Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [182]
Carl Whiteside, the CBI director, was attending a meeting in Breckenridge when the Boulder PD’s press release was issued. When Whiteside was told about Eller’s statement, he asked to meet with the commander. Whiteside worried that his agency would be dragged into the ongoing battle between Hunter and Eller.
“I don’t know who exactly did it,” Eller told Whiteside the next day, “but just look into it.” Whiteside could see that Eller wanted to implicate the DA’s office.
The computer in question was taken to the CBI. Whiteside asked Chuck Davis, his computer expert, to handle the technical side of the investigation. Whiteside didn’t know at the time that two days earlier, Detective Sgt. Wickman had asked Davis to help with a computer that the Boulder police thought someone had broken into. When he arrived, Davis discovered that the police hadn’t fingerprinted the computer, which by then had been handled by a half-dozen people without the precaution of wearing gloves.
Mark Wilson, head of the CBI’s criminal investigation unit, and five investigators were assigned to the case. Hofstrom, Smit, Ainsworth, DeMuth, Wickman, Thomas, Harmer, Trujillo, and Gosage, all of whom had access to the war room, were interviewed. So were Hunter and Wise, though neither of them had access cards. Everyone provided the CBI with an alibi for 1:00 A.M. on June 7. Then Trujillo found the missing Zip drive in the trunk of his car.
The CBI team fingerprinted the entire war room and checked the records of the computer-controlled locks: there had been no entry at or about 1:00 A.M. on June 7. They examined the ceiling, the floor, the walls, the dust patterns, and anything else that might give them a clue. They concluded that only a ghost could have entered the room without proper access.
Meanwhile, Davis’s investigation of the Compaq computer revealed that it had no modem or network connection. Only one fingerprint was found inside the unit, in a region where only an assembly-line worker could have touched it during the manufacturing process. Davis knew it was possible for someone to take the unit apart and pull out the plastic jumper cable beneath the BIOS chip that stores the password and completes the start-up circuit, and that would have erased the password. But Davis assumed that if someone knew enough to pull the jumper cable, he’d also be smart enough to enter a fake password and cover his tracks. Of course, a professional could have done the job and tried to make it look as if an amateur had done it.
Davis discovered that the computer’s internal clock and calendar didn’t work properly. The clock was losing almost ten minutes every two and a half hours. The next time he checked, it lost fifteen minutes in three hours. There was no discernable pattern to the time loss, but he discovered that when the chip was cleared, it didn’t always reset to 00:00 hours, January 1, 1980, as it was supposed to.
Since the clock was malfunctioning, the time of the alleged break-in—1:00 A.M. on Saturday—was meaningless and therefore useless in the investigation.
Davis believed that the computer was defective. He tested another computer of the same model, purchased and installed in Boulder at the same time, and it turned out to have the same clock and chip problems.
The CBI concluded that the alleged break-in never happened. There had simply been an equipment failure. When Eller, Hunter, and Koby met with Davis and Mark Wilson, Davis explained that there had been no breach of security.
The next day, Hunter extracted a promise from Koby that Hunter and Wise would receive a letter of apology from Eller for his false accusations. But when the detectives working the Ramsey case heard about Koby’s promise, they were outraged about what they felt was another instance of their chief not backing them. Eller never sent the letter.
Bill Wise