Perfect Murder, Perfect Town by Lawrence Schiller

body. “John, you can’t do that,” Mason protested. “You’re violating their rights.”
    “I don’t give a goddamn,” Eller snapped. “You either get on board or get out.”
    Larry Mason could see that Eller had no idea how to handle this kind of investigation. His inexperience, bravado, and stubbornness were making a bad situation worse.
     
    On Saturday afternoon at the Justice Center, while theRamseys were providing their various samples, Michael Bynum learned of Eller’s plan to withhold JonBenét’s body until John and Patsy agreed to be interviewed. The lawyer took Pete Hofstrom aside and told him that whether or not his clients had killed their daughter, they were still JonBenét’s parents. They had the right to bury their child. Bynum decided not to tell the Ramseys of Eller’s plan for the time being.
    When the police asked the coroner to hold JonBenét’s body until they had interviewed the Ramseys, he refused. There was no reason for his office to maintain custody of the body, John Meyer said. The police department’s legal adviser, Bob Keatley, agreed with Hofstrom and said so.
    Hofstrom would never say it publicly, but he had now lost all confidence in John Eller. According to Larry Mason, Hofstrom was a strict judge of character. Eller had clearly failed to measure up.
    At 4:37 P . M . a heavily sedated Patsy Ramsey gave the police her first blood, hair, fingerprint, and handwriting samples on the second floor of the Justice Center, a sprawling two-story sandstone building that contains not only the county courts but the sheriff’s department and the DA’s and coroner’s offices.
    “Will this help find who killed my baby?” Patsy asked Detective Arndt while her fingerprints were being taken. Then she added, “I did not murder my baby.”
     
    Meanwhile, Melinda Ramsey, John’s twenty-five-year-old daughter from his first marriage, arrived at the Justice Center. She had been called for a formal interview about her movements over the last few days. An hour later, her brother would be interviewed at the same place.
    The Ramseys’ attorneys and the police had agreed on this location as neutral territory. The police would have preferred to see them at headquarters, but since John Andrew and Melinda were cooperating without independent counsel, the detectives accepted the Justice Center as a reasonable compromise.
    Detective Kim Stewart interviewed Melinda for almost two and a half hours. Detectives Ron Gosage and Steve Thomas questioned her brother from 6:00 to 8:00 P . M .
    Twenty-year-old John Andrew was obviously upset, but he was composed enough to explain that he was a student at CU and had been in Boulder until December 19. Then he had gone to Atlanta to spend the first part of his vacation with his mother, Lucinda Johnson, and his sister and friends. Then the plan was to continue his vacation with his sister, father, stepmother, and their children. He said his father had arranged to meet him and his sister in Minneapolis at about 10:30 A . M . on December 26, and from there they would all continue to the house in Charlevoix, Michigan.
    In the months that followed, the police would confirm that John Andrew, his mother, and her friend Harry Smiles had attended the Peachtree Presbyterian Church in Atlanta on Christmas Eve and that John Andrew had returned to his mother’s home at 1:00 A . M .
    Melinda, who worked at a hospital in Marietta, Georgia, finished her shift at about 7:00 A . M . on Christmas Day. That afternoon, John Andrew, Harry Smiles, Melinda, and her boyfriend, Stewart Long, exchanged gifts at Lucinda’s home in Marietta. In the afternoon they all went across the street to a neighbor’s for dinner.
    Melinda and Stewart Long left the dinner party about 7:00 P . M ., and Melinda started to pack for an early flight the next day. At 9:00 they went to visit Guy Long, Stewart’s uncle, and after visiting other friends were home by midnight.
    At about 8:30 P . M ., John Andrew