Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [167]
When he arrived in February 1991, he found a priority list of 104 items. Most issues in Boulder centered around the city’s growth: Should there be more or less? What would be the impact of growth? In a style endemic to Boulder, combatants argued and fought long after a vote was taken, the losers trying to find a way to save whatever they had lost.
Seven months after he took the job, Honey hired Tom Koby as chief of police. Honey felt that Koby’s twenty-five years in law enforcement had given him a real understanding of the relationship between public safety and other community issues. Within a year, Koby told the city council that police resources were inadequate. With the approval of Honey and the city council, he restructured the department, removing several layers of bureaucracy and creating management teams in their place. Once that system was in effect, he started his push for community policing, where civilians would work with the police to fight crime.
A week after the Rocky Mountain News published its story about Tim Honey’s problems, he resigned. The police union was moving against Tom Koby, and the media were criticizing every move the police made in the Ramsey case. At the same time, Mayor Leslie Durgin told the press that she would not seek reelection. For unrelated reasons, the city’s planning director left his post, and so did Boulder’s superintendent of schools.
The official face of paradise began to collapse. Boulder would soon find itself without the stable day-to-day leadership it had taken for granted for seven years.
I got elected to the Boulder City Council in November of 1987 and I stayed until 1996. I was even deputy mayor for a while. The council hires the city manager, and he hires the fire chief and police chief. The council can’t direct either of them to do anything, but we can certainly make our feelings known to the city manager—and there is nothing wrong with that.
The whole region north of Denver has boomed. There is now traffic congestion. People are getting short-tempered. And wealthier. That’s always a bad sign. Wealthy people are very impatient.
Boulder became a city for people whose lives are not dependent on where they live. They can afford to live anywhere. You have to keep in mind that this place isn’t real life. This is dreamland.
Before long, almost everyone that worked for the city of Boulder was forced to live outside the city because it became so expensive to live here. Like the cops. They live outside the city they are protecting, and they don’t like that. Tom Koby was unable to give the rank and file the type of police department they wanted, and that wasn’t good, either.
When I read in the Daily Camera that this little girl was killed, I would never have predicted that the world was going to descend on Boulder. What surprised me is that as a city, we never got together to protect ourselves. The police, the city council, the mayor, and the district attorney never sat down together and said, “Look, we’ve got something that is snowballing. And the snowball is running down the hill.” We do that for every other problem we have to solve. I’m not talking about solving the case. I’m talking about how to deal with the snowball when it hits Boulder.
—Matt Appelbaum
JOHN RAMSEY TARGET OF PRANK POSTER
The Pearl Street Mall area in downtown Boulder was visited before daylight Tuesday by pranksters who hung posters that label the father of JonBenét Ramsey a killer.
The poster reads: “$100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the murderer John Ramsey.”
—Charlie Brennan
Rocky Mountain News, May 7, 1997
The police told Alex Hunter’s office that a quick review by the FBI of the transcripts of the Ramseys’ police interviews and videos of their May 1 press conference and January 1 CNN interview had produced significant insights about how each parent dealt with the death of their daughter but nothing that would break the case open. There were few inconsistent statements between Patsy’s and John’s stories but many discrepancies between their stories