Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [152]
On a typical day, Lou Smit, a retired Colorado Springs detective hired by DA Alex Hunter…can be found poring over 13,000 pages of reports. The pages are gathered in 15 loose-leaf notebooks, each with a laminated picture of the 6-year-old beauty queen on its cover.
—Marilyn Robinson and Kieran Nicholson
The Denver Post, April 19, 1997
By mid-April, the war room on the first floor of the Justice Center had been outfitted with a large conference table, computers, and cubicles. There was a small adjacent room and lots of wall space for charts, and even a toaster oven where you could bake a small cake. No matter how well appointed it was, however, Steve Thomas knew that the war room wasn’t going to work out. Lou Smit, the police, and the prosecutors each had different roles in the case, and each group saw the same data differently. There were ongoing personality clashes. It wasn’t long before Smit was telling the detectives that he wasn’t so sure the evidence against the Ramseys was strong. As he reviewed the officers’ reports and compared their contents, he could see there was a strong possibility that an intruder could have entered the house and killed JonBenét.
The police detectives were particularly irritated at Ainsworth, who was acting as Hunter’s devil’s advocate, looking at the evidence from a defense perspective. He was supposed to be a cop—on their side.
To break the deadlock, Koby suggested to Hunter that they use a professional mediator to explain to his officers that the way lawyers operate doesn’t damage the integrity of police work. Hunter, who had used mediators in the past to iron out policy conflicts, was all for it. Hofstrom felt it was a waste of time. Nevertheless, they turned to Richard Rianoshek, who had been a cop in Chicago and a detective and police chief in Aspen. He specialized in helping organizations work more effectively. Rianoshek knew that all DAs and police departments face essentially the same problem. It was endemic to law enforcement: prosecutors were often at odds, and the police were frustrated by legal hair-splitting. Throw some controversy into the mix, and the problems would be magnified. In the Ramsey case, given the enormous pressure from the media, Rianoshek knew it would be a miracle if anything worked.
The mediators first met with each side separately, in a small conference room on neutral ground at the University of Colorado. Then there were two meetings with both sides. Hunter, Hofstrom, DeMuth, and Smit attended these meetings, as did all the police detectives plus Wickman, Eller, and Koby. Each session lasted four hours.
Many grievances came to the surface. For example, the cops couldn’t get past Hofstrom’s four breakfasts with Bryan Morgan. Consorting with the enemy! It was like Hofstrom’s notorious precharging negotiations, which were just one step away from plea bargaining. Hofstrom could have accomplished his job with simple phone calls, a detective said. Steve Thomas repeated that Hunter’s staff was interested only in proving that an intruder had killed JonBenét. Hunter’s staff, on the other hand, was convinced that the police were determined to build a case against the Ramseys and refused to look elsewhere.
Rianoshek painstakingly showed both sides that their perceptions were inaccurate. He clarified what the police had said: they might be leaning toward the Ramseys, but if evidence appeared pointing to someone other than the couple, the evidence would prevail. Rianoshek repeated the DA’s position: they weren’t fixated on an intruder. They also thought the Ramseys had committed the crime, but they wanted the police to investigate every possibility. Nevertheless, the meetings deteriorated into mutual accusations, and in the end nothing changed. The inhabitants of the war room were never going to be friends.
When Lou Smit reflected on what he’d been observing, he saw one of the roots of the problem. Over the years, the DA’s office had never bonded with the police. Where he