JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (23 page)

I was struck by the word
chronic
, which would indicate prior abuse. The coroner also said there was acute vaginal injury that had happened around the time of death. He could not pinpoint the time of death closer than six to twelve hours before she was brought upstairs, stiff in full rigor mortis, by her father at 1 P.M.

That would put the time of death very roughly about 1 A.M. and no later than 7 A.M. Since the 911 call had come in shortly before 6 o’clock in the morning, and the murder, staging, and the ransom note would all have required a substantial amount of time to accomplish, the earlier time was the most logical—which would put the time of death between the time the family arrived home that night about 10 P.M. and 1 A.M.

After the large group broke up, Lee stayed on with Koby, Hunter, the coroner, and the detectives. He questioned why a six-year-old girl, who could easily have been manually strangled, had been choked with a garrote. Such complicated violence did not fit the crime. Lee suggested the possibility that death had been accidental, with a cover-up, and noted distinctive elements of “staging.” He suggested that we look at the family members or someone very close to the family as suspects.

Hunter obviously wasn’t buying our conclusion that Santa Bill was innocent, and he asked Lee for some thoughts on Bill McReynolds. Lee suggested vacuuming McReynolds’s car for fibers that might match something from the crime scene. Why, I wondered, would the DA’s office entertain the idea of searching McReynolds’s automobile yet not give us a search warrant for Patsy’s fur boots and coat?

Lee told us the case was going to be very difficult. The house had been compromised. We had to figure out what happened that night without relying on what had been found.

“Rice already cooked,” said Lee. “Crime scene gone.”

The man who probably did more than any other person to sink our Ramsey investigation was someone I admire a great deal, Lou Smit. Before he came aboard, we had been punching holes in Team Ramsey’s single cry of “The Ramseys didn’t do it.” Smit, with impeccable police credentials, brought the Intruder Theory to life.

Alex Hunter had launched his own investigation, allegedly to identify holes in the case that might be exploited by a defense attorney. He brought over Steve Ainsworth, an investigator from the sheriff’s department, then hired Smit, a slight, balding sixty-one-year-old former lawman from Colorado Springs.

Lou Smit is a gentle man and a gentleman. He has a gregarious personality, never has a bad word to say about anyone, and unfailingly shook my hand each time we met, no matter how upset we might be with each other. That unassuming manner and soft voice puts people off guard, and his easy smile, with a country boy toothpick at the side of his mouth, gets their trust. He is a family man and a devout Christian but can turn confrontational sometimes. Then the smile vanishes and a sharp retort replaces politeness. A term was coined for such moments: “You’ve just been Smit on.”

Smit had a terrific record as a homicide investigator but seemed out of place in Boulder, with his three-piece pinstripe suits, a little over-and-under .22 caliber Derringer tucked into a Velcro belt holster, and a wallet filled with family-style photographs of some of the 150 homicide victims whose cases he had worked.

His legend was based upon the 1991 murder of a little girl named Heather Dawn Church. When everything pointed to the family as the killers of their child, Lou refused to give up, complaining that the police would not look elsewhere for a suspect. Smit matched an overlooked print on a screen that led to the real killer and emerged an absolute hero.

His sole job in Boulder, we were told by the DA’s office, would be to implement his particularly successful system of indexing, organizing, and cross-referencing the case file. We had urged the police department to lease either the Overwatch or the ZY Index computer programs to do exactly that, but our request had been denied as being cost prohibitive.

Soon after Smit was hired we went out for a cup of coffee, and he told me one of his personal commandments: “Murders are usually what they seem. Rarely are they perfectly planned,” he said.

He was cautious and noncommittal, which I considered prudent, since he had not yet had a chance to read the thousands of pages in the file. He spoke at length about Heather Dawn Church, as if the murder of that little girl might be the blueprint for this case too.

Three days later at a detective briefing, Smit made his first appearance, greeting us all and taking a seat along the west wall. We went around the table to update our findings. Finally it was his turn. He had been around only about seventy-two hours, not anywhere near long enough to devour the case material, but we hoped he might have some initial insights. He did.

Lou shifted the toothpick to a corner of his mouth, and his eyes twinkled with the excitement of a good bird dog on point. He said, “I don’t think it was the Ramseys.”

He never budged from that position.

16

The Ramsey case was taking an enormous toll on the investigating officers. We were worn out, and there was no relief in sight. When my father was rushed to the emergency room with heart failure in Denver, I was in Atlanta again and, in one of the worst decisions of my life, chose not to come home. I no longer worked out, socialized, or went to movies, investing all my time in the case.

It absorbed all our energy, and we were running ourselves into trouble, taking our families along. There was no way for them to understand something we couldn’t even talk about. I seldom saw my wife of only eight months, who watched with a frustration equal to my own as I was consumed by this unmerciful mystery. This case would wreck marriages and careers.

Among the most distraught was Patrol Officer Rick French, a decorated army officer, a respected SWAT team member, and a gold-medal-winning athlete, for he had been branded “the first officer on the scene.” He believed John and Patsy Ramsey had misled him and said he had the “gut feeling” early on the morning of December 26 that the parents were somehow involved in the little girl’s disappearance.

“Why couldn’t I have found her?” he asked me in one private moment. “If only I had looked in there, you would have had a pristine crime scene and could solve this.”

He was inconsolable. “I’m the fucking cop! I should have found her!”

Trip DeMuth, the deputy DA, gave me the parallel universe theory of the case. He claimed he had been given the job of “defensing” the case, or trying to look at it for holes the defense lawyers could exploit, but DeMuth seemed to truly
believe
that someone broke into the house and killed this little girl. “Why don’t you come to our side?” he once asked me. His allegiance to the intruder idea was apparently so strong that he was eventually removed from the investigation.

DeMuth, who has young daughters, told me, “Steve, you’re not a parent. I hold my daughters every night. It’s unfathomable that a parent could do such a thing to their child.”

“Trip, I may not be a parent, but I am a cop,” I replied. “Believe me. It happens all the time.” In fact, according to Department of Justice statistics, it has happened 11,000 times since 1976.

He looked at me blankly and said that if either John or Patsy Ramsey were involved, “one of them will have a bout of conscience” and would step forward. I told him not to bet on that when the result of the decision could be the death penalty. Trip DeMuth and his boss Pete Hofstrom might as well have been twins, for Hofstrom later told me, “When good people do bad things, they can’t live with their consciences and eventually come forward and admit their guilt.”

They were naive to a fault and suggested a plan to tell Team Ramsey, “Every DA from now to eternity will look at this case file, all prepped and ready to go, and they may pull the trigger. That’s why you might want to deal with us now, before the next DA comes in.” In other words, as I heard it, somebody else—years from now—may have the guts to do what we don’t. The Ramsey lawyers didn’t accept that strange challenge. They had every reason to celebrate their good fortune instead.

Actually, the detectives would have loved to have found some stranger whom we could wrap in a tight cloak of evidence, for there is no joy in looking at a parent for murder. We found no such person out there, although a recent letter from the Ramsey private investigator supplied a multitude of new “suspects” who had had “frequent and recent access” to the house—hundreds of
unnamed
guests at Christmas parties, nannies, friends, neighbors, people from the Historic Boulder tour, a battalion of cleaning women, street musicians, caterers, florists, friends, contractors, window cleaners, plumbers, and videotaping crews. When the case began, police were told that the only outsiders with keys were John Andrew Ramsey and the housekeeper, Linda Hoffmann-Pugh. Now a couple of dozen keys were said to be missing.

Who were all these people, where were those keys, and how the hell was a handful of detectives supposed to track them down? I felt their strategy, if not clear before, was crystal now. Team Ramsey was overwhelming us with useless leads while keeping Patsy and John safely beyond our reach.

We needed more help, but that was one of the core problems in Boulder. The determination to protect the small town’s image overrode common sense, and outsiders were not welcome. Boulder became xenophobic as Chief Koby turned down offers of help, District Attorney Hunter’s office kept the case close to home, and the little local newspaper criticized other media for covering the story. City leaders believed that if the outsiders would just go away, so would the problem. Their real fear, I believe, was that outsiders might peek beneath the curtain and see what the problems really were.

As if I weren’t already up to my ears in work, Sergeant Wickman assigned me to be what is known as the “Affiant” on all future warrants and to put together the document that would be the basis for any arrest. Everything had to be grounded in precise language, and just because the Ramseys were prime suspects did not mean that I could or would ignore any evidence that might point away from them. For more than a year I carried the ever-changing Master Affidavit everywhere I went, carefully locked in a silver aluminum briefcase. If there was to be an arrest, I wanted it up-to-date and at my fingertips. I also became the case file curator, in charge of updating what was to become some eighty-plus notebooks.

Detective Gosage and I checked into the Holiday Inn in Atlanta on April 8, at the start of an eleven-day road trip, and the desk clerk recognized us as Boulder detectives. “Please get them,” she said.

The Ramsey strategy to gain public sympathy wasn’t working. Although they were under no obligation to talk to the police, they were casting suspicion on themselves by dodging us, and people were not buying the declarations of cooperation.

Ellis Armistead, Ramsey’s private snoop, let me know that my work had not been welcomed by the Ramseys and their friends. I could have cared less. Later I would see his comment as a veiled alert that the Ramseys had developed a personal animus toward me. “Why is it always Steve Thomas digging into our affairs?” Patsy asked someone.

We made a surprise visit to the home of Patsy’s parents, and Nedra launched into us like a cruise missile, unshakable in her belief that we were only out to persecute her daughter and son-in-law. We also got another installment of pageant news.

While I steered Don Paugh into a conversation about taxes, Gosage sought some unrehearsed writings by Patsy and struck gold. “If Patsy didn’t write the [ransom] note, why not offer some handwriting to prove it?” he asked Nedra. She defiantly thrust a piece of paper at him and declared, “Patsy wrote that just this morning.”

As we drove away, Ron examined the list of addresses and telephone numbers Patsy had written. It included the name of her friend Barbara Fernie with an important, telltale correction.

In the 376-word ransom note, the small letter “a” was printed in manuscript style 109 times and written in cursive lowercase style only 5 times. The entry on Fernie contained just such a printed manuscript “a” as the second letter of the word
Barbara
, but it had been boldly written over with a black felt-tip pen and made into the cursive-style
“a.”

We had noticed earlier that in prehomicide writings, Patsy consistently used the manuscript “a,” but posthomicide, it disappeared from her samples of writing. This was a major find, for it looked as if she was consciously changing her lettering. She had more handwriting styles than a class of sixth graders and was seemingly able to change as easily as turning on and off different computer fonts.

I thought about how big a mistake it had been to provide the defense lawyers with a copy of the note. A suspect could study it prior to giving writing samples and consciously avoid certain characteristics, such as the style of writing the first letter of the alphabet.

The Colorado Bureau of Investigation, after studying several of Patsy’s handwriting exemplars, noted “evidence which indicates the questioned handwritten note may have been written by [Patricia Ramsey], but the evidence falls short of that necessary to support a definite conclusion.” Chet Ubowski of the CBI, who was being asked to make the call of a lifetime, couldn’t do it with courtroom certainty. Privately, however, Ubowski, who had made the early discovery that Patsy’s handwriting was consistent with the ransom note on twenty-four of the twenty-six alphabet letters, had recently told one detective, “I believe she wrote it.”

Ubowski also pointed out that the tablet contained only seven fingerprints in all: five belonging to Patsy, one from the police sergeant who handled the pad, and one from a laboratory examiner.

To me, the evidence was mounting. There was only one person who looked good as the author of the note, whose pen and pad were used to write it, and whom we could place in the home at the time of the murder—Patsy Ramsey—and the DA’s office still would not call her a suspect.