JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (4 page)

It had been difficult to get information from the parents at first, but now several officers and detectives were speaking with them, pulling together elements of what had happened.

It soon became clear that Patsy Ramsey had changed a very important part of her story and that her statements about her initial movements were inconsistent. It raised some doubts when investigators compared their notes. She originally told Officer French that she checked the bedroom
before
finding the note on the stairs, but she later told Detective Arndt that she went downstairs and found the note first and only then hurried to the bedroom and found JonBenét gone.

An equally important point, made by John Ramsey, was repeated to three different officers. He told French, Arndt, and later Sergeant Whitson that he had personally checked the doors the previous night and all were secure. When three cops get the same information during separate conversations with the same person, I view it as a consistent story. Months later, in an official interview, Ramsey would deny saying it to any of them.

Patsy also told officers she thought the house was locked when they went to bed. No keys had been lost or stolen, John Ramsey told both French and Arndt, and the only people who had keys other than the immediate family were Patsy’s mother and his oldest son, both of whom were out of state, and the housekeeper, Linda Hoffmann-Pugh.

Officers reconstructed some of the timeline of the previous night from the parents’ recollections. John Ramsey said the family returned home from the party about ten o’clock, and he read to both children before they went to sleep. He confirmed to Arndt that he had read to JonBenét after tucking her in. He would later deny those statements as well.

The parents said that everyone was in bed by ten-thirty because they had to be up early for a flight to Michigan, where they had planned to spend a belated Christmas at their vacation home with Ramsey’s older children, then go to Florida for a cruise on Disney’s Big Red Boat.

Patsy said that JonBenét went to sleep wearing long white underwear and a red turtleneck top.

Police were puzzled by the irregular ransom sum demanded by the kidnappers. The two friends, Fleet White and John Fernie, were equally mystified, for such an amount was relatively insignificant in comparison with the overall fortune of John Ramsey, who was a millionaire several times over. He was president and chief executive officer of Access Graphics, a local computer company with worldwide customers, more than 330 employees, and over a billion dollars in sales. Both John and Patsy told police they were unaware of any significance concerning the $118,000 figure.

At the suggestion of police, arrangements were made with the Lafayette State Bank to prepare the ransom cash but to hold it until further notice.

Detective Arndt instructed John Ramsey on how to handle the phone call expected from the kidnapper: Demand to speak to the child. Get specific instructions for a meeting to deliver the ransom. Say he could not get the money until five o’clock that afternoon. Write down what the caller said. Ramsey seemed distracted, but his manner remained cordial, and she felt he understood her.

While Ramsey’s language was clear and articulate, and he even smiled and joked, his overwrought wife was in the care of Priscilla White and Barbara Fernie. She looked vacant and dazed, repeatedly asking in a soft, empty voice, “Why didn’t I hear my baby?” Despite her obvious distress, her husband did not go to her. It was as if the house had separated into two camps, His and Hers, with the friends dividing their time between the two. Patsy stayed in the sunroom, and John paced the dining room and den. It has been my experience that in situations where a child has been injured or killed, the parents cling to each other, so police considered the physical distance between John and Patsy Ramsey to be remarkable under the stressful conditions.

When detectives asked the parents who might be responsible for the disappearance of JonBenét, Patsy promptly gave the name of her housekeeper for the past two years, Linda Hoffmann-Pugh, who had recently asked for a $2,000 loan. The handwriting in the ransom note, the mother said, also looked a little like the housekeeper’s.

The Reverend Rol Hoverstock told police about a phone call made that morning to Patsy’s parents, Nedra and Don Paugh, in Atlanta. Mrs. Paugh, he said, mentioned that Linda Hoffmann-Pugh had commented about how beautiful Jon-Benet was and expressed the fear that someone might kidnap her. The housekeeper’s name had come up several times in a short period, and police had already been told she had a key. She became the first suspect, and police made plans to contact her immediately.

A second name offered was that of Jeff Merrick, who had been terminated by Ramsey’s company several months before in an unpleasant parting. They wrote his name down too.

Detective Arndt asked Ramsey, White, and Fernie for their opinions of the ransom note. White and Fernie commented that it seemed to reveal a familiarity with John Ramsey. The use of such words as
hence
and
attache
indicated the writer was educated. John Ramsey had little to say about it and was unusually quiet. None had any idea what SBTC meant.

In the sunroom, Patsy Ramsey examined a second-generation photocopy of the ransom note, a smeary version that showed little more than the dark printed words. Rather than commenting on the words and content, she told one of her friends that the note was written on the same kind of paper she had in her kitchen. Police would wonder how she could tell, since they saw no similarities.

Detectives also drove through the neighborhood with a video camera, documenting people and vehicles in the area and looking for anything suspicious. Sergeant Larry Mason, the acting detective division commander, was finally alerted at his home by the staff page and telephoned headquarters to find out what was happening. A few minutes later he went to the police department.

Time was passing swiftly, and the two-hour window during which the kidnappers had said they would call was about to expire.

Ten o’clock came and went. Detective Arndt thought it strange that no one, including the Ramseys, seemed to pay any attention to the deadline.

The ransom note had been unclear about the contact date, saying only that the kidnappers would call “between 8 and 10 am tomorrow.” When that was would depend on the “today” when it was written. It could mean December 27 as easily as December 26. But why would parents desperate to contact their child not assume that it meant the current day?

Thirty minutes later the bedroom of JonBenét was sealed with yellow tape. More than four hours elapsed before any part of the big house was officially designated as a crime scene.

Since no call had been received from the kidnappers, police began moving back to the department for a strategy session that would involve the various agencies now working the kidnapping. The two victim advocates soon left for lunch.

Detective Linda Arndt was now alone with seven adults—the Ramseys, the Whites, the Fernies, and the minister. There was no way only one officer could keep track of them all, and Arndt would realize she had lost John Ramsey.

Patsy moved into the rear den and lay on the couch, attended by her friends. She said she was having second thoughts about the housekeeper being the author of the note.

Around noon Arndt used a cell phone to page Sergeant Mason, now at police headquarters, for an update and to get more cops back at the house, but she received no response. Thirty minutes later she repeated the page, and it too went unanswered. The order for radio silence denied her the direct communication she needed. She had not carried a radio pack set with her.

Detective Arndt could not account for John Ramsey until about noon. She found him reading some correspondence, and she incorrectly assumed he had stepped out to get his mail. She was unaware that the house did not have an exterior mail box and that the mail came in through a front door slot. Ramsey had been out of contact for over an hour. In coming months, we realized that the time lapse would have allowed Ramsey plenty of time to roam his house.

Arndt noted a marked change in Ramsey’s attitude when she saw him again. Whereas he had been calm and collected earlier, he now sat alone in the dining room, preoccupied in thought, his leg bouncing nervously.

At one o’clock that afternoon, Arndt enlisted Fleet White to help keep Ramsey’s mind occupied. Making a decision for which she would later be heavily criticized, she suggested they go through the house “from top to bottom” to see if they could find anything belonging to the missing girl. No police officer was available to escort them, which meant the two civilians would be roaming the house unsupervised.

John Ramsey was on the move at once and headed immediately for the basement, starting at the bottom of the house instead of the top as the detective had suggested. Fleet White followed him down.

The basement was a warren of rooms, closets, nooks, and crawl spaces. When Ramsey and White reached the bottom of the stairs, they had several choices of which way to go.

To their left was a tiny bathroom, only a sink and a toilet with a little window above it. To their right was a narrow closet, a laundry room with washer and dryer, and a storage area.

Straight ahead were a pair of open doors. The left one went into a hallway that led to the boiler and freezer area. At the end of this corridor was the white door that had been checked earlier by two police officers and Fleet White.

Ramsey and White walked through the right-hand door instead, which led into a large, oddly shaped room containing a model train setup and a couple of small closets. Weak winter sunlight filtered through the triple window, which was set into the west wall below ground level, looking out on a window well and protected by a metal grate.

Each window had four panes, and Fleet White, having been down there earlier, pointed out the baseball-sized hole in the upper left pane of the middle window. “Damn it, I had to break that,” John Ramsey said, adding that it had happened the previous summer when he kicked in the window to get into the house after locking himself out. Should have fixed it then, he noted, tapping his forehead. The window was closed but unlatched.

They moved out of the train room, turned into the other hallway, and John Ramsey headed toward the white door at the far end. Fleet White was several steps behind. Ramsey turned the wooden latch, opened the door, and screamed, “Oh my God, oh my God!”

Fleet ran to him and saw the body of JonBenét lying on her back in the small windowless room. Her arms were straight above the top of her head.

Earlier, when White had opened that same door, he had been unable to see anything in the stygian darkness. John Ramsey was kneeling beside his daughter, feeling her ashen face. A piece of black duct tape lay on the blanket, and a long cord was attached to her right wrist. Nearby was a pink nightgown. White, who had never before touched a dead person, felt JonBenét’s cold ankle, turned, and ran for help. John Ramsey picked up his daughter, who had been carefully wrapped, papoose-like, in a white blanket, and followed.

Detective Linda Arndt, still working with a cell telephone instead of a police radio, was waiting for her pages to be returned when she heard a shout. The panicked Fleet White ran up the stairs, grabbed a telephone and punched in a few numbers, then hung up. He ran back toward the basement, yelling for someone to call an ambulance, as if he had forgotten a detective was standing right there.

Patsy Ramsey was in the den with her friends, and when White shouted, Priscilla White and Barbara Fernie hurried toward the sound. Patsy did not move from the couch.

John Ramsey emerged from the basement carrying the body of JonBenét, not cradled close but held away from him, his hands gripping her waist. The child’s head was above his, facing him, her arms were raised high, stiffened by rigor mortis, and her lips were blue. The child was obviously dead.

Arndt ordered Ramsey to put the body down on the floor near the front door and told Fleet White to guard the basement door. Instead, White ran back down to the little cellar room, picked up the black tape, and stared at it. By doing so, White unknowingly mishandled a critical piece of evidence.

Linda Arndt felt the body for a neck pulse, noticed the odor of decay, and chose to move the body into the living room herself. She lay the dead child on her back, on a rug before the Christmas tree.

This was another huge error. In a normal murder investigation, the body should have been left untouched as it was found in the basement. Now it had been moved upstairs by the father, then moved again by a detective who should have known better than to touch it at all. Each time it was moved, the crime scene changed and potential evidence was put in jeopardy.

The detective and the father were face-to-face over the body, and he asked if his daughter was alive. When Arndt confirmed that she was dead, John Ramsey groaned softly. He told Arndt, “It has to be an inside job.”

Three years later Arndt described the event differently on national television, revealing information she never put in her police reports. “As we looked at each other, I wore a shoulder holster, I remember tucking my gun right next to me and consciously counting I’ve got eighteen bullets,” she said. “I didn’t know if we’d all be alive when people showed up … . Everything made sense in that instant, and I knew what happened.”

A guttural wail came from Patsy on the far side of the house, and the detective told Ramsey to call 911, then go to his wife. He was back within two minutes, grabbed a blanket from a chair, and tossed it over the body before Arndt could react.

It was one of the most damaging things that could have been done and created a forensics nightmare. By covering the body, Ramsey compromised the already despoiled crime scene even more. Now the possibility existed that any fibers left on the blanket by some unknown person’s clothing might have been transferred from the blanket to the body. Arndt compounded the error by adjusting the quilt so the body was covered from the neck down. When someone else spread a gray Colorado Avalanche sweatshirt over the exposed feet a few minutes later, it became virtually impossible to prove the origin of almost any fiber that might be found on the clothing and much of the body.