Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [175]
Hunter prevailed. “The court finds that there can be no more compelling governmental interest than the arrest and prosecution of her killer,” Judge MacDonald said, and ordered the documents sealed for an additional 120 days, or until the time of an arrest.
On May 12, deputy county attorney Mason had asked Judge Glowinsky to extend her seal on the balance of the coroner’s autopsy report. Mason argued that the case was active, still in the investigation stage, and that the report contained a lot the public didn’t know—including the position of the body when found, how JonBenét was dressed, details about the wounds and injuries she’d suffered, and evidence that had been found at the crime scene. If the information was released, it would make it that much harder for the police to weigh the credibility of witnesses’ statements. Detective Sgt. Wickman provided an affidavit to support the coroner’s request.
Judge Glowinsky ruled on May 15 that all but six brief sections of the report would be released on May 21; the entire document, on August 20. On May 20 Mason appealed the ruling, and on June 2 the Colorado Court of Appeals rejected the appeal. However, the appeals court gave Mason time to file for another hearing of the issue. Eventually the court denied Mason the rehearing but allowed her to take her request to the Colorado Supreme Court, which ordered the seal on the balance of the coroner’s report to remain in place, pending its decision on whether to hear her last-resort petition.
On May 28, Detectives Thomas and Gosage finished their investigation of who had called McGuckin in January to request copies of Patsy’s bills. The detectives were told by an informant that the calls had been made by an employee of Touch Tone, Inc., who had impersonated John Ramsey. The police were told that the employee had photocopied Ramsey’s signature for the faxed authorization he’d sent to the hardware store.
Touch Tone employed several “investigators.” Some of them had obtained various records belonging to John, Patsy, and John Andrew Ramsey, including bank account signatures, bank statements, and credit card receipts. In addition, they had obtained telephone records and banking information regarding the Ramseys’ housekeeper, Linda Hoffmann-Pugh. Touch Tone employees had also obtained the names, addresses, home phone numbers, and toll records of the Boulder detectives working the Ramsey case.
The informant was an investigator for Touch Tone. He told the police it was common practice at the company to assume the identity of the person being investigated, which made it easier to obtain copies of personal and confidential records.
On May 29, Judge Morris Sandstead signed Detective Thomas’s request to search the offices of Touch Tone. There the police found personal records relating not only to the Ramseys but to Jay Elowsky; to John Ramsey’s first wife, Lucinda; and even to the Ramseys’ chief investigator, Ellis Armistead. No one was ever prosecuted, for fear that rights to discovery in a court trial would force the DA’s office to turn over a large part of the police file in the Ramsey case.
What the police didn’t know was that Touch Tone’s services had been paid for by a private investigator in California, who in turn had been retained by a tabloid TV program.
Also on May 29, Ann Louise Bardach, known for her investigative reporting, called Suzanne Laurion to introduce herself. She was coming to town to do a ten-thousand-word article for Vanity Fair on “this dreadful story,” she said. Laurion called back an hour later and said that Hunter would meet with Bardach for a few minutes on June 2.
During the last week of May, Hunter, DeMuth, Ainsworth, Smit, and Detectives Trujillo, Harmer, Thomas, and Gosage met with Dr. Henry Lee to review a list of items that would need additional attention if the Ramseys’ house were ever searched again. Lee also thought it was important to gauge the timing of JonBenét’s head injury