Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [145]
In Boulder on April 2, Detective Steve Thomas spoke to Sergeant Tom Athey of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg (North Carolina) Police Department. Athey told Thomas that they had a suspect in custody who might have been involved in the murder of JonBenét. On March 21, John Brewer Eustace had allegedly kidnapped a two-year-old child from a ground-level apartment. The child had then been violently sexually molested and found with a cloth in her mouth. Entry to the apartment had been made through a small ground-level window that was covered with a screen while a baby-sitter was within earshot of the baby’s crib.
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg police had found in Eustace’s residence a kind of shrine full of JonBenét’s photos carefully cut from newspapers and magazines. Eustace admitted to masturbating while viewing the photographs. Within two days Steve Thomas and Ron Gosage were on a plane to North Carolina to interview Eustace, now a suspect in the death of JonBenét.
At 2:20 P.M. on April 5, Thomas and Gosage arrived at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department and met with Detective Chris Fish. Gosage, who had a two-year-old, became ill when he saw the photographs of the toddler. At 7:30 that evening, the detectives met John Eustace. After two hours of refusing to answer questions, he waived his rights and agreed to be interviewed by the Boulder detectives. Eustace said he wasn’t in Colorado on Christmas night and had never killed anyone. He even pulled hairs from his head and gave them to Thomas and Gosage. He also gave them a handwriting sample. When asked for a pubic hair sample, however, he refused. Later, while Eustace and the detectives took a break to visit the prison toilet, Thomas again asked him for a pubic hair. Again Eustace refused. Gosage pointed out to Eustace that he’d agreed to cooperate. Finally, the prisoner lowered his pants—to show Thomas and Gosage that he couldn’t give them the sample they wanted: he was clean-shaven not only around his penis but throughout his lower extremities. He said, “I know all about pubic hair and DNA. I’m too smart to leave anything behind.”
The next day Thomas and Gosage discovered that at midnight on December 26, Eustace had been working at the Qualex Plant in Charlotte. Between midnight and six in the morning, a coworker remembered talking to him. At 9:37 Eustace clocked out and left for the day.
John Eustace, with his airtight alibi, was just another of the forty-three possible suspects the Boulder PD would interview within the first four months of the investigation. It would take almost a year to check on another fourteen.
While Lou Smit and Steve Ainsworth were trying to locate Kevin Raburn, the released convict who seemed to have disappeared, they continued to search for new leads. Daily, Smit looked at the crime scene and autopsy photographs and read police reports, hoping to discover overlooked clues. He had solved several cases simply by reading and rereading old police files.
On Wednesday, April 9, as Smit was looking at the autopsy photographs yet again, he noticed something unusual about several marks on JonBenét’s body. In one photograph, he noticed two dried rust-colored abrasions on her lower back; in a second photograph, just below her right ear and at a right angle to her cheek, he saw another set of rust-colored abrasions; and a third photograph showed two marks that looked like scratches on her lower leg. Smit asked Trip DeMuth and Ainsworth to look at the photos. They agreed with him that the three sets of abrasions appeared to be identical. In the final coroner’s report, they would be described as “rust-colored to slightly purple” discolorations of unequal size. The investigators agreed that there was about the same distance between the symmetrical marks.
To Smit the marks looked as if they had been made by the two electrodes of a stun gun. Stun guns, about the size of a TV remote control, are used primarily by police and security officers to immobilize people with