Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (29 page)

Within three days of the murder of JonBenét, Jane Stobie, a former employee of Access Graphics, called the Boulder police to say that she had important information for them. Two months later they still hadn’t returned her call, so Stobie, an acquaintance of Denver DA Bill Ritter, called him and told him what she knew. A few days later, the Boulder police called.

On February 21 Detectives Arndt and Hickman interviewed Stobie at police headquarters. She told them that she had gone to work for John Ramsey in July 1991 as a specialist in Hewlett-Packard products. For three years she carpooled every day from Denver to Boulder with some of her coworkers. At first, Stobie said, the company was so small—and there was such an overlap of responsibilities—that it was routine for many of the employees to read each others’ faxes. Then rumor had it that Calcomp, which owned 20 percent of Access Graphics and was itself owned by Lockheed, wanted one of the company’s three founders, Jim Hudson, out. Eventually Lockheed exercised an option to purchase Access Graphics. The word was that John Ramsey got $8 million from the buyout. Overnight, a mom-and-pop operation was reporting to a Fortune 500 corporation.

Stobie saw Don Paugh, Ramsey’s father-in-law, as a nice old southern gentleman and a father figure for some of the young employees. He was called the Andy Griffith of Access. Sometimes he would party with them at Potter’s, a bar on the Mall.

But after John Ramsey’s daughter Beth died in January 1992, employees at Access Graphics started getting “knifed,” Stobie told the police. If an employee happened to offend Sun Microsystems, one of the firm’s large suppliers, the person would be fired without warning. This seemed to happen again and again. At least that’s how it looked to her, Stobie said.

In April 1993, Stobie told the police, Access sent her to Atlanta to manage the office there. Nedra Paugh and her other daughters, Polly and Pam, were running the so-called Atlanta branch. They sold supplies for the most part and were showing minimal profit.

Stobie found the Atlanta office totally unprofessional. There was pageant literature everywhere. Polly spent a lot of the day screaming at her husband. Stobie overheard con
versations about oral sex and discussions between Nedra and some employees about the size of Burke’s penis when he was born. All in all, it gave the impression of a place where the family got together rather than a workplace. Stobie felt that the Atlanta “branch” had become a potential embarrassment to John Ramsey now that Access had to answer to Lockheed, and she resented having to straighten out his family. In July 1993, Stobie said, she was ordered by Tom Carson to tell Nedra that the Atlanta office would close and that she would be laid off. Patsy’s mother screamed and then sobbed, saying that she needed the job to keep her arthritis at bay. She had to be active. Stobie felt sorry for her, but the business came first. In 1994, not long after Stobie returned to Boulder, she was let go.

A few months after Stobie’s police interview, she began to tell her story to various reporters.

The snow was still on the ground on February 23 when Geraldo Rivera taped two daytime TV shows at the Alps Boulder Canyon Inn. It was advertised as a “town meeting” but consisted of an invitation-only audience of local journalists, lawyers, pathologists, friends of the Ramseys, and some hotel guests.

In the first hour there was a debate between Dr. Cyril Wecht, a noted forensic pathologist, and Larry Pozner, a Denver criminal defense attorney. Wecht said that JonBenét was a victim of prior sexual abuse. In light of the possibility that semen was found at the crime scene, he said, this was a sex crime, with John Ramsey as the logical “primary suspect.” Pozner was outraged at Wecht’s statement and insisted that the presumed facts on which he based his claim were hardly reliable.

“He [ Wecht ] talks about semen,” Pozner said. “What semen? Nobody’s released a report saying they had found semen.”

The second hour, taped the same afternoon, focused on
how the Ramsey case was affecting various Boulder residents. Bill McReynolds, now known publicly as a suspect, proclaimed his innocence to Rivera’s audience. Pam Griffin and her daughter, Kristine, talked about their experiences with Patsy and JonBenét during the previous year.

One local resident told Rivera that when he used to travel out of state and mention that he was from Boulder, people would say, “Oh, that beautiful place in the Rocky Mountains, right next to the Flatirons!” Now, he said, people asked him, “Who did it?”

The next day, on February 24, Detective Arndt reinterviewed the Ramseys’ gardener, Brian Scott. She had already spoken to him earlier in the month.

Scott, who had graduated from the University of Colorado the year before, told the detective that he’d started working for the Ramseys in June 1995 as a landscaper. The last time he was at the house was December 10. The family used large wooden candy canes to decorate the yard during the holidays, and he noticed that they hadn’t been arranged properly. They needed deeper holes, which he dug before pounding them into the ground. Detective Arndt asked him what he remembered about the window-well grate near the rear patio. Scott said he didn’t remember that the window was broken. He’d only been in the basement to fix the sprinkler clock. He didn’t know there
was
a wine cellar, much less
where
it was. He did recall a broken window at the front of the house, but it was for the electrical cord for the Christmas lights and certainly not big enough for someone to crawl through—something like 2 inches square.

While Scott adjusted the candy canes along the front walk, he saw a blue Chevy Suburban pull up to collect JonBenét. She was wearing a pair of blue overalls and was being bratty about something. “I think she might have been giving orders,” Scott said, “like, ‘You get in the back. You do
this.’ Something like that.” A moment later the car was gone. That was the last time he saw JonBenét.

On December 25, Scott went to the apartment of his girlfriend, Ann Preston, at around 10:30
P
.
M
. and stayed until just after midnight, then went home alone. There was nobody to confirm his alibi for the rest of the night. Arndt asked him for a handwriting sample, and two weeks later he gave the police blood, saliva, and hair samples as well. Only then did he feel he was a suspect.

The Ramseys’ street, 15th Street, was the nicest street in the neighborhood, better than 14th, better than 16th or even 13th. But 7th, 8th, and 6th were pretty nice too.

But the Ramseys’ home could have been anyplace. From the property you couldn’t really see the mountains, not even the Flatirons. As far as I could tell, never being on the top floors of the house, it didn’t seem to have any views. The house didn’t even have a front porch.

Unlike so many homes on the street, it didn’t have a driveway out front. The Ramseys approached their home through an alley that ran behind the house. I never saw them enter through the front door—always through that alley and the side door off the patio. The alley was just wide enough for one car. It was all beat up, lined with trash cans. There was pavement in some places, gravel in others. I don’t think they realized what an eyesore it was when they moved in.

I took it upon myself to trim the other side of the passageway. It could never be an elegant approach. It was not what I thought the Ramseys would want to see every day.

—Brian Scott

Late on the afternoon of February 25, Bill Wise walked into Alex Hunter’s office and told him that two journal
ists, Dan Glick of
Newsweek
and Charlie Brennan of the
Rocky Mountain News
, wanted to see him as soon as possible about something they had uncovered. The reporters told Hunter that on December 26, 1974, Bill McReynolds’s nine-year-old daughter, Jill, had been kidnapped with a friend, who was then sexually assaulted. Jill was released unharmed. In addition, the reporters had discovered that McReynolds’s wife, Janet, had written a play called
Hey, Rube
, which was about the murder of a young girl that took place in a basement. It was based on the 1965 torture killing of Sylvia Likens in Indiana. Hunter immediately called John Eller and told him these details.

The next day, at police headquarters, Detectives Thomas and Gosage interviewed Janet McReynolds about her play and her daughter’s kidnapping, details she and her husband had failed to mention in their previous interviews. A few days later, the detectives interviewed the McReynoldses’ son Tristan, who had first met Patsy when he delivered a gingerbread house to the Ramseys from his bakery. Once she’d come into the bakery to inquire about his father’s health. Tristan had been in Detroit with his girlfriend between December 24 and 26. The alibi of Jessie, the McReynoldses’ other son, was also verified.

It was becoming clear to Pete Hofstrom and the Ramseys’ attorneys that the CBI was not going to allow an outsider to observe its work. Carl Whiteside interpreted the law his way and would not budge. Toward the end of February, as Whiteside had suggested, the police sent some of the DNA evidence to Cellmark Diagnostics. The Maryland lab was
not governed by Colorado law, and officials there would allow the Ramseys’ representatives to observe their testing procedures if Hunter’s office approved. On February 25, deputy DA Trip DeMuth wrote a letter to the lab approving observation by a Ramsey representative. Once testing began, it would take a minimum of six weeks before the results would be available.

WHAT’S ALEX HUNTER SAYING?

When Jeff Hendry of the Boulder Sheriff’s Department read Chuck Green’s column, he smiled. He had more than one story of his own to tell about Hunter’s office. For instance, there was the time the sheriff’s department busted a drug dealer in his house and found a kilo and a half of cocaine, $80,000 in cash, semiautomatic weapons, Mac 10s, Uzis, and various handguns. While Hendry and his fellow officers were searching the house, his pager went off. Bill Wise’s phone number appeared on the screen. When Hendry called, Wise told him the money was being seized under civil statutes and had already been settled: $20,000 of the $80,000 would go to the drug dealer’s attorney. According to the law, proceeds from drug sales were to be confiscated, not given to the charged person. The cash had been sitting on top of the cocaine. It was clear to Hendry that this money represented cash from drug sales and should be seized. It was not covered by civil statutes, Hendry argued, which allowed money to remain the property of the suspect. Wise remained firm: the DA had already decided how it would be handled. Hendry concluded that Bill Wise’s first concern was that the defense attorney be paid. When Hendry asked himself why, the only answer he could come up with was that this was Boulder.

The
Denver Post’
s acid column about Hunter was the first in a series of newspaper articles and TV broadcasts that would attack the Boulder DA for his office’s laid-back approach to the law.

Plea bargaining had been a major part of Hunter’s first campaign platform, and he addressed it in his second term too. In the late 1970s, the DA’s office had to contend with fifteen hundred felonies a year, at a time when there was only one criminal judge on the bench. A judge could handle perhaps sixty cases a year, according to Hunter. By the late 1990s, Boulder County had two thousand felony cases a year and only two district court criminal judges. Like all
DAs, Hunter had to handle the overflow within the financial means of the community. Even in Boulder, with its low crime rate, plea bargaining was unavoidable.

I would have difficulty being a DA in Boulder. My personal philosophy involves taking a hard stand, using jails, using prisons, standing up to those who argue that you can fight crime by being nice to folks and seeking rehabilitation over and above punishment. Retribution has its own rehabilitative component.

Hunter has an unusual way of resolving cases. He doesn’t call it plea bargaining. He calls it precharging negotiations, and he does it before charges are filed. It is a unique way of looking at things. You can run a system that way, an effective system, a system that’s in tune with the community. And it works very well in Boulder.

Pete Hofstrom, who heads Hunter’s felony division, is perfect for the job. He takes everything in, is excellent analytically. He can spot an issue, understand a case, and resolve it. He’s effective in his job. But he’s not a dynamic trial lawyer.

Everyone likes Pete. And he can flourish in a system with the Boulder prosecution philosophy for a long time.

—Robert Grant

Back in ’78, Alex had this no-plea-bargaining policy. It got him national attention, but I don’t think it lasted a year. We all realized that plea bargaining serves a purpose. It’s not an evil thing. It’s something that works.

Today I’m a defense attorney in Boulder. Back then I was with the public defender’s office. During that no-plea-bargaining time, we defense attorneys were encouraged to come and have a dialogue with the DA. We plea bargained through precharging negotiations. Alex had deputy DAs
screen the cases first. We would go in and lay out our case, sometimes too prematurely. At that point, a misdemeanor charge might be agreed to instead of a felony.

Technically, you could say there were no pleas bargained, because the charges weren’t filed yet.

Today the vestiges of that era are still in Boulder. I would say in 10 percent of my cases, maybe 15 percent, I can go to the DA and say, “We need to talk. Here’s what’s wrong with your case.” Or if we know what is likely to happen, plea bargain it before charging.

As defense counsel, I’m always asking, Who is this defendant? And also, Who is this victim? I have to focus just as much on how much the victim has been hurt as on what has happened to my client. In other words, Pete Hofstrom and I are clones of each other. If I walk in there and just tell my client’s side without any awareness of the impact on the victim, Pete will say, “You haven’t done your homework. Come back with the other side of the story.”

—Paul McCormick

After I spent four years as a deputy DA for Alex Hunter, I became a judge in Boulder County. Some of us district judges would just flat-out refuse to accept plea bargains from Hunter’s office. These were cases where we could see that the defendant deserved a heavier hand. An example: Hunter’s staff would bring me someone arrested for driving under the influence and want to plead it to careless driving when it was easy to prove a prima facie
*
case on the actual offense. I would review it and say no.

The only other negative reaction I ever saw to all this
plea bargaining came from the police. The community never said a word.

—Virginia Chavez

Soon after Alex Hunter hired Pete Hofstrom in 1974, the DA’s office examined the issue of rehabilitation versus retribution for criminals. Determined to make the most of Boulder’s politically progressive attitudes, in the early 1980s Hunter initiated a series of discussions with a broad spectrum of residents. During a ten-year period, he invited more than twelve hundred groups to his office. He met mostly with women, always asking the same kinds of questions: “A seventeen-year-old kid is caught committing a robbery with a .357 magnum. Do you throw the book at him? Do you give him another chance?”

“You get tough with
anybody
who brings a loaded .357 to a robbery,” more than one Boulderite told Hunter. “If you slap his wrist and give him another chance, what message does that send?”

To some Boulderites it seemed that the DA didn’t like coming down hard on crime. To others, it seemed that Hunter wanted to be in step with Boulder’s citizens, but it was also
possible that Hunter simply wanted to see if his thinking was in line with public opinion. In any case, he came away with a clearer picture of what was expected of him.

Hofstrom and Hunter examined the concept of deferred sentences,
*
as well as deferred prosecution
**
for first-time nonviolent offenders. Hofstrom believed that if such offenders made restitution, attended appropriate rehabilitation programs, and stayed out of trouble for a minimum of two years, their cases should be dismissed and their records sealed; something short of a conviction.

The attitude was deeply ingrained in Hofstrom, who had paid his way through college and law school by working as a prison guard and had maintained a deep interest in the plight of society’s outcasts. Alex Hunter agreed with Hofstrom’s position. As a result, rehabilitation became the first consideration for the DA’s office.

In a small town like Boulder, an attorney doesn’t succeed or fail by his prowess in the courtroom, because so few cases go to trial. If only eight felony cases out of two thousand go to trial each year in Boulder, you have to ask yourself who really decides all those remaining cases.

If you’re a defense attorney with such ferocious power that the DA’s office is afraid to face you in court, you’re in a fine bargaining position. Maybe there are a few attorneys like that in Boulder. But for the most part, you make deals by being on good terms with the DA’s office. That friendship is your livelihood.

It’s not that Boulder is unique that way. What is different is this “Magic Kingdom” business. People who practice law here like to live here. For the most part, they confine their practice to Boulder. They don’t even like to go to Denver. Boulder is small; the legal community is small.

That’s where Pete Hofstrom comes in. There’s no
question he regards his job as deal-making. He’s utterly honest. He’s not greedy, not selfish. He’s not looking to make a lot of money or run for governor. He says that it’s his job to make judgments about who deserves a good deal and who doesn’t.

He has told my law students that there are basically three kinds of people who will come to a prosecutor’s attention: one is the chronic fuckup—not really evil but unable to manage in today’s complicated world and therefore sees crime as an easy out; then there’s the hard-core criminal, a sociopath who’s greedy, selfish, doesn’t care about hurting people—someone with no conscience whatsoever; finally, there’s the citizen, a basically solid person with the right values, the right attitude, the right skills, who has now made a bad mistake.

Pete says you have to treat these three types differently, even if they’ve all committed the same crime. And he has confidence that he can unerringly place people in one category or the other. He understands that in his job, he pretty much has the power to determine the outcome even though it’s the judge who pronounces sentence. Pete is comfortable in that role and believes he’s perfectly capable of making these judgments.

—Marianne Wesson

The DA’s office was soon half a step ahead of Boulder, which often found itself several steps ahead of other cities. Hunter used his office to initiate community programs. Having set up a consumer protection unit and a victim assistance program, he established a crime-prevention education program for all public school children called Safe Guard, a safehouse for domestic violence prevention, and a restitution-collection program for victims of crimes.

Hunter worked closely with Chuck Stout of the Boul
der Health Department on the AIDS threat and supported the department’s controversial needle-exchange program for addicts. When a drug bust netted the county over half a million dollars, he agreed that the money should be used for the education of teen mothers who were at high risk for becoming child abusers. The resulting Genesis program won a Ford Foundation award in 1996.

Hunter was way ahead of the curve in inaugurating and supporting such programs. He said he wanted to be innovative because Boulder expected it of him.

Boulder is a unique city. And Alex Hunter’s strength in staying in office for twenty-five years is his identifying with the community—not in shaping the forces of the community, but in following them and anticipating what Boulder wants from a prosecutor. That is quite different from what most communities in this state want from a prosecutor.

Boulder has been a kind of magnet for different philosophies, ideas, and academics. It’s always changing. It’s a kind of Disneyland, Colorado, where you don’t have to be at all concerned about the mundane part of life. You kind of just let it flow and things are taken care of. In Boulder, you can live in a world of ideas.

Hunter listens well and surrounds himself with good people. He doesn’t believe he’s 90 percent and everyone else is only 10 percent. He’s a consensus builder, both in his job and in his political life. And again, I say he’s in tune with the dynamics of his community.

Boulder lacks poverty, it lacks a ghetto—at least as a geographic entity. But there are pockets of low-income folks in the Boulder community, and there’s a hell of a lot of diversity. It’s racial, ethnic. But even the low income is at a higher level than you would normally think of in terms of a ghetto.

Alex doesn’t fancy himself as a trial lawyer, and his ego isn’t fed in the courtroom. His ego is fed in the political arena.

—Robert Grant

The Boulder City Council is, in many ways, responsible for the city’s overall success. In 1967 the city agreed to tax itself to buy up tens of thousands of acres of open space, which it declared off-limits to development.

My parents came to Denver in 1947, when I was ten, to start the Julius Hyman Company, which produced the nastiest, most dangerous insecticides. Eventually they sold the firm to Shell Oil, which continued producing the same pesticides for a long time. If I had a personal bumper sticker, it would read, “Here longer than most natives.”