JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (37 page)

A middle-aged couple and their son stopped by, and the boy wandered away to look at our John Thomas headstone. Our hearts almost stopped when he rocked it back and forth and loudly called, “This is made of wood!” After a few minutes of tut-tutting about how anyone could possibly buy such a cheap marker for the dearly departed, the family moved away.

The reporters and photographers kept a discreet distance at first but soon abandoned any restraint and became jackals. One photographer set her camera tripod right on the grave and rearranged the items at the headstone to suit her picture. Anything she didn’t want was callously tossed. A poem in a glass frame shattered. For an hour she refused to relinquish the site. We cursed everything about her.

She wasn’t much worse than the rest, however. The women reporters stayed in their vehicles preening in the mirrors until some unsuspecting visitor came to the grave. Then they rushed up in tight skirts, microphones extended like elephant snouts, shouting, “Do you know the family? Why are you here?”

The swarm eventually camped out at the grave itself, smoking cigarettes and flipping the butts on the grass, standing around telling dirty jokes, setting up camera tripods on other graves, and pissing in the bushes. They were disgusting and had no respect whatsoever for the little girl in a coffin six feet below them.

With the press sprawled all over the place, there was no hope of anybody saying anything worthwhile.

After midnight on Christmas—the first anniversary of JonBenét’s murder—I drove to the nearby suburb of Vinings and parked across the street from the Ramsey house. Security lights flooded the grounds, a single white rose was in the mailbox, and two great Christmas wreaths hung on the doors. I wanted to go ring the bell and say, “Let’s talk.” But I had been forbidden from doing so.

Instead I went back to my hotel room and called home. My wife was crying. She had been with me through thick and thin, but our arguments had become fierce over the past few months. I would spend all day at work and nights on the telephone with witnesses or writing reports, working through the weekends. The Ramseys had become part of our marriage, and she had cursed both them and me when I told her that I would be away over Christmas.

She was lonely and depressed and had every right to be. After hanging up, I took a couple of aspirin for the headache that never left me and lay back on the hotel pillow. Christmas dinner was room service, and I watched a movie. Soon, I promised myself, it would get better. But deep down I was coming to realize that there might never be a resolution to this case that dominated my existence.

Back at the grave site, our only real opportunity came on the day after Christmas, when a clean-cut white male about forty years old, wearing dark glasses and looking nervous, sidled into the cemetery, careful to keep his back to the press. He pulled out a little camera, snapped a few shots, and put it away as the press started to film him. Lang and I dashed for our car as he got into a truck and headed east on Polk Street, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. “That’s a Colorado plate,” I said, pulling close behind him. Lang replied, “We gotta take this guy down and ID him.”

We followed him for miles until he pulled into the parking lot of the Atlanta Historical Society. As soon as he got out of the truck, we flashed our badges and handed him a bullshit line about him driving through a drug surveillance area. He bought it and showed a military ID. He was a navy corpsman based at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and said he was just sightseeing in Atlanta and was from Colorado, where his mother lived.

I needed to get inside his vehicle and used an old narc trick to obtain permission. “You have any weapons, narcotics, contraband, bazookas, or machine guns in your truck?”

“No.” He laughed. So did Lang and I.

“Then you wouldn’t mind if I look in it, would you?”

“Sure, go ahead. You guys really looking for a bazooka?”

While Lang kept him talking, I tore into the truck, searching for anything that might tie him to our homicide. The cab was full of fast food wrappers, unused 35-mm film, and blank videotapes. I looked through some notebooks in which he had written. Nothing. Although he had neglected to say anything about visiting the cemetery, we couldn’t do much more at this point. We had a solid ID on him and knew where he was based. We let him go. The guy was just another wingnut that Lang would later thoroughly investigate and clear.

The only other remarkable visitor was John Andrew Ramsey, who got into an altercation with a photographer.

At ten o’clock the warrant ended, and we shut down the surveillance. We retrieved the John Thomas marker and moved the wreath we had left there to the grave of JonBenét. Then a dozen GBI agents and a couple of Boulder detectives sped down Highway 41 to the Buckboard cowboy bar for some shots and beer, respectfully toasting the little girl. I also toasted the GBI agents who had forfeited their Christmas to help us with the attitude “Whatever it takes.” I had wanted to give each of them something special, perhaps personalized golf shirts or some other suitable gift that could say “Thanks,” but Beckner had only authorized handing out cheap Boulder Police Department uniform patches.

I ended the night by myself at the Waffle House, feeling very, very alone and knowing the end was near.

While I was in Atlanta, another Christmas in Boulder was despoiled by murder. University of Colorado student Susannah Chase was beaten to death near the downtown area, in what appeared to be a random assault, someone striking out of the darkness. Chief Tom Koby put Commander John Eller, whom he had just ruined, in charge of the investigation. If another scapegoat was needed on another unsolved murder, well, Eller had already been sacrificed once and was already leaving the department. Eller did as good a job as possible on his final case in Boulder, but the Chase murder remains unsolved.

I got back to Boulder on December 29 and found a stack of accumulated Christmas cards on my desk. From Chief Koby came a department-wide e-mail that urged us to have “frequent attacks of smiling.” Noting that “we have no control over what is ahead of us,” he suggested that we “let things happen rather than make them happen.” That lazy attitude, I thought, was what was wrong with this murder investigation.

A card from Commander Beckner stated that success in the Ramsey matter “will not depend on whether there is a prosecution.” I was disgusted at the suggestion that we should be satisfied with the old college try. I wanted more than that. I wanted a killer arrested.

Hell of a way to close a hell of a year.

I thought a column written by Chuck Green of the
Denver Post
summed things up well for 1997.

For millions of Americans, the Ramseys’ failure to cooperate with the police has been an obscene gesture. They simply cannot understand, despite Fifth Amendment explanations by crews of defense attorneys, why the Ramseys won’t talk. Yes, they have the legal right to remain silent. But they also have a moral obligation to do all they can to help find the monster who killed their daughter. They have chosen to place legality above morality, while complaining that the public just doesn’t understand. Yet all the lawyers in the world, and all the public relations experts on the planet, cannot change the perception that the Ramseys are hiding something. Only the Ramseys can change that, and they need to do only one thing—something their money can’t buy. They must come completely clean with the police. No conditions. No negotiations. No evasions. No lawyers’ games. Only answers.

26

I was still hopeful of solving this murder as 1998 began. We had established probable cause, and in perhaps the biggest step of the past year, we were getting ready to bug the Ramsey home in Atlanta in hopes of possibly overhearing incriminating statements.

But the daring Title-3 electronic eavesdropping plan was scrubbed because, Commander Beckner told me, it had “too much of a political downside.” I considered this a huge setback. The dread of scandal was driving policy in the Boulder Police Department, and once again an opportunity to gather evidence blew up in our faces.

“In a command decision such as this, one has to weigh the worst case scenario,” Beckner said. “What would happen with you and Gosage inside that house if something went wrong and someone got killed? What if an armed guard was overlooked or one of the Ramseys was home and someone got shot?”

I pointed out that police agencies carry out such proactive investigative measures all the time, and it would be a perfectly legal operation with all the paperwork in order before we moved. One cannot live in fear that the absolute worst may occur.

And even if we got caught inside the house, so what? The nation would probably applaud us for trying vigorously to pursue the case. Anyway, this was just a house in Atlanta, not the Russian Embassy. The minimal risks were far outweighed by the possibility of taping implicating disclosures.

During the Christmas trip to Atlanta, I had firmed up the T-3 operation with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and advised them that Beckner wanted a “risk assessment.” In fact, the GBI already had the home at 4070 Paces Ferry Road under observation, and the warrants, manpower, and equipment would not be a problem. “Not only is this operation doable but it’s necessary,” said Ralph Stone, the agent in charge. “We need to be in that house.”

The tentative plan was for a GBI technical specialist to enter the house while the Ramseys were in Boulder for interviews. If confronted, he was to grab something valuable, take off to make it look like an interrupted burglary, and drop the loot on the way. Any subsequent police investigation would be dealt with quietly. With the bugs in place, we would start listening when John and Patsy returned home after being grilled about the vaginal trauma of their daughter and a few other surprises. Words were sure to be said in private.

All that was needed to launch the T-3 was a sign-off by the Boulder police, but our fearful leaders chickened out.

District Attorney Alex Hunter used the media again to attack us, this time in the respected
New Yorker
magazine, saying that the case was “unfileable.”

“The cops became so convinced the Ramseys did it that they’ve never been able to look at the evidence objectively,” he told the author, Lawrence Schiller. Hunter was sabotaging the case before we had even given it to him.

“Every rock must be turned over, and if that means swabbing everyone’s mouth or exhuming JonBenét’s body, that’s what the police will have to do,” he said. Hunter hinted that the DNA of a second person was found on the child’s body, and he gave credibility to the nonexistent stun gun by saying that an exhumation might be needed for tissue analysis. “It wasn’t a fucking stun gun!” I shouted when I read the piece.

Upon publication, the district attorney backpedaled, smoothly claiming that he was quoted out of context, but none of us believed him, and Schiller insisted his report was accurate.

The clothes that might have been worn by the Ramseys at the Whites’ Christmas party finally trickled in for testing a year after the murder, a time delay that seriously damaged the investigation. The polite “ask the Ramseys” approach was deadly slow in getting results.

Had the original investigators bagged the clothing on the morning of December 26, we would have had instant possession of what John and Patsy Ramsey had worn the night before. Beyond that, we could have taken the clothing with a search warrant. Instead we waited more than a year.

Beginning in January 1998, packages of clothing arrived, most of it of questionable value. For instance, we received two grocery sacks containing Patsy’s clothing. The first contained a High Sierra red turtleneck. It smelled brand-new, straight off the rack. The other was a short-sleeved sweater top that was much too small for her, unless she was going for a really tight fit. She had worn neither on Christmas Day. “Gimme a break,” a detective snorted.

The packages came covered with excuses. Team Ramsey said they could not be certain that any of these were the right clothes, it was impossible to determine if the garments had been worn since the date in question, and the clothing had been handled by movers and their private investigator and might have been laundered. In other words, anything that might turn up couldn’t be traced back to the Ramseys.

In that they were wrong, for the labs pulled one of their biggest surprise findings of the case out of those bags.

The investigation of the black duct tape that covered the mouth of JonBenét gave every indication of being just another lost lead when it began shortly after the murder.

Originally we hoped to prove the tape was from the same roll as the pieces found on the back of several portraits in the house. By determining its manufacturer, we might be able to find where it was sold and then track it to the Ramsey house. We already thought that Patsy might have purchased a roll of such tape from McGuckin’s.

The FBI lab said that both tape samples, from the mouth and the pictures, were a low grade and of low quality, possibly the Shufford Mills model PC-600, but they wouldn’t call it a match.

In September 1997 Detective Gosage and I visited the Shufford Mills factory in Hickory, North Carolina, and learned that the tape was made in small quantities. In fact, it comprised only 0.4 percent of the company’s product. We determined that it was sold at McGuckin’s Hardware.

Shufford Mills gave us various tapes for testing, the dates when changes were made in yarn and scrim counts, recipes for various adhesives, and the different production periods, all of which we sent back to the FBI. In November 1997 the lab said the pieces of tape came from different production runs and had different yarn counts. Same brand, same type, different production run, therefore different tape. Apparently the end of the road.

A detective also found the Boulder portrait framer, who confirmed that the duct tape on the picture was his and that he bought his tape at McGuckin’s. Once again we had spent a year chasing something that led to a dead end. The tape on the picture and the tape on the victim came from two different rolls.