Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [62]
When The New York Times wrote that the National Enquirer was the Bible of OJ coverage, all the reporters working eighteen hours a day producing those stories got offered better jobs.
The day JonBenét’s pageant video aired on TV, the tabs dumped eighteen reporters into Boulder. Then they hired freelancers and all the private investigators they could find who hadn’t been grabbed by Time or Newsweek. Everyone was working twenty hours a day. I was one of the first to arrive.
I’ve never seen the kind of hostility toward the media that I encountered in Boulder. The residents seemed personally insulted, as if they were actually involved in the crime—like it somehow had something to do with them, when it didn’t.
In the Simpson case, everyone and anyone was lining up to sell their souls. In Boulder, we all ran into a wall of silence from law enforcement, from prosecutors, city officials, neighbors, the Ramseys’ friends, the Ramseys’ enemies, businesses in every area. Money had nothing to do with it. It was all “Who the fuck are you?”
When you can’t get the DA’s office or the police to talk to you, you go to friends of the police, to ex-cops and ex-cops who are private eyes. By now I’ve spoken to maybe thirty PIs. You don’t do anything illegal. You just ask, “What do you know?”
I’ve always worked against the pressure to deliver a story a week. All I do is hire more private eyes. Maybe I have four of them working at once.
Boulder became a long process, and far from an easy one. It was all about building relationships. It took time. In some cases, to get to someone, you had to take them information that they didn’t have.
—A tabloid journalist
Tabloid headlines screamed that the Ramseys had murdered their daughter, while the mainstream national and local media restricted themselves to saying that the Ramseys were not cooperating with the police.
When the Ramseys returned to Boulder from burying JonBenét, Bryan Morgan, their attorney, wrote to John Eller, offering to make his clients available for a joint interview on January 18, at 10:00 A.M. Morgan stated conditions: the police could question Patsy for only one hour, and a doctor had to be present, since she was still ill; the location must be somewhere other than police headquarters; the permissible topics were to be determined by Morgan’s office; and Morgan himself would select which police officers would conduct the interviews.
A few days later, Eller rejected the offer. In a letter to Morgan, he said that an interview under the specified conditions would not be helpful. “The time for interviewing John and Patsy as witnesses who could provide critical information that would be helpful in the initial stages of our investigation has passed,” Eller wrote. He offered a counterproposal: he wanted to interview the Ramseys separately on Friday, January 24, at 6:00 P.M., and he would not consider any restrictions on the length or the place of the interviews. Eller waited for a reply.
On January 10, the day after Chief Koby’s press conference, Alex Hunter and Bill Wise met to discuss how the DA’s office should handle the media. They agreed that Koby’s stonewalling had backfired.
“It’s shoot yourself in the foot,” Wise told Hunter, “then before you get it Band-Aided, you shoot yourself in the foot again.” Wise wasn’t about to let the police chief destroy his office’s carefully cultivated twenty-five-year relationship with the press.
Hunter decided that he would make himself more available to reporters. His office would try to be helpful—not to pass on information about the case, but to stay in touch. The idea was to say to reporters when appropriate, “You’re wasting time if you go down that road.” That approach, Wise knew, wouldn’t entirely satisfy