Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [63]
It wasn’t long before bookers for ABC’s 20/20, the Today show, Larry King Live, and NBC Nightly News all started to call Hunter. He chatted on the phone with the producers but declined invitations to appear on their shows. When he was ready to speak publicly, he said, he would hold a press conference.
My first memory of death was my father shooting a BB gun and killing a robin. I was about ten at the time and I didn’t know very much about death. He started crying, and so did I. To this day I don’t know why he cried, because it was his choice to kill the robin.
My father died of a stroke in 1983, when he was in his early seventies. It was hard for me. I loved him a lot, but we had grown apart and hadn’t seen each other since I went to the University of Colorado in 1955. In those days I wasn’t prepared for death.
My father had been active in local small-time politics in Briarcliff Manor, New York, where I grew up. He was a Republican. Never swore, was kind, and just a good guy. Indirectly, he prepared me for public service. My present wife’s father, a former FBI agent, DA, and judge from California, later became a second father to me.
I remember driving west in September of 1955 and coming across the plains, watching the Rocky Mountains rise up before me. Then I reached a mesa just outside of Boulder and saw this little town sitting at the foot of the Front Range of the Rockies. I was looking at a very special place. It was completely different from New York, and I was just eighteen.
In the East, family means a lot, but I soon discovered there was no sense of that in Boulder.
—Alex Hunter
Alex Hunter and Bill Wise met at the University of Colorado School of Law in 1960. Hunter, two years ahead of Wise in school, was already winning top awards in national and international moot court competitions when he made Law Review. Hunter graduated near the top of his class; Wise, near the bottom of his. After graduating in 1963, Hunter became a clerk for Leonard Sutton, chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, and traveled around the state working on Sutton’s reelection campaign, at a time when justices were elected by popular vote. This got Hunter thinking about public service. In the spring of 1965, he became a part-time deputy DA in Boulder under Rex Scott.
After his graduation, Bill Wise hung out his shingle as a sole practitioner, but in 1967 he traded in his “typewriter and card table” office for a law partnership with Hunter and Richard Hopkins, another friend. Around that time, Hunter and Wise began to buy property in Boulder County. Neither had much money, but both had little to lose. “One dollar down and a dollar forever” was their motto.
They bought a nine-acre parcel in an industrial park for $120,000. They borrowed the down payment and then borrowed the balance—at a time when they didn’t have a thousand dollars between them. Soon they were able to buy a residential block zoned for business in downtown Boulder; they planned to put up an office building. Wise told a friend that while they were sleeping one night, the city council rezoned the land to residential and they never made the money they’d anticipated.
In 1972 Hunter started thinking about making a run for governor. Even though he had been more politically conservative than most of his Boulder contemporaries in the late sixties, he became chairman of the Democratic Party in Boulder County. He knew that a traditional first stop on the road to the capital was the DA’s office in Boulder, so that’s where he decided to begin, though he knew that his first election wouldn’t be easy. Wise and Hunter gave up their law practice in June 1972 and sold half of the eleven hundred acres they owned in Lyons, Colorado, for $150,000. The citizens of Boulder contributed $500, and Wise and Hunter put $30,000 of their own money into the campaign. Wise became Hunter’s campaign manager. His philosophy was “Bad ink is better than no ink.”
Hunter ran against Stan Johnson, an ex-FBI agent and