Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [186]
Dr. Henry Lee: Well, to solve a case is like building a table. A table has four legs. You need good investigation—good investigation team. You need good forensic evidence. In addition, you need witnesses and public support. Right this moment you don’t have the four legs yet.
Larry King: How many legs of the table do we have?
Dr. Henry Lee: So far, I would say I have only one and a half, maybe.
—Larry King Live, June 26, 1997
On Monday morning, June 30, the police searched the Ramseys’ fifteen-room house yet again. The couple had signed their consent on June 13. Jeff Shapiro was one of the few members of the press who showed up.
Pete Hofstrom, Trip DeMuth, Lou Smit, and Rob Pudim, an architectural draftsman, were the first to arrive from the DA’s office. Joe Clayton, a criminologist from the CBI, arrived soon afterward. Steve Thomas pulled up in a Blue GT Mustang, wearing overalls and a dust mask. Gosage and several other officers soon followed. Before long, plumbers arrived to remove the boiler from the basement. The police used fiber-optic technology to look behind walls and inside the crawl spaces. They were looking for the roll of duct tape and the remainder of the cord, but found nothing. Reporters saw Detective Tom Trujillo attempt to climb through the broken basement window. Steve Ainsworth arrived to collect more fibers to compare with those found on JonBenét’s body. If fibers had been transferred from any upstairs room to the wine cellar, the police would know where JonBenét might have been before her death or where the killer had been before the murder.
Jeff Shapiro was soon bored and left to visit Hunter at the Justice Center. The DA told Shapiro that the cops were planning to knock down a basement wall. “They’re looking for the roll of duct tape,” he said. “I don’t think they’re going to find it.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
Then Hunter told Shapiro that as far as they could tell from one police report, John Ramsey could have left the house for as long as fifty minutes the morning JonBenét’s body was found (information that later proved untrue). “I think John may have taken all that stuff out of the house,” Hunter said. “Someone got rid of it.”
I asked Hunter what time the ransom note said the ransom was supposed to be picked up.
“Hmm. Let me check. Where’s my copy of the note?” Hunter said, teasing me.
Hunter told me there was to be a call between 8:00 and 10:00 A.M. No one outside the investigation had been told that at the time.
“Can I just see what the handwriting looks like?” I asked.
He opened a spiral binder, took out some loose pages, and held them up real close to my eyes—so close that I couldn’t read anything. Then he quickly pulled the pages back, put them away, and went, “Ha, ha, ha.”
“Don’t tell anyone I did that,” Hunter said.
“OK.”
That’s when I got the feeling Hunter must know deep down that the Ramseys did it. All this other stuff was just talk.
That night I left Thomas a message on his voice mail: “I knew you had to drive a cool car. I’m proud of you, man.”
—Jeff Shapiro
Stephen Singular knew that Hunter was talking to the tabloids—Jeff Shapiro had told him. Hunter had to know that the tabs were a driving force in shaping public opinion and that they were committed to the idea that the Ramseys had killed their daughter.
Earlier in the month, Hunter had told Singular it was difficult for the DA’s office to do certain things that needed to be done in the investigation. When Singular gave him the idea of delving into the world of pageants, Hunter suggested, Why don’t you go to the tabloids? They have money, they have