Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [197]
He said he had no comment.
Next she called Dan Caplis, a talk-show host at her radio station, who was also an attorney. Caplis said he would call someone he knew in the Boulder DA’s office to find out whatever he could. Caplis called Bill Wise to warn him about McKinley’s story but just as important, to tell Wise something else—that he was the one who had brokered the deal between the police and their new lawyers, a fact Caplis hadn’t told McKinley. When Wise found out, he was shocked.
In mid-July, knowing that the Boulder police had lost confidence in Hunter’s office, Caplis had approached Richard Baer, a former New York homicide detective and prosecutor who was now an attorney in Denver, and asked if Baer would volunteer his services to the police. Caplis knew that powerful lawyers were representing the Ramseys, and he felt that equally high-powered attorneys should be advising the police. When Baer agreed, Caplis called several people at the Boulder PD, one of whom was Steve Thomas. The detectives liked the idea. Baer then recruited Robert Miller, a former U.S. attorney from Colorado, and Dan Hoffman, former dean of the University of Denver Law School. On July 24, the three attorneys met with Eller and the detectives working the Ramsey case. They discussed an arrangement in which the lawyers would work pro bono.*
It was a relief to the police to have their own attorneys. Like Caplis, these attorneys had no agenda of their own. The police could now get an objective opinion about whether they had a case against the Ramseys or should move on. The FBI had told the detectives that they had enough evidence for probable cause, but now Eller, like Hunter, wanted to know if they had enough to convict beyond a reasonable doubt. He and his detectives didn’t trust Hunter and Hofstrom to tell them the truth. If they didn’t have a case, they wanted to hear it from a neutral source. They were prepared for bad news.
Hearing all this from Dan Caplis, Bill Wise worried about how it would reflect on the DA’s office. He called Hunter, who knew nothing about it. Within minutes, Hunter had Koby on the phone. The chief was more upset that Eller hadn’t told Hunter, than that the news had leaked. The DA told Koby that he didn’t want the story to air until an official announcement was made, because it would look as if the police were blindsiding the DA.
Carol McKinley called Hunter at home, and he agreed to go on the air live the next morning at 5:00 A.M., August 1. It was a face-saving maneuver. He couldn’t afford to let his office look incompetent. On the radio, he said he endorsed the police department’s hiring of attorneys.
In fact, Hunter knew the reputation of the three attorneys, and he hoped their input would work to his advantage. Baer and Miller had a great deal of experience with juries and the rules of evidence. Let the police department hear from its own handpicked consultants that the investigation was flawed. It would take some of the pressure off him.
That afternoon, Hunter issued a press release: “There is no question that outside lawyers providing assistance to a police department is unusual in a criminal investigation. But almost everything about this case is unusual.”
4
When Steve Thomas interviewed Patsy’s sister Pam in Atlanta, she told him that one summer in Charlevoix, JonBenét was standing on the dock barefoot. Worried that she might get a splinter, Pam ran after her.
“You need to put shoes on,” she told JonBenét.
“I don’t want to,” the child answered. “I want to feel the earth’s life under my feet. I want to know what it’s like to walk on something that is alive.”
When the kids are in kindergarten, they only go to school for a half day. So we moms would pick the kids up, and while we waited, we would just chat. My youngest child, a boy, was a year older than JonBenét. My middle one, a daughter, was Burke’s age. And my oldest, who was fourteen, would sometimes baby-sit JonBenét when Patsy had some activity at St. John’s.
That’s how I really met Patsy—through church.