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By Root 1820 0

look at again. The Ramseys’ gardener, Brian Scott, came up. Detective Arndt had interviewed him in February, but she was no longer working on the case. Ainsworth thought Scott’s alibi should be rechecked and that he might be able to describe the condition of the grate covering the broken basement window. Harmer reinterviewed Scott, showing him two photographs taken just after the murder. One was of a bushel basket with some weeds in it, and the other was of the window grate. To the police, the ground cover around the grate looked as if it had been disturbed—perhaps because the grate was lifted up. Looking at the photographs, Scott said it looked as if the ground cover had grown underneath the grate, which indicated that it had been lifted, but he couldn’t tell when. It could have been in September-October, when Ramsey said he entered the house by that broken window, or as late as December, when JonBenét was murdered.

After Harmer left, Scott remembered an encounter with Patsy that he hadn’t mentioned.

I remember Patsy running out of the house, outraged at what had happened. It was October 3, 1995. O. J. Simpson had been acquitted. And I just happened to be there. You could see she was upset over it.

“He’s getting away with murder.”

I thought to myself, He could be innocent. He’s been acquitted.

“It’s a bad system, full of flaws,” was what she was saying. It seemed to her he was getting away with it because he had money.

—Brian Scott

Two weeks later, Harmer spoke to Scott’s girlfriend, Ann Preston, to reconfirm when Scott had left her place on Christmas night. She said it was around 12:30 A.M. Scott’s saliva, hair, and handwriting samples would have to be analyzed before he was cleared.

On June 24, Paula Woodward, an investigative reporter for KUSA, NBC’s Denver affiliate, was standing in line at a Boulder grocery store when she overheard a casual conversation between a customer and the checkout clerk. Fearing she might be recognized, Woodward turned her face away.

The customer told her friend that the Boulder police had visited Reverend Hoverstock to clarify the meaning of several passages in Psalm 118.

That evening Woodward called two sources she had cultivated during the investigation. One of them, an attorney for the Ramseys, told her that they had already considered Psalm 118 because of the $118,000 ransom demand. They had also discovered a passage in verse 27: “God is the Lord, which hath shewed us light: bind the sacrifice with cords, even unto the horns of the altar.” Then Woodward’s police source confirmed that the detectives had visited Hoverstock. What the source did not reveal was that they had found John Ramsey’s Bible open to Psalm 118 during their initial search of the house beginning December 26.

The next day, Woodward aired her scoop that the police were investigating a link between the passage in Psalm 118 and the murder of JonBenét. The morning after Jeff Shapiro heard the news broadcast, he went down to the TV studio and paid for a videotape copy of Woodward’s report. Then he called Frank Coffman.

“Turn to Psalm 118 in your Bible,” Shapiro said.

Coffman read verse 27 in his King James version: “Bind the sacrifice with cords, even unto the horns of the altar.”

“That’s interesting,” Coffman said, “but you need to find something that Patsy once said or some book she read in order for this to mean anything.”

That afternoon, Shapiro was struck by something he had heard from the Ramseys’ friend Judith Phillips. Several years earlier, in an interview in Colorado Woman News, Patsy had mentioned reading and relying on a book called Healed of Cancer. In that book, the author, Dodie Osteen, refers to Psalm 118, but to verse 17, not 27: “I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord.”

Shapiro wrote a story for the following week’s edition of the Globe.

One week later, Charlie Brennan heard from a colleague about the Globe story linking the ransom note to Psalm 118. In Brennan’s Rocky Mountain News story, published on July 8, the day after Shapiro’s Globe story hit the supermarket