JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (31 page)

Apparently Koby was less interested in telling the truth to the Dream Team than in maintaining the public charade of cooperation. He actually used the War Room as an example of how we were all getting along, and asked how things were going over there. “Fine,” Sergeant Wickman responded.

Since I had pulled out of the War Room, I gave Koby the truth about how serious the problems actually were. “We’re not a team at all,” I said. Detective Jane Harmer agreed that the atmosphere was “terribly oppressive” and asked, “How many times are we going to get fucked by them?” Detective Ron Gosage said he did not trust Deputy DA Trip DeMuth and felt that investigator Lou Smit was undermining the case. “Things are a mess,” observed Detective Tom Trujillo. Sergeant Wickman did a quick about-face and lined up with us.

Chief Koby had to choose between the district attorney and his cops, and came down on our side. He told Wickman to assign investigator Steve Ainsworth back to the sheriff’s office and tie Lou Smit down to organizing reports. “Get rid of them if necessary,” the chief said, “and tell DeMuth, ‘This is the way the ship’s going, with or without you.’” Then he deflated the moment by saying he wanted to “talk to Alex.”

I learned later that when the district attorney was informed of our Dream Team, he blanched as white as a kid in the principal’s office before muttering, “Glad to have them aboard.”

I could no longer read Sergeant Tom Wickman, who followed neither of Koby’s suggestions. Abandoned by Chief Koby and with Commander Eller well on his way to being fired, he seemed to be falling under the spell of Pete Hofstrom, the DA’s persuasive deal-making Svengali.

Wickman told me that he was keeping things from both Koby and Eller because he didn’t trust either of them, and he encouraged me to do the same. I couldn’t keep track of his shifting alliances, which became a game of who-knows-what.

To unlock that damned S.B.T.C. acronym at the bottom of the ransom note, I called the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a governmental unit straight out of a Tom Clancy novel. These people are summoned when the White House wants something yesterday, and I wasn’t sure they would help a couple of outgunned detectives in Colorado. “I’ve been waiting for this call for six months,” said Linda Percy, a deputy director at Treasury.

Percy tasked her Rapid Start Team to do a computer search that would look at every piece of public paper ever issued regarding the Ramseys. If SBTC was out there, FinCEN would find it. “We’ll put together a package,” Percy promised. “We’re all behind you.” But even FinCEN was blocked by our lack of a search warrant to get the Ramseys’ credit card and telephone records.

Since John Ramsey had no faith in the Boulder police, I thought perhaps he had sought help from the security experts of Access Graphics’ parent company. “I’ve never spoken to him,” Bernie Lamoreaux, the director of security for Lockheed-Martin, told me. “I’m not aware of any threats by foreign terrorists of any kind.” His elite team of professionals, who protected one of the world’s largest defense contractors, had never heard of SBTC, either.

Team Ramsey launched a long-running campaign of newspaper advertisements, announcing a $100,000 reward “for information leading to the arrest and indictment of the murderer of JonBenét Ramsey.” The detectives asked if we could put in for it.

The ad urged “Anyone with information concerning an adult male approaching young children in Boulder in late 1996” to call a telephone number unrelated to the police department.

We soon learned that the advertisement was developed with information provided by Trip DeMuth. Alex Hunter acknowledged the error and scolded DeMuth, while Ramsey attorney Bryan Morgan crowed that he was “deeply grateful” for the assistance.

What surprised me even more, however, were the similarities between the advertisement and a letter I had received a few weeks earlier from an inmate at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. The prisoner, serving a long sentence for the kidnap and sexual molestation of an eight-year-old girl, likened himself to the genius madman Doctor Hannibal Lecter in the Thomas Harris novel
Silence of the Lambs
.

This pedophile wrote that he knew exactly how the killer of JonBenét thought, and offered this advice: “Run adds [sic] with pleas for assistance, regarding any leads, concerning any young (especially blonde, blue-eyed) girls who have been approached by a well dressed, seemingly normal looking man.” The pervert being sought, this Doctor Lecter impersonator advised, was “an adult male.” The latest Ramsey move seemed to have been spawned from our not-so-secret case file.

Ten days later newspapers reported that another deputy district attorney wrote in a court motion that there was a “real possibility” that JonBenét was killed by an intruder.

Then came an “Open Letter from John and Patsy Ramsey” that was faxed to every major news organization, complaining that police had not worked “past us” to find the real killer. They released a profile of their version of the suspected murderer, and another Ramsey-paid advertisement in the Boulder
Daily Camera
soon expanded that theme. The new ad contained movie lines from
Ransom and Dirty Harry
, which were compared with language in the ransom note. As I read it, I could almost hear the voice of Lou Smit, who had only recently told me the same thing.

Consumed by the case, I lived with a headache, survived on tuna sandwiches and Cokes, and lost an alarming twenty-eight pounds. When Commander Eller ordered me to take a weekend off, I looked at the calendar. My one-year wedding anniversary was coming up. Throughout the case my wife had given me understanding and support, and I had pretty much ignored her. I owed her a lot, although I doubted if I could ever make up for all the arguments brought on by this unending nightmare. We boarded a train bound for the resort of Glenwood Springs, but even as it crawled west over the Continental Divide, I was thinking about the Ramsey case.

22

On August 6, 1997, which would have been JonBenét’s seventh birthday, Detective Ron Gosage and I and a team of agents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation kept covert watch on her grave site from a command post set up in Marietta High School room 212, directly across the street from the St. James Episcopal Cemetery. We had the latest technology and a dozen GBI agents who didn’t understand why Boulder was pussyfooting around with the Ramseys. There were no suggestions for “trust-building” from them. Instead, GBI Special Agent John Lang asked, “Why don’t we just put a bumper lock on these people and show them we are all over their asses? Why isn’t any pressure being applied to these suspects?”

We were grasping at straws, reduced to listening for a graveside confession. I knew it was a long shot at best, but we were about out of options. In my opinion, unless our DA’s office actually
heard
the killer admit the murder, the case was going nowhere.

Special Agent Lang, a former Vietnam Marine and a veteran of years of undercover work with the GBI, had gone to JonBenét’s funeral on his own time in December and wondered why no Boulder cops were there. He became our link to the highly professional GBI, which repeatedly helped us in the coming months of the investigation, although they never came to understand Boulder-style justice.

The warrants for the covert vigil came from the DA in Cobb County, Georgia, because we were afraid to let our own DA’s office know what we were doing. Once again I saw an example of how different the Boulder DA’s office was from the more traditional law-and-order prosecutors’ shops around the nation. In Georgia the deputy district attorneys were eager to help the police. Boulder would have stopped us in our tracks on a grave-site surveillance.

Sergeant Wickman was no help, putting himself at arm’s length from the controversial operation. He didn’t want to know the details, and his single instruction was “Don’t get caught.”

The surveillance began on a curious note the morning before JonBenét’s birthday, when we found all three wrought-iron gates to the cemetery, which had stood open for the past seven months, chained and padlocked. Lang picked one of the locks, then left the gate ajar for visitors. The FBI had told us of other cases in which confessions were made on significant anniversaries at the victim’s grave, so we sat back to wait and watch and hope.

Narrow windows behind the shiny green leaves of a pair of huge magnolia trees provided a straight view across the street, beyond the tall fence, all the way to the grave, which still had no headstone. It had the look of a calm park. A microphone was beneath the stone bench beside the plot, and a camera was hidden in a BellSouth box, feeding information back to our command center, where three television monitors, recorders, a microwave feed, laptop computers, and cell phones blinked ready. The press swarm arrived early.

Curious gawkers, well-wishers, and ordinary people paid their respects to JonBenét throughout the day, and a woman who looked very much like Patsy startled us when she sat on the bench and read from a Bible. A salesman signed up an elderly couple for a nearby plot. No Ramseys came by.

On the birthday itself, a black Mazda pulled up to a gate. The driver opened the padlock with a key and drove through to the grave. Melinda Ramsey and her mother, Lucinda Ramsey Johnson, got out and placed some flowers but left quickly when the media lunged to the cemetery fences with microphones and telephoto cameras.

Pam Paugh, Patsy’s sister, showed up that evening in a sleek black Infiniti. The press flooded to the fence again, and we crowded around our TV monitors and windows about fifty yards away. I watched through a pair of binoculars as the heavy woman in shorts, sunglasses, and a headband approached the grave. The former Miss America contestant, never married, had put on a lot of weight since her pageant days, and I felt sorry for her as she tried to create a private moment amid the media chaos. She placed a bouquet, emptied her pockets onto the bench, then plopped down right on top of the JonBenét plot, looking so despondent that someone at my elbow whispered, “Suicide?”

Pam then softly read from a Bible, and at the conclusion of the Twenty-third Psalm, she said, “JonBenét, whoever did this to you …” Her whispering became unintelligible over our microphone as we strained to hear. Then she quietly sang a song to JonBenét, knelt and whispered a prayer at Beth’s headstone, and drove away. It was a melancholy moment.

John and Patsy Ramsey didn’t visit the grave on their daughter’s birthday, but we hoped they might come late, after the media pulled out. The GBI had borrowed a $55,000 Panasonic night vision camera from the Las Vegas Police Department, so we had eyes after the sun went down, but there were no more visitors.

After midnight, several of us ventured into the dark cemetery and examined the flowers, stuffed bunnies, and trinkets that had been left that day. I read the cards. Pam’s was simply, “Good-bye. You’ll be missed.”

Gosage and I stopped by the Georgia State Penitentiary. While there I paid a visit to death row, and we were given a tour of the “last mile” walked by condemned men. Guards said the most frequent request made by those heading for the cinder block death house was to be allowed to step off the concrete sidewalk and walk barefoot through the grass one last time. I sat in the electric chair, a massive monstrosity of polished pine bolted to the floor, in a room kept immaculately clean by trustees. Thick leather straps and steel buckles. I pulled the stiff mask over my face and wondered what those last few seconds were like before one entered the abyss, awaiting that surge. Maybe just a sense of hearing the train coming as a hundred thousand volts barreled down the line. It was an indescribable feeling. Many men had left this world from this very spot. With the mask covering my face, I thought of the way money perverts our justice system.

Although the grave-site surveillance had failed, we weren’t ready to give up trying to overhear a confession. “This ain’t the time for Marquis of Queensberry rules,” snorted Bob Miller of our Dream Team. “A child has been murdered. We’ve got to play hardball.” He suggested electronically bugging the Ramsey house in Atlanta.

It wasn’t just some wild idea: when Miller was a U.S. Attorney, he hid a microphone in an outlaw bikers’ clubhouse and recorded conversations that led to racketeering indictments.

In layman’s terms, a “Title-3” operation meant that we would plant some listening devices. Then we’d drop grand jury subpoenas on all the Ramseys, including young Burke. “That will fire up some conversations in that house,” Miller said, and our bugs would catch every word. Electronic eavesdropping has long been used by police agencies, but the Boulder Police Department had never done a “T-3.” We thought it was a terrific idea, and the GBI, just as enthusiastic, started making plans to launch the operation.

The DA’s office seethed about our collaborating with the Dream Team, which the media viewed as a direct slam against the way Alex Hunter ran his office. The DA himself admitted, “There is no question that outside lawyers providing assistance to a police department is unusual in a criminal investigation.” Hunter’s people struck back immediately.

Our new attorneys told us to draw up warrants to get the Ramseys’ phone records and cellular phone logs and Patsy’s boots to match against the puzzling beaver hair found on the duct tape. They couldn’t believe similar requests had been denied for months.

Sergeant Tom Wickman and I took my affidavit for the Ramsey records from US West and AirTouch over to Deputy DA Trip DeMuth for review. He was arrogant and aloof, read the two-page warrant, then abruptly said he had to “run it by” someone else in the office. He was back in a few minutes and proclaimed that the warrant lacked probable cause. Bob Keatley, our in-house lawyer, tried in vain to explain that it contained more than enough sufficient facts and information.

DeMuth then left to confer with his immediate superior, Deputy DA Pete Hofstrom, and returned with a litany of other problems, alleging vague sources and material omissions.