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By Root 1881 0

may have been happy with Beckner, but the CBI wasn’t pleased with how he was handling things. Chet Ubowski, the CBI’s handwriting expert, learned from Detective Trujillo that Beckner had requested—and the DA’s office had authorized—another handwriting analysis of the ransom note. Hofstrom and the police had looked for an expert who would testify that Patsy had written the note. They turned to the U.S. Secret Service and got an opinion less conclusive than Ubowski’s. The upshot was that the CBI’s conclusions were now compromised. Under the process of discovery, the Ramseys would have the right to use the second analysis in the defense. The police had never bothered to ask Ubowski if he had put his entire analysis of the ransom note into his report and whether it was his final report. Either way, Ubowski was prepared to say, “Patsy wrote the note.” The CBI saw this as one more example of the missed opportunities in the investigation.

District attorney Bob Grant, a member of Alex Hunter’s task force, had now became the unofficial spokesperson for the Boulder DA. Grant had earned a Purple Heart for saving a man’s life in Vietnam; Hunter had always admired him.

Bob Grant had a gift for speaking intelligently about the Ramsey case without mentioning specific evidentiary issues. He could explain the different roles and responsibilities of the police and the DA’s office and clarify what was feasible as opposed to what the public thought should be happening. He wasn’t afraid to take a poke at the media. He gave great sound bites and was a natural on TV, much more at ease than Alex Hunter could be. He was just the man to help restore Hunter’s credibility.

Behind the scenes, Hunter had begun a series of getting-to-know-you off-the-record meetings with producers for network news anchors Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw and for Larry King. He’d even met with Tony Frost, the editor-in-chief of the Globe. Determined to put the Vanity Fair article behind him, Hunter was laying the groundwork for making his own TV appearances. He wanted to show that he could win in court, no matter what people might have heard about “his bunglegate and conflict of interest baggage,” as he called it. He talked about his twenty-three-year relationship with Pete Hofstrom, his “felony man,” who personally handled over four hundred cases a year. He said that his “tell-the-truth” dealings with public defenders had paid off, proving that advocates and adversaries can be truthful and still advance their agendas. It was one reason why the justice system in Boulder worked so well, he said.

While acknowledging the shadow hanging over him, Hunter stressed that he was a lawyer as much as a politician. He stated that there was no favoritism or selective enforcement in his office, there were only truth-seekers. The goal of his staff was to get “as close to justice as you can.”

While Hunter may have been winning some of his battles in the war over public opinion, he was candid when dealing with DAs Bob Grant and Bill Ritter of his task force. He admitted that his staff was inexperienced. What does this type of evidence really mean? he would ask. When and why should a grand jury be convened? How do you stop the investigation from going in too many directions at the same time? What’s the downside of this? What’s the upside of that? They had many conversations about police-prosecutor relations and, of course, about how the DA’s office should communicate with the Ramseys’ attorneys. The task force DAs had supported Hunter, but now they told him what he was unable to admit to himself.

“You don’t have the horsepower in your office to take this case to trial,” Bob Grant said. To Grant, horsepower was attorneys who had been through a case like this before. “You don’t even have someone who has done twenty homicides,” Grant said, “let alone an attorney who has tried two or three child-victim homicides.”

Alex Hunter got the message: it was time to think about bringing in some help. If the case went to a grand jury, he would need experienced prosecutors.

8

Earlier in October,