidence inadmissible, the DA could petition the court to dismiss the charges, a perfectly routine procedure.
Hunter told Beckner he wouldn’t want to handle it that way. He considered linguistics a good investigative tool, but he did not think it would be deemed admissible in a Colorado court.* Also, Foster had never testified in a criminal trial. They could use linguistics testimony with the grand jury, Hunter assured Beckner, since the rules of admissibility were much broader—even hearsay evidence could be heard by a grand jury. The DA told the commander he would send him Colorado’s evidentiary rules concerning scientific evidence. The two men agreed to wait for Donald Foster’s written report.
However, Beckner seemed deflated the next day when he told Hofstrom they “might not have it.” Hofstrom told Hunter he saw a grand jury request coming.
John Ramsey knew there was no position for him at Lockheed Martin in the Atlanta area and that time was running out on his contract, so he looked into the ever-expanding computer business. Computers were becoming smaller and faster, but programming hadn’t changed much.
In early January Ramsey traveled to Spain, to meet with José Martin, cofounder of Jaleo Software and Communicacion Integral Consultores, which controlled the rights to a program that integrated editing and high-end compositing for TV. CBC, CNN, Spain’s TVE, Australia’s Channels 9 and 7, and Germany’s and Argentina’s networks were all using the Jaleo program. In the coming months, Ramsey and his Spanish partners agreed that Ramsey would head Jaleo Technologies in the United States and sell the firm’s products through dealers in Mexico, Canada, and the United States. Glen Stine, a close friend of the Ramseys, who was vice president for budget and finance at CU, would leave his job in Boulder and move his family to Atlanta to join Ramsey’s new company.
A day after Ramsey left for his first meeting with his future partners in Spain, Craig Lewis of the Globe was tipped off to the trip. He followed the family, tailing them around Madrid. He witnessed Patsy crying before a painting in the Prado museum that resembled JonBenét. When Lewis discovered that Spain might not have an extradition treaty with the United States, he found the hook for his Globe story. The headline read RAMSEYS FLEE TO SPAIN. The story said that the Globe had learned the family had plans to flee the country before a grand jury forced testimony from their son, Burke.
PARENTS TURN IN CLOTHES
More than a year after JonBenét Ramsey was murdered, her parents have turned over to Boulder police the clothing they were wearing the night before their 6-year-old daughter was found dead in their home.
Two months after police finally made the request, they received two shirts, a pair of pants and a sweater this week from John and Patsy Ramsey, according to sources. Authorities sought the clothing to compare with fibers found in the case, sources said.
Police have also requested additional interviews with John and Patsy Ramsey and to talk more with their son, Burke, now 11.
—Marilyn Robinson
The Denver Post, January 29, 1998
When the police inspected the clothes they had received—and there were more items than were reported in the press—they noticed that a red blouse of Patsy’s looked brand-new, as if it had just come off the rack. The detectives were also interested in Patsy’s red-and-black checkerboard-design jacket. Four fibers had been found attached to the duct tape, and they were red and black. The police lost no time in sending the clothing to the CBI for fiber analysis.
2
In the first week of February, Detectives Jane Harmer and Steve Thomas tried to patch up relations between Hunter’s office and Fleet and Priscilla White. Thomas felt it was important to keep White happy since he was a material witness, and he also thought Hunter’s office should not have let the situation deteriorate to the point of the Whites’ campaigning for the DA’s dismissal. The couple agreed to meet with Hunter, Beckner, and the detectives, and Priscilla suggested their house. A few hours before the meeting, however, Beckner told Thomas that Hunter would send Pete Hofstrom in his place. Hunter had given no explanation. Thomas broke the news to the Whites. Predictably, Fleet White wasn’t happy, but he agreed to meet with Hofstrom and Beckner nonetheless. For forty-five minutes the group sat in the Whites’ kitchen. Hofstrom chatted about his years as a prison guard at San Quentin. But since he couldn’t speak for Hunter, nothing was resolved. Soon afterward, Thomas heard that White was now as angry with Commander Beckner as he was with Hunter. He persisted in trying to obtain the statements he had made to the police, and no one would release them to him.
Alex Hunter was wrestling with the inevitability of a grand jury. In the past, Hunter had enjoyed meeting with groups of Boulderites to ask what the public wanted from its DA. Now, while giving a talk to a group of Louisville residents, he asked how many of them had formed opinions on the Ramsey case and on what basis. All but one person said that the Ramseys were guilty, and even the holdout, Hunter felt, had an opinion about the case but pretended otherwise. Driving back to his office, Hunter wondered how he would find twelve impartial county residents for a grand jury.
On February 5, Lockheed Martin, which had bought the Ramseys’ house under its employment agreement with Ramsey, sold it for $650,000 to a limited liability company owned by some friends of the Ramseys. Attorney Michael Bynum said that when the house was eventually sold, the profits would go to the JonBenét Ramsey Children’s Foundation.
While the police and the DA believed that the ransom note was the most important piece of evidence against the Ramseys, the couple’s attorneys believed that the house was the most important piece of evidence for a potential criminal defense of their clients. It was their position that the house should be kept in its original state so that grand jurors or trial jurors could tour it and see how an intruder might have entered and made his way through it. By July 1997, the DA’s office had begun making architectural drawings of the house so that a large-scale model could be built for use during legal proceedings. Both sides knew the house would play an important role in determining who had killed JonBenét.
RAMSEY FRIENDS’ PALM
S CHECKED
Police investigating the murder of JonBenét Ramsey have been asking friends of the family for palm prints, indicating they have a print they can’t match yet.
Police have found a palm print on the ransom note. It is unclear whether this latest request is related to that print.
The palm-print search appears to be another item in the list of investigative tasks created by Cmdr. Mark Beckner when he took over the investigation late last year.
—Rocky Mountain News, February 8, 1998
Carol McKinley, who had gone to work for Fox TV in January, called Dr. Henry Lee to ask how he would rate the chances that the case would ever be solved. On a scale of 1 to 10, Lee gave it a 2. It will never be solved, he said. Then he added, “I’m coming to Boulder. Alex Hunter is making my life hard. He wants me to meet with police again.”
Hunter had been trying to get the police and Dr. Lee together for months. The detectives were reluctant, but the DA was insistent. Now that the police investigation was winding down, he wanted to make sure nothing had been overlooked. Lee said he’d make himself available during a layover at the Denver airport. Hunter told Beckner that if his detectives would attend, there would be no press conference and no grandstanding. If the story leaked, he’d tell the press that Lee was consulting with the Boulder PD and not with his staff. Beckner agreed. When Carol McKinley’s report aired, Hunter discovered that only the local press was interested. He was pleased that interest in the case seemed to be abating.
Perfect Murder, Perfect Town Page 56