JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (27 page)

No new ground was likely to be broken in such an orchestrated meeting. Patsy wagged a finger at the camera and said two knew who killed her daughter, the killer and someone the killer had told. She warned, “We will find you.” Her husband looked sternly into the camera and echoed the threat: “We will find you. I have that as the sole mission for the rest of my life.”

I didn’t have to listen to their words, for the real message was visual. As soon as I saw Patsy, it made sense why this time had been set up for television so quickly. The day before, I had surprised them with our knowledge that the clothes she was wearing on the morning of December 26 were the same she had worn to the Christmas party the previous night. This indicated that she had not changed clothes, and possibly had not even gone to bed that night. My guess was that she had been up all night, dealing with the death of JonBenét.

Today, on television, she wore the identical ensemble she had on during the interview—blue suit with white trim, white sweater, even the silver angel pin on her lapel. I could almost hear a defense attorney’s question at trial:
Detective Thomas
,
what was Mrs. Ramsey wearing.
… . ?

What little morale was left in the Boulder Police Department was crushed on the first weekend of May, when the area around the University of Colorado erupted in three nights of rioting. Firefighters and police officers were assaulted by more than a thousand rioters with a blizzard of debris and Molotov cocktails, and although SWAT teams said they could end it in thirty minutes, Chief Koby would not allow a response, even as he watched his officers fall. After that, he was useless as a leader.

Koby walked into the crowd on the second night, waving his hands like a messiah, and they ridiculed and spat on him. By the third night, there was no law on University Hill, as city leaders surrendered to mob rule.

I was not on the line but watched in disbelief as the police department took on the look of a hospital emergency room. Scores of cops were injured, and the skull of a friend of mine was crushed by a thrown cinder block. Another angry, bandaged cop told me, “We’re getting goddamn murdered out there.”

In the midst of the furor, John Andrew Ramsey stumbled out of an alley, appearing intoxicated. Spotting a familiar face among the SWAT team officers, he called out, “Ron!” An astonished Detective Ron Gosage shook the kid’s hand and told him to leave the area. John Andrew agreed and sauntered away, saying, “I got enough problems of my own.”

At the end of the month, our union gave Chief Koby a no-confidence vote, and he distanced himself even further from the additional controversy of the Ramsey case.

At the end of May we hit the boiler room operation in Denver that was the source of the calls made by the phony “John Ramsey” to McGuckin’s Hardware back in January. It was launched by my search warrant handled by Deputy DA Trip DeMuth, who apparently had no problem authorizing warrants that were not directed at the Ramseys.

Touch Tone Information Acquisition, Inc., sold private information on people, including cops, to anyone who would buy it, such as the supermarket tabloids. Home addresses, names of wives and kids, credit bureau reports, bank statements, and unlisted telephone and pager numbers were all for sale. Touch Tone was pulling in more than $1.5 million a year for their information, and a prisoner had tipped us that a Boulder cop was among those selling data and that there had been an attempt to purchase the ransom note. We could not ignore such serious allegations.

Among the dossiers we found on celebrities, cops, and business executives in several cities—including Boulder detectives—were the very things the DA had been blocking us from obtaining: the Ramseys’ long-distance telephone and itemized credit card records. But our legal adviser Bob Keatley jerked them from our hands, saying the credit cards had been specified only as a target of the Touch Tone warrant, and we could not use them in another investigation.

He was right, but you can’t unring a bell. I walked around for days thinking of what I had seen on those records from hardware stores and marine supply outlets in various states. Such places sell duct tape and cord like that used in the murder. But the Touch Tone material went into the Boulder Police Department’s evidence storage, where it sat useless right under our noses, and we couldn’t touch it. It might as well have been stored on the moon.

Our DA’s office did nothing further with Touch Tone, and DeMuth waved it off with another “So what?” But selling private data on detectives and undercover cops was extremely dangerous, and we later learned that undercover cops with the Los Angeles Police Department had been compromised by Touch Tone. Two years later, prosecutors from neighboring Jefferson County, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, and the Federal Trade Commission built on my original warrant and grabbed Touch Tone’s owners, James and Regana Rapp, on felony racketeering charges.

On the final night of May, I got a taste of the damage that could result from selling personal information on Boulder detectives and was angry that our DA didn’t care.

I live in a small neighborhood at the edge of farming country, a place where people are caring and things are quiet, but when I stepped outside my house about eleven o’clock, I tripped over a cat that had been killed, mutilated, and thrown onto my lawn. The garden hose was sliced, my wife’s flower garden shredded.

Ten days earlier, Sergeant Bob Whitson, who retrieved the ransom note tablet on December 26, was in his home when two shots from a high-powered rifle shattered his bedroom window and narrowly missed him. A third shot drilled through a wall, then a fourth struck the house as Whitson dove to a closet floor, grabbed his weapon and a phone, and dialed 911. Whoever had fired the shots vanished.

Detective Linda Arndt, who rarely carried her gun, telephoned me several times during the investigation, plainly frightened. On one occasion blood was splashed on her front door, and another time she was concerned about a prowler.

There was no follow-up by the police department, which apparently regarded bullets, blood, and dead cats as minor. No stakeouts, no investigation. It was damned difficult to ignore attacks on three detectives deeply involved in the Ramsey investigation as being coincidental and unrelated.

Chief Tom Koby and District Attorney Alex Hunter came up with a very Boulder solution to resolving the differences between our offices. We would sit down with a mediator and reason together. It didn’t have a prayer of success.

We gathered in a fourth-floor conference room at the University of Colorado for what were termed the SALT talks, as if nuclear proliferation, and not cooperation to catch a killer, was the topic. “We’re married and can’t get divorced,” Hunter told the group, reminding us that soon we would all be moving into the Criminal Justice Center, working side by side in what he called his War Room. The only war would be among the people in there.

The detectives complained about the constant drumbeat of damaging media leaks, the lack of prosecutorial vigor, and the rupture of trust. The DA’s office charged that we were concentrating too narrowly on the Ramseys. When Trip DeMuth said he wanted “an enthusiastic investigation of the intruder,” Alex Hunter said DeMuth was “making too much” of that subject. DeMuth rolled his eyes and turned away.

The district attorney then declared, “I have no confidence in my people on issues surrounding the media.” It was my opinion that the “law enforcement” sources always quoted by the press were in the DA’s office, not the police department. Hofstrom challenged Hunter about leaking news to reporters himself. It was not a good day for the DA in terms of respect from his subordinates.

The mediation accomplished absolutely nothing.

On June 3 the detectives were transferred to the War Room, on the ground floor of the Justice Center, about two miles from the police department. It was as if we were stepping into a blindside ambush, and we all knew it was a sham. But since $36,000 was spent to create the working space and the DA wanted to show a unified front—
We’re working the case!—
there we were.

The DA’s investigators, Steve Ainsworth and Lou Smit, were at desks on one side of the room. Detectives Gosage, Harmer, Trujillo, and I stayed on the other, while Sergeant Tom Wickman took a desk in a private office beside Deputy DA DeMuth.

Only authorized personnel were allowed inside, or so we thought. To enter, you pressed an identification card flat against a scanning device that unlocked the only door and recorded your personal code. But since the room was in the same building as the offices of the district attorney, we were concerned about the security of the files, notes, and computers, which had been moved from the police department Situation Room.

I found a couple of red binders on the shelves among our white case notebooks. I pulled one down, started to read, and couldn’t believe my eyes. They were the compiled reports of Ainsworth and Smit and documented that more evidence had been released to Team Ramsey without our knowledge, that the two DA investigators were conducting an independent investigation without telling us, and that they were filing reports about what was said by the detectives behind closed doors during strategy sessions. Lou Smit was talking privately with Patsy Ramsey. He was writing about stun guns, sex offenders, flashlights, and exhumation. They had shown photo lineups of ex-cons and drifters to the Ramseys. What the hell was all this?

Although neither Smit nor Ainsworth was a handwriting expert, one report noted that a suspect’s handwriting contained “similarities … to the ransom note.” It appeared to me that anything that would bolster the Intruder Theory was logged. Once logged, it was part of the case file and would eventually be open to discovery by a defense attorney. Wild and independent speculation should never be in a case file.

When we complained to Alex Hunter, he claimed that he was “kept in the dark on a lot of this.”

The tension in the War Room was so high that Sergeant Wickman lost his temper and kicked over a chair when a fax arrived that showed DeMuth had not consulted him before giving further orders about testing the ransom note.

It was just a sign of things to come.

Only a few days into the new working space, the police computer containing preliminary DNA results and other case information was broken into, and we accused the district attorney’s people of being behind it. A separate investigation then began that ended in what I considered a political cover-up close to an obstruction of justice.

When the preliminary DNA results came back from the CellMark labs, we logged them away in Detective Tom Trujillo’s computer in the high-security War Room. That early report was very ambiguous. We would get a more thorough briefing in five months and would hold this early material as confidential.

Since we did not trust the DA’s office with sensitive information, we kept it from them, and Pete Hofstrom began to gripe that he
had to have
the DNA results. “Little fucker pouts when I don’t tell him,” Wickman said.

When a newspaper reported that the district attorney’s office had not been provided with the data, Alex Hunter called Commander John Eller, who questioned why Hunter had to respond to the media at all.

“I can’t dodge it,” Hunter replied. “I’d like to sanitize this thing.”

“Just tell them the BPD investigators are in possession of the results.”

“But why aren’t we [the DA’s office] in possession?” He paused, maybe remembering all that had leaked from his office. He changed the subject. “I hope [the War Room] will be productive. I’m optimistic. My people are ready to go.”

“I’d like to think so,” said Eller. “My cops have never lost focus.”

“Our goal is to get this case solved,” said Hunter, and Eller couldn’t resist the opening.

“Really? Have you been down there? DeMuth is going behind our backs to CBI, and the reports your investigators are putting in the case file are insane.”

Hunter predicted that if the people in the War Room could not get along, “We are going to get eaten A-fucking-live.”

In a second call that day, the district attorney bemoaned the DNA incident as the “first major crack in the public impression that we are not working together.” He asked Eller to at least confide the DNA results to Pete Hofstrom, who “keeps things from me and has done so for years.” Then he could tell the press in truth that the DA’s office had the results.

“I don’t trust Pete, and it’s not appropriate,” Eller replied, remembering Hofstrom’s involvement in the “ransom the body” episode that caused so much trouble at the start of the case.

Hunter played a political card. “The city council will now have a reason to take Koby to task. Councilman [Bob] Greenlee and those birdbrains will do this.”

“Koby was part of this decision,” Eller said, and the second conversation ended. Two more calls followed on that Friday afternoon, the final one a shouting, cursing demand by the district attorney. Eller still refused.

On Monday morning I found a furious Ron Gosage and Al Alvarado, our computer expert, in the War Room. Someone had breached the computer over the weekend. Alvarado said Trujillo’s password had been overridden, and the documents on the hard drive were compromised. The hacker could not restore it to the original state, so he just put it back together and left. Our entire evidence file, including the new DNA results, was in jeopardy.

Eller was advised that the card scanner had denied an attempt to enter the room over the weekend and that the denied card belonged to Deputy DA Mary Keenan. It is possible someone else used her key. It was also possible that someone who had been escorted into the War Room on Friday had stayed behind, because the card scanner only recorded entries, not exits. Among those people was a computer expert from the DA’s office.

A few days later, a Colorado Bureau of Investigation expert said the problem was not due to a lapsed battery, power surge, or lightning strike and that a computer chip had been bypassed. Commander Eller called Chief Koby, who was vacationing in Texas, to inform him that we wanted an investigation. Koby approved but asked that Alex Hunter be given an opportunity to respond. The chief later denied sanctioning the investigation.