Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [288]
During one of those sessions, Thomas glanced across the room and saw Alex Hunter talking on his cell phone. Here were the videotaped interviews of the most critical suspects in the most important unsolved case confronting Boulder law enforcement, and the DA couldn’t give them his undivided attention? Thomas decided to resign from the Boulder Police Department. He had been weighing the pros and cons of such a move, but watching Hunter chat on his cell phone while the detectives gave their evaluations of the interviews finally tipped his internal scale. Thomas began to draft his letter of resignation.
CHASE TESTS TURN UP LITTLE
Seven months after the brutal murder of University of Colorado senior Susannah Chase, the detective investigating the slaying pledges to forge on “until all leads are exhausted.”
“Do we have enough for an arrest warrant?” Kerry Yamaguchi asked. “Probably not.”
But police did have enough, in recent months, to secure court-ordered saliva samples from at least two potential suspects, including one man who knew Chase and alluded to killing both her and JonBenét Ramsey.
Additionally, Boulder police have taken voluntary samples from at least 14 people, according to court documents recently obtained by the Daily Camera.
Police had hoped to match a perpetrator’s DNA to semen recovered from Chase’s body—semen that a Colorado Bureau of Investigation analyst said was no more than 30 hours old at the time it was recovered.
—Matt Sebastian
Daily Camera, July 23, 1998
Throughout July, as the media awaited word that the case would go to the grand jury, the DA’s staff was immersed in analyzing the evidence. The results of eighteen months of work by the Boulder police, the FBI, the CBI, and other agencies took time to review, and they were generating their own material too. More than forty-six hours of interviews with John, Patsy, and Burke Ramsey still had to be transcribed and cross-indexed.
Hofstrom had prevailed over Michael Kane on one point. On July 21, Trip DeMuth had interviewed Susan Stine for five hours. She came without an attorney, and the interview wasn’t tape-recorded. DeMuth dug around to see if Patsy or John had perhaps confessed to the Stines while living in their home in 1997. Absolutely not, said Susan Stine, who came off as such a staunch supporter of the Ramseys that the DA’s staff wondered how much weight to give her statements.
Fleet White refused to come in voluntarily to talk to Hunter’s staff. That alone confirmed the need to take the case to a grand jury. But there were good reasons for holding back on an announcement.
For over a year, the Ramseys had provided the police with very little, if any, documentation. Now they were complying with most of the DA’s requests, and Kane didn’t want to jeopardize their chance of getting whatever they needed. As long as the DA’s office didn’t publicly call for a grand jury, it seemed that the Ramseys would cooperate. Nevertheless, Hunter hoped that by Labor Day he could announce that on September 15 the case would go to the grand jury. As far as Kane was concerned, the Ramseys were the target the grand jury would hear about.
Steve Thomas finished his resignation letter around July 25 but decided to wait until August 6, JonBenét’s birthday, to turn it in. As the date approached, he thought about making the letter public at the same time that he presented it to Beckner. He had gotten many calls from reporters ever since rumors of his medical leave had surfaced. The most persistent caller was a Shelley Ross for ABC. On August 5, Thomas sent her a copy of his letter by FedEx. He had no idea what her reaction might be. That night he realized that when she received it the next day at around 10:30 A.M. New York time, the letter would be out of his control, so he quickly arranged to have copies delivered to Beckner, Dave Hayes, and police department attorney Bob Keatley at 9:00 A.M. Boulder time.
The next morning, ABC called to say that they wanted to videotape