JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (8 page)

It was the first time police had had a chance to speak with Ramsey since he had left his house the previous afternoon, yet he sat there with two lawyers.

The session lasted only forty minutes, during which time the detectives learned little. Ramsey asked no questions about the murder, the autopsy, or how JonBenét was killed. I later considered this very peculiar behavior. Parents usually want to provide information as soon as possible to help police find who harmed their child before the trail goes cold.

He confirmed that he had been locked out of the house about four months earlier and had removed the metal grate over the window well and kicked in the pane to gain entrance. That explained the broken window. But he made a point of mentioning that the grate was not secured by a lock and that the window had never been fixed.

Giving some family background, Ramsey mentioned how Patsy had conquered cancer over the last few years, then added that this was a tough time of year for his family. His eldest daughter, Beth, had died in a car accident on January 8, 1992. JonBenét was to be buried next to her in Atlanta. A private memorial service was planned in Boulder on Sunday, then the family would fly to Georgia for the funeral on Tuesday, December 31.

Ramsey said he was considering posting a reward. When he was asked again about possible suspects, he repeated the name of Jeff Merrick, who had been through a messy firing from Access Graphics. Then he added another ex-employee, whose name he had forgotten but who had been fired for lying on his application by saying he did not smoke. The company had paid a $15,000 settlement when he sued.

When the detectives asked to speak to Patsy, Dr. Beuf said she was too medicated to talk to anyone tonight. The two police officers insisted that early interviews were imperative. Perhaps tomorrow morning? The pediatrician hedged, saying that Patsy’s emotional state was very fragile. John Ramsey was noncommittal about when he would talk with police again.

Months would pass before he did, and when it happened, I would be asking the questions.

6

Thirty-third Street in front of the police department was jammed with television satellite trucks, and reporters swarmed. At noon on December 28, I ducked into headquarters through the Bat Cave, a hidden back entrance used by undercover cops who did not want to be seen. I could not risk having my photograph taken because I might be back working narcotics in a few days.

The square two-story building was a hive of activity. Uniformed cops, detectives, civilians from the department of social services, deputy sheriffs, and people I had never seen before were coming and going, all looking tired. Framed explosions of bizarre modern art flashed from the walls, reminders that I was back in the New and Improved Boulder Police Department, which had no place for traditional cop decor such as plaques and photos of decorated officers.

I went straight to a corral of offices, cubicles, and government desks that occupied the southeast ground floor, where the line of authority was along one wall. The office of Bob Keatley, the department’s legal adviser, divided the patrol and detective divisions. In line away from him were the offices of Sergeant Tom Wickman, Commander John Eller, and Sergeant Larry Mason. I found Eller standing at his desk, fatigue etched on his face.

“There’s a briefing this afternoon,” he said by way of a terse greeting. “Be there.” He had every available officer and detective working the case and a to-do list that was growing by the minute. “This is going to be big, Steve. It’s an APE.” I nodded at the police jargon—acute political emergency.

The detective bureau folded away across industrial gray carpet, with the newest detectives having the desks closest to the sergeants and being the most likely to catch a “Hey, get in here” call. The veterans gravitated to the far side of the bureau, and Ron Gosage had one of the most distant desks of all, putting a lot of bodies between himself and the bosses. I found him coming around the corner with a cup of coffee in his hand and the usual wad of chewing tobacco in his mouth. We had known each other since we were patrol officers together in Wheat Ridge, and I considered him one of the best detectives in the house. He was assigned to crimes against persons.

“We’ve got some problems with this thing,” he said, in perhaps one of the biggest understatements he had ever made. He described how the crime scene had been compromised big time and said we had not yet even interviewed the parents about the murder.

It took me a moment to comprehend what he was saying. To a detective, the crime scene is Ground Zero in any investigation, the place from which we start piecing together the story of what happened. It is the source of evidence, and it changes from the moment the first police officer sets foot in it. The destruction of a crime scene puts the entire subsequent investigation at great risk because errors made in protecting it can never be undone. To hear that the Ramsey homicide scene had been wrecked was like a punch in the stomach. And it was just as bad to learn that forty-eight hours into this, we had not interviewed the parents. I felt that we were already in deep trouble.

It was about to get much worse. As Gosage and I sat in police headquarters, Pam Paugh, one of Patsy Ramsey’s sisters who had flown in from Atlanta, was staging a one-woman raid on the crime scene that I could only compare to burning the damned place down. And she did it with the help of the cops!

Patrol Officer Angie Chromiak told me later that when she showed up to pull a security shift at Tin Cup Circle, she was ordered by police headquarters to ferry Pam Paugh over to Fifteenth Street to collect some clothing that John, Patsy, and Burke Ramsey could wear to the funeral. Even that decision, as kind as it might have been to grieving parents, was questionable, for
nothing
should be removed from an active crime scene.

To disguise her identity from the media, Pam donned a Boulder Police jacket, complete with badge and patches. When they parked behind the house to dodge the media out front, Pam psyched herself up for the job ahead: “I can do this, I can do this, I can do this,” she panted as she pulled on the latex gloves. Then she headed into the house, accompanied by Detective Mike Everett. She spent an hour on her first trip through the crime scene and emerged with a big cardboard box filled to the brim, which she plopped into the trunk of the police car. For the next several hours, Pam made about half a dozen trips through the house, often spending an hour or more inside, and hauled out suitcases, boxes, bags, and loose items until the backseat of the police car was stuffed like a steamer trunk.

Like me, the patrol officer understood how far out of the ordinary the visit was. “Are you checking all this? It’s way more than just funeral clothes,” Chromiak asked Detective Everett. “You don’t worry about it,” Everett replied. I listened with total disbelief when I interviewed Chromiak about the incident. It was too crazy to be true—what had begun as a courteous gesture to allow some funeral clothes to be fetched had turned, probably without intention, into a scorched earth assault. The officer said she was told by a police intern on duty not to be concerned because “The detectives already know who did it.”

Pam’s last trip was into the bedroom of JonBenét, and she pumped herself up again: “I can do this, I can do this, I can do this.” She came back carrying an armload of stuffed animals and other items from the first room in the house to have been sealed off by police.

Everett kept only a general inventory of what was removed, and even that abbreviated listing was astonishing. Stuffed animals, tiaras, three dresses for JonBenét, pageant photo portfolios, toys and clothes for Burke, John Ramsey’s Daytimer, the desk Bible, and clothing. For Patsy, there were black pants, dress suits, boots, and the contents of a curio cabinet. Bills, credit cards, a black cashmere trench coat, jewelry that included her grandmother’s ring and an emerald necklace, bathrobes, a cell phone, personal papers, bank records, Christmas stockings, her Nordstrom’s credit card, and even their passports! The patrol car was loaded with zipped bags, boxes, sacks, and luggage, the true contents unknown. This, to my mind, was madness. Once those items were gone, they weren’t coming back, and the police were only in their second day of the official search of the house. Pam Paugh should never have been allowed in there at all. The removal of so much potential evidence, with police assistance, was more like an earthquake than a mere procedural error.

Pam finally got into the front seat, clutching some stuffed animals, and Chromiak drove off, only to have Pam thrust out her arms and scream as if spiders were crawling on her. “Get these gloves off of me! Get them off! Get them
off!
Get them
OFF!”
The puzzled cop removed the latex gloves, and Pam immediately felt better. “I need a large Diet Coke with a lot of ice,” she demanded. “Right now!”

On the way to a fast-food restaurant, Chromiak told me, her passenger described making her first million dollars before the age of thirty-two and not knowing what to do with all her money. In reality, she worked at a department store cosmetics counter. The patrol car, stuffed with Ramsey belongings, went to a drive-up window, and Pam (still wearing the BPD jacket) settled down with a Happy Meal. Chromiak paid the bill.

The afternoon briefing began when John Eller walked into the Situation Room, where four long tables had been pushed together to form an empty square. The photo of JonBenét in her pink sweater was tacked to a wall, where it remained throughout the investigation. Gosage and I were at one corner, and every chair was filled, with more people standing. The SitRoom was to become my home for the next year and a half.

Detective Linda Arndt reported that Ramsey lawyer Mike Bynum said the parents of the victim were willing to cooperate with the police, but that any further communication with John and Patsy Ramsey would be with their attorney, Bryan Morgan, present.

Bynum also said the pediatrician, Dr. Beuf, had determined that Burke Ramsey could not be interviewed by police.

Detective Arndt asked Bynum to schedule an interview with John and Patsy Ramsey.

Later that afternoon, Detectives Arndt and Trujillo were advised by Deputy DA Pete Hofstrom that the Ramseys had now both retained counsel and would not consent to an interview with the police at this time. Hofstrom then suggested the detectives submit
written
questions. I did not believe the proposal should even be considered, for it would tip off the people being questioned, and their attorneys, to topics the police considered important.

Hofstrom further advised that the Ramsey attorneys wanted to review all case information before allowing cops access to their clients. All case information? People we wanted to question in connection with the murder of JonBenét wanted an advance look at our case? Any investigator should refuse that demand. The suggestion was preposterous.

But by now, it was plain that the newly hired Ramsey attorneys preferred to talk to the DA’s office instead of to the investigating detectives.

When Detective Arndt was prepared to reply to Hofstrom, she dialed a telephone number where he said he could be located. It was the law office of Ramsey attorney Mike Bynum.

The law is an adversarial process, and in most jurisdictions across the nation, the district attorney and his prosecutors are firmly on the other side of the fence from defense lawyers. Indeed, some are barely civil to each other because their jobs demand such different allegiances. No law-and-order prosecutor, who represents the public, should want to appear too cozy with defense lawyers. The way the justice system worked in Boulder was an anomaly, not the rule. For Deputy DA Pete Hofstrom, the prosecutor, to be making house calls on the defense lawyers was truly an ominous sign to the police.

We were then brought up to date on a new discovery. Crime scene techs at the house had recovered three Sharpie felt-tip pens from an orange metal container on the kitchen counter beneath the telephone from which Patsy had made her 911 call, not far from where the ransom note tablet was found.

That was exactly the sort of physical evidence we needed, and I thank God that Pam Paugh didn’t carry it away, because the U.S. Secret Service eventually determined that one of those pens, a pre-November 1992 water-based ink Sharpie, was used to write both the practice and actual ransom notes. The Secret Service, which maintains a huge database on inks because of its federally mandated assignment to chase forgers, told us, “The ink [on the notes] is unique in the collection of approximately 7,000 standards from the Ink Library.”

That meant that whoever wrote the notes used that exact pen from that cup. They not only left the pad behind but, when they finished, neatly put the felt-tip pen in its container.

Eller gave out new assignments. Gosage and I were to get over to the Criminal Justice Center and collect from the Ramsey family what is known as “nontestimonial evidence”—blood and hair samples, photographs, and fingerprints that could be compared with whatever might come from the crime scene. This is such a standard procedure that it cannot be avoided.

I was anxious to see these people. It had been my experience in thirteen years as a police officer that victims tend to act like victims, so I expected to find a grief-stricken family demanding investigative results. Instead they were flanked by a squadron of attorneys and private investigators and saying absolutely nothing to police.

We set up shop in a narrow room with a sink and long counter, and the family members were escorted in one by one.

John Ramsey, in khakis and a dark sweater, looked unsure of himself as he sat in a plastic chair to have his photo snapped. He nervously put an elbow on the counter, then took it off, leaned over, elbows on knees, then sat up straight again, searching for elusive comfort. He uttered not an unsolicited word, and I could not understand how someone whose child had been killed would not at least ask detectives what progress was being made.