Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [46]
In every room of the cluttered basement, the police found the cast-off possessions of six people: old lamps, toys, beach balls, Easter bunny outfits, pageant decorations, a painter’s easel from Patsy’s recent art classes at CU, a Halloween lantern. Nothing was put away neatly. In the basement hallway, a scarecrow was pinned to a wall.
The police removed the suitcase they had found beneath the three side-by-side windows at the rear of Burke’s train room. They also removed the windows themselves and the exterior window grate. The suitcase had no dust on it, yet a few pieces of broken glass lay on top of it. Inside, they found a blanket with what turned out to be John Andrew’s semen on it.
A little carousel rocking horse and child-size blue-and-red chairs stood against one wall. The train set was mounted on a platform in the center of the room. On one wall were three framed movie posters: Star Trek, Somewhere in Time, and a third poster of Spencer Tracy and Frank Sinatra in The Devil at 4 O’Clock. Leaning against the wall was a poster of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile. In the small storage closet where Fleet White and John Ramsey had looked just before JonBenét’s body was found, the police found a plaque with the words Subic Bay on it.
Down a short hall was the boiler room, which had a chest freezer and an exposed ventilation duct leading to the street. At the rear of that room, a door led to the wine cellar. The door and its painted jamb and frame were removed by the police. Just outside the room, they found two partial sets of golf clubs belonging to John Ramsey. Inside the room was a large corrugated box with six partly used cans of interior paint and seven more gallon-size interior paint cans. Built into the floor was a safe. A greenish-blue tarp lay over it. A bicycle missing its front wheel was propped up in one corner beside some lumber and other construction material. Throughout the house the police had ripped out every toilet, looking for evidence in the plumbing traps.
The evidence taken in the search was itemized on thirteen handwritten pages, which were signed by Detective Byfield. Every notepad and pen in the house was taken. Among the 132 items in the first inventory were the Avalanche sweatshirt and the blanket that had covered JonBenét’s body. Detective Everett photographed a shoe imprint that was discovered in a powder-like substance next to where JonBenét’s body had been lying. Inside the wine cellar, fibers, hair, and the pink Barbie nightgown were collected. Just outside the room, there were wooden shards near an artist’s paint tray that also held part of a broken paintbrush; several paintings, one of which Patsy had done in Michigan, of flowers in a box on her porch; rope; string from a sled; and down the hall on a counter, a red pocket knife. Black sheet metal, wire, vacuumed hair and fibers from almost every room of the house, bedding, street clothes, underwear, prayer books, Christmas gifts, pieces of glass from the broken window, toilet tissue, toilet seats and lids, books, and newspapers were also collected. The list grew longer by the day. Patsy’s and John’s clothing, camera, computers, and 180 videotapes were hauled away in box after box. Before the police left, they photographed every inch of the house and all its remaining contents. On January 30,1997, a judge signed another warrant allowing the police to search for pornography on the hard drives of the seized computers. During the last days of June 1997, there would be a third search of the Ramseys’ house.
In Atlanta, the visiting Boulder detectives found they couldn’t escape the media even in that city. If they so much as drank coffee in a restaurant, some reporter would appear beside them. When they called CNN producer Mike Phelan to request transcripts of the Ramseys’ New Year’s Day interviews, Art Harris, an investigative reporter for the network, called back. Harris