Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [55]
These are a few of the things I learned from being involved in this tragic event. I’ve never had occasion to deal with the media to this extent before. And I wonder how my life has been altered by this.
As a result of this difficulty, there was a deeper sense of community within the school, among both the kids and the adults. We shared a real loss and some real sorrows and fears.
In May, before the school year ended, the Student Council held a tree planting ceremony. Patsy and John came. We wanted to honor the life and death of JonBenét. We needed to find a way to touch her and to let go.
—Charles Elbot
I started to worry that the media would be knocking on my door. The people from Time and Newsweek were reasonably polite. I told everyone I didn’t have any comment. There were days I turned off the phone. At school, they even photographed the children through windows. It really felt as if we were under siege.
You know, when you pay reasonable taxes as we do here, you ought to have a reasonably professional police department. At first I thought they had this case under control. I felt there would be an arrest in the first four or five days. The police didn’t say much, and I thought that was good. They were getting the job done.
I knew they were having long visits with lots of people. All the questions they asked concerned possible child abuse or sexual abuse.
Then the police left a message at school that they wanted to talk to my daughter. No rush, they said.
After school one day, Detective Linda Arndt came to our home with her partner. I didn’t give Megan a lot of warning, didn’t want her worrying about it. I just told her to answer the questions as best she could. We all sat down on the family room floor and introduced ourselves.
They showed her their badges and she held them. That was kind of nice. Then they got out their tape recorder. Which didn’t work.
Finally they decided to go on without the recorder. They told Megan that they wanted to find out who did this to JonBenét and that it would help them to learn more about what JonBenét liked to do, what games she enjoyed playing.
Megan started describing different games. They weren’t familiar with any of them. Pearl beads—they’d never heard of that until we showed them. Then they asked about make-believe games.
“We were going to play Kitty,” Megan said.
“What’s that?”
Kids have all sorts of different names for games, but these officers didn’t seem to know any of them.
“Did you ever have any secrets?” they asked. “It’s OK to have secrets. But now that JonBenét is dead, you don’t have to have any secrets.”
Then they wanted to know what the girls did in the bedroom, what they did in the bathroom. They even talked about bath salts and bath oil and shampoo.
Had they ever been down in the Ramseys’ basement? Megan said they’d been down there once, but it wasn’t a place they played in regularly.
What struck me was that these detectives obviously didn’t have kids. They didn’t seem to understand that a child’s automatic first response to a lot of questions is “I don’t know.” Who broke the glass? I don’t know. As a parent, you learn to ask follow-up questions if you really want to get information.
Then I sent Megan outside to play so I could talk to them privately.
By then, Bill McReynolds—Santa—had been on TV, and I remembered what JonBenét had told me about Santa visiting her. He just kept looking weirder and weirder to me on TV. I told them what JonBenét had said—that Santa was going to pay her a special visit after Christmas.
They said thanks. They would check into it, they said. Again, no follow-up questions. No probing for details that I might be forgetting.
I’m not a professional, but those officers didn’t seem highly competent. I read a lot of mysteries, but I also know life isn’t like a mystery novel.
Later I found out that they had never interviewed any of JonBenét’s inner circle. Two other kids who were close to her seemed to have fallen between the cracks.
So I called some close friends