Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [205]
That evening, Thomas called Shapiro back from Quantico, where he had just arrived to consult with the FBI. The detective was outraged and angry.
“Who is fuckin’ doing this to me?” Thomas said. He was crying.
“All I know is that Bill Wise told one of our guys that he thought you did it.”
“Those fuckers! Those fuckers!” Thomas yelled. “Do you know what will happen if it’s on national TV that I’m the source?” He kept crying. “I don’t know if I can do this anymore.”
“You have to,” I told him.
“I’ve been talking to my wife. I didn’t sign up for this,” he went on. “I’m just a blue-collar working detective trying to get justice for this little girl. I don’t understand all this politics and stuff.”
“You have to do your job. You can be cool,” I said.
He kept crying. “I can’t do it.”
“This little girl needs you. God chose you to be her avenging angel and put you here for a reason,” I told him. “You cannot walk away from it.”
The roles had changed. I was now his big brother.
Then I started to cry.
“If I ever come forward to tell the world the truth, will you stand by me?” he asked. “Will you tell what you know about Hunter and the DA’s office?”
“Yes,” I answered. Then he said thanks and good-bye.
—Jeff Shapiro
Carol McKinley, who was attending a conference in Florida, called her police source while he was in Quantico to give him the public’s reaction to the Vanity Fair article. When she reached him, he was scared—scared that he would be accused of leaking the information to Bardach. Still, he told her, Bardach’s source shouldn’t be blamed. “We’ve never had a voice,” he said. McKinley agreed. Who could criticize any of them for wanting to vent their frustration?
Having read the entire Vanity Fair article several times, Alex Hunter saw that it was now almost impossible for the Ramseys ever to win in the court of public opinion. The mainstream media had now taken the same position that the tabloids had staked out from the beginning: who but the Ramseys could have killed JonBenét? Hunter wondered how he could obtain an impartial jury if the Ramseys were charged.
Then there was the attack on his office—particularly on Hofstrom and himself. Words Hunter had heard so often from Eller—chumminess and web of influence—was what Bardach implied in her story. The article accused the DA of incompetence and of favoritism toward the Ramseys’ well-connected attorneys. For the first time in Alex Hunter’s career, he was facing suggestions of professional impropriety.
“In all my political life,” Hunter said, “these kinds of allegations have never been raised. I’ve been accused of excessive plea bargaining, and I’ve learned to deal with that in a healthy way. But this challenge to my integrity, I confess, has gotten my attention. No question, there is now a shadow hanging over me, and I don’t know how dark it is. I wake up at night to the problem, stew about it, and then go back to sleep.”
On September 6, Pete Hofstrom, Lou Smit, and Trip DeMuth left for Quantico. Hofstrom, sporting a University of Colorado sweatshirt, was more relaxed than usual with the local reporters who were on the same flight. He joked about the Vanity Fair story, introducing Smit as Delusional Old Man, a description lifted from Bardach’s article.
In Quantico, Detectives Thomas, Gosage, Harmer, Trujillo, and Wickman; their pro bono lawyers, who had accompanied them; and Hunter’s team were driven to FBI headquarters in blue vans with tinted windows.
By now the Bureau’s Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit was quite certain that JonBenét’s killer had never committed a murder before. The experts thought that the ransom note was written by someone intelligent but not criminally sophisticated. Someone who had planned a kidnapping in advance would have tried to impress the parents with how great a threat he or she posed. Words like we and us, my group, we’re large, and we’re big were absent. In the note, the kidnappers called themselves a “small foreign faction.” That raised the question, foreign to whom? From whose point of view