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Melody Stanton, up the street at 738, told the police on January 3 that she was certain she had heard a child’s scream at about 2:00 A.M. on the night of the murder. Her bedroom window, which looks toward the Ramsey house from across the street, had been partly open. When questioned by the police, Stanton said that there had been only one scream but it was horrifying. If it came from the child, she assumed the scream had awakened her parents.

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Since visiting the basement with the police on June 30, Smit had also been bothered by something he’d seen in the boiler room just to the left of the wine cellar door. There he had observed an exposed ventilation duct several paces from where the shards of wood, the paint tote, and the remnant of the broken paintbrush had been found. The duct vented through an opening at the front of the house where there had once been a window. If JonBenét had screamed near the duct, the sound could have traveled outside and been heard by the Ramseys’ neighbor, Melody Stanton, although possibly not by Patsy and John, asleep on the third floor inside the house. In July, sound tests conducted by the police confirmed that sound traveled more easily from the basement to the street than it did up through the three floors of the house. If JonBenét had screamed in the basement, it was likely that she was down there when she was hit on the head, either with the flashlight or with, say, a golf club – John Ramsey’s golf bags had been found nearby with their partial set of clubs. An intruder might have used a flashlight to find a hiding child if he hadn’t discovered the light switch for the basement stairs. Since no fingerprints were found on the flashlight. or its batteries, it seemed to Smit that it might have been brought into the house by an intruder, though the Ramseys had never denied that they owned a flashlight like it.
The basement was so cluttered, such a mess – if JonBenét’s parents had killed her, they would not have taken her to this dark, damp pig sty to do it, Smit theorized.
All of his conjectures were very tenuous, Smit knew, and nothing that he wanted to mention to anyone just yet. Months later, however, he discussed his ideas with Steve Thomas. Thomas asked Smit the following question: after the scream – which the intruder had to assume was heard by the parents – would the intruder have hung around, taking the time to strangle JonBenét with the noose and then move the body into the wine cellar? After all, someone, having heard the scream, might be coming down the basement stairs, thereby cutting off the most accessible exit. Why move the child from one hidden place, the boiler room, to the equally hidden wine cellar? And, of course, there wasn’t any evidence that JonBenét had ever been in the boiler room. When Smit mentioned this theory to another detective, the detective asked, What if the scream wasn’t JonBenét’s? Maybe it was her mother’s. Male, female, young, old – could anyone being awakened out of a sleep really tell who had emitted the scream? These questions, among others, made the detectives skeptical of Smit’s scenario.

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It wasn’t long afterward (eidt note - October '97) that Shapiro found Melody Stanton, the Ramseys’ neighbor who had heard the scream the night JonBenét was killed. Unaware of how important her memory of that night was to the police, she told Shapiro what she’d told the police on December 26. Also buried in his Globe story was the fact that Stanton’s husband had heard a crashing sound – the sound of metal on concrete – sometime after the scream. This suggested that someone – possibly an intruder – had left the house. The story, which made headlines, was a scoop for Shapiro. His editor brought him back from banishment after the Hunter fiasco. Stanton was inundated by the media, however. Like Fleet White, she abhorred the intrusion and eventually moved. She would make a reluctant witness for the police.

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Melody Stanton, the neighbor of the Ramseys who had heard the scream, was a case in point (edit note - reason to call a Grand Jury). Her interview wasn’t signed or given under oath, and since the Globe had published her story, she’d become more and more frightened and reluctant to testify.

Steve Thomas book

Page 78-79 pb
READ THIS VERY CAREFULLY AND COMPARE TO SCHILLER’S ACCOUNT!

In a few days another neighbor, Melody Stanton, who lived at 738 Fifteenth Street, diagonally across from the Ramsey home, also changed her original story, which was that she had not noticed anything unusual on the night JonBenét died. When a detective interviewed her a second time, Stanton admitted that she had not told the truth earlier because she did not want to be involved in the case. She now claimed to have heard the piercing scream of a child between midnight and two o’clock on the morning of December 26.
If that cry came from JonBenét, it would help determine the time of death. If a neighbor clear across the street heard the scream, I wondered how anyone in the house could not have heard it.
Her story, which seemed to be a clear piece of evidence, contained its own seed of destruction, however. More than a year later we would discover that Stanton also told the detective, “It may not have been an audible scream but rather the negative energy radiating from JonBenét.”
The detective returned to that odd point several times during the interview, but Stanton never again mentioned the “negative energy”. She insisted that she heard an audible scream, so the detective did not include the “negative energy” comment in his report.
A year later he was ordered to write an amended report. Changing a report is a huge issue for police since it brings the validity of the entire statement into question. His revised report was not the first, and it would not be the last, that would enter the Ramsey case file.

BONITA "PAPERS": MELODY STANTON

Melody Stanton was interviewed by Det. Barry Hartkopp on January 3. Stanton lives across the street and one house to the south of the Ramseys. Her bedroom is on the second floor of the west side of the house which faces the Ramsey home. On Christmas night she had gone to bed at approximately 10:00 p.m. Stanton always sleeps with her window slightly open, and on that night she had opened it 6-8 inches. She related that she had fallen asleep shortly after she went to bed, but was awakened by “one loud, incredible scream”. She related that it was “obviously from a child” and that it lasted 3 to 5 seconds and then abruptly stopped. It appeared that the sound came from across the street, south of the Ramsey residence. She did not look at the clock, but estimated the time at somewhere between 12:00 a.m. and 2:00 a.m. She stayed awake and listened for any other noises for five to ten minutes, but heard absolutely nothing after that no cars, no voices, no footsteps, so she eventually went back to sleep.

Stanton said she had not left on any televisions or radios when she went to bed. She admitted that she did not sit up in bed to look out the window, so she did not see any activity outside her window. When asked why she had not come forward with this information right after the homicide when detectives had canvassed the neighborhood, Stanton said she was so shocked by JonBenet’s death that she at first did not make any connection to the scream. Also, since none of the other neighbors had not mentioned to her about hearing a scream, she began to doubt she actually heard it. In fact, when she told her husband he said she had probably imagined it. It was Diane Brumfitt, a friend of Stanton's, who reported this incident to the Boulder Police after her conversation with Stanton.

Thomas: If that cry came from JonBenét, it would help determine the time of death. If a neighbor clear across the street heard the scream, I wondered how anyone in the house could not have heard it.

Wasn't Thomas aware that "the police confirmed that sound traveled more easily from the basement to the street than it did up through the three floors of the house" when he wrote his book THREE years later?