JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (35 page)

Detective Tom Trujillo, who was steadily falling further behind in getting the evidence tested, fumbled a major opportunity concerning the cord used in the murder. He was adamant that the cord was polypropylene, citing the findings of a lab analyst. Another opportunity would soon be lost.

Following a tip six months earlier, I had found what seemed to be identical cord, packaged as “nylon,” in both the Boulder Army Store and McGuckin’s Hardware, and collected more than fifty samples. Everyone agreed that it seemed a visual match for the neck ligature, but Trujillo insisted that the ligatures in the Ramsey case were not nylon and that we needed to find a polypropylene rope. I told him to have it tested anyway.

In the middle of November, John Van Tassell of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, one of the world’s foremost experts on knots and cords, reviewed the neck ligature, the length of white cord that had been twisted around the broken paintbrush handle to create a terrible killing tool. Van Tassell commented that it was “a soft nylon cord.” Sergeant Wickman and I immediately caught the term.

We asked if he was certain, and the Mountie studied it some more. Sure looks like soft nylon, he said, as he examined what looked like a soft flat white shoelace. Not stiff and rigid like polypropylene.

I retrieved one sample package, a fifty-foot length of white Stansport 32-strand, 3/16-inch woven cord that I had bought. Van Tassell pulled the cord out, frayed an end, held it against the end of the neck ligature, and said, “Look.” The soft white braid and inner weave appeared identical. “I think this is the same cord,” he said.

If a hole had appeared in the earth, Trujillo would have let it swallow him. He had not submitted any of my evidence for comparison. Beckner ordered him to get it to the lab immediately.

My file for May 21, 1997, detailed my purchase of white nylon cord from the sporting goods section of McGuckin’s, some of which was identical in brand and model to the cord I bought at the army store. The price was $2.29. On December 2, 1996, Patsy Ramsey purchased an item from the McGuckin’s sporting goods section. The price was $2.29.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, it was so frustrating. Because Trujillo had not submitted the evidence for testing and remained firm that we had the wrong type of cord, I had held back from searching the army surplus store records. Now so much time had elapsed, the records were unavailable. I had seldom felt such a level of defeat since the investigation began.

Internal politics within the police department detonated in a staccato of actions that further sidetracked the Ramsey investigation. We couldn’t concentrate on catching a killer while all hell was breaking loose inside our own house.

Chief Koby forced Commander Eller out totally in November by giving him the choice of handing in his papers voluntarily or getting fired and losing all his benefits. I had always thought truth would prevail and that doing the right thing would pay off in the end, but the political lynching of John Eller proved that was not true in Boulder. He was allowed to stay around until the first of the year.

I felt sorry for my friend and boss. This case was gobbling up cops like candy.

The Internal Affairs Citizen Review Panel investigating the allegations against John Eller found that he was neither untruthful nor negligent in pursuing Sergeant Larry Mason and complimented him for following through on that action. They said he had been obligated to act. What they didn’t understand was why Chief Koby, who had known of the event from the start, first backed Eller and then reversed himself when things began to unravel and wrote Mason a $10,000 check to settle the matter. Not that it made any difference now, but the bottom line was that Commander Eller had done the right thing.

The timing of his firing was no accident, for Chief Koby was cleaning up loose ends. A few days after John Eller was axed, I was copying some papers when another detective came by wearing a huge grin. “Koby’s quitting,” he said. I looked up, and he repeated it: “Koby’s quitting.” Another cop arrived who had gotten a similar report from a sergeant who got it from a commander. Good news travels fast around a police department. Yes! I thought, wanting to shout in triumph.

But although Koby was resigning, he planned to stay on for another six months and proclaimed that he would be the one to decide the future of the Ramsey case. That Koby, who had never checked out a single file, held the future in his hands scared us. I doubted if he would ever send it over to the district attorney.

The final scene in this installment of the department’s soap opera occurred when the police union handed the chief still another vote of “no confidence.” Only his retirement announcement saved him from the disgrace of our demanding his immediate resignation.

Normally only a few officers attend police union meetings, but this was not a normal night. About seventy-five traffic, patrol, SWAT, narcotics, and special units officers and sergeants and detectives were packed together into a conference room at the Boulder Holiday Inn. Every chair was taken, and cops stood along the walls.

The chief faced an openly hostile audience, and as he started to speak in his low voice, many cops continued to eat chicken wings from plates in their laps and carried on whispered conversations. There was utter disrespect as Koby went through a political tap dance about how much had been accomplished on the issues raised in the last no-confidence vote after the May riots.

The chief said he was sorry that the department had divided into factions just because people disliked him personally. He promised to use a new tax increase to hire thirty-three more officers and went on about what he hoped to accomplish during his lame-duck tenure, as if he really thought he could survive without the support of his troops.

When he was done, an Internal Affairs sergeant read a prepared statement about how the chief was the victim of a few narrow-minded people in the department. There was open laughter. Koby’s only support had come from the despised IA.

A series of officers stood and took the chief to task, and if he tried to interrupt, they would say, “Sir, will you allow me to finish?” After being pummeled for a while, Koby finally left, taking the commanders along with him, and the open discussion began.

For twenty minutes, heated accusations flew like poison arrows. When the IA sergeant again tried to defend Koby, he was told to shut up. When a rookie spoke up for the chief, veteran cops yelled, “Fuck off!”

As tempers, voices, and rhetoric rose, I was shocked to see Commander Mark Beckner seated in the back of the room. It was improper and unwarranted for command staff to attend the meeting because rank-and-file union members needed to be free to speak without fear of future punishment. But Beckner had come in just after the chief and stayed behind, a mole in place. He scurried out as soon as the no confidence vote passed.

After the meeting, bets were placed about who would succeed Koby in the chief’s chair. Detective Gosage put his money on Commander Beckner because the odds against that happening were so huge.

With our Dream Team, we tallied the points supporting probable cause and found more than fifty items. Viewed in a macro-perspective, the case was compelling and imposing.

But our lawyers cautioned that the district attorney’s office held quite the opposite view. Deputy DA Pete Hofstrom had told them the police “had no case” at all.

We spent a long day going over every possible weak point. A HiTec boot print found on the wine cellar floor where the body was discovered had not been identified. Neither had one of the palm prints on the cellar door. The DA’s office still refused to allow testing of the confusing pubic hair found on the white blanket wrapped around JonBenét. The FBI had been asked to do those tests but would not allow Team Ramsey to watch. Therefore it remained in limbo. We felt the DNA could be argued either way, but without resolving other core problems, it was unlikely the case would ever see the inside of a courtroom.

Bob Miller of the Dream Team said the time had come to be more aggressive and launch the Title-3 eavesdropping of the Ramsey home. I agreed that was our best bet for hearing incriminating statements.

Commander Beckner, however, was pessimistic that Chief Koby would approve something as aggressive as a Title-3. Dan Hoffman of the Dream Team remarked, “Koby’s going to be gone soon.” Whoever was the next chief might do the right thing.

The unidentified palm print on the door was more of a riddle than a mystery. There were actually three palm prints on that door, which the killer had to close in order to lock. We had already determined that two of those prints belonged to Patsy Ramsey. Arguing that the third could only be that of an intruder was a stretch.

We needed to identify the print to eliminate it but discovered that even some law enforcement officers were reluctant to cooperate with us. Detective Jane Harmer was unable to get sheriff’s investigators who had been in the Ramsey house during the crime scene search to even return her calls when she sought their palm prints. Complicating matters was the problem of Detective Trujillo not having submitted numerous prints, including those of some police, for comparison.

Even if and when we got all the cops’ prints out of the way, we still had to deal with the other two or three thousand people who had passed through the house.

The Hi-Tec boot print became one of the biggest questions of the investigation. Since Hi-Tecs are popular among cops, a year after the murder I became convinced that a sight-seeing law enforcement officer stepped somewhere he or she shouldn’t have on December 26 and didn’t want to admit it.

Detective Ron Gosage had the impossible job of trying to identify the origin of the boot print, a nightmare assignment if there ever was one. He contacted more than four hundred people, even construction workers who had been in the house five years ago, but did not find the matching print.

I doubted that any member of the Ramsey family would admit to owning a pair of Hi-Tecs, whether they did or not, but Detective Gosage had to ask them. That alerted Team Ramsey, and the defense lawyers and our DA’s office soon began insisting that the unknown boot print was left behind by the intruder.

What they didn’t know was that lab technicians had found not just one but three different unidentified shoe prints in that little room—the main print and two less pronounced impressions that overlapped each other. We considered that a positive development, for how likely would it be that three intruders carried the body into the room? And the possibilities were great that the print was totally unrelated to the murder. Just because something is found at the site of a murder doesn’t mean it is part of the crime.

On a below-freezing winter day, I went with Gosage and another detective to Vail on a tip that a clerk recalled seeing Patsy and JonBenét try on hiking boots at Pepi Sports in that ski resort town. They might have been Hi-Tecs.

A bookkeeper carried in boxes crammed with thousands of receipts for everything from skis to bike rentals, and we hand-searched every one of them. It wasn’t the first or the last hand search we made of receipts. In a Home Depot outside of Atlanta, Gosage and I had to check some twenty-five thousand individual records and journal rolls in a vain search for the possible purchase of cord and duct tape. A clerk said she had waited on Patsy Ramsey during such a transaction. We found nothing, and now we were doing it again in Vail.

“Why don’t you just subpoena all the credit card records of the Ramseys?” asked the bookkeeper.

“Long story.” I was so tired of that question.

“Is the case as fucked up as it sounds? I mean, they’ve already finished TWA Flight 800, sentenced McVeigh to death for Oklahoma City, convicted Nichols, and are doing their thing with the Unabomber. Why are you guys taking so long?”

“Long story.”

We found no receipts for the Ramseys, but a cash or check transaction would not have listed a name, unlike a credit card sale.

As with the palm print, the most frustrating part of the Hi-Tec hunt was the inexplicable lack of cooperation from other cops.

Two pairs of boots that were among the most difficult to retrieve belonged to Detective Sergeant Larry Mason and Detective Linda Arndt, both of whom had been in the house during the first hours. Arndt’s clothing had been collected at the crime scene but not her footwear. It took a direct order from Commander Beckner before Arndt and Mason gave up their boots for testing, about a year after the murder, and it took still longer to get their fingerprints. Mason, the on-scene detective supervisor on December 26, had still not submitted a written report of his actions that day when I left after eighteen months.

A reserve sheriff’s deputy who wore Hi-Tecs at the crime scene retained a lawyer before talking to Detective Gosage. Then we got the name of another patrol sergeant who had been in the basement that day. That was also a year late. At fourteen months, Gosage found that an FBI agent from Denver had been in the basement and owned Hi-Tecs.

The final embarrassment in the Hi-Tec hunt came when Detective Gosage compared the radio log for December 26 with other reports and discovered that a number of bootwearing law enforcement types had also been at the house but had never “aired out,” or given their location, on the radio.

That meant we never really knew which cops, firefighters, paramedics, and sheriff’s deputies were there. It seemed that everybody and their damned brother went wandering through the crime scene that day, and running them down was a virtual impossibility.

What staggered me, however, was the realization that we could no longer count on cooperation from even our fellow Boulder police officers. If that was so, then it was probably time to fold our tents and go home.

Another strange part of the puzzle was the big black flashlight that had been found standing on its lens end on the kitchen counter. Some perceived it as a possible murder weapon, although that was never proved.