Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [267]
Haney worried that both Steve Thomas and Lou Smit had lost their perspective. It wasn’t that they were unprofessional in meetings, but they had forgotten to keep an open mind. During one meeting, Smit, Thomas, DeMuth, and the other detectives had gotten into an argument over the grate covering the broken basement window. That was when Haney said to himself, Hey, I’m not here to fight, I’m not here to referee, I’m not here to take sides. I’m here to do a job. He wondered whether Thomas and Smit shouldn’t have been taken off the case earlier.
Hunter, Kane, Smit, DeMuth, and Wise met with Hofstrom to draw up a list of who would attend the police presentation from their side and came up with seventeen names.
Wise joked that they had to add two more to make a small foreign faction.
“What do you mean?” Hofstrom asked.
“I assumed that you had read the ransom note,” Wise replied. “I’ll get you a copy.”
Meanwhile, the Boulder PD received word from the CBI about the four red and black fibers that had been found attached to the duct tape. The lab had been sent a red blouse and sweater, black pants, and a red-and-black checked jacket belonging to Patsy.
Now the CBI reported that the fibers were not consistent with the slacks or the sweater but were consistent with the jacket Patsy had worn the night JonBenét had been murdered. The CBI could not say for sure that the fibers didn’t come from some other piece of clothing made of the same material, but this important evidence would be included in the police presentation.
When the detectives began working the Ramsey case, they said to each other that they wouldn’t settle for anything less than the death penalty. After the CBI’s tests determined that what they had thought was semen was in fact blood, the detectives said they would accept nothing less than a conviction on a murder charge. A few months later, they would have settled for a felony conviction. By the time they met with the FBI at Quantico in September 1997, they would have considered an indictment a victory. When Eller was replaced, handcuffing would have felt like a triumph. After a solid year of working the case, they prayed for the chance at a second interview with the Ramseys. Now, eighteen months in, they were happy to have the opportunity to present the case to the DA.
On May 26, Beckner and the seven detectives began rehearsing the presentation. For almost a month they had worked in the law offices of their pro bono attorneys, Bob Miller, Richard Baer, and Daniel Hoffman. Baer’s staff showed them how lawyers presented complex evidence to a jury, and the detectives organized their presentation along those lines.
The previous year, the attorneys had mediated between the DA’s staff and the police. Now Steve Thomas and his colleagues hoped that after their attorneys had seen their run-through, they would call Hunter and say, “We’ve looked at it, and we think they’ve got it.” The call was not made.
On Saturday, May 30, two days before the scheduled police presentation, Alex Hunter was gardening in his front yard when the phone rang at about 9:00 A.M. Hunter’s nine-year-old son answered.
“This is John Ramsey,” a man said. “Is Alex Hunter there?”
“Yeah, right,” the boy replied. The family had received many crank calls.
When the caller was unable to convince the child that he was Ramsey, he asked to speak to an adult. “Oh, sure it is,” Margie Hunter said sarcastically when her son told her that a John Ramsey was on the phone.
Unable to convince Hunter’s wife, Ramsey still insisted on speaking to her husband.
“Am