JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (19 page)

The manager showed us where black duct tape was sold in the paint department and explained that purchases were not listed as specific items on receipts. Instead the computers logged them according to the sections from which they came, and during rush times like holidays, harried cashiers sometimes hit the wrong computer key and credited an item by mistake to an adjacent department. The paint department was next to the builder’s hardware department. Among the items on Patsy’s December 9 receipt was an item from builder’s hardware. The price was $1.99. On the December 2 slip, there was an item from the garden department. It was $1.99. Duct tape also sold for $1.99. We had no way of knowing what she had bought.

Although still too distraught to meet with us, John and Patsy Ramsey spoke for several hours with their newest trophy hire, John Douglas, formerly with the FBI’s behavioral sciences unit.

John Ramsey’s lawyer Bryan Morgan was at the profiler’s side and permitted no direct questions about the Ramseys during a long interview.

Douglas, wearing a silk tie and an expensive suit, talked with machine-gun rapidity. He said the killer was someone who knew the house well, because it was a high-risk situation, and he pronounced the murder to be a crime of anger directed toward John Ramsey.

His former colleagues in the FBI disagreed and would tell us they were unaware of anyone killing a child as revenge against the parents. To my mind, a revenge killer would probably have left the lifeless body splayed beside the Christmas tree for maximum shock value.

I asked if Douglas knew of
any
kidnapping for ransom in which the victim was killed and left on the premises. He recalled a case involving a family member.

They also had recited a list of suspects for us—Jeff Merrick, Mike Glynn, and Jim Marino, all former Access employees who had been seen at a mysterious dinner with Tom Carson, currently the company’s chief financial officer. Then he shocked us by also offering the name of Fleet White. The Ramsey camp had turned on one of its best friends.

Among the books Sergeant Wickman said were on John Ramsey’s night stand was
Mindhunter,
by John Douglas. In the book he wrote that when loved ones or family members are the killers, careful attention is given to “staging” and diverting suspicion elsewhere. In the Ramsey case, the amateurish ransom note diverted the authorities for several hours.

Douglas also wrote that holidays were particularly stressful times and could trigger violent behavior. JonBenét was killed over Christmas.

Douglas stated that in parental murders, great care is usually shown in the disposal of the body. JonBenét had been carefully tucked into a blanket in a cellar room, and not discarded outside in the freezing cold.

John Douglas was almost denying his own writings in order to give the Ramseys a pass. The dust jacket of his next book identified him as a consultant on the JonBenét Ramsey case. It did not say for which side.

That same day, John Ramsey doubled the reward he was offering, to $100,000.

Gosage and I returned to Access Graphics for an appointment with CEO Tom Carson, who had been so negatively portrayed by Patsy’s mother and who was now linked by John Douglas to a suspicious dinner with Merrick, Marino, and another friend, Mike Glynn. Unlike most of the others at Access, Carson was open and helpful and had a rock-solid alibi. At the time JonBenét was killed, he was in France with his girlfriend, Natalie, and her parents.

He dismissed the controversial dinner as just a get-together with old friends, not a conspiracy to commit murder across a table in a public restaurant in which John Ramsey was a partowner. I would devote many hours to running down the stories of the others named, and the result was always the same. It was an innocent gathering that meant nothing to our case.

Carson had no idea the Ramseys had given us a copy of the gently worded handwritten sympathy note he sent them after the murder. Team Ramsey asked us to see if there was any link to the ransom note.

Another of those at the dinner, Jim Marino, had known John Ramsey since the 1970s in Atlanta and said he was a good guy with no enemies. When Marino had an accident in 1978 and was temporarily confined to a wheelchair, Ramsey offered him a sales job, which turned into long-term employment. Marino was making $51,600 a year when he left Access Graphics and considered himself a loyal friend of John Ramsey.

Detective Gosage started to take hair samples before Marino could warn him that some were hair plugs that cost ten dollars apiece. He would be cleared as a suspect but remained an ongoing character in the case. Even while he defended his pal John Ramsey on national television, Marino would repeatedly be pointed out by Ramsey and his lawyer as a murder suspect.

13

To make headway with the case, we needed to get the district attorney’s office on board, so as January neared an end, we gave them a six-hour presentation in an attempt to repair our frayed relationship. It had been difficult to work together before the presentation. Afterward it was almost impossible.

Bob Keatley, the police department’s legal adviser, practically ordered us to the table. An ethical and scholarly man who keeps books about Lincoln in his office, Keatley insisted that the breach between the two law enforcement arms charged with making the case had to be repaired. Let’s get everybody on the same page, he said.

The DA’s office had complained they were not being kept up to date, which was true, since Eller had kicked them off the case. Now we were inviting them back as full partners. They would hear it all, as we demonstrated the breadth and depth of the investigation to date—and showed that, after a month of hard work, we had found nothing that persuaded us that anyone broke into the house and murdered JonBenét Ramsey. That was a backward way of telling them the department’s position that Patsy and John Ramsey should be named the chief suspects in the death of their daughter.

So on a cold and snowy day, we all filed into the SitRoom, where Keatley, Eller, Koby, and Hunter took places at the front of a square of tables. Seven detectives were around the edges, along with the DA’s top two men on the case, Pete Hofstrom and Trip DeMuth.

Eller began, saying we wanted the weak points of our case highlighted and their legal opinion of the best future strategy. Detective Melissa Hickman gave the detailed timeline, and Sergeant Bob Whitson reviewed the events of December 26.

Detective Mike Everett went through an exhaustive review of the crime scene, including finding pineapple in the victim’s intestinal tract as well as in a bowl that bore the fingerprints of Patsy and Burke. I considered that to be an extraordinary piece of evidence. We knew JonBenét did not eat the fruit during the White’s party, yet it was in her stomach.

One by one, the detectives gave the DA and his lieutenants everything, including the trauma to the vagina, the still unknown murder weapon, the conclusion of several doctors that the strangulation followed the blow to the head, and that DNA had been found in the panties and beneath the fingernails. We pointed out that the DNA could be totally unrelated to the case, since no skin or blood was found beneath the nails to indicate that JonBenét had scratched her killer.

And we brought them in on the secret that the lab had discovered what was believed to be a pubic hair on the blanket. So far we had been unable to identify it. That single hair would become one of the most lingering and controversial questions of the entire case, for Team Ramsey and those within the DA’s office who believed an intruder killed the child would insist that it had to have come from the murderer. As we would discover, there was almost an unlimited number of possible sources for the mysterious hair.

Sergeant Wickman concentrated on the ransom note, and when he disclosed that our handwriting expert thought Patsy was the possible author, the room went pin-drop silent. Hunter pushed back his chair and groaned, “Awwww, Jesus.”

We reported on the preliminary FBI determinations. The FBI had been given a chance to look at the note and determined that it was written in the comfort of the home and probably after the killing, not before. The crime scene reflected careful staging, they said, a criminally unsophisticated killer attempting to cover up what had happened.

I recapped the memorial service, Atlanta, Access Graphics, our scores of interviews with an incredible range of suspects, and pointed to all the false trails we had followed, the fact that we had had hundreds of telephone tips and letters and that the Crimestoppers’ number was jammed. And still no outsider had surfaced that legitimately looked like the killer.

We wanted to know from the DA: Based on everything you’ve heard, are the Ramseys suspects or not?

It was a rhetorical question, because obviously in our eyes they were. But the Ramseys were not going to be labeled as such. We couldn’t call the suspects “suspects.”

Hunter, Hofstrom, and DeMuth accused us of not knowing how the system worked and reminded us again that while our job was to make an arrest based on probable cause, the threshold they would face in court would be proof “beyond a reasonable doubt.” They pointed out that we had no silver bullet, no slam dunk for a jury. We understood that, but we argued in return that they were interpreting beyond a reasonable doubt (BARD) as meaning an Absolutely No-Doubt Confession.

Since I doubted that they ever wanted to see this case in front of a jury, I felt their argument was an excuse. We accused them of being played like fish on a hook. We wanted some prosecutorial backbone, some definite guidance—get this-and-this, call so-and-so, wrap up such-and-such a detail. We told them we needed a grand jury to use when people slammed doors in our faces. We had shown them a hell of a lot of circumstantial evidence, and we felt we could get them to that higher legal level they demanded if they would only back us to the hilt and stop lying down for Team Ramsey.

Hofstrom, scribbling on a big tablet with a black Magic Marker held like a crayon, thought we were being too tough on the Ramseys. “So you’ve got a guy that acts a little weird and won’t talk to you,” he said. “So what? Doesn’t mean he’s a killer.”

That was the defining moment that drove the final spike between the DA’s office and the police department. They still were not going to intervene aggressively and get that grand jury going for us. In other jurisdictions, we would probably have been handing out subpoenas already and hauling reluctant witnesses into a room where they had to talk. I could not comprehend why this laid-back Boulder attitude was still the rule for the DA’s shop while the world’s media were accurately reflecting the mood of the people to Do Something!

Our chief of police sat there quietly uninvolved as the meeting collapsed. Tom Koby observed that when it came time to question the Ramseys, he should probably do it himself because he was “more on their intellectual level.”

That we had made little headway in resolving our problems was repeatedly illustrated during the coming weeks. Deputy DA Trip DeMuth told us that we should back off from the Ramseys and let Hofstrom get in there and “work his magic.” Hofstrom called Commander Eller to ask what he could tell Team Ramsey, and the commander curtly replied “Nothing.”

Even the Colorado Attorney General’s office was against letting the defense lawyers learn anything more than what was absolutely required by law. In a briefing with us, Assistant Attorney General Mary Malatesta, head of a special unit that deals only with capital cases, likened it to an all-out war. Don’t share anything at all with the defense, she told District Attorney Alex Hunter. Tell them nothing. Instead, after the AG’s representative left the room, Hunter requested police blessing for Hofstrom to speak with the Ramsey lawyers—without informing us—“in order to maintain and build their trust.” Had he even heard what Malatesta had just said?
Don’t share anything at all with the defense
—
tell them nothing
. As much as we would have liked to have Malatesta’s gunslingers in our corner, we never saw them again.

The situation reached an apex of lunacy when the DA told Chief Koby and Commander Eller a few days later that he was thinking about offering a deal to the unknown killer of JonBenét.

Hunter was planning a press conference to unveil his latest weapons, criminalist Dr. Henry Lee and DNA specialist Barry Scheck, both of whom had been tainted with the dubious fame of helping O. J. Simpson beat a murder rap. By hiring them, Hunter made sure Team Ramsey did not.

The DA figured that while he was talking to the press anyway, he could announce a “mercy window” to the murderer, and if the killer surrendered during that time, then Hunter would “plead for his soul” and ask the court to be lenient. To me, that was not unexpected. It would be the easy way out, the quick fix, business as usual in Boulder.

But by the time Hunter appeared before the cameras on February 13, he had performed a complete flip-flop and played the part of the fire-hardened district attorney, vowing “no mercy” for the killer and promising “you will pay.” Alex Hunter was all over the map on the JonBenét Ramsey case and would continue to be so throughout the long investigation. One day he would say one thing to one person, the next day the exact opposite to someone else. He drove us all to distraction because you trusted his word at your peril.

The reporters were kept waiting before the news conference while the principals deliberated backstage in a direct reversal of roles. Koby and Eller had gotten a glimpse of Hunter’s intention of playing the hard-line prosecutor and wanted him to tone it down because they didn’t want him to bluff with cards he didn’t hold. Hunter agreed with them and kept his promise until he stepped into the bright lights.

“We’re going to solve this case,” the DA pledged, as Koby and Eller stood by bewildered. “I want to say something to the person or persons that committed this crime, the person or persons that took this baby from us,” he continued, gazing directly into the cameras. “I mentioned the list of suspects narrows. Soon there will be no one left on the list but you. You have stripped us of any mercy we may have had in the beginning of this case. We will see that justice is served and that you pay for what you’ve done to this beautiful little girl.”