Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (8 page)

The police figured that John Andrew had a minimum of four and a half hours he could not account for—longer if he didn’t stay to see the entire movie. It would have been longer still if he never went to the theater but went to an airport instead. That scenario would give John Andrew almost nine hours to get from Marietta to Boulder and back. Until all airline and private plane flights were checked, John Andrew Ramsey would remain a suspect.

Late on Saturday evening, December 28, DA Alex Hunter, who was still in Hawaii, called Bill Wise. He learned that the police had not only asked a heavily sedated Patsy Ramsey for a handwriting sample, they had asked her to copy out parts of the ransom note. She had become hysterical and could not complete it. Hunter agreed with the police procedure but was upset to hear from Wise that John Eller had tried to barter with the Ramseys—JonBenét’s body in exchange for formal interviews with them.

The DA expected the police to follow the law and not jeopardize the integrity of the case. Hunter had always pro
tected the constitutional rights of Boulder’s citizens from overzealous police officers. To Hunter, Eller seemed to be such an officer.

UNEASE SETTLES OVER BOULDER MYSTERY STILL SURROUNDS CHILD’S SHOCKING DEATH

On Sunday morning, after briefing Eller on the status of the investigation, Detectives Mason, Thomas, Gosage, and Arndt attended the memorial service for JonBenét at St. John’s. Undercover officers videotaped everyone at the church. The police weren’t taking any chances. Maybe the
killer, like the arsonist who returns to watch the fire he set, was among those present.

On Sunday, December 29, I arrived at church late as usual. It was in the middle of the homily, so I sat in the balcony.

There was a lot of crying, and I started to feel this huge wave of emotion crashing down, this huge tragedy. I realized that many families with children knew this family. They knew this child.

The Ramseys were members of the church’s Foyer Group, which was for couples new to the community who wanted to meet people. If you weren’t involved in a group with the Ramseys, you might not know them. You see, Boulder doesn’t have any overall social structure—just clubs and more informal groups.

That morning, Rol said he hoped this terrible thing could be resolved. And said it would never happen again.

After the service, almost everyone went to an adjoining building for coffee, as usual. One friend, Paula Schulte, said to me, “Maybe we can pull together as a church to help this family.” I don’t know why, but I answered that I couldn’t see anything good coming from this thing.

—Niki Hayden

When I arrived at St. John’s, I put my arms around Patsy’s sister Polly, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk to Patsy. Pam, Patsy’s other sister, told me I had to go over and talk to her.

“Who could have done this to JonBenét?” Patsy asked.

“I wish I knew,” I said. “Are you sure you had all the
doors locked?”

“Yes, we are sure.”

“Are you sure you pushed the button on the patio door?”

“We had all the windows and doors locked,” Patsy said.

Before I could say another word, someone else was talking to Patsy.

That was the last time I saw Patsy or John.

—Linda Hoffmann-Pugh

I knew where St. John’s was because I had once gone to a wedding there. That Sunday, December 29, it was sunny but cold. Some of us from the school and the neighborhood went together. We were all crying. The service was unbearably sad—people were sobbing all over the church. Patsy was shrouded in black.

John spoke first. He told us he was wearing a medallion that JonBenét had won at her last pageant. He said that he often told his daughter the talent division was the most important because it was judged not on your appearance but on your achievements. The medallion he was wearing had been awarded to JonBenét for talent. He made it quite clear that he was not a fan of child beauty pageants. He thanked us all for coming, told us to remember we were all part of his family. He looked spaced out.

As I watched John speak, the gossip we were hearing about his possible involvement in JonBenét’s death seemed ridiculous. Then Patsy’s sisters spoke. They were more charismatic and evangelical in their approach to worship.

Bill McReynolds, who’d been the Santa at the Ramseys’ Christmas party, got up to talk. He told us that Jon
Benét had given him fairy dust for his beard. He rambled and he was almost incoherent. He was so strange that some of us were uncomfortable.

When the service ended and Patsy stood up to get out of the pew, John helped her. Every step of the way, he told her, “I need you to be strong.” She stopped beside me and put her arms around me and we cried. Most of the congregation was in tears.

We all went to the parish hall. There were silver pots of tea and cookies. Funeral stuff.

Outside, the media people were circling.

Eventually the Ramseys left for the airport and flew to Atlanta with JonBenét’s body.

—Barbara Kostanick

After the service, Detective Steve Thomas, thirty-six, who had been transferred to the case from narcotics only the day before and still had long hair and a goatee, helped the Ramsey family into their waiting cars as photographers closed in. “Get rid of them!” John Andrew shouted to Thomas. When the detective asked one photographer to step back, he accused the officer of protecting a killer.

John Ramsey emerged from the church, and on his way to his car, he passed Thomas, whom he knew from the day before, when he had given blood and hair samples. Without looking directly at the detective, Ramsey shook his hand and said, “Thank you.” Thomas caught Ramsey’s eye and, looking squarely at him, said, “Good luck.” As the motorcade pulled away, Thomas was left with an uneasy feeling about JonBenét’s father. The detective had expected Ramsey to say, “Find the motherfucker” or “Bring the bastard to me.” Instead he got a thank-you and a weak handshake. Maybe Thomas’s reaction was due to frustration—the police had been unable to interview the Ramseys properly. The primary suspects were
slipping out of their control, and the detectives were angry.

Several hours before the Ramseys left for Atlanta that Sunday, Detective Linda Arndt sent a fax to Bryan Morgan, the Ramseys’ newly hired criminal attorney. It was two pages long:

Questions: JonBenét’s immediate family

John, Patsy, and Burke Ramsey

What time did each of you go to your bedroom?

What time did each of you go to sleep?

Was your bedroom door open or closed?

Was there any TV or radio on when you went to bed?

What had JonBenét eaten before she went to bed?

Where, specifically, was the ransom note found?

What did Patsy do after she found the ransom note?

Who was the first person Patsy contacted after the note was found?

How did John find out that JonBenét was missing?

What interior house lights were on when the family went to bed?

What exterior lights were on when the family went to bed?

Who checked the doors and windows of the house to see if they were secure?

What was JonBenét wearing when she went to bed on Christmas night?

What time was the family planning on leaving the home on the morning of December 26th?

What time did each of you wake up on the morning of December 26th?

Did any of you get up during the night?

In the late afternoon of Sunday, December 29, a Lockheed Martin corporate jet left Jefferson County Airport, just south of Boulder, with the Ramsey family. JonBenét’s body left on a Delta Airlines flight from Denver International Airport. Two hours later, Fleet White called Detective Arndt and asked her to retrieve JonBenét’s favorite toy from her bedroom so the family could bury her with her Kitty. The day before, one of Patsy Ramsey’s sisters had gone into the house with police permission and taken out an oil painting, several American Girl dolls, a portfolio of JonBenét’s pageant photographs, a pageant medal with a blue ribbon, graduation photos of the older children, and a Bible from John Ramsey’s desk, but she had missed JonBenét’s stuffed cat, which Patsy had wanted retrieved.

Arndt did as she was asked and then delivered the toy to Priscilla White. The Whites would take it with them to Atlanta the next day.

On Monday, December 30, before the Whites and Fernies left Boulder for JonBenét’s funeral in Atlanta, Linda Arndt interviewed Fleet White again.

White believed that an intruder had gotten into the Ramseys’ house. “Somebody got into that house,” he told Arndt. “I don’t know how, but they got in. Somebody wanted to hurt that family and obviously hurt their daughter.” White suggested that perhaps some beauty pageant mothers might have resented the Ramseys. A few hours later, Arndt and Detective Jane Harmer met with Fleet White again, this time with John Fernie, in Fernie’s office. The Ramseys’ friends were worried that John Andrew was a suspect, and they wanted everything possible to be done to clear his name promptly. An hour later, the Whites and the Fernies left for the Denver airport.

When Arndt returned to headquarters, she told Eller about her conversation with White and Fernie. Clearly, the Ramsey family was concerned about preserving John Andrew’s and Melinda’s presumption of innocence. Arndt suggested that maybe the department should make a public statement to pacify the Ramseys, that it might help the police get their cooperation. Eller agreed to the concept, but he said that at this early stage of the investigation, no one could be exonerated completely. That afternoon, at a scheduled press briefing, a police spokesperson said that both of John Ramsey’s older children had been out of state at the time JonBenét was murdered but had not been eliminated as suspects. Forty minutes after the press conference ended, Arndt called the Ramseys in Atlanta and told them about the media briefing.

That same day, Eller placed Detective Sgt. Tom Wickman, who had a master’s degree in psychology, in charge of the crime scene investigation. Of the thirty officers now working on the case, seventeen were detectives.

DA Alex Hunter would be in Hawaii for the next several days, but Bill Wise kept him informed. Some of the news
was not good. Wise was troubled that John Ramsey had carried JonBenét’s body upstairs and that evidence might have been contaminated. Also, he told Hunter, the media were starting to criticize the Boulder police for not having secured the crime scene.

Over the next several weeks, the police would reconstruct piecemeal the events leading up to the murder. They learned that on Christmas Eve, the Ramseys had dinner at Pasta Jay’s restaurant on Pearl Street, then stopped by the Whites’ house, and then drove around Boulder looking at Christmas lights before going home. After the children were in bed that night, John Ramsey went across the street to their neighbors the Barnhills’, to pick up a bike he had been hiding in their basement. When he got home, he placed it under the Christmas tree in the living room. On Christmas morning, JonBenét and Burke gave gifts to their parents and each other, and in the early afternoon, JonBenét rode her new bicycle around the patio before the family went to the Whites’ house for dinner. Fleet White, forty-seven, was retired, having made his money in the oil business. His daughter, Daphne, was the same age as JonBenét, and Fleet White Jr. was a year older. When the Ramseys left the Whites’ house, they stopped off at their friends the Walkers’ to drop off some presents and then stopped briefly at the home of the Stines, who were also friends. Glen Stine, forty-eight, was vice president for budget and finance at CU. The Stines’ son, Doug, was about Burke Ramsey’s age. Patsy talked to Susan Stine for about ten minutes. By that time, JonBenét was asleep in the backseat of the car.

During a conversation between John Ramsey and
Detective Arndt on the morning of December 26, Ramsey said that the family arrived home at about 10:00
P
.
M
. Christmas night. Ramsey parked their Jeep Cherokee next to their Jaguar in the garage, he said. According to a police report, he carried JonBenét, who was still asleep, upstairs to her room, where he took her shoes off and read to her. Patsy undressed her, remembered singing a bedtime song to her while she slept, and kissed her good night. Meanwhile, Burke was downstairs playing with a model he’d gotten for Christmas and didn’t want to go to bed. John helped his son finish what he was doing and then took him upstairs and put him to bed before he himself retired

At about midnight, Scott Gibbons, a neighbor, looked out his kitchen window toward the Ramseys’ house and saw a light on in the kitchen area. Sometime later, Adam Fermeire, another neighbor, who was up watching TV, said he didn’t notice anything strange through the window that faced the Ramseys’ house.

Diane Brumfitt, another neighbor, told Detective Barry Hartkopp on December 31 that on Christmas night she did not see a light on at the southeast corner of the Ramseys’ house, though there had been a safety light in that spot for years. She remembered thinking that it was unusual. Melody Stanton, up the street at 738, told the police on January 3 that she was certain she had heard a child’s scream at about 2:00
A
.
M
. on the night of the murder. Her bedroom window, which looks toward the Ramsey house from across the street, had been partly open. When questioned by the police, Stanton said that there had been only one scream but it was horrifying. If it came from the child, she assumed the scream had awakened her parents.

Patsy Ramsey told Rick French, the first police officer to arrive at the scene on the morning of December 26, that her husband got up before her, at around 5:30
A
.
M
., and took a shower. She got up a few minutes later, got dressed,
and put on her makeup. From the third-floor master bedroom, she then went down the back spiral stairs, which were decorated with green garlands and red Christmas ribbons, and stopped on the second floor at a laundry area just outside JonBenét’s room, where she washed a soiled jumpsuit of her daughter’s in the sink.

The door to JonBenét’s room was about 10 feet away, but Patsy said she didn’t look in on her daughter. After doing this bit of laundry, she continued down the spiral staircase to the first floor. As she reached the bottom, Patsy saw three sheets of paper spread across one of the steps.

Patsy said she didn’t remember but must have stepped over the papers, and police forensics later confirmed that no one appeared to have stepped on the ransom note. At the bottom of the stairs she turned around and, without picking up the papers, began to read them. After getting through a few lines, she realized the note was about JonBenét. She ran back upstairs, pushed open the door to her daughter’s room, and found her bed empty.

Patsy screamed for her husband. Within seconds, John Ramsey reached the second floor. He was still in his underwear. Patsy told him there was a note downstairs that said JonBenét had been kidnapped. She ran to Burke’s room, she said, turned on the light, and saw her son sleeping. Then she went downstairs, where she found her husband hunched over the three pieces of paper.

John told Officer French that as he read the pages, he realized someone had taken JonBenét. He had no idea where she was. It was still dark outside. Later Ramsey would tell a British TV interviewer that he knew he had to do something. But how could he close the airports and block the roads out of Boulder? Those were the first thoughts that went through his mind, he said. He soon realized that only the police could do what needed to be done.

Before he finished reading the ransom note, he told
Patsy to call the police. Immediately afterward, Patsy called the Whites and Fernies and told them something terrible had happened. “Barbara, get over here as fast as you can,” she said to her friend. Seven minutes after Patsy’s call to 911, Officer French was at their front door.

John Fernie told the police that he was the first of the Ramseys’ friends to arrive. His wife, Barbara, came later in her car. As Fernie drove over, he thought that John must have had a heart attack, since Patsy hadn’t told his wife what had happened

Fernie parked his car in the alley behind the Ramseys’ house and ran to the patio door on the south side, which he always used. It was locked. When he looked through the glass-paneled door, the lights were on and he could see some papers lying on the wooden floor. They were not facing him, but from where he stood, he could read the first few lines of one page. That was all he needed. He understood immediately that JonBenét had been kidnapped. Once inside the house, he read the entire ransom note. At first he thought it was bizarre, then later he saw it as perverse.

A few minutes later, John Ramsey tried to phone his pilot, Mike Archuleta, to tell him what had happened and learned that the pilot was already on his way to the airport for the Ramseys’ scheduled flight to Michigan. When Archuleta returned Ramsey’s call, Patsy answered. Archuleta told the police that Patsy had been hysterical, barely coherent. She was now being consoled by her friends when a second officer, Karl Veitch, arrived. The police then paged Mary Lou Jedamus, a victim advocate.

By 6:45, three more officers—Barry Weiss, Sue Barcklow, and Sgt. Paul Reichenbach—had arrived. Now there were twelve people in the house, including five police officers, the Ramsey family, and their friends. John Ramsey told Officers French and Veitch that he believed the house had been locked when he went to bed.

Just after 7:00, Detective Fred Patterson, one of Boulder’s most experienced officers, arrived at the Basemar Shopping Center, a mile from the Ramseys’ home. He had arranged to meet Detective Linda Arndt, who was driving in from her home in Louisville. Arndt and Patterson were briefed by Reichenbach, who had come from the Ramsey home for this meeting.

Reichenbach told the detectives that there was light, crusty snow and frost on the Ramseys’ lawn and he had seen no fresh footprints in the snow. The brick walkways were clear of snow. He had examined the exterior doors and windows and had seen no signs of forced entry. Other than that, all Reichenbach knew for sure was that there was a ransom note, the parents said the child was missing, and now they were praying. A short time later, when Arndt and Patterson arrived at the house, Fleet White and John Fernie had just returned from dropping Burke and the Fernies’ kids off at the Whites’ house.

Scott Gibbons, the Ramseys’ next door neighbor, told police that at about 8:00
A
.
M
. he saw the door on his side of the Ramseys’ house open. But by then, anyone inside the house could have opened the door. A few minutes later, Officer Larry Burton found an earring at the curb directly in front of the Ramseys’ house. It didn’t seem to belong to anyone inside.

That morning, Officer Weiss noticed a heavy police-style flashlight on the Ramseys’ kitchen counter. By the end of the day, none of the cops had claimed it, so it was taken into evidence. Sometime that morning, Detective Arndt found a paper bag with children’s clothing next to the den door, and she moved it into the cloakroom.

Around noon, at police headquarters, Detective Jim Byfield received the first of several printouts listing the calls made to and from telephones the police had targeted. After the list was reviewed, additional phone traps were
ordered.

During the next seven days, the police would trap calling information from phones belonging to suspects, neighbors, family friends, doctors, business associates, corporate offices, and public officials. Even the telephones at United Airlines Red Carpet airport lounges and the mortuary that held JonBenét’s body were trapped. In all, there were traps on more than sixty-seven telephone numbers belonging to fifty-nine individuals, including Lt. Governor Gail Schoettler and her husband, Don Stevens, who knew John Ramsey from the days when they both attended Michigan State University.

After JonBenét’s body was found, victim advocate Grace Morlock told detectives, John Ramsey said more than once that he didn’t think the kidnapper meant to kill his daughter, because she was wrapped in her blanket. When Patsy saw her friend Susan Stine at the Fernies’ house later that day, she kept asking, “Who would do this to my baby?” Susan responded, “I don’t know.”

The police interviewed Linda Hoffmann-Pugh for a second time on Friday, December 27, and they came with a tape recorder. The Ramseys’ housekeeper told the police that the day after Thanksgiving, she, her daughter Ariana, and her husband were at the Ramseys’ house washing the windows and getting the house ready for Christmas. Hoffmann-Pugh brought the Christmas decorations in from the garage but couldn’t find the artificial trees that had been brought to the house from the Access Graphics storage hangar. There should have been a tree for the playroom and one for each of the five bedrooms. Hoffmann-Pugh even checked the basement, but she couldn’t find them, so she continued cleaning the windows.

After they had washed the windows, Hoffmann-Pugh and her daughter started searching the house for the missing trees. She saw a closed door in the basement just past
the boiler room, which she had never noticed before. She tried to open the door, but it was stuck shut, apparently from a recent painting. She pulled at it hard and the door finally opened. Feeling around in the dark, she found a light switch on the wall to her right.

The room was full of trees, some still covered with last year’s decorations, replicas of Burke’s model airplanes and John Andrew’s cowboy hats, boots, and red scarves. The next day the housekeeper had her older daughter, Tina, her son-in-law Mike, and her husband, Merv, take all the trees upstairs and place them in their proper rooms.

The police asked Hoffmann-Pugh if she had closed the door to that storage room securely. She didn’t know. She couldn’t even tell the police what the room looked like empty because she wasn’t the last person to leave, she said.

When the police asked if she’d seen a broken window in the basement or had ever cleaned up broken glass from a broken window, she said she couldn’t recall anything like that.

That same Friday, December 27, the police fingerprinted the housekeeper’s entire family, including her daughters and sons-in-law.

On Monday morning, December 30, several of Sheriff George Epp’s detectives met with him in his office at the Justice Center. Sheriff Epp had jurisdiction over the entire county, which included the city of Boulder. Even though the Boulder PD had primary responsibility for the city, the sheriff’s department and the Boulder PD often loaned each other officers. The day after JonBenét’s body was found, the Boulder police had requested four of Epp’s detectives to work on the Ramsey case. Epp’s officers had been involved with kidnappings in the past, including the Tracy Neef case, in which a child had been abducted from Bertha Hyde Elementary School and found dead near Barker
Reservoir at the top of Boulder Canyon.

This morning Epp’s detectives were upset with what they’d seen over the weekend. Eller, they said, wasn’t organized. He wasn’t running things efficiently. Some officers were just sitting around when they should have been canvassing the Ramseys’ neighborhood. One of the detectives said that Eller’s attitude was, We’ll just vacuum up all the evidence, pull together everything, and give it to the DA to make a case out of it.

Epp was also troubled to learn that Larry Mason was working for Eller. Larry was the kind of cop who needed to be nurtured by his supervisor. But Eller’s reputation was that he wouldn’t accept input from anyone. Mason and Hofstrom could work well together, but Eller and Mason were bound to be trouble.

After the meeting with his detectives, Epp called police chief Tom Koby and offered his department’s continued assistance. He had a couple of detectives available who wanted to help, he said.

“We’re fine,” Koby told him. “We can handle it ourselves.”

A few weeks later, one sheriff’s detective made T-shirts for his department, stenciled with
WE
’
RE THE OTHER GUYS
in bold letters. When the case dragged on, a second set of T-shirts appeared, bearing the slogan
WHEN IT ABSOLUTELY
,
POSITIVELY HAS TO BE SOLVED OVERNIGHT
.

That Monday afternoon, December 30, Pete Hofstrom received a letter from Bryan Morgan, one of the Ramseys’ attorneys. A gracious gentleman in his midfifties with a passion for tough cases, Grady Morgan preferred to be known by his middle name as a tribute to his birthplace, Bryan, Texas. A proper defense, he believed, included addressing a client’s emotional needs.