Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [252]
• To boost morale, a consultant has been brought in to provide “emotional survival” training to the top administrators. In April, the consultant will work with officers and their families.
—Julie Poppen
Daily Camera, February 18, 1998
Commander Beckner was in discussions with Jim Jenkins, an Atlanta attorney who had represented Melinda and John Andrew Ramsey since March 1997 and was now counsel for Burke Ramsey. The police were hoping to conduct a formal interview of Burke and to do it before the media got wind of it. By mid-February, Beckner and Jenkins had agreed that the interview would take place in Atlanta, at a neutral location, and that it would be videotaped and conducted by a police officer rather than a child psychologist. Most important to the police was the stipulation that John and Patsy would not be present and that neither they nor their attorneys would be provided with information about the interview. The day after they agreed, Marilyn Robinson of The Denver Post called Jenkins, detailed for him the position he’d taken in his discussions with Beckner, and asked for a comment on the pending interviews. Jenkins was livid. Not only had someone leaked the fact that he was talking to Beckner, but they knew everything he had said. Jenkins now believed he saw Beckner’s hidden agenda—to use Burke as a weapon in the police-backed media campaign against his parents. Beckner denied Jenkins’s charges. Nevertheless, that same afternoon, the lawyer called off the interview between the Boulder PD and Burke Ramsey.
FORMER RAMSEY CASE CHIEF QUITS
The former chief investigator of the widely criticized JonBenét Ramsey murder investigation will call it quits Saturday.
“I wanted to be chief. I wanted to do it my way,” Eller said.
On Friday, personal belongings packed in boxes stacked in his office, Eller, characteristically wearing a pin-striped suit, talked about his career, his family, the Ramsey case and his future.
On one side, Eller, whose smiles are few and fleeting, is a self-proclaimed “fairly hard-nosed” cop who doesn’t mind he has rattled a few cages. On the other side is a man whose all-time favorite band is Led Zeppelin, who painted a mural of sea creatures and animals at the Niwot Child and Family Advocacy center and who has expressed his sense of humor by drawing political cartoons.
—Christopher Anderson
Daily Camera, February 23, 1998
That week, twenty-four Boulder detectives took John Eller out to lunch at Dolan’s restaurant. It was more like a wake than a retirement celebration. The officers had a group picture taken of themselves to make into a plaque. Eller took the floor and gave the detectives an inspirational speech of the sort Knute Rockne used to give his players before they took the field.
A week later, Steve Thomas and Eller’s brother, who had come from Florida, helped Eller load two Ryder trucks with his life’s belongings. On February 28, with Eller’s brother in one truck and Thomas and Eller in the other, they began the four-day drive to Florida. Within a few months, Eller would return to the police academy for night courses to get his Florida law enforcement credentials.
The cross-country trip was tiring for Thomas. He couldn’t understand why he needed so much coffee to keep awake during the drive east. He had also been having headaches for months. He knew he needed to see a doctor, but he couldn’t fit an appointment into his tight schedule.
BECKNER TO TAKE COMMAND OF DETECTIVE BUREAU
The names should be a roll call of the Boulder Police Department’s best and brightest—Detective Linda Arndt, Sgt. Larry Mason, Cmdr. John Eller and Chief Koby.
Instead, the litany represents the tarnished reputations of Boulder’s men and women in blue, careers forever changed—some would even say ended—by the ghost of JonBenét Ramsey.
But Mark Beckner, the 42-year-old commander who took the reins of