Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [44]
The next day, January 3, I met with the Ramseys at the home of one of their friends. I was struck by their grief. It was so enormous, so emotional. In that first meeting, John tended to accept the recommendations of his attorney on strategy. In the coming days and weeks, he became more assertive about making decisions that might not have been what his lawyers would have preferred.
By then I had seen their CNN interview on January 1. They were sincere, grieving parents who were terribly upset. That came through with crystal clarity. Within twenty-four hours, the networks and news organizations had purchased rights to the pageant video and still photos. They paid a hell of a lot of money, and there wasn’t much we could do about it.
On January 4, I was at Peter Hofstrom’s house with Patsy when she gave her second handwriting sample to the police. They had her sit down and write the precise wording of the note. “Speaking to anyone about your situation, such as the police, FBI, etc., will result in your daughter being beheaded.” For all the anguish it caused, I don’t think it helped the police one bit. They were taking a woman who had just lost one of the most precious things in her life and rubbing her nose in it, almost gratuitously. Patsy wasn’t able to write it. The whole episode just sickened me.
Our strategy from the very first day of my involvement and for some weeks thereafter was to minimize the opportunities for the Ramseys to be photographed. Our highest priority was to keep a low profile—let them grieve privately and work their way through all of this. That’s why we agreed they should stay with their friends.
John Ramsey had a strong desire to track down the killer, through newspaper ads, public appeals, or whatever was necessary. That has been his desire from the very first day.
He hired several investigators, along with John Douglas, an ex-FBI profiler. Douglas was very emphatic about putting some of the ransom-note handwriting out there to try to get people to pay attention and pass along tips that might lead to the killer.
Keep in mind that you reach a point where, without police powers, you can’t go further. For legal reasons, a lot of what I’m talking about had to be put on the shelf.
—Pat Korten
On Saturday, January 4, Alex Hunter returned from his vacation in Hawaii. The DA knew he wasn’t coming home to a case that would be solved in a few weeks. That same day, the police finished their search of the Ramsey house. For nine days they had fingerprinted, vacuumed, and gathered evidence. All of it would be analyzed and tested by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and the FBI in the coming months. The initial search warrant had been extended three times, and over eight hundred items were taken into custody. Detective Byfield, for example, had found duct tape that looked similar to the tape found in the wine cellar on the back of two paintings, one of which hung in JonBenét’s bedroom. The police would later learn that this tape had been placed on the frames by Better Light Photography Studio in 1993 and didn’t match the tape Ramsey said he had ripped off JonBenét’s mouth.
The Ramseys’ home, which had a red brick Tudor façade, contained 6,866 square feet of living space, and nearly filled a half-acre lot. There was no fence surrounding the property. The front of the house was built in 1927, and the rear was added later and had been remodeled several times over the years. A back elevator had been replaced with a spiral staircase when the Ramseys renovated the house in 1992. The floor plan was a maze, and the decorating was unusual: flowered carpets, thick white moldings, vivid colors.
The living room furniture was reproduction French provincial, and the walls were hung with 19th-century French and English oil paintings. A floor-to-ceiling Christmas tree stood on a handmade rug. Just beyond the living room was the sun room, with leaded-glass windows, which looked out on the street. Its walls were covered with a forest landscape mural. A Chippendale dining table was 10 feet long. A wrought-iron