Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [51]
—Niki Hayden
I was standing out there that Sunday, taking pictures for my paper. I knew Pastor Rol. He looked at me the same way he was looking at all the media—with complete contempt.
When most of the press had left, he came over to me. “Why do you have to do this?” he asked. I told him that this was my job. I had to put food on my family’s table.
He didn’t respond. He seemed not to understand me. Then I added, “I’d much rather be photographing elk in the mountains. That’s what I really like to do.”
—A news photographer
7
On Sunday morning, January 5, John Ramsey was still angry about what Patsy had been put through the previous day when she gave her second handwriting sample at Pete Hofstrom’s home. However, as he had promised, he gave four of his own samples to the police before going to church with his wife.
Now that the Colorado Bureau of Investigation had determined that the ransom note was written on a pad that came from the Ramseys’ house, the police had to obtain unsupervised and casual handwriting samples from the family and their friends. Analysts would need a variety of specimens to compare with the ransom note. Just before the Boulder detectives left Georgia, they asked the Roswell police to search Don and Nedra Paugh’s garbage for the family’s handwriting samples and any other useful evidence that John and Patsy might have left behind.
Meanwhile, Detectives Gosage and Harmer had gone to Charlevoix, Michigan, to search the Ramseys’ summer house, a two-story white Victorian overlooking Round Lake, where they moored a powerboat, the Grand Season. They kept their sailboat, the Miss America, at nearby Lake Charlevoix. The detectives were looking for evidence that someone had attempted to contact the Ramseys with the intent of harming them. The police hoped that the Ramseys’ caller ID telephone devices, answering machine tapes, computers, or mail might hold some clue about who might have murdered JonBenét. Perhaps there might be other evidence related to the crime scene. Also, they would contact several people about the Charlevoix Little Miss pageant. The police were hoping to learn more about JonBenét’s pageant activities. In all, the detectives stayed in town for three days. They discovered nothing useful.
When DA Alex Hunter was briefed about the case, he took an interest in the pageant aspect. He learned that Pam Griffin, who sewed JonBenét’s pageant costumes, had been the first to shed light on the subject, when Mason interviewed her the day after the murder. Since then the police had discovered that a dozen or so families in Boulder County participated in pageants. Hunter asked to see the pageant video of JonBenét that was making headlines. He knew nothing about children’s beauty pageants and had never seen such a display. The tape made him blush.
The police had found out that few of JonBenét’s school friends or their parents had been invited to watch her compete. The pageants were a separate world from the rest of the Ramseys’ life.
During the winter of 1995 and the first months of 1996, JonBenét had competed in her first pageant, at the Twin Peaks Mall, just twenty minutes from Boulder. The judges ignored her. Not long afterward, Patsy entered JonBenét in the Colorado State All Star pageant in Denver. John, Patsy, Nedra, and Burke were in the audience to cheer her on.
Pam Griffin told the police that when she first spotted JonBenét performing at the All Star pageant, she saw that Patsy didn’t know how to apply pageant makeup or style her daughter’s hair. When JonBenét presented herself in front of the judges, she mouthed oohs and aahs and rolled her eyes in a very amateurish way. Even so, Pam thought she showed promise. Pam, who was there to watch another six-year-old whose costumes she’d designed, introduced herself to Patsy, and they realized they lived only twenty minutes from each other. Pam suggested that she could make a few alterations to the party dress JonBenét was wearing. Patsy accepted the offer. “Do whatever you need to