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By Root 1724 0

the media’s reporting. Ramsey said little. Once or twice he replied, “Thank you.” A week later, Shapiro called Ramsey again. This time he kept Ramsey on the phone for forty-nine minutes. Shapiro did all the talking. He apologized again and said that the media had been wrong in accusing Ramsey. Again Ramsey said little except “Uh-huh,” “Yes,” “No.” Then Shapiro asked him if he had any theories, and Ramsey replied, “Oh, I don’t have any concrete theories, no.” At one point, Shapiro told Ramsey that the evidence he had found was linked in some ways to Patsy. Ramsey didn’t respond. Toward the end of the conversation, however, Ramsey introduced a topic: the violent crimes that had taken place in Boulder since JonBenét’s death. Mentioning an attack on a woman by a man posing as a prospective home buyer, he said, “When I saw that, I said holy mackerel.” Shapiro replied that there had been many skull injuries to women. “Exactly,” Ramsey said. Shapiro mentioned the red heart drawn on JonBenét’s hand, and Ramsey said he had heard about it only recently. He hadn’t seen the Barbie nightgown in the wine cellar, he said. Then he volunteered that he didn’t know whether his daughter had been sexually assaulted or whether it was staging.

Shapiro told Ramsey, “Someone I know said, referring to you, ‘This guy didn’t do it. Trust me.’”

“I say that twenty-four hours a day,” Ramsey replied.

It was unclear why John Ramsey stayed on the phone with Shapiro and listened to the reporter’s monologue. Possibly Ramsey tape-recorded the conversation, hoping Shapiro would say something Ramsey could use in a future civil lawsuit against the Globe.*

Shapiro placed a third call to Ramsey, and Melinda answered. After Shapiro introduced himself, Melinda passed the phone to her father, who said he was busy and would call back. He never did. The reporter wrote Ramsey a twenty-nine-page letter saying, among other things, that he felt guilty about the type of work he was doing and that he wanted to advance himself in life. He admitted his wrongdoing and said he was considering becoming a Christian. These communications with Ramsey and Michael Tracey’s documentary affected Shapiro’s view of not only the Globe’s agenda but their methods of obtaining stories. It wasn’t long before Shapiro began to tape-record his phone conversations with his editors.

By the end of the year Ramsey and Shapiro were talking without the knowledge of his editors. When Melinda got married, Shapiro sent flowers. On December 23, Ramsey sent Shapiro a letter thanking him for the flowers and enclosing two books on Christian faith that he said might be meaningful. He complimented the reporter on his “good journalist skills” and even mentioned a Texas case he might look into, in which a woman on death row for killing her children might be “a victim of our flawed justice system.”

On Friday, May 1, Hunter and Beckner agreed that the police would make their formal presentation of the case to the DA’s office within a month. The commander told Hunter that the detectives would not name a perpetrator but would lean on linguistics and handwriting analysis to link the ransom note to Patsy Ramsey. Also, they were expecting the results of the CBI’s analysis of the clothes worn by the Ramseys the night of the murder and the morning afterward. Beckner told Hunter that the presentation would be unlike any other that the police had given the DA’s office. Hunter said he would bring a team of experts to listen. He would approach this with an open mind, Hunter reassured Beckner, and if there was a case, he would take it to trial. If there was any doubt, he said, he would take it to a grand jury.

They discussed where to hold the presentation. The police department’s conference rooms were being used for the training of thirty new officers, and Judge Bellipanni saw a conflict of interest in using a courtroom. The next best site was the CU campus. School would be out by June 1, and some of the buildings were so large that the entire Boulder police force could fit in them. Although the presentation had to