Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [285]
He didn’t freak out, didn’t throw things. It wasn’t even in his voice. But you could see the rage. You could feel it. I mean, it was powerful. I wanted to get out of the room, but Patsy was standing between me and the door. I’m not saying he didn’t have a right to be angry. I’m just saying I saw him angry. I saw the coldest eyes. He never said a word, but it was right there in his face. It was palpable. You could cut it with a knife.
Patsy was freaking out. It was, “What are we going to do? We’re having the Christmas house tour…” He was angry, but she was in a total panic. The flood had ruined Patsy’s image of what her perfect house should look like.
—Linda Wilcox
After the interviews were over, Hunter’s staff met in his office. Some thought the Ramseys were guilty; others were sure they were innocent.
Kane, Smit, DeMuth, and Haney found that their opinions were divided. Smit and DeMuth thought the intruder theory was more viable now and that no one could say for sure that the Ramseys had killed their daughter. Tom Haney, however, couldn’t see any suspects besides the Ramseys. The door hadn’t been closed on an outsider committing the crime, he said, but he thought it was a very distant possibility.
Kane saw no alternative but to go to a grand jury. Smit didn’t like what he was hearing. He realized that Kane had made up his mind that at least one of the Ramseys was guilty.
Hunter agreed with Kane: they would take the case to the grand jury.
They discussed how to proceed, and decided to use the Boulder police as primary investigators. Each officer would be sworn in. The grand jury wasn’t like a courtroom trial, where the police were only advisory witnesses. Tom Wickman would sit in during all the testimony in the grand jury sessions. He’d be allowed to whisper in Kane’s ear, “Be sure to get this in,” and “Don’t forget that this cop did that.” Officers who had worked the case would be called as witnesses, and as the grand jury moved along, Kane said, he would use the detectives as investigators for special assignments. Haney, who had known Kane for years, knew he would present everything, including exculpatory evidence.
But they were putting the cart before the horse with all this talk of a grand jury. There was a lot of work to do before they got there.
The next day, Lou Smit told Hunter that his wife had recently had a recurrence of cancer and he wanted to be by her side. They were in their sixties, he said, and they wanted to travel before she began chemotherapy. Smit said he wouldn’t leave the case but that he’d like to work out of his home in Colorado Springs, cut his time back to twenty hours a week, and come to Boulder only for weekly meetings. “I’m in this for the duration,” he assured the DA.
With the Ramseys’ interviews over, a full-scale public relations war broke out. The first official word of the interviews was published in the local dailies on June 25, even as they were taking place. The DA’s office told the press that the interviews didn’t preclude the Ramseys appearing before a grand jury and that the current questioning was part of an ongoing investigation. The same day, Beckner told one reporter that “significant” test results from the Ramseys’ clothing had surfaced; he didn’t say, however, that the fibers on the duct tape were found to be consistent with Patsy’s jacket. In The Denver Post, Chuck Green noted that the Ramseys were talking now because in this interview situation, they were allowed to ask their attorneys’ advice. Green also speculated that “by submitting to interviews now, they should be able to detect the direction of the investigation and anticipate what jeopardy they might be in if a grand jury summons their testimony.”
Denver attorney Larry Pozner, president-elect of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, confirmed for the media that the Ramseys had given Hunter’s office medical