Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [64]
In September 1972, Alex Hunter won the primary by fewer than 300 votes. With that victory under his belt, he and Wise targeted University of Colorado students, since this would be the first year that eighteen-year-olds were allowed to vote in Boulder County. Among other things, Hunter called for reclassifying marijuana possession as a misdemeanor, while Johnson took a law-and-order stance, saying that marijuana use leads to heroin addiction.
Although The Denver Post came out against Hunter, he profited from having positioned himself in an emerging liberal community. He was elected by 687 votes out of some 68,000.
CU students voted en masse, and Hunter’s percentages from the campus precincts were enormous. That same year, liberals who advocated controlling the growth of Boulder and protecting the environment won a number of local races and formed a new establishment. Boulder had survived transient hippies and the antiwar movement and was coming into its own. The city elected a black mayor and issued its first same-sex marriage license. Soon some would call it the People’s Republic of Boulder.
When Alex Hunter became DA, he named Bill Wise his first assistant. Wise had no desire to try cases, so instead he worked as press liaison and administrator, preparing budgets and signing payroll vouchers, while Hunter tried cases. Wise and Hunter soon learned that the DA’s office couldn’t fool the press. “If we made a mistake, we admitted it,” Wise said.
Hunter had intended to stay in the DA job for four years, then move on, he hoped, to the Colorado attorney general’s office, the rung just below governor on the political ladder. Busy with his job, Hunter’s land investments failed and he found himself overleveraged. It wasn’t long before he had to file for bankruptcy under Chapter 11.
But at the same time he was enjoying the DA’s job. He started a Consumer Unit and a Victim Witness Unit—community services that didn’t exist elsewhere in Colorado at the time. At his request, the county commissioners budgeted $5,000 to compensate crime victims. Hunter began to build a relationship with local citizens. Before long he was attracting good people to his office, too, including Pete Hofstrom from the sheriff’s department.
Whenever Wise and Hunter heard that someone was interested in running for DA, they would sit down and talk that person out of running, pointing out that with Hunter’s record of community services and low crime, no one could unseat him. Hunter also created the impression that he had the money to run a tough campaign, though in fact he didn’t.
By 1976 Hunter found himself enjoying being a big fish in a small pond. He ran—unopposed—and was reelected.
In subsequent years, he would put down roots. After the dissolution of his first marriage, which produced three children, Hunter married Margie, a gynecologist, and the couple had two children together. They moved into a ranch-style house with a sunroom that overlooked a small stream. Beyond was a view of the Flatirons and the Indian Peaks. Like most Boulderites, Hunter was physically active. He liked to work up a sweat on the squash court and on his Schwinn exercycle.
After Koby’s press conference, Hunter asked his chief deputy, Bill Nagel, to contact out-of-town DAs who had handled two recent high-profile cases—Jeffery Dahmer and Polly Klaas—for any advice they could give. Michael Meese, of the Sonoma County DA’s office in California, sent to Boulder a complete report of what they had learned from the Polly Klaas kidnap-homicide case. It included strategies for investigative teams, data processing, and press control. Hunter was particularly interested in the reports on media guidelines.
Bill Wise and his wife, Diane Balkin, a Denver chief trial deputy DA, suggested—independently—that Hunter retain Barry Scheck, a well-respected DNA specialist from New York, as a consultant.* Then Wise thought