JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (41 page)

Legal and strategic details were worked out simultaneously. A tent would shield the site from any media or helicopters. A coroner and our forensic and medical experts would be standing by to work in a private GBI facility. Remove the body around 3 A.M., take her away in a secure convoy for the tests, return and rebury her the same day.

Lang said that Georgia law would be researched to determine if advance parental notification was needed, because the GBI would do it strictly by the book. But they would not allow it to become entangled in back-and-forth negotiations with Team Ramsey lawyers. Notification, if required, would be given by a brief call from a cell phone at the grave site, with a backhoe already in place. When the call ended, they would dig.

In a matter of days, the GBI said Atlanta was ready to go.

But the operation was then canceled because the negatives were greater than the possibility of finding conclusive evidence.

Once again, Lang was astonished at Boulder-style justice. “I may not be the most educated guy around, but hey, Mister Prosecutor, let the chips fall where they may. Either place your bet or fold, because this case ain’t going to get any better.”

No matter what plans fell through in Atlanta, Lang continued to help. He was now starting each day at the Moonbean coffee shop near the Ramsey home. Patsy was in there almost every morning, sometimes with a girlfriend, and had been mentioning JonBenét. Lang told me he hoped that by becoming a familiar face, he might get close enough to overhear something worthwhile. He never gave up.

29

The DA’s office called John and Patsy Ramsey “prime suspects” for the first time in March 1998 and said there was sufficient probable cause for a grand jury indictment.

I had dreamed for months of having a grand jury support the detectives with subpoena powers that would break through the wall of silence, because our hunt for the killer had stalled. Elsewhere I had worked with grand juries that were powerful bodies, headed by aggressive prosecutors who used their awesome legal powers to get major indictments.

So when I learned of the DA’s change of position, I wanted to be optimistic that they might finally start acting like prosecutors. I should have known better.

First District Attorney Bill Wise had noted that a good prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich. After seeing the DA’s plan, I knew the sandwich was in no danger.

I wasn’t at all surprised in the fall of 1999 when the Ramsey grand jury came back empty-handed after more than a year of on-again, off-again investigation. From the very start, the whole thing troubled me and was destined to fail.

Our Dream Team had been on the sidelines but came through for us at a critical moment. When Deputy DA Pete Hofstrom proclaimed that a grand jury could not be used as an investigative body, our guys responded, “Wrong.”

Bob Miller, the former U.S. Attorney, personally explained the law to Alex Hunter and his lieutenants and pointed out that grand juries were used all the time to conduct investigations. The process was used so seldom by Alex Hunter’s office that the Boulder prosecutors didn’t understand it. Still, Hunter was uneasy and asked, “We need to do this, huh?”

When Miller confirmed that it was indeed a necessity, he also suggested that the district attorney hire outside help to run the grand jury. Hunter agreed, tacitly acknowledging that not a single prosecutor on his staff of twenty-five attorneys was capable of doing the job. For now, however, Pete Hofstrom remained in charge, and Hofstrom had just been embarrassed. He wasn’t going to make it easy.

A few days later in the SitRoom, I sat through one of the most unbelievable briefings of the case as Commander Beckner explained Hofstrom’s grand jury parameters.

The commander began with the extraordinary revelation that “people in the DA’s office” were now saying that John and Patsy Ramsey were the “prime suspects,” although he did not mention why they had come to that realization. Then he added that the DA’s people also agreed that enough probable cause existed to obtain a grand jury indictment.

After a brief burst of hope, my heart sank as Beckner outlined their game plan.

• The grand jury might have the sole mission of helping us secure records, testimony, and evidence.

• It might not hear the entire case at all.

• It would not be used to obtain an indictment.

• And if a “runaway” grand jury somehow returned an indictment on its own, the DA would not be obligated to prosecute.

“It would be a travesty to [indict and] lose a weak case at trial,” said Beckner, echoing the odious no-win outlook.

I was totally bewildered. They believed they could get an indictment against the prime suspect in a murder that had captivated the interest of the world, and were not going to do so.

In my opinion, this was just another deception to buy more time to pray for a miracle confession. They seemed willing to go to extraordinary lengths, even to distort the grand jury process, to avoid a courtroom fight with Team Ramsey.

Our next order of business, said Beckner, would be a “formal presentation” of our case to
convince
Pete Hofstrom why we needed a grand jury at all. I believe we lost both ways on this one. If we did not convince the prison guard, we wouldn’t get the necessary grand jury subpoena power. If we did succeed, the police department would surrender control of the case, and the DA’s office would take up to six months after our presentation to decide whether to actually call a grand jury.

The conditions were galling. In my opinion it was time to step up and take a swing. This case was for a jury to decide, not some bureaucrat in the DA’s office. Who knows? You might just win! It was like watching a building burn down and being unable to do anything about it.

Hofstrom piled on stringent conditions. He wanted the specific particulars for a grand jury in writing, which our Dream Team cautioned against, because it would be “discoverable” by defense lawyers. It could be done verbally, they said, without risk.

Then he resurrected DeMuth’s Five-Year Plan of interviewing everyone in Boulder County plus everyone who had passed through in the last couple of years. Had every “reluctant” witness been interviewed by police, and “if not, why not?” “Have you attached a transcript of each interview, and a copy of each report, or witness information sheet or relevant interview notes for that person to the list? If not, why not?” On and on it went. “If not, why not?” became a familiar refrain.

He wanted us to detail what each person would testify to, why we thought so, and the reason why they should appear before a grand jury. At times we had a hard time figuring out what the hell he was even talking about, such as when he wrote, “What is the relevance and materiality of that testimony to the issue of whether or not there is sufficient admissible evidence to file a charge against an identifiable person in this case?”

To get things under way, Beckner wanted each uncooperative witness “rated.” I could imagine asking the Lunch Bunch in Atlanta, “Hey, just wondering, are you cooperative, semi-cooperative, reluctant, hostile, and if none or all of the above, how would you rate yourself on a one-to-ten scale?”

And the formal presentation idea was highly unusual and unprecedented in Boulder. A disgusted Detective Gosage stormed in with perhaps the longest speech I ever heard him make: “We’ve given them half a dozen presentations over the past months! Nothing has changed! We sat around and showed them how the evidence pointed at the Ramseys, and they argued that it was an intruder. I won’t sit through another bullshit dog and pony show. Let’s drop it in their laps and walk away. They can do with it what they want.”

As a final insult, Hofstrom decreed that the law allowed only a couple of investigators to serve any grand jury. Wrong again, according to our advisers. In any case, none of the line detectives who had worked the case for the past fourteen months and knew it down to the last detail would be chosen.

The four being considered were DA investigator Lou Smit and Deputy DA Trip DeMuth, with the police “possibly” represented by Commander Mark Beckner or Sergeant Wickman.

I could not see Pete Hofstrom, after a career of plea bargains, pushing to get this case to trial. Now he would lead a team that included Smit, who thought the Ramseys were innocent; DeMuth, whom I thought had bent over backward to accommodate Team Ramsey; Beckner, an administrator who was trying hard to become chief of police; and Wickman, a demoralized police sergeant who hadn’t even been told a grand jury was going to be called.

Eventually, at the end of April, twelve jurors and five alternates were chosen to serve on the grand jury. Among those helping to pick the panel were Lou Smit and Trip DeMuth.

The DA’s office wanted us to admit openly that the police had “no prosecutable case” before a grand jury was summoned. That would be their life raft, for if things didn’t work out, they could point to those words and say, “See, even the cops said they didn’t have it.”

“Depends on what you mean by
prosecutable,”
Detective Gosage observed.

Commander Beckner instead offered a cautious compromise: “We agree that at this particular point in time, sufficient admissible evidence does not currently exist to reasonably expect a
conviction.”

Beckner also issued a press release stating, “We have worked well with the DA’s office in the last five months, and I expect to work closer with them in the months that follow.” That left the detectives shaking their heads. It was a publicity spin that all was well in Camelot.

On unlucky Friday the 13 in March:

• One of the first officers to arrive at one of the most colossally bungled crime scenes of all time was assigned to teach “crime scene response” to a training class of new Boulder cops.

• Sergeant Tom Wickman was by now so far out of the leadership loop that he learned of the grand jury request from reading a newspaper in the distant town of Ouray.

• And Commander Beckner told me to discontinue the thick Master Affidavit, saying it would never be used for an arrest.

A few days later we were ordered to hand over to Deputy DA Trip DeMuth all personal journals, notes, diaries, and anything else in which we may have written any observations about the Ramsey case, whether or not the documents were part of the official case file. We weren’t even allowed to have personal thoughts? The police department attorney, Bob Keatley, told Beckner that Constitutional issues were involved and that there would be no such seizure, particularly in a case in which no one had been charged.

We had become the most dysfunctional law enforcement organization in America.

I could relate to the comment of the out-of-body narrator in Haruki Murakami’s book
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
: “My reality seemed to have left me and now was wandering around nearby.”

Sergeant Wickman finally gave the DA’s office our long-held secrets about the enhanced 911 telephone call that recorded young Burke’s voice although his parents insisted he had been asleep and about the grave-surveillance operations in Atlanta. Pete Hofstrom rested his chin on his chest, staring, while Trip DeMuth sat silently, “stunned” that we had done this without their knowledge, Wickman said.

During their discussion, Wickman used a term from my warrant for the covert surveillance in Atlanta, which had been to look for any “suspicious grave-site visitor.” Within a week we got a call from Patsy Ramsey’s sister Pam, who wanted to report a “suspicious grave-site visitor.” The exact term from my sealed warrant had found its way into Pam Paugh’s lexicon. We simply could not trust the DA’s office to keep anything a secret.

Detective Jane Harmer called the number of Patsy’s parents in Atlanta to discuss the “grave-site visitor,” and Patsy answered. It was only the third time that a Boulder detective had spoken to her since the murder.

Speaking in a flat monotone, Patsy said that the suspicious man in the cemetery had carried pictures of JonBenét cut from magazines, was in his fifties, from Hagerstown, Pennsylvania, and had a stuttering problem. They did not get a license plate number, and although her sister Polly rushed to tell nearby firefighters about the man, she did not call the police. Informing firefighters instead of the Marietta cops made no sense at all to me.

Patsy paused, then asked, “Are the detectives close?”

“We’re very close,” Harmer responded, hastily scribbling notes.

They exchanged a few pleasantries, then Patsy said, “You know I want to be out there every day” and related a dream in which she was “sitting down with the police … to work together.”

I mouthed silently, “Ask if she will talk to us,” and Harmer said, “The detectives want to talk with you, too, Patsy, and with John.” The feeling was mutual, Patsy said, but the attorneys claimed the police were only trying to frame her and her husband. The lawyers, she said, would not be happy if they found out she was speaking to the police at all.

It’s your decision, not theirs, Harmer parried, and Patsy replied that the lawyers were being paid to give advice, so she had to heed it. She was playing her usual coy game of offering to cooperate, then pulling away before anything could happen.

Then she ventured the suggestion that Mark Beckner could fly to Atlanta for a talk to “rebuild trust.”

“Believe me, no one wants this more than me,” Patsy told Harmer. “Whoever did this is sitting there laughing.”

“This is absolute bullshit,” I whispered to Wickman. They had avoided mentioning the mysterious grave visitor to the local cops, and she was tugging our chain with the possibility of a private meeting, the same ploy she had used with Father Rol. I knew it wasn’t going to happen.

When the call ended, we told Beckner to accept the invitation immediately. Let’s get on a plane, go down there, and knock on her door, we urged him. Wear a wire, ask questions. Seize the day! He declined.