The Cases That Haunt Us (54 page)

When my unit consulted on a potential domestic case or when I was teaching criminal investigative analysis at Quantico or for any other police agency, I used to stress that it is absolutely critical to look closely at what was going on in and around the victim’s family in the days or weeks before the crime.

The 1996 Christmas season was a happy time for the Ramsey family. They loved Christmas anyway, particularly the excitement of the kids, and this was one of the best times of their lives. John’s company had topped a billion dollars in annual sales. Patsy had recovered from a terrifying and deadly cancer. The children were happy. JonBenet charmed everyone, and she and Patsy loved going to the pageants together, despite whatever judgments any of us might have about their value. The family was looking forward to the vacation in Michigan and then the cruise on the Disney ship.

Now fast-forward several hours to this beautiful little girl, strangled to death with a garrote, bashed in the side of her head, tied up, and left in the basement wine cellar. How do you get from point A to point B?

One of the first things we look for in profiling is a precipitating stressor: something that made the offender act or react the way he did. We don’t have any here. There’s nothing going on. No matter how badly JonBenet messed the bed (if she did at all; the urine stains in her panties and long johns could easily have come about when her bladder tension released at death), I don’t believe that Patsy would suddenly lose every instinct and inhibition she’d ever had and strike out violently at the being she clearly loved as much as anyone else in the entire world. And God knows she wouldn’t strangle her daughter to death. It just doesn’t happen that way. There would have to have been some previous behavior to suggest this was possible, and there simply was not.

I mentioned that when I first met Patsy, she was wearing a large cross around her neck. I’ve often seen people accused of crimes suddenly get religion, and I was wondering if the stress of what she was undergoing had occasioned this necklace. But then when I had the opportunity to examine many of the Ramsey family snapshots, I saw that she had been wearing this same cross for several years. I learned it had been given to her by her minister during her cancer treatments. I saw nothing to imply to me that her religious faith and her belief in her miraculous salvation from cancer were anything but genuine. And I have trouble believing that she could have been so cynical as to assert that her baby’s killer would get his just desserts from God even if he eluded temporal justice if she were the killer. This is not to say that I have been taken in or influenced one way or another by her religiousness. I am only pointing out a belief structure on her part that seemed to be internally consistent.

LOU
SMIT’S
SCENARIO

I was not alone in my analysis. In March 1997, Alex Hunter hired a retired El Paso County Sheriff ’s Department homicide detective named Lou Smit to conduct an investigation on behalf of the DA’s office. El Paso County is due south of Denver and encompasses Colorado Springs and the U.S. Air Force Academy. Smit, a gentle and soft-spoken man in his sixties, had acquired legendary status in Colorado as a brilliant investigator with an astounding 90 percent clearance rate on more than two hundred homicides. In his wallet he kept a plastic photo folder with pictures of some of the victims for whom he’d obtained justice.

Smit’s legend was solidified with his working of the 1991 murder of Heather Dawn Church, a little girl who was killed in her house near Colorado Springs. The case went nowhere for four years with the prevailing attitude being that someone in the family had done it, and the police were not aggressively seeking other potential suspects. With dogged determination and an obsessive attention to detail, Smit found a print at the scene that had pretty much been overlooked. He was able to match it to a suspect who was subsequently arrested in Florida. Smit had pulled the proverbial rabbit out of the hat.

Shortly after Smit came on the Ramsey case, he examined all the evidence and, unlike the Boulder PD, concluded that, as in the Heather Church case, an intruder had killed JonBenet. He believed that a pedophile who had seen JonBenet in public decided to go after her that night and broke into the house while the Ramseys were celebrating with the Whites.

The offender probably went in through the grate and window well to the basement, then explored the entire house. He used Patsy’s pad and pen to write the ransom note. Then, before the family returned home, he hid and waited for them. Once he was convinced they were all asleep, he went into JonBenet’s bedroom and immobilized her with a stun gun applied twice directly to her skin. He taped over her mouth with duct tape he had brought in with him and carried her unconscious down to the basement, where he could remove her from the house without disturbing the parents on the third floor.

He found Patsy’s paint box and broke off the brush handle to fashion into a garrote with the cord he’d brought. As he choked the child as part of his erotic fantasy, he simultaneously penetrated her with his fingers. The unidentified
DNA
under JonBenet’s nails and in her underpants, the unidentified pubic hair, an unidentified palm print on the door, a Hi-Tec brand bootprint on the floor, and a scuff mark on the wall below the window all came from the
UNSUB
, according to Smit’s theory. The fingernail deposits occurred when JonBenet awakened and tried to fight him off. That was when he panicked and struck her hard in the head, possibly with a flashlight. Believing he’d killed her, he left the body and escaped from the house, taking with him the articles he’d brought in—the cord, the duct tape, and the stun gun.

Smit also had an interesting alternative theory to the $118,000 figure. If the intruder was planning to flee to Mexico, at the exchange rate in effect at the time, $118,000 would have yielded 1 million pesos.

After he left the DA’s office, Smit went through his presentation on the case for me. I didn’t necessarily agree with all of his interpretations, but his overall approach made a lot of sense, much more than the twisted logic of the bed-wetting scenario. Many of the other investigators, including, according to Steve Thomas, some from Quantico, objected to Smit’s assertion that an intruder would be bold enough to break in and then hang around a house full of sleeping people. But there is much precedent for this. You can be fearless or mission-oriented without being particularly criminally sophisticated.

THE
STUN
GUN
THEORY

Lou Smit pursued the Ramsey investigation with every bit of the dedicated meticulousness with which he had worked the Church case and all the others. His theory took shape when, studying photographs of JonBenet’s body, he noticed two sets of small red welts on her skin. Each set was the same, with the two marks in the same relationship to each other. He thought it highly unlikely that two such regular marks could be coincidental. He pursued this with several people, eventually ending up with Michael Dobersen, the coroner of Arapahoe County, Colorado. Dobersen had worked on a case involving a stun gun. After studying the photographs Smit showed him, he said that they did seem to be consistent with a stun gun, but he couldn’t say for sure without examining the body itself.

Smit pursued the stun gun possibility and narrowed down the type of weapon that could have produced the telltale marks to an Air Taser brand. According to Steve Thomas, the police discounted the possibility of a stun gun being used in the crime, but I do not know why. I am not an expert on such weaponry, but when Smit showed me his evidence, it looked compelling to me.

Like the attic floorboard in the Lindbergh kidnapping, this is one of those elements upon which the entire case can hinge. If, in fact, a stun gun was used by the offender, that would virtually rule out the parents by itself, in my view.

A stun gun could be used on a six-year-old child with only two possible intentions in mind: to torture her for sexual pleasure or to immobilize her. Neither of these fits into any reasonable scenario involving the Ramseys. The presence of a stun gun would show planning and intent, not accident. If the marks on JonBenet’s body did come from a stun gun (and it would be unlikely to have two sets that so match up to an Air Taser that did not), it is interesting to note that while the notepad and the possible head-blow weapon were in plain view in the house, the items intended to
control—
the duct tape, the cord, and the possible stun gun—were not found, suggesting the offender probably brought them with him. This is also probably true of the flashlight, which would be another natural implement for an intruder to bring. When he found he needed a blunt-force weapon, then, he had it right there.

THE
RANSOM
NOTE

Few would disagree that the three-page ransom note is as important a piece of evidence as exists in this case. Anyone hoping to come up with a theory of who killed JonBenet Ramsey has to come to grips with the significance and meaning of this communication.

When I saw the note, how long and bizarre it was, my first thought was that, regardless of who wrote it, it had to have been written before the killing, not afterward. No one—family member or intruder—would have had the presence of mind, the mental concentration, to sit down in the house and write this out with the body lying there in the basement. For this reason, I don’t believe the note was part of a staging in the same way that the police and some members of the
FBI
seem to believe. This does not mean I think monetary gain was necessarily the prime motivator in the case, although it could have been. It just means that the note was written deliberately, not as a hasty cover-up after the fact.

With very few exceptions, the spelling is correct and the syntax consistent, leading me to believe the note was written by an educated individual. Compare this to the Lindbergh communications or the Jack the Ripper “From hell” note. But it is so strange and the amount of the ransom demand is so small relative to the Ramseys’ wealth and what we would expect an extortionist to ask for that we can rule out sophisticated or professional criminals. If this is a criminal-enterprise homicide, it was perpetrated by an amateur.

For the sake of convenience, I will use the masculine pronoun in this analysis.

To begin with, the phrase “Listen carefully!” implies an offender unsure of himself who therefore feels the need to secure attention. Using the plural “we” lends him more strength and credence, as does the suggestion that they are foreign terrorists with a political agenda. However, the silliness and awkwardness of the sentences “We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction. We respect your bussiness [
sic
] but not the country that it serves” gives him away. What occurs to me is the construction of a teenager or young adult who watches a lot of movies. I can imagine a movie character saying, “They represent a small foreign faction …”

Even the phrase “At this time we have your daughter in our posession” is awkward and unsophisticated. And interestingly, though there are repeated references throughout the note to “your daughter,” she is never mentioned by name. Is it possible the writer of the note did not know her name or, even more likely, did not know how to spell it?

On the second page, the writer says, “Any deviation of my instructions will result in the immediate execution of your daughter. You will also be denied her remains for proper burial.” This also speaks to the writer’s insecurity. And I don’t believe a mother would refer to her daughter’s death as an execution. In the same way that Patsy wouldn’t physically abuse the body, I don’t believe she would talk about withholding the remains. This would be too painful for the mother to countenance.

Anyone trying to make up a ransom note as staging would write something as short and to the point as possible. You’d be careful not to give any unnecessary clues.

I find it equally interesting that the note instructs Ramsey to “withdraw $118,000.00 from your account.” It doesn’t merely demand the money, it gives specific instructions, as if the writer knew that this precise amount of money was available in the account. I therefore think it likely that the writer had been in the house before and seen some documentation, possibly a pay stub, that this amount had been deposited in John Ramsey’s account. To a young adult, this might have seemed like a lot of money and a good amount to ask for.

Many have suggested that the $118,000 figure was such an inside piece of information that the note had to have been written by one of the Ramseys. I must admit, I don’t get this at all. If one or both of the Ramseys were using this note to stage an apparent kidnapping, why would they purposely point the finger at themselves by using inside information? If John Ramsey knew he wasn’t going to have to pay the ransom anyway, why not ask for $5 million and make it look more legitimate?

The only scenario that might make some logical sense in which one of the Ramseys came up with the figure would be if Patsy wanted to stick it to John through the note; that is, if she were trying to give him a message. This could also account for such phrases as “You are not the only fat cat around so don’t think that killing will be difficult,” “Don’t underestimate us John,” and “Use that good southern common sense of yours. It is up to you now John!”

But if that were the case, Patsy would have found ways to continue revealing herself and sticking it to John after the fact, and she did not. In fact, the police were monitoring all of their interactions with each other that first day at the Fernies’ house, and there was no evidence of her trying to get back at him or punish him in any way. To me, the $118,000 figure points away from the Ramseys but toward someone who knew them or had observed personal details of their lives.

There are quite a few movie references in the note. “You and your family are under constant scrutiny as well as the authorities. Don’t try to grow a brain, John” corresponds to “You know that I’m on top of you. Do not attempt to grow a brain,” lines delivered by the Dennis Hopper extortionist character in
Speed
, which was out on video at the time of the murder.