Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [306]
WRITER: I didn’t know about the dumbwaiter.
WOMAN: I didn’t know either until I was told.
With that, the woman got up and went back to her table.
“The system will put it right,” John Ramsey had often said. And each time they failed, he was confident that at the next juncture, things would be put right. He had begun to think that way while waiting for their April 1997 police interviews. When those interviews failed to diminish the police’s interest in him and Patsy, he waited for the next chance to put things right. A second set of interviews with the DA’s office in June 1998 had changed nothing, and now the grand jury was meeting. At this point his lawyers had told him it was likely Patsy would be charged. He just didn’t know how to tell her. Nevertheless, Ramsey didn’t lose faith in the process.
He knew they would have to wait for a jury to decide. Only then would he and Patsy be exonerated.
Like many Americans, Steve Thomas and Lou Smit, waited for the grand jury to finish hearing the case. Smit and Thomas, both intimately familiar with it, had different opinions about the meaning of the evidence. Smit hoped that the evidence would exonerate the Ramseys, while Thomas believed that it would cast enough doubt to let them off. The two detectives agreed, however, that all conclusions about the case—as well as the grand jury’s verdict—hinged on seven major items of evidence.
The first was the pubic hair found on the white blanket that had partly covered JonBenét’s body. There was only one test—called advanced mitochondrial—that could still be done to tie the pubic hair to someone. There was so little of the hair left after the previous tests, however, that this mitochondrial test would destroy what remained. Some of the detectives believed that the hair belonged to some family member, but the couple’s attorneys had objected to doing the destructive test at this time. They insisted that it should be conducted only when a suspect had been matched to other elements of the crime—and, of course, no one, including the Ramseys, had been conclusively matched to any element of the crime. It was also possible that the hair had adhered to the blanket in the Ramseys’ dryer, left there by another garment on some earlier occasion.
The shoe imprint found near JonBenét’s body was the second piece of evidence. Ron Gosage had compiled a list of more than six hundred people who had been in the Ramseys’ house during the six months prior to JonBenét’s death. He had gotten in touch with more than four hundred of those people, and not one of them had ever worn or owned that kind of Hi-Tec hiking shoe. The imprint was of the “poon”—the area on the sole at the heel where the brand name is stamped. The size of shoe couldn’t be determined from the imprint, since the poon is the same size in all shoes, the better to advertise brands. Unless the detectives could match the shoe to someone who had been cleared of the crime by other means, the possibility existed that it was the killer who had left the shoe imprint.
The third piece of evidence was related to the window in the basement train room. It had been open, there was a scuff mark on the wall under it, and pieces of glass had been found on the suitcase just beneath it—possibly the result of Fleet White’s visit to the basement window that morning when he picked up the broken glass from the floor under the window and replaced some of it on the windowsill. The partial spiderweb on the window-well grate was not conclusive proof that nobody had entered though the window opening. The sudden rise in temperature the morning after the murder allowed for a spider to come out of hibernation and drop its first lines of a new web, and some people argued that the strands of the web itself were elastic enough to survive disruption.
The fourth area of evidence consisted of the unidentified palm prints—one smear of a partial print found on the ransom note and a full palm print found on the wine cellar door. The print on the note covered such a small area of a hand that it could never be