Perfect Murder, Perfect Town Read Online Free PDF Page B

Westmoreland.
     
    At 10:00 P . M ., Pam Griffin was watching the local news when they said something about the body of a little girl being found in a basement. When JonBenét’s picture flashed on the TV screen, Pam grabbed her daughter, Kristine, told her guests she’d be back in a while, and drove to Patsy’s house.
    Pam and Kristine stood behind the yellow tape in the cold clear winter night and waited for Patsy to come outside. As they watched, a tiny black body bag was wheeled out on a stretcher. Pam asked about Patsy. Detective Larry Mason told her the Ramseys weren’t there. Pam told Mason she was a friend of Patsy’s—that she made beauty-pageant costumes for JonBenét. Mason asked her to come to police headquarters the next morning. Then Pam and Kristine left for their home in Longmont, twenty miles northeast of Boulder. No one had told them where Patsy was.
     
    Earlier that day, Pete Hofstrom had assigned deputy DA Trip DeMuth to work with the police. DeMuth arrived at the Ramsey house in midafternoon and was soon troubled by the reluctance of the police to consider his advice on the preservation of evidence. Now, after spending only an hour and a half collecting evidence, the police announced that they were almost ready to release the house as a crime scene and return it to the Ramseys. DeMuth insisted that much more investigative work had to be done. In this hugehouse, the police had concentrated mainly on two rooms—the wine cellar and JonBenét’s bedroom. When DeMuth found himself at an impasse with Commander Eller, he called his boss, Hofstrom, who phoned Eller immediately.
    Eller made it clear to Hofstrom that he wanted the DA’s office to get out of the crime-scene-analysis business. It was his call to make, Eller said, and if he said the police were finished at the Ramsey house, then they were finished. Twenty years earlier, in Dade County, Eller had been taught that a crime scene belonged to the police. A district attorney was there to give legal advice. Cops should never let prosecutors tell them who to interview or how to investigate. Those were tactical decisions, Eller had learned, and strictly police business.
    Hofstrom, just as gruff and stubborn as Eller, bluntly explained to the commander how much work still had to be done at the crime scene. The officers and technicians hadn’t even scratched the surface, he said. He wanted the entire house fingerprinted, shoeprint impressions taken, hair and fibers collected, drainpipes ripped out, floorboards removed. He wanted every drawer, every closet, every nook and cranny searched. The evidence, Hofstrom insisted, must be in a form that could be properly presented in court when the time came.
    To Eller, the prosecutor’s demands seemed a challenge to his authority. The commander made it clear once more that he was in charge. Hofstrom had better stay out of it or chaos would follow.
    Commander Eller had been rotated into his job as head of the detective division only eleven months earlier, and he had never once directed a homicide investigation. Pete Hofstrom had twenty-three years behind him in the DA’s office, fifteen of them as head of the felony division. In the last four years, he had overseen twenty-three murder cases in Boulder County.
    Rather than argue any longer, Hofstrom went overEller’s head. He called police chief Tom Koby, who had been given periodic briefings since JonBenét’s body was found. Late that night, Koby suggested to John Eller that he consider the recommendations of the DA’s office very seriously and continue to search the scene. In the coming weeks it would become apparent that Eller could neither forgive nor forget Pete Hofstrom’s questioning his skill, professionalism, and his authority.
    In the end the police would continue their work at the crime scene for ten days, during which there would be constant disagreement between them and the DA’s office. Hofstrom wanted three times what was needed—according