JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (17 page)

We knew Patsy had mentioned during the 911 call both the SBTC initials and the word
Victory
, which were at the bottom of the ransom note’s third page. But the new answers said, “Patsy read only the first part of the note, not the entire note, and immediately checked JonBenét’s room, confirming that JonBenét was not in her bed.” Those were contradictions not only of the emergency call but of the sequence of events Patsy first related to the first officer, in which she found the bed empty before finding the note.

Another important point was the answer to what JonBenét had to eat that night: “JonBenét may have eaten some seafood, such as cracked crab and/or shrimp” at the Whites’ party. Neither the question nor the answer mentioned pineapple, which indicated that she ate what was found in her stomach at the autopsy
after
coming home, and we had found a ceramic bowl on the breakfast table containing pineapple. Patsy’s prints were on the bowl.

The question “What was JonBenét wearing when she went to bed on Christmas Day night?” was obliquely answered: “The best recollection is that she was wearing long underwear pants and a polo shirt when she went to bed.” It did not mention what color the shirt was—the white one on the body or red, as Patsy had said on December 26. It did not mention the word
turtleneck,
which she had told police on the morning the body was found. It was an extremely evasive answer to a simple question.

There is a downside to such probing questions, however, for they can educate a suspect about what investigators know, and I thought too much was being given away here. Also, written questions give no chance for a trained police interviewer to follow up on inconsistencies and bore in deep for information or to observe the body language of a nervous suspect.

Both John and Patsy went to bed “around 10” and were asleep “around 10:40.” Patsy awoke the next morning “at approximately 5:30 a.m. John woke up a little earlier and was already in the bathroom when Patsy awoke.”

To the question of which interior house lights were on when everyone went to bed, the peculiar reply was “The custom is (and it is believed custom was followed that night), that JonBenét’s bathroom light would have been on, with the door open a crack to allow a little light into her bedroom from her bathroom.”

Asked if either of them got up during the night, which I considered to be a yes or no question, the answer came back, “Neither has a memory of doing so.” I thought this conveniently allowed the possibility that some witness may have seen one of the parents up and about.

Asked who checked to see if the doors and windows were secure, the innocuous reply was “Patsy did not check the doors and windows. John does not believe that he did.” He had told several policemen that the house was locked.

The Ramseys’ public relations man soon put a media spin on the non-answers, which did not come close to being a true interview. “John and Patsy Ramsey have cooperated extensively with the police and other law enforcement authorities from the very beginning of their investigation, and this cooperation will continue. Written answers to all of the written questions submitted by the Boulder Police Department have been delivered to them this afternoon.” The statement was outrageous. What extensive cooperation was he talking about? We had hardly seen these people since the day of the murder and, except for this minimal communication, had heard nothing from them.

We got very little from an interview with nine-year-old Burke Ramsey, for whom Team Ramsey had dictated stringent terms to an agreeable district attorney’s office: No police could be in the room, the questioning would be by child psychologist Suzanne Bernhard, and the session would not be held in a police building. Any possible police leverage was bargained away before the session began. We all felt sorry for Burke, but damn, he might actually know something! And while Bernhard’s professional credentials were fine, some prosecutors in surrounding jurisdictions refused to use her because of a perceived pro-defense bias.

Detectives Jane Harmer and Ron Gosage, a group of social workers, and Burke’s lawyer, Patrick Burke, watched from behind a two-way mirror. The detectives were able to make suggestions to Bernhard, but the psychologist asked shrink questions, and the interview became an entirely different sort than one to solicit evidentiary information.

The boy remembered his sister as being “nice” but added, “Sometimes she bugged me.” JonBenét would tickle him and rummage through his desk to find candy and baseball cards. Bernhard asked how he was dealing with his sister’s death, and Burke replied, “I kind of forget about it. I just kind of go …” and he lapsed into sounds similar to Nintendo beeps.

What do you think happened to your sister?

I know what happened to my sister. She was killed.

But what happened?

I know what happened.

How was she killed? Have you talked to your parents about it?

I asked my dad, Where did you find her body? He said, In the basement. I think someone took her down in the basement … took a knife out [losing words, he made a slashing gesture] or hit her on the head.

He said the house was usually always locked.

His descriptions were flat and indifferent. Bernhard detected no fear that the killer might come back for him or that Burke thought the family was in danger. The psychologist said it was very unusual for a child to feel safe when a sibling had been violently killed.

It was the only time that authorities had been allowed to speak to Burke since December 26, when a detective managed to ask him a few questions before the boy left the home of Fleet White. More than a year and a half would pass before Burke was allowed to be interviewed again.

The most incredible thing about the interview had nothing at all to do with the boy. It was, in my view, a step by Team Ramsey to build a bridge to a specific detective they apparently believed to be sympathetic.

Attorney Patrick Burke, his client Patsy Ramsey, and her son were escorted to the interview by Detective Linda Arndt. While the boy settled in to talk with Bernhard, Patsy and the detective waited in a nearby kitchen, alone. They stayed together during the full hour of the interview. Arndt submitted a report.

Patsy was coughing with bronchitis, which led to a discussion of her ovarian cancer, her difficult recovery, and how she had been saddened that her chemotherapy ordeal vied for the family’s attention with her younger sister’s pregnancy. She told Arndt about moving from West Virginia to Atlanta and laughed that she was the black sheep of the family. The conversation rambled from Patsy’s being invited to join the board of the Boulder Philharmonic to how being a mother was so important to her.

Then, Arndt recalled, Patsy bowed her head and cried, confessing that she could have no more children because of a hysterectomy following the cancer. The conversation drifted to her relationship with JonBenét and how she had taken her daughter to New York and they had seen five Broadway shows in four days. Patsy said Burke was going back to school, John was going back to work, but she had nothing to return to. She loved Burke, but really missed JonBenét, and Burke did not like to wear makeup and bake cookies.

Then she said it was good that Detective Arndt was on the case and urged her to find the killer.

Team Ramsey had gone out of its way to put Patsy and John off-limits to police, but an experienced defense attorney like Patrick Burke had allowed Arndt and Patsy to be alone for an hour. I felt that was no accident.

A few hours after the interview, Arndt reported that the lawyer called her at the police department, asking if there was a second ransom note and what results had been received from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. Arndt reported she told him there had been but the single ransom note and that we hadn’t received anything from the CBI.

Although we pursued these logical avenues of investigation, we did not focus just on the Ramseys, although they complained that we did. Patsy told one friend, “They’re trying to frame us.” We were much too busy to do that. Our mailboxes, telephone voice mail, and desks in the Situation Room were littered with unsolicited theories, possible suspects, and hate mail. Sketch artists offered everything from a Michael Jackson look-alike to “the Fly” as the culprit, a Beverly Hills psychic left multiple hours-long voice mail messages for me, and Internet groupies passed along their ideas. Letters flooded in, sick, twisted stuff from the underbelly of society, which were read when we had a chance.

Not only was Team Ramsey throwing us suspects to check out, but names were coming in from everywhere. A woman tipped us that her ex-husband had sexually assaulted their daughter, tied her up, and covered her mouth with duct tape, so we ordered him in. He turned out to be a spit-and-polish graduate of the Naval Academy and a successful businessman. We had asked only a few questions when he responded, “Have you been talking to my ex-wife?” We wouldn’t tell him, but he explained the poisonous relationship that had followed their breakup. We checked his story, and the alleged assaults on the child never happened. Angry and rejected lovers were a prime source of potential suspects, and for every person we cleared, two more appeared.

We invested huge amounts of time over the coming months chasing these phantom leads while the public wondered why it was taking us so long to solve the case. Nothing illustrated these futile efforts better than our investigation of Santa Claus.

“Santa Bill” McReynolds was trapped, and his life ruined, by his fondness for appearing on television. Once he and his family emerged as suspects, they would be hounded for years, although nothing more than innuendo ever connected them to the death of JonBenét.

The retired professor of journalism at the University of Colorado had played Santa at previous Ramsey Christmas parties and in 1996 had been included in a Santa special produced by folksy CBS-TV correspondent Charles Kuralt, who finished filming McReynolds just before he went to the Ramsey home. Such a colorful character became an overnight celebrity.

McReynolds, who hugged Patsy in church during the memorial service, was anything but a roly-poly Jolly Old Elf. Instead he was a frail sixty-seven-year-old man with a flowing white beard who was still recovering from heart and lung surgery performed in August 1996, only four months before the murder.

Sick or not, we weren’t going to cut him any slack in our first interview. The Ramseys had put him on their early list of suspects, and a witness had told police that JonBenét said a “Secret Santa” was going to visit her. McReynolds knew nothing about that.

In our interview McReynolds suggested incest as a possible motive for the murder, but he later retracted that and told the
Today
show that the Ramseys were a terrific family.

We took hair, handwriting, blood, and prints, then had a long talk. Santa Bill told us how special JonBenét was, never asking for gifts for herself, just wanting “joy and peace” for everyone. “There are angels everywhere,” she told him. “Every day is Christmas.”

JonBenét had led McReynolds by the hand on a tour of the house during the 1995 Christmas party, including her bedroom and the basement to see where the Christmas trees were kept, and had given him a vial of glittery “stardust” to sprinkle in his beard. He carried it to the hospital as a lucky charm during the surgery.

He confirmed being at the 1996 party but said he was at home in Rollinsville, a little mountain town about an hour from Boulder, with his wife and friends on Christmas night. After their guests left that evening, both husband and wife climbed into bed and slept all night. He was on postsurgical medication and needed his rest.

McReynolds said what was truly terrible was that this wasn’t the first child to die during his Santa years. A little boy who was “a special friend” had been murdered several years previously.

Detective Gosage and I felt there were a lot of loose ends with Santa Bill. Anything else you want to tell us? Anything else we’re going to find out? He floored us. When his own daughter was ten years old, she and another girl were kidnapped, and the friend was molested before both girls were released. When did that happen? He didn’t remember, it was so long ago, about twenty-five years.

When I got up to thank him for coming in, McReynolds grabbed me around the shoulders. “Santa doesn’t shake hands,” he said. “Santa hugs.”

Gosage called McReynolds’s daughter, who corroborated his alibi and confirmed the kidnapping episode when she was a child. Gosage got a police report on the abduction, read it, and slammed the papers down on the desk. The kids had been snatched on December 26, 1974—
exactly
twenty-two years before the murder of JonBenét. McReynolds had not told us that!

Then when a couple of reporters discovered that Santa’s wife, Janet McReynolds, had written a play about a girl who was tortured and murdered in the basement of her home, my jaw hit the floor. All the other coincidences, and now this. This wasn’t a hiccup of a lead, it was an atomic bomb.

Janet McReynolds was quiet and impressive, her grandmotherly appearance existing comfortably with a considerable intellect. With degrees from three universities, including a Ph.D., she had worked as a teacher and a writer and had won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for her play,
Hey
,
Rube
, which was produced in New York and Los Angeles. It was based on a true story about the horrible murder of a teenage girl in Indianapolis.

Despite the subject matter, there was nothing to link the play or its author to the murder of JonBenét. We asked if there was anything else we should know. She said there wasn’t.

We still had to check out her two sons, Tristan and Jesse. Tristan had a tight alibi, having been in Michigan with his girlfriend over the Christmas holidays. Jesse was a different story. He had done two and a half years in an Arizona prison for conspiracy, aggravated robbery … and kidnapping.

Then came the final undoing of Santa Bill. McReynolds loved appearing on television, and someone recognized him as a regular customer at a local adult bookstore. He came in again for an interview that cleared him of suspicion, but at a personal price.