Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [295]
Fleet White, who didn’t own a computer and had resisted buying one, was spending nights at the Boulder library, researching the law. One night he bumped into Frank Coffman.
“Do you know anyone in this town who has confidence in Alex Hunter?” White asked Coffman.
Coffman didn’t know how to answer. The citizens of Boulder must have had confidence in Hunter or they wouldn’t have elected him for six consecutive terms.
“Don’t you think Michael Kane is respectable?” Coffman replied. “Aren’t you encouraged by having such a hardworking, honest, and dedicated guy in charge?”
“Oh yeah, I met Kane,” White responded finally. It had taken him a few seconds to figure out who Kane was. “It doesn’t matter if it’s Kane, if it’s you or me. I’ve got to keep the pressure on.”
“Were you impressed?” Coffman asked.
“Not really. They should have gone to a grand jury a long time ago,” White replied.
Coffman tried to figure out what was driving White. Then he realized that White had experienced something he himself hoped never to see: a six-year-old child lying murdered at his feet on the floor of his friend’s living room—a child who had played with his own daughter the night before.
White had recently told one of the detectives that he would go to jail before he would testify before the grand jury. His attitude was puzzling. The proceedings were secret, he would not be cross-examined, and he would be able to tell an impartial jury what he had been unwilling to tell the police. During this period, a journalist also had a chance to meet the Whites. They had told her she could write a story about them but that she wasn’t to take notes, use a tape recorder, or quote them. They talked for hours, but in the end there seemed to be nothing new to print.
A local lawyer who commented occasionally on legal affairs in the media also met with them. She, too, found their attitude illogical—they wanted closure in the case but refused to cooperate. Eventually, she concluded that the Whites, having lost confidence in the process and thinking there would never be an indictment, had reasoned that their noncooperation couldn’t hurt the case. It was like stabbing a corpse: it’s already dead, so you can’t hurt it anymore.
On August 17, the Whites released a letter to the media in which they said they shared Steve Thomas’s view about the DA’s office. The grand jury had been delayed by all parties, Fleet White wrote, even the current leadership of the Boulder PD, in order to take advantage of a new statute, passed on March 21, 1997, but not going into effect until October 1, 1997, which allowed grand juries to issue reports when allegations of commission of a class 1, class 2, or class 3 felony are not proved or no indictments are handed down. Apparently, White believed that even if the grand jury was used in the case, it would issue a report rather than an indictment.
The police may have been baffled by Fleet White’s behavior and his decision not to cooperate with a grand jury, but it was possible that he was consumed by one big discrepancy—the fact that he had not seen JonBenét’s body when he looked into the wine cellar in the early morning of December 26, 1996, whereas John Ramsey had found her body after a similarly quick glance into the same dark room several hours later. White knew from his police contacts that John Ramsey had suggested him as a possible suspect—and that Ramsey went so far as to speculate to Lou Smit that White’s wife, Priscilla, might have owned a stun gun. Since White hadn’t been given access to his previous statements to the police, he might have also wondered whether someone was hoping to trap him in inconsistencies between what he had told the police earlier and what he might