Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [133]
I snuck into the Boca Raton Resort & Club Hotel to see the president when he was in Florida. I knew that hotel like the back of my hand because I’d spent days there as a kid. I got past the Secret Service and all the way up a stairwell to the twenty-fourth floor, one floor below Reagan. That’s when I was taken into federal custody.
I was wearing a shirt with an American flag and FREEDOM FOREVER printed on it, and I’d wrapped another little flag around my wrist. I looked like a comic book character.
When I was caught, I thanked God that I hadn’t brought my Swiss Army knife. It might have looked like an assassination attempt. They interviewed me for hours. I told them I was interested in politics. I showed them how I’d driven my bike past the police at the golf course entrance. One of their cars followed me when they let me ride my bike home.
At twenty-two, I got an internship at the White House Office of Media Affairs, in the Clinton administration. Washington was like a futuristic Roman empire. There was a lot of beauty, a lot of corruption, and a lot of people compromising their values. I have a history of getting into confrontations—because I question the way things operate. That happened in Washington, so I went back to Florida and freelanced for the Miami Herald until the Globe hired me.
—Jeff Shapiro
The Boulder PD was now being criticized almost nightly on TV programs such as Larry King Live and Geraldo. Though detectives weren’t being identified by name, it was hard for Steve Thomas and his fellow officers to take the constant ridicule. It wasn’t only the national media that attacked them; the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post also chastised them. The attacks were excruciating. What made them worse was the continued silence of Chief Koby. With no one speaking up for them—and strict instructions that they were not to speak to the media—the detectives were frustrated and angry. Officers who wanted the Ramsey case prosecuted without delay and were willing to ignore the presumption of innocence realized that the media could be an effective tool, indeed a weapon.
It was under these circumstances that one detective called Carol McKinley. He insisted on anonymity but wanted the public to know that the Boulder PD was doing its best and that they knew who the murderer was. The officer told McKinley that suspects were not always arrested immediately. Good police work took time. No matter what was being said, he and his colleagues weren’t the Keystone Kops. His primary concern was the department’s reputation, he said.
Meanwhile another source of McKinley’s, an attorney for the Ramseys, told her that his clients were the victims of poor police work and media speculation. He believed the Boulder PD was using the tabloids and the mainstream media to convict his clients.
There was evidence that an intruder had killed JonBenét, he said, but to protect the investigation, he couldn’t reveal the nature of the evidence. His clients were being framed, he claimed, and the public was being misled.
Though Alex Hunter didn’t know who had killed JonBenét, he was certain that John Eller had been unable to see the big picture since that day in mid-January when the test on what was alleged to be semen came back negative. The commander was too focused on the Ramseys as the only suspects, a position that was unacceptable even to those in the DA’s office who thought that Patsy and John Ramsey had killed their daughter. Hunter, who planned to hire his own investigators, first had to get the files from Eller for an objective review. That would be step one. Hunter told Wise, “How do you know you’ve got it unless you’ve read the whole case?” The second step would be to prepare the files for eventual transfer to a prosecutorial team.
Hunter told Koby his plan, and the chief agreed, as long as the DA’s personnel did not interfere, second-guess, or reinvestigate. Hunter agreed. Eller also responded positively when Koby told him. Now the case file would be cataloged and indexed by Hunter