Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [199]
Also listed in the ad was a phone number for caller responses, which belonged to the Ramseys’ private investigators. Television viewers were told by one ex-FBI profiler to call the police with information, since they were the ones gathering the evidence and running the case.
That same day, Denver morning talk-show host Peter Boyles, whose ratings were climbing as a result of his coverage of the case, took out his own full-page ad in the Daily Camera. It was addressed to Patsy and John Ramsey. He called their plea laughable and said they were not behaving like the parents of similar victims. He commented, “Fred Goldman’s behavior exemplifies the true victim parent of a child who has been murdered.* You, on the other hand, have led Colorado and the nation on a seven month, low speed, white Bronco chase.” Boyles stopped short of saying the Ramseys had killed their daughter.
Alex Hunter hoped that the information the Ramseys were publishing in their advertisements—a third and fourth ad displayed some phrases from the ransom note—combined with the $500,000 reward the Globe had offered in June might just produce something. Hunter’s official position was that the Ramseys’ ads weren’t helpful, that it was unprofessional to release information that only the killer was likely to know—especially in a case like this, when all you had was a ransom note. Privately, however, Hunter understood the counterargument: that if you do release some information, someone might come forward and identify a suspect. Hunter was thinking of how the Unabomber had been caught when his brother saw some phrases in the manifesto published in the Washington Post and the New York Times and recognized them from Ted Kaczynski’s letters to his family. Hunter would have wanted the entire ransom note published, but it wasn’t his case yet, and he couldn’t go up against the Boulder police in public.
Lou Smit and Steve Ainsworth’s list of people who had to be reinterviewed grew ever longer. By now Smit was all but certain that someone other than the Ramseys had murdered JonBenét. Nobody had been able to find any motive for them to kill their daughter. Nor had the police uncovered any indications of previous cruelty or perversity in either parent. Smit had to admit that the writing pad—and possibly the ransom note—was damaging evidence. But it was mitigated by the evidence that he thought pointed to an intruder.
In mid-July, on the same day that Smit asked the Ramseys about the stun gun and the Hi-Tec shoes, he spoke on the telephone to Sue Bennett, more widely known as Jameson. Under that name, she maintained a Web site that provided a detailed timeline of events connected with JonBenét’s death, culled from various unofficial sources and public documents. She had contacted Smit at the suggestion of a journalist and provided him with information she thought he might not know.
Since February the police had been interested in Jameson, who lived in Hickory, North Carolina. They wanted to know how she got some of the information posted on her Web page—some information that had never been released to the public, including facts that even the police were originally unaware of. When the police learned that Jameson’s real name was Bennett—which was John Ramsey’s mother’s maiden name—they became even more conscious of her.
I used to go on-line to chat about home schooling. That’s how I teach my kids.
After the murder of JonBenét, I spent more time on-line. I followed the case. My first instinct was that the parents were going to be blamed for this, and I didn’t think they were guilty. It didn’t sound like something a parent would do. Then I read that JonBenét had an older half-brother. I went into one of the chat rooms to see if people were talking about him.
After I chatted a short time, someone called me a name. I was attacked. At the time, I was talking about what happened to JonBenét physically—in