JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (47 page)

Sergeant Wickman picked up his briefcase that night and left, saying, “This thing is all but over for us. I don’t have a fucking clue as to what they’re doing anymore. I’d be pissed at Beckner for not telling me, but I don’t think he has a clue either.”

On the night of June 17, I made my decision to take a bunch of accumulated overtime, holidays, and leave and just get away from the madhouse.

Although I had pangs of guilt about abandoning the case, I realized that I wasn’t really quitting anything because it clearly was no longer our case. I decided to simply leave quietly, and to cite my health concerns as the reason.

When I informed Chief Koby of my decision, he tried to arrange a paid leave for work-related illness. “It’s time to let go, Steve,” he said. “You need to get back to your life. We gave the DA a case, and if they want to screw it up, that’s their decision. This is not your life.”

“Steve thinks it is,” said Sergeant Wickman.

JonBenét’s brother, Burke Ramsey, was interviewed in Atlanta for two hours a day on consecutive days in early June, after Deputy DA Pete Hofstrom and Detective Schuller visited Georgia for a while to determine whether the boy was “a morning person or an afternoon person.” Now eleven years old, Burke would be interviewed alone by Schuller while Hofstrom and Ramsey lawyer Jim Jenkins watched from another room. The arrangement seemed designed more to make the boy comfortable than to elicit information.

Rolling back on the idiotic order that we stay out of Georgia, Detective Jane Harmer was allowed to fly to Atlanta to represent the Boulder cops. She was kept waiting in her hotel room for hours before being contacted by Pete Hofstrom, who then refused to tell her where the meeting with Burke would take place. Harmer changed her ticket and returned to Boulder early. Videotapes of Burke’s interviews were sent back to us for review.

Since I had done all the previous work in Atlanta and there was a lot left to do there, I had hoped to be included on the trip. Even if we were not involved in the interview, Harmer and I could still have covered a lot of ground. That was not to be. “There is resistance to Thomas in Atlanta,” Beckner said. I wasn’t well liked by the DA’s office, the Ramseys, or their lawyers. In my opinion, Team Ramsey apparently had such a firm hold on the current negotiations that we could no longer even do routine police work without their say-so.

About that time, Beckner received a letter from a retired cop, who challenged him to “get some backbone, get some guts …” and added, “You guys should be ashamed … . Shame!” The hate mail was humiliating.

Burke Ramsey seemed to have recovered his memory, but to me his answers seemed awkward and he was clearly uncomfortable. When asked how he thought JonBenét had been killed, he replied, “I have no idea.” In his first interview he had been explicit in describing what happened to her. He confirmed that her bed-wetting had been a big problem.

With his legs pulled up and his chin on his knees, Burke said he played some Nintendo on the afternoon of December 25. When showed a photograph of the pineapple and bowl, he recognized the bowl. That showed it belonged in the house and was not brought in by an intruder. He recalled nothing unusual at the Whites’ party other than getting a mild shock from the electric deer fence outside.

He said that his sister fell asleep in the car on the way home but awakened to help carry presents into the house of a friend. When they got home, JonBenét walked in slowly and went up the spiral stairs to bed, just ahead of Patsy. That was quite a difference from the initial and frequently repeated story that she was carried to bed. I felt that this poor kid was confused and that he really had no idea what had happened that night.

He heard the “house creaking” during the night, he said, and when he awoke, his mother was turning on the lights and in a rush, saying, “Oh my gosh, oh my gosh,” then his father turned the lights off again. Burke stayed in bed “wondering if something bad had happened.” He heard his father trying to calm his mother, then telling her to call the police.

Burke told the detective he did not get out of bed that morning and that a policeman looked into his room. He recalled thinking that when the police arrived “we would probably be tied up all day” and that he was disappointed the family would not be going to Charlevoix as planned.

When the three days of interviews about his sister’s murder were over, Detective Schuller asked the boy if there was anything he wanted to ask. Burke said yes and pointed to the detective’s wristwatch. “Is that a Rolex?”

There was a new sex angle going on, of which we had been unaware, and it involved Susan Bennett, the Internet junkie known as Jameson. It was she who had sent the DA’s office the early Internet communications that had turned out to be so damning for linguist Don Foster.

Now we learned that Jameson was posting confidential information on the Web, and it looked to us as if she had an inside source.

In the following days and weeks, Lou Smit admitted that he talked to Jameson “a lot” because “she has good information.” Smit said Jameson claimed to have secret information about the Whites, their Christmas party, and what the children did. She passed Smit a tip about another Internet junkie who had found a Web site for child pornography and thought one of the children shown in an explicit sexual pose looked like the daughter of Ramsey housekeeper Linda Hoffmann-Pugh. The DA’s office began an investigation.

I wondered why they were chasing such things. Why wouldn’t they aggressively pursue the prime suspects with the same sort of zeal? When Pete Hofstrom asked the police to check out an unknown rapist and see if he was linked to the Ramsey case, I realized that they were still actively searching for their intruder and that Fleet White, Santa Bill McReynolds, and Chris Wolf were on top of their list.

Smit had not entered anything about those conversations with Jameson in the official files until we brought up the subject. Then he quickly wrote some retroactive cover-your-ass reports and pledged to stop any “direct contact” with her.

Not that it mattered anymore. They had hidden things from us all along, as if a murder investigation were some kind of “find out if you can” game, just as we dared not share everything with them if we wanted to keep it out of the media. “Alex Hunter is the biggest fucking media mouth going,” I told Lou Smit in a moment of protest. Smit chewed his toothpick and agreed, “Hunter is bad about that.”

On June 22 I typed up my letter requesting unpaid leave from the Boulder Police Department. Chief Koby, in his final day on the job, set up a meeting with some city bureaucrats to push for me to be granted paid medical or administrative leave due to illness. When the city representatives asked why it was related to the job, he replied, “Walk a mile in these detectives’ shoes for two years, and you tell me.” The city eventually said it would contest any such claim regarding my assignment to the Ramsey case.

I didn’t really care, since that was Koby’s idea anyway, not mine. I would just stay out for a while on a mountain of uncompensated time that had accumulated during the investigation. Then I would decide what to do next.

John and Patsy Ramsey were coming back to Colorado for their interviews, so I planned to hang around one more week and watch the delayed videotapes, then begin a long vacation. That night I dined with my family on Father’s Day, and they supported my decision.

Commander Beckner and Sergeant Wickman asked if I wanted to clear out right now instead of sitting through the interviews. No, I said, I wanted to see this show. It was the culmination of the investigation, and I wanted to give constructive observations.

But something was wrong. Beckner repeated his suggestion twice. I knew the DA’s office did not want me anywhere near the Ramseys, but now there even seemed to be a problem with me watching them on a television monitor. Beckner dodged for a minute, then agreed I could stay and observe. But only that. “Don’t write any reports on those interviews,” he ordered. “These are the DA’s deals, and I don’t want you to write a report.”

What an extraordinary order! They didn’t want any possibility that I might document what was happening now that the DA was running the show. It was clear to me that Commander Beckner had gone over to the other side and was marching in lockstep with the DA’s office and Team Ramsey. Nothing would be allowed to mar the neat picture of cooperation. The sellout was now complete.

In the final week of June, as the super-secret Ramsey interviews were held at the nearby Broomfield Police Department, Mark Beckner was named the new police chief in Boulder.

34

The June 1998 interviews with Patsy and John Ramsey defined them, in my opinion. During three days of questioning at the police department in nearby Broomfield, Colorado, Ramsey displayed a tenacious and stubborn defense of his wife and family. Patsy looked like a woman teetering on the edge. Her demeanor did not contradict my hypothesis of what happened that night.

I wished the interviews had been before a grand jury. While they could have asserted the Fifth Amendment, John Ramsey circumvented that dicey situation by letter to Alex Hunter. The DA’s office allowed the Ramseys to remain safely within a negotiated comfort zone. Throughout the sessions, Ramsey referred to the district attorney and the deputy DA as Alex and Pete, while Hunter, in conferences with the police, referred to him as “Big John.”

John Ramsey went on a tirade about the Boulder cops even before Lou Smit began to question him on June 23. “What the Boulder Police did to us is only exceeded by what the killer did to us,” he charged, painting us as a bungling lynch mob who treated them as “hunted suspects.” It was only because of our actions, he said, that their own investigation began. “These fellows were hired to protect us,” he said. What rubbish, I thought. Team Ramsey was up and running shortly after the murder, and from my point of view, the Ramseys had been treated with kid gloves for a year and a half. “The law in the hands of bigots is a dangerous thing,” Ramsey declared. “And that’s what we have here.”

Later in the interview Ramsey would insist that “We offered and offered and offered” to cooperate, but that the Boulder Police “were up to no good.”

Smit, who had been unable to sleep the night before the interview thinking about what was ahead, let him blow off steam, then settled in, with prosecutor Mike Kane also asking questions. Ramsey was accompanied by his attorney Bryan Morgan and a private investigator. The Boulder detectives were allowed to view videotapes of the interviews later, and briefing sessions were held each evening between the DA’s office and the police.

Ramsey stuck close to his team’s theory that the murderer was someone known to the family who was angry with them. The intruder came in through the basement window, scuffing the wall and putting the suitcase beneath the window, then hid out and killed JonBenét.

The next morning, December 26, John Ramsey had been in the upstairs bathroom when he heard Patsy scream his name. He hurried downstairs while she was coming up, and she handed him the ransom note on the second-floor landing.

As an aside, he remarked lightly that his attorneys get nervous when he recalls exact details. They should have been nervous, for Patsy was telling her interviewers about the same time that she did not pick up the note, which had no fingerprints. It was a direct contradiction.

Ramsey, indicating that he took the note downstairs, said he’d spread it on the floor to read it, then checked on Burke and found him asleep. He told Patsy to call the police. Asked why he did not make the call, he replied that it was just the way things were done in their family.

The first big surprise came when Ramsey announced that, while police were in the house, he used a pair of binoculars to look out of Burke’s second-floor bedroom window and saw a strange truck parked behind a home across the road. It was the first that any of us had heard of this. I could not believe that the father of JonBenét had waited eighteen months to reveal this information. If he thought it might be in the least way relevant to her murder, why didn’t he dash downstairs right away and yell, “Hey, cops! There’s a suspicious truck in the alley!”?

He also mentioned for the first time that there was a hang-up telephone call that morning. Although it was suggestive of a kidnapper, our records did not show such a call, and the phones were monitored.

Ramsey stuck to his original story of seeing the girl’s body “clearly and instantly” when he opened the cellar door and for the first time said he did
not
turn on the light. Our tests and the testimony of Fleet White had convinced us that it was impossible to see anything in the darkness, particularly when the view was blocked by a jutting interior corner.

JonBenét, he said, was lying on the floor on her back, and the blanket was neatly folded across her body, tucked in “like an Indian papoose, like someone put her there comfortably with her mouth taped.” Describing how he untied one wrist, he said the ligature was very tight around the swollen arm, although the autopsy showed no sign of a tightly bound cord. In fact, it had been so loosely tied that the knot and loop remained intact when removed.

The reason for giving the early instruction to his pilot to get the plane ready was that he wasn’t thinking clearly and just wanted to take his wife and son “home to Atlanta.” And when the police wanted the Ramseys to come in for interviews later that day, he said, “We couldn’t.”

Following up on why they yearned for Atlanta, John Ramsey replied that Patsy liked the South, enjoyed shopping and the country club life in the city, and could not find lipstick in Boulder.

He talked about his new Harley motorcycle. Returning to more serious subjects, Ramsey stumbled when Lou Smit questioned him about the pineapple. He insisted that he didn’t remember JonBenét eating it at the Whites’ Christmas party and knew she didn’t eat it at home before going to sleep. In retrospect, he thought it “strange” that Priscilla White fixed her a plate of cracked crab. He would “guarantee” JonBenét did not eat the pineapple at home, so it had to be before they went to the Whites’ or while they were there. “I don’t buy that an intruder fed her pineapple,” he declared, adding that he recognized neither the bowl containing the fruit nor the spoon that were on the table.