Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [200]
Then someone said that I was John Andrew—and that I was also the killer. I received one letter from a college professor suggesting I confess. I was even turned in to the police. I thought, This is ridiculous. I’m a middle-aged housewife with a bunch of kids. Later I learned I was actually considered a suspect.
I knew the authorities had to look at everyone. But it shocked me when I discovered the police were even reading conversations on the Internet.
—Jameson
Jameson told Lou Smit her theory of the murder: While the Ramseys were at the Whites’ house on Christmas night, an intruder had entered their house and hid in the basement. The intruder was young and a friend of John Andrew’s and might have had a history of pedophilia. Jameson said that after the intruder entered the house, he fantasized about kidnapping JonBenét for sex, while always knowing he would kill her. While waiting for the family to get home, he wrote the ransom note. When they returned and JonBenét was put to bed, the intruder took her from her room and inadvertently killed her, sooner than he had planned.
For his part, Lou Smit listened to Jameson and tried to reconcile what she said with what he knew. He encouraged her to deal directly with the Boulder police and gave her no investigative details about the case, but he couldn’t dismiss her out of hand.
It was hard for Steve Ainsworth to wait in the wings. He and Smit hadn’t been authorized to do too much. On August 7, he drove out to the Dakota Spa, the New Age retreat and meeting center in Lyons where Jacqueline Dilson worked. It was Dilson who had suggested to the police and the DA in January that her ex-boyfriend, part-time reporter Chris Wolf, had behaved oddly after JonBenét’s death. Ainsworth had read the police reports about both Dilson and Wolf and felt that further follow-up was needed. Now, Dilson told Ainsworth that on February 13, the day Koby and Hunter had first appeared on TV for a press conference, Chris Wolf “freaked out.” She and her daughter, Mara, had both seen Wolf biting his nails when Hunter, looking into the camera, said, “We will get you.” After the broadcast, Wolf left, Dilson said. She added that Wolf had threatened to kill her in April. “I should just strangle you” were his words.
A month later, the Ramseys’ investigators suggested that the DA should look at Wolf, not knowing that Ainsworth had already opened a file on him. Ellis Armistead, John Ramsey’s chief investigator, faxed Ainsworth additional background information about Wolf. By the end of September, Smit and Ainsworth had received two more communiqués from the Ramseys’ investigators suggesting that they continue to look at Wolf. It wasn’t until February 1998 that Wolf was again contacted by the Boulder police. He was then working for the Louisville Times as a reporter. He agreed to give the police a sample of his saliva. Then he provided them with his palm prints and fingerprints and spent an hour supplying a handwriting sample. Wolf wondered if he would ever be cleared, since he believed the murder would never be solved.
The same day that Ainsworth interviewed Dilson, Bill Hagmaier of the FBI called Alex Hunter. Now that the trip to FBI headquarters in Quantico had been firmed up by the police, Hagmaier didn’t want the DA and his staff to come east and be disappointed. The Bureau, he said, was not going to say that the Ramseys had killed their daughter. They were prepared to say that there was probable cause, but as of this date, the threshold of reasonable doubt had not been crossed.
Even though he now knew that there wasn’t enough evidence for an arrest, Hunter told Hagmaier that he would still make the trip. He wanted to hear firsthand what the FBI experts had to say.
On August 13, the full, uncensored autopsy report, including six brief sections that had been held back from the public since May 15, was released.
The details previously not disclosed to the public were that a Colorado Avalanche sweatshirt