Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [91]
In 1991, twelve years after Eller arrived in Boulder, police chief Tom Koby, who had replaced Propst, assigned him to develop, implement, train, and manage a twenty-four-member SWAT team, even though Eller had never worked SWAT. When at first Eller failed to pass the physical fitness test, the other officers joked that he might not be able to make it around the block. One Boulder officer said that it was like putting someone in charge of homicide who’d never been a homicide detective. Nevertheless, Eller enjoyed the challenge.
During one drug arrest, Eller ignored the lead officer’s advice to go through surrounding cover while approaching a house and instead ordered his men to make a straightforward entry up a driveway, an order that put the team in harm’s way. Then, when the suspects scattered, the officers were not only in danger, they had no perimeter coverage. On another occasion, Eller put himself in the line of fire of one of his own officers. Soon after, Jim Kolar, the team sergeant, took his concerns to Koby. He told the chief that Eller’s deficiencies in tactical training and judgment were endangering the lives of SWAT personnel. When Koby did nothing about it, six of the team members, with seventy years of experience among them, quit.
During his SWAT team tenure, Eller supervised the conversion of a former phone company property into the police department’s new $7 million facility, which also housed the fire department. When that project was completed in 1991, Eller was promoted to commander under Koby.
Many of Boulder’s hard-line police officers were loyal to Eller, whom they saw as a dedicated cop. He stood up for them, and he always insisted that integrity came first. But, Eller also rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. His detractors found him inflexible and vindictive when his decisions were questioned. Diplomacy and tact were not his strong suits. People either loved or hated John Eller.
“We want to do it differently from the way we’ve done it before,” Tom Koby told Alex Hunter politely but firmly as they sat together in Hunter’s office at the Justice Center. Koby wanted his friend to know that he agreed with Eller: the Ramsey investigation should be run in a more traditional way, without the DA’s office. It was their job to find the killer, Koby said, not the DA’s. He didn’t want second-guessing from the DA’s office about the police investigation.
Hunter protested that Eller was not conducting interviews and developing evidence in an unbiased manner. He was possibly ignoring exculpatory evidence.* Hunter knew that a defense attorney would eventually challenge and probably destroy the case Eller was making. Furthermore, in Hunter’s view, Eller didn’t seem to care about protecting the case from a prosecutor’s perspective.
Hunter decided this was a good time to tell Koby that he had asked Dr. Henry Lee and Barry Scheck to join the DA’s investigation. Koby immediately complained that Eller and the detectives might see it as a lack of confidence in their ability—exactly the kind of backseat driving he’d been referring to, Koby said. When Hunter explained to him that Lee and Scheck’s expertise would be fully available to Koby’s people and that their solid reputations would help turn around the public’s negative perception of the police, however, Koby didn’t disagree. A few days later, he sent Detective Trujillo to Connecticut to meet Dr. Lee and give him the case report, videotapes, and photographic slides.
Koby knew that someday the case would belong to the DA’s office and that they should reach a compromise now, not later, on how to cooperate.