On January 14, 2009, the day after Stan Garnett became the new Boulder DA, I called him because he'd publicly said that he wanted to look at the unsolved JonBenet Ramsey murder case with fresh eyes. Surprisingly, he called back the next day, in part because he'd had some connection to the Alan Berg assassination in Denver in 1984, the subject of my first book. A few weeks later, I made an appointment to drive up to Boulder and speak with him about the Ramsey case. He seemed open-minded about the now twelve- year-old homicide and told me that his office, Boulder Police Department personnel, and other law enforcement were having a powwow about the case at the end of February 2009.

               In just the past two days, the substance of that meeting has become national news, and we've learned that a 20-some member advisory council made up of state and federal officials were at the gathering. We now know that they recommended the BPD go back and interview certain individuals connected to the case. One is Burke Ramsey, nine at the time of his sister's death and now 23. What we don't know and what seems very strange is that the BPD appears only now to be getting around to talking with these people -- a full nineteen months later. What they've been doing for the past year-and-a-half is about as mysterious as the murder itself. In my February '09 talks with Garnett, I gave him some very specific information about people connected to child pornography whose names have been associated with JonBenet's death. These leads had all been developed long after the murder, when certain people in Boulder had come forward to civilians with new information, in part because they did not want to go to the local police.   

               Initially, the Garnett appeared interested in opening up the investigation beyond the Ramsey family, just as the first DA on the case, Alex Hunter, had been when I'd approached him in April 1997. Back then, Hunter's complaint to me was that the BPD did not want to conduct an investigation into child abuse and child pornography that went outside the Ramsey family, and he was clearly frustrated by this. Twelve years later, there was reason to hope that Garnett would follow through with his desire to broaden the investigation. Within a few weeks, however, he'd turned the case back over to the BPD; some of the very same detectives who'd narrowed the murder probe earlier were in charge of it once again, the first sign that maybe Garnett's eyes were not all that fresh. In my future communications with the DA, he told me to pass along any information I had to the Boulder Police, as he did not have time to deal with it. So I did.  

               Let me be clear: we are talking about giving names to the Boulder Police Department of at least one offender convicted of child pornography charges, whose name had been raised by people in Boulder as having connections with the Ramsey homicide. When I attempted to convey this information to the BPD, I was essentially dismissed, as if this could not possibly be useful to them. I'm hardly the only one who had this experience. Throughout the past couple of years, I saw retired homicide detective Lou Smit on numerous occasions before he died in August 2010. He talked to me at length about the suspect list he'd put together since officially leaving the Ramsey investigation nearly a decade earlier, and sent along to the BPD. He felt the same kind of dismissive attitude toward him that I had -- despite having had a 90% clearance rate on his murder cases over decades of police work.

               It would be fine to be dismissed if there was reason to believe that the BPD has now broadened its investigation and is willing to look in new directions. But if that isn't the case, the public has the right to know what the police have been doing and how their tax dollars have been spent on this case.

               I'll have other things to say about information that was conveyed to the Boulder authorities around the time of this February 2009 powwow, but the critical question now is whether the BPD is going to interview more people beyond Burke Ramsey and other well known names in this case.

               More to come.