Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [67]
“You must know something about this,” Lt. Prentup said to him.
Smith told the officers he had no idea how the pictures had been obtained by the tabloid. He agreed to take a polygraph the next day.
The next morning, January 11, the coroner’s staff and Shawn Smith were taken to Amich & Jenks, a polygraph firm in Wheat Ridge, just west of Denver. Everyone on Meyer’s staff passed except for Patricia Dunn, who had shot some of the photos. Her polygraph results were inconclusive.
Shawn Smith was next.
“Did you arrange with anyone to give or sell those JonBenét photographs to the media?”
“No.”
Jeff Jenks, the examiner, had Smith hooked up to the polygraph in an 8-by-10-foot windowless room. Smith’s respiration, sweat output, blood pressure, and heart rate readings were fed into a briefcase-size machine.
“Did you give or sell any of those JonBenét photos to anyone outside of Photo Craft?”
“No.”
“Do you know for sure who distributed those JonBenét photographs to the media?”
“No.”
Jenks excused himself and joined Prentup, who was watching the examination from the next room. “He’s either involved or he knows someone who is,” Jenks told the officer. He went back inside and sat down next to Smith.
“You really need to come clean on this,” he told Smith. “Sometimes things happen in people’s lives. They get in a bind.”
Smith didn’t answer. A few minutes later, Prentup and Smith left for Boulder. Smith still wouldn’t talk.
The next stop for the detectives was the Hotel Boulderado, where many out-of-town reporters were staying. Registration records indicated that NBC, ABC, CBS, and all the cable channels were still in town. Prentup checked the list for tabloids. When he saw the Star, the National Enquirer, Hard Copy, and American Journal, Prentup felt as if he were looking into an abyss.
Late in the afternoon, back in his office, Prentup listened to a voice-mail message. “I’d like to give you a hypothetical,” said Peter Schild, a respected defense attorney, who had once worked in the public defender’s office. “If I had someone who has some knowledge about the JonBenét photos that the Globe is publishing, someone who should have known better…”
Schild was obviously speaking for someone. Probably Smith, who under pressure, was starting to crack.
Prentup called Pete Hofstrom, who in turn called Schild.
As any good attorney would, Schild wanted immunity for his client in exchange for his client’s full cooperation.
“Schild says it’s someone you know,” Hofstrom reported back to the detectives.
“No sale,” Prentup told him. “We don’t like bargaining with someone who’s hiding behind his lawyer’s skirt. Our terms are full accountability and a complete and honest statement in exchange for our not arguing for any particular sentence. We’ll live with the judge’s call.”
The detectives could tell that Hofstrom wanted to get this incident out of the way. What mattered was solving JonBenét’s murder.
On January 14, the day after the Globe appeared in supermarket racks, Hofstrom met Schild for breakfast at the Harvest restaurant on Pearl Street. The detectives knew that Schild’s mystery client would also be at the meeting. If the three of them couldn’t work out a deal, the client’s identity would remain a mystery to the officers.
Schild trusted Hofstrom, who was known to prefer precharging plea bargains, which Boulder’s defense attorneys called negotiations. More important to the attorney, however, was Hofstrom’s understanding of the human condition, particularly in criminals. They might have done terrible things, but he still cared about them as human beings.
Within an hour, Hofstrom called Prentup: Schild would deliver his client as soon as the plea agreement was typed.
Dunphy and Prentup waited on the second floor of the Justice Center for Schild and his client, Brett Sawyer, a former deputy sheriff, who was now a private investigator handling mostly divorce cases and insurance