Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [155]
The interviews will be conducted at a neutral location, such as the Child and Family Advocacy Center in Niwot.
The conditions are “consistent with standard police interview techniques.”
After this was published, Hunter told the press again that though the Ramseys were the focus of the investigation, they were not the only suspects. It was a deliberate attempt to appease the Ramseys so that negotiations could continue. By Saturday evening, the Ramseys had agreed to all but two of Eller’s conditions. The interviews would take place at the DA’s offices, which they considered more neutral, and Pete Hofstrom would be present during the questioning.
On Monday all parties were back on board with an agreement that the interviews would take place on April 30 beginning at 9:00 A.M. Charlie Russell, another of the Ramseys’ media representatives, called handpicked members of the media to tell them that everything was back on track.
On April 23, Detective Melissa Hickman returned to Boulder from the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California. In addition to its work for the government, the company did sound and photographic enhancement on a nonprofit basis for law enforcement agencies, using state-of-the-art technology. Hickman had taken the audio tape of Patsy Ramsey’s 911 call to the Southern California firm. The tape included a few additional seconds of sound along with Patsy’s frantic call for help, sounds that may have been recorded when she replaced the headset improperly. The police had been unable to decipher the additional sounds.
In February, Detective Trujillo had sent a copy of the tape to the U.S. Secret Service, but their attempt to enhance the recording had not succeeded. Aerospace used a different technology, and voices in the background could now be heard more clearly.
Hickman listened to the tape and wrote down what she heard.
“Help me Jesus, help me Jesus.” That was clearly Patsy’s voice. Then, in the distance, there was another voice, which sounded like JonBenét’s brother.
“Please, what do I do?” Burke said.
“We’re not speaking to you,” Hickman heard John Ramsey say.
Patsy screamed again. “Help me Jesus, help me Jesus.”
And then, more clearly, Burke said, “What did you find?”
This snippet of conversation was obviously important. Patsy and John had told the police, and CNN on January 1, that when they found JonBenét missing, they checked Burke’s room for their daughter, who sometimes slept there. They had never said what they found in Burke’s room. Later, Patsy said they did not awaken Burke until about 7:00 A.M., when her husband roused him to have him taken to the Whites’ home.
In Boulder, Hickman and her colleagues debated the scenarios. They couldn’t believe that John Ramsey would have forgotten to mention to the police that his son had gotten up and spoken to him and his wife that morning after Patsy checked on him and before the police arrived. Perhaps it was conceivable that she didn’t remember because she was so distraught. But on the tape, John had directed a statement directly to Burke. How could he have forgotten talking to his son? The Ramseys’ credibility was now seriously in question.
The police decided not to tell Hunter or anyone on his staff what they had learned. They feared leaks of this valuable evidence. The police also decided not to ask John or Patsy Ramsey about the 911 call in their scheduled interviews, for fear of tipping their attorneys to what they had discovered. More than a year would elapse before the police told Hunter’s staff about the enhancement tape of the 911 call.
When Burke had been interviewed on January 8, he was not questioned about his whereabouts that morning. But even in that interview, the boy had not told the police that he was asleep when the 911 call was made. The police needed to know what he remembered about that morning and if his memory differed from Patsy’s. The detectives would have to wait until June 10, 1998, when Burke was interviewed again, to ask him.
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James Thompson, known to