Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [209]
In writing about his visit to the house, Glick said that an intruder could have climbed through the broken basement window—an accurate observation that challenged what Ann Bardach had reported in Vanity Fair just days before. The Newsweek writers also attempted to correct several other misleading observations in Bardach’s article. For example, she had given little weight to John Ramsey’s attempt to collect the $118,000 needed for the ransom. In Newsweek, the writers outlined some of the steps Ramsey had taken on December 26 to obtain the funds. Glick and Keene-Osborn were getting their information directly from the Ramsey camp, and to some the story read like a defense brief for the couple.
There were others lobbying more directly for the Ramseys. In August, Alex Hunter had declined to be interviewed by ABC’s Diane Sawyer, and Koby’s office didn’t even return Sawyer’s personal calls. But while working on the Newsweek article, Sherry Keene-Osborn told Hunter that Michael Bynum had granted Diane Sawyer an interview and a tour of the Ramseys’ house.
On September 10, just three days after the Newsweek story was published, Prime Time Live devoted a full hour to the Ramsey case.
“This is Mike Bynum,” Sawyer told her audience, “a former prosecutor and close friend of the Ramseys. Since the murder, he has been by their side, and is now speaking for the first time.”
“The Ramseys, in my opinion, based on everything I know,” Bynum said, “are absolutely incapable of murder and incapable of harming that child.”
“You’re saying there has never, for a moment, been a flicker of…even doubt in your mind?” Sawyer asked.
“In my mind, that is absolutely correct.”
Bynum told Sawyer about the Ramseys’ most familiar complaint—that the police had tried to withhold JonBenét’s body in exchange for interviews. He didn’t know whether or not it was illegal, Bynum said, but he was sure it was immoral and unethical. “Hell no, you’re not getting an interview,” he had personally told the police, said Bynum.
Sawyer asked why the Ramseys had acted the way they had—with a seemingly unnatural restraint and concern for how they appeared to the public. She implied that innocent parents would not only give police an interview but most likely camp out at police headquarters and refuse to leave until the case was solved.
“In the circumstances that John and Patsy Ramsey were in,” Bynum said, “you go ahead and do that, and pick up the pieces later, because you’re going to be shredded.”
“Innocent or not?”
“Absolutely,” Bynum replied. “Absolutely.”
“Polygraphs,” Sawyer asked. “Have they taken a lie detector?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Should they? Will they?”
“Not if I ever have anything to say about it.”
“Why?”
“Oh, that’s Ouija board science, number one,” Bynum responded. “And I will also tell you, to my knowledge, that that request has not been made of John and Patsy.”
Later Sawyer asked, “Who do the Ramseys think killed their daughter?”
“They don’t know,” Bynum replied. Then he said that the Ramseys had passed on leads to the police.
Sawyer asked if they were “real leads” or “serious leads.”
“Very much so,” Bynum told Sawyer. “We know absolutely that there is evidence of an intruder. But that information, interestingly enough, hasn’t leaked out.”
Together, Sawyer and Bynum walked through the now-vacant Ramsey home. Standing in the basement at the train-room window, Bynum demonstrated how the entire frame of the three-section, multipaned window could swing open, enabling a man of his size—“5-10 and 175”—to get through. He showed how a perpetrator could have reached the window merely by hoisting himself up, using an object such as the suitcase that police found beneath the window.
For the first time, the entrance to the wine cellar was shown on TV. Sawyer’s voice-over described a windowless concrete room that was not as hidden as some press reports had suggested.
“Doesn’t it almost have to be someone who at least knew where the wine cellar was,” Sawyer asked Bynum, “or had a kind of map