Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [242]
Late on the night of December 21, Susannah Chase, a student at the University of Colorado in Boulder, was beaten unconscious just a few blocks from Pasta Jay’s restaurant. A baseball bat was found near the scene of the crime. The press learned that there were no arrests imminent. Sheriff Epp offered his department’s help to Commander Eller, whom Tom Koby had assigned to the case. Eller declined the sheriff’s offer. Instead, using his authority as head of the detective division, he reassigned several detectives from the Ramsey case to the Chase investigation.
CU STUDENT DIES FROM BEATING
The death of a 23-year-old University of Colorado student has detectives once again working around the clock through the holidays to solve a brutal slaying.
After lingering in grave condition for two days, Susannah Chase was removed from life-support equipment and pronounced dead at 11:35 P.M. Monday at Boulder Community Hospital, where her Stamford, Conn., family had gathered.
Chase died unable to tell police who beat her beyond recognition and left her to die early Sunday in an alley a short distance behind her home. The police recovered a baseball bat near the bloody crime scene at 18th and Spruce streets.
Chase’s death came a few days shy of the first anniversary of the murder of JonBenét Ramsey.
—John C. Ensslin
Rocky Mountain News, December 24, 1997
A few days after Chase’s death, Epp realized his office still hadn’t been given information about the crime or a possible killer, though his department was responsible for protecting the county, which included the city of Boulder, and there was a murderer on the loose. Eller would wait two weeks before calling a meeting with Epp’s officers.
For his part, Alex Hunter couldn’t understand Tom Koby’s thinking. Just a week earlier, the chief had told the Daily Camera that dismissing Larry Mason from the Ramsey case was one of the biggest mistakes of his career. “This was one of the most painful things from start to finish on everybody involved,” Koby had said. “I supported the decision that was wrong. It had terrible consequences for Larry. There is no way I can ever make that right.” Then in almost the same breath, Koby put Eller in charge of Boulder’s second high-profile case in less than a year, though the murder of Susannah Chase posed a more serious threat to public safety than JonBenét’s killing. Everything had changed, Hunter knew, but in effect nothing had changed. A year earlier, Eller had seemed certain that the Ramsey case would be solved within a few weeks; now he seemed to believe the same thing about the Chase murder. To Hunter, it looked like a rerun. An overconfident Eller was keeping at bay everyone who offered to help him.
Just before 7:00 P.M. on December 26, Judith Phillips drove from her home on Lincoln Place to the Ramseys’ former home on 15th Street. Phillips and a few friends had organized a small gathering to remember JonBenét on the first anniversary of her death.
By evening, the lights decorating the surrounding houses were washed out by the floodlights that TV camera crews had set up for their coverage of the candlelight vigil. A framed black and white photograph of a pensive JonBenét rested atop two golden angels attached to a lamppost. A burning candle and bunches of flowers rested on the front stoop. A ten-year-old girl had brought a decorative tiara and left it as a symbol of her sorrow.
“She was a sweet individual and I miss her,” said Phillips, who had helped arranged the small shrine. “She will have justice.”
Holiday wreaths and stuffed animals lay at the base of the lamppost beside a typed poem, “The Ballad of JonBenét,” which began, “In 1990 a child was born. Her cold wealthy father ruled with scorn. Her mother did the best that she could do.”
Reporters and TV crews outnumbered the thirty or so residents of Boulder who kept vigil on the bitter