Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [96]
Koby returned from Santa Fe on Monday and asked Hunter to take Wise off the Ramsey case. Hunter knew that if he let Wise stay, Eller would use it as an excuse to push the DA’s office further out of the investigation. There was nothing to do but comply with Koby’s wishes.
“Pig’s ass,” was all that Bill Wise had to say until Koby asked Hunter if he was going to discipline Wise.
“They should take some of those cops and beat them within an inch of their lives for the way they bungled this case,” Wise told Hunter. “That’s where the disciplining should be.”
If the purpose of the press conference was to reduce the number of calls from the media, it was a failure. During the briefing, unhappy TV viewers called the Boulder DA’s office to complain that their local station had preempted their soap operas, but by midafternoon, Hunter and Koby had calls from the Detroit News, the Connecticut Post, the Today show, Good Morning America, CNN, Time, and Newsweek. Producers at one network said that they would stay in town until the case was solved. ABC was already spending $150,000 a month to keep five producers in Boulder. CNN had an entire studio, a library of hundreds of videotapes, and an editing room set up at the Residence Inn.
Before the week was out, Hunter had received 170 calls from the media. Before long, he and Bill Wise were spending five hours a day talking to reporters.
While the press was chasing Hunter and Koby for sound bites, at police headquarters Detectives Jane Harmer and Melissa Hickman were interviewing Linda Hoffmann-Pugh and her husband, Merv, for a third time. The detectives went over the housekeeper’s story again and collected additional blood, hair, and saliva samples. They wanted to know when Linda had last changed JonBenét’s sheets. The Monday before Christmas, she told them. When they told Linda that John Ramsey had said he’d broken the basement widow to enter his home, she found it odd. She said that Ramsey always came in through the garage door, which he opened with a remote-control device, then through a door to the house that was never locked except when Nedra was home alone at night with her grandchildren.
Hoffmann-Pugh was then asked to make a list of everyone she knew who frequented the house and a list of those who had keys. After two hours of intense questioning, she was so upset that for a moment she couldn’t find her own key. Months later, the police asked her about scuff marks they found on the wall below the broken basement window and near John Andrew’s suitcase. Maybe someone had climbed in that night and left the marks. Had she ever seen the marks? No, she told them.
The police theorized that if someone other than the Ramseys had killed JonBenét, he or she might have used a key to get in, since there was no clear sign of forced entry. On December 26 John Ramsey had told the police there weren’t any keys “hidden under rocks” in the yard and that only John Andrew, Nedra, and Linda had extra keys. But three weeks later, on January 21, Patsy’s attorney told the police that the Whites, the Fernies, and Joe Barnhill also had keys. In April 1997, Ellis Armistead, an investigator hired by the Ramseys, would tell the police that there were twenty more extra keys outstanding. In the end, however, the detectives could find only nine people who said they had keys. Six of the keys were returned. Three were missing.
The police soon learned that the front door locked automatically when it was closed. The police were told that Patsy, possibly without her husband’s knowledge, had hidden a key outdoors near the front door because whenever she went out front for something, she got locked