JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (5 page)

And the mistakes continued. The body itself was now a crime scene and should have been declared totally off-limits, even to the distraught parents, until it could be professionally examined. But Ramsey knelt beside his daughter and stroked her hair, then lay down and put his arm around her. Arndt thought he was crying but saw no tears. He came to his knees, peered around, then hugged JonBenét and called her his little angel. No matter what his motive, he was altering things that should have been left untouched.

The others were coming down the hallway, Patsy Ramsey being held upright by her friends. On reaching the body, she fell across her daughter, substantially adding to the possibility of fiber transfers. The blanket, the sweatshirt, the personal close contact of the parents—all were extraordinarily damaging to the future evidence collection process.

Arndt simply could not control this many people, and her calls for help had not yet been returned. Barbara Fernie tugged at her arm, pleading with her not to leave them, and a shaken Fleet White was in the next room. To restore some order, the detective asked Father Hoverstock to lead a prayer, and she stood beside the piano to watch.
“Our Father, Who art in Heaven …”

Patsy Ramsey rose to her knees, her arms straight overhead, and called out, “Jesus! You raised Lazarus from the dead, raise my baby from the dead!” The woman seemed ready to swoon.

Arndt used the cell phone to call 911. The absence of a police radio created another crisis, for had she been able to broadcast “156. Code 10. 755 Fifteenth Street,” the cavalry would instantly have been on the way. But instead of reaching Boulder, her cell call bounced to neighboring Weld County, which was uninvolved in the case, and a few minutes later she saw an ambulance cruise past the house. The paramedics had been given the wrong address.

Arndt placed a second 911 call, this time got Boulder, reported the child’s death, and requested detectives, the coroner, and an ambulance. The dispatcher issued a Code Black to designate the call as a homicide, and a few minutes later, at 1:20 P.M., Officer Barry Weiss rushed in through a rear door, calling her name.

4

The case was breaking wide open on two different fronts. About the same time Ramsey found the body of his daughter, a detective discovered what would mark a turning point in the investigation, the existence of a possible practice ransom note in a tablet belonging to Patsy Ramsey.

When Sergeant Bob Whitson had arrived at the house, he asked for handwriting samples of John and Patsy Ramsey, standard procedure to begin eliminating people as possible authors of the ransom note. Without hesitation John Ramsey had picked up two tablets of white lined paper—one from a countertop and the other from a hallway table a few steps from the spiral staircase—and handed them to the policeman. Whitson scribbled
John
across the top of one, which contained business notes Ramsey said he had made, and
Patsy
atop the second, on which the first four pages were covered with doodles, lists, and other writing in a feminine hand. Both pads were taken to the police department and given to Detective Jeff Kithcart, our forgery and fraud investigator, who put them aside while he completed more pressing jobs.

Just before the big briefing was to begin, Kithcart reviewed the tablets. They seemed ordinary enough, apparently the same kind of paper on which the ransom note had been written. He flipped through the one bearing the word
Patsy
and, in the middle, noticed a page with a partial salutation written by a black felt-tip pen.

Mr. and Mrs. I

The single vertical line seemed as if it could be the downstroke that would start the capital letter R. To Kithcart it looked like the start of another ransom note, and it was in a tablet belonging to the mother of the missing child.
How did it get in there
? He quickly headed toward the conference room, thinking that perhaps something more than a kidnapping was at work, but before he could share his find, the Code Black came in.

Police cars, fire trucks, and an ambulance swarmed around 755 Fifteenth Street. A Santa Claus doll watched blankly from a small sleigh on the snowy lawn as uniformed officers walked between the giant candy canes and paper-bag luminaries. Green vines gripped the Tudor brick facade, and a giant wreath hung on the front door that led into the living room where the dead body of a little girl lay beside a gaily decorated Christmas tree.

Sergeant Larry Mason, the acting detective bureau commander, and a supervisory agent from the Denver FBI office arrived as paramedics tended to the distraught Patsy Ramsey, who was clinging to her child. Mason and the FBI agent went downstairs and surveyed the small dank room in which the body had been discovered.

Commander John Eller received his second telephone call on the case when a detective advised him that a body had been found. Just after hanging up, Eller heard the phone ring again, and Police Chief Tom Koby said, “John, I think they need your help in there.” Eller was out the door. He would not see his family again for five days.

At the Ramsey house a detective overheard John Ramsey on the telephone at 1:40 P.M., telling his pilot to ready his plane for a flight to Atlanta. Ramsey was soon told to cancel that flight, but police would consider the action suspicious. Why would a father whose child had just been murdered be readying an airplane to get out of town? It made no sense.

With the discovery of the murder, a comprehensive search of the house was imperative, but warrants take time, and a legal shortcut was considered. When signed by the property owner, a “consent to search” form grants the needed permission but carries the risk that the owner might later claim coercion because of police pressure. Warrants are infinitely better.

Detective Tom Trujillo arrived on Fifteenth Street with the consent form at 2:15 P.M., just as the parents emerged from the house. He gave the form to Sergeant Mason, who handed it to John Ramsey, who read and signed it. Ramsey would eventually say he thought he had been signing an authorization for an autopsy.

John Ramsey’s adult children, John Andrew Ramsey and Melinda Ramsey, along with Melinda’s fiancé, Stewart Long, had just arrived by taxi from the Denver airport. They had flown from Atlanta to Minneapolis that morning en route to meeting the family at the vacation place in Charlevoix, Michigan, but the tragic news caught up with them at the Minneapolis airport. They made an emergency flight to Colorado.

Patsy Ramsey, wearing a long fur coat, walked out sobbing uncontrollably and still leaning on her friends. She climbed into a car and was driven away. Her husband got into a van, and the coterie of family and friends relocated to the Fernie residence in South Boulder, on Tin Cup Circle.

It was perhaps the most critical moment of the investigation. The crime had abruptly changed from kidnapping to murder, the place was surrounded by police, a detective sergeant and an FBI agent were there, yet the parents simply walked away. No one said a word to stop them, and they were not even going to police headquarters to be questioned. Important questions ranging from why that unexplained partial note was in Patsy’s tablet to why John wanted to fly away from Boulder were left unanswered. In most child murders, parents resist leaving the body.

The parents had been treated with quiet respect throughout the morning, when it was thought their little girl had been kidnapped. Murder is treated much differently, and when a child dies, authorities
must
look at the parents. The FBI would tell us that only about 6 percent of all child murders are committed by strangers, while an overwhelming 54 percent are committed by family members. The investigation of such murders normally begins with those who live inside the home. Not this time.

By 2:35 P.M. the house was empty except for the body of JonBenét. Much too late, police officers were finally assigned to guard the doors.

At the police department ten minutes later, John Eller hung up his overcoat and headed for the Situation Room, where his detectives and various officers were gathering for a briefing.

A pair of Denver FBI agents wanted a word. Things had changed, they said, since the agency had first been notified that a federal crime, kidnapping, had been committed. “This is now a homicide,” said one. “It’s local, so it’s not our case.” Agent Ron Walker added, “Look at the parents. No bullshit, that’s where you need to be.” They promised future FBI assistance and left. A third agent, from Boulder, stuck around to help.

Eller got the briefing moving by giving Detective Mike Everett total crime scene responsibility for gathering physical evidence and assigning another detective to draft a search warrant for the house. The commander did not want his people going in with only a consent order that might blow up when challenged. He was also uncomfortable to learn that Tom Trujillo and Linda Arndt had already been designated as co-lead detectives at the scene. For some unknown personal reason, the two detectives were not on speaking terms. I knew both of them and thought they were a most unlikely match.

Eller looked around the room and saw not only cops but Pete Hofstrom and another prosecutor from the DA’s office, more victim’s advocates, and the city’s public information officer. He noted that arrangements had to be made as soon as possible to interview the Ramseys individually at police headquarters.

The briefing was guided by what little was known. A warrant was suggested for the housekeeper’s home in nearby Ft. Lupton, which the local cops had under surveillance, and another warrant was discussed for John Ramsey’s office at Access Graphics. Police wanted handwriting samples, notes, pens and paper, tape, and cord. Within minutes they were off and running.

As hours passed, Commander Eller asked where the search warrants were and was told the district attorney’s office was demanding a string of rewrites and revisions. He knew that a detective could normally hammer together such a warrant in an hour, but this one was stalled until the DA’s office would turn it loose.

It was a dangerous and early indication that once again the Boulder Police Department and the Office of the Boulder County District Attorney were not going to mesh well on a major investigation, as the result of long-ingrained philosophical differences. That happened frequently in Boulder, and in this case it would have devastating consequences. In other jurisdictions where I’ve worked, prosecutors worked in the trenches alongside the cops, many of them even carrying badges and guns, putting on raid jackets when necessary, and getting their hands and boots dirty. Over the years in Boulder, however, the cops and prosecutors had learned it was best that they not work together, for their goals seldom seemed to be the same. Police were charged to apprehend suspects, while to the police, it seemed the prosecutors were more intent on refining a system of politically correct justice in a small, highly educated, mostly white town with a low crime rate. We were not a team.

Therefore the prosecutors had not gone to the Ramsey house immediately to give the police legal advice while a major felony investigation—the kidnapping of a child—was unfolding. But they were forever afterward highly critical of every mistake the officers made. My question about their twenty-twenty hindsight during the coming months was “Where were you when you were needed?” Had a deputy district attorney been on the scene supervising the legal points, perhaps things would have turned out differently.

Instead of focusing on the family, the police investigation was headed another way, toward Linda Hoffmann-Pugh, the Ramseys’ housekeeper. Despite being overcome with grief, she furnished the startling information that the little girl had a problem wetting her bed. That was of great interest to the police. Often the fouling of a bed is seen in cases of incest, as a child tries to appear undesirable to an offender.

For the first six months Hoffmann-Pugh worked there, she said, JonBenét wet the bed every night, and Patsy even had the girl in pull-up diapers. Then the bed-wetting had stopped, but it had resumed about a month ago. When Hoffmann-Pugh arrived for work, she said, Patsy already had the bed stripped and the sheets going in the washing machine.

She told the police that the problem also extended to JonBenét soiling the bed, and recalled once finding fecal matter the size of a grapefruit on the sheets.

Hoffmann-Pugh had fallen apart with emotion at her home on Valle Drive in Ft. Lupton when two detectives told her that JonBenét was dead. This was what she had dreaded and warned the family about! The gorgeous child was allowed to roller-skate and ride her bike all alone, and the nightmare had come true. “My poor Patsy,” she sobbed. “I love Patsy like my daughter.”

Patsy had hired her away from a cleaning service crew known as Merry Maids about fourteen months earlier and had befriended her new housekeeper. Hoffmann-Pugh had dropped out of high school as a sophomore, married at age fifteen, and had six children. She was wearing a pair of Patsy’s old shoes as she spoke to police.

The detectives quickly cleared up the question of the $2,000 loan she had recently requested from the Ramseys. Patsy had agreed to recover the loan from future weekly paychecks of $200. Hoffmann-Pugh was to use part of the money to pay the rent, and the rest would go for truck parts and some family dental work. Christmas dinner had been soft tacos because her husband had no teeth.

Mervin Pugh, the husband, was visibly intoxicated when he was interviewed, and the detectives knew he had had a few brushes with the law back in Michigan. “Is she missing or dead?” he asked. “How did she die, was it natural, strangulation, or what?” The questions were awfully close to the truth, close enough to raise police suspicion.

A blunt-spoken man in his fifties, Pugh had been in the Ramsey home a few times to help his wife, including a recent weekend when they spent three hours hauling Christmas decorations up from the basement. He said he didn’t know the Ramseys but had been inside the house. “All you gotta do is turn around in that goddamn place and you don’t know where you’re going.” His wife agreed it would be difficult to locate the storage room in which the body was found.