Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [215]
“Could you give Hunter a call and just talk to him for a minute,” Gosage asked, “so we know you’re telling us the truth?”
I said, “No.”
Thomas looked at me like, Don’t fuck with me.
I just looked back at Thomas. Finally I said, “Fuck.”
Thomas activated his cell phone, and I gave him Hunter’s home number. Hunter’s answering machine picked up.
“What does Hunter see in you?” Gosage asked.
“I guess he likes me. I brought him information, like I brought you information,” I told him. “When I talk to Hunter, it’s different from the way I talk to you. He’s more political. He’s not military the way you are.”
“Are you a double agent for Hunter?” Gosage asked.
“No. I’m a twenty-four-year-old kid caught in the middle of something.”
“Junior detective,” Thomas called me. Then Gosage repeated, “Junior detective.” It was their joke.
“If I’m a junior detective,” I interjected, “I should have a gun.”
“You could be a private investigator if you want,” Thomas said. “You don’t need to be licensed in Colorado.” I told them I’d start looking for a badge. Steve said he’d introduce me to this guy who sold guns below cost, a Glock or a Beretta.
After that Sunday night, at Chautauqua Park, I felt like one of the boys.
—Jeff Shapiro
What Jeff Shapiro didn’t know was that the detectives were wearing a hidden microphone and that the conversation was being recorded and transmitted by radio to a van parked just a hundred yards away.
The following Thursday, October 1, Gosage took the tape to Eller, who listened to Shapiro recount how Hunter wanted to smear him with the supposed sexual harassment allegation. Eller remained calm. The next day, he and Gosage met with Koby and played him the tape.
Koby was thunderstruck: Thomas and Gosage were not only trying to find the murderer of JonBenét, they were also investigating the conduct of Hunter’s office. He was angrier at the detectives than at Hunter. On the one hand, the tape confirmed what Eller had been telling him all along about the DA’s office; on the other hand, it gave the police enormous power over Hunter—power that Koby wouldn’t allow them to use.
Koby knew that Eller’s rage at Hunter would destroy whatever was left of his professional relationship with the DA. The department’s work would suffer. Eller would have to be replaced. To Gosage, it was clear that Koby was “handing up” Eller to protect Hunter.* Koby kept the original tape and ordered Gosage to destroy the copies in his presence. When Gosage told Thomas what had happened, Thomas believed it was more important to Koby to maintain his relationship with Hunter than to expose the DA’s subterfuge.
Two days earlier, September 29, the Boulder County clerk’s office provided copies of the previously sealed search warrants to the media and the public. Representatives of every newspaper, radio station, local television affiliate, and national network stood in line to obtain a copy of the sixty-five-page package, which cost $48.75. This represented the largest batch of released investigative material from among the eight thousand pages the DA’s office had received from the police department to date. A total of 179 sets were purchased.
By now Hunter had decided to give up his fight to keep the search warrants sealed. Both the text of the ransom note and a photocopy of the original had been published, and nine months of aggressive reporting by the media had led to the disclosure of many other details of the crime.
In a cover page to the search warrants, the DA’s office wrote that no evidence of child pornography had been found to date, and for the first time it was confirmed that nothing “consistent with semen or seminal fluid” had been found at the crime scene. Two brief passages had been blacked out by Judge MacDonald, at the request of the DA’s office. After the line “In the area where Det. Arndt had told Det. Everett that the decedent had been found by her father he observed two blankets on the floor in the center of the room,” a line and a half were deleted. On the next page, which was a list of items removed from the Ramsey