Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [120]
He was furious with himself. He was sure John Andrew would figure out that he’d been the one who called Allison Russ. The next morning he called her and explained a bit more. He didn’t tell her he worked for the Globe, only that his name wasn’t Hayworth.
“Jeffrey Scott is my real name,” Shapiro said. Then he told her that he’d run into John Andrew. “He’s a nice kid.”
RAMSEYS ENTER PLEA ON INTERNET
JonBenét Ramsey’s family has gone online to urge Boulder police to clear her older half-brother as a suspect in the slaying of the 6-year-old beauty princess.
“It should be made perfectly clear by the Boulder Police Department that John Andrew is not a suspect in this horrible crime,” the family urged in a statement posted Sunday on the Internet.
“To continue to refuse to do so is cruel to a fine young man and the rest of our family,” said the statement, which was signed by the 20-year-old’s father and stepmother, John and Patsy Ramsey, and his mother, Lucinda Ramsey Johnson.
—John C. Ensslin
Rocky Mountain News, March 3, 1997
As the nation became obsessed with the Ramsey case, some turned to the Internet to keep up with developments. Finding information on-line was easy because of JonBenét’s unusual name. By early 1997, a user could type it into a search engine and receive between three hundred and a thousand matches.
Most of those who logged on were housewives between the ages of thirty and fifty. Many of them went on-line just after the Ramseys appeared on CNN on January 1, 1997. Some men participated as well. At first everyone simply searched for information from newspapers and other sources. Then people sought out—or created—Web sites and began participating in discussion forums and message boards devoted to the case. There were even parody Web sites, including Gone with the Spin—a look at how the Ramsey camp manipulated the media—and Patsy’s Postcards from Prison—which had photos of Patsy’s prison pageant. Soon there were three hundred Web sites devoted to the Ramsey case.
Most of those who followed the case on-line had children of their own and were haunted by JonBenét’s death. The regulars became emotionally invested in the case and in their cybercommunity. They supported their on-line friends through events in their “real lives,” but they also bickered about the case. By spring 1997, the regulars had split into groups—the Pro-Rams and the Anti-Rams. Everyone wanted to recruit those in the third group, the Fence Sitters.
The first discussions started on a bulletin board run by the Daily Camera, with a core group of about two hundred participants, though it often seemed like more. In cyberspace, it’s easy to steal names and hide true identities, and everyone began to wonder if the killer was among the participants. As is typical in cyberspace, conspiracy theories emerged. Pro-Rams were accused of being on the Ramsey payroll and of trying to control the news spin on the Internet.
By the summer of 1997, there were about a thousand people following the Ramsey case on-line, and they were dedicated. They dug through both mainstream media reports and the tabloids for nuggets of information, and they theorized endlessly. When the Ramseys appeared on television on May 1, 1997, the Boulder News Forum conducted its first real-time transcription of a TV event. The first message transmitted was, “Patsy has a mustache.”
At 10:00 A.M. on March 3, Bill McReynolds, who was still considered a suspect by the police, met with Detectives Thomas and Gosage at police headquarters for his fourth interview. This time the proceedings were tape-recorded. By now the detectives had finished their background checks on the McReynolds family and friends, and they wanted to see if they had missed something. When this interview was over, however, they hadn’t discovered anything new. Still outstanding were results of McReynolds’s blood and hair samples and an analysis of his handwriting.
There’s this feeling in Boulder that we’ve got to be protective of our Eden. We can’t have this violation