Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [97]
I was born in Lyons, Kansas, and my dad was a poor wheat farmer. I had three brothers and one sister. I’m the youngest, and one of my brothers is twenty years older than me. He’s a welder, with his own construction business in Fort Morgan, Colorado.
When I was thirteen we moved to Fort Morgan because my dad wasn’t doing well. He went to work for my brother as a ditch digger. My dad was an alcoholic. He died in 1986. My mother was forty-one when she had me. I have six living kids. Ten grandchildren. And a paper route.
I have my ladies, the women I work for. I have a doctor’s wife in Greeley, and a lawyer. I was working for a bonded agency called Merry Maids when I met Patsy. I started with her one day a week. I was dumbfounded, the place was so huge. It was too much for one person. Soon we had four people, once a week.
Patsy was warm and kind. Just a sweet person. But she had a hard time keeping up with the laundry. She was doing lots of charity work and was involved with her children’s schooling.
Then I went to work for her three days a week, $72 a day. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I’d get there at 9:00 in the morning and be gone by 3:00. That’s when my daughter Ariana gets out of school. Sometimes I worked for Patsy on Saturdays and holidays. She gave me a $300 bonus at the end of my first year. That was October 27, 1996.
Patsy was afraid she wasn’t going to live, that her cancer would come back and she’d never live to see the children grow up. She read a lot about illness and healing. Every three months she had a checkup. She believed if she prayed, everything would be all right.
Patsy admired John. He accomplished a lot. She told me that when they started out they had nothing, and they worked themselves up to where they were now.
I first met JonBenét when she was in preschool. She was home, like, half a day. Patsy called her Jonnie B. I spent half my time picking up after her. She and her brother would just leave everything on the floor—their socks, their shoes, toys, books, just everything. They were never trained to put things away properly.
I always came in the side door, and I’d walk right into the kitchen and not know where to start. Dishes all over. If they had Ovaltine, the jar would still be open. I always had to wipe the peanut butter off the counter.
“I think we ought to get a hamper,” I told Patsy.
“Yeah, that sounds good,” she answered. But we never got one.
“Linda is not here to pick up,” Patsy’s mother would say. “She’s here to clean. How do you expect her to do a good job if she’s picking up?”
“OK, Mom, I’ll work it out.”
Patsy’s clothes went into the laundry chute. I never had to pick up after John. Maybe once—a pair of shoes. Patsy changed purses once a week. She’d lay her purse on the spiral staircase, and I’d clean it out and put it in the closet. She had maybe forty of them, and even more pairs of shoes.
I think the problem with the children was they didn’t have any responsibility. They were spoiled. Burke had this red Scout knife and always whittled. He’d never use a bag or paper to catch the shavings. He’d whittle all over the place. I asked Patsy to have a talk with him. She answered, “Well, I don’t know what to do other than take the knife away from him.” After Thanksgiving I took that knife away from him and hid it in the cupboard just outside JonBenét’s room. That’s how that problem was solved.
These weren’t naughty children. They dressed themselves, and Patsy did JonBenét’s hair. All her daughter’s clothes were organized in drawers. Turtlenecks in one drawer, pants in another, nighties and panties in one, socks in another. Days of the week on all their underclothes.
“Just go away and leave me alone,” JonBenét said when I tried to help her with her boots. Sometimes she acted like a spoiled brat.
“No, don’t you answer the door,” she’d say when someone went to open it at a luncheon Patsy gave. “I’m answering the door.”
JonBenét spent a lot of her time sitting on her bed watching Shirley Temple movies on her VCR. She loved them all.
She also