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floor. Two hours later she was awake again, sobbing, asking for Burke, asking if all the doors and windows were locked.
    John Ramsey, lying on the sofa, slept fitfully. When he nodded off, his mask of stoicism vanished. He heaved with sobs.

2
    Niki Hayden, a writer for the Daily Camera , was at her office late in the day on December 26 when her editor, Joan Zales, said to her: “I think the Ramsey family are members of your church.”
    Hayden was stunned. She looked at a picture of JonBenét that Zales was showing her, but she didn’t recognize the child or recall the name.
    â€œWould you know them if you saw them?” Zales asked.
    â€œI don’t think so.”
    Hayden thought she knew most everyone at St. John’s Episcopal Church, but these people were strangers to her. She assumed they were very recent arrivals, though they weren’t.
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    I’ve been married for almost thirty years, and I was originally trained as a teacher. Now I work for the Daily Camera. When my husband and I moved here in 1982, I saw Boulder as a beautifully designed small town that had preserved its old buildings—a very human scale for pedestrians. It wasn’t like living in New Jersey or New York, where you often feel dwarfed.
    Boulder was much more of a college town then than it is today. My first impression was that Boulder was a small city with intelligent people who liked small-town life. They could have made more money in a bigger place, but they wanted a real community. These were people who dedicated a portion of their lives to public service. I didn’t ponder it deeply—I was immersed inchanging diapers, learning to be a mom.
    Today, I see less and less of that community spirit and much more of people who have escaped or retired from large cities and can pay people to run this city for them. They’re not as involved. Today, we Boulder residents are not devoted to public service the way we once were. We’ve become more of an urban center.
    Rol Hoverstock is pastor of St. John’s. I knew him before he came to our church, before he was ordained. He owned a bicycle shop in town and he wanted to be a priest. When he left Boulder for his first parish in South Dakota, he was shaky, nervous, ill at ease in the pulpit. Then Father Jim—Jim McKeown—retired, and Rol was the congregation’s unanimous choice to replace him. The priest who came back to us from South Dakota was a man who suddenly felt comfortable with what he was doing. I think of him as a country priest. He had a vision for our church as a family community. He really wanted a strong program for children. There’s nothing I don’t like about Rol.
    â€”Niki Hayden
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    The next morning, Friday, December 27, everyone in the Daily Camera ’s second-floor newsroom was scrambling to gather any scrap of information on the Ramseys. It was almost as busy as Election Day. The paper that morning led with an article about the murder of JonBenét.
    MISSING GIRL FOUND DEAD
    A 6-year-old Boulder girl reported kidnappedearly Thursday was found dead in her parents’ home later that afternoon. It is Boulder’s first official homicide of 1996.
    Police detectives and crime scene investigators began searching the house late Thursday after securing a search warrant. No details of what they had found were disclosed.
    Although the official cause of death was not yet known, Police Chief Tom Koby said the case is considered a homicide. The child had not been shot or stabbed, said Detective Sgt. Larry Mason.
    No arrest had been made as of press time, and police had no suspects, Mason said.
    The Boulder County coroner’s office refused to discuss details of the case, though an autopsy will be performed today, according to city spokeswoman Leslie Aaholm.
    The child was the 1995 Little Miss Colorado and a student at Martin Park [sic] Elementary School, according to a family friend. Patsy Ramsey traveled around the