The Cases That Haunt Us (53 page)

And that’s a scenario that is pretty tough to work out. We have to assume that the events that led to JonBenet’s death began in her bedroom. If Patsy was suddenly angry with her, we can therefore say that her reaction would have taken place in the bedroom, or possibly the adjoining bathroom if the anger was over a bed- or pants-wetting incident.

Then what? Does Patsy pick up the nearest heavy object she can find and bean her kid with it across the skull? It doesn’t make any sense. And what was the object in question? Though it has never been positively identified, police speculated (with good reason, I think) that it might have been a heavy flashlight, either the one found in the kitchen or one like it. Was the flashlight in JonBenet’s bedroom? Why? If not, where did it come from? Did Patsy say, “You just wait here, young lady, and when I come back, you’re really going to get it!” then go downstairs to bring it up to punish her daughter with? Or maybe she was so angry she dragged JonBenet down to the kitchen or basement to mete out this uncharacteristically harsh discipline and hit her even harder than she’d planned to.

I don’t buy it. A mother who doesn’t even swat her six-year-old’s behind doesn’t suddenly have the impulse to bash her brains in. I’ve never seen a spontaneous display of violence against a child when there was no preconditioning behavior in that direction.

But let’s say Patsy did hit her that hard. Where did it happen? In the bedroom? The bathroom? The kitchen? The wine cellar in the basement? Well, where did police find a lot of blood?

Nowhere!

I have investigated a fair number of blunt-force head-trauma assaults in my career, and one feature that is pretty consistent among them is blood. When police have a suspect in a blunt-force head-trauma murder, the first thing I advise in interrogation strategy is to see how the suspect reacts when you tell him you’ve got blood evidence on him, on his clothing, in his car, whatever. Because the overwhelming odds are that the victim’s blood did end up somewhere incriminating to the offender.

But at the Ramsey crime scene there was very little blood. Was it because the killer had time to clean it all up? I don’t think so. That kind of evidence is really difficult to get rid of. You pretty much have to get it out of the house, as we believe O. J. Simpson did. And his house wasn’t even the murder scene. It is completely unlikely that any killer—an insider or an intruder—could have cleaned up the scene well enough to erase large amounts of blood evidence.

Which gets us back to the cause of death. While the blow to the head was certainly forceful enough to have caused death, the coroner’s report only speaks of it as an associated cause. The specific cause, as we’ve noted, is listed as “asphyxia by strangulation.” And with good reason. The most reasonable scenario under which the victim would not suffer massive head bleeding would be that her heart was no longer pumping, or pumping only faintly. In other words, she’d already been garroted. The petechial hemorrhages under the eyelids are consistent with this finding.

Now, if that was the case, how can we work in an accidental, suddenrage-provoked injury on Patsy’s part? You can suddenly lash out and hit someone with your hand or fist (though the evidence is not good that this is what happened), but you don’t accidentally garrote your child, or anyone else, to death. That is very much an intentional act, and to my knowledge, no one has suggested that this mother did that to this child.

Okay, then, maybe John did it. Maybe this ligature was part of some horribly perverse sex game. My esteemed colleague Roy Hazelwood has done a lot of research on autoerotic asphyxiation and why it so often ends in death. The scenario would have John choking his daughter to the point of passing out, then reviving her, all the while performing some kind of sex act on her.

Possible? Physically, yes. But again, not one iota, not one scintilla, of evidence suggests he practiced or was capable of this kind of behavior, and an overwhelming amount of evidence suggests he was not. People do not act in a vacuum. Every action is tied to every other action. John

Ramsey is not and was not a sex offender and has none of the characteristics.

Another problem with this scenario is, if John killed JonBenet, then even if the death was accidental, the sexual abuse that accompanied it would not be. Under this circumstance, John could not have counted on his wife to stand by him. Yes, maybe if she were particularly crazy she might have perceived a sexually abused child as a rival and been satisfied that she was eliminated. Maybe she would have considered that John was her ticket to the good life, so no matter what she thought of his actions, she had to stand by him. But those are pretty bizarre possibilities for people who gave no indication of any aberration of this nature, and a reasonable, calculating executive such as John would have known he couldn’t count on his wife not to give him up, especially over time.

I almost feel as if I am dignifying John Ramsey’s accusers by going over this, but we have to make very, very clear that he could not have done this to his daughter.

So if we go back to our made-up scene, we see that no part of it makes any sense.

I said we would get back to the issue of motive. Let’s look at a possible scenario suggested by Detective Steve Thomas in his book,
JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation.
I’m not going to present it in the level of detail that Thomas does, but I want to represent it accurately, because though he and I disagree, I believe we’re both after the same thing.

Thomas believes there was already tension between Patsy and JonBenet on Christmas Day, based on the child’s willfully refusing to wear the dress her mother had selected for her. After dinner at the Whites’, the Ramseys came home and before long put the two children to bed. Patsy was frazzled with the hecticness of the holidays and preparations for the trip to Michigan, which Thomas says she did not want to make.

Thomas speculates that JonBenet wet the bed and woke up. The red turtleneck shirt found balled up in the bathroom must have been what she wore to bed, then Patsy stripped it off her when it became wet and redressed her in the clothing in which she was found.

The detective goes on to say, “I never believed the child was sexually abused for the gratification of the offender but that the vaginal trauma was some sort of corporal punishment. The dark fibers found in her pubic region could have come from the violent wiping of a wet child.”

I have to say here that I find this part of the theory, particularly, bizarre. The abrasions around and on the inner wall of the child’s vagina certainly seemed to be the result of some form of digital sexual penetration, but the suggestion that they actually resulted from Patsy forcefully wiping her there brutally enough to do that is hard to imagine.

In any event, Thomas then postulates “some sort of explosive encounter in the child’s bathroom,” in which JonBenet was slammed against a hard surface. At that point, Patsy was overtaken by panic at what she’d done, quickly decided she couldn’t risk the emergency room route, so she moved her daughter’s body down to the basement room. She then went back upstairs to the kitchen and wrote the ransom note from her own tablet to make the crime appear to be a kidnapping.

After that, she returned to the basement and realized that though JonBenet was mortally wounded, she wasn’t actually dead. Thomas allows for the possibility that JonBenet was already dead at this point and that Patsy realized it. In her desperation, Patsy seized the closest items available to her, the handle from the paintbrush in her painting box and a length of cord, with which she fashioned a garrote around the child’s neck and tied her wrists in front of her.

For the next several hours, she fine-tuned the staging, placing the three-page note where it was later found and putting a piece of duct tape over JonBenet’s mouth. The rest of the roll and the remainder of the cord were either deposited in a neighbor’s trash can or perhaps down a nearby storm sewer.

Then she “discovered” the note, screamed, alerted her husband, and set the events of the morning into motion. When Officer Rick French responded to the 911 call shortly before 6 A.M., Patsy was still wearing the outfit she’d had on the evening before; she’d never gone to bed. Evidently, she’d been too busy.

Thomas speculates that John Ramsey first grew suspicious while reading the ransom note, more so when no kidnapper called, and probably found JonBenet’s body on his own sometime during the morning when Detective Arndt noticed him missing. Then John faced his own dilemma: whether to give up his wife or stand by her. JonBenet was gone and he’d already lost another beloved daughter. If he turned on Patsy, the family would effectively be destroyed. So he became part of the cover-up and used Arndt’s suggestion that he and Fleet White look through the house as an opportunity to officially “find” the body. And the Ramseys have stood together, hidden behind their lawyers, and stonewalled the police ever since.

I have trouble with this scenario on many levels, all of them based on my two and a half decades studying violent crime, particularly the behavioral aspects. First, if Patsy took such time to set up the scene to make it look like something other than what it was, why didn’t she do the one truly obvious and mandatory thing: make it look as if someone had broken in and then left again? If you’re going to go to all the trouble of writing a ransom note and staging the body, how do you forget to make it look like a break-in? The Ramseys actually said they thought they’d locked all the doors. Okay, maybe Patsy was panicked and not thinking clearly. But it defies logic that she would think of all these arcane, sadistic things to establish credibility, then not do something so simple. Possible, but highly unlikely. The same is true with the legal pad that the ransom note came from. If Patsy wrote the note herself, she knew where the paper came from, she knew it would be evidence, she knew it would help tie her to the crime. And she’s going to leave it out in plain sight? Totally illogical. If you’re going to do that, you’re going to leave the duct tape roll and the cord out in plain sight, too. If you dispose of one, you dispose of all of them.

Thomas believes that when John carried JonBenet’s body upstairs, he had already previously discovered it. Having seen John’s reaction when he was describing finding the body to me, I am certain that his reaction was genuine. I also believe that if either John or Patsy knew that JonBenet’s body was in the house, they’d be itching to get the ordeal over with rather than let it drag on for hours. One of them would have innocently said, “Has anyone checked the basement?” “Has anyone looked downstairs?” or “I thought I heard some noise downstairs.”

I also think the condition in which the body was found suggests Patsy wasn’t the perpetrator. Many commentators have mentioned JonBenet’s being wrapped in the blanket and cited my frequent observation that parents or others with proprietary interest in the victim will leave her in some kind of loving or protected state. In his book, Steve Thomas went so far as to state, “John Douglas was almost denying his own writings in order to give the Ramseys a pass.”

Well, I can’t help it if readers, particularly law enforcement professionals, misunderstand or misinterpret what I say, or only look at the surface material. This is a problem I run into again and again. It’s as if there is a Profiling 101 course that can easily be applied to fit every case. Unfortunately, that’s not the way it is. It’s not easy to become an experienced profiler, and even if you get to that stage, all profilers are not created equal. In this case, if Thomas had ever asked me about this detail, I would have been happy to clarify it for him.

For one thing, the body was not protectively wrapped as I would expect to find in a parental murder. It was haphazardly draped, with the arms and feet sticking out. In all probability, the intruder intended to use the blanket to carry JonBenet out of the house. This is in no way similar to the almost hermetic wrapping or sealing I have often seen. But much more to the point, I cannot conceive that a loving mother with a profound proprietary interest in the victim could possibly insert her fingers into her little girl’s vagina to punish her, let alone make it look as if an intruder had molested her, and then stage her dead six-year-old’s body with a garrote tightly around her neck. If that were the case, we would have seen profound evidence of psychopathology from Patsy by now, and we have not. And with Beth’s death and her own cancer, not to mention a prostate cancer scare with John, this woman has experienced precipitating stressors in her life.

Then there is the issue of motive, the one we deferred a little earlier because this is the most fruitful context in which to discuss it.

To react in a certain way requires precursive behavior. As mentioned previously, we are told that JonBenet had a chronic problem with bed-wetting to the point that Patsy had a morning washing routine for dealing with it. So why would one more incident make her snap? With the excitement of Christmas, the late nights and parties, preparing to go away and generally being off schedule, if anything, a mother would expect it to be more likely for an accident to occur and would take it in stride.

It’s not enough to suggest that she was tense because of the upcoming trip; that’s not enough of a reason. It’s not enough to make Patsy say something to the effect of “JonBenet, you’ve wet your bed five hundred eighty-two times already and I’m not going to take it any longer,” then slam her across the room. Mothers don’t suddenly act that way. No one does.

And, of course, a bed-wetting confrontation would much more likely occur in the morning than the middle of the night. You have to jump through too many of those hoops to make it work.

This goes as well for the other possible motive some have suggested: that JonBenet suddenly wanted out of the pageant world and Patsy couldn’t deal with that. This is another scenario you have to jump through hoops to achieve. All indications are that JonBenet loved performing, in fact pushed her parents to let her do more. The family had enjoyed a happy day, and even coming up with such a notion at bedtime when all she was thinking about was going to Michigan and then on the Disney boat would have been completely out of context. And it is not the kind of thing that would have come up in the middle of the night. If it did, JonBenet would have to have gone up to her parents’ bedroom and made her announcement, thereby involving John as well as Patsy, which means that one person couldn’t have flown off the handle without the other intervening. And if such a mother-daughter confrontation had occurred at bedtime, both John and Burke would have heard it. It doesn’t work.