JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (30 page)

We conducted tedious re-creations in the small room where the body was found, duplicating lighting conditions with the help of a photographic expert with sensitive meters and placing a white cotton blanket where JonBenét had lain.

John Ramsey had said he spotted the blanket instantly when he opened the door. It was as dark as a coal mine at midnight in there, and to open the door, he would have had to step back to a point where a blind corner would have blocked his view. I stood where Ramsey had been and saw only a wall of impenetrable blackness.

Lou Smit: “I can see in there.”

Even with the light on, Detective Gosage said, “I had to step completely into the cellar and look around the corner to my left to see the blanket on the floor.”

When I finally left the house, it was with a sense of keen disappointment, for I felt we had all betrayed JonBenét by being unable to resolve our differences.

21

I rounded a corner in the police department and literally bumped into Chief Koby. Back from Texas, he looked fit, tanned, and rested and asked how the case was going. I told him we had probable cause to make an arrest but were stymied by the DA’s office. Koby was carrying a pair of grannie glasses and a book,
Care of the Soul
, and observed that the Ramsey matter was “an encounter between good and evil” and I was a “warrior of the light.” He promised that “the light will prevail.” The chief would have been a terrific monk on a mountaintop, but he was too Zen for me.

We thought we had successfully knocked down the preposterous stun gun scenario but underestimated the tenacity of DA investigator Lou Smit. The idea, although demonstrably wrong, stuck to the case like glue, no matter how many times we thought we had proved it couldn’t have happened that way.

Smit told us that he had located the type of stun gun used in the attack, and I listened in amazement one afternoon as Trip DeMuth emphatically described to his boss Pete Hofstrom just how the intruder had used it to immobilize JonBenét.

“We have a killer out there who may kill again,” Smit told me, almost with tears in his eyes. Forensic pathologist Dr. Werner Spitz in Michigan definitively discounted the stun gun, but that also made no difference. When Pete Hofstrom arranged a private interview between Smit and the Ramseys, the stun gun moved to center stage, helped by the opinion of a county coroner Smit found who said that it could not be totally discounted.

The police detectives were neither informed in advance nor invited to the interview, and it was held at a Team Ramsey law office. The main subject of their chat was the nonexistent stun gun, “something which only the killer and we know about, which can lead us to the killer,” Smit told them.

“Do you know what a stun gun is?” he asked John Ramsey.

“It’s an electrical thing,” Ramsey answered.

“Patsy, do you know what a stun gun is?”

“No.”

He pressed to learn if any of their friends or acquaintances owned, had access to, or had ever mentioned a stun gun. “This case could be as easy as that,” said Smit.

JOHN: Can you buy those?

PATSY: What’s a stun gun?

John Ramsey decided, for no apparent reason, that a woman would be more likely to use a stun gun than a man, and turned once again on his old friends Fleet and Priscilla White. He suggested that if he had to pick between the two, then Priscilla would be more likely to use such a tool. His reasoning was that “She came from California.”

Smit wrapped up their twenty-five-minute meeting with the flat statement “Look, the killer made a mistake if he took that device in with him. He made a very big mistake … . It could be his undoing.”

Unmentioned was that police had taken from John Ramsey’s desk a sales videotape from an I Spy store in Florida that contained information about stun guns. I believed that if Smit really wanted to pursue the stun gun issue, he would have to cross-examine Ramsey hard on that point since the videotape indicated a logical source. They couldn’t ignore the possibility that their favored assault weapon might belong to someone other than an intruder. Many months would pass before Ramsey was questioned about the tape, and he would say he never watched it.

The killer did leave something behind, but not as exotic as a make-believe weapon. The person who killed JonBenét left that three-page ransom note, and we were able to use it to clear a number of suspects. Unless there was a conspiracy, if they didn’t write the note, they did not kill the child. And while outside experts stopped short of saying Patsy Ramsey was the author, mostly because of rigid standards for expert court testimony, none could eliminate her either.

But in still another unwarranted “trust-building” deal, the DA’s office allowed Ramsey-hired handwriting experts full access to our best piece of evidence. They made a lot of “Aha!” sounds as they pored over the 376-word note inside the Boulder Police Department Evidence Room and a few hours later gave us a complicated presentation that concluded Patsy Ramsey could not be identified as the author. I expected nothing less from people paid for by the defense team but was pleased that, when pressed, even they had to admit that they could not
eliminate
her as the writer either.

One thing we managed to keep from them for a while was that the lab analysts had a partial print from the ransom note. However, it didn’t belong to the killer but to Chet Ubowski of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, who handled the note during his examination. The
only
print identified on that note belonged to the document examiner. There was no indication that an intruder had ever touched the ransom note. And it seemed odd to us that no prints were on the note from either of the parents, who presumably would have handled it and even gripped it tightly.

But lab analysts
did
identify seven latent fingerprints on the tablet from which the ransom note came. None of them belonged to an intruder. One belonged to Sergeant Whitson, who handled the tablet on the morning of December 26. A second belonged to CBI’s Ubowski. The remaining five fingerprints were Patricia Ramsey’s.

In October I would make a ten-day trip to Michigan, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., carrying the ransom note and folders filled with Patsy Ramsey’s handwriting samples. No one ever took the possibility of car-jacking as seriously as I did in those cities, and I made certain that I always had quick access to my pistol. The two boxes I carried were more valuable than gold.

The Speckin Forensic Laboratories in Okemos, Michigan, a retired Secret Service document examiner, and a current Secret Service analyst all took a crack at the ransom note. Their conclusions were of varying strengths, but they did agree on one thing—just like the people hired by Team Ramsey, they could not eliminate Patsy as the possible author.

That made five independent sources that would not rule her out, plus Chet Ubowski at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, who thought she wrote it but could not say so under oath in a courtroom. And the Speckin Lab was ready to testify that there was only an infinitesimal chance that some random intruder would have handwriting characteristics so remarkably similar to those of a parent sleeping upstairs.

Taken together, the six opinions formed a strong body of evidence, but I wanted more—I wanted someone willing to stand in a court of law and decisively declare who wrote the note.

I had no idea where to find such a person.

Two new encounters with the DA’s office finally led me to the personal decision that they wouldn’t lift a finger against the Ramseys, no matter who we interviewed or what we discovered. Short of a confession, they weren’t going to move.

Pete Hofstrom and I got into it in a parking lot one evening. Frustrated by the lack of cooperation we were getting from the DA’s office, I demanded to know exactly where he, the chief trial deputy, stood on the case.

“I’m middle-of-the-road on this,” Hofstrom barked, using his favorite line, which indicated that it did not matter to him whether the Ramseys were guilty or innocent. He rationalized that there was nothing to indicate they were involved, which I challenged, and nothing to indicate they were not.

“You’re not in a vacuum,” I replied, wondering why he thought his job was to sit on the sidelines as the investigation foundered around him. “You’re the prosecutor. You have to have some sort of opinion by now, or we’re in worse shape than I thought.”

“Thomas, I’m right down the fucking middle!” he shouted, waving his arms. The bantam prison guard was mad.

“That’s nothing but a cop-out,” I said. Hofstrom shot back, “If you’re so mistaken about me and my motivations, the same could be true in you being mistaken about the Ramseys.”

“No.” I shook my head. “Look at the case.”

“So what good is an arrest if we won’t prosecute the case? It will just ruin their lives,” Hofstrom bellowed. “Just because she wrote the note doesn’t mean we can prove a murder.”

“It’s not much of a stretch,” I replied.

As we parted, he got in the last shot, telling me that he would “continue to have breakfast with Bryan Morgan.”

I was left standing there, wondering why a chief prosecutor had already declared, “This is not a prosecutable case.”

Only a few days later, I discovered that the DA’s office had sat on potentially incriminating evidence.

Frank Coffman, a local writer, had told me that Pam Griffin, a friend of Patsy Ramsey’s from kiddie pageant circles, claimed Patsy had told her about writing the so-called practice note for some innocent reason. I jumped at the possibility that a suspect had admitted to a third party that she had written it. It was a huge development, and I brought it up promptly.

DA investigator Lou Smit coughed, then acknowledged that he had received the same information some time earlier. “I was going to write a report on that,” he said. I was appalled that he had not placed it before us immediately. It seemed to me that if something pointed against the Ramseys, it might never reach the detectives. If that had surfaced, what else could there be? Why were they putting material that might help the Ramsey cause into the case file when legitimate leads such as this were stashed in a desk drawer somewhere? Burying leads from fellow investigators is one of the worst things a detective can do because it destroys trust.

Nothing came from several attempts to get Pam Griffin to repeat her statement to police, and the DA’s office wasn’t impressed enough to force her immediate testimony.

With the latest incidents involving Hofstrom and Smit fresh in my mind, I felt that we desperately needed some outside help. To get it I took a gamble that could have cost me my badge, although that no longer seemed like such a terrible price to pay if it would move this impossible case forward. The result was better than I had dared imagine.

Dan Caplis, a well-respected Denver lawyer whose father was a cop in Chicago, was also a talk-show host to whom I often listened, and I set up a meeting to ask—beg—for his help. Caplis revealed his longtime relationships with some of the prosecutors in Alex Hunter’s office but offered his assistance. “I’ve got some ideas,” he said. “Let’s stay in touch.”

Within a few weeks Caplis had recruited Rich Baer, a powerful Denver attorney who happened to have been a take-no-shit homicide prosecutor in New York. That alone was a coup, but he also lined up Dan Hoffman, a former dean of the Denver University Law School and a former state public safety commissioner, and Bob Miller, who once served as a Reagan-appointed U.S. Attorney.

I was way out of bounds by scheming to bring in outsiders while Alex Hunter was officially the lead prosecutor, but now that these top private attorneys were willing to help, I wasn’t about to let them go. With them aboard, I felt the DA’s office would no longer be able to push us around.

When I met Rich Baer, a partner in one of the best law firms in Colorado, he confirmed that other colleagues, including former judges and federal prosecutors, also wanted to help. “We will have only one shot to make this case successful in prosecution,” Baer said. “If it takes thirty days or three hundred, we are willing to commit our time and resources.” The price tag: nothing. All I had to do now was get them in the game. I felt like a high school football coach bringing out the Dallas Cowboys to face a rival. We called them our “Dream Team.”

A week later Rich Baer, Dan Hoffman, and Bob Miller walked into Chief Koby’s conference room, the dollar value of their Rolex watches alone probably more than a cop’s salary. Awaiting them around the cherry-wood conference table were Chief Koby, Commander Eller, Sergeant Wickman, and the four detectives.

Disclosing their links to the other side, they admitted knowing and working with some of the Ramsey lawyers and officials in the district attorney’s office, dating all the way back to law school. But they pledged to represent only the Boulder Police Department and our interests. Commander Eller noted that two of them had done work for Lockheed, which owned Access Graphics, and asked, “What if Lockheed doesn’t let you do this?” Hoffman replied, “Lockheed doesn’t tell me what to do.”

Hoffman said all three wanted to work for something truly worthwhile, such as finding the killer of a child. “I’m in it through thick or thin, limited only by my life’s duration,” he promised.

Baer said they could review the case, pare it down to its essence, and help plug any loopholes. I edged the discussion into how the district attorney’s office seemed reluctant to prosecute this case and revealed some of the problems we were having because they seemed afraid to tangle with Team Ramsey in a courtroom.

And I listened with growing confidence as our new Dream Team, veteran trial lawyers all, said that many of the issues the DA’s office viewed as insurmountable weren’t so tough after all. Bob Miller commented, “Sometimes you gotta pull the trigger and go for it, even if you lose.”

Chief Koby cordially escorted our new attorneys out while the rest of us remained in his office, trying to imagine the thunderclap when the news reached Team Ramsey and DA Alex Hunter. Our euphoria vanished when Koby returned, his face clouded with anger, and jumped me for suggesting “to outsiders” that the DA’s office wasn’t 100 percent supportive of our investigation.