Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [304]
Alex Hunter attended every session. For the first time in his career as DA, Hunter was giving his full attention to a case. He knew that his legacy and reputation would depend on his evaluation of the evidence being presented to the grand jury. If an indictment was handed down, it would be his responsibility to sign it if he believed there was a case against either of the Ramseys. If he didn’t see the evidence—well, that was a bridge Hunter might have to cross later.
The police also worried about their legacy. In November 1998, Tom Wickman asked a journalist, “Why does the media keep talking about how we screwed up?” Before the reporter could answer, Wickman said, “We’ve been looking outside the Ramseys since the beginning. We are doing the best we can to look at other leads and I don’t know why this story keeps perpetuating.” Then he suggested that they have coffee. They didn’t talk about the grand jury—only about Wickman’s background as a psychology major and his interest in law enforcement and how different this case would have been if the press had gone away after the first few weeks.
That evening, Jay Leno did a routine about an imaginary phone call:
CALLER: “I’d rather not give my name. I’m a detective with the Boulder Police Department. I don’t appreciate your jokes about us not being very good investigators. I just don’t think it’s fair.”
LENO: Well, I understand what you’re saying but you have to admit it does seem like you’re moving awful slow on this JonBenét Ramsey murder case.
CALLER: There’s been a murder at the Ramseys’!?! Why didn’t someone tell me? I’d better get over there right now!!!
In many respects, the case was “scene-dependent”—could a person have lifted the window-well grate and climbed through the broken window to the basement and still leave a partial spiderweb intact? How well could someone hear from one room to another?
On October 29, the grand jury toured the Ramseys’ fifteen-room house. By 9:10 A.M. some jurors were already combing the property, going in and out through the side doors on the north side of the house and in and out the front door and peering in through the windows on the ground level. Each juror carried a notepad and several pages of photocopied material.
Kane, Levin, Morrissey, Wise, and Hunter lingered in the yard while the jurors spent several hours in the house, working mostly alone, almost never speaking to one another, each moving along at his or her own speed. The house was now unfurnished, and without the aid of photographs, it was hard to visualize how it had once looked. Still, the tour was sure to have an impact on the jurors. It was, after all, the crime scene.
Before the group left, one male juror tested the drainpipes on the exterior of the house, to see how strong they were. Possibly he wondered whether the pipes could support someone trying to scale the outside of the house. Another juror looked at the duct that led from the boiler room to the front of the house. Probably the jurors had been told Lou Smit’s theory about how the scream might have been heard by the neighbor but not on the third floor, by JonBenét’s parents.
At 11:20 the jurors left, two hours and twenty minutes after they arrived.
As the sheriff’s van pulled away from the house, Wise said to Kane, “We’ve got a problem. Sixteen of them went in and only fifteen came out. I think we lost one.” Wise saw a momentary flicker of panic cross Kane’s face before the prosecutor realized that Wise was pulling his leg.
That afternoon, the grand jury began hearing from Tom Trujillo, who had been sworn in as a grand jury investigator. CBI analyst Debbie Chavez was the next to give testimony. Her areas of expertise included the