Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (48 page)

“Don’t tell anyone I did that,” Hunter said.

“OK.”

That’s when I got the feeling Hunter must know deep down that the Ramseys did it. All this other stuff was just talk.

That night I left Thomas a message on his voice mail: “I knew you had to drive a cool car. I’m proud of you, man.”

—Jeff Shapiro

Stephen Singular knew that Hunter was talking to the tabloids—Jeff Shapiro had told him. Hunter had to know that the tabs were a driving force in shaping public opinion and that they were committed to the idea that the Ramseys had killed their daughter.

Earlier in the month, Hunter had told Singular it was difficult for the DA’s office to do certain things that needed to be done in the investigation. When Singular gave him the idea of delving into the world of pageants, Hunter suggested, Why don’t you go to the tabloids? They have money, they have freedom, they don’t play by the rules. Then he suggested tracing what people were downloading from the Internet, although it might be an invasion of privacy.

Singular was taken aback. The DA was suggesting doing things that Singular himself considered legally tenuous.

“There are highly qualified people that you could involve who wouldn’t have to worry about breaking the law,” Singular told him.

Hunter didn’t answer.

Singular understood that the DA was talking to many journalists and possibly enlisting their help too. He wondered if maybe Alex Hunter was dancing with the devil.

On July 2, Steve Thomas called Jeff Shapiro. “Some of the guys and I are going to sleep in the house tonight,” he said. “We’re trying to get a feel for the place.”

“That’s cool.”

“I thought you might want to know,” Thomas continued. “We’re going to reenact some scenarios. If you want to come by—just by accident, like, walk by—feel free.” Then Thomas added, “I’ll try to help you out little by little. But be cool about it. Be careful.”

“I will, and thanks a lot.”

“Jeff, I know Patsy killed that girl.”

It was the first time Shapiro felt that Thomas trusted him.

Later that evening, Shapiro went to the Ramseys’ house. He climbed a tree on the next-door property at about 8:30
P
.
M
. From there, he could watch the cops through binoculars.

Inside the house, the detectives spent hours running through different scenarios of what might have happened on December 26.
*
Sometimes with the lights on, sometimes with the lights off, they ran the scenarios, starting in JonBenét’s bedroom, either just before or just after she went to sleep. In each scenario they took it for granted that either the killer or JonBenét, or perhaps both, knew the route from her bedroom to the wine cellar.

From JonBenét’s second-floor bedroom, it was less than four full paces to the top of the carpeted spiral staircase that led down to the ground floor. The thirteen steps of the staircase could have been maneuvered in the dark by someone who knew them. A visitor—or an intruder—would need a light, the detectives reasoned, even if they did not have to control a struggling child. A parent or the child would not need a light. The flashlight found on the kitchen counter on December 26, which was normally kept near the kitchen, could have been used either as a light or as a weapon—in the kitchen or in another room. By now the CBI had determined that both the outside of the flashlight and the batteries inside held no fingerprints. Most likely they had been wiped clean. This was highly unusual. An intruder would probably have taken the flashlight with him when he left. A perpetrator who lived in the house might have removed his prints from the flashlight and the batteries in a moment of panic, though it would have been more natural to leave them.

Continuing with the scenario, the detectives saw that once they were down the staircase, there were several likely directions to the basement—none of them allowing for quickness or ease of movement.

A logical direction for the killer—or for a terrified JonBenét who was running away—would be down another short flight of stairs toward what the Ramseys called the butler’s kitchen. There, a door to the left allowed a quick escape into the narrow side yard on the home’s north side—but no access to the garage or basement.

Or, coming from the spiral staircase, someone might head straight for the door that led directly to the brick patio at the southwest corner of the ground floor and then to freedom down the back alley.

However, to reach the basement from the spiral stairs, where the ransom note was discovered, a perpetrator or a fleeing JonBenét would be forced into a more circuitous route.

Once down the stairs to the butler’s kitchen, the detectives realized, the perpetrator could only reach the basement stairs by crossing that room, climbing yet another short flight of stairs, then turning to the right to reach the door to the basement. The problem was that the door swung out into that narrow hallway. It became an obstacle that would force you to sidestep or squeeze around it to get past for anyone who knew the house, and a stranger wouldn’t have known the door was there.

The second route to the basement from the spiral staircase would first lead toward the patio doors, then veer left, right by where the flashlight was kept, through a 25-foot-long kitchen, where a fleeing JonBenét or an intruder would past an island counter and three high chairs.

At the end of the kitchen was a short hallway, into which they would have to make a left turn, and there, immediately to the right, was the door to the basement. Opening that door, however, the detectives discovered that they were in total darkness. There was no light switch on either wall at the top of the stairs or immediately outside the basement door. Any stranger would grope in vain for a light. Eventually, he
might discover it set high on the wall behind his back, inconveniently located opposite the door.

Once in the basement, a stranger would find no fewer than four closets, two storage rooms, and a hobby room. The wine cellar, where the Ramseys typically kept construction materials and their Christmas trees, was at the end of one basement corridor—past a utility sink, past the boiler room, and behind a door.

The investigators considered the possibility that JonBenét fled from her bedroom to this remote hideaway in the middle of the night to elude someone. If so, she would have run a straight path from the bottom of the basement stairs directly to the boiler room, winding up in front of the latched wine cellar door. Only someone who knew the house intimately could make this journey quickly. Or, as one officer suggested, a mischievous JonBenét may have been playing a game of catch-me-if-you-can and led her killer to the spot outside the wine cellar.

If JonBenét had been hit with the flashlight in or near the kitchen and was carried unconscious to the basement, the perpetrator would have followed the same route into the boiler room, winding up in front of the wine cellar door.

The detectives felt that in every scenario, JonBenét spent the final moments of her life just outside the wine cellar door, where the police had found wooden shards from the broken paintbrush that was tied to the cord at one end of the noose. That was also where they found Patsy’s paint tote. The tote contained the unused portion of the paintbrush and additional brushes similar to the one used in the murder. After JonBenét was murdered, the police surmised, her body was taken inside the windowless room.

In an attempt to recreate the final acts of violence, the detectives screamed at different locations in the house, taking an intruder into account. At one point, Thomas ran from the house and slammed the door behind him. He
wanted to know how long it would take someone to leave the house by the shortest route.

Just before midnight, Frank Coffman joined Shapiro. They stood on a wooden fence in the backyard and watched as lights in the house were turned on and off. They saw Detective Gosage, with a flashlight in his hand, performing a pantomime in which someone found John or Patsy and JonBenét, attacked one or the other, but ended up fracturing JonBenét’s skull instead. With the flashlight still in hand, Gosage recreated a slightly different scenario in the kitchen. It looked as if the detectives thought the flashlight was the murder weapon.

After midnight, Shapiro saw the garage door open. Gosage pulled out in his Blazer. Steve Thomas and Lou Smit stayed until the early hours of the morning.

The next day, Trip DeMuth and Tom Trujillo maneuvered the basement window-well grate while Gosage inspected some spiderwebs to see if the grate could be moved without breaking the webs completely.

Watching the police that night, I thought about that movie Manhunter where William Peterson talks to an unknown killer while hunting him down. One night I went back to the Ramsey house, looked up at JonBenét’s window, and spoke to Patsy: “I know you walked in. I know you did it. Didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

I found myself driving past the Ramsey house five to ten times a day. Sometimes I’d go into the backyard and eat lunch on the patio or in the playground. I would just hang out to get a feel for it, the way Thomas did. “Home Sweet Home” is what I started calling the Ramsey house—my home away from home.

A few days later, Thomas called me and asked me to come in and meet Sgt. Wickman.

“Jeff, is your loyalty to the DA’s office, the police, or the Globe?” Thomas asked.

I looked at him seriously. “My loyalty is to JonBenét. I will work with whoever I have to work with to do whatever it takes to avenge that girl.”

At that moment I saw a look in Thomas’s eye that I’d never seen before in my life. It was a look of total respect and admiration.

Thomas had told me they couldn’t get to Hunter through the normal chain of command. They needed my help. That was when I decided to tell them some of the things that were going on in Hunter’s office. I related to them some of my conversations with Hunter.

As Thomas questioned me about the things that were going on in the DA’s office, I sensed he was trying to get negative information. They wanted to know all about Lou Smit. I called him “the fox,” “the ace detective”—something I’d picked up from Hunter—and told them about his intruder theory.

Finally Wickman stood up and thanked me for coming in. Steve Thomas left with him. A moment later, he returned alone.

“That was good,” he said. “Wick was totally impressed—especially the stuff about Smit.” Then Steve continued, “I fuckin’ can’t stand Smit. Sometimes I’m in the DA’s office talking to Smit and DeMuth. They’re telling me about the intruder theory, and it’s like—I just look down at my piece and I think to myself—well, I’ve got one in the chamber and seven in the clip.”

We started laughing.

Thomas told me that he believed John and Patsy killed JonBenét. I said I thought it was Patsy who actually did it. Thomas just smiled. “You’re on the right track,” he said. Then we started talking more about Lou Smit.

“Jeff, this guy is convinced the Ramseys are innocent. He is obsessed with his Christian values. We’re ready to arrest the Ramseys—and he’s looking for intruders.”

Then I tried to tell Thomas that Hunter is a good guy and that Hunter thinks Eller is the problem. I told him what he had said about Eller.

“That’s because Eller is the only guy over here who challenges him,” Thomas said.

“Isn’t Eller kind of an asshole?”

“Jeff, Eller is a fuckin’ good guy,” Thomas shouted. “I wish I could just take you in the back and show you our files.”

I could feel we were bonding.

“Just keep it between us, and we’ll keep talking,” he said. “We have to get Hunter off the intruder path.”

I understood that I was the messenger from the cops to Hunter, and from Hunter to the cops. Soon I would become the messenger from God reminding Thomas and the cops that they were needed.

That was how we left it: my job was to get Hunter off that path.

—Jeff Shapiro

While the detectives seemed to be having doubts about Lou Smit, the veteran investigator was gaining admiration for them. Most of them were top-notch, Smit thought—honest to a fault. Their major problem was their lack of experience. How many murder cases did they have to solve in the last five years? Also, there was no devil’s advocate in their ranks to keep them objective, a situation aggravated early in the case when the DA’s office took the position that the cops weren’t doing their jobs right.

One detective stood out in Smit’s mind. Steve Thomas was a professional. He was dedicated and, like Smit, only wanted justice for the victim. Thomas knew the case from every angle, and he was in the field, where detectives should be. The only fault Smit could find in Thomas’s
thinking was that he’d started, like Eller, from the position that the Ramseys must have been involved in JonBenét’s murder. Like most narcotics officers once he found his target he never let go. Thomas’s lack of experience as a homocide detective seemed to prevent him from stepping back and looking at all the evidence from a different perspective. It was a shame, Smit thought, because under different circumstances, they might have made a team.

PORN EXPERT CALLED IN TO RAMSEY CASE

When the police had finished the four-day search of the Ramsey home, the couple wanted some independent reporters to determine how easy it would have been for an intruder to enter their house. Just before the Ramseys went to Atlanta, a Ramsey attorney contacted Dan Glick of
Newsweek
and offered him a tour of the house. That same week, Clay Evans of the
Daily Camera
was asked if he’d like a tour. Both reporters were told that they could not publish what they had seen or what their conclusions might be until the Ramseys gave them permission—if ever. Both reporters agreed to the conditions.

Evans found many of the family’s personal effects—furniture, books, wall hangings, and even some food—still in the house. What interested him most was the basement. In his notes, he described it as “unfinished,” with walls that had been repainted just before the murder. It had a claustrophobic feel, with low ceilings and small rooms. There were no lighting fixtures—just bare bulbs everywhere. Toilets and sinks were still disassembled from the various police searches. At the back of Burke’s train room, Evans saw the place where the police had found the broken window. He saw that a full-grown person could have crawled through an opening of that size. Just past the boiler room was the unfinished, windowless room where JonBenét had been found. It didn’t look like a wine cellar. The room was “dark and bunker-like, with waterstained cement walls and floor.” The door and its frame had both been removed by the police.

After his tour, Dan Glick considered the relationship of JonBenét’s bedroom to her parents’ and Burke’s rooms. To him, the path from the second floor down the spiral staircase to the basement didn’t seem difficult, and though a stranger to the house, he easily found the wine cellar. He agreed that a grown man could have climbed through the basement window and escaped through any of several doors. An intruder with a key could have entered the house easily, and someone without a key could have entered through any of the doors that had pry marks. Of course, at the time, neither reporter knew that the doors with pry marks had been found latched from the inside and that a partial spiderweb extended across the grate at the broken basement window.

Just weeks before Glick’s visit to the house,
Newsweek
had published an article by him and Sherry Keene-Osborn titled “Complications in the Case.” The writers insisted that previously published information—that there was no sign of forced entry at the house and that semen had been found on
JonBenét’s body—was completely false. The article attempted to set the record straight on behalf of the Ramseys and their attorneys, since the police had made no attempt to do so.

Glick had turned a corner in his thinking. Balancing what little he knew of the evidence with his own investigation into the family’s background, the fact that JonBenét told her friend’s mother that Santa would visit her the day after Christmas, and now the house itself, Glick concluded that Patsy and John Ramsey were unlikely to have been involved in JonBenét’s death. A few days after he saw the inside of the Ramseys’ home, Glick told his friend Charlie Brennan that an intruder could well be the answer. He now thought the Ramseys were probably blameless. From then on, Glick’s articles gave far more space to exculpatory evidence than to evidence pointing to the Ramseys’ guilt.

On July 8 and 9, a moving crew packed the remainder of the Ramseys’ belongings from the house on 15th Street for transport to Atlanta. Their new suburban home, which cost $700,000, was located near the cemetery where JonBenét was buried. The house where JonBenét died was put on the market for $1 million.

HANDWRITING TEST FAILS TO CLEAR PATSY RAMSEY

Lou Smit had a hard time reconciling the grief-stricken Patsy, who reportedly was unable even to comb her own hair in the days after her daughter’s death, with the person who was able to compose and write a two-and-a-half-page ransom note while her daughter lay dead in the basement. Smit was now ready to believe that John and Patsy could not have killed their daughter.

During the first days of June, the DA’s office received a phone call from Patsy Ramsey. Alex Hunter was out. Patsy left a message that the family was leaving for Charlevoix on June 6 now that Burke was done with school for the year. Lou Smit, who had been driving by the Ramsey’s house each morning at 7:00
A
.
M
. to look around and say a prayer for JonBenét, happened to be at the their home when Patsy and John drove by on June 6. Seeing an opportunity to develop a relationship with the Ramseys, he waved to them. John stopped his car and got out. Smit greeted Ramsey and the two men stood on the front lawn chatting. It was the first time the investigator had met either of the Ramseys. A moment later Patsy joined them and Smit invited the couple into his van to continue the conversation. Just before the Ramseys departed, Patsy told Smit that she and her husband had nothing to do with the death of JonBenét. They wanted the killer to be caught, she repeated. Then the Ramseys and Smit joined hands and prayed together that the detective would find JonBenét’s killer and this nightmare would soon end. Smit continued to stop each day at the scene of the crime on his way to work to pray for JonBenét.

It wasn’t long after that Smit received a letter from John Ramsey. The worst thing that I have ever done in my life, Ramsey wrote, is that I once committed adultery when I was married to my first wife. I wanted you to hear it from me, Ramsey continued, before you read it in some tabloid.

As he had always done in the past, Smit was letting the evidence lead him to the murderer. At this point, he saw no hard evidence against Patsy or John, but there were several strong indications that pointed to an intruder. One was the print of a Hi-Tec shoe that the police had found in the dusting on the cement floor near JonBenét’s body.
*
Another indicator was a partial, smeared palm print that was found on the ransom note. Third was another unidentified palm print, this one found on the wine cellar door. Fourth were some pieces of glass found on top of the suitcase under the broken basement window that was found open and the scuff mark on the wall below the window. Fifth was the possibility that a stun gun had been used on JonBenét. Sixth was the pubic hair found on the blanket JonBenét’s body was wrapped in.

Smit also took into account the many outstanding copies of the house key. Then there was the strange fact that every object used in the crime—except the roll of duct tape and the remainder of the cord—was found in the house. Did it mean that the tape and cord were brought into the house for the purpose of kidnapping JonBenét? If so, then it was logical that the intruder had taken them with him so that they couldn’t be traced back to him. And if the roll of tape and the cord had belonged to the Ramseys, why weren’t they left in the house with the other crime ele
ments? This seemed to indicate that the intruder had come to kidnap JonBenét and that the murder somehow grew out of the planned abduction.

Since visiting the basement with the police on June 30, Smit had also been bothered by something he’d seen in the boiler room just to the left of the wine cellar door. There he had observed an exposed ventilation duct several paces from where the shards of wood, the paint tote, and the remnant of the broken paintbrush had been found. The duct vented through an opening at the front of the house where there had once been a window. If JonBenét had screamed near the duct, the sound could have traveled outside and been heard by the Ramseys’ neighbor, Melody Stanton, although possibly not by Patsy and John, asleep on the third floor inside the house. In July, sound tests conducted by the police confirmed that sound traveled more easily from the basement to the street than it did up through the three floors of the house. If JonBenét had screamed in the basement, it was likely that she was down there when she was hit on the head, either with the flashlight or with, say, a golf club—John Ramsey’s golf bags had been found nearby with their partial set of clubs. An intruder might have used a flashlight to find a hiding child if he hadn’t discovered the light switch for the basement stairs. Since no fingerprints were found on the flashlight or its batteries, it seemed to Smit that it might have been brought into the house by an intruder, though the Ramseys had never denied that they owned a flashlight like it.

The basement was so cluttered, such a mess—if JonBenét’s parents had killed her, they would not have taken her to this dark, damp pig sty to do it, Smit theorized.

All of his conjectures were very tenuous, Smit knew, and nothing that he wanted to mention to anyone just yet. Months later, however, he discussed his ideas with Steve Thomas. Thomas asked Smit the following question: after
the scream—which the intruder had to assume was heard by the parents—would the intruder have hung around, taking the time to strangle JonBenét with the noose and then move the body into the wine cellar? After all, someone, having heard the scream, might be coming down the basement stairs, thereby cutting off the most accessible exit. Why move the child from one hidden place, the boiler room, to the equally hidden wine cellar? And, of course, there wasn’t any evidence that JonBenét had ever even been in the boiler room. When Smit mentioned this theory to another detective, the detective asked, What if the scream wasn’t JonBenét’s? Maybe it was her mother’s. Male, female, young, old—could anyone being wakened out of a sleep really tell who had emitted the scream? These questions, among others, made the detectives skeptical of Smit’s scenario.

Nevertheless, Smit knew he had to ask the Ramseys if they had ever owned or possessed a stun gun and whether they owned or had ever worn Hi-Tec shoes.

On Saturday morning, July 12, Smit, Hofstrom, the Ramseys, and one of their attorneys met at the Justice Center for an informal tape-recorded interview. By now the Ramseys had come to believe that Hofstrom and Smit would be straight in their dealings. The absence of the police from the meeting may have led the Ramseys to conclude that Smit believed them possibly innocent of their daughter’s murder.

Lou Smit showed Patsy and John many of the crime-scene photographs taken by the police in the days after the murder. In one photo Patsy noticed a small white toy bear dressed in a Santa suit. It was among the other toys on the second bed in JonBenét’s room. She told Smit she didn’t know where the bear came from. The stuffed toy had not been confiscated by police after the murder, and now it seemed to be missing. In the coming months the DA’s office would try to determine how it got there.

Then Smit asked the Ramseys about the stun gun. John Ramsey said that they never owned one. Ramsey thought he remembered being given a videotape on self-defense by Spy World, a high-tech security outlet in southern Florida, which might have included a segment on the use of stun guns. The family didn’t wear or own Hi-Tec shoes, he said.

Five days later, Smit asked John Andrew about the same items. Like his father, he said he knew nothing about stun guns and didn’t own Hi-Tec brand shoes.

Hoping that someone with information might come forward, Smit believed that the police or the DA should go public with what they’d discovered about a stun gun and asked permission to release the information. But Hunter considered the stun gun theory “iffy.” He talked to the police about exhuming JonBenét’s body, but they were against it. The media were sure to find out, they said, and exhuming the body would lend credibility to what the detectives called Smit’s “wacko” stun-gun theory. Hunter knew they had another reason: no jury would believe that the Ramseys could have used such a device on their daughter.

Lou Smit’s request was turned down. The police said they would inquire about a stun gun when they recanvassed the Ramseys’ neighborhood. It would take another six months.