Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [157]
“If you hadn’t killed your fucking baby,” Colfax wrote, “this wouldn’t have happened.” He stuffed the note and some pages from a paperback book, Interview with the Vampire, into the front door mail slot, took a matchbook, printed Gosage’s name on it, and set fire to the paper. He watched it scorch the inside wall from a nearby window, hoping that because it was made of brick, the house wouldn’t burn down.
The next morning he called Gosage again. This time he confessed to trying to burn down the Ramseys’ house, which the police knew nothing about. Within an hour he was arrested. Six months later, on January 16, 1998, Colfax was sentenced to twenty-four months’ probation for first-degree arson, a class-three felony. For stealing the morgue log pages, he was sentenced to two years in the county jail, with no credit for the seven months he had sat in jail after turning himself in for the arson. By then, Lou Smit and Trip DeMuth had interviewed him several times. Colfax’s alibi for December 26 checked out.
On Tuesday, April 29, the day before the scheduled police interviews, all of the Ramseys’ attorneys walked into the Access Graphics offices on the Pearl Street Mall and went directly to John Ramsey’s fourth-floor office, with its view of the Rockies. They were soberly dressed in black and navy. Shortly afterward, Patsy and John arrived. They seemed nervous as they made their way upstairs.
Before long Patsy left her husband’s office and walked aimlessly down the hall. Then she went back in. Forty-five minutes later she was pacing the halls again. Before noon, she left the building by a fourth-floor exit to the alley. When she returned, she found the door locked. She banged on it, but a security guard refused to admit her—she didn’t have company ID. She had to walk around the building and enter through the front door, where the receptionist knew her.
By dinnertime, the meeting had disbanded.
Meanwhile, Steve Thomas and Tom Trujillo were at police headquarters consulting with the FBI’s Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit personnel, who had come to Boulder to assist the detectives. The Boulder PD had waited months for this opportunity to question the Ramseys.
Along the way, the detectives had been divided in their opinions about the parents’ culpability. For example, Trujillo and Wickman had at one time speculated that John Ramsey and JonBenét had some type of sexual relationship, but Thomas and Gosage didn’t believe it for one moment. By now, however, all the detectives felt that Patsy was involved in JonBenét’s death and that although John Ramsey had nothing to do with the actual murder, he was likely to have contributed to its cover-up.
All the detectives agreed that one major mistake had been made in the first weeks, even before the CBI determined that there was no semen on JonBenét’s body: Patsy had not been arrested. The detectives were sure that if only Hunter had agreed to jail Patsy—even for a short time—she would have caved in. Every time they themselves walked into a cell and heard the heavy steel doors clang shut behind them, a fear of never being able to return to the outside world hit them. If Patsy’d had to face that kind of dreadful uncertainty about her future, she would have broken down and the case would have been solved that very day, the detectives believed.
The detectives and Hofstrom had also long been divided on how to deal with the Ramseys—whether to push them or soften them up. Now that the interviews were imminent, they had to talk strategy. Thomas and Gosage met with Hofstrom. As expected, the police and the DA’s office still had opposing views on how to handle the questioning. Hofstrom wanted to use the interviews to “build bridges” with