Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [250]
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In the first week of February, Detectives Jane Harmer and Steve Thomas tried to patch up relations between Hunter’s office and Fleet and Priscilla White. Thomas felt it was important to keep White happy since he was a material witness, and he also thought Hunter’s office should not have let the situation deteriorate to the point of the Whites’ campaigning for the DA’s dismissal. The couple agreed to meet with Hunter, Beckner, and the detectives, and Priscilla suggested their house. A few hours before the meeting, however, Beckner told Thomas that Hunter would send Pete Hofstrom in his place. Hunter had given no explanation. Thomas broke the news to the Whites. Predictably, Fleet White wasn’t happy, but he agreed to meet with Hofstrom and Beckner nonetheless. For forty-five minutes the group sat in the Whites’ kitchen. Hofstrom chatted about his years as a prison guard at San Quentin. But since he couldn’t speak for Hunter, nothing was resolved. Soon afterward, Thomas heard that White was now as angry with Commander Beckner as he was with Hunter. He persisted in trying to obtain the statements he had made to the police, and no one would release them to him.
Alex Hunter was wrestling with the inevitability of a grand jury. In the past, Hunter had enjoyed meeting with groups of Boulderites to ask what the public wanted from its DA. Now, while giving a talk to a group of Louisville residents, he asked how many of them had formed opinions on the Ramsey case and on what basis. All but one person said that the Ramseys were guilty, and even the holdout, Hunter felt, had an opinion about the case but pretended otherwise. Driving back to his office, Hunter wondered how he would find twelve impartial county residents for a grand jury.
On February 5, Lockheed Martin, which had bought the Ramseys’ house under its employment agreement with Ramsey, sold it for $650,000 to a limited liability company owned by some friends of the Ramseys. Attorney Michael Bynum said that when the house was eventually sold, the profits would go to the JonBenét Ramsey Children’s Foundation.
While the police and the DA believed that the ransom note was the most important piece of evidence against the Ramseys, the couple’s attorneys believed that the house was the most important piece of evidence for a potential criminal defense of their clients. It was their position that the house should be kept in its original state so that grand jurors or trial jurors could tour it and see how an intruder might have entered and made his way through it. By July 1997, the DA’s office had begun making architectural drawings of the house so that a large-scale model could be built for use during legal proceedings. Both sides knew the house would play an important role in determining who had killed JonBenét.
RAMSEY FRIENDS’ PALMS CHECKED
Police investigating the murder of JonBenét Ramsey have been asking friends of the family for palm prints, indicating they have a print they can’t match yet.
Police have found a palm print on the ransom note. It is unclear whether this latest request is related to that print.
The palm-print search appears to be another item in the list of investigative tasks created by Cmdr. Mark Beckner when he took over the investigation late last year.
—Rocky Mountain News, February 8, 1998
Carol McKinley, who had gone to work for Fox TV in January, called Dr. Henry Lee to ask how he would rate the chances that the case would ever be solved. On a scale of 1 to 10, Lee gave it a 2. It will never be solved, he said. Then he added, “I’m coming to Boulder. Alex Hunter is making my life hard. He wants me to meet with police again.”
Hunter had been trying to get the police and Dr. Lee together for months. The detectives were reluctant, but the DA was insistent. Now that the police investigation was winding down, he wanted to make sure nothing had been overlooked. Lee said he’d make himself available during a layover at