Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (68 page)

Asked about the cord, Ramsey said, “It’s not mine. Fleet White knows about cords, lines, and sailing.” Asked about the duct tape, he replied that it was something White would own: “Fleet had some special tapes, possibly black duct tape.” Asked about the stun gun, he said he didn’t have one, but he knew that women from California sometimes carried them for protection. Maybe Priscilla White had one, he suggested.

Watching the videotape, Thomas was enraged that Ramsey had taken control of the questioning. The detectives screamed at the TV monitor and banged their fists on the table.

“Shut him up.” “Ask him this!” they yelled. Gosage threw his remote control at the TV. “That’s not the way to ask the fucking question!”

By Thursday night, June 25, the interviews were over. The twenty hours Tom Haney had spent interviewing Patsy were unlike anything he’d ever experienced. He didn’t believe in the baloney about multiple personalities, but having interviewed Patsy for all those hours, he was sure that she was not who she pretended to be—ever. That was what he believed. Still, it was almost impossible to believe that she’d turned from a normal mother, which until then she had given every indication of being, into a murderer that night. Haney had never been able to come up with a motive for the killing, and now, after three days of questioning, he had not been able to find a trigger that might
have set Patsy off—if she was the killer. All he knew for sure, based on his years of experience, was that the person who killed JonBenét was not afraid of discovery in the house. The ransom note alone convinced him of that. Someone had sat down after the murder and written the note. Haney was sure of it.

One deputy DA viewing the videotape felt it would be unreasonable to assume that Patsy Ramsey, out of the blue and cold-bloodedly, placed a noose around her daughter’s neck and used it. Logic suggested, however, that Patsy might have hit her daughter on the head with a heavy object by accident and rendered her unconscious. Then, believing JonBenét was already dead—and unable to face the horrifying idea that the world would see her as her child’s murderer—she might have set about to cover it up. If that was true, at that moment Patsy Ramsey became her daughter’s killer. Coming from Atlanta, where most murder cases are charged as first-degree death penalty offenses, it was likely Patsy Ramsey had never considered Boulder’s more liberal climate.

Of course, the deputy DA had to admit that there were holes and unanswered questions in his theory. What was the motive that might have caused Patsy, who had never been seen so much as slapping her kids, to hit—deliberately or accidently—JonBenét on the head? If she did hit the child by accident, why not take her pulse or call 911? If Patsy was together enough to engage in a cover-up, she had to have been capable of seeking medical attention.

Over Thanksgiving break in 1994, the Ramseys went to Georgia. I was working for them as their housekeeper. They were due home on Sunday but were a day late because Atlanta was fogged in. When I came to work Monday morning, the house was flooded. It was really bad. A window in John’s third-floor bathroom had been
left open by a painter. Then the wind blew the shutter, which apparently hit the hot water control on the shower and turned it on. The water must have been running for three days. It destroyed the bathroom floor, ran down into John Andrew’s closets and out into his room on the second floor, and all the way down into some rooms on the ground floor. It was so bad that I called Don Paugh at Access Graphics.

When John and Patsy showed up, they went straight upstairs. We were all standing in the bathroom. There was water everywhere. John was in his stocking feet; he always took his shoes off when he came into the house.

He slammed the window shut. Then he realized his socks were wet. That made him furious. He was more mad about his socks being wet than about the house being ruined. I looked into his eyes and they’d almost changed color. He was so angry. Really angry. I don’t know how to explain it. It was like this light switch had come on behind his eyes. It was the last straw.

He didn’t freak out, didn’t throw things. It wasn’t even in his voice. But you could see the rage. You could feel it. I mean, it was powerful. I wanted to get out of the room, but Patsy was standing between me and the door. I’m not saying he didn’t have a right to be angry. I’m just saying I saw him angry. I saw the coldest eyes. He never said a word, but it was right there in his face. It was palpable. You could cut it with a knife.

Patsy was freaking out. It was, “What are we going to do? We’re having the Christmas house tour…” He was angry, but she was in a total panic. The flood had ruined Patsy’s image of what her perfect house should look like.

—Linda Wilcox

After the interviews were over, Hunter’s staff met in his office. Some thought the Ramseys were guilty; others were sure they were innocent.

Kane, Smit, DeMuth, and Haney found that their opinions were divided. Smit and DeMuth thought the intruder theory was more viable now and that no one could say for sure that the Ramseys had killed their daughter. Tom Haney, however, couldn’t see any suspects besides the Ramseys. The door hadn’t been closed on an outsider committing the crime, he said, but he thought it was a very distant possibility.

Kane saw no alternative but to go to a grand jury. Smit didn’t like what he was hearing. He realized that Kane had made up his mind that at least one of the Ramseys was guilty.

Hunter agreed with Kane: they would take the case to the grand jury.

They discussed how to proceed, and decided to use the Boulder police as primary investigators. Each officer would be sworn in. The grand jury wasn’t like a courtroom trial, where the police were only advisory witnesses. Tom Wickman would sit in during all the testimony in the grand jury sessions. He’d be allowed to whisper in Kane’s ear, “Be sure to get this in,” and “Don’t forget that this cop did that.” Officers who had worked the case would be called as witnesses, and as the grand jury moved along, Kane said, he would use the detectives as investigators for special assignments. Haney, who had known Kane for years, knew he would present everything, including exculpatory evidence.

But they were putting the cart before the horse with all this talk of a grand jury. There was a lot of work to do before they got there.

The next day, Lou Smit told Hunter that his wife had recently had a recurrence of cancer and he wanted to be by her side. They were in their sixties, he said, and they wanted
to travel before she began chemotherapy. Smit said he wouldn’t leave the case but that he’d like to work out of his home in Colorado Springs, cut his time back to twenty hours a week, and come to Boulder only for weekly meetings. “I’m in this for the duration,” he assured the DA.

With the Ramseys’ interviews over, a full-scale public relations war broke out. The first official word of the interviews was published in the local dailies on June 25, even as they were taking place. The DA’s office told the press that the interviews didn’t preclude the Ramseys appearing before a grand jury and that the current questioning was part of an ongoing investigation. The same day, Beckner told one reporter that “significant” test results from the Ramseys’ clothing had surfaced; he didn’t say, however, that the fibers on the duct tape were found to be consistent with Patsy’s jacket. In
The Denver Post
, Chuck Green noted that the Ramseys were talking now because in this interview situation, they were allowed to ask their attorneys’ advice. Green also speculated that “by submitting to interviews now, they should be able to detect the direction of the investigation and anticipate what jeopardy they might be in if a grand jury summons their testimony.”

Denver attorney Larry Pozner, president-elect of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, confirmed for the media that the Ramseys had given Hunter’s office medical records and confidential documents that even a grand jury would be unable to obtain. “All the Ramseys ever wanted was a competent, objective set of investigators,” Pozner told
The Denver Post
, “and they now believe it is in the hands of such investigators. They will cooperate fully.” Pozner was speaking for the Ramseys just as Bob Grant had often spoken for Hunter’s office.

Grant told one journalist, “The fact of the matter is that
people who are under the umbrella of suspicion or who are suspects are more likely to wait to talk to prosecutors, because prosecutors are in a decision-making capacity and police are not.”

Hal Haddon released a prepared statement, which said in part, “We have honored every request for information which has been made by the district attorney’s office over the past 18 months.” This outraged several members of Hunter’s staff, who had made numerous requests on behalf of the Boulder PD that were never honored. Hunter, displeased by Haddon’s spin, issued a statement of his own.

DA: RAMSEYS’ HELP WAS LIMITED

Dan Glick learned about one exchange of words during the Ramseys’ interviews, and
Newsweek
published the snippet on June 28:

L
OU
S
MIT
: John, look, it was an accident. This could all be a lot easier for everybody.

J
OHN
R
AMSEY
: Look, somebody bashed my daughter’s head in, Somebody strangled her. It wasn’t any accident.

A few days later, freelance writer Frank Coffman spoke to Lou Smit on the phone.

“People think that because your beliefs are similar to the Ramseys’ religious beliefs, you might be sympathetic to them.”

“I’ve put just as many Christians in jail as anybody,” Smit retorted.

“Don’t you think the motive is difficult?” Coffman asked.

“Yes,” Smit said.

“I just don’t see why anybody had to kill that little girl,” Coffman said.

“Yeah, really,” Smit sighed.

When Coffman told a friend he thought Smit was on the Ramseys’ side, his friend said, “He’s just jerking your chain. He’s buttering up the Ramseys so he can get close to them.”

On June 23, during the Ramseys’ interviews, Mark Beckner was named Boulder’s new director of police services.

“Because Commander Beckner and I have worked closely on the Ramsey case this past half year,” Alex Hunter told the
Daily Camera
, “I can say that we are on the way to forging the sort of cooperative relationship that will
serve this community as well.”

Tom Koby, who’d had his retirement accelerated, agreed to stay with the Boulder city manager’s office to work on special projects. Among them was an expansion of the Restorative Justice program, which handled community-service sentencing. By year’s end, however, callers would hear the following message on his voice mail: “This is Tom Koby. I don’t live here anymore. Those of you I’ve worked with, I’ve enjoyed it. I wish you all well.” Alex Hunter told the
Daily Camera
, “Tom Koby was a great fit for the city of Boulder. This community and what it stands for took Tom and his wife by storm. He loved Boulder.”

RAMSEY COOPERATION MITIGATES SKEPTICISM

By the end of June, Pete Hofstrom had reviewed all the evidence and had made up his mind. Regardless of what his boss, Alex Hunter, intended, he himself would not participate in presenting the Ramsey case to the grand jury. As far as he was concerned, the evidence did not amount to probable cause against the Ramseys—or anyone else. The chief deputy DA would stand on principle: he thought it was just plain wrong to go after the Ramseys with so little hard evidence.

I have to fault Alex Hunter for not being willing to stand up and say, “We don’t have it.” He doesn’t have the backbone to do what’s right when he doesn’t have it. In the Elizabeth Manning case, he passed it on to the judges. Now he’s passing the decision on to the grand jury. I’d rather see him go on record in the Ramsey case if the evidence isn’t there and be straight and say that he’s not going to pursue it. After twenty-five years in
office, you’d think he’d be able to take the heat himself.

A truly principled man would stand up and say, “If you don’t like my conclusion, if you want to appoint a special prosecutor, go ahead—that’s fine. But these are my ethics.”

—Judge Murray Richtel

By the end of the first week in July, there were disagreements in the DA’s office about how and when to interview the Ramseys’ friends. Susan and Glen Stine were willing to come in voluntarily, as were others, now that the case was in the DA’s hands. Pete Hofstrom, who was still advising Hunter, even though not directly involved in presenting the case, suggested that the staff move ahead with the interviews, but Michael Kane said that conducting them now might be a mistake. The Stines were sure to be called before the grand jury, and there the DA’s office would get testimony that was unrehearsed and given under oath.

Bill and Janet McReynolds had recently returned from the East Coast to collect their personal belongings before moving permanently to Massachusetts. When asked, they came in for another interview with the DA. It took all day. Detective Dan Schuler, who had interviewed Burke Ramsey, joined Lou Smit in the questioning. The similarities between Janet McReynolds’ play and JonBenét’s murder were discussed at length. The investigators explored Bill McReynolds’ physical ability to commit the murder—and questioned all the details of his travel to Spain, complete with several plane changes, the carrying of bags, all within ten days of the crime.

In the end Schuler said Bill McReynolds required more investigation and Smit felt that his wife had to be interviewed again.

When Steve Thomas heard of the interviews, he was outraged. In his mind, the Ramseys were destroying another per
son’s life in their desire to avoid being charged for murder.

Steve Thomas couldn’t forget the three days he had sat at police headquarters viewing the videotapes of the Ramseys’ interviews each evening, exchanging ideas for the next day’s session. Hunter’s group had sat on the right side of the room, and the detectives who had worked the case for over eighteen months sat on the left. Haney sat with the cops.

During one of those sessions, Thomas glanced across the room and saw Alex Hunter talking on his cell phone. Here were the videotaped interviews of the most critical suspects in the most important unsolved case confronting Boulder law enforcement, and the DA couldn’t give them his undivided attention? Thomas decided to resign from the Boulder Police Department. He had been weighing the pros and cons of such a move, but watching Hunter chat on his cell phone while the detectives gave their evaluations of the interviews finally tipped his internal scale. Thomas began to draft his letter of resignation.

CHASE TESTS TURN UP LITTLE

Throughout July, as the media awaited word that the case would go to the grand jury, the DA’s staff was immersed in analyzing the evidence. The results of eighteen months of work by the Boulder police, the FBI, the CBI, and other agencies took time to review, and they were generating their own material too. More than forty-six hours of interviews with John, Patsy, and Burke Ramsey still had to be transcribed and cross-indexed.

Hofstrom had prevailed over Michael Kane on one point. On July 21, Trip DeMuth had interviewed Susan Stine for five hours. She came without an attorney, and the interview wasn’t tape-recorded. DeMuth dug around to see if Patsy or John had perhaps confessed to the Stines while living in their home in 1997. Absolutely not, said Susan Stine, who came off as such a staunch supporter of the Ramseys that the DA’s staff wondered how much weight to give her statements.

Fleet White refused to come in voluntarily to talk to Hunter’s staff. That alone confirmed the need to take the case to a grand jury. But there were good reasons for holding back on an announcement.

For over a year, the Ramseys had provided the police
with very little, if any, documentation. Now they were complying with most of the DA’s requests, and Kane didn’t want to jeopardize their chance of getting whatever they needed. As long as the DA’s office didn’t publicly call for a grand jury, it seemed that the Ramseys would cooperate. Nevertheless, Hunter hoped that by Labor Day he could announce that on September 15 the case would go to the grand jury. As far as Kane was concerned, the Ramseys were the target the grand jury would hear about.

Steve Thomas finished his resignation letter around July 25 but decided to wait until August 6, JonBenét’s birthday, to turn it in. As the date approached, he thought about making the letter public at the same time that he presented it to Beckner. He had gotten many calls from reporters ever since rumors of his medical leave had surfaced. The most persistent caller was a Shelley Ross for ABC. On August 5, Thomas sent her a copy of his letter by FedEx. He had no idea what her reaction might be. That night he realized that when she received it the next day at around 10:30
A
.
M
. New York time, the letter would be out of his control, so he quickly arranged to have copies delivered to Beckner, Dave Hayes, and police department attorney Bob Keatley at 9:00
A
.
M
. Boulder time.

The next morning, ABC called to say that they wanted to videotape him. Peter Jennings would be reporting his resignation on the evening news, and they needed a face to associate with his name. Thomas agreed to let them film him at Home Depot, where he would be buying some lumber. He had been doing some home remodeling work with Todd Sears, a close friend. Sears had resigned from the department several years earlier, when Tom Koby interfered with a drug investigation he was heading.

When Mark Beckner arrived at work that morning, he
found a copy of Thomas’s letter:
*

Thomas went on to detail some of his grievances.

Then Thomas vented his frustrations about being muzzled during the investigation.

Finally, Thomas stated his hopes, fears, and regrets.