Perfect Murder, Perfect Town by Lawrence Schiller Read Free Book Online

group of Lockheed Martin, Access Graphics’ parent company, had been notified. In a series of phone calls, Lockheed Martin specified a chain of command to handle essential business in John Ramsey’s absence.
    Ramsey’s top people had gathered to manage the unmanageable. It was like the day John F. Kennedy waskilled: nothing seemed normal. Nobody used the chair where Ramsey usually sat. Their job, Merriman said, was to make sure a billion-dollar business continued to operate. Very quickly they settled on a collaborative crisis team. It included Ross Churchill, Michael Minard, Laurie Wagner, Tom Carson, who was out of town, and Merriman. One of the division managers remarked that JonBenét’s death would be a global story: “John’s a rich guy. His daughter is a child beauty queen. They’re going to attach dirty sex stuff to her death. It won’t be about JonBenét. It’s all about selling papers.”
    Everyone agreed that the business had to be isolated from the tragedy. They set up a procedure to keep clients and employees informed. As workers returned from the Christmas holidays, those who didn’t already know would have to be told. Some were likely to feel helpless, outraged, or saddened. To employees at Access Graphics, JonBenét was not an abstraction—she was a real little girl. She’d visited the building. She had sat in her daddy’s big chair. When she entered a room, it became brighter.
    Then it hit Gary Merriman. Could the Daily Camera story about the company hitting a billion dollars in sales have anything to do with JonBenét’s death? He was the one who had urged sending out the press release. John’s picture had accompanied the article. Had he exposed the Ramsey family to some lunatic? Merriman would be tormented for months afterward by the thought that he might have inadvertently targeted JonBenét.
    Lockheed Martin’s Gary Mann said he’d keep in close contact for the next few weeks, but there wasn’t much to add to what Merriman and his team were doing. Clearly, Lockheed Martin trusted the organization John Ramsey had built, but they also seemed to want to distance themselves from Ramsey’s problems. JonBenét’s death was none of Lockheed Martin’s business. Mann told Carson, Churchill, Merriman, and Wagner to report to him for thenext ninety days. Wagner was appointed company spokesperson. Lockheed Martin had a succession plan in place if it turned out that one was needed. No one was irreplaceable to the corporation. Life had to go on.
     
    Shortly after 8:15 A . M . on December 27, Dr. John Meyer entered the autopsy room at Boulder Community Hospital, accompanied by his medical investigators, Tom Faure and Patricia Dunn. Dunn had been at the Ramsey house the previous day and was Meyer’s primary investigator on the case. For the autopsy, Detectives Linda Arndt and Tom Trujillo were on hand for the Boulder police; senior trial deputies Trip DeMuth and John Pickering were there for the DA’s office.
    Attendants unsealed a heavy white plastic bag, revealing JonBenét’s body wrapped in a sterile white sheet. The child was placed on the steel autopsy table, whose slightly inclined subtray permitted fluids to drain into a sink-type apparatus. The sheet was removed and set aside as part of the evidence.
    Meyer knew that in nine out of ten cases of a child’s suspicious death, the perpetrator or an accomplice says that a bike fell on the victim or the child slipped in the bathtub—some accident is concocted to explain the victim’s injuries. Meyer also knew, however, that good forensic pathology usually reveals the real cause of death.
    JonBenét’s body was just as Meyer had observed it twelve hours earlier in the Ramsey living room. Every stitch of her clothing, plus the ligatures on her right wrist and around her neck, remained in place. Paper bags had been sealed around her hands and feet to preserve any possible trace evidence.
    Patricia Dunn took color slides for the coroner’s