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By Root 1683 0

ready to fly to Atlanta with his wife and son and leave his daughter’s body—and the investigation into her murder—behind; the refusal to cooperate with the police; and the hiring of criminal attorneys. In reply, the FBI experts pointed out that no two people respond to trauma and grief the same way, and that the police should not overanalyze what they had observed. Most of the time, the parents of a victim are all over the police. “Why the hell haven’t you caught my child’s killer?” “What’s going on? I want to know everything.” In this case, the police had to acknowledge that it was their own commander’s actions that had led to the long postponement of the parents’ interviews.

The police also mentioned that the Ramseys had separate attorneys. Did this imply separate liabilities? They wondered aloud if one parent had knowledge of the crime before the fact, and the other had knowledge after the fact. The FBI had no answers to these speculations.

After the Quantico meetings, Detectives Thomas and Gosage visited Shurford Mills in Hickory, North Carolina, the country’s largest manufacture of adhesives. The FBI had determined that the tape allegedly removed from JonBenét’s mouth had first been manufactured in November 1996 under the brand name Suretape. The tape had a 40 percent calcium filler in the adhesive, and its yarn/scrim count of 20/10 helped pinpoint that Bron was the tape’s distributor. The black duct tape Thomas purchased from McGuckin in May for the same price that appeared on Patsy Ramsey’s sales slip carried the names Suretape and Bron.

6

Meanwhile, back in Boulder, Eller and Koby met to discuss how to deal with the Vanity Fair article. They knew that Bardach would never reveal her police source, and they doubted that he would come forward on his own. They discussed using polygraph tests to flush out the culprit, but Koby knew that without a hard lead, he didn’t have the legal right to polygraph his officers. Eller and Koby understood they had to do something, but decided against a formal investigation. The department had already initiated two investigations relating to the case: an internal affairs inquiry into Larry Mason’s charges against Eller, and the inquiry into the war-room computer break-in. Nevertheless, Koby announced that he was going to polygraph his officers, hoping the source might give himself up. This also seemed to be the right move for the department to make from a PR perspective.

When Greg Perry, the president of the police union, heard that Koby would be ordering polygraphs, he reminded the chief about a rock-solid provision in the union contract: until a suspect was named, no officer had to take a polygraph. Furthermore, the department was not allowed to discipline anyone for refusing to cooperate with an investigation. The purpose of a polygraph was to pressure a suspect and get him to confess. No one expected the test to reveal the truth. Still, an inconclusive result might be damaging: Officer X “failed” a polygraph. The union would not allow something like that to happen to one of their members because of the media—and they didn’t care if it was Vanity Fair or the Globe.

Upon his return from Boston, Koby told his officers, “If you talk to the press, you’re fired.”

In New York City, Ann Bardach got a call from one of her two police sources. He told her that people thought John Eller was her source. He didn’t mind that Eller was under suspicion: it would take the heat off the detectives, he said. Hunter will use the rumor against the him, the officer said, and it might cost Eller his position in the investigation. Bardach knew her sources, and Eller wasn’t one of them—she had never even met the commander. She asked her source what she could do for the commander. Nothing, the officer replied.

Bardach, troubled by the conversation, talked to her editor. She asked Vanity Fair to call Tom Koby and set the record straight. The magazine refused. Eller was Koby’s problem, they said, not theirs.

When Steve Thomas returned from the East Coast, he left a message on Jeff Shapiro’s