JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (26 page)

John Ramsey said he read for a bit and took an over-the-counter melatonin to help him fall asleep about 10:30. He heard no suspicious sounds that night.

Did Patsy shower and dress that next morning [December 26]? we asked. “Well, she got up, I mean she was downstairs, I don’t remember if she took a shower or not, she was, I think she was dressed when I saw her first.”

His recall of the ransom note was infuriatingly imprecise. “Did she show you the note on the landing?”

“I don’t remember.”

He said he grabbed it and laid it on the floor to better read it “really fast without having to sit and read it.” The visual image was disturbing to me. Why spread such an important document on the floor, which meant he would have had to get down on his hands and knees to read it? And if he grabbed it, as he said, why weren’t his fingerprints on the note? His answers only reinforced the mystery.

We walked him through events after the police arrived. Ramsey said that Detective Linda Arndt had suggested he and Fleet White look through the house. Then, when I asked about the trip to the basement, he revealed the biggest piece of new information of the day.

Ramsey said he checked Burke’s train room, where he and Fleet discussed the broken window. He then added, “I’d actually gone down there earlier that morning, and the window was broken, but I didn’t see any glass around, so I assumed it was broken last summer. I used that window to get in the house one time when I didn’t have a key, but the window was open, I don’t know, maybe an inch, and I just kind of latched it.”

What?
I had to work to keep my face neutral, for while he was describing the broken window, he had also admitted going down to the basement alone and unseen
before
he went down with Fleet White and found the body.

I pushed on that. “Fleet had talked about earlier being down there alone and discovering that window. When you say that you found it earlier that day and latched it, at what time?”

“I don’t know, probably before ten.”

Just about when Detective Arndt lost track of him and thought he had left to get the mail. Now he admits being in the basement!

He then described going to the little cellar room on the subsequent trip downstairs with Fleet White, unlatching and opening the white door. He snapped his fingers and said, “It was instant, I mean, as soon as I opened the door I saw the white blanket … and I knew what was up.” She was on her back on the floor with the white blanket folded around her, her arms were tied, and there was a piece of black tape over her lips, he said, and her head was cocked to one side.

The door opens outward, so he would have had to step back or aside before moving through. He did not say he saw the blanket after turning on the light but “instantly.” Fleet White had stood in that same doorway that morning and could see nothing in the windowless darkness. I had always considered that Ramsey might have known something before he entered, and with this new admission of going to the basement earlier, I was sure of it. By the time he went back downstairs with Fleet White, I thought he knew exactly where the body was.

Nevertheless, his theory was that “someone came in through the basement window, because there was a blue Samsonite suitcase sitting right under the window and he … could have gotten in the house without that, but you couldn’t have gotten out that window without something to step on. Even to have known those windows were there wouldn’t have been obvious to anybody just walking by.” The grate, he added, could be pulled off, and the window was not painted shut.

This was the DA’s Intruder Theory, although it contradicted the events of December 26, when Fleet White said Ramsey shrugged off the open window. Now it had become very important, for the open window pointed toward their intruder. And we knew that Fleet White said he had moved the suitcase, so the intruder had not done that.

Ramsey added that during the morning of December 26, “I went around and I looked around the house that morning and … all the doors were locked and I had checked every door on the first floor … and they appeared to be locked.” To me, if all the doors on the first floor were locked, that meant an intruder would have had to either have a key or enter and exit at some other point, which made the basement window even more important. And the undisturbed dirt and debris on the sill of the basement window, along with the unbroken spiderweb between the metal grate and the wall, demonstrated to me that no one came through that window. In my opinion, there was no intruder.

Both the Ramseys’ answers when asked whether they had reviewed the police reports were astonishing. Patsy said, “We got them, but I didn’t read them, I don’t think.” John Ramsey said he only “scanned them.” I turned that over in my mind: Your child is murdered, you hire a top dollar legal team and believe the police are trying to frame you, but you are not interested enough to do more than “scan” police reports? Most unlikely.

But even with that cursory reading, John Ramsey said he found “errors or misunderstandings.” He said that not only did he not check every door in the house the night before but he did not believe he checked
any
door. Also incorrect was the police notation that Ramsey said he read to the kids before going to bed. “That did not happen. I mean what happened was that the kids went to bed and then I read.”

I asked, “Do you attribute that simply to an officer’s error in recollection, or might you have said that?”

“No, I wouldn’t have said that. I think that maybe the way I said it was misinterpreted. I clearly did not read to the kids that night. JonBenét was asleep, we wanted Burke to get to sleep. We were going to get up early the next morning.”

To believe him now, one would have to believe that three police officers—Officer French, Detective Arndt, and Sergeant Reichenbach—were all mistaken about what Ramsey had told them.

I asked about the infidelity in his first marriage. He identified the woman as Jodi Roberts, who worked for him as a secretary in the late seventies. “I haven’t seen her since then,” he said. “It was certainly one of those things you regret in life. When I heard of the movie
Fatal Attraction,
we didn’t go see it because I think I could have written it.” I considered that to be a very peculiar answer because if Roberts was such a menace, why was he only now supplying her name, when he had given up so many other people, including close friends, as murder suspects? We asked about any other suspects. He mentioned business associates from the eighties, former Access employees, the cleaning lady.

He also put a dent in part of the latest Intruder Theory, in which the DA’s investigator Lou Smit claimed the killer left a scarf behind. Ramsey identified the scarf as a gift from one of his kids. Patsy had said the same thing.

As we neared the end of the interview, Ramsey said, “I’ve seen a lot of effort and time and money being spent trying to categorize Patsy and I as child abusers, and that couldn’t be further from the truth.”

I told him a lot of effort had been made to make the crime look like something it wasn’t. “One theory is that something happened in that house that may have been accidental, that turned to panic, that turned to cover-up.”

“That’s a false theory,” he almost snarled. “Anyone who knows Patsy and I can tell you that is total bullshit.”

“John,” I asked, “are you involved in any way in the death of your daughter?”

“No.”

“John, are you involved in any way in the preparation of that note?”

“No … I will spend every dime I have, every minute of time I have, if that’s what it takes to find who killed her.”

Before concluding each interview, I asked if they would take lie detector tests, and the responses were decisive and totally opposite.

Patsy became the forthright, wrongly blamed victim and snapped, “I don’t know how those work, but if they tell the truth, I’m telling the truth. I’ve never given anybody a reason to think otherwise.”

Does that mean yes, you’d pass it?

“Yes, I would pass it … . I’ll take ten of them. Do whatever you want.”

Now a detective never refuses a suspect who offers to take a polygraph, and we had been using an FBI polygrapher on other suspects. He should have been set up and waiting in the next room for just such an eventuality. But Pete Hofstrom, who didn’t believe in lie detector tests, had told me that if we asked, the Ramseys would “just say no.”

But Patsy Ramsey had just said yes. It was a golden opportunity, and we weren’t allowed to capitalize on it.

John Ramsey appeared ready for the question. “What I’ve been told is that I felt tremendous guilt after we lost JonBenét because I hadn’t protected her. You know, I’d failed as a parent I was told that with that kind of an emotion, you shouldn’t take a lie detector test because you do have that guilt feeling. So I don’t know anything about the test, but I did not kill my daughter, if that’s what you want to ask me. She was the most precious thing to me in the world. So if the lie detector test is correct and it’s done correctly, I would pass it one hundred percent.”

I told him that others had already been polygraphed and then asked point-blank if he would take one. He grew angry, a remarkable attitude change in just one question. “I would be insulted if you asked me to take a polygraph test. Frankly, I mean if you haven’t talked to enough people to tell you what kind of people we are … I will do whatever these guys [indicating his attorneys] recommended me to do, but we are not the kind of people you’re trying to make us out to be. It’s a tragic misdirection I think that you’re on, and the sooner we get off of that, the sooner we’ll find who killed JonBenét.”

In later months, Team Ramsey would insist that the Ramseys had never been asked to take a polygraph. I had asked both of them, and neither ever did.

And that was it. They had marched into the DA’s office with their army and marched right back out again, victorious.

19

The
Colorado Peace Officer’s Handbook
, written by our departmental attorney, Bob Keatley, says that “probable cause” for an arrest exists “When you have sufficient reliable information to believe that under the totality of the circumstances there is a fair probability that the suspect has committed … a crime.” To make the decision, the officer relies upon, among other things, personal observations, past experience, a suspect’s presence at the scene, information from other officers, attempts to avoid detection, and incriminating, contradictory, or evasive answers from the suspect.

We had all of that and a lot more.

If there was one certainty in this entire investigation, it was the nearly unanimous consensus within the law enforcement community that probable cause existed to arrest Patsy Ramsey. I believed that, as did every detective on the investigating squad and our boss Sergeant Tom Wickman, who one day suggested, “The probable cause is there. Maybe the five of us should just go make the arrest.” Commander John Eller believed it, as did Police Chief Tom Koby and his successor, Mark Beckner, who personally told me so.

Chief Koby would also tell me later that District Attorney Alex Hunter thought “from day one that Patsy did it” and that probable cause existed.

There was no doubt at all that we had the elements of probable cause.

But it wasn’t enough, because the DA’s office—which would eventually admit that the Ramseys were “prime suspects” and that enough evidence existed to get a grand jury indictement—changed the rules. When Deputy DA Mary Keenan announced several years later that she was a candidate to succeed Alex Hunter, she mentioned that the history of plea bargaining by his office had eroded the courtroom skills of Hunter’s prosecutors.

That was the catch. There was no prosecutor in Boulder who could take the Ramseys into court, fight off their defense team, and bring the pieces of the puzzle together for a jury. Years of plea bargaining had made them paper tigers. In one case, a woman bought a pistol the day after being separated from her husband, practiced at a firing range, then wrote a will and farewell letters to her children. When her husband came to remove his belongings from the house, she shot him in cold blood, then surrendered to a cop. Detective Kim Stewart and I interviewed the woman, a criminology professor, arrested for the first-degree murder of her husband. Compared with the Ramsey fiasco, this was easy, as she waived her Miranda rights and confessed the premeditated act to Detective Stewart and me. Only four hours after the shots were fired, we had the confession on tape. But Deputy DA Pete Hofstrom began negotiating with the public defender that day, and the killer, instead of facing a death penalty trial, quickly accepted a reduced charge and twenty years.

Now in the Ramsey case they told us there would be no arrest, because we couldn’t yet prove the case “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Therefore their interpretation of BARD became the new standard for the investigation. I felt that the DA’s office was asking on the one hand for a slam-dunk certainty of conviction while on the other hand seemed to be doing everything possible to prevent us from getting it.

But was there any case that they would take? They had an abysmal record in murder trials, had not taken one to court in years, and sure as hell didn’t want this one. Their prayer was for a confession, so they could make a deal and not have to face a jury.

Team Ramsey counterattacked at noon on the day after the interviews, when John and Patsy Ramsey met with seven handpicked reporters from Boulder and Denver. Lawyers stood nearby to make sure that certain topics, such as the death of JonBenét, were not discussed. I wondered why any legitimate journalist would attend such a prearranged performance. The only issue was murder, and they had agreed not to ask about it.

John Ramsey immediately overstepped their own guideline and said, “I did not kill my daughter JonBenét.” Patsy added, “Let me assure you that I did not kill JonBenét and did not have anything to do with this.”