JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (12 page)

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To further understand the personalities of Patsy and John Ramsey, we compiled detailed biographies.

From a very young age, Patsy appeared determined to rise above her West Virginia upbringing to succeed, and showed that she appreciated the value of a good appearance. You could almost plot her progression from high school sweetheart to glamorous beauty queen to well-to-do hostess in the pretty front rooms of an expensive home. Her history showed she understood the value of drama and staging. The FBI would tell us that the disposal of the body of JonBenét had the classic elements of a staged crime, complete with a Hollywoodized ransom note.

Her husband was just as much a product of his environment, a solid Midwestern man who appeared quiet and thoughtful but who seemed as determined as his wife to take charge of his destiny.

Eventually, I would drive with Detective Gosage across a bridge and into Parkersburg, West Virginia, Patsy’s hometown, and stand in the neighborhood where her parents, Don and Nedra Paugh, had bought four consecutive homes rather than move away. Many years later they moved to an upscale home in Charleston, South Carolina, but even then held on to the property at 2006 Thirty-fifth Street.

Patricia Ann Paugh, a right-handed baby girl with brown hair and green eyes, was born on December 29, 1956, at St. Joseph’s Hospital and was brought home to Thirty-fifth Street. She was soon followed by two sisters, Pam and Polly. They knew everyone on Thirty-fifth Street and everyone knew them. It was that kind of America for a hardworking, God-fearing Methodist family like the Paughs.

Don Paugh began his working life at the B&O Railroad as a relief telegraph operator. When he was laid off, he passed through a series of menial jobs in dairies and marble quarries until he went off to West Virginia University. He and Nedra, who dated for seven years, were married in 1955, and Don earned his engineering degree the year Patsy was born.

The education brought a better job at Bendix Westinghouse. Then the army scooped him up for the Corps of Engineers. Active duty ended with Paugh holding captain’s rank, and he drove up the Ohio River knocking on corporate doors until he found a job with the Bakelite Company, which would become Union Carbide, and he and Nedra settled down with their growing family.

Patsy had an uneventful childhood and developed a drive to succeed that was coupled with physical beauty and popularity. Her teachers at Emerson Elementary and Vandevender Junior High remembered her as a quiet, well-behaved student who made good grades. On the playground she was a leader, surrounded by friends.

When she was thirteen she attended a Miss West Virginia contest and fell under the pageant spell, confiding to her sister Pam, “I want to do that someday.” Popular, slim, and smart, Patsy had set her course.

She was named a fraternity sweetheart and participated in her first pageant at a county fair, a title that both she and Pam eventually won. The third sister, Polly, chose not to follow them on the pageant runways. In her sophomore year in high school, Patsy was first runner-up for Miss Teen-Age West Virginia. As a kid she had liked to dance and play the flute, but in the talent competition she performed dramatic readings. Linda McLean, her drama coach at Parkersburg High, became her coach, while Patsy’s father had her stand behind a kitchen chair as if it were a lectern and practice enunciating clearly so as to be heard by a room filled with people. The high school had competitions with other schools in public speaking and dramatic interpretation, and Patsy excelled. Her senior entry in the 1975 Parchisian took up more space than almost anyone else in her class of about seven hundred students.

PAUGH, PATSY—Elks leadership contest, Field House office assistant, Junior Orchesis, Junior West winner, Little Red cheerleader, Masque and Gavel, Mummers, Pep Club, Red Wing Drill Team, Revue, Senior West winner, Sports Carnival, Student-Faculty Forum, teenager of the month nominee, Thespians, Voice of Democracy School Winner, WEO, National Forensics League, state drama festival winner.

I traced her from Parkersburg to journalism school at West Virginia University in the fall of 1975, where she joined Alpha Xi Delta. One sorority sister, Theresa Lucas, was also involved in the pageant world. Patsy continued gathering experience in the evening gown, interview, talent, and swimsuit categories and won more titles: second runner-up for Miss Morgantown, then first runner-up for Miss Wood County and Last Person Standing in an at-large competition. Theresa was named Miss West Virginia of 1976 and the following year relinquished her crown to her sorority sister, Patsy Paugh, who would represent her home state in the Miss America pageant.

Her talent performance for Miss West Virginia had been a moving soliloquy from
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
, but there was a problem in getting copyright clearance to use it on a national stage. Linda McLean told us that she and Patsy wrote an original three-minute speech, entitled
Deadline
, about censorship, and it won a nonfinalist talent award in Atlantic City and a $2,000 scholarship.

The celebrity of being a Miss America contestant and winning the Miss West Virginia crown gave Patsy a Cinderella kind of year, and she grew more popular and confident, always appearing in public in coordinated outfits, heels, and with her hair perfectly done. She dated few boys, usually older and from the best families.

She graduated from the university in 1979 with a magna cum laude degree in journalism and a minor in advertising. Her father bought her a new car, and just as he had as a young man, she drove away looking for a job. Atlanta, the big city, was calling, and together with her college friend Stephanie McCutcheon, Patsy headed to Georgia over the July Fourth weekend.

They stayed for a while with Stephanie’s brother, Dan, at his apartment on Powers Ferry Road and partied in Underground Atlanta and other hot spots. The welcome mat was always out for someone who had walked the Miss America runway. Dan, however, was of a more serious nature, and one evening his upstairs neighbor called wanting to talk about some computer business. Dan told the girls they had to be quiet and behave because “Mister Ramsey’s coming down.”

Putting together the background of John Bennett Ramsey, I found that flying was part of his life. He was born on December 7, 1943, exactly two years after Japanese aircraft laid waste to Pearl Harbor. His father went off to war. James “Jay” Ramsey was a pilot, flying cargo into China over the “Hump” of the Himalayas, while his wife, Mary Jane, stayed in Nebraska to look after their only child. When the war ended, James came home wearing the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal, and three battle stars and became director of the Nebraska Department of Aeronautics in Lincoln. John entered Randolph Elementary School the same year that his brother, Jeff, was born.

The boys grew up in a home ruled by midwestern principles and military correctness and inherited the fervent belief that hard work led to success. By the time he started Lefler Junior High in Lincoln, John Ramsey was known for being optimistic yet quiet.

When his father was appointed director of the Michigan Aeronautics Commission, the family moved again, and John went to high school in the small town of Okemos. He held summer jobs with an engineering company and the state highway department and also worked for his father at the aeronautics commission while attending Michigan State University. Surrounding himself with friends at school, he was involved in activities but remained in the background while he studied engineering.

He married dark-haired Lucinda Lou Pasch a month after earning his degree in electrical engineering in 1966. Commissioned as a navy ensign, he and Lucinda were posted to the huge Subic Bay naval base in the Philippines, but Ramsey did not follow his father into military aviation.

Subic Bay served the Seventh Fleet during the Vietnam years, and Ramsey, a civil engineer, stayed busy with public works projects and received excellent performance reviews. Lucinda gave birth to their first child, Beth, in the Philippines. After active duty, John moved back to Michigan and took a master’s degree at the Michigan State University Business School. Shortly thereafter, his second daughter, Melinda, was born.

He ran into problems while working with AT&T in Columbus, Ohio, where his quiet manner was apparently viewed as a sign that he had difficulty communicating. He lost that job but took a technical sales position in Huntsville, Alabama, and a year and a half later moved to Atlanta in another sales job.

In 1976 his son was born, but John Ramsey’s marriage soured after he had an affair with a woman he would later say seduced and stalked him. Tracking her down would become a difficult part of my investigation because he gave us few details. His wife filed for divorce in 1977, which he would call his “year in hell.” She got the children, he moved into an apartment by himself, and his mother died of cancer.

But John’s career was about to take off. He joined the computer revolution as manager of Southern Peripherals and Instruments in Atlanta. The company didn’t do well, and his bosses were unhappy because they said Ramsey tried to expense about $5,000 worth of repair work on his Porsche and personal flying costs. Despite their differences, the owner described him as a quiet gentleman.

Friends told me he was a flop as a bachelor, too introverted to be very good with women, although he exercised the power of his American Express card. “John knew how to close the sale,” a friend said. Even in the heat of the chase, however, John would unfailingly find a telephone each night and call his children.

He leaned over his apartment balcony in Atlanta one afternoon and saw a beautiful young woman visiting his downstairs neighbor. On the pretext of having to discuss a computer problem, Ramsey went down to talk to Dan McCutcheon. Once seated, he kept peering at her, smitten even before being introduced. John soon left his shyness behind and gave the AmEx card a workout, squiring his beauty queen to the best places in Atlanta in his little brown Porsche. “Patsy was his Jackie O,” recalled one friend.

Patsy’s parents detested divorce, but their misgivings evaporated when Ramsey flew up to meet them in West Virginia, holding hands with his three well-behaved kids as they crossed the airport tarmac. John and Patsy were married on November 5, 1980, at the Peachtree Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, where he became a deacon, and they settled into their first home. He was thirty-six years old, and she was twenty-three.

Borrowing money from Don Paugh, John and Patsy moved to the Atlanta subdivision of Dunwoody and in their basement launched a company they called Technical Equipment Specialists, Inc., known as TecSpec, which sold computer equipment for other businesses. Patsy handled the office, and her mother helped in sales. When neighbors complained about the delivery trucks, Ramsey rented office space at the airport so that he could fly in his spare time.

John Ramsey then joined with two other entrepreneurs to create MicroSouth, a distributor of computer instrumentation in the Southeast, and he was named president. When they hit the $500,000 mark in sales, MicroSouth held a big party, unaware of the fortunes on the horizon.

MicroSouth linked with a California firm, Calcomp. They also created the Advanced Products Group in 1986. Don Paugh, Ramsey’s father-in-law, was hired to run the new company.

The next step was to go national, and APG merged with CAD Distributors in Boulder and CAD Sources from New Jersey to form another company that would primarily sell Sun Microsystems components. The partners hunted through a dictionary for an appropriate name, and
Access
jumped out. Not only did it represent entry to information, but it began with the letter A, which meant prime placement in the Yellow Pages. Access Graphics was born, with headquarters in Boulder and John Ramsey in charge of sales. He was soon named president and commuted from Atlanta to Boulder, where Patsy rented an apartment for him near the Access offices.

In 1991 the little garage start-up caught the attention of huge Lockheed-Martin, which bought it and kept Ramsey in place as president. He and Patsy decided to leave Atlanta, and she oversaw a massive remodeling of a brick home on Fifteenth Street, not far from the University of Colorado and Chautauqua Park at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Things could not have been any better.

But on January 8, 1992, a tragedy occurred that shook John to his very core when his eldest child, Beth, was killed in an automobile accident near Chicago. Later that year his father died. John Ramsey fell apart on the death of Beth. The strong, silent executive collapsed inward, and nothing could soothe him. He would be heard in the middle of the night, crying and wailing in the attic, wrapped in pain. I would often consider the visible agony he endured on the death of Beth in comparison with his almost businesslike response to the murder of JonBenét.

Some questioned if John Ramsey ever really got over Beth’s death, for he surrounded himself with her photographs and reminders of their relationship. He read the Bible daily and immersed himself in readings about the afterlife. When he bought a plane, he had Beth’s name stenciled on the cabin.

Access Graphics was extraordinarily successful, with several hundred employees and offices in Mexico, Canada, and Europe, and Ramsey had enough money to indulge his family and his own passions of flying and sailing. He raced his sloop
Miss America
, using his children and friends as crew, and designed a new boat from scratch, with traditional lines, and named it the
Grand Season
. Ramsey had two airplanes, and when cataracts diminished his vision, he hired pilots to help him fly.

John Ramsey had become a millionaire, and his wife would sometimes awaken and find him sitting on the side of the bed, calculator in hand, crunching numbers to make his investments grow even larger. He had two more children, a son, Burke, and a third daughter, JonBenét.

Through it all, he remained a “mystery man” to many, allowing only his closest friends to see his wry humor. He was reserved and modest in all things, from conservative suits to Republican beliefs. He drank only socially. The family regularly attended the Episcopal church. Their little white dog, whopeed all over the house, served as a reminder that nothing is perfect.