From the Boulder Weekly:

Just Colfax, ma'am

Rev up your modems everybody, because Boulder's most aesthetic corpse cabbie is online! That's right, J.T. Colfax-amateur arsonist, portrateur of the perished, and maverick Ramsey investigator-now has his own website, and maintains a regular presence on the Daily Camera's online Ramsey Murder chat forum. Of course, Colfax has no access to the Internet behind bars in the Boulder County Jail. (They call it a luxury jail, but do they really mean it?) Colfax sends his correspondence via snail mail to Schenectady, New York, where former Boulder inmate and Colfax compatriot Lance Matthews posts them on the Camera forum and the Colfax Diaries website

(http:members.tripod.com/~JT_Colfax/index.htm).

Desperate for leads in their irreparably fumbled murder investigation, Boulder flatfoots are apparently monitoring Colfax's cyberspace traffic closely. In a forum entry posted Oct. 17, Colfax spoke of Dean Cole, a jail kitchen trustee who was working on a remodel job in the Ramsey home five weeks before the murder. He told Colfax that the plumbing was out in the house, so a number of the workers were making regular trips down to the fateful basement to retrieve water from the hot water heater. This would of course deflate the theory that a stealthy intruder in Hi Tech boots-the marks of which were found at the scene-had murdered the young beauty queen. If there were numerous journeymen stomping in and out of the basement and around the house only a month before the murder, a foreign boot mark represents little more than a useless clue for the clueless Boulder cops.

Just three days after Matthews posted this information on the web, Colfax says a Boulder police detective visited Cole in his cell, grilled him about his work in the Ramsey house and took his palm print. Cole was justifiably freaked out by the whole experience, Colfax says, and reamed him out for leaking his name into cyberspace. (Boulder PD detectives have not responded to requests for comments.)

If true, the incident begs interesting questions: What are the Boulder police doing chasing down such a non-lead almost two years after the murder? In all their thorough investigating and naval probing, did the Boulder PD not realize that there were a bunch of construction workers smearing their boogers and footprints all over the house until they heard it from Colfax? We knew they were desperate. But earning their tax-paid salaries interrogating random tradesmen and fishing for Internet tips from Ramsey-obsessed yardbirds long after JonBenet's body has turned to bones is really desperate.

And while the Boulder cops wait eagerly by their screens for the latest Colfax news feed, local news pooches won't touch him. "I'm handing them HOURS OLD Ramsey action and they can't stand it," the baseboard arsonist reports from Boulder County Jail. (Colfax is there because Boulder and Denver police decided they liked him as a murder suspect in the Ramsey case and leaned on him for weeks trying to link him to the crime. A beer-logged Colfax finally went off and stuffed burning Ramsey news clips through the mail slot of the Ramsey house, blackening some wall paper and inspiring the perpetually misfiring Boulder DA's office to charge him with arson and jam him behind bars for two years.) Colfax ran into a drone from the Daily Camera in the jail library (on which she was doing a feature) and tried to tip her to the fact that Ramsey detectives had been to the jail that very morning to interrogate Cole. "She VEHEMENTLY WOULDN'T HEAR IT, and wouldn't touch the note I wrote for her with details," Colfax recounts. "She just stood there shaking her head back and forth. People are more cartoonish than I always thought." The one-inmate news service also contacted various broadcast and print newsrooms with the information and found "so many were outright HOSTILE."

Now that Colfax has access to the 'Net, it should only be a matter of days before he's e-mailing press releases directly to newsrooms-the proven way to get stuff mentioned by slovenly news anchors and reporters. All he has to do is have his website manager download a City of Boulder release, copy the logo and do his own City of Boulder news flash. If nothing else, it should improve the City's image as a source of schoolmarmish, politically tepid and completely boring news.