Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (42 page)

Patsy was asked about the ransom note. How did she feel about the fact that some handwriting experts believed she wrote it? She didn’t know that to be the case, she said. What about the fact that her pen was used to write it? She replied: “It was?” Thomas asked why the handwriting looked like hers. “It looks that way because it may have been written by a woman,” she answered.

“I did the best I could. I just put her to bed,” Patsy said in answer to one question. “I
just
don’t know that,” she would say again and again.

There were several breaks before lunch, during which Hofstrom allowed Patsy and her attorneys to use his office. Thomas worried that they were telling John Ramsey what his wife was being asked, to make sure that his story would not be at odds with hers.

After the first break, she was asked if she would take a polygraph. “I’ll take ten of them,” Patsy replied. Later, when the detectives requested that a test be administered to her, Patsy’s attorney and Pete Hofstrom were unable to agree on the terms.

In the afternoon, Thomas asked Patsy if she or any member of her family had purchased duct tape or cord prior to the murder. They knew she might have bought tape at Home Depot in Athens, Georgia, or at McGuckin Hardware in Boulder. Patsy couldn’t remember buying such items. She’d have no need for them, she said. Her answer was no.

Patsy was shown a photo of the flashlight that had been found on the kitchen counter—which detectives surmised might have been used in the blow to JonBenét’s head. Patsy said the family owned one like it but she couldn’t tell from the photo if this was the one.

Patsy was not only vague, Thomas felt, but coy and charming, even flirtatious, her eyes wide and her head cocked to one side. Thomas, who had grown up in the South, was familiar with the demeanor. Thomas knew better than to be influenced by it. He was also trained to be circumspect. He was sure that Patsy was involved in her daughter’s murder. He just didn’t know
how.

When Patsy’s interview was over, it was John Ramsey’s turn. Dressed casually, he sat down, crossed his legs, and put his hands in his lap. He was at ease. His attorney, Bryan Morgan, sat next to him.

The detectives took Ramsey through his previous statements. When they questioned him about putting JonBenét to bed and reading to her, he said that she had been asleep and that Rick French was mistaken—he hadn’t said, “I put her to bed and read her a book.” What he had said was, “I put her to bed and then I read a book.” Ramsey also told the detectives that Burke had slept through the events of that morning until he was awakened for the short ride to the Whites’.

John Ramsey said that he had gone down to the basement at around 10:00
A
.
M
. that morning. It was the first the police had heard about this. None of Detective Arndt’s reports indicated that Ramsey had visited the basement before the body was found. Ramsey now told the detectives for the first time about his finding the broken window open, which had surprised him. Taken aback by the revelation of Ramsey’s visit to the basement, Thomas asked him why he didn’t report what he found to Detective Arndt since someone could have entered through the window. Ramsey said he didn’t know why. He just didn’t know, he said a second time. When asked if he also went into the boiler room and checked the wine cellar, he replied that he didn’t go into that area of the basement.

Ramsey was asked to tell the detectives how he had found JonBenét’s body. He said that after he opened the door and as he was still reaching for the light switch, he saw to his left the white blanket and his daughter’s hands protruding. Then he screamed and went inside. He didn’t remember exactly when the light was turned on. He wasn’t sure he saw the blanket while the room was still dark.

“When you opened the door, did you see the blanket and JonBenét before or after you turned on the light?” Ramsey was asked again. He said he didn’t remember. He didn’t remember turning on the light. He just didn’t remember. He didn’t indicate whether he’d stepped into the room before seeing his daughter on the floor. It had all happened so quickly, he said.

Then Thomas told Ramsey that Fleet White had been in the basement early that morning and had opened the wine cellar door but seen nothing in the room. Ramsey was surprised. He said he had no knowledge about White being in the basement earlier that morning. How did he explain the fact that White opened the door to the wine cellar, looked in, and didn’t see the blanket and the body, whereas he had seen them both almost immediately? I just don’t know, Ramsey said. I can’t explain it.

By now the police had asked Vahe Christianian, the co-owner of Mike’s Camera in Boulder, to measure the ambient and reflected light inside the wine cellar with its door open and the lights out, to verify what could and could not be seen during a quick glance inside the room. The test showed that there was not enough light to see anything in the dark unless the viewer had spent time getting accustomed to the darkness or his eyes adapted quickly to the surroundings.

However, there was a possible explanation. JonBenét’s body was inside the room and to the left. It might not have been visible to White standing just at the threshold and blocking reflected light from entering the room. Yet if someone stood 5 to 10 inches
inside
the threshold, more reflected light would have entered. Then, looking directly to the left, the person might have seen the white blanket in the dark room. Maybe there was enough reflected light from just outside the door.

The detectives asked Ramsey why, just minutes after finding JonBenét’s body, he had called his pilot to have his private plane take him and his family out of state that afternoon. Ramsey said that he had wanted to get back to Atlanta—where he and his family would be safe. Reminded that he had made the phone call within twenty minutes of finding his daughter’s body, Ramsey repeated that he had felt his family would be safer in Georgia.

Finally, he was asked what he thought of polygraph tests. He said, “If they are accurate, I’m for them.”

“What if I asked you to take one?” Thomas said.

“I have never been so insulted in my life as by that question,” Ramsey said angrily.

“Will you take one?” the detective asked.

“No,” was Ramsey’s answer.

John Ramsey’s interview lasted just over two hours. The detectives felt no need to go into a second day.

After the tapes of the interviews were transcribed, the police evaluated the Ramseys’ interviews. It became clear
to them that Patsy didn’t want to revisit the unpleasant events of December 25–26, 1996, and couldn’t be shaken from her picture-perfect view of her life and family. John Ramsey seemed more realistic in his attitude toward the tragedy. The detectives felt confirmed in their belief that Ramsey was probably not involved in the actual murder of his daughter. But Patsy was—the officers were sure of it.

Like all investigators, Thomas and Trujillo would like to have found a motive—or at least a reason—for JonBenét’s murder. Maybe the child’s bed-wetting had gotten to her mother. Maybe the fact that the six-year-old still demanded help in the bathroom had somehow precipitated the events of that night. Nothing was evident, however. Of course the police knew that they weren’t required to find a motive. Their job was to connect evidence to a suspect.

The following day the Boulder PD again asked Alex Hunter to file charges against Patsy Ramsey. The police said they had discovered enough inconsistencies in both John and Patsy’s stories—combined with Patsy’s handwriting analysis—that there was now probable cause to arrest Patsy. Again Hofstrom pointed to the fact that the police had no eyewitnesses, had ambiguous forensic evidence, had parents with no history of mistreating their children, and—maybe most importantly—no evidence of a motive. Hunter said he wanted to see evidence beyond reasonable doubt. A case he was sure he could win in court. The DA said their would be no arrest warrant issued at this time.

RAMSEYS FINALLY GIVE INTERVIEWS

Charlie Brennan of the
Rocky Mountain News
was one of the reporters who had staked out the Justice Center the day of the interviews, hoping to see the Ramseys and their attorneys. All he got was a quick glimpse of John Ramsey arriving after 3:00
P
.
M
. He didn’t see the Ramseys or their attorneys leave. When he checked his voice mail the next day, he heard, “Call me as soon as you get this. Give me a phone number where you can be paged or called Thursday morning.” The message had been left the previous evening by Rachelle Zimmer, a spokeswoman for the Ramseys.

Like a few other reporters, Brennan had been told by Charlie Russell, another Ramsey spokesperson, that he shouldn’t leave town. An hour after hearing the voice mail message, he was in Boulder with a photographer, waiting in front of Dot’s Diner, at 8th and Pearl. When his cell phone rang, Rachelle Zimmer gave him a password—“subtract”—and designated a place where they should meet.

“You’re not to ask them anything about the murder,” Zimmer told him but did not say who “they” were. “There will be lawyers present. You can’t photograph them. And you can’t ask the attorneys any questions.” The list of restrictions went on: Don’t ask about yesterday’s interview with the police. Don’t disclose today’s location, even afterward. The interview would last thirty minutes, Zimmer added before hanging up.

A private security guard met Brennan and six other reporters at the side door of the Marriott Hotel in Boulder. They had all been given the same password. They were shown to a small, tastefully appointed ground-floor lounge. A lavish bouquet on a low table separated the media from an empty couch.

As they waited, Paula Woodward, an investigative reporter for KUSA, NBC’s Denver affiliate, asked Carol McKinley a question: “Who do you think killed JonBenét?”

“This isn’t the place to talk about that,” McKinley replied.

“You think they did it, don’t you?” Woodward insisted.

“That’s not something I want to talk about—not right now,” McKinley said as she returned to her seat.

Rachelle Zimmer, who had been hovering about the room, made a final check before John and Patsy Ramsey entered with their lawyers and Patsy’s father. John was neatly dressed in a tweed jacket and paisley tie; Patsy wore a blue suit, with a silver angel pin on her right lapel. Her eyes were clear; her smile, warm. She sat to John’s left, exactly as she had during their January CNN interview.

Most of the reporters, who had never seen the Ramseys in person, found their quiet grace impossible to reconcile with the rumors building around them.

John Ramsey spoke first: “We’ve been anxious to do this for some time, and I can tell you why it’s taken us so long.” Ramsey explained that their first obligation had been to talk to the police. Now that they had, they wanted to “clear up some issues.”

Ramsey discussed how and why his attorneys had been hired, explaining his close relationship to Michael Bynum. Then he raised the subject the reporters had been told to avoid: “Let me address it very directly: I did not kill my daughter JonBenét. There have also been innuendoes that
she had been or was sexually molested. I can tell you that those were the most hurtful innuendoes to us as a family. They are totally false. JonBenét and I had a very close relationship”—Ramsey stumbled over his dead daughter’s name. Then he added: “I will miss her dearly the rest of my life.”

Then Patsy spoke: “I’m grateful that we are finally able to meet together face-to-face. I’m appalled that anyone would think that John or I would be involved in such a hideous, heinous crime. But let me assure you that I did not kill JonBenét and did not have anything to do with this.” She added, “We feel like God has a master plan for our lives and that in the fullness of time, our family will be reunited again and we will see JonBenét.”

John said, “I have corresponded several times with a little girl about our son Burke’s age in southern Illinois. She was very distressed by this. I have received a card from an elderly lady. I think she said she was eighty-five. She said she had to wait until she got her Social Security check so she could buy stamps to send us a letter. It’s just been wonderful.”

Patsy continued. “I know you have been diligently covering this case,” she said, “and we have appreciated some of what you’ve said—I’ll be frank, not all of what you’ve said.”

Some of the reporters chuckled as Patsy continued. “We need to work together as a team. And we need your help.”

Then Patsy held up the newspaper advertisement that had appeared four days earlier, in the Sunday edition of the
Daily Camera
, offering a $100,000 reward for information.

“We feel like there are at least two people on the face of this earth that know who did this,” Patsy continued. “That is the killer and someone that that person may have confided in. We need that one phone call. We need the one phone call to this number that may help the authorities come to a conclusion with this case.”

As Patsy repeated “one phone call,” the reporters
exchanged glances among themselves.

With less than twenty minutes left, Patsy asked for the first question. Phil LeBeau, who weeks before had received an unsolicited call from her, was first. “This is the same plea, I think,” LeBeau began, “that you and John made in your CNN interview four months ago.” The reporter wanted to know why the public had seen little evidence of other efforts by the Ramseys to catch the killer.

John responded, even though the question had been directed to Patsy.

“We’ve been distressed that the [original] reward [offer] wasn’t better publicized,” he answered.

Reporter Bertha Lynn, whose husband was a Denver district judge, wanted to know why two grieving parents had dragged their feet in giving police an interview if they wanted to catch their child’s killer.

“The impression that we haven’t spoken with police is totally false,” John Ramsey replied. He detailed the time he and Patsy had spent with police on December 26 and 27.

“What
has
been delayed has been this formal interrogation of us as suspects,” he went on. “Frankly, we…were, as you might imagine, insulted that we would even be considered suspects in the death of our daughter. And felt that an interrogation of us was a waste of our time and a waste of police time.”

“Mr. Ramsey, what do you want to say to the killer of your daughter?” Paula Woodward asked

“We’ll find you,” Ramsey said evenly. “We will find you. I have that as a sole mission for the rest of my life.”

“Patsy?” Woodward asked.

“Likewise. The police and investigators have assured us that this is a case that can be solved. You may be eluding the authorities for a time”—Patsy jabbed her finger toward the cameras as she spoke directly to the killer—“but God knows who you are, and
we will find you
.”

Those words would comprise the front-page headline of the
Rocky Mountain News
the next day.

Charlie Brennan asked the next question: Did the Ramseys fear a life spent under a permanent cloud of suspicion?

John replied that they weren’t concerned: their true friends knew what they were made of. Then he added, “An arrest is absolutely necessary in our lives for closure…an arrest must be made for us to go on with some semblance of a life and hope for the future.”

Both John and Patsy clasped and unclasped their hands as they spoke, and Patsy often had both palms pressed together as if in prayer. The two of them didn’t touch each other as they sat side by side on the love seat.

Clay Evans of the
Daily Camera
wanted to know whether they were now second-guessing anything they had done or not done to date. They said no. LeBeau then asked, “John, would you recommend the death penalty for the person convicted of killing JonBenét?”

Meeting LeBeau’s eyes directly, Ramsey said: “I would absolutely want the most severe penalty to be brought.”

“Patsy?” LeBeau asked.

She nodded slightly, then looked down. Her eyes welled with tears and her lips trembled, but she did not make a sound.

Then Bertha Lynn, pointing to the contrast between the JonBenét pictured in the advertisement and the child cavorting onstage in a provocative costume, asked the Ramseys whether involving their daughter in pageants now seemed a mistake.

“Those were beautiful pictures,” Patsy said. “I’m so happy that we have those pictures. They’re all that we have now.”

John added, “That was just one very small part of JonBenét’s life.”

“A few Sunday afternoons,” Patsy said.

“If you could,” Phil LeBeau asked Patsy, “what would
you say to JonBenét right now?”

“I’d tell her that I love her and I will be seeing her real soon. It won’t be long.”

Abruptly, Rachelle Zimmer brought the session to a close. Within moments, the Ramseys and their lawyers were gone.

Out in the parking lot, the photographer for the
Rocky Mountain News
turned his key in the ignition and told Brennan, “If those people are guilty, then I don’t know anything about people.” Brennan agreed. Their gentleness allayed any suspicion that they had killed JonBenét. To Brennan, they seemed trustworthy.

As he drove back to Denver to write his story, he heard Carol McKinley and Mike Rosen talking on the radio. The host of a morning talk show on McKinley’s station, Rosen was a moderate conservative. Now he questioned McKinley aggressively.

“There was nothing substantial,” Rosen protested. “None of you pushed them. Now you know why they didn’t invite people like me or Peter Boyles,” he said, referring to another controversial Denver talk show personality.

Back in his office, Charlie Brennan turned on the TV mounted over the city desk. Switching from channel to channel, he watched key passages from the Ramseys’ news conference appear again and again. Some critics were already calling it an infomercial for the Ramseys. With repeated viewings, Brennan noticed that John Ramsey’s eyes were focused somewhere in the middle foreground, on the floral arrangement. That seemed normal, Brennan decided. But Patsy’s demeanor troubled him. She would shut her eyes for several seconds while she spoke. It was an odd little tic, Brennan thought. It suggested that she might be lying.

“I’m appalled that anyone would think that John or I would be involved in such a hideous, heinous crime.” Patsy said. Then she closed her eyes and added, “I loved that child with my whole of my heart and soul.”

Maybe it meant nothing, but she did it again when she said, “We would like to think that we don’t know anyone that we ever met in our lives that could do such a thing to a child.”

She shut her eyes again when she said: “I feel like [the police] are doing a broad investigation, and that is all I need to hear.”

As Brennan wrote his story for the next day’s paper, the confidence he’d felt in the Ramseys while in their presence began to recede.

We’ve been able to convict the Ramseys because they were outsiders.

Usually a crime like this will bring the community together, but we really didn’t adopt them as one of our own. They were just one of dozens of families who came here to escape other cities. That made things easier on us.

—Peter Adler

Professor of Sociology, University of Denver

Now that they had completed police and media interviews, the Ramseys began to cooperate to some degree with the DA’s office. They had met Pete Hofstrom earlier in the year and trusted him. Introduced to Lou Smit when they gave their police interviews on April 30, they came to believe he wasn’t looking to target them. He didn’t seem to have an agenda. It was likely that they were impressed not only by Smit’s religious faith but also by his telling them that he intended to let the evidence lead him to JonBenét’s killer. Not long afterward, Smit made the same statement to a colleague, adding: “If the evidence led to Jesus Christ, I would follow it.” Experience had taught Lou Smit that an investi
gator had to get to know his target, look him in the eye from time to time. It was important to build a positive relationship with the target, not alienate him. Smit believed that after a bridge was forged with the Ramseys, he would be able to rely on his gut to tell him what the evidence couldn’t.

Two weeks later, Smit, Ainsworth, and Hofstrom met with the Ramseys and showed them a photo lineup. Included were Kevin Raburn, his mother and sister, and two sex offenders the investigators were checking out. The Ramseys couldn’t identify any of them. Without blood and hair samples from Raburn, who still hadn’t been located, Hunter’s office began to process the few handwriting samples they had culled from his prison files.

While Smit and Ainsworth continued investigating Raburn, unknown to them, the Longmont police were also looking for him. Back in March, when Smit and Ainsworth had first tried to locate him, Raburn was forging checks. A Longmont detective had tracked him down, unaware that Hunter’s office was looking for him. Raburn agreed to turn himself in for check forgery and, still unknown to Smit and Ainsworth, appeared on May 13 at the police department, where he was released pending a court date. After that he became a fugitive, and Smit and Ainsworth were still unaware of his run-in with the Longmont police.

STUDENTS RIOT ON HILL BONFIRES BURN AS 1,500 FACE OFF WITH POLICE OFFICERS