Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [109]
To Gary Merriman, life at the company was now like something out of Night of the Living Dead, especially since Access Graphics had been such a wonderful place to work before the tragedy. The front door to the building was in the heart of downtown Boulder, on the tree-covered Pearl Street Mall. Over the last six years, the company had expanded from twenty-five to more than four hundred employees.
The staff at Access was energetic and fearless. The average age was in the late twenties. The corporate culture was entrepreneurial. Employees were encouraged to take risks, and the company prospered. As it grew, Merriman was hired to head the new human resources department and to structure the company.
Despite its growth, the company had the atmosphere of a small shop. John Ramsey was decent to his employees, more patriarch of a large family than president of a company. He elicited loyalty and dedication from his employees. Introverted by nature, he treated people with respect and concern for their welfare. He often referred to Access Graphics as “four hundred families.” And his staff responded accordingly.
In the office, no one ever heard Ramsey raise his voice—in anger or in delight. Even when frustrated by a setback, he dealt calmly with the problems at hand. Ramsey seemed to know that problems were not solved by being emotional.
What was most noticeable to Ramsey’s colleagues was his sense of ethics. When people made mistakes, he never attacked their integrity. He was, however, offended by failure of character. On this point, he was firm. Business matters came and went, problems would be resolved or not, but character was permanent. If someone fell short in Ramsey’s estimation—even if only in manners—he would remember it.
There was one unwritten rule that everyone at Access Graphics understood: John Ramsey never mixed work with his personal life. No matter how close they were to him or how long they had been associated with him, he almost never invited his employees home. You could have a close relationship with John Ramsey at work and never see him outside the office.
Within three days of the murder of JonBenét, Jane Stobie, a former employee of Access Graphics, called the Boulder police to say that she had important information for them. Two months later they still hadn’t returned her call, so Stobie, an acquaintance of Denver DA Bill Ritter, called him and told him what she knew. A few days later, the Boulder police called.
On February 21 Detectives Arndt and Hickman interviewed Stobie at police headquarters. She told them that she had gone to work for John Ramsey in July 1991 as a specialist in Hewlett-Packard products. For three years she carpooled every day from Denver to Boulder with some of her coworkers. At first, Stobie said, the company was so small—and there was such an overlap of responsibilities—that it was routine for many of the employees to read each others’ faxes. Then rumor had it that Calcomp, which owned 20 percent of Access Graphics and was itself owned by Lockheed, wanted one of the company’s three founders, Jim Hudson, out. Eventually Lockheed exercised an option to purchase Access Graphics. The word was that John Ramsey got $8 million from the buyout. Overnight, a mom-and-pop operation was reporting to a Fortune 500 corporation.
Stobie saw Don Paugh, Ramsey’s father-in-law, as a nice old southern gentleman and a father figure for some of the young employees. He was called the Andy Griffith of Access. Sometimes he would party with them at Potter’s, a bar on the Mall.
But after John Ramsey’s daughter Beth died in January 1992, employees at Access Graphics started getting “knifed,” Stobie told the police. If an employee happened to offend Sun Microsystems, one of the firm’s large suppliers, the person would be fired without warning. This seemed to happen again and again. At least that’s how it looked to her, Stobie said.
In April 1993, Stobie told the police, Access sent her to Atlanta to manage the office there. Nedra Paugh and her other daughters, Polly and Pam,