Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [129]
This is one of the earliest details that caused investigators to focus their attention on the slain girl’s family, police sources said.
—Charlie Brennan
Rocky Mountain News, March 11, 1997
John Fernie was angry when he read Charlie Brennan’s story about footprints. Like many media stories, this one came from an unnamed source and made the Ramseys look guilty. Fernie wondered if the source had provided the reporter with all the facts. He knew that his own footprints were there in the snow that morning. He had driven up the back alley to the Ramseys’ house just after 6:00 A.M. in response to Patsy’s frantic call that terrible morning. He remembered walking along the brick sidewalk to the patio door, looking through the glass panel, and reading a line or two of the ransom note, which was lying on the floor just inside the door. Then he had run through the snow-covered grass, around the south side of the house, to the front door. If the cops had been looking, they would have found his footprints. A year and a half after JonBenét’s death, Fernie told a reporter that the police still had not checked the shoes he wore that day, though a shoe imprint had been discovered next to JonBenét’s body.
Carol McKinley, a reporter for Denver’s KOA-AM Radio, disliked the way some reporters used the word source without further identification. She also noted that nobody was questioning it. In fact, McKinley knew that it was the official silence and resulting information vacuum that had created these endless “sources.” After reading Brennan’s no-footprints-in-the-snow story, McKinley knew that she had to develop sources of her own. One of her friends who was close to a Boulder officer investigating the case agreed to introduce her to the detective.
“I don’t want to know anything you don’t want me to know,” McKinley told him. “I just want to know what this case is doing to your life, what you’re thinking. Let me do a profile on you.”
The officer agreed to be interviewed, but only after McKinley turned off her tape recorder did the real story begin to emerge. She could see that the detective needed to talk about his frustrations. He told her about the problem between Eller and the DA’s office, and how leaks to the press were hurting the investigation, how some of his colleagues had been maligned in the press for months, and how the Ramseys’ attorneys seemed to know everything the police were doing. “You must never reveal my name to anyone,” he told the reporter. McKinley agreed.
“Keep this all under your hat,” the officer told her. Never once, however, did he say that John or Patsy had murdered their daughter.
Before long, McKinley, like other reporters, had found additional sources in the DA’s office, among the Ramseys’ attorneys, and at the CBI. The information she had as a result permitted her to maintain a balance in her reporting. She leveraged information from one source and confirmed it with another.
The day Brennan’s no-footprints-in-the-snow article was published, the CBI gave the Boulder police Bill McReynolds’s DNA test results: On the surface the report seemed to exclude him. His DNA did not match the DNA found on JonBenét’s underpants. Nor did it match some DNA that the CBI had found under her fingernails, which coroner Meyer had clipped and preserved. However, the CBI pointed out that the material found under her fingernails showed signs of contamination and the markers on the DNA typing were weak. The origin of the contamination had yet to be determined. Since handwriting and hair analysis for McReynolds still hadn’t been completed, and Janet McReynolds’s DNA test results were still pending, the couple remained suspects.
While Detective Thomas was reviewing the McReynolds file, his phone rang. It was Allison Russ, John Andrew Ramsey’s friend. She told the detective about the calls from Matthew Hayworth and Jeff Scott. She also mentioned the different phone numbers he had given her. Later in the afternoon, Detective Harmer couldn’t find “Matthew Hayworth” at the youth hostel where Shapiro had first stayed.