JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (29 page)

The spiral staircase ended at the rear of a small hardwood hallway on the main floor. Patsy said she stepped over the ransom note, which was spread out on the third step from the bottom, then turned around to read it. It was extremely hard to miss any of those steps without falling, and I was doing it in daylight. Patsy’s account wasn’t ringing true to me.

On my right was the garage and the entry through a small mudroom, which the family called the cubby room. Beyond that was a bay-windowed study that matched the shape of JonBenét’s balcony directly above it. Wide windows faced the patio overlooking the garden.

To my left were a hallway table, sink, and countertop. This was where the ransom note tablet had been retrieved. Below the counter was a drawer that had contained rolls of tape: Scotch tape, packaging tape, but not black duct tape. Beyond the counter was a “butler’s kitchen,” out of sight but complete with everything necessary for caterers during a party.

Down the short hall was the main kitchen. The telephone from which the 911 call was made was located in a small recessed nook on the southwest wall. Beneath the phone had been the cup that held the Sharpie pen. How would any stranger know the writing implements were so handy, and why take the time to put it in the cup when he wanted to flee from a murder scene? Why not just leave them on the table when finished writing? Why not bring a completed ransom note with him?

The kitchen, with a restaurant-sized walk-in refrigerator, gas stove-top, convection and microwave ovens, was arranged in an efficient work-flow pattern. Lou Smit wanted to examine a place where photographs indicated an unexplained spot of blood, but Detective Gosage pointed out, “It wasn’t blood, Lou, just some spilled juice.”

A big black flashlight found in the kitchen remained unexplained.

The kitchen was the demarcation line between backstage and the front of the curtain, and I moved through to the formal areas and the main rooms.

Down the main hall was the front door, with a mahogany grandfather clock in the foyer. To the south was the living room, dominated by a Steinway grand piano. French and English oil paintings had complemented a 1781 spinning wheel beside a big fireplace with a limestone mantel. We had sifted the ash box below to be sure no evidence had been burned, although we thought it highly unlikely that an intruder would light a fire in an occupied home to destroy evidence.

Through the living room was the small solarium with brick walls and leaded glass windows. In there, Patsy, seated in an overstuffed chintz chair, had “eyeballed” Officer Rick French while the lifeless body of her daughter lay in the basement ten feet below her.

I moved west, into the formal dining room, which had been converted from a sunporch. The mahogany dining table, banded with an inlay of ebony and rosewood, was ten feet long and surrounded by Chippendale chairs. A sideboard topped with marble was along one wall, a hand-carved china cabinet was in a corner, and a crystal chandelier hung overhead. An antique mirror and an original oil painting dominated walls that were hand-painted by a Denver artist named Shoshone in what Patsy had referred to as a green malachite faux finish.

Connecting the dining room back to the kitchen was the family’s breakfast room, in which a table had been surrounded by hand-painted cabinets, a collection of dainty figurines, and an antique cupboard from Wales. To one side had been a Singer sewing machine that Patsy’s grandmother received as a wedding present in 1918.

It was on that table that police had found the porcelain bowl containing fresh pineapple and bearing the fingerprints of Patsy and Burke. To me, that connected Patsy to pineapple, and pineapple was found in JonBenét’s stomach, and one plus one equals two. I came to believe Patsy had given JonBenét pineapple that night.

Our experts studied the pineapple in the stomach and reported that it was fresh-cut pineapple, consistent down to the rind with what had been found in the bowl. It was solid proof that it wasn’t canned pineapple, and what were the chances that an intruder would have brought in a fresh pineapple to cut up for his victim?

At lunch we had our sandwiches at that table while trying to convince Lou Smit of the connection between the mother’s fingerprints on the bowl and the pineapple remains found in the child’s body. He countered that a crime scene photo showed a Tupperware container in a paper sack in JonBenét’s bedroom, and he believed the contents of that plastic bowl might have been pineapple.

Maybe she got up during the night and ate the pineapple in her room, he said, giving us an unlikely alternative. The Tupperware container, never seized, was long gone, and the grainy photo on which he relied was totally inconclusive. I thought the material could have been popcorn, maybe beads, certainly not unrefrigerated pineapple. Perhaps, Smit argued, if she knew the intruder, he might have fed her. “Maybe Santa,” he ventured.

For an entire week we prowled the property, sitting on the Ramseys’ chairs, lying on their bed, walking in their footsteps. The entire team went up to the master suite one midnight. We turned on no lights, and the stillness was total, further convincing me of the implausibility of an intruder.

One night we tried to figure out if the parents could have heard JonBenét scream. While some of us stayed in the master suite, Detective Gosage tiptoed through the dark house, then shouted. His shout was clearly audible to me, but Trip DeMuth said it was difficult to hear. We could even hear a shout from the basement, although our intruder theorists could not.

But we all agreed that Melody Stanton, the neighbor who claimed to have heard a scream, “obviously that of a child,” on Christmas night, could have done so. I wanted to go over and talk to her right then and dig deeper into her story, but Deputy DA DeMuth refused, putting a blockade between police and Melody Stanton. He said he planned to “prep her” before trial. DeMuth didn’t explain his reasons to mere police officers and detectives. I could not fathom why a prosecutor would intentionally stop us from talking to her. Such a thing had never happened before in any investigation I was involved in, but with a wave of his hand—
poof!
—DeMuth sealed off an important avenue of investigation from the investigators. I knew that in other cities, not only would the prosecutor have okayed the interview but he probably would have helped conduct it on the spot. The difference of opinion between the DA’s office and the police had thrown into question whether or not there was a scream at all. It would be up to a jury to make the ultimate decision.

Detective Gosage wrote in his official report that he could hear movement and noise, even when people were trying to be quiet, no matter where he stood in the house. Sergeant Wickman told him that Deputy DA DeMuth wanted that report changed. Gosage refused. I found it incomprehensible that any prosecutor would make such a demand, for defense lawyers would pounce on the alteration to paint the cop as unsure of what he saw or heard. DeMuth was putting us on dangerous ground.

Lou Smit and I stayed into the wee hours on several nights, since the Ramsey case really had its hooks into both of us, and our discussions frequently turned to debate and then to flat-out argument. We went to the basement, to the bedrooms, to the stairwell. What happened, Lou? How did an intruder slip in on the quietest night of the year, commit a violent murder, stage the scene, spend considerable time writing at least two ransom notes with Patsy’s pad and pen, and depart undetected while three people in the house slept through it all? He offered that the intruder could have broken in while the Ramseys were at the Whites’ party, learned the layout of the house, researched the family’s history, prepared the ransom note, and hidden while waiting to strike.

“Lou,” I said, “we’re here at two o’clock in the morning in a house that is so old we can hear it creak every time we take a step, and nobody heard anything that night? No intruder snuck in and murdered that child.”

“Yes, they did.”

“No, they didn’t.”

All night long.

DeMuth now wanted the locks removed to be reexamined six months after the crime, although our lock guy and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation had examined them earlier and found no signs of tampering. Repeating the tests at this point only invited another legal challenge. Investigator Steve Ainsworth was down on his knees with pieces of adhesive tape, picking up fibers from the closet. Useless busy-work. Six months after the murder, the integrity of any hair and fiber evidence was questionable at best after an army of people had been through the house.

The media camped outside, while continually criticizing the police for being inept, had no idea what was really going on inside the investigation nor did they know of the distance between the two sets of investigators.

In the basement, Detective Gosage and I got filthy while snaking through three connecting crawl spaces that got smaller and tighter as we went. We found only dirt and some newspapers from the 1920s, probably left behind by the original carpenters. The basement that had been so cluttered and messy at the time of the murder was now pristine.

One of the two possible basement-level points of entry was a northeast corner foot-square window into a bathroom. Smit, examining a photograph with his magnifying glass, thought he had seen a thumb-print in the thick layer of dust on the exterior sill. We argued that it wasn’t a print at all. “Then he wore gloves,” Smit concluded. Sergeant Wickman retorted that someone needed a “magic X-ray wand” to unlock that window from the outside. The carpet of pine needles and the dirt around the window were intact, and photos from December 27 showed the window secured and undamaged. A vanity shelf just inside was undisturbed.

As the press watched and cameras clicked, we tested it for possible entry. Wickman wiggled through headfirst on his stomach and had to use his hands to grab overhead pipes and lever himself in. Smit managed to slither in on his back. Both dragged significant amounts of debris in with them, and no such debris was found during the original search. The techs had found no unknown prints when they dusted the pipes that Wickman grasped to make his entry. Even Lou Smit eventually admitted that the small window wasn’t a possible point of entry for an intruder. He just moved on to another theory that in my opinion was equally far-fetched.

He and DeMuth walked the premises deep in conversation, discussing how the intruder committed the crime. Not
if
there was an intruder, just
how
he did it. Gosage and I tagged along, rudely countering their suppositions with cold evidence. “Just because something is humanly possible, or that an acrobatic circus monkey could get through a window, doesn’t mean it happened,” we protested. It made no difference.

Two new padlocks had been placed on the grate that covered the well leading to the broken basement window. We unlocked them and continued our review. A thick tangle of foliage bordered the heavy metal grate, and although crime scene investigators in December said the growth was intact and showed no impressions, Smit challenged both points.

He deduced from the photographs that foliage growth beneath the edges proved the grate had been removed and replaced. We showed that it was simply not a flush fit and that space gave the foliage plenty of room to grow, just as weeds come up through sidewalk cracks. Smit then suggested the foliage appeared crushed under the grate. We learned a detective had lifted the grate during the initial investigation, checked the window well, and then replaced it, so there were several explanations for why the ground cover was beneath the rim.

Lou Smit was certain that another photo showed a footprint at the bottom of the window well. We would later clear away the leaves and debris and take new, detailed photographs. The “footprint” was a blemish in the concrete.

Their theories were built on an improbable series of whatifs. If
this
happened, then it just might be possible for
that
to happen, and therefore something else
might
have occurred that could
possibly
explain away some incriminating evidence, and there you had it!—an intruder creeping around with murder on his mind. They were supposed to be playing the role of devil’s advocate to look for holes in our case, but I thought this was ridiculous.

They made the pictures and the facts show anything they imagined. Every time we knocked down one point, they took refuge in another, forcing us to demonstrate how something didn’t happen rather than what actually took place, and apparently ignoring any evidence that might lead to John or Patsy Ramsey.

Just below the metal grate was the window broken by John Ramsey after forgetting his key the previous summer. The scuff mark on the interior basement wall beneath the broken window was now viewed by Smit and DeMuth as having been made by the intruder, not Ramsey. If it was a shoe scuff at all! That vital point was never proved, and in a cluttered basement, many things could have left such a scrape on a wall.

In December both Sergeant Wickman and Detective Mike Everett had seen at least three strands of a spiderweb reaching from the brick window well upward to the covering grate. No one had photographed it. The sill had a complete coating of undisturbed dust. Now spiders had woven another palm-sized web into the same general area. When we moved the end of the grate, several strands broke.

Smit, however, had managed to ease it open in an elaborately cautious way without breaking strands, and that was enough for him. This was how the intruder oozed into the window like an amoeba, knowing in the darkness not to disturb the web. Or, DeMuth argued, “The sticky spiderweb may have reconnected itself after the intruder came in.” How could we dispute such a deduction?

I pointed out that the murder happened on a frigid December night, when Colorado spiders are dormant. Experts would be found to say that it got warm enough the next afternoon for a spider to wake up and spin another web exactly at the point where the other was broken. Possible? Maybe. Probable? No.