JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (32 page)

Wickman was dumbfounded, and I almost lost my temper. “For Christ’s sake. This is a simple affidavit for telephone records. Do you want the pineapple, the duct tape, and the kitchen sink in there too?” I thought I was being rhetorical.

“Yes,” he said. “You need all of that. This is a death penalty case, and we have to be careful.”

I said that an eighty-page affidavit was not needed for telephone records and cited other cases, but DeMuth dug in his heels and asked, “What are you hoping to find?”

“Who knows? Did a kidnapper call? Did the Ramseys call anyone before they called 911? If I knew what I would find, I wouldn’t be getting a friggin’ search warrant!”

DeMuth specifically noted an item that he said “inferred” the Ramseys were not cooperating. “Maybe we should just ask them—”

“No fucking way!” Sergeant Wickman broke in.

What began as a request for a simple warrant I felt became payback for bringing the Dream Team aboard.

As we walked out, DeMuth said that although we had the legal right to take the warrant directly to a judge, “Make sure you tell him it does not have the support of the district attorney’s office.” It was a cold threat.

Not long thereafter, a list of “prioritized tasks” for us to tackle followed from Hofstrom and DeMuth. After a single reading we started referring to it as the Five-Year Plan. Among the things demanded:

• Make a list of potential suspects culled from all friends, neighbors, business associates and individuals associated with the Ramseys and obtain biological samples from
each
of them for DNA testing. (Clearly impossible.)

• Interview every neighbor, person, stranger, or visitor in the Ramsey neighborhood, investigate all their alibis, and question each on whether they owned duct tape, cord, or stun guns. (Clearly impossible, and it would bring up those damned stun guns again.)

• Interview and get DNA samples from
all
Ramsey associates and schoolmates and all sex offenders. (Clearly impossible.)

• Identify
every
person present at
all
of JonBenét’s beauty pageants, interview each of them, investigate their alibis, and find out whether they possessed duct tape, cord, or stun guns. (Preposterous.)

• Summarize
every
sexual assault or burglary that ever occurred in Boulder, before and after the murder. (Ridiculous.)

• Establish a “closer rapport” with the Ramseys. (That one in particular was a slap in the face.)

It seemed to me that the DA’s office had lost touch with reality. Their wish list—
all, each, every
—involved thousands of unknown people and was beyond accomplishing. If that was their standard, then failure was knocking at the door. By raising the bar so high, they knew we would never be able to hand the case off to them for prosecution.

At the end of August Chief Koby turned down a city council offer of $150,000 to hire and train six new police officers. Koby declined. His department was strained to the breaking point, but the chief was in his leadership mode. Within a week orders came down for us to knock off the overtime and work strict forty-hour weeks. Most of us continued our grueling schedule, unpaid.

We could have used twenty more detectives. I recruited an intern to help with the filing in the SitRoom. The detective bureau’s two secretaries had fallen far behind in transcribing the overflowing box of taped interviews, and we had about three billion leads still pouring in from kooks, clairvoyants, and con artists. Interpol passed along the services of a seer in Holland.

Among the best leads of the month was still another that we could not touch. The Ramsey credit card purchases showed up again, this time through the mail anonymously from a tabloid newspaper to Sergeant Wickman. There were copies of purchase records from marine supply depots, hardware stores, and boating retailers in Charlevoix, Atlanta, and Boulder during 1996. Any of these places could have sold duct tape and cord. An investigator’s dream come true—the paper trail.

Sergeant Tom Wickman and I took it in to Bob Keatley for a legal opinion, and he almost had a heart attack. His exact words were most un-Keatley-like—“Shit, shit, shit!”—and he snatched the documents away. “Put it out of your mind,” he ordered, imagining how a defense lawyer would do an O. J.— style “Police Planted the Glove” tap dance on us.

It was a struggle to let those Visa documents vanish into the Evidence Room, where the Touch Tone records were already gathering dust.

23

Then came
Vanity Fair
. In this unlikely magazine venue, reporter Ann Bardach tipped the JonBenét investigation right over the precipice by exposing how the hunt for the killer had become lost to internecine battles between law enforcement agencies in an unforgivable breach of public trust. Bardach stopped just short of accusing the Boulder County District Attorney of obstructing justice.

The DA, who should have stayed above the media fray, had instead long been a leading participant. In June he welcomed Bardach into his office for a three-and-a-half-hour interview, asked her what she thought he should do, and was allegedly horrified to discover that she planned to quote him. It was difficult to believe that someone who had been in public office for almost three decades could be so naive about the press, but Alex Hunter was used to getting his way with the local media. Bardach said she told him up front that everything was on the record.

She pillaged the city, and by the time she contacted me she had already talked to about fifty people, including other cops, and had a pile of information. I agreed to meet her, without making any commitment. The police were tired of being tarred and feathered in the media though unable to respond. If the DA could talk to her for more than three hours, why couldn’t I speak to her? A couple of cops approached me about “setting the record straight.”

As the publication date drew near, Hunter was worried about Bardach’s portrayal of him in the magazine. In a tape-recorded interview later, my confidential informant, Jeff Shapiro of the
Globe
, recalled what happened. He said the district attorney told him, “Let me know if you come across it. That would be very interesting.”

“It was pretty apparent [what Hunter was suggesting by way of an advance copy],” said Shapiro, who was talking with Hunter daily. “But he’s the fucking DA … . He’s not so stupid as to say, ‘Go commit a crime for me.’”

But Shapiro said he took the oblique comment to be tantamount to an order, and not long after that the
Globe
went out of its way to snag a pre-publication copy of
Vanity Fair
.

As another
Globe
reporter drove them over to the Criminal Justice Center, Shapiro called Hunter on a cell phone to ask if the article should be dropped off at the front counter. According to Shapiro, the DA replied with a laugh, “No. I think something like that can get you in here for a few minutes.”

Hunter’s first assistant district attorney and longtime pal Bill Wise ushered them to a reserved parking space, then personally escorted them into the district attorney’s private chambers, where they all spent an hour reading the story.

“No matter what mistakes the police made, they have been exponentially compounded by blunders and improprieties in the DA’s office,” Bardach wrote. She published a list of the DA’s actions that ranged from asking advice from Hal Haddon, head of the defense team, to giving away confidential information. Former FBI profiler Gregg McCrary was quoted as saying that the sharing of vital evidence was “unprecedented and unprofessional and an obstruction of justice. It’s criminal … . It’s possible you could make a case for prosecutorial malfeasance. It completely undermines the investigation.”

The article was the equivalent of an explosion and for the first time posed serious questions to a nationwide audience about the way Hunter’s office was handling the JonBenét murder investigation. Although some of us in the police department were delighted to see the truth finally come to light, the story could not have been published at a worse time.

We had been invited to Quantico, Virginia, to give a full presentation to the Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit of the FBI, and we jumped at the opportunity. Having the CASKU experts hear and analyze your case was not an everyday thing for local cops.

To our pleasant surprise, District Attorney Hunter had agreed to attend the presentation instead of hiding behind his “trusted advisers.” Maybe he would listen to the FBI. He told CASKU’s Bill Hagmaier that he would like to “see what you can do for us.” I considered Hunter’s presence at the meeting a big step forward.

Prior to leaving for Virginia, we gave the DA’s office a preview of what we planned to show CASKU, unaware that Hunter and his staff had read the Bardach article and were stewing with anger.

We withheld the 911 tape and grave-site surveillance from the preliminary discussion but went through the physical evidence, its analysis, and current status. After a few questions, Hunter and his people filed out in silence.

A few hours later the district attorney abruptly canceled his plans to go to Virginia, claiming that the police had only “half a loaf. It’s not enough for me to go.” I concluded that after reading the Bardach article, Alex Hunter was not about to leave his little Boulder County kingdom and risk having to explain his actions to the FBI. Once again he sidestepped personal responsibility.

We flew to Virginia by ourselves. In Quantico Sergeant Tom Wickman dealt photocopies of the
Vanity Fair
article to us like a deck of cards. The room went silent, the only sound the turning of pages and someone whispering, “Jesus H. Christ.” I braced for the shit storm that was bound to come, but I wasn’t sorry that I had spoken as a background source. The information I gave wasn’t about evidence in a murder investigation but about possible malfeasance in government.

On Monday morning an FBI van with tinted windows picked us up at our hotel, then swung by another hotel for the DA’s contingent. The long ride to the FBI Training Academy at Quantico was made in total silence.

A huge conference table dominated a large windowless room, with the American flag in one corner and the FBI shield on the far wall. About two dozen people were waiting for us—some of the nation’s foremost pathologists, behavioral science specialists, CASKU team members, hair and fiber experts, the Critical Incidence Response Group, and other veteran agents.

Bob Miller and Dan Hoffman of our Dream Team took chairs beside Detectives Gosage, Harmer, and Trujillo, Sergeant Wickman, and me. The DA’s group—Deputy DAs Pete Hofstrom and Trip DeMuth and investigator Lou Smit—were scattered around the table, and when Hofstrom introduced himself, he mentioned having been a guard at San Quentin.

As I presented the overview of our case and Detective Trujillo reviewed the evidence, DeMuth heckled: “Can’t hear you!” and “Is that all you have indicating Ramsey involvement?” The FBI agents were openly surprised by his effrontery.

Sergeant Wickman told the group how forensic specialist Dr. Werner Spitz had discounted the stun gun, and we discussed the issue of whether or not the little girl had sustained previous vaginal trauma, which the FBI considered extremely important.

We reviewed the autopsy results and crime scene photos, and I mentioned how the duct tape seemed to be part of the staging. There was a perfect lip impression on the tape and no tongue indentation to indicate that JonBenét had been alive and fought to remove it. Pictures showed that bloody mucus in the mouth area had been covered by the tape, indicating that it was applied after the injuries. To me, the inescapable conclusion was that the tape was applied after she was dead.

In turn, the CASKU agents noted that of the more than seventeen hundred murdered children they had studied since the 1960s, there was only one case in which the victim was a female under the age of twelve, who had been murdered in her home by strangulation, with sexual assault and a ransom note present—and that was JonBenét Ramsey.

They told us that while it might be possible that someone broke into the house that night, it wasn’t very probable. The staging, evidence, and totality of the case pointed in one direction—that this was not the act of an intruder.

The crime, they said, did not fit an act of sex or revenge or one in which money was the motivation. Taken alone, they said, each piece of evidence might be argued, but together, enough pebbles become a block of evidentiary granite.

These conclusions by the FBI’s highly respected profilers were exactly what I hoped would provide a breakthrough in the case, but Hofstrom, DeMuth, and Smit seemed unimpressed. They ignored CASKU, just as they ignored us. It felt like we were on a train to nowhere.

The CASKU meeting had been derailed before it even started. That was the pattern in this entire case. Any spark for optimism was soon doused by reality.

CASKU observed that they had never seen anything like the Ramsey ransom note. Kidnapping demands are usually terse, such as “We have your kid. A million dollars. Will call you.” From a kidnapper’s point of view, the fewer words, the less police have to go on.

Based on their studies of the evidence we provided, they believed the note was written in the home, after the murder, and indicated panic. Ransom notes are normally written prior to the crime, usually proofread, and not written by hand, in order to disguise the authorship.

The FBI deemed the entire crime “criminally unsophisticated,” citing the child being left on the premises, the disingenuous $118,000 demand in relation to the net worth of the family, the description of the accomplices as “gentlemen,” and the concept of a ransom delivery where one would be “scanned for electronic devices.” Kidnappers prefer isolated drops for the ransom delivery, not a face-to-face meeting.

There was also an absence of strong language and anger, and the victim was never referred to by name, thus depersonalizing her to the offender. The intelligent wording suggested an educated writer who had some exposure to the South, as shown by the reference to “southern common sense.”