JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (51 page)

Detective Steve Thomas #638
Detective Division
Boulder Police Department

36

I had three copies of my letter delivered to the police department that morning. One went to legal adviser Bob Keatley, and another went to Commander Dave Hayes, whom I respected. Neither gave out their copies. The third went to Chief Mark Beckner.

The chief’s secretary telephoned to say that Beckner wanted me to come in. Sorry, I said. I don’t work there anymore. Then came a call from Internal Affairs, which wanted “to get this thing figured out.” Nothing to figure out, I said. I’m a carpenter now.

About an hour later, reporter Craig Lewis of the tabloid
Globe
, whom I had never met, showed up at my front door with a complete copy of my letter of resignation. I would not talk to him. I knew Lewis had close contacts with the office of the district attorney, so I could imagine where he received his copy. DA Alex Hunter was on vacation in Alaska, and his shop was in the hands of his first assistant DA, Bill Wise.

By 5:30 P.M. my resignation was the top story on ABC World News Tonight. Cops told me that the conference room at police headquarters was packed, eyes glued to the TV screen.

The next call was not so nice. The Boulder Police Department wanted my badge and credentials immediately and also directed that I return my equipment on Monday morning, when an escort would take me through the “secured areas of the department.” What a joke. One day I’m on a murder case, and the next I have to be escorted through secure areas, as if there were something in there I didn’t know about.

I would not set foot back in Boulder until this was done, and I wasn’t about to carry a cardboard box through a ring of reporters and sheepishly hand it over as if I had done something wrong. I said I would surrender my badge only to Commander Hayes, and within a couple of hours, not after the weekend. With the help of my friend Todd Sears, I inventoried every item of police gear I had—gun belt, leather gear, helmet, radio, vests, uniforms, the works, including all my Ramsey investigative case notes.

At 9:30 P.M. Hayes and Sergeant Mike Ready, another old friend, were waiting in an unmarked police car beneath a single streetlight at a feed store in the nearby town of Golden. Sears and I got out of my truck and shook hands with them. They were only intermediaries, and we had a history. I turned over all the gear, with Sears going over the inventory sheet. Handing my shield to Dave Hayes was one of the toughest things I had ever done.

For the rest of the night my telephone rang with calls from the media, which I didn’t answer, and calls from friends and other cops who let me know they were in my corner. When I stepped outside my house, a neighbor called out from across the street: “I got one thing to say to you. Right on!”

The public relations person in the DA’s office put out a statement calling my letter “outrageous” and “substantially false,” although she did not say exactly what was false.

I had taken them totally by surprise, but I knew these media-savvy politicians would quickly recover, and I expected a full counterattack because it is no little thing when a cop lays down his badge and issues the kind of charges I had made. I remembered
Globe
reporter Jeff Shapiro once telling me how a gleeful Alex Hunter helped the tabloids go after Commander John Eller because “It’s his time.” Now, I knew, it was my time.

Defense attorneys joined the fray. By attacking the office of the district attorney, I was threatening their own rice bowls. The last thing they wanted in Boulder was an aggressive DA who would vigorously prosecute criminal cases.

There was quite a bit of dissension in the police department, with line cops challenging Beckner and his command staff. Police officers had complained about the DA’s office for twenty years, and this was a golden opportunity to take the challenge public, while a national spotlight shone on Boulder. My supporters were saying that the department had lost a good cop, that what I had said was true, and that the department should not play it safe on this one. Even some officers I didn’t know stood up for me, demanding to know what Chief Beckner was going to do.

In response, he sent a memo to his troops saying, “It is important for everyone to know that the investigative team, myself and the Deputy Chiefs do not agree with Steve’s conclusion that the case has no chance of success.” The chief promised to continue working closely with the DA’s office.

The letter did its job by getting the attention of Governor Roy Romer, who convened a team of metro district attorneys to discuss what was going on in Boulder. These were the same men who had been advising DA Alex Hunter, but now their professional reputations were on the line, so they had to find a way out of the mess while still supporting Hunter. To abandon him would indicate that they had given him bad advice all along. Hunter, the master politician, had once again placed intermediaries between himself and disaster.

The governor pledged to look into the appointment of a special prosecutor for the Ramsey case. Hunter’s office promised to cooperate.

Suddenly there was a much higher priority on the table than getting even with me. I was put on the back burner while the DA tried to make the best of a terrible situation. If the governor named someone else to handle the case, it would be a devastating blow to the reputations of the Boulder prosecutors.

It was up to the governor to restore public confidence in the way things were being handled. He could no longer remain on the sidelines, and he made his official response six days after I resigned. At the time, Governor Romer was a leading light of the national Democratic Party in which Ramsey attorney Hal Haddon was also a major player. Knowing those unseen political links, I did not expect much as I watched the press conference on my living room TV.

Alex Hunter was left in place, although the governor forced him to swear in a couple of deputy district attorneys from elsewhere in the state. Being publicly forced to accept experienced outside help was a black eye for the Boulder DA, but he had survived and remained in the game.

The best part, to me, came when Governor Romer announced that a grand jury would be called to look into the murder of JonBenét Ramsey. Hallelujah!

The
Rocky Mountain News
ran an editorial that read, “The bold gamble by former Boulder Detective Steve Thomas has paid off after all. His bombshell of allegations regarding the Boulder County District Attorney’s office performance in the JonBenét Ramsey case, coupled with a dramatic resignation, has prompted the governor to act.”

That sounded good, and to the uninitiated it seemed that the pieces were finally falling into place. But they didn’t know about Deputy DA Pete Hofstrom’s rules of engagement. There was still heated opposition within the DA’s office to using a grand jury at all, so it might turn out to be nothing more than window dressing. No matter what was presented, no matter how strong the evidence, no matter what Mike Kane and his new deputies wanted, the final decision on whether to seek an indictment would be made by District Attorney Hunter, who trusted and depended upon Hofstrom.

Although I liked to think my letter had something to do with the governor’s decision to force the grand jury, I found it interesting that Romer never called to speak to me. He dealt only with the lawyers who had reputations and careers on the line.

While the media frenzy continued, I stayed busy with a contracting job to build a new store. A national tabloid showed up on my doorstep with a six-figure offer to sell my story. I refused. Dozens of offers to be interviewed had no appeal. I felt that I had said my piece. A month after I resigned I made a single brief television appearance. Sacks filled with mail arrived, supporting my decision to quit, giving me courage to get through one of the most trying periods of my life.

The most surprising support came from the last place I expected, a columnist for the Boulder
Daily Camera.
Juliet Wittman wrote:

I have followed the JonBenét Ramsey case only in the newspapers, but the pattern of laziness, obfuscation and near pathological sympathy for suspects Thomas saw in the DA’s office is more than familiar. Now I watch in bemusement as all the familiar rationalizations are floated, ranks close, and Governor Romer helps with damage control. Too bad for the dedicated cop who put his livelihood and reputation on the line to expose corruption. Too bad for JonBenét.

As the days passed, it seemed that things were calming after the firestorm. The police department didn’t want to go to war with me and create a sideshow that would overshadow the case. They didn’t deny my specific allegations and did not call me a liar. They were content to let it blow over, and so was I.

In fact, I was rather pleased with the way things were turning out. At least there would be a grand jury, and Deputy DAs Pete Hofstrom and Trip DeMuth were no longer on the case, replaced by new assistants for Mike Kane. That alone was cause for jubilation.

The ditzy scheme in which DeMuth was going to head dual new investigations of the Ramseys and “other suspects” was abandoned, and Sergeant Tom Wickman was appointed to be a police advisory witness to the grand jury. At least there would be some cop input, although Wickman had been an administrator, not an investigator, and didn’t know the case as well as other detectives on the team.

I was satisfied, but the DA’s office and the trash media couldn’t leave well enough alone.

A source alerted me that the DA’s office had gotten my confidential personnel file from the police department “to see what we’re up against.” Reporters told me the DA’s office was using my health condition to say that my letter was only sour grapes for not being granted paid medical retirement.

Almost immediately stories appeared citing material from my personnel folder, and Bob Grant, the DA of Adams County, told a reporter, “No ill will to Thomas, but he was forced off the case by medical retirement. He wasn’t there to get the job done.”

Another reporter told me that First Assistant DA Bill Wise was dropping hints, not to be quoted, that I was mentally unstable. Then false reports surfaced that I was leaking case information to almost every publication and station that wanted it.

Hunter’s spin was in motion. “It’s his time,” rang loudly in my ears. The usual systematic dehumanization of anyone who spoke against the Boulder establishment was once again in play. They were trying to take away my pride, my accomplishments, my integrity, and my reputation, and were set on destroying everything I had worked for. They were doing to an ex-cop things they wouldn’t dream of doing to their pampered suspects, the Ramseys. And still I did not respond.

Jeff Shapiro of the
Globe
was waiting in ambush when I arrived home late one night in mid-August. He screeched his car to a stop in the middle of the street and flung open the door. Earlier that night he had confronted my wife when she answered the door in robe and pajamas, and tried to talk his way into our house.

“They’re calling you a head case,” Shapiro told me. “The DA’s office wants to destroy you.” So tell me something I don’t already know.

Shapiro then added a warning about his tabloid employer. I would talk to them or else, he said ominously. The
Globe
had burrowed deep into my background, and “a devious little plan” had been hatched that was going to leave me with “some rather unpleasant choices to make.” He started to tell me about myself.

I had studied in Sweden for a year after graduating from high school, and they had even looked up my host family there. Shapiro recounted things from my personal life that set my heart racing. “They paid a lot of money for that,” Shapiro said.

Their threat would be based on the premise that my mother had killed herself because my father left her. I was stung to the core and hurt beyond belief. My mother died from a medical condition, not suicide. But I felt that a tabloid newspaper would not refrain from printing something just because it wasn’t true. Facts just got in the way of a good story. And I couldn’t run away. “If you move, they’ll find you,” said Shapiro.

He will never realize how close I came to hurting him that night. Instead I told him to get off my property and never come back. Before he got into his car, Shapiro said that I should expect another visit from Craig Lewis, his fellow
Globe
reporter, who had shown up earlier with the copy of my resignation letter. “He drives a red Explorer. Watch for it. Leave the door closed when he knocks,” Shapiro warned.

When the doorbell rang a few days later, it was a Federal Express delivery. The
Globe
had dredged up ancient photos of members of my family in Arkansas, and my hands shook as I leafed through them. Photographs of my mother, my grandparents, my aunt, sisters, loved ones, navy pictures of my grandfather. They were going to drag my family into this mess, innocent people who had done nothing to bring about such an invasion of privacy. I worried about how my ill father would react when the tabloid spread lies about our family before millions of readers.

It was the most revolting, sick, and slimy thing I had ever encountered. Their intent was clear. The pictures were accompanied by a letter from Craig Lewis, saying he wanted me to “sit down and talk … and help me with some background information, particularly the whole conflict between the cops and the district attorney.” It was carefully worded, but the warning, pictures, and letter were like some old Mafioso scheme, and to me it added up to extortion. I did not want to see my family’s most private memories splashed across a supermarket tabloid, but I still refused to meet with Lewis.

This was the same tabloid newspaper that Alex Hunter was in bed with. He had almost adopted Jeff Shapiro as a pet reporter; Craig Lewis had helped deliver the
Vanity Fair
article to him; and the DA looked at
Playboy
with Tony Frost, the
Globe
editor. It disgusted me.