Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [172]
Hunter called investigator Steve Ainsworth into the meeting with Singular so that the detective could hear directly what some of the mothers had said. Later the DA called Pam Griffin to ask about the photographer. She said that Simons had once asked for permission to take her daughter’s face and transpose it to a sexy body in a photograph. It was out of character for Simons, Pam said.
Hunter told Singular that he was having trouble getting the police to pursue the line of inquiry Singular was suggesting, and he asked the writer to see what he could learn about the people JonBenét saw outside her immediate family. Hunter wanted to know how she acted when she was not in the company of friends and family. The DA also wanted handwriting samples from the people that Singular thought should be considered. Finally, Hunter asked for help in finding potential sources of the ligature. He didn’t care if it pointed to the Ramseys or someone else, he said. He wanted the information. Hunter was so intent on finding something everybody else had missed that some of his deputies had begun to refer to him as Dick Tracy.
Lou Smit and Steve Ainsworth read over the reports of the police interviews with Randy Simons. It appeared that he’d never been questioned in depth. Yet who better than a photographer to familiarize them with the fringe world of beauty pageants? On May 14 they drove to Genoa, Colorado, where Simons was living. The next day Simons granted Ainsworth an interview but was unable to shed much light on the case.
Still, because he was a professional photographer who sometimes photographed nudes, they investigated him as well. Without the photographer’s knowledge, Hunter’s office obtained handwriting samples and a sample of his saliva from a cigarette butt. A month later, on June 17, Ainsworth also interviewed pageant photographer Mark Fix. Eventually Ainsworth concluded that neither photographer had been involved in the death of JonBenét. Whether someone else connected with pageants had been involved was still an open question.
Stephen Singular returned home late the night he saw Alex Hunter. He stepped into his daughter’s bedroom and stood in the dark, just listening to her peaceful, even breathing. He’d done the same thing every night for a couple of months after JonBenét had been murdered. He would wake up at two or three in the morning, walk to her room, and stand there listening to her breathing for a few minutes. He knew that what had happened in Boulder could happen anywhere.
10
DNA TESTS DONE, OFFICIALS MUM
The much-anticipated results of additional DNA tests in the JonBenét Ramsey murder case have been returned to Boulder authorities, sources told The Denver Post Wednesday.
Authorities reportedly met in closed-door session, and officials could not be reached for comment on the purpose of the meeting or the results of the tests.
—Marilyn Robinson
The Denver Post, May 15, 1997
In Denver, Carol McKinley sat in her living room listening to her frustrated police source, who was calling from a pay phone. Chief Koby was still refusing to defend his detectives from press attacks, and both Hunter and Hofstrom were a lost cause, he said. The DA’s office seemed more interested in protecting the rights of the Ramseys than in putting them in jail. John Eller was the only law enforcement official strong enough to stand up to the Ramseys’ lawyers. Eller, he said, would never give up.
What had really gotten to the detectives, the officer said, was that they were coming up against witnesses who could help the investigation but wouldn’t cooperate. Under Colorado law, the police had little leverage. They couldn’t force anyone even to return a phone call.
In another conversation, McKinley’s source told her that some detectives believed the war room was simply a place from which Hunter’s people intended to steal information about the case. Though the