Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [61]
“I think that is also a media question,” Koby answered. “Why has the media given so much attention to this case and literally no attention to the case you just described? I have never, in the twenty-eight years I have been in this business, seen such media focus on an event. It is intrusive, and making it much more difficult to work through this situation.”
Earlier in the week, Koby had told McCullen, “It’s not OJ and it’s not LA here in Boulder. Our guy won’t walk.” Now McCullen asked Koby to expand on that. “The reference,” Koby answered, “is that we are not going to have this case tried in the media.”
Someone asked Koby whether John Ramsey’s picking up his daughter and bringing her upstairs had contaminated the crime scene.
“No, we didn’t lose anything,” Koby replied. “We feel pretty confident that we did it right.” Again it didn’t seem to McCullen that Koby was covering up. He seemed to mean exactly what he was saying.
Jim Burrus from the Boulder Planet asked, “How much experience do you, as chief, and does John Eller, as commander of the detective division, have in investigating homicides?”
“I have no experience running a homicide investigation,” Koby replied, “but I have twenty-eight years in the business, with a lot of investigation experience…. I don’t have John’s résumé in front of me. [We do] have [people] who are involved in homicide investigations that we have [conducted] over the last several years.”
Alli Krupski asked why Koby didn’t believe in the public’s right to know more about the status of the case. Koby pointed out that the evening’s briefing was meant for the people of Boulder because the investigation meant “a great deal” to the local community. “But the reality is this situation is a curiosity to the rest of the country,” Koby said. “And quite frankly, it is a sick curiosity in some ways.”
To many of the reporters, the police seemed to be saying that there was something dirty about their profession and his office wasn’t going to keep them informed.
The criticism from reporters in the foyer was immediate. The verdict was that nobody had really interviewed the chief. “If I had been there, I would have beaten him up,” one TV reporter told a local journalist.
Stephen Singular, author of the book on the life and death of Alan Berg that became Oliver Stone’s film Talk Radio, had been watching Koby on TV in the foyer. When the police chief commented, “The less you know, the easier it is to give advice,” Singular wondered whether the case was really so complex that the police weren’t going to solve it for a long time. Had they botched it so badly in those first hours that it would never be solved? What were the hidden facts that made the secrecy of the police so imperative?
To Singular, Koby’s virtual silence was deeply disturbing. He knew that the information void would be filled with speculation, conjecture, guessing, projection, and fantasy. The talking heads—the so-called experts—wouldn’t have read the police reports, wouldn’t have talked to witnesses, wouldn’t have seen any of the evidence. The wall of silence from law enforcement, Singular felt, would soon be battered by noise from the media. It was a dangerous trend.
8
In the late eighties I went to work for a tabloid newspaper, and now I’m a writer for another tabloid. Before that I was in marketing. Now that I work for a tabloid I get to travel, eat wherever I want to, and stay in the best hotels.
Most of the time I write about celebrities who get drunk and throw up in public—no economic summits or Nobel laureates. When some actor dies on location, you fly there. You’re part of a “gang bang.” Five or six reporters from your newspaper drop into town with fifteen grand in each of their pockets. You own the fucking place in twelve hours.
I covered O. J. Simpson’s criminal trial. Almost everyone who worked for a tabloid covered OJ. One paper offered Kato Kaelin, OJ’s houseguest, a quarter of a million dollars for his story. He passed, saying he didn’t want to profit from Nicole Simpson’s death. Of course at that