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By Root 1864 0

for the real killer.” The attorneys said that the leaks about the shoe imprint and the stun gun had taken place on Beckner’s watch, implying that the police had been the source. On this matter, the attorneys were disingenuous. They were the ones who had responded to the Los Angeles Times story about the stun gun, whose source, the article stated, was a Ramsey neighbor who had been interviewed by the police. The source of an early December Rocky Mountain News story about the shoe imprint was not a member of law enforcement either. More to the point, however, was something that the attorneys failed to point out in their letter: during their investigation, detectives often failed to admonish possible witnesses not to discuss their interviews with anyone.

The attorneys’ letter concluded on an ominous note: “We will no longer deal with the Boulder Police Department, except to honor our previous commitments.”

With John and Patsy Ramsey now living in Atlanta, it was unclear to the police whether their attorneys were consulting with the couple or acting independently. Frustrated by this, Beckner authorized Steve Thomas to approach Rev. Hoverstock and ask if he would act as a liaison between the family and the police. Hoverstock agreed, and within a few days he told the police that the Ramseys would meet with Beckner at their home in Atlanta. Beckner clarified that the meeting would be all business—he didn’t “want to chat about the weather.” Negotiations broke down over the scope of the questions Beckner would be allowed to ask. The police assumed that the Ramseys’ attorneys had intervened.

Meanwhile, Beckner called Hunter to say that he was looking at the first week of March as a likely time for the DA to issue an arrest warrant or to convene a grand jury. Beckner had not mentioned in whose name the warrant would be written. Hunter replied that he was open to convening the grand jury but not to a fishing expedition.

Bob Grant had told Hunter he didn’t have the horsepower to handle this case before a jury, and now Hunter called Bill Ritter, another member of his task force, for advice about a grand jury specialist with Colorado experience. Ritter recommended Michael Kane, a former assistant U.S. attorney now living in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and working for the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue. Ritter said he was one of the finest grand jury experts he’d ever worked with.

In mid-January, Beckner told Hunter that Donald Foster, the Vassar linguistics expert who had been working on the case with them, at Hunter’s suggestion, was making some headway with his analysis. Beckner was eager to hear from Foster.

Steve Thomas had visited Foster earlier in the month, taking along hundreds of pages of writing from many different suspects, including Patsy and John Ramsey. Foster had followed the case on the Internet long before he was sought out to work on it. He had even entered some of the chat rooms and discussed the case with people like Jameson.

Foster was impressed with the detective. “I can’t tell you what our theories or the evidence are,” Thomas had said. “And I’m not going to prejudice your thinking.” Foster found that kind of commitment to justice unusual. He had heard the same thing from Hunter when they first talked on the phone. To the professor, both men seemed dedicated to finding JonBenét’s killer.

In his work, Foster always began with the assumption that no detail, however small, is irrelevant. Something as seemingly trivial as a period after the abbreviation Mr. can be a vitally important clue. In this example, it could suggest someone’s nationality: Americans use a period after the abbreviation but British writers do not. In one murder case, Foster identified the author of a document as someone educated in India. Among other clues was the misspelling of the name Rhonda as Rondha. In addition to such minutiae, Foster tracked down source material such as books, TV shows, movies, or music lyrics that might have influenced the writers whose documents he analyzed.

Beckner hoped Foster would name Patsy Ramsey