Free Perfect Murder, Perfect Town by Lawrence Schiller Page A

because they can no longer stay alive.
    This can happen when you are young, or old, or anywhere in between.
    He told the children that there was no right or wrong way to feel at a time like this and that they should not be afraid to talk to their parents or teachers. “You need to know that tonight you should feel safe,” he said. “What happened doesn’t usually happen in Boulder.”
    “Yeah,” one third grader responded, “JonBenét’s parents would have told her that too.”
    “That’s true,” Elbot said. “But you need to understand it’s a rare occurrence.”
    He told the children that this was like crossing the street—an accident can happen, but it’s not likely to happen.
    Elbot knew the children were terrified.
    He suggested to them that they make some drawings. Jo-Lynn Yoshihara-Daly, the school’s social worker, helped the younger children. Some of the kids painted pictures of JonBenét’s family. Some drew JonBenét. Some added words to their pictures.
     
    A few of us parents thought we should only tell our children that JonBenét died. Others thought we should say she had been murdered but not that she had been murdered in her own house. By Saturday morning there was a huge amount of speculation about the cause of JonBenét’s death. Some parents had heard JonBenét was strangled. My daughter was in JonBenét’s kindergarten class and hadn’t heard anything. But some of the older children had seen news reports on TV.
    The school psychologist told us he would tell the kids the facts that were known, but he assured us hewouldn’t go near the subject of whether JonBenét was sexually assaulted. He would talk mostly about safety, about how you could feel safe. He wanted to focus on what the kids needed most.
    The art therapy took forty-five minutes, maybe an hour. There were about twenty-five kids in two groups—younger children in one group, the older kids in another. Jo-Lynn dealt with the kindergartners.
    The kids decided what had happened. They figured it out all by themselves. They drew pictures of JonBenét and her house. Then they came back to us parents with their drawings and their conclusions.
    They said that JonBenét’s family went to bed and forgot to make sure that all the doors were locked. Then a bad man had snuck in and murdered JonBenét. They decided that if a bad man came into their homes, they would have to make a lot of noise to scare him away. They decided they all wanted whistles. They said that no bad man could stand having a huge whistle blowing in his ear.
    On the way home, I bought my daughter a whistle that she could hook to her pillow. She wanted her friends to have them too, so I bought whistles for them. Other parents I know got whistles for their kids. Our kindergarten kids latched on to the whistle idea pretty strongly.
    For weeks, my daughter wouldn’t go to sleep without the light on, the bedroom door open, and the whistle clipped to her pillow.
    She didn’t sleep through the whole night for months afterward.
    Now I always make sure I turn on the house alarm that I hadn’t used in two years. I don’t think there’s a night that’s gone by since this happened that I haven’t had our alarm on.
    I was happy that my child grasped that whistle. It was something that gave her some comfort, some sense of power. You realize that it’s absolutely futile, but you’re never going to tell your child how futile it is.
    —Barbara Kostanick
     
    By Saturday morning, having been present at Mason and Arndt’s abortive attempt at an interview the evening before, Michael Bynum realized that the police were targeting his friend and client John Ramsey. His instincts told him to make sure the Ramseys had every protection the law provided. Bynum, in his early fifties and a longtime resident of Colorado, was born in Arkansas and retained faint overtones of the South in his soft-spoken speech. Like so many who eventually settled in Boulder, he had attended the University