Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (16 page)

To Singular, Koby’s virtual silence was deeply disturbing. He knew that the information void would be filled with speculation, conjecture, guessing, projection, and fantasy. The talking heads—the so-called experts—wouldn’t have
read the police reports, wouldn’t have talked to witnesses, wouldn’t have seen any of the evidence. The wall of silence from law enforcement, Singular felt, would soon be battered by noise from the media. It was a dangerous trend.

In the late eighties I went to work for a tabloid newspaper, and now I’m a writer for another tabloid. Before that I was in marketing. Now that I work for a tabloid I get to travel, eat wherever I want to, and stay in the best hotels.

Most of the time I write about celebrities who get drunk and throw up in public—no economic summits or Nobel laureates. When some actor dies on location, you fly there. You’re part of a “gang bang.” Five or six reporters from your newspaper drop into town with fifteen grand in each of their pockets. You own the fucking place in twelve hours.

I covered O. J. Simpson’s criminal trial. Almost everyone who worked for a tabloid covered OJ. One paper offered Kato Kaelin, OJ’s houseguest, a quarter of a million dollars for his story. He passed, saying he didn’t want to profit from Nicole Simpson’s death. Of course at that very moment his agent was shopping a Movie of the Week deal for him. Nicole’s parents were selling stuff to the tabs. We all had DA sources, cop sources, drug buddy sources, everybody who had ever fucked anyone. During the Simpson case, you had mothers selling out daughters, sisters selling out sisters. That’s how you get cynical.

When
The New York Times
wrote that the
National Enquirer
was the Bible of OJ coverage, all the reporters working eighteen hours a day producing those stories
got offered better jobs.

The day JonBenét’s pageant video aired on TV, the tabs dumped eighteen reporters into Boulder. Then they hired freelancers and all the private investigators they could find who hadn’t been grabbed by
Time
or
Newsweek.
Everyone was working twenty hours a day. I was one of the first to arrive.

I’ve never seen the kind of hostility toward the media that I encountered in Boulder. The residents seemed personally insulted, as if they were actually involved in the crime—like it somehow had something to do with them, when it didn’t.

In the Simpson case, everyone and anyone was lining up to sell their souls. In Boulder, we all ran into a wall of silence from law enforcement, from prosecutors, city officials, neighbors, the Ramseys’ friends, the Ramseys’ enemies, businesses in every area. Money had nothing to do with it. It was all “Who the fuck are you?”

When you can’t get the DA’s office or the police to talk to you, you go to friends of the police, to ex-cops and ex-cops who are private eyes. By now I’ve spoken to maybe thirty PIs. You don’t do anything illegal. You just ask, “What do you know?”

I’ve always worked against the pressure to deliver a story a week. All I do is hire more private eyes. Maybe I have four of them working at once.

Boulder became a long process, and far from an easy one. It was all about building relationships. It took time. In some cases, to get to someone, you had to take them information that they didn’t have.

—A tabloid journalist

Tabloid headlines screamed that the Ramseys had murdered their daughter, while the mainstream national and
local media restricted themselves to saying that the Ramseys were not cooperating with the police.

When the Ramseys returned to Boulder from burying JonBenét, Bryan Morgan, their attorney, wrote to John Eller, offering to make his clients available for a joint interview on January 18, at 10:00
A
.
M
. Morgan stated conditions: the police could question Patsy for only one hour, and a doctor had to be present, since she was still ill; the location must be somewhere other than police headquarters; the permissible topics were to be determined by Morgan’s office; and Morgan himself would select which police officers would conduct the interviews.

A few days later, Eller rejected the offer. In a letter to Morgan, he said that an interview under the specified conditions would not be helpful. “The time for interviewing John and Patsy as witnesses who could provide critical information that would be helpful in the initial stages of our investigation has passed,” Eller wrote. He offered a counterproposal: he wanted to interview the Ramseys separately on Friday, January 24, at 6:00
P
.
M
., and he would not consider any restrictions on the length or the place of the interviews. Eller waited for a reply.

On January 10, the day after Chief Koby’s press conference, Alex Hunter and Bill Wise met to discuss how the DA’s office should handle the media. They agreed that Koby’s stonewalling had backfired.

“It’s shoot yourself in the foot,” Wise told Hunter, “then before you get it Band-Aided, you shoot yourself in the foot again.” Wise wasn’t about to let the police chief destroy his office’s carefully cultivated twenty-five-year relationship with the press.

Hunter decided that he would make himself more available to reporters. His office would try to be helpful—not to pass on information about the case, but to stay in touch. The idea was to say to reporters when appropriate, “You’re wast
ing time if you go down that road.” That approach, Wise knew, wouldn’t entirely satisfy the hungry media, but it might take some of the edge off reporters’ antagonism.

It wasn’t long before bookers for ABC’s
20/20
, the
Today
show,
Larry King Live
, and
NBC Nightly News
all started to call Hunter. He chatted on the phone with the producers but declined invitations to appear on their shows. When he was ready to speak publicly, he said, he would hold a press conference.

My first memory of death was my father shooting a BB gun and killing a robin. I was about ten at the time and I didn’t know very much about death. He started crying, and so did I. To this day I don’t know why he cried, because it was his choice to kill the robin.

My father died of a stroke in 1983, when he was in his early seventies. It was hard for me. I loved him a lot, but we had grown apart and hadn’t seen each other since I went to the University of Colorado in 1955. In those days I wasn’t prepared for death.

My father had been active in local small-time politics in Briarcliff Manor, New York, where I grew up. He was a Republican. Never swore, was kind, and just a good guy. Indirectly, he prepared me for public service. My present wife’s father, a former FBI agent, DA, and judge from California, later became a second father to me.

I remember driving west in September of 1955 and coming across the plains, watching the Rocky Mountains rise up before me. Then I reached a mesa just outside of Boulder and saw this little town sitting at the foot of the Front Range of the Rockies. I was looking at a very special place. It was completely different from New York, and I was just eighteen.

In the East,
family
means a lot, but I soon discovered
there was no sense of that in Boulder
.

—Alex Hunter

Alex Hunter and Bill Wise met at the University of Colorado School of Law in 1960. Hunter, two years ahead of Wise in school, was already winning top awards in national and international moot court competitions when he made Law Review. Hunter graduated near the top of his class; Wise, near the bottom of his. After graduating in 1963, Hunter became a clerk for Leonard Sutton, chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, and traveled around the state working on Sutton’s reelection campaign, at a time when justices were elected by popular vote. This got Hunter thinking about public service. In the spring of 1965, he became a part-time deputy DA in Boulder under Rex Scott.

After his graduation, Bill Wise hung out his shingle as a sole practitioner, but in 1967 he traded in his “typewriter and card table” office for a law partnership with Hunter and Richard Hopkins, another friend. Around that time, Hunter and Wise began to buy property in Boulder County. Neither had much money, but both had little to lose. “One dollar down and a dollar forever” was their motto.

They bought a nine-acre parcel in an industrial park for $120,000. They borrowed the down payment and then borrowed the balance—at a time when they didn’t have a thousand dollars between them. Soon they were able to buy a residential block zoned for business in downtown Boulder; they planned to put up an office building. Wise told a friend that while they were sleeping one night, the city council rezoned the land to residential and they never made the money they’d anticipated.

In 1972 Hunter started thinking about making a run for governor. Even though he had been more politically conservative than most of his Boulder contemporaries in the late sixties, he became chairman of the Democratic Party in
Boulder County. He knew that a traditional first stop on the road to the capital was the DA’s office in Boulder, so that’s where he decided to begin, though he knew that his first election wouldn’t be easy. Wise and Hunter gave up their law practice in June 1972 and sold half of the eleven hundred acres they owned in Lyons, Colorado, for $150,000. The citizens of Boulder contributed $500, and Wise and Hunter put $30,000 of their own money into the campaign. Wise became Hunter’s campaign manager. His philosophy was “Bad ink is better than no ink.”

Hunter ran against Stan Johnson, an ex-FBI agent and a good DA. Hunter’s campaign ads said: “Stanley Johnson has never even tried a case in 3½ years.” Wise and Hunter assumed that the voters didn’t know that
most
DAs don’t try cases.

In September 1972, Alex Hunter won the primary by fewer than 300 votes. With that victory under his belt, he and Wise targeted University of Colorado students, since this would be the first year that eighteen-year-olds were allowed to vote in Boulder County. Among other things, Hunter called for reclassifying marijuana possession as a misdemeanor, while Johnson took a law-and-order stance, saying that marijuana use leads to heroin addiction.

Although
The Denver Post
came out against Hunter, he profited from having positioned himself in an emerging liberal community. He was elected by 687 votes out of some 68,000.

CU students voted en masse, and Hunter’s percentages from the campus precincts were enormous. That same year, liberals who advocated controlling the growth of Boulder
and protecting the environment won a number of local races and formed a new establishment. Boulder had survived transient hippies and the antiwar movement and was coming into its own. The city elected a black mayor and issued its first same-sex marriage license. Soon some would call it the People’s Republic of Boulder.

When Alex Hunter became DA, he named Bill Wise his first assistant. Wise had no desire to try cases, so instead he worked as press liaison and administrator, preparing budgets and signing payroll vouchers, while Hunter tried cases. Wise and Hunter soon learned that the DA’s office couldn’t fool the press. “If we made a mistake, we admitted it,” Wise said.

Hunter had intended to stay in the DA job for four years, then move on, he hoped, to the Colorado attorney general’s office, the rung just below governor on the political ladder. Busy with his job, Hunter’s land investments failed and he found himself overleveraged. It wasn’t long before he had to file for bankruptcy under Chapter 11.

But at the same time he was enjoying the DA’s job. He started a Consumer Unit and a Victim Witness Unit—community services that didn’t exist elsewhere in Colorado at the time. At his request, the county commissioners budgeted $5,000 to compensate crime victims. Hunter began to build a relationship with local citizens. Before long he was attracting good people to his office, too, including Pete Hofstrom from the sheriff’s department.

Whenever Wise and Hunter heard that someone was interested in running for DA, they would sit down and talk
that person out of running, pointing out that with Hunter’s record of community services and low crime, no one could unseat him. Hunter also created the impression that he had the money to run a tough campaign, though in fact he didn’t.

By 1976 Hunter found himself enjoying being a big fish in a small pond. He ran—unopposed—and was reelected.

In subsequent years, he would put down roots. After the dissolution of his first marriage, which produced three children, Hunter married Margie, a gynecologist, and the couple had two children together. They moved into a ranch-style house with a sunroom that overlooked a small stream. Beyond was a view of the Flatirons and the Indian Peaks. Like most Boulderites, Hunter was physically active. He liked to work up a sweat on the squash court and on his Schwinn exercycle.

After Koby’s press conference, Hunter asked his chief deputy, Bill Nagel, to contact out-of-town DAs who had handled two recent high-profile cases—Jeffery Dahmer and Polly Klaas—for any advice they could give. Michael Meese, of the Sonoma County DA’s office in California, sent to Boulder a complete report of what they had learned from the Polly Klaas kidnap-homicide case. It included strategies for investigative teams, data processing, and press control. Hunter was particularly interested in the reports on media guidelines.

Bill Wise and his wife, Diane Balkin, a Denver chief trial deputy DA, suggested—independently—that Hunter retain Barry Scheck, a well-respected DNA specialist from New York, as a consultant.
*
Then Wise thought of hiring Dr. Henry Lee, a Connecticut criminologist who had gained national prominence in the Simpson trial. Because the media made no clear distinction between police work and the DA’s job, Hunter knew that the presence of Lee and Scheck might help his friend Tom Koby present a bet
ter image of Boulder’s investigative efforts. It might also change what Hunter feared was the small-town image Koby had given the case.

Scheck usually worked for the defense.
*
He had destroyed the credibility of a police criminalist, Dennis Fung, on the witness stand in the Simpson criminal case. So it might prove tricky to convince Koby to accept Scheck’s role in the case. On the other hand, when law enforcement retained experts like Lee and Scheck, they became unavailable to the defense.