The Cases That Haunt Us (46 page)

Victory!

S.B.T.C

The note was written with a black, felt-tip marking pen, and the blocky handwriting appeared to belong to someone who was either extremely nervous or consciously attempting to disguise his or her normal style, possibly by writing with the nondominant hand.

Before long, the patrol supervisor, Sergeant Paul Reichenbach, came to the house. The note had warned against notifying the police—something just about any parent would do regardless of the threat—and if the house was under surveillance, or “scrutiny,” as the note said, the presence of two marked patrol cars would have been quite obvious.

Along with Reichenbach, two sets of the Ramseys’ close friends, Fleet and Priscilla White and John and Barbara Fernie, responded to Patsy’s frantic phone calls and came over. The Whites had hosted the Christmas dinner the previous evening. It was the second year that the Ramseys and the Whites had spent Christmas together.

Reichenbach called for more personnel, including a crime scene evidence team, and someone from the victim-witness office. He instructed the telephone company to institute a trap-and-trace on the Ramseys’ line, then notified the detective supervisor on call, Sergeant Robert Whitson. He directed that there be no further police radio traffic in case the kidnappers had access to a police scanner. Reichenbach conducted a quick survey of the house, including JonBenet’s room. He found no obvious signs of forced entry. His observations were consistent with French’s: Patsy was verging on hysteria while John was calm and composed. According to witnesses, they did not seem to interact much, especially once the Whites and Fernies arrived. The two women took Patsy into the sunroom off the living room to sit with her and comfort her.

Now, even at this early stage, we’re already starting to see some problems with the investigation. The premises from which a victim has presumably been kidnapped are a crime scene and must be treated as such to preserve potential crucial clues. All investigators operate according to the “theory of transfer,” which states that no one enters or exits a room without leaving something behind and taking something away. Therefore, the more people at a scene—and this includes police officers—the more corrupted the scene will be. It is perfectly understandable that the Ramseys would want their closest friends around them, and commendable that the police would want them to have this emotional support during their ordeal, but valuable evidence already could have been destroyed. The first choice would be to remove everyone from the house and take them to the police station or some other location, and to secure the house and grounds. If that was not deemed practical for whatever reason—such as the need to wait for a phone call from the kidnapper—and if everyone had to be there, then they needed to be contained in one place where they would not corrupt the entire scene. They should not have been allowed to wander the house freely, particularly in obviously critical areas such as JonBenet’s bedroom. Unfortunately, these mistakes would be compounded as the morning wore on.

At one point Fleet White attempted to help out by conducting his own search. On the far wall of a storage room in the labyrinthine basement, a small broken window immediately caught his attention. In another part of the basement, White also walked through the small furnace room toward a door to another storage room the Ramseys referred to as the wine cellar, even though they were both very light drinkers. It was completely dark when White opened the door and he could not find a light switch, so he reclosed the door and returned upstairs. There, John Ramsey explained that he himself had broken the window Fleet had seen some months earlier when he’d returned to the empty house without his key.

By this time two victim advocates had arrived to offer emotional support for the Ramseys and to act as liaisons with the police. But this further complicated the scene. And as one officer left the house to bring the ransom note to police headquarters, the Ramseys’ pastor, the Reverend Rol Hoverstock, of St. John’s Episcopal Church, also arrived.

During this time Burke Ramsey was awakened and told that his sister was missing. He dressed and was taken from the house to the Whites’. John and Patsy wanted him removed from the tension and trauma as much as possible, but this action could be criticized. If JonBenet had (presumably) been kidnapped by unknown parties for unknown reasons, how much sense does it make to bring Burke to an unsecured location? Why did the police accede to it?

As with many aspects of this case, at least two explanations are possible. On the positive side, we could say that in times like this, under this incredible stress, you tend to think in a linear, immediate-result-ori-ented manner. John and Patsy didn’t want Burke traumatized for life by what he might experience here, and so they wanted him taken to the place he felt most comfortable and safe. The police agreed to this because they were sensitive to the same things the Ramseys were.

The negative interpretation would hold that if one or both of the Ramseys had been the perpetrator, they would know that Burke was in no danger away from them. And the negative judgment on the police would be that they blew it: they never should have let a potential victim and/or material witness out of their protection. Yet, one (that is, the Ramseys or the police) could easily reason that if the kidnapper had wanted Burke, he would have taken him at the same time he took JonBenet. And at the Whites’ house, Burke would be under constant visual supervision by people who genuinely cared for him, and no one is going to brazenly break in in broad daylight and grab him.

My decades of experience investigating kidnappings and murders tells me that the proper explanation cannot be determined in a vacuum. Each element must be fit into an overall pattern, which is what we’ll attempt to do.

Sergeant Whitson put detectives on the case, then informed the Boulder County Sheriff ’s Department and the District Attorney’s Office, in the person of Peter Hofstrom, chief of the felony division. According to Steve Thomas, the detective who was to play a major role in the investigation, a canine unit with a tracking dog was also put on standby, but for some reason was never used. Thomas considers this another mistake, and I agree. I have been impressed by the ability of tracking dogs to follow even a faint scent from a given point to where the victim was next taken.

John Ramsey called his friend Rod Westmoreland, an attorney and vice president of Merrill Lynch’s Atlanta office, to arrange for the ransom money. John and Patsy had met in Atlanta and lived there until John’s successful regional computer-distribution company, MicroSouth, merged with two others to form Access Graphics, with the central office to be located in Boulder. John moved there to become chief executive. Patsy and the children followed, after Patsy found the 1920s house on Fifteenth Street. Patsy’s father, Donald Paugh, a former Union Carbide executive, worked for John’s company in Atlanta and also moved to Boulder. Access, which topped $1 billion in annual sales, was then sold to Lockheed Martin, which kept John as chief executive.

In spite of the relocation of the family out West, the Ramseys still essentially considered themselves Atlantans, and Patsy, a native West Virginian who had represented the state in the Miss America pageant, missed many aspects of the Southern lifestyle.

Westmoreland, tracked down at his parents’ home in Tupelo, Mississippi, quickly went to work on the money. He called back to tell John he had arranged for a $118,000 credit line on his Visa card, which would translate to a cash advance at any local bank. Needless to say, anytime the phone rang, the police immediately snapped to attention, expecting that it might be the kidnapper calling.

A little after 8 A.M., Sergeant Whitson contacted John Eller, commander of the Boulder PD detective division. Like so many other people at this time of year, Eller was out of town, vacationing with his family in Florida. Within a few minutes of this call, detectives Linda Arndt and Fred Patterson arrived on scene, having already seen the ransom note and been apprised of the situation thus far. From all accounts, Arndt treated the Ramseys with great compassion and consideration, trying to reassure Patsy as best she could. She instructed John on how to react when the kidnapper called, stressing that he should try to keep him on the line as long as possible.

John called Michael Archuleta, the private pilot who was to fly the Ramsey plane, a 1972, twin-engine Beechcraft King Air C-90, to Charlevoix, Michigan, and told him what had happened. Archuleta had worked extensively with John, and they considered each other good friends. John’s two older children from his first marriage, Melinda and John Andrew, and Melinda’s fiancé, Stewart Long, had planned to fly from Atlanta to Minneapolis where they would be picked up by the Ramsey plane, and then they’d all proceed to Charlevoix. John asked Mike to reach them at the Minneapolis Airport and have them divert to Denver. John’s oldest daughter, Elizabeth, called Beth, had been killed in an automobile accident in Chicago with her friend Matt Darrington on January 8, 1992, when she was twenty-two. John had been devastated by the loss of Beth, going into an extended mourning, but by his own account had come out of the ordeal with his faith renewed and strengthened. The Beechcraft plane was named for Beth.

Police officers began questioning the Ramseys, trying to piece together an official version of the story. Both of them thought all doors had been locked the previous night. According to Steve Thomas’s account, there was some discrepancy in Patsy’s story as to whether she’d checked JonBenet’s room and found it empty, which had prompted her to go downstairs looking for her and found the note, or whether she had found the note first and then gone to the bedroom to check. While this could be significant if Patsy was, in fact, still working on getting her story “straight,” I have generally found that parents of child victims often don’t remember details of their own actions during these times of fear and stress. I have seen parents block out the entire experience the way you hear of car-crash victims being unable to recall anything about the accident.

Both parents remembered leaving the Whites’ house about 8:30 in the evening, making two brief stops to leave gifts at the houses of other friends, and returning home shortly after 9:00. JonBenet fell asleep in the car, and John carried her into the house and upstairs to her room, where Patsy got her ready for bed. They said she did not wake up during any of this. John then went to attend to Burke, but the boy insisted on completing assembly of a Christmas toy. By the time John put him to bed and came up to his own bedroom, a converted attic space on the third floor, Patsy was already in bed. John took a melatonin tablet to help him sleep and set the alarm clock for 5:30 A.M.

The detectives asked John if he could think of anyone who might have taken JonBenet or might wish him harm. The first person he thought of was Jeff Merrick, a longtime Access Graphics employee who had been let go and was apparently extremely bitter about it. He had filed a complaint with Lockheed Martin, and John was told by several people that Merrick had threatened to bring down both him and Access.

Patsy’s first thought when asked a similar question was Linda Hoffmann-Pugh, their housekeeper. Patsy said Linda had been acting strangely and had asked to borrow $2,500 because she couldn’t pay her rent. Patsy also recalled that her own mother, Nedra Paugh, had told her that Linda had once remarked, “JonBenet is so pretty; aren’t you afraid that someone might kidnap her?”

The police sent officers out to interview Hoffmann-Pugh and her husband in nearby Fort Lupton. In the meantime, the 8:00–10:00 window in which the kidnapper had said he would call had come and gone, unless, John Ramsey recalled thinking, it referred to the next day. Since they didn’t know exactly when the crime had taken place—before or after midnight—John could not be sure. At one point, John was seen going through the mail, and the rumor surfaced that he had left the house to go get it. In fact, the mail came into the house through a slot in the front door. Several people have commented on the apparent nonchalance and detachment this demonstrates, but John says that he was anxious to see if there was any communication from the kidnapper.

By lunchtime no word had come, and the various police officials began leaving the house and returning to the station to work the case. The two victim advocates had also gone. This left Detective Linda Arndt as the only police officer at the scene to supervise seven civilians: John and Patsy Ramsey, Fleet and Priscilla White (who had returned after taking Burke to their house to be watched), John and Barbara Fernie, and the Reverend Rol Hoverstock. Arndt was clearly uncomfortable with this arrangement and called Detective Sergeant Larry Mason for backup. For whatever reason—possibly due to the holiday-thinned staffing roster—none came.

In what may have been an attempt to keep John occupied while she was dealing with everyone by herself, around 1:00 in the afternoon Arndt asked him to take one of the other men and look through the house to see if they could find anything new or possibly related to the crime. John asked Fleet White to accompany him and suggested that they begin in the basement and work their way up.

THE
WINE
CELLAR

John and Fleet went through the basement room by room. Past the table set up with Burke’s electric trains, they came upon the broken window, where they found several small splinters of glass on the floor. John figured these were probably still from his unusual entry the previous summer. It certainly seems odd in retrospect not to have fixed the window in all those months, but this was a low-crime area. The Ramseys also had a burglar alarm, but had not used it for months because the children kept accidentally setting it off.

John and Fleet noticed a suitcase resting near the window. If there had been an intruder and the window was his point of exit, he could have used it as a step. But since the two men moved it in their search, it would be difficult to say. They looked through the crawl spaces under the dining room, then retraced their steps into the furnace room, coming to the wine-cellar door that Fleet had looked in earlier and found pitch-black.