JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (44 page)

Lawrence Schiller, who was writing a book about the case, had been reading my official police reports, and I was furious. Several witnesses called me to ask how their names and telephone numbers, which had been given to me in confidence, had ended up in the hands of an author.

I went to see Commander Beckner and protested the latest round of leaks from the district attorney’s office, which was the only other place those reports were available. He later told me that Alex Hunter denied the accusation.

“That’s it?” I asked. “We’re just going to sit by and let confidential material go out like that?”

“I can’t compete with Hunter. He’s too entrenched and too politically powerful. We have to live with it,” Beckner replied. “Don’t you understand how many hundreds of other cases we have to file with that office? Steve, this is but one case! Look at the big picture. Do you want to see the entire system burned down?” Beckner would often remind me of his “big picture.”

Schiller later told me that his source in the district attorney’s office had supplied him with fifteen hundred pages of police reports, memos, and other confidential information from the case file.

Winter. Spring. Summer. Fall. Winter. Spring. Now we were almost back to summer again, and we knew we were about to be thrown overboard. Detective Gosage spoke for us all one morning. “We’re nothing but piss-ants,” he stormed. “Let’s just get this fucking thing done. They took some energetic and aggressive detectives a year and a half ago and gave us this fucked-up case, and now they’ve broken all of us. We have been so fucked over in this, I just want it done.”

Any dreams we had of a successful prosecution had long since vanished.

In my opinion, my friends were even more trapped in this morass than I. Gosage was a family man with a wife and baby and could not afford to walk away from this screwed-up department. Harmer had other obligations and could not risk being blackballed, and we had learned from the example of former commander John Eller that finding another police job was almost impossible if you were tarred by the JonBenét case. Sergeant Wickman wasn’t going to walk away from a long career and the potential of promotion to higher rank, although he was counting off the days he had left to retirement. Even the indefatigable Bob Keatley was thinking about resigning as our in-house attorney, which would be devastating to the entire department.

Things were different for me. My wife barely recognized in me the man she had married only two years before and had already told me that if need be, she would support us while I turned my hobby of remodeling old houses into a full-time carpentry business.

I had three choices. Did I want to resign and disappear into anonymity? Did I want to continue with this case, although I felt it had become an insult to any honor and integrity? Or did I want to leave and make a statement? The third option was the most intriguing, but if I left, I couldn’t help the case … or could I?

The DA’s office was about to make the choice easy.

PART FIVE

LAYING DOWN THE BADGE

31

We had interviewed 590 people, consulted 64 outside experts, investigated and cleared more than 100 possible suspects, collected 1,058 pieces of evidence, tested over 500 items at federal, state, and private laboratories, gathered handwriting and nontestimonial evidence from 215 people, built a case file that now bulged to 30,000 pages, reviewed more than 3,400 letters and 700 telephone tips, and contacted seventeen states and two foreign countries. And it all kept leading us in one direction. The detective team believed that John and Patsy Ramsey had knowledge of, and were involved in, the death of their daughter, JonBenét.

We endured the “Intruder Presentation” of Deputy DA Trip DeMuth in the middle of May. His justification was that he had been “asked to defense the case” and anticipate the thoughts and actions of defense lawyers and a jury. “The best way to know your strengths is to first understand your weaknesses,” he said.

His tone was arrogant during the two hours he tried to weigh our case down with excruciating minutiae, couching his criticism behind phrases such as “This is what the defense will do … .”

What we had hoped to hear was a competent prosecutor telling us what a defense attorney would say about a critical piece of evidence or situation and then giving us advice on how a combined team of the police and the DA’s office, working together, could counter their argument. This analysis by someone who, in my opinion, had hindered our investigation was the worst sort of Monday-morning quarterbacking.

The man who wouldn’t sign search warrants, opposed polygraphs of the Ramseys, and had come up with the incredible Five-Year Plan seemed to think he had a crystal ball on what a jury would believe.

How do you prove the marks on her skin were not caused by a stun gun? How do you prove she did not scratch her killer? Did the work hours spent developing other suspects rival the work hours spent on the Ramseys? Did you fingerprint the Doctor Seuss book that was found in the suitcase, and if not, why not? He attacked the FBI and CBI labs. On and on and on. Before our eyes, his Five-Year Plan grew into a Ten-Year Plan. “This is the most watched case in American jurisprudence. There will be no excuse for not doing all these things I’m suggesting,” he said.

Then DeMuth criticized us for “shopping experts” until we got an answer we liked. This was ironic, since his boss Pete Hofstrom would later take the 911 tape enhanced by the Aerospace Corporation down to New Mexico to let his brother-in-law, who worked in the Los Alamos scientific complex, have a crack at analyzing it. The brother-in-law apparently declared that he heard a voice say, “I scream at you.” That meaningless comment managed to cast doubt on the Aerospace conclusion that Burke said, “What did you find?” and was another gift to the defense lawyers. They would now be able to point out to a jury that even the prosecutor’s office and the police did not agree about what was on the tape.

DeMuth even cast doubt on Officer Rick French’s version of what happened in the Ramsey home that first morning, saying that the officer could be mistaken and that John Ramsey might simply have “misspoken” about his description of events.

DeMuth maintained that we had full access to the FBI, yet at the same time he was barring the further testing of the mysterious alleged pubic hair.

When he completed his presentation, one detective noted wryly that DeMuth “forgot to tell us to compare a fiber in the Ramsey attic to a hair in the beard of General Ulysses S. Grant.”

We noted that DeMuth did not prove an intruder committed the murder. He never mentioned that we had identified Patsy as the writer of the ransom note, nor did he address the confirmation of prior vaginal trauma, and some of his evidentiary points were in error. DeMuth threw a mass of little things at us, but I believed they were pebbles bouncing against a steel wall, for our macro-perspective overwhelmed his nitpicking. The main thing missing in the case was a team of aggressive and determined prosecutors.

What really irritated us was when his pettiness surfaced and he said that our fairness was skewed. About the same time, we received word from Mark Beckner that the DA’s office was echoing Team Ramsey’s claim that we had manipulated the evidence. What they were saying was tantamount to claiming we had committed a crime, an unforgivable piece of unfounded gossip for which none of them took responsibility.

Even after DeMuth’s recital of our shortcomings, I felt we held a decent hand. Commander Beckner told me later that he felt we had gone far beyond showing probable cause. “I think she [Patsy Ramsey] did it,” he said. “We should just charge them both with felony murder and aiding and abetting.”

And Sergeant Tom Wickman, going behind Beckner’s back in what I considered to be an attempt to reinsert himself in the leadership of the case, visited District Attorney Alex Hunter at his home. He told me that Hunter believed the intruder idea was bullshit.

But Wickman was cautious about putting much stock in the DA’s comment. “I never fucking know whether to believe anything that comes out of the guy’s mouth,” Wickman said. The district attorney tended to tell people what they wanted to hear.

As if to underline that point, we learned that one of the prime suspects had begun direct communication with the district attorney.

John Ramsey wrote Hunter a personal letter and followed up with a telephone call. The DA would claim that he spoke briefly with Ramsey on the telephone but would not discuss the case.

The letter, however, got a warm reception and remained in the DA’s office for three weeks before the police were told about it. Ramsey wrote that he resorted to the personal touch because it was difficult to communicate through attorneys who were trying to protect his rights.

Ramsey accused the Boulder Police of trying to convince others that a family member had killed JonBenét from the moment we walked into his house on December 26. We would not accept help from outsiders, he claimed, and the Ramsey family had no confidence or trust in us.

That was a rehash of lies, since those first police on the scene were investigating the alleged kidnapping of his daughter. And had they immediately focused on the family as murder suspects as soon as the body was discovered, this case might have been on an entirely different track a year and a half later.

Ramsey said in his private letter that he and his family members would meet anytime, anywhere, and for as long as needed with investigators from the DA’s office. They were willing to speak before a grand jury. He referred to the murderer of his daughter as “It,” wanted “maximum justice,” and pledged a million-dollar reward.

The Ramseys had a track record of offering to talk openly but then retreating behind their lawyers when the time came to speak. I knew there was no way the DA’s investigators would be given a meeting without involving Team Ramsey.

Hunter and Pete Hofstrom started laying plans for an interview immediately after the police presentation, saying that it would be “unethical” to refuse to talk with the Ramseys, even though the DA’s office had called them “prime suspects.” Lou Smit, a Ramsey sympathizer, was appointed to do the interview. The detectives would not be part of the interviews “because it was not acceptable to the Ramseys,” Beckner explained.

There is nothing wrong with prosecutors talking with the attorneys of someone whom police wish to question and negotiating a deal for an interview. But for this one, I felt the timing was completely wrong.

The whole purpose of our upcoming presentation was to finally get the case to a grand jury, and from there to an indictment. Why, I wondered, should the Ramseys be allowed to waltz in at the eleventh hour and speak under conditions such as having an outspoken sympathizer like Lou Smit asking the questions?

At first glance, the mere fact that they were willing to answer questions would seem to be a break for the investigators, possibly even better than having them appear before a grand jury. A person cannot be compelled to testify before a grand jury unless they are given immunity in return for not invoking their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. In the interviews we might get something we could use. Or we might not. But John Ramsey had just written Alex Hunter a personal letter, pledging they would testify under oath in front of the grand jury. Take him up on it!

Then the Ramseys could be called to testify under oath, answer sharp questions without their lawyers’ advice, and with the possibility of perjury charges over any inconsistencies. The pressure would be significantly higher. They would maintain the right to exert their Fifth Amendment rights if they chose to do so.

At this point in the case, the grand jury was a better bet.

To me, it all added up to the biggest sellout of the investigation. I let Beckner have it, with a blistering response. On the one hand the district attorney was planning to convene a grand jury to hear evidence indicating that Patsy Ramsey had killed her daughter. On the other, they let John Ramsey, who was once again dangling that well-gnawed carrot of “cooperation,” set the rules for a new and important interview.

Furthermore, the police were to be cut out of the picture if a grand jury was to hear the JonBenét case. Pete Hofstrom now said that only Lou Smit from the DA’s office and at best one police representative would be sworn in as investigators. That critical decision reduced the rest of the detective team to a state of near uselessness.

Because of secrecy rules, the investigators who knew the case best would not be told what was happening in the grand jury room and would therefore be unable to offer guidance. Even if a cop were chosen as an investigator, he or she would not be allowed to discuss testimony with the rest of us.

This was a strategic error of some magnitude, for legally there is nothing to limit the number of detectives who can be sworn in to assist a grand jury. All of us should have been made eligible to sit in. Who better to recognize the truth and error, strong and weak points of a witness’s testimony? In other jurisdictions that would have been done almost automatically. Not in Boulder, where the DA’s office was cloaking its opinion as law.

We didn’t yet know who the police representative would be. It might be Beckner. It might be Wickman. It might be no one. But I was told that it would not be me.

With that brewing in the background, the time was fast approaching when the detectives would have to deliver their presentation of the case to the DA’s office. Hunter and Hofstrom said they wanted the entire case laid out, allegedly so that they could decide whether to call a grand jury.

It was an unreasonable demand and in my experience totally unprecedented. They had total access to our case file and claimed that Lou Smit knew it better than anyone, so why did we have to run it by them still again? What did they want this time? How many hoops must we jump through to get them to move?