JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (9 page)

A few minutes after he left the room, he was back, shepherding Burke, a month shy of turning ten years old and apparently oblivious to the gravity of the situation. Gosage and I went gently about our business while Ramsey held and hugged the boy, almost smothering him and speaking quietly in his ear.

Patsy Ramsey came in next, looking as if she had just crawled off a shipwreck. Her dark hair was pulled back sharply and capped by a pair of sunglasses atop her head. Without makeup, she in no way resembled the effervescent beauty about whom I had been hearing. Tear trails stained her cheeks as she stood between us with her ink-smeared fingers ready to be rolled for prints. One of her attorneys leaned against the wall and watched.

Patsy was unsteady as I had her lift the sleeves of her loose denim blouse so I could check for bruises or scratches on the fronts and backs of her hands and arms. Then I checked her face and neck and found nothing unusual. We were standing in a row at the counter, with Patsy in the middle, when she shifted slightly and whispered to Gosage, “Will this help find who killed my baby?”

He carefully replied, equally softly, “I hope so.”

Patsy looked at her inked fingers and spoke again. “I didn’t kill my baby.” The lawyer apparently did not hear her, but my head snapped around as if on a swivel. Colorado Revised Statute Procedure 41.1 spelled out that we couldn’t ask investigative questions during this evidence collection, but we could certainly listen if anything was said voluntarily, and the mother of the murder victim had blurted out something totally unexpected. I directed my comment to Gosage. “What did she just say?”

Patsy Ramsey repeated, to me this time, “I didn’t kill my baby.”

The lawyer launched away from the wall, placed his hands on her shoulders, brought his face to within inches of her ear, and whispered emphatically. She didn’t say another word during the entire session, but what she had already said hung like thunder.
I didn’t kill my baby.

No one suggested that she had.

Detective Arndt took the handwriting samples from John, Patsy, and Burke, and when a private investigator asked for copies, she gave them to him. She later would be criticized for giving them a copy of the ransom note. All that information was evidence and should not have been handed over. But the handwriting and the ransom note were mere drops in the bucket.

We didn’t know it then, but one of the most disheartening aspects of the entire case would be the incredible amount of evidence given to the Ramseys and their lawyers. It went out the door, drop by drop, page by page, until the police and prosecutors had few secrets left. In my opinion, Team Ramsey had it all, and that cold fact sickened me.

The Ramseys were among dozens of people who would give handwriting exemplars in the case. To keep the comparisons accurate, we had them all write a mock business document, called the London Letter, which incorporates a variety of characters and punctuation. They also wrote a series of words from the ransom note—
Mr. Ramsey, John, withdraw, family, attache, daughter, S.B.T.C., your, delivery, 100%, killing, instructions, countermeasures, $118,000, difficult, authorities, and bank.

While Arndt handled the writing samples, the elder kids of John Ramsey from his first marriage were made available for interviews and evidence samples.

Melinda Ramsey, twenty-two, wore a white pullover and jeans, and her eyes were puffy from weeping. She was attractive and polite when a detective and a sheriff’s investigator began questioning her, but by the time the interview was done she was left with her head buried in her arms, crying. They had pressed her hard about the possibility of inappropriate sexual behavior in the family. Melinda vehemently denied that, and in fact revealed nothing of significance, since she was in Atlanta at the time of the murder. She had been caught in a web not of her own making, and the interview left her with a bad taste about dealing with police.

Gosage and I interviewed twenty-year-old John Andrew Ramsey. He was a lanky young man with dark eyes and short dark hair, who wore a checkered shirt, a winter jacket, and an attitude. When the blood tech moved close with her needle, the former Eagle Scout, who was now a third-semester sophomore at the University of Colorado, whispered, “I may pass out.”

Although he also claimed to have been in Atlanta when the crime occurred, we had to check him out because of the neighbor who had reported seeing him on Christmas Day. We had to determine who was right.

We asked him to put his thoughts on paper, and he wrote a document that brimmed with feelings about his little stepsister being murdered, giving us a glimpse into his world. He caught our attention immediately by writing, “I think it was someone that had intimate knowledge of my family and how we lived day to day. Why would they leave the ransom note on the back staircase instead of the front?”

Good question, I thought. How would a stranger know which stairway Patsy Ramsey would come down that morning?

He ridiculed the idea of a small foreign faction being involved, was certain the crime had nothing to do with his father’s company, and questioned why a ransom note was left at all. “Why did they ask for $118,000? I could pay that amount,” he wrote. Someone was envious of their wealth and thought of the Ramseys as “rich bastards,” he said.

John Andrew told us that whoever did this was probably uneducated, were amateurs at kidnapping, and had seen the movie
Ransom
, in which the family of Mel Gibson’s character was a “spitting image” of his own. He did not believe anyone came in through the broken basement window. They had a key, he surmised.

In one comment, he described his stepmother as “flashy” and guessed that the killer might be someone close to her.

John Andrew also buttressed the comments of the housekeeper’s husband, Mervin Pugh, and former nanny Suzanne Savage about the house being difficult to navigate. “You don’t know your way around real easy right off the bat … . You have to open lots of doors. It has lots of ups and downs,” and the basement entrance was hard to find. It was becoming very clear to the police just how difficult it would have been for any stranger to get to that distant basement storage room.

On the afternoon of December 28 Commander Eller again urged Pete Hofstrom from the DA’s office to try to secure interviews with John and Patsy Ramsey. “We need to talk to those parents,” he said.

Hofstrom replied that the family was leaving Boulder the next day, as if that made a difference, and once again brought up the issue of releasing the body for burial. Eller told him nothing had changed, it was still evidence. Take it up with Chief Koby, he said.

That evening, however, Eller spoke to Bob Keatley, our legal adviser, who saw that the issue was heading into a morass. The possibility of finding further evidence beyond what had come from the autopsy might not be enough to convince a court to hold the body further. He advised that it would be best to release it for burial. Eller did so.

As dusk closed over the mountains, Detective Gosage and I made an unannounced visit to the home of Barbara and John Fernie, who had rushed to comfort the Ramseys on December 26 and then gave them refuge.

We learned that our questions were a bit late, even though the investigation was only beginning. The Fernies told us that a private investigator working for the Ramseys had been there earlier, making his own inquiries.

That rocked us. Clearly a separate and well-organized investigation about which we knew nothing was already under way.

As any experienced officer knows, it is important to lock someone to a story as soon as possible after a crime has been committed. As I saw it, for a defense team to employ that tactic was tantamount to an attack on police investigators, for our own inquiries would be subject to comparison with what the PIs had gotten in the first interviews.

We realized how quickly they had moved only when we later learned that the Whites had also been visited by the private investigators the day after the murder. The two couples that had rushed to aid their friends gave statements to Ramsey representatives even before the child was buried, and the private investigators had not shared a shred of their findings with the police.

There was no sign of the Ramseys at the Fernie residence, but we did pick up one bit of interesting information. Some friends of Patsy’s were concerned about how JonBenét was being groomed for pageants with the heavy makeup, the elaborate costumes, and the recent addition of platinum-dyed hair. It was creating a “mega-JonBenét thing,” and some friends had planned to have a talk about it with Patsy after Christmas.

As the second full day of the investigation came to a close, the parents still would not give interviews to police and had hired lawyers and private investigators who were tying down the testimony of witnesses before police got to them.

“Why won’t they help us?” I wondered. “What are they afraid of?”

The next day, Patsy Ramsey’s fortieth birthday, St. John’s Episcopal Church at Fourteenth and Pine was packed for the memorial service, and the congregation included four Boulder detectives. It was a cold, cloudy Sunday afternoon. I sat in the last row, Detective Gosage worked a hidden camera to film every face, and Sergeant Mason and Detective Arndt were at strategic points. It is not unusual for a killer to attend such services, so we were watchful.

Outside the church the media waited for a glimpse of the family, and I began to understand how far this case had moved beyond normal press coverage. JonBenét was going to be a superstar in death.

The press also had been in a stand-down mode during the holidays, when newspapers run canned feature stories, and football games and reruns are the normal television fare. So when the murder of a child beauty queen surfaced, the media pounced to fill the idle Christmas air time and headlines. It meant ratings and advertising dollars during a traditionally slack time, and the unexpected combination of a horrible murder, kiddie beauty pageants, puzzling parents, and tranquil Boulder promised fascinating stories.

When pictures and videos were found of a singing, dancing JonBenét, it became the biggest story in the United States.

With the aggressive media buying information and photographs, the police were soon conducting an investigation in a goldfish bowl, our every move watched and dissected. And although we didn’t yet understand how the media worked, everything we did seemed to be in print or on the air within hours, tarnishing witnesses and exposing evidence.

While the media lurked outside, Father Rol Hoverstock conducted a brief but moving memorial service for the slain child. Sunlight brightened the stained glass windows and washed across his face.

In prayer Patsy’s sisters, Pam and Polly, waved their arms over their heads and loudly called for heavenly help. As an Arkansas native, I had often seen such performances in southern churches, but their actions were so unusual in Boulder that a little girl in the pew beside me was swept up by their spirit and joined in, twirling her arms and shouting.

A surprise speaker was Bill McReynolds, an eccentric old guy with a snow-white beard who looked like and played Santa Claus at the Ramseys’ Christmas parties. He offered a heartfelt tribute to the little girl who once gave him some “stardust” to sprinkle in his beard. Patsy, in a black veil, stepped into the aisle to give Santa Bill a big hug. He would soon be on the suspect list.

John Ramsey rose to say a few words, his arms across his chest and his voice tight. He said he had grown spiritually from the death of JonBenét, then shared a secret. He said he once missed the talent portion of a pageant in which his daughter had won a medal. She had given him the medal, and today he wore it outside his shirt. It was one of the items taken from the house by Pam Paugh that police failed to inventory.

I wondered how I could distinguish between a genuinely grieving parent and one whose grief might be masking some possible involvement in a crime.

After the service, Patsy hugged her housekeeper, Linda Hoffmann-Pugh, who did not know that Patsy had named her as the first suspect.

A scuffle broke out between men of the church and photographers, and John Andrew Ramsey was suddenly in my face, shouting for me to “get rid of them!” I resented being treated like hired help, and when I asked a photographer to move, he taunted me for protecting a killer. I was disgusted with both of them.

John Ramsey approached me. After such an emotional service, I thought he might be ready to tell me to find the bastard who killed his little girl. Instead he offered a mild “Thank you” and a weak handshake, not making eye contact. I didn’t let go of his hand until he looked up, and I said, “Good luck.”

He walked quickly to a waiting motorcade of luxury cars, and, escorted by a Boulder Police black-and-white, the family headed off to meet a private jet for the flight to Atlanta. Ramsey never looked back.

They carried along Sister Socks, a gray-and-white stuffed animal that had been left behind during Pam Paugh’s sweep through the house. Sister Socks was retrieved for them by Detective Arndt.

Rumors were flying that the Ramseys were reluctant to deal with police because Commander Eller had heartlessly tried to force interviews by holding the corpse of JonBenét hostage until he got what he wanted.

To me it was a play for sympathy as part of a wellconceived strategy to shift attention away from their refusal to cooperate. Instead they would blame their silence on the Boulder Police.

But the excuse that we had attempted to “ransom the body” left me wondering why the exact words Pete Hofstrom had used in his meeting with Commander Eller were now coming from the mouths of the Ramseys’ lawyers.

Detective Arndt made one final try at persuading the lawyers to grant interviews but was told that the family would be out of state for an unknown time. She responded that she had a single page of questions the police would like to have answered, and the attorney said, “Fax them.”