JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (13 page)

Access Graphics celebrated its $1 billion sales mark as 1996 neared an end. John Ramsey had lived the American dream, coming from modest beginnings, doing well in school, serving his country, working hard and prospering, marrying one beauty queen and fathering another. His future seemed bright and limitless.

Patsy had spent only three days partying in Atlanta before John Ramsey stepped into her life. The evening they met was tentative, and when he left for a moment to go call his children, she thought it was just an excuse and that would be the last she would see of him. But he came back, and by the end of a game of charades, Patsy and John were an item.

When they married, Patsy joked that at the age of only twenty-two, she had inherited three kids, two dogs, and a station wagon. That same year, her sister Pam won the Miss West Virginia crown, the first time in state history that sisters had done that, and only the second time in the Miss America competition.

Patsy landed an advertising job with McCann-Erickson but soon joined her husband in running their home-grown business, TecSpec, out of the remodeled basement. Later Patsy joined a friend’s company, Hayes Computers, as head of the creative department.

People had begun noticing a marked change in the freshfaced Patsy as her husband’s accumulating fortune offered a lifestyle that she fully embraced. She drove a Mercedes and wore a mink coat to work, diamonds sparkling on her fingers as she produced technical manuals. She had a breast augmentation. She stayed with Hayes Computers until she became pregnant six years after she was married. Her first child, Burke, was born on January 27, 1987. JonBenét came along three years later.

Patsy stayed busy with a huge social calendar that touched all the right bases in Atlanta—Twigs, the Junior League, hostess for the symphony’s Black-and-White ball, head of a million-dollar fund-raiser for the Egleston Children’s Hospital, and patron of the Miss America scholarship program. It was reported that Patsy spent $30,000 on a single
Gone With the Wind
luncheon party in Atlanta. Her home was a showplace, and every Christmas she hired a Santa Claus for her parties.

John denied her nothing. With money no object, he bought a vacation home, a 110-year-old Victorian house on Belvedere Avenue in Charlevoix, Michigan, on a bluff overlooking Round Lake Harbor and the yacht basin, and Patsy set about a three-year renovation that almost reduced the place to its foundations before rebuilding. Landscaping alone cost more than $100,000. With its peaked roofline, a mast for flags on the lawn, and gingerbread gables, the place needed a grand name, so she christened it Summerhill. When Patsy took her morning coffee on the broad open porch, one could almost hear the old pump organ being played by Olive Eckinger, the opera singer who had married tycoon Roy MacArthur in that very house in 1917. Olive had planted showy, fragrant peonies. So did Patsy.

She plunged into community events there, too, because she wanted Charlevoix to consider the Ramseys more than mere summer people. As soon as the home was finished, Patsy put it on the town’s historic tour to benefit a local hospital and personally greeted each visitor.

In Boulder Patsy also poured money into a makeover of their new home on Fifteenth Street. But her fairy-tale life slammed into reality in 1993, when she was thirty-six years old. She had endured steady discomfort in her shoulders and elsewhere for about six months and was taking sixteen aspirin every day. While judging a Miss West Virginia pageant in July, she felt a lump in her stomach. Atlanta doctors found an advanced case of ovarian cancer. Her head was still spinning with the news when they performed a hysterectomy. “A nightmare,” she told an interviewer.

In a life-or-death gamble, John and an Atlanta doctor friend pulled strings and arranged for Patsy to become part of an experimental cancer-fighting protocol at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where she would receive high experimental doses of drugs and therapy. In the coming months she traveled to NIH every three weeks and spent four days undergoing the risky treatments, then flew back to Boulder and within a few days entered the Boulder Community Hospital to recuperate. Then a few weeks later, it was back to NIH to do it all over again. Her hair fell out, and for days she was only able to lie in bed exhausted. But she had an immense drive to recover, partly, one friend would later say, to keep an unnamed “blond bitch” down the street from getting her husband.

The steel in that comment showed the West Virginia girl who had apparently discovered that a pretty face in public could cover up private problems. The family spaces in their house were a mess, but the front room was showplace clean. Her little daughter’s bed-wetting was private; the pretty gowns and a winning smile were what the public saw. Life inside the family was not the perfect image portrayed for the outside world.

Patsy Ramsey conquered cancer, receiving a good report from NIH after Thanksgiving 1995, and Christmas, her favorite season, was coming. The Boulder house was on the Tour of Homes for that year. Starting in September, a procession of fourteen maids scrubbed the huge house, and decorators were given a free hand and an open checkbook. A sash wrapped every doorway. The basement was converted into a bustling headquarters for the guides and servers as some two thousand people visited. Ten volunteers manned the house every hour. Patsy’s pageant gown was carefully arranged on her bed with the tiara displayed on black velvet in the huge closet amid feathers and ball gowns and hats. It took four days to remove, wrap, and store all the decorations and left a maze of finger- and footprints for our crime scene technicians to examine after the murder.

Patsy’s social life recovered apace with her health. Soon people saw the black Jeep Grand Cherokee or the white Jaguar once again cruising between appointments in Boulder as Patsy plunged into social activities that included the Colorado Dance Festival, the Boulder Philharmonic, the hospital auxiliary, and the university’s women’s club, and she played on a women’s softball team called Mom’s Gone Bad. She helped create the Good Fairy Project and chaired the science fair at High Peaks Elementary, where Burke and JonBenét were students.

Throughout it all, she steered her daughter through the world of child beauty pageants, a time-consuming effort that fueled the shared dream of Patsy and her mother and sister that JonBenét might some day grab the gold ring that Patsy and Pam had missed and become Miss America. My profile of Patsy led me to believe that she had gone beyond living vicariously through her daughter. She was enhancing JonBenét’s pageant résumés with such things as violin and French lessons, and was even attributing highly improbable quotes to the child, such as how the world would be a better place if we planted daffodils. Just to have JonBenét win titles didn’t seem to be enough for Patsy. It seemed to me that she sought perfection.

It looked as if 1996 would be another fortune-blessed year for Patsy, as if time wanted to make up for her illness. In January she and John went to the Cotton Bowl, and in the spring, a patio party with musicians helped celebrate the running of the Bolder Boulder 10-kilometer road race. Patsy took an art class at the university, where her expensive clothes, flashy jewels, big hair, and makeup did not fit in with the other students, who wore Birkenstock shoes and smocks. “One of those rich Atlanta-Dallas women,” said an instructor.

The lake house was the scene of a family reunion of about thirty people. Space was so tight that guests slept on floors and even in the family boat. They dined on smoked trout and grilled whitefish. Patsy organized and Police Chief Dennis Halverson helped judge a bicycle decorating contest at the Charlevoix Venetian Festival. It was won by JonBenét, who turned six that summer.

The holiday season of 1996 was a long series of parties, including an early surprise fortieth birthday celebration at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, attended by Patsy’s friends. None of her Atlanta women friends responded to their invitations. A comic dressed up like the girl who beat Patsy out for the Miss America crown did a three-minute spoof from material supplied by Nedra.

The Boulder house looked splendid, the front walkway bordered by candy canes and theme-decorated Christmas trees in every major room. On December 23, Patsy held a glittering Christmas party. About two dozen adults and children decorated gingerbread houses on the big dining room table. JonBenét looked happy and beautiful in a black velvet dress. The only odd moment was when a policeman arrived to say he was answering an emergency 911 call. He did not enter the festive house but was told through a speaker that all was well, and he went away. Santa Bill McReynolds entertained the guests, and housekeeper Linda Hoffmann-Pugh helped serve.

Within three days, a ransom note, a murder, and the focus of a horrified nation brought the dream to an abrupt end.

PART TWO

A GATHERING STORM

9

John and Patsy Ramsey broke their silence on New Year’s Day with an interview on the Cable News Network instead of talking to us. Arranging an interview with a news organization was a tactic they would use repeatedly in coming years, and in my opinion it was always sheer propaganda, allowing them to spin a public relations story while avoiding the police. Most of the time the reporters involved agreed in advance not to ask them anything about the murder of their daughter. And the reporters, however well informed, knew only a fraction of the real case. Cops wanted to ask tougher, deeper questions—and on the first day of 1997 our topics would have included a long ransom note written in a familiar hand, JonBenét’s bed-wetting, a broken paintbrush used to make a garrote, pineapple found in a bowl and in the victim’s stomach, and what looked like traces of semen on the victim. The only danger to Patsy and John Ramsey when they put on their dog and pony shows did not come from the interviewers but from themselves. Even a carefully controlled statement still might give us something we could use.

Patsy did exactly that when she declared on CNN, “You know America has just been hurt so deeply with the tragic things that have happened. The young woman who drove her children into the water, and we don’t know what happened with O. J. Simpson. And I mean, America is suffering because of lost faith in the American family. We are a Christian, God-fearing family. We love our children.”

I had taught many police classes about deceptive responses, and it was always a red flag when someone proclaimed innocence by repeated religious affirmations. And why was she bringing up Susan Smith’s lies about murdering her own children?

The Ramseys also told the national television audience that they were “not angry” about the murder of their daughter and wanted to move on with their lives. That left an opening, which the reporter didn’t grasp, to ask how anyone could
not
be angry about such a thing. Anger, particularly only days after a person’s child is violently slain, is a natural emotion.

John said that the murder of his daughter “makes no sense” and announced a $50,000 reward.

Patsy, apparently still feeling the effects of her tranquilizers, gave several reasons why she felt JonBenét was better off dead, then issued a warning. “There’s someone out there,” she declared. “There is a killer on the loose. I don’t know who it is. I don’t know if it’s a he or a she. But if I were a resident of Boulder, I would tell my friends to keep your babies close to you.”

The subject came around to whether they would be talking to the Boulder police. “Whatever anyone wants, we will cooperate,” Patsy Ramsey told CNN.

That came as good news to us because we were on the way to Atlanta, where they were sitting in a television studio. Maybe we were reading them all wrong. It sounded as if all we had to do in Georgia was knock on their door and get those interviews.

And it certainly was no secret when Detectives Ron Gosage, Tom Trujillo, and Jane Harmer, Sergeant Larry Mason, and I arrived. We were met on the tarmac in Atlanta by a convoy of police cars that escorted us into the city. The Ramseys knew we were coming, and Commander John Eller was pushing the DA’s office to arrange a meeting.

Gosage and I stayed up all night reviewing the case, readying questions, but our quarry fled without warning. The Ramseys were on their private plane again, headed for points unknown. We never saw them. So much for their promised “cooperation.”

Trujillo and I went over to the Peachtree Presbyterian Church to talk with the Reverend Dr. Frank Harrington the next morning. He knew the family well, had married John and Patsy, buried Beth, baptized JonBenét, and had just buried her, too. If anyone could provide us with some insight, it should be the Reverend Harrington.

The minister met us with a frosty demeanor and a curt, “I’m not sure I want to talk to you. I will tell you I will share no privileged information.”

That set me thinking about the rules of privilege, in which information can legally be kept in confidence, such as between doctor and patient or lawyer and client. Also privileged would be a confession by a parishioner to a clergyman.
“Is
there privileged information?” I asked.

“I won’t answer that,” Harrington said. “Do I need an attorney?”

“We’re not here as adversaries, and you’re not a suspect,” I said, hoping to smooth things out. But we had to wait around for ten minutes until both a witness and a lawyer arrived, and our brief exchange yielded little information.

Why would a man of God reach for a lawyer rather than voluntarily give police everything he could to try to solve the terrible murder of a child, particularly if he wasn’t violating the sanctity of confession? But Harrington wasn’t alone in that peculiar behavior. I would repeatedly run into that same wall of silence, and more lawyers than I can remember, in the coming months. I wanted to scream at these people, “Don’t you even care?”

If people were not going to help, I had to start considering other options, including the possibility of a grand jury that would have subpoena power and could demand answers.