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to the cops. The police wanted half of what was necessary—according to Hofstrom. Differences of opinion between branches of law enforcement are to be expected, but nothing like this.
     
    At 10:45 P . M . Larry Mason stepped outside the Ramseys’ house and made an official statement to the two local reporters there. The TV crews had left earlier, to get on the air by 10:00. The dead child’s name was JonBenét Ramsey, age six, said Mason. He refused to answer any questions.
     
    Except for his terse statement, Mason had ignored the media throughout the evening. By 11:30, he found only Elliot Zaret from Boulder’s Daily Camera . The Camera was holding the presses till Zaret filed a story. The reporter wanted to know exactly what had happened inside. Were there any signs of a break-in?
    “I don’t give a fuck about your First Amendment,” Mason growled. “All I care about is solving this fucking case. I know what you journalists do—you’re in everybody’s face.”
    But Zaret persisted. He’d already been led astray once that evening, when the coroner’s investigator, PatriciaDunn, told him that they had custody of the body, which suggested that the body had been removed when in fact it was still in the house.
    “Nobody’s telling me anything,” Zaret said. “There’s a dead little girl, and I don’t know if there’s a murderer on the loose. People reading the story tomorrow will be worried if they don’t know.”
    Zaret asked Mason to talk to him off the record at least, then tell him what, if anything, he could print.
    “What do you want to know?” Mason finally said.
    “The cause of death.”
    “I can’t tell you that.”
    “Was she shot?”
    “No.”
    “Was she stabbed?”
    “No.”
    “So she was strangled,” Zaret said.
    “I didn’t say that. You can’t print she was strangled.”
    “Can I print she wasn’t shot or stabbed?”
    “Yes. And if you burn me, I’m never going to say another word to you again.”
    Zaret printed only what they’d agreed on.
     
    At 11:44 P . M ., seventeen and a half hours after Linda Arndt was first paged, she was the last person to leave the Ramsey house.
     
    At midnight that night, Dr. Beuf and his wife, Penny, were still at the Fernies’ house, along with Patsy’s friend Patty Novack, who had become her unofficial nurse. Patsy had to be helped even in the bathroom.
    Finally, the Valium she had taken made Patsy drowsy. She fell asleep again on the living room 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.
    “Would you know them if you saw them?” Zales asked.
    “I 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.
     
    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