JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (15 page)

“What are you doing?” Larry Mason wanted to know.

“Conducting interviews. What are you doing?”

“I’m in Alpharetta having a piece of pie and coffee.”

One of my last jobs in Atlanta was running down a tip that Mason said he received from Alli Krupski, a reporter from the Boulder
Daily Camera
newspaper who was on assignment in Georgia. Krupski claimed to have sources who knew about sexual molestations involving John Ramsey but refused to name them, citing press shield laws. The episode chewed up a lot of detective time over the coming months until we concluded the allegations were groundless.

Watching his growing relationship with the press made me lose confidence in the sergeant who was managing the Atlanta end of the investigation.

The Boulder detectives were not the first ones to knock on the doors along Northridge Drive in Atlanta, where John and Patsy Ramsey had lived before moving to Boulder. The networks, the tabloids, magazines, and newspapers had already interviewed many of these people and would do so again right after we left.

I was disgusted to be pounding the pavement in a place the Ramseys had lived a decade earlier, trying to question former neighbors and nannies, when John and Patsy were the ones with the information.

But police follow tips from one source to another, and Nedra Paugh had given us the name of Vesta Taylor, who had lived across the street from John and Patsy for ten years. Nedra described her as “the crier of the neighborhood” because nothing happened on that street that she didn’t know about, so she seemed to be a good place to start. Sure enough, Mrs. Taylor, with a charming southern drawl, steered us toward the “Lunch Bunch,” ten influential couples who were among John and Patsy Ramsey’s oldest and closest friends.

That sent us back to the moneyed side of Atlanta, where the Lunch Bunch lived in impressive homes that bespoke Old South money—doctors, lawyers, accountants, and their exquisite wives, who had gone to church and on weekend getaways with the Ramseys. It required months to speak to them all.

Not surprisingly, they folded protectively around their absent friends, remaining courteous to us but wary. “Don’t waste your time investigating John and Patsy,” was the common refrain. There was unanimous and unquestioning support, but none could explain why the Ramseys were not talking to the police. If Patsy or John was ever shown to be the killer, I knew these people would be shaken to the core, for as one said, “It would be a Jekyll and Hyde ten thousand times over.”

Colorado Bureau of Investigation technicians gave us some bad news when they determined that the substance found on JonBenét’s leg during the ultraviolet light examination at the autopsy, initially thought to be semen, was just a smear of blood. Without a semen sample to match, our hopes for a quick breakthrough vanished and the universe of potential suspects grew astronomically. A woman could as easily have been the killer as a man.

Despite rumors in the press, I began to doubt that John Ramsey had been involved in some sort of incestuous attack on his daughter that ended in murder. Nothing I had seen or learned during the investigation thus far indicated such a thing. Other detectives, however, clung to that possibility for many months.

As our time in Atlanta neared an end, Sergeant Tom Wickman in Boulder officially released 755 Fifteenth Street as a crime scene after ten days of searching that had given us hundreds of items to examine but not the silver bullet that would prove who killed JonBenét. We were well aware that the trashed crime scene would haunt the case forever.

An unusual “swipe” was discovered on the white door of the small basement room where JonBenét had been found, so the victim’s hands were traced and measured by Georgia police before the funeral. It would not be the last time that the premature release of the body would hamper the investigation. To many of us, the original decision to hold it pending evidence testing was correct.

Wickman had an argument at the Ramsey house with Detective Greg Idler, who had carefully lifted the metal grate above the broken window and found that the spiderweb between the window well bricks and the grate wasn’t necessarily attached. Wickman challenged Idler’s findings. The original web had never been photographed or committed to a report, a huge error that would become extraordinarily controversial in months to come. “I have detectives who will testify to it,” Wickman barked at Idler about the web being attached.

On the long flight home, I weighed the results of the Atlanta trip and felt that at best we were coming back with a mixed bag. Our interviews with relatives, neighbors, and friends had added some valuable material to the biographical records but did not come close to breaking the case. What we
didn’t
get, however, was important. The Ramseys had gone out of their way to avoid us, and the lack of cooperation we found in Atlanta had taken us by surprise. We had expected an outpouring of assistance from ministers and friends and relatives. We didn’t get it.

Time was working against us, for the murder was ten days old and cooling fast. We needed a task force of forty investigators, not just a handful of detectives, and I could not understand why Chief Koby had recently turned down offers of help from the Denver police and other agencies.

Three years later, when two student gunmen massacred eleven other pupils at Columbine High School in neighboring Jefferson County, Colorado, a multiagency task force of some 150 investigators was assigned to the case. When I told one of them that our department sure would have welcomed that sort of response in the Ramsey case, he replied, “All they ever had to do was ask for help. Nobody asked.”

10

John Ramsey was keeping his mouth shut, but his money was talking loudly.

Certainly everyone has the right to hire a lawyer and the right to remain silent, and I could not blame someone with a lot of money for hiring an attorney with impeccable credentials. But Ramsey had gone far beyond protecting his interests. What he had done would be unheard of in most big cities, even in the largest police investigations, and he simply overwhelmed a little town like Boulder.

Starting only a few hours after he found the body of his daughter, he retreated into a legal stronghold that could not be cracked. At least, not by us.

Hal Haddon of Denver had been the chief trial deputy in the state public defender’s office before going into partnership with two other attorneys, Bryan Morgan (the friend and occasional breakfast partner of Pete Hofstrom in the DA’s office) and Lee Foreman, in 1976. Eight years later, when Colorado Senator Gary Hart failed spectacularly in his presidential bid, Haddon was his campaign manager. His candidate crashed, but Haddon was left plugged into the Democratic Party political network, particularly in Colorado. In the nineties, as the attorney for Rockwell International, he engineered a plea bargain as a grand jury investigated the company for alleged environmental crimes at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant just outside Boulder. The deal so enraged the grand jurors that they leaked their secret report to the press. Ramsey hired Haddon.

Bryan Morgan of Boulder was no stranger to law enforcement, partially from his representation of a woman named Lee Lindsley in a case several years before. Police responding to her early morning 911 call had found the snow around the house undisturbed and her physician husband shot to death. She was charged with murder, but Morgan successfully argued that two intruders did it, and Lindsley was acquitted. She moved to Atlanta and taught at the elementary school attended by the older children of John Ramsey. The Lindsley and Ramsey cases had a lot of similarities, including a claim of an intruder and the same defense attorney, but Deputy DA Trip DeMuth, in an extraordinary decision, forbade my pursuing that line. “The case is sealed,” he said. We had never intended to razor-blade open the file but thought to interview some of the major participants. “Don’t go near it.” Ramsey hired Morgan.

John Ramsey hired Patrick Burke of Denver to represent Patsy. Burke had once worked with Pat Furman, a professor of law at the University of Colorado, to gain acquittal for a man allegedly involved in the white supremacist slaying of Denver talk-show host Alan Berg. Ramsey hired Furman, too. The police found it particularly interesting that John and Patsy would be represented by separate attorneys, a move that can indicate a possible conflict of interest between the parties.

A lawyer was needed in Atlanta for the family members back there, and someone suggested Jim Jenkins, one of the top lawyers in Georgia. Ramsey hired Jenkins.

The private investigative firm of Ellis Armistead in Denver was brought aboard. Pat Korten, a public relations specialist in Washington, D.C., was hired to deal with the press. Handwriting experts were hired. And John Douglas, a former FBI profiler who had spent a career getting into the minds of killers, was hired.

We referred to the whole pack as Team Ramsey, and although the attorneys resented being called “defense lawyers,” that’s precisely what they were, as one would later openly declare.

One of the first bitter tastes of their new media-spinning strategy came on the first Sunday of January, when Pat Korten, their PR man, used the dignified surroundings of St. John’s Church in Boulder for a photo op. After the solemn service, John and Patsy did not leave through the usual eastside exit but instead walked out through the front doors and straight into waiting press cameras. The church had been used to help create an image of a grieving father and mother. Boulder County District Attorney Alex Hunter had been on vacation in Hawaii over Christmas, and his subordinates chose not to ruin his holiday. Staying somewhat distant from an unpopular event was a tactic favored by Hunter, a Teflon politician who was always at least one step removed from any carnage left behind by his office. Hunter would blame an unfavorable development on a judge, a cop, a subordinate, the press, the statutes, grand jury secrecy, or some other surrogate and would seldom accept personal responsibility if a case went bad. So it would be in the Ramsey case, when he would surround himself with other lawyers and experts to present whatever happened as a team decision. He would refer to them as his “trusted advisers” and thus dodge personal responsibility for directing the case.

Hunter was a millionaire land developer before he ran for office on a vow to protect the environment. His other two major promises were to go easy on marijuana, which got the student vote, and to abolish plea bargaining. “Alex will be in the courtroom,” promised a campaign flyer. He narrowly won the DA’s office in 1972, one of the few Democrats to win anything that November as President Richard Nixon led a nationwide Republican sweep. U.S. bombers attacked Hanoi, the big movie was
Cabaret
, astronaut Gene Cernan became the last man to walk on the moon, and personal computers didn’t exist.

The world had changed many times since then, but in Boulder there was one constant—at the end of the century, Alex Hunter, at the age of sixty-three, was still in office and thinking about running for reelection once again.

The seat of power in Boulder was Hunter’s office inside the Criminal Justice Center at Sixth and Canyon Streets. The DA had seen scandals, outrages, murders, fads, riots, and other elected officials come and go and survived them all. In the White House the presidents change, and new administrations almost totally replace old ones. Previous philosophies and the way things are done change as the new broom of elections sweeps the place clean. That did not happen in the Boulder County District Attorney’s office. Alex Hunter and his people settled in as permanent staff, set in their ways, and in the process he became the most powerful figure in the small political pond that is Boulder. Hunter was so untouchable that few—especially the local newspaper—would say a word against him, much less point out that the emperor of Boulder County wasn’t wearing any clothes.

Hunter’s first act after taking office in 1972 was to hire his business partner, Bill Wise, as his first assistant district attorney. Wise had been Alex Hunter’s best buddy since they attended law school together, and they later became law partners and business associates, even owning real estate with one of the many Ramsey attorneys. After a couple of decades of administrative work, Wise was still at his friend’s elbow and drawing a $108,000 public paycheck but rarely setting foot in a courtroom. Wise was a favorite source for reporters, even going to ball games with them. Police believed that he was a source of many of the press leaks.

After Hunter’s first year in office, he had to suspend or fire seven people in his office for attending a party at which a platter of cocaine was shared. Three were prosecutors.

And his pledge of no plea bargaining evolved into what is now called “precharging negotiations.” Prosecutors and defense lawyers make the deals
before
a defendant is charged, a practice that has resulted in some truly awful agreements. Questionable results stacked up like cordwood before a cold winter. Despite overseeing more than 200,000 cases for prosecution and handling a number of horrible murder cases, DA Alex Hunter had never sent a killer to death row.

In 1981 Christopher Courtney shot two people dead in a public building and was charged with murder. The district attorney blamed the mistrial that followed on a flaw in the law. Courtney pled guilty to criminally negligent homicide and took a two-year prison sentence.

The next year, hired killer “Tattoo Bob” Landry kidnapped a woman and, when his gun didn’t work, crushed her head with a rock. The DA accepted a confession in exchange for life imprisonment, saying that it was the same as the death penalty because Tattoo Bob was very sick. County Undersheriff Kirk Long resigned in disgust over that case, writing that “The only adversarial relationship that exists in the Boulder criminal justice community is between the district attorney’s office and law enforcement.” One police chief called the DA “gutless.”