JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (28 page)

The following day John Eller advised the city manager and the head of the CBI of what he was going to do, then asked Hunter for a private meeting. As the two men walked along Boulder Creek, Eller told the district attorney that information might have been stolen from the breached computer and that the cops thought Hunter’s office was responsible. Eller told me later that the district attorney offered no denial, only a “Hmmm, do what you have to do.”

Then Detective Trujillo brought us some good news and some bad news. He had never entered the DNA results into his computer, so that was safe, and he had electronically hidden my Master Affidavit, which also contained the information. But now his ZIP drive, which contained the backup of the case file, had also gone missing. This was turning into a
Spy vs. Spy
episode.

CBI agents investigated Computergate, and we underwent videotaped questioning. I responded with “Absolutely” when asked to take a polygraph. Investigators even searched Trip DeMuth’s home computer.

Several days later, it all started going south on us when Detective Trujillo found the missing ZIP drive. He had simply misplaced it.

Chief Koby then voluntarily handed Hunter the DNA secrets that we had so zealously guarded and told Commander Eller to apologize to the district attorney. Eller refused. Koby, who had originally backed the investigation, now abandoned the commander. “How could you do this?” Koby asked.

The chief and the DA then sought to have all the CBI interview tapes made during the computer breach investigation destroyed because “people let their hair down.” That was tantamount to destroying evidence in an official investigation, and Eller protested, “I can’t believe this is even being considered.” A press release went out that announced the Colorado Bureau of Investigation determined there was an equipment problem and absolved the DA’s office of any involvement.

Eller had been on borrowed time because of his dogged insistence on treating the case like a serious murder investigation, but after accusing the DA of a burglary that couldn’t be proved, the commander became the fall guy for the entire investigation.

The internal Computergate probe died in that final conference. The CBI agent eventually suggested that the problem was merely a malfunction, perhaps just “a microscopic bump.”

But our computer guy, Al Alvarado, never wavered in his conclusion and said a CBI agent confirmed to him that there had been an unauthorized breach but that instructions had come down to issue a formal statement that said otherwise.

It was a cover-up.

Meanwhile, our
Twilight Zone
existence continued in the War Room.

• Pete Hofstrom, wearing a Do Not Disturb sweatband around his bald head, asked if the labs had made a call on the handwriting and said he needed the information because Team Ramsey wanted to respond to an East Coast newspaper.

• I found the shelves of the steel cabinets in the War Room almost empty. “Where the hell are our notebooks?” I yelled, throwing up my hands in total shock. We found the notebooks containing all the details of our case, many of them open, strewn across the DA’s conference table before Alex Hunter and Lou Smit, who were having their pictures taken for a magazine. Our case files had become props for a Hunter photo shoot.

• Lou Smit, whom I considered thoroughly compromised because of his unwavering commitment to the Ramseys, met privately with the Ramseys at 755 Fifteenth Street and prayed with them inside his van. He later announced that he would never participate in their indictment or arrest.

I drove to the nearby War Room for a scheduled briefing. Lou Smit was the only one there, and he confronted me with a tone I had never heard from him before. “Do you got a problem with me?”

I stood up, and we were nose to nose and arguing hard. I insisted he was damaging the case with so many unproved theories about what might have happened.

“There is nothing to indicate their involvement, and I’ll write my reports that way,” he stormed.

“It’s outright sabotage,” I responded.

He said the DA’s office was lining up experts to counter our experts and prove that a stun gun was used. Talk about a united front. “So, you got a problem?” he shouted.

“Yeah,” I shouted back. “You!” I blasted him for polluting the file. “If we had the same evidence against anyone else that we have against Patsy Ramsey
right now
, their ass would be in jail.”

For the only time in our months together, I felt that if Lou were twenty years younger, we would have come to blows. I was closer to this man than to anyone in the DA’s unit, but we were miles apart philosophically. As tempers quieted, Lou returned to his desk but couldn’t resist one last punch, whispering over his shoulder, “Wickman’s on our side.”

Despite our differences, I still respected Smit. On many nights we sat alone in the War Room debating our conflicting theories. We argued without letup, but neither of us wavered. He did not care for the picture of convicted child-slayer Susan Smith that a detective had tacked on a wall, and detested the screen-saver on one computer that continuously scrolled the brightly lettered sentence THE RAMSEYS ARE THE KILLAS … THE RAMSEYS ARE THE KILLAS …

A month and a half after moving into the War Room, we could take it no longer. I bought thirty heavy-duty four-inch-wide binders, picked up Detective Ron Gosage, and set off to the War Room on a Saturday night to “borrow” the case file for a few hours. Through a pager code, Detective Jane Harmer let us know the coast was clear. We were in and out of there just as fast as we could load the folders into my Mustang.

I had hatched a deal with the manager of Kinko’s copy shop so we could duplicate about twenty thousand pages late that night. We would put the copies in the police department and return the originals to the DA’s office. In very careful words, Sergeant Wickman had obliquely told me that we would need a copy of the case file in the police department if we ever pulled out of the War Room. So while okaying the project, he avoided knowing the details.

Working like fiends on high-speed machines, Gosage and I copied thousands and thousands of pages, tore open reams of paper, punched tens of thousands of holes, and slowly assembled a duplicate file, looking over our shoulders and wondering what our excuse could be if someone from the DA’s office walked in. “Screw ’em,” Gosage said. “This is our case.”

It was hard not to stop and read, for we kept finding material we had never seen before, such as potential “points of entry” for an intruder and diagrams suggesting “open” doors. I kept wondering why was this shit in the official files? Didn’t the DA’s investigators realize the potential damage? Don’t think, just copy, copy, copy.

After midnight Bob Keatley marched in and put the entire charge on his personal credit card. “Might look better this way,” he said. Keatley explained that we had the legal right to copy our own files, but I still felt as if I was involved with the likes of G. Gordon Liddy and Bob Haldeman. We finished at 2 A.M., and in the dark of night we returned the originals to the steel cabinet, then locked our new file up tight in the police department. Except for periodic briefings, I never went back to the War Room.

20

The Ramseys vanished right before our eyes. After their interviews and the following press conference, they ducked behind their shield of attorneys and public relations spinners. To me, they were almost taunting the police. Since their lawyers had been given nearly all our evidence by the DA’s office, they knew what they were facing and had reason to be confident that any future discoveries would also be passed along. And when we didn’t move on probable cause, Team Ramsey had to know we wouldn’t move at all.

John and Patsy Ramsey spent the summer at their lakeside house in Michigan, where Patsy cooked a batch of warm cupcakes for the Charlevoix cops. We were left behind to fight among ourselves.

And we did. An airport meeting with Dr. Henry Lee, the forensics specialist working for the DA’s office, fell into shambles. Instead of getting further insight into the evidence, Lee was exasperated at the ill will between us and the DA’s office. To our chagrin, he likened our bickering to the backroom fights he watched while working on the O. J. Simpson case. Lee said he did not know what his role was in Boulder, did not like what his friends were saying about his involvement in the Ramsey case, did not know what District Attorney Alex Hunter wanted from him, did not have a crystal ball with which to solve the crime, and would not be made to look like a fool in court. Lee snapped at Hunter, “Captain this ship.”

The ship truly was without a captain. Boulder city manager Tim Honey was fired, Mayor Leslie Durgin was leaving at the end of her term, and several top bureaucrats were dismissed or quit. The leaderless city was in turmoil as Councilman Bob Greenlee, enjoying mini-fame as a frequent talking head on Ramsey panel shows, became mayor.

I still felt that the house on Fifteenth Street was a central character in the mystery of JonBenét Ramsey’s death. Both the DA’s office and the police wanted to go back into it, but for different reasons. I wanted to re-create and document John Ramsey’s improbable description of how he found the body, while Deputy DA Trip DeMuth wanted to look for “new evidence” that would substantiate his Intruder Theory. Why DeMuth expected there would be anything left to find was beyond me. Team Ramsey private investigators, defense lawyers, painters, carpenters, and cleaners had scoured the place for four months, and you can’t pull old evidence from new paint. Police wanted entry through a search warrant, but the DA’s office and the Ramseys agreed to a consent-to-search. That was promptly heralded in the next day’s paper as the Ramseys’ continued cooperation with authorities.

The house occupied a prime half-acre on University Hill and had undergone considerable additions and remodeling since it was built in 1927. It sprawled over most of the lot, and the classy red brick Tudor front masked an ugly California stucco rear. In all there were almost 7,000 square feet of living space in the three-story, million-dollar house that Patsy’s mother, Nedra, called “a hell-hole.”

The smell of fresh paint was strong when I returned for another look on July 2, 1997, and with most of the furniture removed the place seemed much less gaudy than I remembered.

I ascended the main staircase near the front door, passed a second-floor landing, and emerged on the top floor, a converted 1,500-square-foot attic that was the master bedroom suite of John and Patsy Ramsey. The stairs ended just opposite the bed. High ceilings, expensive curtains over large arched windows, a photograph of Patsy and Burke on one wall, a painting of flowers over the fireplace mantel. Detective Gosage was toying with the electronic control that lowered an eightfoot movie screen from the ceiling. There were no personal effects or clothing, and the drawers were empty. It looked like a furniture showroom.

Half the top floor was taken up by the parents’ individual dressing rooms and bathrooms. I took Lou Smit into the cavernous closet that Patsy Ramsey had once filled with designer clothing and argued how unlikely it was for such a woman to wear the same outfit on two consecutive days. He shrugged.

The second staircase, the one Patsy said she descended on the morning of December 26, started nearby, and I went down to the second floor. From that landing the stairway changed to the spiral staircase that led to the first floor.

The middle level was called the children’s floor and was divided by a large playroom. Burke Ramsey’s room was dominated by a big wooden propeller from one of his grandfather’s aircraft hanging on the east wall. Next door was the room of his stepsister, Melinda. It contained a wicker rocking chair that had been in the family for four generations.

At the other end of the floor was John Andrew’s room, to which Patsy had retreated during her cancer therapy.

The common landing that separated John Andrew’s room from the spacious bedroom of JonBenét was bordered by a counter, sink, and cabinets. It was one of those overhead cabinets that had been open, with a package of pull-up diapers hanging halfway out of it, on the night JonBenét was killed. A washer-dryer combination was stacked next to the spiral staircase. Housekeeper Linda Hoffmann-Pugh said she would often find JonBenét’s bed stripped of sheets that were already in the washer when she arrived.

JonBenét’s room had once been the fanciful canvas of a professional designer but now was only empty space. The antique English burl walnut beds were gone, as was the corner cabinet that had been hand-carved on the theme of the cat and the fiddle and a cow jumping over the moon. A mural showing the child’s love of hats had vanished beneath a new coat of cream-colored paint. The closets were empty, the trophies removed, the carpeting was replaced. At the rear were two doors, one into her bathroom and the other out to a small balcony.

I leaned against a wall and visualized it as it was last Christmas. The dresser in the corner, the beautiful tree with angel ornaments, the portrait with the innocent smile, kid stuff all over the floor. What a life she would have had.

In her bathroom I examined every item—the faucets, the side of the tub, the countertop where the rolled-up red turtleneck was found, everything—trying to imagine what surface could have crushed her skull. I walked to where her bed had been and pretended, as the intruder, to scoop her into my arms. It was difficult to close the door behind me, but the intruder would have done so, because Patsy said she had to push it open that morning. I descended the spiral stairs to the first floor with my eyes closed, imagining the trek in darkness while carrying a child either unconscious or fighting, knowing the parents were asleep upstairs and her brother was just down the hall. Each footstep had to be taken so carefully that I thought the whole scenario impossible.

I repeated the experiment by going down the main staircase, but that would have meant passing Burke’s bedroom and coming closer to the parents asleep upstairs. Not a likely path. In either event I would have ended up at the head of the basement staircase, trying to find the odd light switch that was on the wall behind me, not inside the door where one would expect it to be.