Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [176]
By now the police were receiving forensic test results almost daily but withholding some of them from Hunter’s office for fear of leaks to the Ramseys or the media. Over four dozen people had given blood, hair, and handwriting samples, all of which were tested, but none of them matched the forensic evidence from the crime scene.
Several pieces of evidence matched John and Patsy’s samples, but that was logical and to be expected, since they lived in the house and had constant, lengthy contact with their daughter. Without semen or some other hard evidence, the incest theory went nowhere. A careful review of Dr. Beuf’s medical records had given no indication of prior abuse. Nor could the police find any indication of prior suspicious behavior on the part of JonBenét’s parents.
The police had hung their hat on the Ramseys as culprits, but they were still unable to provide the DA’s office with enough evidence to warrant an arrest. Neither Alex Hunter nor the police were ready to admit that the case was unsolvable, however. Knowing that the ransom note was the best piece of evidence they had, Hunter hoped that the CBI’s handwriting experts would find something solid, but Chet Ubowski would not take the leap and say that Patsy had written the note. The CBI expert refused to tailor his conclusions to the needs of the police and the DA.
To say that Patsy hadn’t been excluded as the author of the note was only “soft evidence,” as Hunter called it, and it might not be enough to charge her as an accessory. In addition, the DA believed that under Colorado law an accessory could be charged only when a principal was charged.* Harder evidence would be needed to charge a perpetrator.
Hunter called his old friend Bob Kupperman, formerly of the Institute for Strategic and International Studies, who recommended using a psychological linguist, Donald Foster, a professor of dramatic literature at Vassar. Foster studied grammar, syntax, punctuation, style, and vocabulary to track down the authors of texts. He had accurately identified for the FBI source material for parts of Theodore Kaczynski’s Unabomber manifesto. He had also identified the writer Joe Klein as the anonymous author of the novel Primary Colors and had discovered William Shakespeare was the author of a previously anonymous Elizabethan funeral eulogy.
Hunter thought that Foster might be helpful in the Ramsey case. Just before the July Fourth weekend, he called Foster, who told the DA that he had once written a letter to Patsy Ramsey and another to her son, John Andrew, while following the case on the Internet. He said he had wanted to lend them some support. Hunter saw no conflict of interest.
Foster agreed to analyze the ransom note for the DA’s office. He would also be sent Janet McReynolds’s play Hey, Rube, Christmas letters and articles written by both Janet and Bill McReynolds, some of Patsy Ramsey’s writings, and transcripts of the Ramseys’ January 1 and May 1 press conferences. Not long after speaking to Foster, Hunter said that “this case will come down to linguistics.”
U.S. district judge Richard Matsch, who was presiding over the first Oklahoma city bombing trial at the time, had noted that handwriting analysis was not a science and wasn’t subject to peer review and was therefore not verifiable. But the Colorado state courts felt differently. In many cases, state judges had allowed handwriting experts to testify about comparisons and to draw conclusions from them.
For months the Boulder police had been collecting Patsy’s handwriting samples: beauty-pageant entry forms, school documents, applications, and business letters. They had recently visited the offices of Hayes Micro Computer in Norcross, Georgia, where Patsy had worked before marrying John. There they found more handwriting samples. This material was relevant for handwriting analysis but was of limited value