DEADLOCK IN BOULDER

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Behind the heavy wooden furniture and between the shelves stacked with law books in the office of Alex Hunter, district attorney of Boulder, Colo., there are three familiar images: a bust of Abraham Lincoln, a sketch of John F. Kennedy--and a photograph of JonBenet Ramsey.

Last week Hunter sat at ease, that photograph behind his right shoulder, and in a rare interview acknowledged to TIME that he had received "thousands" of letters about JonBenet, many of them from people who are "very sad and angry" that the killer or killers of the six-year-old have not been brought to justice. "I know people want closure," he said, "but I'm not going to rush to satisfy that understandable desire."

Rush? More than nine months have passed since JonBenet's beaten and strangled corpse was found the day after Christmas; yet tabloid speculation about why Hunter hasn't brought charges in the case of the slain little queen of prepubescent beauty pageants hasn't let up. And being in a "rush" is one charge no one would lodge against District Attorney Hunter.

To the contrary, furious feuding between Hunter's office and the Boulder police seems to have brought the investigation to a halt. Frustrated members of the Boulder police department insinuate that Hunter has been sitting on the case because he is pals with lawyers for JonBenet's parents, who remain the chief suspects. A police source goes so far as to contend that "the Ramsey attorneys are making the calls, telling us [presumably through Hunter's office] what we can do and when we can do it." Hunter's many defenders--he is so popular that he has been elected to seven four-year terms, five without opposition--reply that the police are covering up their own ineptitude. The cops have hopelessly botched the investigation from the start, this argument goes, and are now so uncooperative they will not even share evidence with Hunter's office.

But what new evidence could there be to share? All indications are that little, if any, has turned up for months. In the TIME interview, Hunter threw out tantalizing hints about an important test to be done on unspecified material found in the Ramsey house. But he conceded that it is "not a smoking-gun test" and added that "we've got lots of work yet to do"--implying it may be months, if ever, before he brings charges against anyone.

And at worst? There's a growing feeling that the case has drifted, unacknowledged, into the limbo of famous unsolved murder mysteries. Many legal experts believe there will never be any arrests, let alone a successful prosecution. "The case is a mess," says a police source. "It's irretrievable."

That might have been true even without any feuding. Many legal insiders--not all of them partisans of Hunter's--believe that, as the police source puts it, "the case went down the toilet in the first five hours." From the beginning, it was obvious that the cops who were called to investigate what was initially reported as a kidnapping had allowed contamination of evidence that might have been found at the crime scene. Detective Linda Arndt waited hours for a ransom call that never came before ordering a search of the house. She gave that order not to other cops but to John Ramsey, who found his daughter's body in a basement room and carried it upstairs--a complete violation of police procedure. Meanwhile, Arndt allowed friends and neighbors to wander in and out; coroner John Meyer, arriving to examine the body, had to push through a crowd to enter the house. As the months have gone by with little new evidence, it has become increasingly clear just how disastrous those initial blunders were.

But the feuding has certainly done nothing to salvage any remaining chance of developing a prosecutable case. At times, both sides have seemed to devote more energy to sniping at each other than to looking for JonBenet's killer. D.A. Hunter went so far as to refuse to attend a September session in Quantico, Va., at which Boulder police sought the guidance of FBI experts in evaluating evidence. His explanation was that the cops were going to show the FBI only some of the evidence and there was little point to his attending a partial review. Earlier, the police had enlisted three lawyers to give them independent guidance on the investigation. The cops could not have aroused more resentment if they had openly told Hunter's office, "We don't trust you."

And they don't. Though Hunter has said from the first that JonBenet's parents were "a focus" of the investigation--and says it still--many police and other critics think he has no zeal to prosecute them. Indeed, they say, historically he has not been enthusiastic about prosecuting anybody; police bitterly accuse him of negotiating far too many plea bargains. Dale Stange, just retired as a Boulder patrolman, says the D.A. has long been known to the police as "Alex Let's-Make-a-Deal Hunter." Carla Selby, a community activist, voices another suspicion: "There's a feeling that Alex is vulnerable to big money, that he is protecting the Ramseys"--who are very big money. John Ramsey is head of a computer-products distributor that racked up 1996 revenues of $1 billion.

The strongest suspicion, though, is that Hunter is partial not so much to the Ramseys as to their lawyers. Boulder, for all its academic eminence as the site of a University of Colorado campus and its reputation as a refuge for dropouts, is very much a small town where "all the lawyers are friends," says a retired judge. The Ramseys' legal team is headed by Hal Haddon--and if Hunter is a midsize fish in Colorado Democratic politics, Haddon is a whale. He was a close adviser to former Senator Gary Hart and a strong ally of Governor Roy Romer's.

Hunter shrugs off all the charges. Too many plea bargains? Just "locker-room talk" from cops. Closeness to Ramsey lawyers? "A bogus issue," he says. (Boulder lawyer Tom Lamm agrees that "Alex doesn't cross over that line to do anything that would suggest collusion.") The D.A. insists he is not being slow, just deliberate. Says Hunter: "This case is not in a posture for presentation" to a judge or jury. The obvious, though unspoken message: for all their leaking of dark suspicions about the Ramseys, the police have not shown Hunter enough hard evidence to support an arrest, let alone a prosecution.

In fact, the same police who criticize Hunter have hardly been moving with lightning speed themselves. They took months to even set up an interview with JonBenet's parents--partly, according to insiders, because the police were maneuvering, though unsuccessfully, to keep Hunter's prosecutors from attending.

Police chief Tom Koby is said by some of his own officers to have more interest in community-outreach programs than in solving crime. Most of the time that approach might fit the needs of Boulder, where police spend as much time seeking bicycle thieves as hunting for more hardened criminals. JonBenet's murder was the only one in 1996. But, say critics, Koby should have realized early that his troops were in need of outside help. Instead, he seemed to resent the idea that anyone outside Boulder should even take an interest in the case. In a January appearance on local TV, he scolded the rest of the country for "sick curiosity." Since then he has had almost nothing to say publicly. Last week he agreed to an interview with TIME, but then abruptly canceled it.

Chief of detectives John Eller is "the seed" of the conflict between the police and Hunter's office, according to the police source. Eller once even voiced suspicion that the D.A.'s office had tampered with police computers; the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) looked into the matter and dismissed it. No one questions that Eller is driving the investigation zealously, but there are whispers that he has become overwrought and erratic. Says a critic who knows him well: "He doesn't listen to the D.A.'s office. When they tell him you need more physical evidence or more searches done, he ignores this advice."

It is entirely possible, though, that the cops and the D.A. have just about all the physical evidence they are ever going to get. Given that, and the seeming deadlock between the investigators, some Coloradans are calling for a grand jury to examine all the evidence. Says councilman Bob Greenlee: "If it turns out the investigation was compromised from the first day, we need to know."

Conceivably, a grand jury could even crack the case. A Colorado law permits one spouse to testify against another in cases of child abuse that results in death or serious injury. But the right against self-incrimination would still apply. That raises the bizarre possibility that either John or Patsy Ramsey could be granted immunity and then confess to committing the murder--and could no longer be punished.

Hunter says that while there would be "political benefits" to calling a grand jury--presumably it would quiet citizen unrest that the case is being allowed to fizzle out--the time is "not right" legally. Nor does he show any sign of calling in the cbi, another move that has been suggested as a way to speed up the investigation. It might have the opposite effect. A CBI investigation could consume months and might well result in only a rehash of the existing evidence.

Hunter in effect dares the police or anyone else who thinks he is protecting the Ramseys or moving too slowly to file a motion with the courts compelling him to prosecute. But, he points out, anyone doing so would need affidavits showing that the evidence to support a prosecution exists. "This case has its own time clock," Hunter said last week. And when might that clock ring? Hunter refuses to speculate, but here's a hint: his office is already budgeting money to continue the investigation--through all of next year.

--Reported by Terry McCarthy and Richard Woodbury/Boulder

With reporting by TERRY MCCARTHY AND RICHARD WOODBURY/BOULDER