Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [110]
Stobie found the Atlanta office totally unprofessional. There was pageant literature everywhere. Polly spent a lot of the day screaming at her husband. Stobie overheard conversations about oral sex and discussions between Nedra and some employees about the size of Burke’s penis when he was born. All in all, it gave the impression of a place where the family got together rather than a workplace. Stobie felt that the Atlanta “branch” had become a potential embarrassment to John Ramsey now that Access had to answer to Lockheed, and she resented having to straighten out his family. In July 1993, Stobie said, she was ordered by Tom Carson to tell Nedra that the Atlanta office would close and that she would be laid off. Patsy’s mother screamed and then sobbed, saying that she needed the job to keep her arthritis at bay. She had to be active. Stobie felt sorry for her, but the business came first. In 1994, not long after Stobie returned to Boulder, she was let go.
A few months after Stobie’s police interview, she began to tell her story to various reporters.
The snow was still on the ground on February 23 when Geraldo Rivera taped two daytime TV shows at the Alps Boulder Canyon Inn. It was advertised as a “town meeting” but consisted of an invitation-only audience of local journalists, lawyers, pathologists, friends of the Ramseys, and some hotel guests.
In the first hour there was a debate between Dr. Cyril Wecht, a noted forensic pathologist, and Larry Pozner, a Denver criminal defense attorney. Wecht said that JonBenét was a victim of prior sexual abuse. In light of the possibility that semen was found at the crime scene, he said, this was a sex crime, with John Ramsey as the logical “primary suspect.” Pozner was outraged at Wecht’s statement and insisted that the presumed facts on which he based his claim were hardly reliable.
“He [ Wecht ] talks about semen,” Pozner said. “What semen? Nobody’s released a report saying they had found semen.”
The second hour, taped the same afternoon, focused on how the Ramsey case was affecting various Boulder residents. Bill McReynolds, now known publicly as a suspect, proclaimed his innocence to Rivera’s audience. Pam Griffin and her daughter, Kristine, talked about their experiences with Patsy and JonBenét during the previous year.
One local resident told Rivera that when he used to travel out of state and mention that he was from Boulder, people would say, “Oh, that beautiful place in the Rocky Mountains, right next to the Flatirons!” Now, he said, people asked him, “Who did it?”
The next day, on February 24, Detective Arndt reinterviewed the Ramseys’ gardener, Brian Scott. She had already spoken to him earlier in the month.
Scott, who had graduated from the University of Colorado the year before, told the detective that he’d started working for the Ramseys in June 1995 as a landscaper. The last time he was at the house was December 10. The family used large wooden candy canes to decorate the yard during the holidays, and he noticed that they hadn’t been arranged properly. They needed deeper holes, which he dug before pounding them into the ground. Detective Arndt asked him what he remembered about the window-well grate near the rear patio. Scott said he didn’t remember that the window was broken. He’d only been in the basement to fix the sprinkler clock. He didn’t know there was a wine cellar, much less where it was. He did recall a broken window at the front of the house, but it was for the electrical cord for the Christmas lights and certainly not big enough for someone to crawl through—something like 2 inches square.
While Scott adjusted the candy canes along the front walk, he saw a blue Chevy Suburban pull up to collect JonBenét. She was wearing a pair of blue overalls and was being bratty about something. “I think she might have been giving orders,” Scott said, “like, ‘You get in the back. You do this.’ Something like that.” A moment later the car was gone.