JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (11 page)

Fleet and Priscilla White were trusted friends of the Ramseys and had been the first people Patsy Ramsey called on the day of the murder after she called the police. The Whites had rallied behind the Ramseys in that time of crisis, but as the days passed, they grew troubled that John and Patsy seemed to be dodging the police, and decided to talk to them about it.

The Whites flew to Atlanta for the funeral with other friends and stayed at the home of John’s brother, Jeff. When Jeff learned of the Whites’ plans, he called the home of Patsy’s parents, where the clan had gathered. Emotions were running high, and the family overreacted.

I was later able to piece the story together from interviews with many of those present. Some of them grew afraid, and one of Patsy’s sisters thought the Whites were coming over to kill them all. The situation, no more than a possibly unpleasant conversation between two old friends, was clearly pushed into a danger zone, although there was no evidence that the Whites were even angry.

Nevertheless, Patsy’s father, Don Paugh, loaded two pistols and tucked them beneath a couch cushion so that he could be ready to protect his family. John Ramsey calmed everyone down before the Whites arrived, saying that Fleet was his friend and would not harm anyone. Rod Westmoreland told Paugh to put away the guns, and Don said he did so, although his wife continued to believe her husband was sitting on a pistol that night.

Fleet White is a large, intense man who does not hide his opinions, and although his voice was muted, the extended Ramsey family characterized him as waving his big hands about, speaking excitedly, and following Ramsey around the room in what they considered to be a confrontational manner. Fleet wanted John to know how chagrined his friends and supporters were that he seemed to be avoiding the cops. Don’t hide behind your attorneys, he said. They’re giving you bad advice.

White later told me that he did not understand the reports about his meeting with John Ramsey being some sort of battle. Nothing extraordinary happened at all, he said, and the only truly emotional moments came when everyone watched a television broadcast about the funeral.

Fleet and Priscilla White were both soon named by the Ramseys as possible murder suspects. Before the case was done, many other friends the Ramseys had in Boulder would join the Whites on the suspect list.

In Boulder the investigation had turned into an uphill fight. The parents were gone, the crime scene was trashed, and I considered our own prosecutors to be in bed with the Ramsey attorneys, leaving the police to chase their tails.

Eller had his detectives and technicians on jobs ranging from checking the lint trap in the dryer to investigating the significance of the $118,000 ransom demand. Patsy Ramsey’s handwriting samples were being gathered, videotapes and the family computer were seized for review, and the duct tape was being researched.

I wanted to collect banking and telephone records, one of the most elementary and important steps in the investigative process. It has been proved time and again that crimes can sometimes be solved simply by finding a purchase receipt that leads to incriminating evidence. The right piece of paper will put a suspect at a certain place, at an exact time, doing a specific thing. Whom did they call? What did they buy? When did they do it? Where? Such records can be almost as good as a photograph, and the warrants to get them are so routine that they are considered boilerplate.

When I resigned from the Boulder Police Department eighteen months later, the district attorney’s office was still preventing our access to the Ramseys’ complete toll records and credit card receipts. We didn’t have them the first week, and we didn’t have them a year and a half later, because the DA’s office stonewalled us, never really explaining why. My guess was that they had either made a quiet deal with the Ramsey attorneys or were afraid of them or were simply overwhelmed by the legal firepower of the Ramsey attorneys or a combination of the above. I considered their lack of action to be obstructing our investigation.

Jeff Merrick, who had known John Ramsey for twenty years, was the second person they had named as a possible murder suspect. He was not surprised when we contacted him, for that friendship had ended in bitterness when Merrick was pushed out of Ramsey’s company, Access Graphics, in April 1996.

The firing was done in a particularly Machiavellian manner; Merrick was promoted, then his new executive position was abolished. John Ramsey refused to intervene, or even to see his old friend, and Merrick appealed to corporate owner Lockheed-Martin, which offered a cash settlement. When we contacted him, he thought the animosity that led to his firing was still at work. “I’m the only guy who ever pulled on the Ramsey halo,” he said.

For months to come we crawled all over Merrick, who finally walked into the police department one Saturday morning to answer still more questions, against the advice of his attorney but wanting to settle things once and for all.

“I’m here, on a murder case, without a lawyer, talking to two detectives, having been pointed out by John Ramsey as a suspect,” Merrick said to me. “Now, where is John Ramsey?”

He was eventually cleared. I was curious about the depth of John Ramsey’s friendships.

I returned to the Ramsey house briefly, taking care to stay out of the way of the crime scene investigators. Inside, it seemed like Grand Central Station. Detective Linda Arndt and women from the department of social services leafed through Patsy’s picture albums, exclaiming about the decor.

Joe and Betty Barnhill, the elderly neighbors so trusted by the Ramseys that JonBenét’s silver Christmas bicycle had been hidden with them, would also eventually be pointed at as possible murder suspects by the Ramseys. From the moment I saw them, I knew it was ridiculous that they should be considered and that we should be spending time investigating them.

Joe, a silver-haired man in his seventies, was taking care of his wife, who had Alzheimer’s disease, and Joe was crippled so badly with palsy himself that he needed both hands to sign a shaky signature allowing us to obtain their personal and medical records. He never asked for a lawyer, and shook our hands as we left, saying, “I’m confident that you will solve it.” That sort of cooperation was rare, and we certainly weren’t getting it from the Ramseys. We soon cleared the Barnhills.

The Barnhills rented out a basement room to Glenn Meyer, who would be pointed out by Ramsey investigators as a possible suspect because he carried a heavy load of debt. Meyer was an even more unlikely suspect than the Barnhills, since his own son had been murdered in Boston. He could not have been more cooperative with us. After an interview, giving writing and hair samples, and passing a polygraph, he was also cleared.

Meyer and the Barnhills also alibied each other, having watched television together on Christmas night and all going to bed early, Meyer with a case of the flu.

Another reason to interview the Barnhills, however, was that Joe had told the police he had seen JonBenét’s older half-brother, John Andrew, in Boulder on the evening of December 25. John Andrew claimed to have been in Atlanta at the time. During the interview Barnhill sheepishly told us he had made a mistake and apologized, saying that he probably would not even recognize the young man in a crowd. That went a long way toward firming up John Andrew’s alibi.

The Barnhills also had a key to the Ramsey home, something we had not known. The Ramseys initially said that the only outsiders with keys were two relatives and the housekeeper. Since then we had turned up one with the former nanny Suzanne Savage and now another with the Barnhills. We didn’t know how many keys existed, and the number would continue to grow.

Jacques, the white bichon frise dog that belonged to JonBenét and was temporarily in the care of the Barnhills, jumped into my lap while we all watched the five o’clock news about the funeral in Atlanta.

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.

I knew nothing about child beauty pageants, had never even heard of them until this case, and was baffled about why parents would parade their little girls in such contests. My image had been of some kids wearing starched sundresses. Since JonBenét had been a star on these tiny tot beauty runways, I had to learn about that peculiar world.

My education began with a visit to the home of a pageant mother whose house was filled to bursting with sashes, tiaras, trophies, pageant pictures, magazines, and other accoutrements of the trade, a gaudy showcase of kids in costume. It seemed to me that the overweight woman was having a second try at being young and beautiful by living through her prepubescent daughter, who pranced about while we spoke. What is all this? I wondered, as the mother launched into a diatribe of petty, scathing comments about other pageant moms. In no time at all they would be offering each other up as possible suspects. I found that somewhat scary and awfully sad. But I would learn that there were thousands of women across the nation like her, all wanting their girls to be Miss America. The pageant world of JonBenét was not for the faint of heart.

FBI statistics show twelve-to-one odds that in child homicides, a family member or insider is involved, so there was no way we could just give the Ramseys a pass.

Anyway, they were avoiding us, and we needed to find out why.

Late on New Year’s Eve at the city fuel yard in Boulder, Sergeant Wickman rolled up just as Ron Gosage and I were putting gas in our cars. It gave me a chance to campaign for getting some detectives to Atlanta right away. The funeral was there, the family was there, answers to some of our questions were there, while in Boulder all we had was an abandoned house that had crime scene techs crawling all over it.

Sergeant Larry Mason had asked me, “Why do we need to go to Georgia?” Sergeant Wickman, who had now returned and was the crime scene superviser, realized the urgency and said, “Go.”

It wasn’t that we would ignore other leads. We would continue to investigate the Linda Hoffmann-Pughs, the Jeff Merricks, the Suzanne Savages, and all the others whose names were popping up. But who
were
John and Patsy Ramsey?

Not much time was left in 1996, and a bitter wind swept the rooftop of the empty parking structure at Foley’s department store where Police Chief Tom Koby, Commander John Eller, Sergeant Tom Wickman, and Detective Tom Trujillo, in charge of the evidence, had gathered for an urgent talk about new information from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

I was told later that the isolated spot was deliberately chosen to avoid the reporters, cameras, and microphones that had turned Boulder into a media center. Only after the police officials had made very sure they were alone did Wickman and Trujillo bring the commander and the chief up to date.

Chet Ubowski at the CBI had pulled startling information from the tablet belonging to Patsy Ramsey. By comparing tear patterns, Ubowski had determined that the first twelve pages were missing and the next four—pages 13 through 16—contained doodles and lists and some miscellaneous writing.

But the next group of pages, 17 through 25, were also missing from the tablet. The following page, 26, was the practice ransom note (Mr. and Mrs. I), and that page showed evidence of ink bleedthrough from the missing page 25.

Comparisons of the ragged tops of the ransom note pages with the remnants left in the tablet proved that it had come from pages 27, 28, and 29.

To me, being able to prove that the ransom note came from her tablet was an incredible piece of evidence.

Furthermore, the ink bleedthrough discovered on page 26 indicated that perhaps still
another
practice note could have been written on page 25 and been discarded. Two possible practice notes and one real one covering three pages led me to believe that the killer had spent more time in the house composing the ransom note than we originally thought.

But even more significant, it seemed clear that whoever wrote it was unafraid of being caught in the house. We never found the missing pages.

Then Eller and Koby were told that Ubowski had moved from examining the tablet to looking at the ransom note itself, comparing its writing with known samples the detectives had gathered from various sources.

What the CBI examiner told them, very privately, was astounding: Twenty-four of the alphabet’s twenty-six letters looked as if they had been written by Patsy.

When taken together, the tablet, the Sharpie pen, and the writing formed a powerful base of evidence. And that evidence pointed directly at Patsy Ramsey.