The Cases That Haunt Us (47 page)

But as soon as John opened the door, he saw something and, according to White, screamed, “Oh my God, oh my God!”

John raced in and found JonBenet lying on her back on the floor with a white blanket wrapped around her torso. Her hands were stretched over her head, tightly bound with thin cord. A piece of black duct tape covered her mouth. Next to her body was one of her favorite pink nightgowns.

Fleet touched JonBenet’s ankle; it was cold. He turned and raced up the stairs for help. John knelt down over her, ripped the tape from her mouth, pulled off the blanket, and began trying to loosen the wrist binding. All the while he said he begged her to talk to him. Her eyes were closed.

He picked her up and carried her stiff body upright around the waist, up the stairs into the living room where Linda Arndt was. Fleet had already come upstairs and shouted for someone to call an ambulance. John laid JonBenet on the floor next to the Christmas tree, uttering words of comfort while Arndt checked for vital signs. But the detective could see that the child was in full rigor mortis and her lips were blue. Fleet then went back to the basement, where he picked up the piece of duct tape. That made two people who had now handled it.

Before Patsy came back into the room, John covered JonBenet’s body with another blanket, as if he were tucking her into bed. The Reverend Rol Hoverstock saw what was happening and began praying out loud. When he completed his prayer, he informed John that he had performed the last rites of the Episcopal Church over JonBenet.

There are conflicting versions of what Patsy did at this point. According to Steve Thomas’s account, which presumably came from his fellow police officers, as soon as Fleet came upstairs shouting, Priscilla White and Barbara Fernie hurried toward the sound, while Patsy did not move from the couch in the sunroom. She came in a few moments later supported by her friends. According to John Ramsey’s account, Patsy essentially fought her way into the living room, rushing past him and falling onto JonBenet’s body, screaming and crying hysterically. It is then generally agreed that she implored Hoverstock with something to the effect of “Jesus, you raised Lazarus from the dead. Raise my baby from the dead!”

Whatever the exact timing or sequence was, at one moment John Ramsey and Linda Arndt were face-to-face kneeling over JonBenet’s body. It was right after Arndt had searched in vain for a pulse and John asked her if his daughter was still alive. She looked him in the eye and told him that JonBenet was dead. John emitted a low groan of anguish.

Now here the narrative gets strange. John and Patsy were both feeling that Arndt had been extremely solicitous and sensitive toward them and continued to feel so throughout that agonized afternoon and the days ahead. Other members of the police department apparently had the same impression. In fact, at some later point, certain other detectives were annoyed that Patsy would speak with Arndt but not with them.

But three years after these events, when she had left the Boulder police force, Arndt recalled the scene differently when she appeared on a nationally broadcast television program. “And as we looked at each other, I remember—and I wore a shoulder holster—tucking my gun right next to me and consciously counting, I’ve got eighteen bullets… . Because I didn’t know if we’d all be alive when people showed up.” She went on to say, “Everything made sense in that instance. And I knew what happened.”

The implication, I think it’s generally agreed, is that what she felt happened was that John had killed his daughter or had at least taken part in the killing or the cover-up.

To my way of thinking, this is an extremely peculiar statement on many levels. For one, none of it ever went into Arndt’s reports. Second, she apparently continued to treat the Ramseys well, not giving any indication that she felt she was dealing with suspects rather than grieving parents. Third, even if John Ramsey was going to attack her right then and there, what’s this about having to count eighteen bullets? There were only seven people in the house beside herself, and none of them was armed. I set great store in gathering impressions through face-to-face contact, but what kind of evidence is this—she saw murder in his eyes?

I would tend to chalk up this reaction to the profound stress of having to deal with the situation on her own without any support, having the dead child found right in the house after police searches had missed her, and realizing therefore that the crime scene was coming apart before her eyes. Even her former fellow officers found the statement curious.

FROM
KIDNAPPING
TO
MURDER

As the case suddenly turned from kidnapping to murder, Linda Arndt directed John to call 911 again. When that didn’t provide immediate results, she called twice more on her own. She would soon get the backup she’d been requesting: more police, an
FBI
special agent from the Denver Field Office, the fire department, and an ambulance with paramedics. Boulder police chief Thomas Koby called detective commander John Eller and told him his help was urgently needed.

Amidst the new clamor and turmoil, Detective Sergeant Larry Mason asked John Ramsey his plans. John’s instincts were to get the family back to Atlanta, where their parents and his brother Jeff were, and where he already knew he wanted to bury his daughter, near Beth in the cemetery in Marietta, Georgia. Mason told him the family should stay in the area, at least for several days. According to John, he said they would. The police say they overheard a telephone conversation in which John told Mike to prepare the plane to fly to Atlanta and considered it suspicious that he’d want to get out of town so quickly. If, in fact, it did happen that way, I see nothing suspicious in it. This is a man used to being able to control things who wants to get to the comfort and relative safety of the place he considers his real home.

The police now wanted the house cleared. One of the Fernies suggested that the Ramseys go to the Fernies’ house in South Boulder. Just as they were leaving through the front door around 2:15, a taxi pulled up with John Andrew and Melinda Ramsey and Stewart Long, who’d taken the first flight they could from Minnesota after getting the message from Mike Archuleta. John went to them and told them, “JonBenet is gone.” Everyone erupted in a new flood of tears.

At about the same time, Detective Thomas Trujillo arrived with a consent-to-search form, which he handed to Larry Mason, who asked John to sign it. He did so, later saying he thought he was signing a consent form for an autopsy to be performed on JonBenet.

Then the Ramseys drove to the Fernies’ home, where Fleet White would bring Burke, and where they would have a twenty-four-hour police guard. What they didn’t know at the time was that those officers would be trying to listen to every word they said.

Though in retrospect the scene was already hopelessly compromised, detectives went about the collection of evidence. The most crucial piece was the ransom note itself, which fortunately had already been taken in and preserved. Sergeant Whitson had asked the Ramseys for handwriting exemplars to compare with the note, and John had quickly given him two white, lined legal tablets. One had been lying on the kitchen countertop and contained Patsy’s notes, doodles, and shopping lists. The other was on a table in the hallway not far from the spiral staircase on which Patsy had found the note and contained John’s writings. Whitson marked the top sheets “John” and “Patsy.” The two pads were taken to the police department and given to Detective Jeff Kithcart, the forgery and fraud expert.

As he was going through Patsy’s pad, Kithcart noticed something extraordinary. Toward the middle of the tablet, a few words were written on a page in black, felt-tip pen: “Mr. and Mrs.,” along with a single downstroke that could easily have been the beginning of a capital
R.
The paper appeared the same as the one on which the ransom note was written. Apparently, this was a first draft, and after consideration, the writer had decided to address the note to Mr. Ramsey only.

What this meant, of course, is that police could now say with a fair degree of certainty that the three-page ransom note was written
in theRamsey house
, using their own pad and paper. This narrowed the scenario considerably. Either an intruder (or intruders) had spent a fair amount of time in the house undiscovered, or JonBenet had been killed by one or more of the three individuals known to be in the house at the same time: John, Patsy, and Burke.

When a child is murdered in or near the home, the parents and close family members are always high on the initial suspect list. Statistics tell us that they are the likely killers. As a rule of thumb, the younger the child, the more probable a family member was involved. This was certainly well-known to Special Agent Ron Walker of the Bureau’s Denver Field Office, who had been called in to consult on the case.

There are few people in law enforcement for whom I have higher regard than Ron. For one thing, I trained him in profiling and criminal investigative analysis at Quantico and found him to be a natural. For another, he saved my life. In December of 1983, when I had lapsed into a coma in my Seattle hotel room from viral encephalitis while working the Green River murders, it had been Ron and fellow agent Blaine McIlwain who’d gotten worried when they couldn’t reach me and broken down the door and rescued me.

Ron advised the Boulder police to look closely at the parents; this was the highest-percentage shot in a case like this. He also pledged whatever assistance from the
FBI
the police would like. Similar offers would soon come from Denver PD and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

Just so we get this straight, since the passage of the Lindbergh law, the
FBI
has primary jurisdiction in a kidnapping case. But once a body is found, it becomes a local matter because homicide is a state crime. Then, the Bureau can do no more than offer whatever assistance the local agency wishes to have. The
FBI
can provide an evidence response team, profiling and criminal investigative analysis, lab facilities, legal advice, major-case computer management, cover out-of-state leads and liaison, whatever. But they have to be requested. Unfortunately, none of these services was used early on to an extent that could have made a difference in the investigation.

This is an important consideration in all of law enforcement. Just as in medicine, where doctors refer patients to other doctors with specialty training in a given field, no law enforcement official is going to be expert in everything. And the smaller and less experienced the department, the less specialized expertise they’re going to have. This is completely understandable and there is no shame in it.

What is understandable but not acceptable is when a department refuses to accept assistance from another agency that does have the expertise and the experience. The Boulder PD was—and is—full of dedicated, hardworking officers. But it is also true (as well as fortunate) that the city has only suffered, on average, a single homicide a year. Regardless of their dedication, there’s no way they could have the depth to work a homicide the way a major department such as New York or Denver could. Evidently, this one looked pretty straightforward to them, even though the crime scene itself was already a mess.

I’ve had it both ways, and I’ve often found that when a local department calls us in willingly and early, as opposed to when the investigation has already gone south and the media and the public are screaming for results, it means that the guy or woman in charge generally has a fair degree of self-confidence and therefore is not threatened by outsiders trying to help. Two out of many such individuals who come immediately to mind are Lexington County, South Carolina, sheriff Jim Metts, who asked for my unit’s assistance when a young woman and a little girl were abducted from in front of their houses, and Rochester, New York, police captain Lynde Johnson, who asked us to help solve a series of prostitute murders. I personally worked the South Carolina case on scene, and my associate Gregg McCrary went up to Rochester. In both cases, a highly effective working relationship between local law enforcement and the
FBI
led to successful apprehensions and trials. I wish the same had happened in Boulder.

Linda Arndt and Larry Mason came back to the Fernies’ house several times the following day to talk to the Ramseys. At one point Arndt asked John and Patsy to come down to the police station and answer questions more formally.

I don’t mean to implicate either officer, but it was probably around this time that the antagonism and animosity between the Ramseys and Boulder Police really took root, and I don’t think it was the conscious doing of either side.

Patsy was distraught, heavily sedated, and proclaiming she wanted to die. John didn’t feel she was in any shape to leave the house and be subjected to the rigors of a police interview. The police had a high-profile murder investigation on their hands, the kind that often or usually ends up with parental involvement, and they wanted to lock the parents each into his or her own story.

The Ramseys’ friend Michael Bynum was at the Fernies’ paying a condolence call when Linda Arndt made the interview request of John. Bynum was an attorney who had been a prosecutor in the Boulder district attorney’s office and was now in private practice with a large local firm. He told John he was wary of how they were now being treated by the police and asked if John and Patsy would trust him to make some decisions on their behalf. John said he was only too grateful to have the help of a close friend.

Bynum immediately told the police that the Ramseys would not be going down to the police station to be interviewed at this time because he didn’t feel they were in shape for it. Then he contacted Bryan Morgan, a prominent Denver attorney and one of the name partners of Haddon, Morgan and Foreman, and asked him to represent John. Bynum got another attorney, Patrick Burke, to represent Patsy. Bynum had enough experience with the criminal justice system to believe that anyone who became enmeshed with it needed to be personally represented by counsel.