JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (43 page)

She then faced the major problem of what to do with the body. Leaving the house carried the risk of John or Burke awakening at the sounds and possibly being seen by a passerby or a neighbor. Leaving the body in the distant, almost inaccessible, basement room was the best option.

As I envisioned it, Patsy returned to the basement, a woman caught up in panic, where she could have seen—perhaps by detecting a faint heartbeat or a sound or a slight movement—that although completely unconscious, JonBenét was not dead. Others might argue that Patsy did not know the child was still alive. In my hypothesis, she took the next step, looking for the closest available items in her desperation. Only feet away was her paint tote. She grabbed a paintbrush and broke it to fashion the garrote with some cord. Then she looped the cord around the girl’s neck.

In my scenario, she choked JonBenét from behind, with a grip on the broken paintbrush handle, pulling the ligature. JonBenét, still unconscious, would never have felt it. There are only four ways to die: suicide, natural, accidental, or homicide. This accident, in my opinion, had just become a murder.

Then the staging continued to make it look more like a kidnapping. Patsy tied the girl’s wrists in front, not in back, for otherwise the arms would not have been in that overhead position. But with a fifteen-inch length of cord between the wrists and the knot tied loosely over the clothing, there was no way such a binding would have restrained a live child. It was a symbolic act to make it appear the child had been bound.

Patsy took considerable time with her daughter, wrapping her carefully in the blanket and leaving her with a favorite pink nightgown. The FBI had told us that a stranger would not have taken such care.

As I told Lou, I thought that throughout the coming hours, Patsy worked on her staging, such as placing the ransom note where she would be sure to “find” it the next morning. She placed the tablet on the countertop right beside the stairs and the pen in the cup.

While going through the drawers under the countertop where the tablet had been, she found rolls of tape. She placed a strip from a roll of duct tape across JonBenét’s mouth. There was bloody mucus under the tape, and a perfect set of the child’s lip prints, which did not indicate a tongue impression or resistance.

I theorized that Patsy, trying to cover her tracks, took the remaining cord, tape, and the first ransom note out of the house that night, perhaps dropping them into a nearby storm sewer or among the Christmas debris and wrappings in a neighbor’s trash can.

She was running out of time. The household was scheduled to wake up early to fly to Michigan, and in her haste, Patsy Ramsey did not change clothes, a vital mistake. With the clock ticking, and hearing her husband moving around upstairs, she stepped over the edge.

The way I envisioned it, Patsy screamed, and John Ramsey, coming out of the shower, responded, totally unaware of what had occurred. Burke, awakened by the noise shortly before six o’clock in the morning, came down to find out what had happened and was sent back to bed as his mother talked to the 911 emergency dispatcher.

Patsy Ramsey opened the door to Officer Rick French at about 5:55 A.M. on the morning of December 26, 1996, wearing a red turtleneck sweater and black pants, the same things she had worn to a party the night before. Her hair was done, and her makeup was on. In my opinion, she had never been to bed.

The diversion worked for seven hours as the Boulder police thought they were dealing with a kidnapping.

John Ramsey, in my hypothetical scenario, probably first grew suspicious while reading the ransom note that morning, which was why he was unusually quiet. He must have seen his wife’s writing mannerisms all over it, everything but her signature. But where was his daughter?

He said in his police interview that he went down to the basement when Detective Arndt noticed him missing. I suggested that Ramsey found JonBenét at that time and was faced with the dilemma of his life. During the next few hours, his behavior changed markedly as he desperately considered his few options—submit to the authorities or try to control the situation. He had already lost one child, Beth, and now JonBenét was gone too. Now Patsy was possibly in jeopardy.

The stress increased steadily during the morning, for Patsy, in my theory, knew that no kidnapper was going to call by ten o’clock, and after John found the body, he knew that too. So when Detective Linda Arndt told him to search the house, he used the opportunity and made a beeline for the basement.

Then, tormented as he might be, he chose to protect his wife. Within a few hours, the first of his many lawyers was in motion, the private investigators a day later.

That’s the way I see it, I said to Lou Smit. That’s how the evidence fits to me. She made mistakes, and that’s how we solve crimes, right? I reminded him of his own favorite saying: “Murders are usually what they seem.”

Lou Smit totally disagreed with my version of the events that night, insisting that the Ramseys were innocent. In his intruder theory, the killer had seen JonBenét during one of her public appearances, perhaps the Christmas parade, and decided to go after her on Christmas night while the Ramsey family was out for the evening.

The pedophile intruder came in through the window-well grate and basement window, then spent quite some time roaming around the big house and learning the layout. He found a Home Tour brochure and learned more about the family. It was also during that period, while he was alone, that he came across the Sharpie pen in the cup and Patsy’s writing tablet and wrote the ransom note. Then he hid, and waited.

Around midnight, when the house finally grew silent after the family went to bed, the intruder went upstairs and immobilized his victim with a stun gun, duct taped her mouth, and carried the child to the basement. He planned to remove her from the home in the Samsonite suitcase. The note was left on the spiral staircase.

Downstairs, the intruder fashioned Patsy’s paintbrush handle into a garrote. Too impatient to wait, he simultaneously sexually assaulted and choked JonBenét in some sort of autoerotic fantasy. His presence in the basement also accounted for the Hi-Tec bootprint, the unidentified palm print, and the scuff mark on the wall below the window. The unidentified pubic hair was left during the attack, and the unknown DNA in her underwear resulted from the same incident, in Smit’s theory.

Smith theorized that JonBenét regained consciousness, screamed, and fought her attacker, getting the unidentified DNA beneath her fingernails. The attacker struck her on the head, possibly with the black flashlight. The panicked intruder fled through the basement window, taking the remaining cord, duct tape, and stun gun with him.

That’s how I see it happened, Lou Smit told me, adding, “The theory doesn’t determine the evidence. The evidence should determine the theory.”

“Exactly, Lou,” I replied.

Smit later expanded on the theory to
Time
magazine, suggesting the garrote is a favored tool of pedophiles, and that the intruder had asked for the peculiar ransom of $118,000 because he planned to flee to Mexico, where the currency exchange rate would turn that sum of American dollars into roughly a million Mexican pesos.

I told Smit I found it hard to imagine the intruder roaming the house, writing the ransom note, sexually assaulting, garroting, and violently killing the child, apparently without fear of being confronted, while in a house full of sleeping people. CASKU had taught me one thing—ransom kidnappers kidnap for financial gain. Pedophiles kidnap for sexual gratification. But the two are mutually exclusive. Smit’s hybrid pedophile-ransom-kidnapper-murderer would have been most unique.

For two hours we argued as Lou challenged my conclusions and I countered his. Neither of us could prove exactly when JonBenét ate the pineapple, but I said it came from the bowl of pineapple on the breakfast table, while he thought it was in the Tupperware bowl found in her room.

About the only thing we agreed on was that the attorneys, including the DA’s office, had screwed things up, and we questioned the advice the Ramseys had received from their lawyers. As for the DA’s office, Smit said Hunter was a politician.

Smit knew his position was unpopular, but that was the way he saw things. He told me that he was never attempting to do anything more than help the case, but his belief that the Ramseys were innocent was not an act.

We finally finished, shook hands, and parted as friends.

I realized that Lou Smit had become a major problem, a problem that no one would address. We’ll eventually be hearing from him as a defense witness, I thought, but when I raised the issue with Commander Beckner, he said we would just have to accept that and asked if I knew how bad it would look to remove Smit from the case.

Detective Trujillo and Sergeant Wickman flew to Washington on April 3 to go over evidence with FBI laboratory experts, particularly the still-unidentified pubic hair.

The FBI asked: Where’s the pubic hair?

Only then did Trujillo realize that the evidence was sitting at the CBI lab, not the FBI lab. Such errors were maddening and becoming more frequent.

By January 1998 Trujillo had still not submitted all the prints of police officers for comparison with the palm print on the cellar room door. The paintbrush handle fashioned into the garrote took a year to finally get fingerprinted! And when the cord test results were returned, the samples I had purchased from the army store were consistent with the murder ligature.

Sergeant Wickman prepared my annual performance evaluation, said I was “above reproach,” and Beckner signed it. I received the highest ratings in service excellence, integrity, respect for diversity, initiative, teamwork, and safety. The seventh category, “Strives to maintain physical and emotional wellness,” was only a “standard” because Wickman had seen the obvious—I was not doing well balancing family, health, and social activities with work. The eighty-plus notebooks filled with the case file behind my desk bore mute witness to the reason why. No one could say I had not tried to do my job.

When Wickman asked about my future, I admitted that I was probably done with the Boulder Police Department once the Ramsey case was over. I could never file another case with this district attorney’s office. I could barely tolerate being in the same room with them.

Something else was also going on. My lethargy, headaches, continued weight loss, and growing back pain forced me to see a doctor, although I didn’t tell anyone about it. She asked if I had been irritable, depressed, or found it difficult to concentrate. All of the above, I said, and during the next several weeks I endured a regimen of intensive physical examinations and blood tests.

Finally the doctor gave me the grim news that I had something called chronic lymphocytic thyroiditis. The thyroid gland, which a person cannot live without, was failing, and my body was producing antibodies that were consuming my thyroid. It could develop into more serious problems, she said, although I thought what she had already told me was serious enough.

I can’t be sick, I thought. I had never been sick in my life. I had been on the SWAT team, for God’s sake, and that’s about as rough as it gets. But the cold facts were right there before me. The same sort of thyroid problems that contributed to my mother’s death when I was a child were in my body too.

When I was able to refocus, the doctor was telling me that new drugs were now available to counterbalance the loss of the thyroid. With lifetime therapy to stabilize my metabolism, I could return to normal, although I would have to monitor my immune system carefully in the future.

She said I could continue working without my performance being affected, but she encouraged me to make a lifestyle change. I laughed when she asked if I was under any current stress. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m a detective on the Ramsey case.”

“Don’t kid yourselves,” Commander Beckner told a couple of detectives. “Don’t think that we will ever actually handcuff somebody in this case. Should there be a charge, you can bet the DA’s office will negotiate a controlled surrender.”

We were all living for that big payoff, and we weren’t going to get it. If a Ramsey was ever charged, they would surrender with lawyers and bail money and probably never even get out of their street clothes. “Let me tell you, we won’t be putting handcuffs on anybody,” Beckner reiterated. Another reason for not forcing the issue, he said, was that he did not want to get sued over “this thing.”

He added that although there might be a grand jury, and probable cause existed for an indictment, the case might not get prosecuted. “Can you live with that?” he asked me. I said no, I couldn’t. I told him that under those circumstances, I most likely would leave the police department. I requested a letter of recommendation, and he gave me one.

Chief Koby told a briefing of the top people in the DA’s office and police department that all roads now led toward the Ramseys. The police position was clear, he said. We believed we were working on the right suspects.

Commander Beckner agreed. He said that when he came aboard, he was open-minded on the evidence, but the investigation had led him squarely to the Ramseys. “We can’t tell you exactly what happened that night, but we all agree that it’s the Ramseys,” he said. He drew a triangle on a grease board and marked the police at the very top of the triangle, beside the names of John and Patsy Ramsey.

District Attorney Alex Hunter picked up the marker and placed himself right there alongside the detectives. Deputy DA Pete Hofstrom marked himself halfway down the triangle, and Lou Smit was placed at the very bottom.

Hunter looked at the triangle and once again erected a wall between himself and a decision. He said his office had problems with the case proceeding and that he would have to convince them to get on board.

His wishy-washy stance of trying to be all things to all people, marking himself beside the detectives, then warning that he couldn’t control his own office, was too much even for Chief Koby. “It’s time to make a decision, Alex,” he said. “Either pursue the Ramseys or pursue an intruder. Or take it to a grand jury. Or don’t take it to a grand jury. But make a decision!”