JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (18 page)

McReynolds was distraught over the discovery of something he thought was buried so deep in his private life that his wife of thirty-five years was unaware of it until we called him. He emphasized that his sexual fantasies never involved children or child pornography.

Analysis proved that Santa Bill didn’t write the ransom note, and he was much too frail to have made a midnight run from Rollinsville, done a Spiderman entry of the Ramsey home, awakened his victim, fed her pineapple, and then killed her, all the while fearless of being discovered and without leaving behind a shred of evidence.

Additional information he shared with us at the interview, which we were later able to confirm, further eliminated him. We investigated the hell out of this old man. He didn’t do it.

Bill McReynolds retired from the Santa Claus business that day, but although I no longer considered him a suspect, I couldn’t say the same about his son Jesse, who had no corroborated alibi. He had come home from the Christmas party at his parents’ home, had a drink of scotch, swallowed some powerful prescription drugs he took for depression, and gone to bed alone, not awakening until late the next morning.

Jesse McReynolds, now thirty-eight, had botched a $113 gas station robbery in Arizona during which he forced the clerk to move from Point A to Point B. Thus the kidnapping charge. And while living in Nederland, near Boulder, he had some other scrapes with the law.

An ex-con knows what’s going on in an interrogation room with two detectives, and Jesse McReynolds knew he looked good to Gosage and me as a suspect in the Ramsey case. His best chance was to work with us, so he became a picture of cooperation. Blood sample? OK. Lengthy interview? OK. Whatever we wanted, he gave, and Jesse’s handwriting eliminated him as the author of the ransom note.

Seldom has one family given so many different leads to investigators, but in the end, after following the trail for months, there was nothing to link any of them with this crime. Nevertheless, the DA’s office repeatedly resurrected them as suspects.

12

The investigative team, now narrowed to four primary detectives with Sergeant Tom Wickman in charge, received new assignments after Atlanta. For the next phase of the investigation, Ron Gosage and I took Access Graphics, business associates, St. John’s Church, and all the Atlanta assignments. Detectives Jane Harmer and Linda Arndt got the friends, the domestic help, and the pageants. Wickman would assist Detective Tom Trujillo with the forensics and evidence, while other detectives helped on peripheral assignments.

Eller made a couple of smart moves in the realignment, as he rounded the team into its final form. The thoroughly professional Harmer would offset the sympathetic Arndt, who we worried might be getting too emotionally involved to remain objective. Although putting Trujillo on evidence would remove him from fieldwork, he seemed to have a problem with priorities, and I was concerned that his slowness in accomplishing tasks might hinder the testing of evidence. For instance, a full
year
passed before he completed his report on the initial Atlanta trip. Trujillo and Arndt still were not speaking, and the sergeant who reported the undisturbed snow now filed an amended report. The first officer was having difficulty in recollecting certain events. Then Arndt began amending her reports, too. I saw big trouble ahead.

The best business address in Boulder is the Pearl Street Mall, a shady pedestrian thoroughfare bordered on both sides by restaurants, government buildings, boutiques, and bookstores. Thousands of people, from musicians to corporate executives to tourists, flock there daily. A tasteful sign above one doorway reads Access Graphics. The staff was unexpectedly arrogant, defiant, and unhelpful when asked to help police pursue the murderer of their CEO’s daughter. In fact, eventually they threw us out of the building.

At first Detective Gosage and I worked out of the quiet fourth-floor office of Don Paugh, Patsy’s father and an Access vice president. We had to consider the possibility that it might be bugged. We learned later that John Ramsey was in daily contact with his top officers.

We had one list of current employees and another of those who had left or been dismissed by the company—hundreds of names. So we started at the top of the Access hierarchy and best-guessed which others to interview. Vice presidents and other key employees filed in to see us, and we took their hair and handwriting samples and recorded their alibis. They agreed to take polygraphs if necessary. Our questions were standard. Know of any enemies or zealots? Lawsuits? Ever been in the Ramsey home? What about hostile takeover attempts? Trouble in other countries? We learned about petty corporate politics, who didn’t like whom, who was on the fast track, and occasionally someone vindictively tried to get a rival investigated. A lot of agendas were at work in the Pearl Street Mall. When we asked why the Ramseys would not talk to us, the answer was always a shaking head and “I don’t know.”

On our second day, Denise Wolf, the fiercely loyal assistant to President and CEO John Ramsey, handed me a slip of paper containing the 1995 bonus her boss was paid in 1996 under a deferred compensation plan. I did a double take as I read the numbers. John Ramsey received a net bonus of $118,117.50, almost the exact amount asked for in the ransom note. To me, that was too precise to be a coincidence, and it was known to very few people.

Finally Gary Merriman, the head of human resources, let us know that our questions were interfering with the running of a billion-dollar business, and they kicked us out, citing concerns over “trade secrets” and “liability.” Our further requests were met with stony replies, although they professed continued cooperation. But in reality we were told to get a search warrant or a court order.

We posted a sign-up sheet for them to come down to police headquarters and talk to us in an interrogation room. The interviews with Access employees continued throughout January, sometimes helpful, sometimes hostile, and turned up nothing.

They weren’t the only ones not cooperating. Detective Jane Harmer advised us that the High Peaks Elementary School, which had been attended by the Ramsey children, found that having detectives around was “disruptive.” Burke Ramsey had returned to classes, without police escort, a few weeks after a “small foreign faction” killed his sister. When Detective Gosage called a therapist who we were told had seen JonBenét, he was told to “talk to the parents’ attorneys.” The pediatrician, Dr. Beuf, would not talk to us. Team Ramsey claimed, contrary to legal opinion the cops had received, that the doctor-patient privilege between Beuf and JonBenét extended past the grave. Patsy’s sister Pam Paugh suggested that the Ramseys “might be available by fax.” I thought the conspiracy of silence was growing stronger by the day, and felt we were now past the point where a grand jury
might
be helpful. Now I thought one was absolutely necessary.

But when we broached the subject with the DA’s office, as early as January 1997, we were stopped cold. Elsewhere grand juries are kept in session or on call year-round to handle just these sort of situations, but Boulder County seldom used them. Instead of immediately convening a grand jury to help the police investigate this murder, District Attorney Alex Hunter suggested that we “ask permission” from the Ramseys to speak to the pediatrician and others. His deputies, Pete Hofstrom and Trip DeMuth, were advocating a soft, hand-holding approach to “build trust” with the Ramseys as the best way to get information instead of being aggressive. To me it appeared that Team Ramsey was playing them like puppets. If these people wanted to act like suspects, it was time to treat them as such.

At seven o’clock on January 9, Chief Koby was at the Boulder Public Library for his first press briefing, and as our spokesman, he was a disaster.

First, he had limited the session to the locals and left the major newspaper and television reporters cooling their heels outside, their bad mood growing by the minute. Excluding the national media was a huge mistake since the case was the focus of worldwide attention. Anytime you turned on the TV, in Miami or Anchorage, Bangor or San Diego, there was JonBenét parading on stage in provocative clothing and poses. Every newspaper in the land carried stories almost daily, and commentators filled the airwaves with opinions. Our chief of police, with his long hair and beard, consistently failed to understand the media.

He stepped into trouble immediately when he attempted to defend the botched handling of the crime scene. “Most legal experts will tell you, police officials and legal experts will tell you, we’ve done it just right,” he said. Astounded reporters scribbled in their notebooks.

Equally surprised were his detectives as we watched the broadcast in the Situation Room. The chief said it would have been “totally unreasonable” to interview the Ramseys on that first day. I couldn’t have disagreed more, and probably so did most of America. That had been
exactly
the right time to interview them, while events were fresh and before they created Team Ramsey.

Then, instead of
using
the press, Koby attacked it! “I have never, in the twenty-eight years I have been in this business, seen such media focus on an event. It is intrusive, and making it much more difficult to work through this situation … . The less you know, the easier it is to give advice.”

After that, we could almost hear the sound of the hunting horns. Angry at him, the indignant media came after us harder than ever.

The police department had split into factions because Commander John Eller had taken Sergeant Larry Mason’s credentials and suspended him, accusing Mason of leaking confidential information to the media during the trip to Atlanta. “We got him,” Eller had whispered to me as Mason got off the plane, carrying a
Daily Camera.
“We set him up.” That decision eventually would bury John Eller.

The commander had chosen the wrong incident, and Mason fought back. Just when the department needed unity, Commander Mark Beckner launched an Internal Affairs investigation, and Mason sued Eller. Cops questioning cops played out over the coming weeks until Mason was officially cleared of leaking information. Chief Koby, who had sanctioned Eller’s original decision to suspend Mason, would issue an apology and write a $10,000 check to the sergeant to settle the case. A review board finally ruled that Eller did nothing wrong and had been duty-bound to pursue Mason in the first place.

Several years later my wife and I had dinner with Lawrence Schiller, the author of
Perfect Murder
,
Perfect Town
, also about this case. He told us that when he was conducting interviews, Mason surprised him with the comment “You knew I was [
Daily Camera
reporter] Alli Krupski’s source, didn’t you?”

The fighting within the department became sharp, bitter, and divisive and interfered with our investigation into who killed JonBenét. It also created an unofficial gag order that would be strictly adhered to thereafter by cops. There was never a general order posted on the board, but it became an iron rule—the chief would be the police spokesman. Nobody else would say anything, no matter how we were attacked. That left the field open for the DA’s office, which was a leaking sieve to the press, to blame the cops for every problem in the case.

The detectives wanted the chief to stand up and denounce the bullshit propaganda, but Koby thought it best to “ride out the storm.” His strategy, apparently, was no strategy at all. He ventured out only periodically, and then only to self-destruct before the press.

The SitRoom was littered with to-do lists, Polaroids of people interviewed, memos, and diagrams, all pieces of a giant puzzle we were trying to assemble, and I was still running into DA-imposed roadblocks. They still didn’t support warrants to obtain the credit card and telephone records from the Ramseys.

McGuckin’s Hardware is a Boulder landmark built around the idea that if you can’t find what you need at McGuckin’s, you probably don’t need it. Office Manager Joann Hanks had a puzzling telephone conversation with a brusque caller who identified himself only as “John.” He wanted to know about a couple of December charges on his American Express bill. He read the dates and amounts of the purchases. When told the information had been purged from the store computer and would require a hand search of receipts, the man said he would call back on Monday, January 20.

Hanks found the receipts and was startled to see the signature of Patricia Ramsey. A $46.31 purchase on December 2, 1996, at 7:40 P.M. and a $99.88 receipt on December 9 at 11:14 A.M. Hanks notified John Christie, the head of security, who called the police. We wondered why John Ramsey, so soon after the murder of his child, was hunting up old credit card purchases.

Gosage and I were at the store to await the call. The McGuckin’s people put us in the president’s office and had Joann Hanks’s calls transferred to his telephone. We managed to record three conversations with “John Ramsey.” It was not John Ramsey at all, but an impersonator. Through the most circuitous routes, we found that the number had been washed several times to disguise its point of origin, which was a Denver boiler room operation known as Touch Tone, Inc. I began the legal paperwork needed to take a closer look.

But while still in McGuckin’s, it dawned upon me that the huge store had an elaborate video surveillance system that keeps watch over every square inch of corridor and bin of merchandise. The receipts did not itemize what Patsy had bought, but if luck was on our side, there was a possibility we might be able to
see
whatever she bought. If she bought duct tape or white cord, it would be powerful evidence.

The security manager cut short that investigative avenue. The recorded security tapes were recycled every thirty days. The ones we wanted from December 2 and 9 had already been reused. We had missed by only a couple of weeks, but it might as well have been a lifetime. If the DA’s office had let us aggressively pursue the Ramsey credit card receipts early on, those videotapes could have been in evidence by now. It was a missed opportunity to get evidence, whatever it might have shown.