JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (24 page)

The problem was demonstrated once again when I called Trip DeMuth about our handwriting find from Nedra Paugh and found the prosecutor unimpressed. “She probably doesn’t want to make her ‘a’ like that anymore because she knows we are looking at her handwriting and the ransom note,” he said.

“Yes, Trip,” I agreed. “You’re probably right.” I hung up the phone very gently to keep from throwing it against the wall. How could someone simultaneously understand and misunderstand that important point?

Detective Gosage and I went out for dinner in Atlanta and sought solace in a few beers while surrounded by a crowd of normal people with normal lives. We wondered whether our own lives would ever be normal again. This case changed everyone it touched.

Rain slammed down in sheets as we drove to the Ramseys’ old home in Northridge, where the baby footprints of newborn JonBenét were imbedded in a cement patio. I got out of the car and stood in the pouring rain, feeling crushed by the futility of chasing the killer of this little girl. “God,” I asked silently, “please help us.”

We finally got to speak with Lucinda Ramsey Johnson and her daughter, Melinda, but the interviews were in the twenty-fifth-floor office of attorney Jim Jenkins and turned out to be a farce. We made a previous agreement on conditions for the interview, but now Jenkins informed us that there were “ground rules.” We were not allowed to ask anything about John Ramsey, and our time would be limited.

We spoke first to Melinda, who added the names of multiple friends who had stayed in the Boulder house overnight, including some who had slept in JonBenét’s room. I wanted to shout, “Why didn’t you tell us this months ago?” Anyone who had slept in the very bed of the victim could potentially be the source of the unidentified pubic hair.

The interview with Lucinda was almost useless. We managed to pin down that the suitcase found in the basement had been with the family for some time, which meant it wasn’t hauled in by an intruder. She, too, added more names to the mushrooming roster of overnight guests in the Boulder house, some of whom had stayed in JonBenét’s bedroom. Their whereabouts were unknown, she said.

But anytime we mentioned her first ex-husband, she would glance over at her lawyer, then reply, “I’m not going to answer any questions about John Ramsey.” The interview lasted only twenty minutes, when we had enough questions for twenty hours. Gosage closed his notebook in disgust.

On our way out, Lucinda tried to hand us a large stuffed rabbit and a bag of other items that people had left at JonBenét’s grave because they might be “clues.” “Mail it,” I told her. They wanted us to look at garbage but wouldn’t answer vital questions. More wasted time, more wasted effort. The killer of JonBenét remained at large.

I went outside the office tower in downtown Atlanta and stood in the sunshine as angry as I had ever been. These people seemed to have something higher on their value scale than the life of a child.

The DA’s investigators, Lou Smit and Steve Ainsworth, claimed that they could now place a stun gun in the hands of their unknown intruder. We would spend months proving to our satisfaction that it simply did not exist, but they wouldn’t give up on the idea.

Smit and Ainsworth concluded from studying photographs of the body that some of the abrasions were marks left by the prongs of a stun gun. When they asked the coroner about it, the answer was “Sure, anything is possible.” With that, they began to consider whether the child’s body should be disinterred so the skin around the marks could be tested.

Experts engaged by the police concluded there was no stun gun involved at all, but the DA’s team never relinquished their claim that such an exotic weapon was used to subdue JonBenét.

Back in Boulder, Linda Arndt was a happy detective. She had won a victim’s assistance award in April and came into the SitRoom to show off a vase of beautiful flowers, which she said were from “John and Patsy.” She turned and left immediately, and Detective Jane Harmer looked at me in disbelief. “What the fuck was that all about?” she asked. Detectives normally do not receive flowers from suspects.

The weekly meetings of the leadership in the police department and the DA’s office became so acrimonious that Commander Eller said they were nothing but occasions to see “who could bring the most guns to the table and outshout each other.”

We felt the DA would never aggressively pursue the Ramseys, and they resented us not buying into the “trust-building” strategy that would enable Pete Hofstrom to “work his magic.” In my opinion, all his magic had done was to help the Ramseys disappear.

PART THREE

ROCKY ROAD TO NOWHERE

17

Negotiations to arrange police interviews with the Ramseys continued through March and April, and when agreement was reached, in my opinion the DA’s office had given away the store.

It was not that we were without leverage, because the Ramseys were being hammered by an international press corps for not cooperating with us. One of the first things prosecutors can do when a subject refuses to talk is to compel them to appear before a grand jury. But under the Fifth Amendment a suspect cannot be forced to testify. So sometimes prosecutors will try to negotiate an interview.

While it was totally appropriate for Deputy DA Pete Hofstrom to be working with the Ramsey attorneys to arrange a meeting between the detectives and their clients, I felt that his “trust building” strategy and evidence sharing in this clearly adversarial situation were steering the case right off the cliff.

Sergeant Wickman outlined the specific conditions to us at a breakfast meeting, giving us instant indigestion. Each parent would be interviewed for two hours only, with a two-hour break between, during which they could talk to their lawyers. The interview would be held at the office of one of their attorneys and take place in only two days. The attorneys would be present, the questioning would be limited, it would not be videotaped, and they would be supplied with all their prior statements. And I was not to be one of the questioners.

“Well, what do you guys think?” Wickman asked.

“What the fuck should we think? This is totally absurd,” I said.

“Hofstrom thought he negotiated a pretty good deal,” Wickman stated.

If the goal was to stay friendly with Team Ramsey, then it was a great deal. For the police, it was a disaster. We would never allow such luxuries to the parents of a poor kid killed in the projects, so why should we coddle these people?

No, we told Wickman. Absolutely not.

We might as well have said nothing. At the afternoon briefing we learned that the police documents had been released early that morning, before we were informed. Not only did the prior statements go over, but so did the official reports of Officer Rick French, Sergeant Bob Whitson, and Detectives Fred Patterson, Linda Arndt, and myself. Those documents specified what we had said, done, and observed and were utterly priceless, far above and beyond what we had been told had been requested.

It gave the defense lawyers an incredible windfall of information and did irreparable damage to the case.

The entire Q-and-A had been undermined. We would now be questioning a couple of intelligent, well-coached people who could study as if preparing for a high school test.

We were in free fall, and the ground was coming up fast.

Then they dropped the other shoe. Team Ramsey would also get to examine the actual ransom note, receive exact one-to-one copies of both the ransom note and the practice note, and get photographic negatives of important evidence pictures.

When we protested to Deputy DA DeMuth about the treasure trove being given away, he responded, “They’ll get it anyway if they are ever charged.” So wait until someone is charged, I said.

I considered it an act of treason and refused to participate in handing it over. I just couldn’t do it. My defiance would be duly noted, and I didn’t care. While Detective Trujillo was in the lobby giving the material to defense lawyer Patrick Burke, Detective Arndt came up and gave Burke a hug.

Then the defense attorneys were allowed inside the Boulder Police Department to examine the actual ligature and garrote that killed JonBenét. I watched, sick inside, and Sergeant Wickman bellowed in protest, “You’re giving the fucking murder weapon to the suspects!” In my opinion, Team Ramsey was being allowed to loot our Property and Evidence Room.

There was one last terrible surprise in store.

Deputy DA Pete Hofstrom told the Ramseys with great sorrow that they had been treated “unfairly” and then added, “We have nothing to indicate you are involved in this crime.” Then he suggested that the Ramseys propose the interview conditions.

John Ramsey casually waved his hand and said, “We’ll cooperate.”

Easy decision.

Detective Melissa Hickman plopped into a SitRoom chair and flipped her tablet onto her desk with weary resignation. She had just been at the office of the district attorney and seen one of the Ramsey attorneys in the conference room, the depository of the most sensitive and confidential information in our case. The defense lawyer should not have been allowed anywhere near an area that was supposedly so off-limits that the DA was calling it his “War Room.”

Hickman reported that Lou Smit had handed the defense lawyer a card of condolence and asked that it be forwarded to “John and Patsy.”

Chief Koby, just back from a vacation mountain biking and skiing in Taos, New Mexico, popped his head into the SitRoom. “Got it cracked?” he asked.

Three FBI agents from the Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit who came to Boulder to advise us on the interviews termed the conditions “ridiculous.” All control had been lost, and the proposed interviews would be useless, they said. Had the same thing happened within an FBI bureau, they said, there would be “thunder rolling down the halls.”

The Ramseys could stall for two hours, then walk away and tell the media they had cooperated, the CASKU guys said. Like most of America, the FBI wondered what the hell was going on in Boulder.

“The case is not being handled well,” said the CASKU agents.

The Intruder Theory? Absurd.

Hofstrom? Needs to act like a prosecutor, not a public defender.

Tomorrow’s interview? Don’t do it.

Grand jury? As soon as possible.

We canceled the interviews, backed by an FBI news release stating that the conditions “were inconsistent with sound investigative practices.”

When Team Ramsey protested, as expected, DA Alex Hunter and Chief Koby crawled back with a letter blaming an “unfortunate miscommunication.”

They sent along an alternate set of conditions, which was not too far from the Ramseys’ original list. There would be separate interviews but within a single day. Talks would be recorded by audio but not video, and detectives designated by the police department would conduct the interviews. Pete Hofstrom would be in the room. To get them to the table, the deal was accepted, which meant I would get a shot at questioning them, and even under the dubious conditions, I looked forward to the opportunity. Maybe I might be able to pry something loose.

Sergeant Wickman took the CASKU team over to the DA’s office for a courtesy call, and when they returned, one said, “I have a new appreciation of what you are up against.”

One FBI agent said that CASKU offered their expertise and made grand jury suggestions, but “they didn’t even listen to us.” Trip DeMuth telephoned me at home that night to say he thought the FBI agents were “a presumptuous bunch.”

I knew the interviews would be a one-shot chance. Once the Ramseys walked out, we wouldn’t be seeing them again.

Pete Hofstrom urged me to be “soft and comfortable” with John and Patsy, for “they might want to work with us.”

I guess he wanted me to ask tough questions like “What’s it like living in Atlanta? Hot and humid, I bet, huh?”

But I had conducted many interrogations, and I knew this one was going to be the hardest of them all. The most difficult thing in police work is to obtain a murder confession, and I damned well knew one was not going to come during this silly fishbowl interview. One-on-one in an interview room the day the body was found, I might have had a chance to have gotten an acknowledgment of some involvement, but not here and now, with a bunch of lawyers hanging on every word.

I spent hours examining every piece of evidence, every photograph, every officer’s report.

A picture taken at the Whites’ dinner party on Christmas night caught my eye, and something nagged at my memory. Then it came to me—Patsy was wearing a red turtleneck sweater and black pants in the picture. I found in an interview with Rick French that he said the morning of December 26 she was wearing a red turtleneck and black pants. She was wearing the same damned clothes! Had she been up all night in them? I wondered.

This woman, to whom looking good appeared always so important that she had a closet filled with designer clothes, had attended a party, come home late, put her children to bed, gone to sleep herself, arose early to fly across the country, put on fresh makeup and fixed her hair, and then put on the same clothes she had worn the previous night? Not likely, in my opinion. When I mentioned it the next day to Trip DeMuth, he remarked, “So she wore the same clothes two days in a row. Big deal.”

Maybe it wasn’t for him, but to a former Miss America contestant?

18

The interviews with Patsy and John Ramsey produced no earthshaking revelations. Having had the opportunity to study police reports, and with their lawyers and experts crawling all over evidence that should never have been shared, I felt the parents were about as well rehearsed as actors taking the stage. But at the end of the day, I concluded that as investigators, we had reached our goal—we had established probable cause. And when Patsy Ramsey left that room, I believe she could have been in handcuffs and charged with involvement in the death of JonBenét.