Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [125]
Epp wrestled with himself about what his department should do. After all, the sheriff’s department shared jurisdiction for the city of Boulder. It was supposed to serve the same citizens.
Sitting around the conference table in Epp’s office in a closed door session, Captains Shomaker, Hopper, McCaa, and Pringle of the sheriff’s department discussed their role in the Ramsey case with Epp. What should we do? What should we do? The obvious answer was to start their own investigation into JonBenét’s death, starting with the premise of an unknown killer, someone not living in the house. Following all the leads, they would allow the evidence to show them the path to JonBenét’s murderer.
But Epp worried that a separate investigation might ruin relations with the Boulder PD. Worse, it might be seen by Boulderites as political maneuvering at the expense of the police. Epp and his captains let the idea drop, but they continued to stew.
Alex Hunter hoped that a citizen would come in, write a letter, or call the tip line with information that would break the Ramsey case. It had happened in other cases. Sometimes he actually sat alone in his office waiting for a call from the police saying they’d found a smoking gun, something to hang the case on the Ramseys.
The tabloids had become just as restless as they ran out of negative items to print about the Ramseys. The National Enquirer worked on “Daddy’s Secret Porn Life,” in which it would claim that Ramsey had been seen leaving a house of prostitution in the red-light district of Amsterdam, where Access Graphics had a satellite office. When such stories appeared, the Boulder police weren’t far behind, following leads as they appeared in print.
One tabloid reporter had called over two hundred escort services in the Colorado area looking for anyone who might have had contact with John Ramsey. After a stripper who called herself Sharon contacted the Boulder police to inform them about the reporter’s investigation, Detectives Thomas and Gosage spoke to the Arapahoe County DA’s office and the Aurora Police Department and met anonymously with several prostitutes the tabloid reporter had called, following leads supplied by the reporter. They found no indication that John Ramsey had been involved with local prostitutes.
Soon after that search for prostitutes, Detective Harmer received a phone call from Christopher Doherty, a reporter for the Globe. A woman named Kimberly Ballard had told the Globe she’d had an affair with John Ramsey from August 1994 through the spring of 1995, while Patsy was battling cancer. The Globe was set to publish Ballard’s story, Doherty said.
When Alex Hunter heard about this, he knew that even if the allegation were true, cheating on a desperately ill wife was still a long way from murdering your six-year-old daughter. Detective Harmer, however, thought that Ramsey might have told Ballard something material to the case—perhaps a passing reference to something that only the police and the killer knew. The Boulder PD followed up on the lead.
Detectives Harmer and Arndt went to Tucson, where Ballard now lived, to interview her face-to-face, but she declined to meet them. Nevertheless, they conducted some background checks on her and visited the Brown Palace, the Denver hotel where Ballard claimed to have met Ramsey on several occasions. The hotel had no record of these visits. In the end, the police found no evidence that Ramsey had ever met Kimberly Ballard. On April 22, the Globe reported that the Boulder PD had Ballard under investigation. The tabloid published her story based solely on their interview, with no independent confirmation.
Two and a half months after the Boulder police began investigating John Andrew and Melinda Ramsey, they received the final pieces of evidence that cleared Ramsey’s older children of any involvement in JonBenét’s murder. Bryan Morgan wrote to Detective Thomas on March 4 stating that John Andrew had made an ATM transaction at the QT Store on Roswell Road, in Marietta, Georgia,