Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [223]
During this period, the detectives interviewed Burke Ramsey’s teachers and followed up the information they’d been given about JonBenét’s habit of asking adults to wipe her when she was on the toilet. Several experts told them that the age of modesty in girls was about seven or eight. Until that age, it wasn’t uncommon for a child to ask for help from anyone around—a dad, a mom, a baby-sitter or a grandparent. It was just as common for a child not to ask for help and simply pull up her pants, producing a different problem for the parents. There were no statistics to indicate whether a child who asked for help on the toilet might also somehow invite sexual contact. To their surprise, the detectives also learned that bed-wetting was not unusual in children up to that same age. Some of the officers had their own child-rearing experiences but still consulted casually with friends. The opinion of those parents was that the age of modesty was much lower, maybe five.
During this time, the detectives also contacted the first of more than twenty locally registered sex offenders and checked the alibis of all of them.
Slowly, the police chipped away at the to-do list.
Meanwhile, Lou Smit met with Ramsey investigators Jennifer Gedde and John Foster to discuss several suspects who had turned up as a result of the newspaper ads. Smit now worked only with Trip DeMuth. The police detectives quoted in the Vanity Fair article had made such unkind remarks about him that he didn’t feel like involving them in his work. Smit still thought about Kevin Raburn as a suspect.
My name is Kevin Raburn. I was raised in Boulder County, grew up in Louisville. High school in Lafayette. That’s when I broke a window, in something like a milk truck. The judge gave me forty-five days in the Boulder County jail. That ruined my school totally. My mom worked to support my sister and me. She was a single parent.
In ’87 Boulder was laid-back. I lived there when I was nineteen. Worked in Burger King, rode my ten-speed bike. Then I got a job cooking at Bennigans, 26th and Canyon. The rent was always high, especially for people who had to work. Everyone has a job and a half, two jobs, unless they have parents helping with the rent, which I didn’t. Everything I needed I could walk to, even the foothills. The mountains are nice.
Then I started stealing bikes. That’s something they don’t like in Boulder. Bike theft is taken seriously. By 1990 I was sentenced to a halfway house, and I started violating their rules—walking away—and they put me back in jail. In ’93 I did another bike theft. I like to ride bikes. Another theft, another felony, prison at Arrowhead, another halfway house. In ’94 the mandatory parole kicked in, and I got a four-year sentence. While I was working full-time at Rafferty’s, cooking, in ’96, I failed my Breathalyzers and they sent me back to prison.
On December 26, the day JonBenét was murdered, I went to Juanita’s near the mall in Boulder, looking for a second job. Got a job. Worked days at Rafferty’s, nights at Juanita’s. That’s when the TV crews would come in and talk about the killing of JonBenét. It was on TV a lot, but I didn’t think much about it. Lots of police around—Channel 7, Channel 4.
Then one night in February I stole some AA batteries for my Walkman. I don’t even know why. I already had some. Next thing, I’m in jail again on a misdemeanor charge. Being jailed for battery theft when I should have been