JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (6 page)

Both were cooperative and gave fingerprints, and unaware that she had been the first person named as a murder suspect, the housekeeper scratched out a compassionate note of condolence to Patsy. It was only a first interview. Police would be back.

The search warrant for the Ramsey residence was authorized at eight o’clock that night, and twenty-three minutes later, Dr. John Meyer, the coroner, put on protective booties and latex gloves and entered to perform the job of officially pronouncing the child dead.

The blanket was removed from the upper torso and the sweatshirt from the feet. The child wore a white long-sleeved shirt with a star of silver sequins on the chest, and long-john pants that appeared urine stained. When the body was turned over, police saw that a garrote was knotted tight around her neck. It had been fashioned from a thin cord tied to a narrow wooden stick about four inches long and splotched with colors, broken at one end, which had been used as a handle. A gold necklace and cross—a Christmas present—were entwined in the garrote. Abrasions were noted below the right earlobe and right jawline, and there was a small amount of blood around the nasal passages. White cord similar to the garrote was still tied around the right wrist. Small bits of lint and dust were on her bare feet, and her blond hair was done in two ponytails. The little body was zippered inside two plastic bags and taken away by the coroner’s wagon. Meyer stayed only seven minutes, not taking the time to perform two routine procedures that would have helped establish the time of death—taking vitreous fluid from the eye and obtaining the internal body temperature. Determining the time frame in which death occurred is extraordinarily important in a murder investigation and would present a problem for months to come.

The body was taken to the coroner’s facility in the basement of the Boulder Community Hospital and placed in a refrigerated drawer. The morgue log noted the arrival.

Technicians began a ten-day search of the rambling house, but the crime scene had been thoroughly polluted by having so many people go in and out during the kidnap phase. Evidence such as the ransom note, the body, the suitcase in the basement, and the tape that covered the victim’s mouth had all been moved. Who could tell what was real and what had been disturbed? The photographs that were taken were of a house, not a pristine crime scene.

Still, a technician went through the darkened house slowly with a video camera before the body was moved, producing a tape that was eerie in its juxtaposition of death amid the debris of what had been a happy Christmas.

On the stair landing just outside the victim’s bedroom were a washer and dryer and some wall cabinets, and the door of one cabinet stood wide open, with a large package of pull-up diapers hanging halfway off the shelf. Police were struck by the oddity of diapers being used in a household with kids aged nine and six, particularly when viewed in light of the bedfouling report about JonBenét, We had to determine if that was somehow related to her death.

On the bathroom counter lay a balled-up child’s red turtleneck sweater. Although Patsy said JonBenét had gone to bed wearing a red turtleneck, the body was discovered in the same white pullover she had worn the evening before. Who had changed her clothes?

Downstairs in the basement, another technician examined the broken window. Three windows, each eighteen-by-thirty-inch rectangles, were in a row. The top left pane in the center window was broken, and the screen was off. The tech noticed pieces of glass outside the window and a scuff mark on the wall. The dust, film, and debris on the windowsill were undisturbed.

Outside, a detective examined the steel grate that covered the window well and found undisturbed cobwebs still attached from the grate to the bricks. The foliage around the grate also appeared undisturbed.

In the far corner of the basement, just outside the small room where the body had lain, Detective Mike Everett discovered a half-dozen oil paintings on canvas and an artist’s plastic tote box belonging to Patsy. In the tote was a broken brush splotched by paint. Splinters were on the floor beside the tote. It was a major find because the broken brush matched the fractured end of the multicolored stick used in the garrote. The detective had found the source of part of the murder weapon and where it had been broken.

Because Detective Arndt had touched the body, another tech collected her jeans and black silk blouse, but not her footwear. It was important to take those garments because fibers from Arndt’s clothing could be used for elimination purposes against any fiber discovered on the body. In another astonishing lapse of procedure, however, no one had collected the clothing worn by either of the Ramseys, both of whom had been in direct contact with the body as it lay in the living room. A huge legal fight would ensue over the coming months as we sought to retrieve their clothing, particularly Patsy’s red turtleneck sweater, her black-and-red-checked blazer, and any fur garments. They would eventually assume tremendous importance.

Police officers also canvassed the neighborhood. An elderly couple across the street said they had seen John Ramsey’s older son and JonBenét’s half-brother, John Andrew Ramsey, at the Ramsey home on Christmas Day. Another neighbor, Melody Stanton, whose bedroom faced the Ramsey home from across the street, did not want to get involved with the investigation and told police that she heard nothing unusual during the night. She would soon revise her statement to say that she had heard a child scream.

While the Ramseys were at the Fernies’ home on Tin Cup Circle, John Eller sought the opportunity to put cops with the family around the clock so the officers could report what they saw and heard. Throughout the night of December 26 they watched John and Patsy alternately sleeping, roaming the halls, and just sitting around, seemingly lost to the world. The parents said little to each other.

Patsy was in a stupor on the living room floor after taking a Valium issued by Dr. Francesco Beuf, her children’s pediatrician and a family friend. John Ramsey also took a couple of Valium and walked through the house drinking scotch, occasionally stumbling. Once, a police officer overheard him cry softly, “I’m sorry … . I’m so very sorry.” John Fernie and Dr. Beuf took him for a short walk outside.

Months would pass before we learned that only a few hours after the body of JonBenét was found, an attorney representing the Ramseys was already on the scene making calls.

Fleet and Priscilla White had returned to their home by six o’clock, and after telling their children that JonBenét had gone to heaven, they received a call from a local lawyer named Mike Bynum. He wanted to know if they were OK and had everything they needed. That evening, Bynum joined the family and friends gathered at Tin Cup Circle.

Later the Whites told us they were interviewed the following day, December 27, by a three-person team of private investigators and attorneys representing the Ramseys. While police were barely getting the investigation cranked up and had yet to have any serious interviews with John or Patsy Ramsey, legal help was being summoned and was in the field, locking crucial witnesses into their stories.

At about 9 P.M. John lay beside Patsy for about ten minutes but then got up and left her again. Nothing was said between them. He went to the Denver airport with friends to pick up other family members. Patsy awakened an hour later and asked where her son and husband were, then sobbed, “Why did they do this? Why did they do this?” She wanted more pills but was told she had to wait.

Patsy’s two sisters, Pam and Polly, arrived from Atlanta about 11 P.M., and instantly demanded to know from a police officer if suspects had been found and if the FBI was involved. The two sisters settled in beside Patsy and read the Bible to her, all three waving their arms in the air and moaning. One said she had a vision in which JonBenét was an angel. A police officer later noticed that the Bible verses dealt with forgiveness.

John Ramsey returned at midnight. He and Patsy took more Valium and fell asleep on the floor. Family members stayed close, praying. Patsy would awaken occasionally and ask for more Valium, declaring she just wanted “to stay asleep.” She said she no longer had a reason to live.

The worst thing that could happen to the Boulder Police Department had just exploded and there was going to be hell to pay.

At police headquarters, John Eller weighed the damage. He had worked in Boulder for many years since working for the big-city police department in Miami, and knew what it took to handle a case such as this.

He knew there was a lack of tough front-line experience in this city where nonconfrontation with citizens was almost insisted upon. Since the appointment of Tom Koby as a New Age police chief in 1991, Eller had watched with dismay as the Boulder Police Department became divided into “meat eaters,” who took care of business, and “grazers,” who organized ice cream socials and shied away from real street police work. Boulder had just the kind of gentle justice system it wanted, but it was woefully unprepared to handle a monster homicide case.

The timidity of the officers was further complicated by a district attorney’s office that was tightly connected to the community of defense lawyers and plea-bargained almost everything. Many cops didn’t trust the prosecutors. And some of us felt you almost had to have a videotape of a murder, a full confession, and an affidavit from the victim to get a homicide case to go forward in Boulder. Eller expected little help from the DA.

Eller also realized that the officers who responded to the Ramsey home that morning were all products of Boulder-style policing, which had them trained not to be assertive or confrontational. The lack of aggressiveness in those early hours may have doomed the investigation before it started. As a future police chief would observe some months down the line, “Our department wasn’t ready for something like this.”

All of that was irrelevant, however, for no matter what the situation, the case was now Eller’s to pursue. He examined the roster. He had a couple of gold circle detectives already on the job but decided he needed a few more meat-eaters.

At this point in the Ramsey homicide case I was not involved. I was working as an undercover narcotics cop, with a uniform of unshaven face, long hair, and jeans. Furthermore, I was on vacation.

I first heard about it that evening as my new wife and I ferried a bed (a Christmas gift from my father) back home from Denver. Driving west toward the Rocky Mountains as night fell, I heard a grim radio report about the murder of a six-year-old girl in the Boulder home of her wealthy parents, apparently the victim of a kidnapping attempt gone bad.

I wondered who had caught it, because a police department is a pretty lonely place during the holidays. But every detective is intrigued by a murder in his town, and something didn’t sound right. Why would a kidnapper who wanted ransom money murder his victim and leave the body at the crime scene? Even dead, the body was valuable collateral because the family, unaware of the death, might still pay the money.

5

The coroner, Dr. John Meyer, hardly noticed the detectives, other investigators, and DA staff members who stood in the autopsy room in the basement of the Boulder Community Hospital as he began trying to determine how JonBenét had died. In most murders a single cause of death, such as a gunshot wound, is relatively obvious before the first autopsy cut is made. Meyer was about to uncover not one but two possible causes of death, heightening the mystery surrounding the little girl’s murder.

It was the morning of December 27. The little body was first removed from a locked yellow outer covering, then from an inner black bag. The paper sacks were removed from the hands and feet, and Meyer began describing his findings.

The victim weighed forty-five pounds, was three feet, eleven inches tall, and had green eyes, and some green garland was caught in her blond hair. A single loop of white cord was around the right wrist, tied on top of the sleeve but so loosely the doctor easily slid it free. There were 15½ inches between that loop and a loop on the other end, which once apparently had bound the left wrist. A white cord of the same type was wrapped so tightly around the throat and neck that a deep horizontal furrow had been dug into the skin. A gold chain and cross were tangled in that ligature, which was tied behind the neck to a broken stick. Blond hair was snared in the knot, and the coroner had to cut the hair in order to remove the cord, which was tied more like a noose than a twisting garrote. The broken paintbrush used as the garrote handle had
Korea
printed on it.

When Meyer clipped the nails of each finger, no blood or tissue was found that would indicate a struggle. He used the same clippers for all the fingers, although doing so created an issue of cross-contamination. For optimal DNA purposes, separate and sterile clippers should have been used for each finger. Furthermore, we later learned that the coroner’s office sometimes used the same clippers on different autopsy subjects.

A heart was drawn in red ink on the palm of the victim’s left hand, she wore a gold ring on her right middle finger, and a gold bracelet was on her wrist. It was a gift from her Aunt Pam, engraved “JonBenét 12-25-96.”

The long underwear and a pair of oversized floral panties with
Wednesday
printed on them were both stained by urine, and the panties had red stains in the crotch. Meyer found the vagina slightly discolored and noted an abrasion at the seven o’clock position of the hymeneal opening, along with some red liquid consistent with blood. It appeared that the vaginal area had been wiped, and small dark fibers were collected from her pubic region.

Detective Trujillo then scanned the body with ultraviolet light and saw fluorescent markings along the thighs. Such light is useful in observing fluid not visible to the naked eye, and Trujillo thought he saw traces of semen. Samples were taken for testing. Any presence of semen on the victim would indicate a male attacker.