JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (52 page)

Later the FBI became interested in the blackmail threat after learning that Shapiro had made secret tape recordings of
Globe
meetings in which the plans were laid to pressure me. In one an editor said, “Let him stew. The pictures will freak him out.”

As much as I wanted to strike back, I declined the offer of a federal investigation. If I fought them, it would just create juicier stories.

Lewis, when confronted by other media about his tactics, claimed he had innocently sent the pictures to me because he thought I would like to have them. I don’t know how a dishonorable man like that can look at himself in the mirror. I don’t know why any decent person would work for such a gutter publication. They are utterly beyond redemption.

In 1999 Craig Lewis was indicted by neighboring Jefferson County on charges of extortion and conspiracy for his work on the Ramsey stories and for his blatant attempt to force me to talk.

Only after the personal attacks did I start thinking about writing a book. Remaining a silent martyr would not work for me.

The resignation furor had been one thing, but this massive and outrageous campaign of retribution was intolerable—smearing my name by telling reporters I was mentally unbalanced, blackmail attempts by a tabloid reporter with close ties to the DA, sullying my reputation by saying I was just a pissed-off city worker who was refused a medical retirement, and claiming I was a dangerous media leak when the DA’s office itself had diarrhea of the mouth. Hunter had snapped at a reporter in late 1999 when questioned once about voluminous press leaks from his office, “I am tired of these allegations! We leak nothing.” Hunter then took himself to a new low, and declared all the memos, reports, and case information leaked to author Lawrence Schiller were from “a janitor, or a burglary, or something.”

Now I had become the bad guy in the Ramsey murder investigation for exposing the flawed justice system. Anything to deflect attention from the DA’s weak handling of the Ramsey case.

Things had descended to a new level, and the truth had become a casualty in this undeclared war against me.

When my plans for a book came out, even more problems arose. At one point a lawyer representing the city said, “We’ll tell you what you can and cannot put in that book.” My lawyer had different ideas about the First Amendment, particularly since I had signed no confidentiality agreement with the police. I was never called before the grand jury, so I was not revealing any secrets from that chamber.

As a last try, Chief Beckner appealed to my attorney, saying, “Come on, Steve is one of us.” No, responded my attorney. He’s not.

In my opinion, there are no secrets left in the Ramsey case, thanks to the office of the district attorney. What they were afraid of was exposure of their carefully constructed but false image that everything was fine.

I actually left Colorado to get out of the firestorm while lawyers combed through the books trying to find some way to silence me. They failed and backed off, so I came home again.

I dedicated the entire next year to writing this book.

As I wrote, I watched from the sidelines and talked to my cop friends to keep abreast of what was happening as the vaunted Ramsey grand jury started its sessions. Linguist Don Foster was not called as a witness. Lou Smit did testify. John and Patsy Ramsey did not. Neither did I, although I knew the case intimately. What was it they did not want me to say?

I do not doubt the abilities of prosecutor Mike Kane or his assistants, but almost two years had passed before they came on the scene, and the case they took over was already irreparably damaged. They could not be expected to magically repair what was done in the first two weeks of the case, or to repair the damage done by the sharing of evidence and secrets with the prime suspects, or to undo the special deals that had been made between the prosecution and the defense.

One of our Dream Team lawyers, thinking out loud, once wondered if having the Ramseys interviewed
prior to
the convening of the grand jury might have been part of a special deal to exclude John and Patsy from appearing officially as witnesses. Being interviewed by Lou Smit and Trip DeMuth with defense lawyers present was an entirely different experience from facing the secret proceedings with Mike Kane in charge. I thought that speculation was going too far, for surely the DA’s office would not sabotage its own grand jury.

Then, from an anonymous source, I received a copy of a letter containing information on the cold case of one Thayne Smika, who had been arrested in the shotgun slaying of Sid Wells, the boyfriend of actor Robert Redford’s daughter. The accused murderer is today, in cop talk, ITW—in the wind—because District Attorney Alex Hunter secretly promised the defense attorney that the 1983 grand jury hearing the case would
not
indict Smika. The victim’s family, the investigating cops, and the grand jurors were not told of the deal. In the letter, an attorney named Dan Hale wrote that based on what he had seen, he reached the preliminary conclusion that “criminal acts were possibly committed during the grand jury investigation” and the stipulation agreed upon between Hunter and the defense lawyer “that certain witnesses would not be called and that no indictment would be returned … may be contempt of court.” Dan Hale later became a judge and stopped saying bad things about Alex Hunter. Hunter insisted that the Ramsey grand jury would not be under any stipulation similar to the deal he made in the Smika case.

I remembered Pete Hofstrom’s strange criteria for the possible Ramsey grand jury and how it might not even be asked to return an indictment. I once asked Commander Beckner if the grand jury was at least going to target the Ramseys and seek an indictment, and he admitted, “I don’t know. Let’s just see where it goes.”

A Dream Team lawyer had observed that if the Ramseys were not specifically viewed as suspects, we might as well feed our 30,000-page case file into the shredder. Without targeting them, there will never be an indictment, he said.

As the months passed, the grand jury met off and on, and I stayed as far away as possible, devoting my time to this book and swinging a hammer. On the weekend before the grand jury was due to end, a friend advised me that Dr. Henry Lee told Alex Hunter, “This is a monumental decision. It all comes down on your shoulders … . It comes down to you. If you move forward with this, you have to confess your sins.”

With that sort of warning hanging in the air, I knew where the grand jury was going. Obtaining an indictment would not have been difficult, in my opinion, based upon the available evidence and the agreement of so many law enforcement experts. The key was in Lee’s comment about “moving forward,” which meant an indictment followed by an arrest and a trial. These were not the strong points of our district attorney.

So after meeting for a year and a half, the grand jury adjourned in October 1999 without even issuing a report. Under law the grand jury has the option of writing a report but is not bound to do so, and the jurors usually follow the wishes of the district attorney. There was no indictment, no nothing. It was an odd, whimpering way to end this extraordinary case, and it meant that District Attorney Alex Hunter did not have to explain anything to anyone.

“I and my prosecution task force believe we do not have sufficient evidence to warrant the filing of charges against anyone who has been investigated at this time,” said the district attorney.

Cloaked by the secrecy rules of the grand jury, Hunter can continue to dodge questions about what really happened. But it took fifteen years to learn of the deal that was made that crippled the Thayne Smika grand jury, and no lie can live forever.

The Boulder Police Department is no better post-Koby than it was pre-Beckner, although some gold circle cops are still hanging in there.

Chief Beckner continually writes editorials and posts memos about how great things have become under his leadership. But the steady exodus of good cops continues, another seven experienced officers and detectives resigning in 1999 alone. At one point the average officer on the overnight shift had less than two years of experience, including his time in the police academy.

Sergeant Tom Wickman was promoted to commander. An Internal Affairs investigation began into tapes and material that had gone missing from the official Ramsey file, something I had brought to Beckner’s attention a year earlier. Missing case file evidence is a serious matter, but nothing was done when I complained.

“Our department wasn’t ready for something like this,” Beckner once told me about the Ramsey investigation.

It still isn’t. The recipe for a future disaster exists.

Deputy DA Mary Keenan announced as a candidate for district attorney. Among her campaign contributors was Dr. Beuf, the Ramseys’ pediatrician.

Fleet White was arrested in Boulder in early 1999 for not paying a traffic ticket. He was handcuffed and taken to jail.

Tom Koby grew shoulder-length hair and a bushy beard and is occasionally seen strolling the Pearl Street Mall. He is now associated with a nonprofit venture capital firm doing worthy charitable community work.

DA investigator Lou Smit resigned shortly after the governor called the grand jury into session. He wrote in a long, public letter that “John and Patsy Ramsey did not kill their daughter [and] a very dangerous killer is still out there.”

DA Alex Hunter and all his lieutenants had stuck by Lou Smit, even when we strongly challenged his ability to work in an objective fashion. They liked to say that Smit knew the case better than anyone, even better than the detectives. Lou Smit held the keys to the kingdom when he quit and returned home to Colorado Springs.

In December 1999, a few months after the grand jury came back and shortly before the third anniversary of the murder of JonBenét, Lou Smit was seen in Atlanta, praying at JonBenét’s graveside with John Ramsey. He had shown case photographs to medical examiners with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and was actively conducting an investigation, still asking stun gun questions. At this writing, he has never been challenged by the DA’s office for doing so. Smit had gone over to Team Ramsey, taking all his invaluable insider knowledge with him. Hunter bet on the wrong horse.

When people ask if I believe the case will ever come to trial, if anyone will ever be arrested or convicted in this dreadful murder of a beautiful child, I sadly tell them, “No. It will never see the inside of a courtroom.”

Between 1989 and 1998, there were fifty-seven homicides in Boulder County, and only a handful ever went to trial.

Alex Hunter announced in March 2000 that he would not seek an eighth term as district attorney, finally surrendering the job he held for nearly three decades. Bill Wise, his first assistant district attorney, also chose to step down at the end of the year.

I try to remain hopeful that the JonBenét Ramsey murder will be officially solved. If and when that happens, I will be the first to applaud.

But the reality of the matter is that if it gets to a courtroom, the aggressive Team Ramsey attorneys will butcher both the police department and the office of the district attorney, no matter who handles the case.

So a successful prosecution at this point is probably impossible, and it was made that way because the case was mishandled from the start, and because politics was foremost in the minds of leaders who pretended that all was well while the case disintegrated faster than sugar in water. It was the way things had been done for decades in small-town Boulder, where the system of justice is led by underzealous prosecutors who are heavily influenced by defense attorneys, and a different standard of justice exists for the rich and the poor. They should have taken a much harder line in the case from the first hours, but the police and prosecutors were untrained, unable, and unwilling to do so.

When the police botched the crime scene, they damaged the Ramsey case. When the district attorney’s office started making deals, they lost it.

It was institutional idiocy, and in my opinion, there are several people in Boulder who are going to have to beg their way into heaven after this one.

I often think of the victim, little JonBenét, forever a beautiful little girl.

I believe most people are wrong about who she was, and I imagine that she would eventually have rejected the plastic Barbie doll beauty contestant lifestyle.

Shortly before her death, she participated in the America’s Royale Tiny Miss pageant, which had a “come as a famous person” theme. She dressed as Marilyn Monroe, and her mother did the same. I doubt that JonBenét even knew who Marilyn Monroe was. I believe her strong-willed little spirit would have chosen her own course in life, not one mapped by a mother living vicariously through her daughter’s beauty.

The more I learned about JonBenét, the more I was impressed by a child who talked about how many trips she had taken around the sun and the rhythm of the earth beneath her feet. She was an incredible little kid who loved to be tickled.

Miss America was the least she could have been.

EPILOGUE

When I began this book, I knew that at least a year would pass before it could be published, and wondered if anyone would still be interested in the tangled JonBenét Ramsey case. I underestimated both how long it would take to complete the book and the incredible response it would receive.

Several events combined to thrust the subject back into the headlines. The whimpering end of the grand jury and a week’s worth of dramatic national television interviews of former Detective Linda Arndt stirred the coals. Interest grew intense again in early 2000 when made-for-television movies, including the film version of Lawrence Schiller’s
Perfect Murder, Perfect Town,
found a national audience.

That was followed by publication of John and Patsy Ramsey’s own book, when their image of a reticent, media-shy, beleaguered couple coping with the death of their daughter vanished in a blaze of publicity. John and Patsy personally put the story back in play by grazing through the very media that they had for so long excoriated. I read their book, and found it contained nothing new, as they pointed their fingers at suspects who had already been cleared. In my opinion, they were trying to rewrite history, as evidenced by their so-called “Chronicle of Cooperation” with the police. I thought back to the one day of the entire investigation when I was able to pose questions to them. A single day in eighteen months. They could have stopped the criticism at any point in the first few days of the investigation by simply cooperating with police. They did not. And they allowed the case to grow cold.