Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [68]
Sawyer said to Prentup, “Well, I guess this means I lose my concealed weapons permit.” It was his only comment.
Ainsworth escorted Sawyer to what detectives call the hard room—nothing on the walls, no table, only one hard plastic chair coated with Armoral, so slippery that nobody could sit comfortably. The interview was videotaped through a one-way mirror.
Sawyer told them that it began with a phone call the morning of Friday, January 3, when Brian Williams, an editor for the Globe, told him, “We’re looking for information the rest of the media doesn’t have.” Sawyer took the job. He would be paid $50 an hour. He claimed he had no idea the Globe was a tabloid.
Sawyer suspected that the police had their film developed at Photo Craft, and he went to see his friend Shawn Smith, who worked there.
“We don’t work for the cops anymore,” Smith told him, “but we do the coroner’s processing.”
Sawyer told Ainsworth that a moment later he found himself peering through a photographer’s magnifying loupe at the internegatives of JonBenét’s autopsy and the crime scene photos that had been taken by the coroner’s investigator. The six-year-old child was just three weeks younger than his own son and one grade behind him at the same school.
Sawyer waited while Shawn Smith made the prints he’d requested. An hour later, he handed them to a courier.
Two days later, Sawyer told the officers, Brian Williams called and said the pictures were being shown to one of the Globe’s experts. Sawyer would be paid his fee of $500, plus a $5,000 bonus. On Saturday, Sawyer told Ainsworth, he woke up to the Daily Camera’s front page headline TABLOID OBTAINS MURDER-SCENE PHOTOS. The article said there would be a full investigation and potential felony charges against whoever had compromised the case.
Ainsworth asked Sawyer why he had turned himself in.
“My conscience got to me,” Sawyer said. He worried about embarrassing his family.
When Sawyer’s interview was over, he agreed to sign his statement. Half an hour later, Ainsworth called Shawn Smith, who continued to deny everything.
“You know Brett Sawyer, don’t you?” Ainsworth asked. Then Smith admitted everything.
What struck the detectives was that if Sawyer hadn’t turned himself in, Smith would never have talked. A court date of February 20 was set for Sawyer and Smith.
When the Globe published the photos on January 13, it promised its readers an exclusive glimpse into JonBenét’s TERRIFYING LAST MOMENTS IN THE HOUSE OF HORROR. The tabloid claimed the photos held answers to what happened the night JonBenét died: CORONER: THIS WEAPON KILLED JONBENÉT, 6.
When the photos appeared, the DA’s staff saw them for the first time. One prosecutor joked that “it was as tasteful as you can get with stolen property. The only part of the body shown was a hand hanging down.” Hunter’s office would not receive a complete set of photos until mid-April.
Within hours the other tabloids had called police headquarters and the DA’s office for reactions to the Globe’s publication of the photos. Don Gentile of the National Enquirer was first. Two other tabloid reporters offered Bill Wise money to answer their questions. “They’re naive,” Wise said. “Boulder’s a city that as public officials go is virtually bribery-free.”
The tabloids used their money. Reporters like Marilyn Robinson of The Denver Post, and Mike Gudgell of ABC found themselves without a story most of the time. “I’m going to lose my job,” Wise kept hearing from some reporters. At the time he felt sorry for them. Then he started getting calls from private investigators who claimed they were looking for work. In all, twenty-six PIs called. What they really wanted, Wise knew, was information for their clients—the tabloids and even some members of the mainstream media, who were employing the same methods.
No one could stop the tabloids from using money to get information. Sometimes it worked—even in Boulder. More often, however, it didn’t, and by the end of April, there were three criminal investigations into the tabloids’ business practices. After the