Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [25]
That night, John Meyer returned to the morgue. With the coroner was Dr. Andrew Sirotnak, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado’s Health Sciences Center. The two men reexamined JonBenét’s genitals and confirmed Meyer’s earlier findings that there was evidence of vaginal injury. Meyer knew that JonBenét’s death could be traced to strangulation and a blow to the head, but the facts surrounding the sexual assault of the child were unclear. In the event of a trial, the physical evidence about that would be open to interpretation.
4
On Saturday morning, December 28, seventy parents and children showed up at High Peaks Elementary School. The administrator had arranged for therapists to come in to talk to the kids and their parents. The school was in a U-shaped red brick building whose interior had been scrubbed clean and spruced up by dedicated parents. Now, many of these same adults gathered around the small tables in the library and talked in groups. Some of them were grateful to be temporarily separated from their children. It would give them a chance to express their own sadness and anxiety freely.
In the kindergarten classroom, children of various ages were gathered, some of them hyper, some of them relaxed, all of them full of questions. Charles Elbot, the principal, got their attention and then sat in one of the little chairs and read aloud from a book entitled Lifetimes, the Beautiful Way to Explain Death to Children.
All round us, everywhere, beginnings and endings are going on all the time. With living in between.
Sometimes, living things become ill or they get hurt.
Mostly, of course, they get better again but there are times when they are so badly hurt or they are so ill that they die because they can no longer stay alive.
This can happen when you are young, or old, or anywhere in between.
He told the children that there was no right or wrong way to feel at a time like this and that they should not be afraid to talk to their parents or teachers. “You need to know that tonight you should feel safe,” he said. “What happened doesn’t usually happen in Boulder.”
“Yeah,” one third grader responded, “JonBenét’s parents would have told her that too.”
“That’s true,” Elbot said. “But you need to understand it’s a rare occurrence.”
He told the children that this was like crossing the street—an accident can happen, but it’s not likely to happen.
Elbot knew the children were terrified.
He suggested to them that they make some drawings. Jo-Lynn Yoshihara-Daly, the school’s social worker, helped the younger children. Some of the kids painted pictures of JonBenét’s family. Some drew JonBenét. Some added words to their pictures.
A few of us parents thought we should only tell our children that JonBenét died. Others thought we should say she had been murdered but not that she had been murdered in her own house. By Saturday morning there was a huge amount of speculation about the cause of JonBenét’s death. Some parents had heard JonBenét was strangled. My daughter was in JonBenét’s kindergarten class and hadn’t heard anything. But some of the older children had seen news reports on TV.
The school psychologist told us he would tell the kids the facts that were known, but he assured us he wouldn’t go near the subject of whether JonBenét was sexually assaulted. He would talk mostly about safety, about how you could feel safe. He wanted to focus on what the kids needed most.
The art therapy took forty-five minutes, maybe an hour. There were about twenty-five kids in two groups—younger children in one group, the older kids in another. Jo-Lynn dealt with the kindergartners.
The kids decided what had happened. They figured it out all by themselves. They drew pictures of JonBenét and her house. Then they came back to us parents with their drawings and their conclusions.
They said that JonBenét’s family went to bed and forgot to make sure that all the doors were locked. Then a bad man had snuck in and murdered JonBenét. They decided that if a bad man came into their homes, they would have