JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (14 page)

From the church we went to the funeral home, where an assistant director told us that there were no suspicious visitors during the viewing, no one seemed out of place. Just hundreds of people paying their respects to a dead child. We asked if the parents were curious about the injuries that had been skillfully hidden by clothing and cosmetics. No, he said, “They never asked.”

The St. James Episcopal Cemetery is an old burial ground filled with weathered nineteenth-century tombstones. Live oaks and magnolias tower over a black wrought-iron fence around the perimeter. A six-foot-tall old rugged cross, erected in 1862, stands along the path to a slight rise in a rear corner, a place I would come to know well. JonBenét’s grave was blanketed with flowers. It was sunset, and in the failing light I sat on a stone bench beside the plot and frustration churned within me. I felt such a responsibility—we had to find her murderer.

Back in Boulder Commander John Eller was unhappy that Deputy DA Pete Hofstrom had failed to get the interviews, and he was particularly incensed about how the “ransom the body” phrase that had originated with Hofstrom had ended up in the press, which then criticized the police for something that never happened.

It seemed to me that the prosecutor was working in tandem with the Ramsey lawyers and that the automatic distance that separates prosecutors and defense attorneys elsewhere in the nation had evaporated in Boulder. It hurt the investigation when details about the case showed up in headlines and on television.

Eller lit into Hofstrom in his office that evening, telling him that the police were in charge of the investigation. The DA’s staff could be legal advisers for the cops but would no longer be privy to our confidential material, he said. Taking an extraordinary step, Eller removed the DA’s office from the investigation, a move endorsed by Chief Koby.

Hofstrom huffed, “Don’t ask us back, because we’re not coming,” then bolted from Eller’s office so quickly that he forgot his pager. Within ten minutes it buzzed, and Eller read the telephone number of Ramsey lawyer Bryan Morgan. Eller sighed. To the cops, this was like having KGB agents in the Pentagon.

One room in the large brick home of Patsy’s parents, Don and Nedra Paugh, in the Atlanta suburb of Roswell is a shrine to beauty pageants, filled with pictures and articles and with trophies and crowns won by Patsy and Pam. Nedra seemed obsessed by pageants. Only a few minutes into a homicide interview and she wouldn’t stop talking about beauty contests. She told us that JonBenét had started on the runways at the age of four for exactly the same reason children begin training for the Olympics at an early age. If you don’t start them young, she said, “They fall miserably behind.”

Since John and Patsy were dodging us, we were attempting to build a historical file the hard way, through talking to their friends and family members. We were hunting for a name from the past, someone with a grudge, perhaps an enemy capable of negotiating that big confusing house in Boulder and killing JonBenét.

Nedra gave us some two dozen suspects off the top of her head, and when we asked if the initials SBTC meant anything to her, she snapped, “Yes. Son of a bitch Tom Carson.” Years before, Carson, the current chief financial officer at Access Graphics, had been involved in Nedra’s dismissal from the company. She also pointed to Fleet and Priscilla White, Jeff Merrick and his “vicious” wife, housekeeper Linda Hoffman-Pugh, a handyman, a painter, the gardener, the nanny, and a couple of neighborhood kids. While thinking about other possible suspects, she accused one worker of theft, called a black man “boy,” and described a little girl the same age as JonBenét as homely. But she had not one negative word to say about John Ramsey, which I thought was unique for a mother-in-law.

Nedra was a sad sight, with her head tilted listlessly to the side, her bathrobe hanging open, and both hands gnarled by arthritis, but she spoke almost without pause, giving us a mass of information that we would dig through for months.

She was swift to defend John Ramsey for assembling his own team of lawyers and investigators. “It’s not that you folks in Boulder aren’t doing a good job and can’t resolve this,” she said. “But it’s my understanding that … there’s never been a kidnapping in Boulder, so if you’ve never been on a kidnapping before, you need great minds who have done this before.”

She agreed with Mervin Pugh, Suzanne Savage, and John Andrew Ramsey in thinking that no stranger could have navigated that maze of a house. “You couldn’t find the basement in that house if you didn’t know where it was. You know it was down, but which door would you go through to find it? There’s a lot of doors that look like a basement door in that house.”

Such identical statements coming from a number of independent witnesses who were all well acquainted with the house were painting a good picture that no stranger was involved in this crime. Whoever did it knew the layout. Nedra said Patsy would never return to that house and had told her husband: “Torch it.”

Nedra was chatty about almost everything else but became evasive when asked about the bed-wetting history of JonBenét. During the interview questions kept coming to my mind. I was very curious about the bag of diapers that police had found hanging out of the cabinet just outside JonBenét’s room and about why Patsy had told police that the child went to sleep in a red turtleneck although the body was found in a white top and the turtleneck had been discovered rolled up on the bathroom sink. Could there have been a bed-soiling accident that night? Patsy was the only person who could tell us, and she wouldn’t.

It is not unusual for a parent to lash out in unreasoning anger after becoming extremely frustrated with a child over toileting issues. It is also not unheard of for children to dirty themselves as a defense against sexual abuse and incest, intentionally making themselves unattractive to the offender. We let Nedra’s evasiveness go for now but would later become convinced that bed-wetting played a significant role in whatever happened to the child.

Detectives don’t like to jump to conclusions, and we did not yet know what had happened. We try to let the evidence lead where it will, and we were too early in the process of interviewing those who best knew JonBenét to make a definite decision.

I wanted to know what JonBenét would do if awakened suddenly. “She didn’t like you pulling her out of bed,” her grandmother replied. “She would scream bloody murder.” From my perspective, Nedra apparently saw where this line of questioning might lead. “Unless they chloroformed her or taped her mouth, she would have screamed like you wouldn’t believe.” So in the view of one family member, it seemed unlikely that a stranger could have slipped the girl quietly out of the bedroom. I liked the idea that JonBenét was a fighter.

The press was ready to pounce as soon as we walked out of the Paughs’ home. When we had entered, only a lone media sentinel was staking out the place, but when we left, there must have been a hundred newspeople waiting for us.

It was like stepping onto a stage and took me so much by surprise that I made the brief extemporaneous comment that we were in Atlanta merely as part of conducting a full investigation, not to serve warrants or make arrests. Off camera, I naively told the reporters to relax, they weren’t going to miss anything. My short, nondescript comment became a sound bite for the nation.
Ramsey detective speaks!

The insatiable news beast stalked us relentlessly. We would make last-second turns and run red lights only to discover more media waiting when we arrived at our destination. They laid siege to the Roswell Police Department, which had lent us a private room, and constantly telephoned our unlisted numbers.

Reporters booked every other room around ours on the entire floor of the Holiday Inn, forcing us to speak in whispers for fear of some high-tech eavesdropping. As the cliché goes, it’s not paranoia if they really are after you.

After the holidays, with regular reporters back on duty, the JonBenét case had become even bigger than before. National television shows were dedicating whole chunks of time to it, flashing the pageant pictures, and newspapers from major big-city dailies to ragtag supermarket tabloids ran stories in every edition. Freelancers fought to dredge up crumbs of information to sell.

And whatever they were doing was working, for case information that should have been confidential was winding up in the media almost daily, and Chief Tom Koby and Commander John Eller of the Boulder Police Department were concerned. Not only were the cops being heavily criticized, but the investigation was being placed in jeopardy by whoever was leaking our findings to the press.

When a story hit later in the week that “Reports out of Denver indicate the ransom note was from a pad found inside the home,” Koby and Eller became so angry that they actually considered a deal offered by one media outlet, who were willing to give up their source in exchange for an exclusive interview.

On Turtle Lake Drive in Marietta is a pleasant two-story pale brick house with gray shutters and a stand of slender trees shading its neat sloping lawn. It is the residence of Lucinda Lou Johnson, the first wife of John Ramsey and the mother of Beth, Melinda, and John Andrew. She engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with us from the very start, and I wasn’t really sure who was the cat and who was the mouse.

Our interview, of course, could not begin until a friend of hers arrived to be a witness. Again we wanted background, or historical, information. Somewhere in the past might lie the answer to the murder.

John and Lucinda were married on July 16, 1966, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. During twelve years together they moved often as Ramsey served in the navy and then began his business career. They had three children, but after her husband had an affair with another woman, they “went their separate ways” during the last years of their marriage.

“Who was she?” I asked.

“I don’t recall her name,” she replied.

It was difficult for me to believe that any scorned ex-wife could ever forget the name of the “other woman” who broke up her marriage.

They divorced on February 24, 1978, and the judge granted Lucinda custody of all three kids, with generous visitation rights for John Ramsey, who paid $200 per child and $200 in alimony each month plus the college expenses for all three, and the package became more generous as the years passed and John Ramsey prospered. The property settlement was simple: Each spouse got half interest in their home in Lilburn, Georgia, where she continued to live until it was sold. She kept the 1977 Cutlass station wagon, and the court gave John the ’69 Olds, an eight-track tape deck, and his tools.

Lucinda soon met a man ten years younger than she during a skiing trip and married him. Her new husband never replaced John Ramsey as the father of the three children. They moved to Turtle Lake Drive, where she continued to live following her second divorce in May 1991. He kept a 1987 Honda and paid for the termite inspection, and this time she kept the tools.

She remained on good terms with John Ramsey and even visited the family in Boulder, for although divorced, they were still related because after John’s mother died, his father married Lucinda’s widowed mother. From being John’s wife for a dozen years, Lucinda became his stepsister. She and Patsy coexisted, even working together on the social scene when Beth became a debutante.

Although not too illuminating, our interview was cordial enough, and I thought I saw some room for a bit of future bargaining. Lucinda wanted a public declaration that her children, John Andrew and Melinda, were innocent of any involvement in the murder of their stepsister, something stronger than the recent official statement from the City of Boulder. And we needed to find and talk to the mistress. As I left, I thought something might be worked out.

Sergeant Larry Mason and I go way back. When I was involved in my first shooting, Mason gave me a bear hug and later nominated me for a decoration of valor. But that was a long time ago, and things had changed between us.

I had seen him talking with reporters inside the private room set aside for our use at the Roswell PD, and at dinner one night, when Detective Trujillo and I agreed that whoever was talking to the press should get smoked, Mason said he was worried that someone might “get set up” over the leaks. At that moment Art Harris, a CNN reporter, sat down at our dinner table and popped open his laptop computer. Mason, who had invited him, told him to leave, then explained that the only reason Harris was there was because of negotiations to get the transcript of the Ramsey interview on CNN. I didn’t believe him.

When the Roswell police public relations officer suggested that we issue a brief news release, Mason drafted a statement. Shortly after 3 A.M. the next morning, Commander Eller sent a fax to the Holiday Inn ordering Mason not to address the media and gave instructions for the hotel staff to slip the fax beneath Mason’s door. If the hotel carried out that routine instruction, Mason must have stepped over the envelope to open his door the next day. He would deny seeing Eller’s fax, and later that day he stepped before the cameras and read his statement. No one could have imagined that such a small event would turn into such a demoralizing and important sideshow to the Ramsey investigation.

Every morning I asked Mason over breakfast, Do you have the FBI team on surveillance? Did you find a particular witness? Did you run the computer queries? No. No. Always no. He was like a kid on vacation and babbled on about how much he enjoyed the grits.

One day I picked up a ringing phone at the Roswell Police Department, and Art Harris of CNN was on the other end, looking for Mason. The sergeant growled, “Fuck CNN,” then disappeared with a cell phone, only to return a moment later to say he had to go back to the hotel and turn in his key. I pointed out that the key was a plastic throwaway. He left anyway.

In the midst of one interview during a twenty-hour workday, my pager went off and I found a telephone.