JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (21 page)

Detectives are professionally insulted by suspects who commit atrocious crimes. We are driven to apprehend them, and usually we have the methods, tools, and resources with which to do that. The victim’s family and the detectives have a common bond and goal. Who better to turn to than the cop who will do anything possible to catch the killer of a loved one?

We returned to Atlanta’s finest neighborhoods to interview more of the Lunch Bunch, who seemed terribly inconvenienced by it all. Private investigators had made the rounds the day before, spreading the word that we only wanted to “interrogate the Ramseys,” thus painting us as the bad guys in a murder investigation.

One couple was typical. The wife said, “John and Patsy just want to move on” with their lives, so we should leave them alone. I wondered what that meant, since we weren’t standing on her front porch with questions about a stolen bicycle but about the murder of their friends’ daughter. The husband, who was an attorney, barely contained his contempt for us and demanded that we talk to the Ramseys “like in a living room, on a couch and stuff.” Not how we do business, we said, and the door slammed shut behind us.

Another assignment for the trip had been to research the death of John Ramsey’s first child, Beth. Because of the vaginal trauma inflicted on JonBenét, we had to determine if there had ever been any sexual abuse involving Beth. There had not.

We traveled to Arizona, Georgia, Ohio, and Illinois and felt like cold-calling encyclopedia salesmen showing up on a doorstep. Some people demanded to have their lawyers present, some wanted to see the questions in advance, and others would not talk at all.

All the information we gathered said the same thing: Beth was a sweet girl with a bright future, and there was nothing untoward in her relationship with her father, who was utterly devastated when she was killed in an automobile accident.

Elizabeth Pasch Ramsey was born in the Philippines while her father was in the navy but was brought to the United States while still a baby. She was her daddy’s girl, always at his right hand, always on his mind. John Ramsey adored his firstborn child and thrilled in her accomplishments as she captained the Wheeler High cheerleading squad in Marietta, took a degree in finance at Miami University in Ohio, spent a summer studying in London, and got a job at Delta Air Lines as a flight attendant in 1991. Some time after her first boyfriend died of cystic fibrosis, she resumed a relationship with former classmate Matt Derrington, and friends said they were considering marriage. On January 8, 1992, she was a passenger in Derrington’s BMW when it slid on a patch of ice at I-55 and North County Line Road outside of Chicago, into the path of a bakery truck. Both were killed. She was only twenty-two years old.

What interested me as an investigator were the totally opposite reactions that John Ramsey showed to the deaths of his eldest and youngest daughters. When Beth died, in an
accident
, he was inconsolable, and relatives spoke of how he could be heard late at night almost howling in grief. Years later her presence was still large in his life. Pictures of her filled a desk drawer, her name was on his plane. But when JonBenét was
murdered
, we saw little open grief.

I wondered where was all of that emotion this time? Where was the anger? Why wasn’t he acting more like Marc Klass than a cool CEO hiding some minor transgression behind a buffer of lawyers?

We were all concerned about that unidentified pubic hair the lab found on the white blanket that was wrapped around JonBenét, for it opened the possibility that a sexual attack had taken place and the hair was left behind by the killer. Despite Team Ramsey’s claim that the hair belonged to the unknown intruder, in reality it may have come from a huge number of sources.

However, it could be meaningless and of innocent origin. A former FBI profiler explained that there are always “artifacts” at a crime scene and that not every cigarette butt or beer can is related to the murder.

Nevertheless, it became the subject of a thorough investigation all its own. Detective Trujillo reported that the Colorado Bureau of Investigation concluded it did not come from John or Patsy Ramsey.

Later the CBI lab suggested that it might not be a pubic hair at all but an “ancillary” hair that could have come from someone’s arm, chest, or other area of the body. FBI testing was delayed because Team Ramsey wanted their own people to watch any such examination, which the FBI would not allow.

When I thought of the pubic hair, I vividly remembered the shock of discovering that a number of visitors to the Ramsey home had stayed as overnight guests, and some had slept in the bed of JonBenét. Any of them could have been the source of the mysterious hair.

I first came across that line of investigation in an interview with Brad Millard, a college friend of John Andrew Ramsey. We routinely asked if he had ever been in the Ramsey home in Boulder. Not only had he been there, but he even spent a night in JonBenét’s bed, he said.

I felt like breaking my pen. With a simple fluke question, a young man volunteered that he had slept in the victim’s bed! How many other guests had slept there?

Patsy’s mother, Nedra Paugh, and her daughters Pam and Polly came in to see us at the Roswell PD but didn’t bring much new information. To dodge the press, Pam drove in with Nedra lying flat in the backseat. One of the first things the grandmother told us was that she too had slept in JonBenét’s bed.

Now we knew that two people—Millard and Nedra—had slept there, and as time passed, so many more names would surface that JonBenét’s room started to remind me of a Motel 6.

In my opinion, there was no reason to assume the pubic hair had come from an attacker who actually crawled into bed with JonBenét during a sexual assault. The hair displayed microscopic consistencies with Melinda Ramsey. But there were also a number of other hairs and fibers collected from the blanket—many of which were consistent with JonBenét and Patsy Ramsey. Others were never sourced.

We would find that a number of visitors had used the bed while the child was elsewhere. The hair could have come from any of them, or it could have been transferred through some other contact, such as in a washing machine or dryer. We also found that obtaining pubic hair samples was even more difficult than trying to interview people.

Despite my explaining how a Q-and-A worked, Nedra talked nonstop. But if you could stay with her long enough, reality might drop into the conversation.

She revealed a bit more about JonBenét messing her pants and bed, a subject she had minimized in our previous interview. Now, however, she said that the child did not wipe properly after a bowel movement, and quite often an adult would have to wash her bottom and change her undies. They called it “dirtying.” The grandmother also mentioned two occasions when the little girl had gone to play with her best friend, Daphne White, and had come home with Fleet White carrying her soiled underwear, saying that JonBenét had had an accident and was wearing a pair of Daphne’s panties. That made me think of another alternative to the foreign DNA found in her clothing.

We tried to get information about bedtime snacks and managed to learn that the girl loved grapes, sliced apples, and fruit of all kinds, especially pineapple. Give her a whole can and she’d eat it. We knew she ate pineapple the night she died, and now her grandmother told us how much the child loved it. While she was talking, I weighed some alternatives. That she was given a bedtime snack from the bowl that had Patsy’s fingerprints made more sense to me than the possibility of an intruder feeding the child pineapple, keeping her alive long enough for it to reach her digestive tract, then killing her.

Nedra was also obviously aware of the current evidence. When she talked about “an old booger of a dog” that JonBenét liked to wrestle, she pointed out that the dog did not scratch the girl’s vagina.

Pam Paugh answered some pageant questions. JonBenét was the driving force behind the pageants, she said, and loved the femininity and girlishness of the contests. Pam denied that the child’s hair had been dyed. It had only been “highlighted” because JonBenét wanted to be even more blond. And the child “played hard” and always had dirt beneath her fingernails. “Wouldn’t let you trim them,” she said. Bingo, I thought. More DNA possibilities. But Pam stubbornly insisted there was no bed-wetting problem.

The younger sister, Polly, added the name of Barb Fernie, the friend who was so close to the Ramseys that Patsy called her on the morning of December 26, to the list of people considered suspects. The other woman who rushed to Patsy’s side that morning, Priscilla White, was also suspicious, said Polly. Priscilla had been seen copying Patsy’s Daytimer calendar, and Polly said that might explain how someone’s handwriting might be duplicated, perhaps on a ransom note. Finally, she also pointed to Lori Wagner, a top Access Graphics vice president and staunch defender of John Ramsey. Polly denied that JonBenét had a bed-wetting problem and claimed that she had never seen her sister Patsy get angry, not once in her entire life. Never.

It bothered me that we were having to get all of this secondhand from aunts and a grandmother. John and Patsy Ramsey were in Atlanta. Gosage and I were in Atlanta. We had a lot of questions about their murdered daughter, and they stonewalled us.

Pam wanted to know why we couldn’t just write out our questions and let John and Patsy respond that way. “If John and Patsy remain suspects, you may never talk to them,” she said. But Nedra said she thought Patsy should talk to us, and Polly remarked that she did not see why John and Patsy couldn’t come in and talk to us, just as she was doing. “I don’t even see a problem with coming to the Boulder Police Department. You just want to know the facts,” she said. That’s how we felt too.

Unexpectedly, a witness stepped forward and broke both his silence and John Ramsey’s story about the timing of the discovery of JonBenét’s body.

In a telephone interview, Stewart Long, the boyfriend of John Ramsey’s daughter Melinda, recounted for me the sudden rush to reach Colorado that he, Melinda, and her brother, John Andrew, had made on the morning of December 26. When they arrived at the Ramsey home shortly after 1 P.M., they were unaware of anything more than that JonBenét had been kidnapped.

Long said that John Ramsey climbed into a van with him and John Andrew and told them that JonBenét “was with Beth now.” The father and son broke down in tears as John Ramsey described how he had discovered the body around eleven o’clock that morning.

I almost dropped the telephone as I reached to make sure the “record” button was pressed on my tape recorder. “When you say eleven o’clock that morning, are you assuming that was Mountain time or Eastern time?”

“I’m assuming that was Mountain time. He said eleven o’clock, so I’m assuming he was speaking of his own time reference.”

I was blown away. We had just found a credible witness who heard John Ramsey say he’d discovered the body
two hours
earlier than we previously believed. That punched a big hole in the generally accepted timeline. Eleven o’clock would have been just about the time John Ramsey temporarily vanished from the sight of Detective Arndt, when she thought he had gone out to get the mail. I recalled how Arndt described the marked change in his behavior after he came back, silent, brooding, and nervous.

Under those circumstances, any investigator would have to consider the possibility that Ramsey might have found the body on his private walk through his home and not when he and Fleet White went to the basement a few hours later.

The detectives were concerned about one of their own. Linda Arndt, who had been a good cop, now seemed unhappy, withdrawn, or outright hostile. It looked as if the problems she had encountered as the first detective at the Ramsey home were eating her up inside.

In early March Arndt had a private meeting with Patsy. She drove to the home of a Ramsey friend, where Patsy greeted her with a hug. Arndt reported that she took off her blazer and even lifted her sweater to prove to lawyer Patrick Burke that she wore no recording device and carried no police equipment whatsoever, not even a gun. We were enraged about the unauthorized visit, which Arndt termed “personal.”

Since we had been trying for so long without success to get formal interviews, any information would have been welcome, but when I asked what they talked about during the hour-long chat, she looked me in the eye: “I told Patsy our conversation would be in confidence. I can’t tell you.”

“You’re a detective, Arndt!” I protested. “You have a duty to give us that information.”

“I can’t tell you,” she repeated, and she never did.

Only four days later I drove Arndt to a repair shop to pick up her car and used the private moment to ask where her head was at. Tears welled in her eyes as she confided her concern that she was about to be kicked off the team. I suggested that she become more of a team player and got the cold reply that she preferred to work alone.

She raised a finger to her forehead, thumb back like a cocked pistol, and told me, “If I get kicked off this thing, I’m going to take out myself and everyone else.”

15

Evidence was accumulating to indicate the involvement of a parent, but we could not ignore other leads, and there were dozens of them. That we kept clearing the other potential suspects, one after another, from Massachusetts to California, didn’t impress the DA’s office.

• As Gosage whistled the theme from
Deliverance
, we tracked down a computer whiz who was said to have been acting weird. He and his barefoot girlfriend lived in a mobile home amid a landscape of rusting cars, junk heaps, and hound dogs in northwest Georgia. The man had visited Boulder several times on business and might have met John Ramsey, but that was it. Ironclad alibi of Christmas dinner in Georgia with his girlfriend’s family.

• In a dirty interview cubicle at the Denver County Jail, we interrogated Sandra Henderson. She and her ex-husband, Bud, had run their own technology business, and Sandra once embezzled from Access Graphics. They were each $18,000 in debt to Access—a 1 away from the ransom amount and close enough for a look. She was in a Department of Corrections halfway house the night JonBenét was killed, and Bud Henderson was at home, alone and asleep.