Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [143]
I started as a secretary in the sheriff’s office, detective division, in 1971—just two detectives and me. I’m from Lincoln, Nebraska, a very conservative state, and I was real straight. Back then, the sheriff’s department didn’t have a height requirement. My husband is 6-feet-4. Brad was, like, 5-feet-5. Pete Hofstrom was a little shorter, and the fingerprint guy was maybe 5-feet-6. Hopper, who’s still here, is, like, 5-feet-3. We had some terrific people.
To know Pete Hofstrom is almost to love him, even though he’s the most eccentric person I’ve ever met in my life. Considering all the years I’ve lived in Boulder, that’s a pretty profound statement.
Pete had his eye on being a DA.
As the department grew, Alex Hunter started hiring and Pete was a known commodity. If you have the opportunity to grab a known commodity, you grab it.
I’m you-do-the-crime-you-do-the-time. I have a real issue with extenuating circumstances—that everybody’s behavior is excused in some way or another. We’ve created a society full of excuses. Three strikes and you’re out. I don’t care if it’s a freaking doughnut that you stole on the third strike. Now Boulder people just look at me and shake their heads. I’m from the old school.
Hofstrom is even older. But he’s liberal. Pete is very good at seeing the overall picture. Cops are always looking at the 95 percent that is OK in a case. He’s going for the 5 percent that’s a potential problem. It’s one thing to look at a case from probable cause. Pete considers what’s necessary to prosecute someone.
I’d always say to Pete, “This is not for us to decide. It’s for a jury to decide. Or for a judge to decide.”
—Sandy Long
6
Moses Schanfield, a DNA expert and forensic scientist, was now consulting with the Ramseys’ attorneys, who notified Cellmark Diagnostics that they no longer required one of their experts to be present during the DNA testing procedures. Cellmark’s work could proceed without them, as far as the Ramseys were concerned. Presumably, the lawyers had decided that if the test results implicated their clients while their own representative was present, it would be extremely difficult for them to challenge Cellmark’s methods. Better to position themselves so that a legal challenge could be made against both the science and Cellmark’s findings.
Kary Mullis, the primary developer of PCR typing and a Nobel laureate, had often said that this testing was never intended for police forensic work because it was too vulnerable to contamination. In the Simpson criminal case, Mullis had told Barry Scheck that the process was too delicate to be reliable when blood and other fluids were collected from crime scenes. But now Scheck was on the prosecution’s side in the Ramsey case. He could play devil’s advocate and, perhaps more important, advise the DA on how to combat a possible challenge to incriminating DNA test results.
At every opportunity, the Ramseys insisted that an intruder had entered their house, citing publicly the missing home keys, pry marks on the doors, and the broken window in the basement. The police felt strongly, however, that none of these points of access had been used. During their initial inspection of the exterior of the house on the day JonBenét’s body was found, detectives had noticed several strands of a spiderweb on the grate covering the window well in front of the broken basement window. It extended from the edge of the grate to some nearby rocks, and this seemed to confirm that nobody had entered through that window recently.
If the police could