JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (22 page)

• One of Father Rol’s parishioners claimed he came across a crazed-looking man standing beside a truck behind the Ramsey house, holding some white cord and a stick and grunting, “You can’t have her. She’s mine.” He embellished his story periodically with new clues from “visions.” He said the mysterious stranger was also at St. John’s Church during the Christmas pageant just before the murder and whispered to him, “Don’t you just want to strangle her?” We checked out everyone he named, then even searched his apartment to make sure he wasn’t the murderer. Gosage and I probably spent about two hundred man-hours chasing the alleyway boogie-man, and it came to nothing.

• Detectives tracked every known pedophile in Boulder County and came up dry. Chief Koby passed along a name suggested by a friend of the wife of the district attorney. Other detectives gave us that “I’m glad it’s not us” look.

The worst of the bunch, and the most likely suspect we came across other than the Ramseys, was John Brewer Eustace III, in custody in Charlotte, North Carolina, for kidnapping a two-year-old girl. Police found the name of JonBenét Ramsey atop a bizarre list of the pedophile’s favorite sexual fantasies, and he kept a scrapbook filled with photographs of JonBenét alongside a Barbie doll on a makeshift altar. The guy sounded real.

Even in his orange jail overalls, the gaunt Eustace looked like a predator. When he found out who we were, he waived his Miranda rights because he wanted to talk about the “goodlooking little girl.”

No matter what his other crimes, we needed information from him, so we offered some fresh air and took him from the jail to the Charlotte PD a few blocks away.

Gosage, with a baby at home, could barely contain his disgust as Eustace recounted, “hypothetically, of course,” how he would molest little girls and the importance of wiping fingerprints from bodies. In the North Carolina incident, he confessed to entering the apartment through a garden-level window while an adult was awake in the living room, shushing the little blond child, and taking her away through a window, leaving behind a flashlight. He later tied her, put tape over her mouth, and wrapped electrical cord around her head to control her. The similarities to our case convinced us that we had to investigate this suspect upside-down.

He smoked three packs of Marlboros while recounting dozens of molestations, watching our reactions through half-closed eyes, carefully avoiding dates or places. But he feigned forgetfulness when we tried to account for his whereabouts on December 25.

When we sought samples of pubic hair, he shrugged that he couldn’t provide any because he shaved his crotch so as not to leave telltale DNA evidence. But in a fourth-floor detective bureau bathroom, Eustace pinched folds of pubic skin and we plucked stubs of hair with tweezers. Finally we returned him to his county jail cell. Back at the hotel I stood beneath a steaming shower scrubbing hard with soap to rid myself of the stench of John Eustace.

We found that he’d had a temporary job with a film processing lab during Christmas week, and a computer-generated time sheet showed that he was at work on December 26. Coworkers remembered he had tried to kiss an unwilling woman employee that night. It was impossible to be in North Carolina and Colorado at the same time. We cleared Eustace but hoped the Charlotte cops would put him away for a couple of forevers.

It was extremely frustrating to chase the nonsense leads, and we seemed to be constantly heading down roads that led nowhere. Information evaporated before our eyes, suspects were cleared, tips were not what they seemed. The effort spent on such things was chewing up detective hours and not getting us close to the people on whom we should be concentrating.

Evidence at hand pointed to the Ramseys. But instead of the focus narrowing, as in normal investigations, this one widened like an inverted funnel. At some point we hoped common sense would take over; we wanted to stop chasing phantoms. There was no shortage of suspects, just a shortage of detectives.

One day I asked Trip DeMuth, our primary contact with Alex Hunter’s office, why they didn’t see what we saw. Everyone we had interviewed had resulted in a dead end, the evidence was piling up, and of all of the handwriting examples, only one person—Patsy Ramsey—came back as the likely author. We saw nothing that pointed to anyone outside the home being involved. Locked house. Dead child. Two parents. Hello?

“We need to follow the evidence, but we’re headed off in every direction but that one,” I told him.

He responded, “What if it isn’t the Ramseys?” That was the bottom line for the district attorney’s people. To me, they weren’t following the evidence. They seemed to be bending over backward for the prime suspects.

Our police chief, Tom Koby, pledged, “Even if solving the case costs a million dollars, we will do it.” A few months later, he took a look at the overtime and expenses and announced, “We may need to scale back the investigation.” Within weeks, he reassigned Detective Linda Arndt, whom I didn’t mind losing, but also the indefatigable Detective Melissa Hickman, whom we hated to see go.

Sergeant Wickman remained in command, and Detective Tom Trujillo would continue at his desk, handling the evidence. That left Ron Gosage, Jane Harmer, and myself to face the Ramsey juggernaut. At the same time, the Denver police had thirty-five detectives working a January homicide.

While the chief would not even hire extra clerical help for us, he spared no expense on the frivolous. Command staff received massage certificates. A retreat was planned for his departmental leaders, although this was hardly the proper time to be taking time off. Then he announced that his role in the case would change, and he would back away from the day-to-day operations so “the detectives can do their jobs.” His timing was remarkable. The ship was sinking and the captain was heading for a lifeboat.

We were handed over to a psychologist in the banquet room at the Marriott Courtyard. We hated being there. When asked to speak, we did, although our body language belied our comments. Arms crossed chests, eyes roamed the ceiling, and smiles were nonexistent. Who could talk about “feelings” when a to-do list ten miles long waited back at the office?

I wondered how many murder investigations around America were run this way.

Chief Koby surprised me one day when he found me working late, alone in the SitRoom, and took a chair. He ventured his opinion that the Ramseys’ not being constantly on our doorstep offering help was indicative of guilty people.

The story was still huge news and showed no sign of waning. JonBenét stared out from newspapers, panels of “expert” talking heads filled the airwaves, and the Australian edition of
People
featured her on its cover. Santa Bill McReynolds popped up everywhere, housekeeper Linda Hoffmann-Pugh was riding around in a limousine paid for by the tabloids, and
USA Today
predicted we were close to an arrest.

Out of the pack of hundreds of journalists, Jeff Shapiro of the sensationalist
Globe
tabloid would stand out from the others. He was deceitful but dug deeper than any of them, caused a crisis in journalistic ethics with secret tape recordings, and damn near brought down the district attorney.

He surfaced in the middle of March, stalking John Andrew Ramsey. A high school friend of John Andrew’s was approached by someone who identified himself both as Matt Hayworth and Jeffrey Scott and was talking about the case. When I checked him out with an early morning telephone call, a young man’s sleepy voice confirmed I was talking to Jeffrey Scott.

He came awake in a hurry when I told him I was a cop. The guy was obviously a reporter and was lying. A short time later, an editor from the
Globe
telephoned to apologize. Jeffrey Scott was one of theirs, and his real name was Jeff Shapiro. Before long, I would recruit him to be a confidential informant.

The Colorado Bureau of Investigation lab discovered a semen stain after all on a blanket inside the suitcase that had been retrieved from the basement. DNA tests matched the specimen to John Andrew, and since we had cleared him, another trail ended where it started. Intruder theorists in the DA’s office would try to weave the semen stain, the blanket, and a Doctor Seuss book also found in the suitcase into a convoluted scenario in which JonBenét was lured from her bed with the book. The plan was then to stuff her in the suitcase and take it out through the window. When it was argued that the suitcase didn’t fit through the basement window, the theory simply changed to having her taken out through a door while the suitcase was used as a stairstep to the window. It was a convenient arrangement of these facts.

We kept sending the CBI evidence to test, and they were moving us to the head of the line and doing solid work. The DA’s office decided that future DNA tests would be conducted by CellMark Diagnostic in Maryland, the largest independent testing lab in the country. In my opinion, the main reason was to placate Team Ramsey.

The reason was painfully obvious. CBI director Carl Whiteside had banned Ramsey experts from observing the testing procedures, so they simply opened a new line of attack, and Trip DeMuth cleared the way for them. DeMuth gave CellMark orders not to begin testing without prior authorization from the Boulder County District Attorney’s office. “The reason for this restriction is that arrangements must be made to allow a representative from the Ramsey family to be present,” he wrote.

To me, we had squandered a huge advantage. We should have done the testing as we wished and let the defense conduct their tests only if and when someone was charged. Their complaint that all the evidence would be destroyed in the tests was a tactic, not a fact.

They never stopped pushing, and when they pushed on the DA’s office, it seemed to me that they usually got what they wanted.

As often happens when detectives start kicking around seemingly unrelated items, we figured out that Patsy’s fur boots might be a possible source for a beaver hair the FBI lab had identified on the sticky side of the tape that had been across JonBenét’s mouth. It could even have been a case-breaking discovery, and we should have been off and running with search warrants in hand to get those boots. But the DA’s office once again stopped us in our tracks by shrugging their shoulders and declining to proceed with a warrant.

When Detective Trujillo mentioned that Patsy had worn a pair of fur boots at her latest handwriting appearance, he sparked my recollection that Melinda Ramsey’s boyfriend, Stewart Long, had told me that when he arrived at the house on December 26, Patsy was standing out in front, wearing a fur coat.

Despite our repeated explanations during the rest of my association with the case, the DA’s office never pursued a search warrant for the fur coat or boots. To me, it was inexplicable.

The Ramsey house was also through giving up information. Gosage and I drove by 755 Fifteenth Street late one afternoon, and it looked as busy as a bus station. Detectives weren’t allowed beyond the sidewalk without a warrant, but a small army of carpenters, painters, construction workers, and cleanup crews were rushing about, performing a massive overhaul. Any trace evidence that might still exist vanished beneath new coats of paint or was vacuumed up or tossed out with the trash. I called out to a painter in the garage. He looked at me, reached up, punched a button, and the door rumbled closed in my face.

We hoped that Dr. Henry Lee might be able to put some of this puzzle together, but at the conclusion of our first briefing for him, the nation’s most celebrated criminalist was shocked almost to silence by how badly the crime scene had been botched.

While about three dozen men and women from Boulder County law enforcement, including Koby and Hunter, waited in a big conference room at police headquarters, Lee hung out downstairs, bantering with the detectives.

He told us that he was not a magician, and pretending to look through an imaginary magnifying glass, he said, “I see the same things you see.”

At the time, Lee was director of the Connecticut State Police Crime Laboratory, and when the official session got under way, he gave us all a primer in the basics, from crime scene to laboratory to courtroom. The man was a walking textbook.

Then we showed him photos of the crime scene. “Wait,” Lee said. “The pillow in the kitchen in this picture doesn’t show up in that one. Why?” His eyebrows rose in wonder when he learned how things had been moved and how many people had trampled through the place before the photographers took their pictures. What he was viewing was not necessarily how things looked on the day of the murder. Lee said nothing but made a note.

We went through numerous pieces of evidence—the body, the clothing, the first officers’ observations, no forced entry, the ransom note, ink and pen.

Lee suggested that the cellar room in which the body was found was not necessarily the location of the primary attack. He also wondered about the presence of the pink nightgown discovered near the victim. A kidnapper, he ventured, probably would not bring a victim’s favorite piece of clothing along with a dead body.

John Meyer, the Boulder County coroner, had barely begun his autopsy findings before Lee questioned the urine stains found on the crotch of the long-john pants and the panties beneath them. Were there corresponding stains on the bed sheets? We didn’t know, although when the crime became a murder instead of a kidnapping, those sheets should have been promptly collected for testing.

Meyer said he found a lot of redness, some small flecks of blood, and dark-colored fibers in the vaginal area, but no old scarring. There was some abrasion and hemorrhaging in the vagina. Also present was irritation and chronic inflammation in the vaginal vault, which he said was evident for some period. He was unsure whether the cause was infection, digital manipulation, lying in urine, or even the very unlikely event of self-manipulation. It was inconsistent with penile penetration, but chronic vaginal abuse was a possibility, Meyer said.