Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [302]
For his part, Bob Grant saw a fundamental difference between Thomas’s letter and Smit’s. Thomas had intended his to be made public; he’d had an agenda. Smit, on the other hand, had meant his letter to be private; only as an afterthought did he release it to the media. That made Smit’s message weightier. If the case reached trial, no matter who the defendant was, any defense attorney would have to try to get Lou Smit as a defense witness. Not doing so would be tantamount to malpractice.
The two letters showed exactly how complicated the case was. Two experienced detectives, both with full knowledge of all the evidence, had come to opposite conclusions. That raised a question: If these two disagreed, could a grand jury ever agree on who killed JonBenét?
Hal Haddon told The Denver Post, “I would hope the authorities in charge of the investigation will take note of what Lou Smit said, and will devote some significant resources to finding the real killer.”
“Lou Smit has been on this case for how many months now,” Mark Beckner told the same paper, “and I don’t recall him ever presenting any arrest warrants to the DA’s office.”
On the evening of September 27, Smit’s letter spread like wildfire on the Internet, and 20/20 broadcast a one-hour special, hosted by Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer. Correspondent Elizabeth Vargas pointed out: “We emphasize there may be evidence to the contrary [to what we are reporting] not available to us or different conclusions that might be drawn [from what we are reporting]. And a reminder—in law, and in fairness, all people are considered innocent until proven guilty.” The report detailed Donald Foster’s conclusions about Patsy’s authorship of the ransom note; the enhanced 911 call with Burke’s voice in the background; the four fibers found on the duct tape that seemed to match Patsy’s jacket; and a time study prepared by the police, that showed how long it would take for someone to complete the murder and the cover-up while the family slept, unaware.
Vincent Bugliosi, a former Los Angeles prosecutor, told Vargas, “The strongest evidence against the Ramseys in this case is nothing that directly implicates them. [It is] the implausibility that anyone else committed these murders. But paradoxically, the strongest evidence that I’ve just pointed to, by its very nature, is the weakest evidence against the Ramseys.” Vargas asked, “Why?” Bugliosi continued, “If we come to the conclusion that JonBenét was not murdered by an intruder, the inevitable question presents itself: which [parent] did it? A prosecutor can’t argue to a jury, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the evidence is very clear here that either Mr. or Mrs. Ramsey committed this murder and the other one covered it up…’ There is no case to take to the jury unless [the DA] could prove beyond a reasonable doubt which one [of them] did it.” Later in the show, Bugliosi told Vargas, “Even if you could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Patsy Ramsey wrote the ransom note, that doesn’t mean that she committed the murder.”
Alex Hunter had watched 20/20 fearing the worst. The attack on him wasn’t as bad as he had expected. But listening to Foster’s conclusions regarding Patsy and the ransom note, he knew there was another side to that story, which the Ramseys’ attorneys were sure to make public. Several months earlier, Bryan Morgan had given Hunter a copy of a letter that Foster had written to Patsy Ramsey in the spring of 1997, before he agreed to work for Hunter. The DA was aware that Foster had followed the case on the Internet from February 1997 and that he had also written to Patsy. But when Morgan told him about the second communiqué, which Foster sent to Jameson, who ran an information Web site on the Internet, Hunter was dismayed. It seemed that at first Foster believed that Jameson was in