Now here the narrative gets strange. John and Patsy were both feeling that Arndt had been extremely solicitous and sensitive toward them and continued to feel so throughout that agonized afternoon and the days ahead. Other members of the police department apparently had the same impression. In fact, at some later point, certain other detectives were annoyed that Patsy would speak with Arndt but not with them.
But three years after these events, when she had left the Boulder police force, Arndt recalled the scene differently when she appeared on a nationally broadcast television program. “And as we looked at each other, I remember—and I wore a shoulder holster—tucking my gun right next to me and consciously counting, I’ve got eighteen bullets. . . . Because I didn’t know if we’d all be alive when people showed up.” She went on to say, “Everything made sense in that instance. And I knew what happened.”
The implication, I think it’s generally agreed, is that what she felt happened was that John had killed his daughter or had at least taken part in the killing or the cover-up.
To my way of thinking, this is an extremely peculiar statement on many levels. For one, none of it ever went into Arndt’s reports. Second, she apparently continued to treat the Ramseys well, not giving any indication that she felt she was dealing with suspects rather than grieving parents. Third, even if John Ramsey was going to attack her right then and there, what’s this about having to count eighteen bullets? There were only seven people in the house beside herself, and none of them was armed. I set great store in gathering impressions through face-to-face contact, but what kind of evidence is this—she saw murder in his eyes?
I would tend to chalk up this reaction to the profound stress of having to deal with the situation on her own without any support, having the dead child found right in the house after police searches had missed her, and realizing therefore that the crime scene was coming apart before her eyes. Even her former fellow officers found the statement curious.
FROM KIDNAPPING TO MURDER
As the case suddenly turned from kidnapping to murder, Linda Arndt directed John to call 911 again. When that didn’t provide immediate results, she called twice more on her own. She would soon get the backup she’d been requesting: more police, an FBI special agent from the Denver Field Office, the fire department, and an ambulance with paramedics. Boulder police chief Thomas Koby called detective commander John Eller and told him his help was urgently needed.
Amidst the new clamor and turmoil, Detective Sergeant Larry Mason asked John Ramsey his plans. John’s instincts were to get the family back to Atlanta, where their parents and his brother Jeff were, and where he already knew he wanted to bury his daughter, near Beth in the cemetery in Marietta, Georgia. Mason told him the family should stay in the area, at least for several days. According to John, he said they would. The police say they overheard a telephone conversation in which John told Mike to prepare the plane to fly to Atlanta and considered it suspicious that he’d want to get out of town so quickly. If, in fact, it did happen that way, I see nothing suspicious in it. This is a man used to being able to control things who wants to get to the comfort and relative safety of the place he considers his real home.
The police now wanted the house cleared. One of the Fernies suggested that the Ramseys go to the Fernies’ house in South Boulder. Just as they were leaving through the front door around 2:15, a taxi pulled up with John Andrew and Melinda Ramsey and Stewart Long, who’d taken the first flight they could from Minnesota after getting the message from Mike Archuleta. John went to them and told them, “JonBenet is gone.” Everyone erupted in a new flood of tears.
At about the same time, Detective Thomas Trujillo arrived with a consent-to-search form, which he handed to Larry Mason, who asked John to sign it. He did so, later saying he thought he was signing a consent form for an autopsy to be performed on JonBenet.
Then the Ramseys drove to the Fernies’ home, where Fleet White would bring Burke, and where they would have a twenty-four-hour police guard. What they didn’t know at the time was that those officers would be trying to listen to every word they said.
Though in retrospect the scene was already hopelessly compromised, detectives went about the collection of evidence. The most crucial piece was the ransom note itself, which fortunately had already been taken in and preserved. Sergeant Whitson had asked the Ramseys for handwriting exemplars to compare with the note, and John had quickly given him two white, lined legal tablets. One had been lying on the kitchen countertop and contained Patsy’s notes, doodles, and shopping lists. The other was on a table in the hallway not far from the spiral staircase on which Patsy had found the note and contained John’s writings. Whitson marked the top sheets “John” and “Patsy.” The two pads were taken to the police department and given to Detective Jeff Kithcart, the forgery and fraud expert.
As he was going through Patsy’s pad, Kithcart noticed something extraordinary. Toward the middle of the tablet, a few words were written on a page in black, felt-tip pen: “Mr. and Mrs.,” along with a single downstroke that could easily have been the beginning of a capital R. The paper appeared the same as the one on which the ransom note was written. Apparently, this was a first draft, and after consideration, the writer had decided to address the note to Mr. Ramsey only.
What this meant, of course, is that police could now say with a fair degree of certainty that the three-page ransom note was written in the Ramsey house, using their own pad and paper. This narrowed the scenario considerably. Either an intruder (or intruders) had spent a fair amount of time in the house undiscovered, or JonBenet had been killed by one or more of the three individuals known to be in the house at the same time: John, Patsy, and Burke.
When a child is murdered in or near the home, the parents and close family members are always high on the initial suspect list. Statistics tell us that they are the likely killers. As a rule of thumb, the younger the child, the more probable a family member was involved. This was certainly well-known to Special Agent Ron Walker of the Bureau’s Denver Field Office, who had been called in to consult on the case.
There are few people in law enforcement for whom I have higher regard than Ron. For one thing, I trained him in profiling and criminal investigative analysis at Quantico and found him to be a natural. For another, he saved my life. In December of 1983, when I had lapsed into a coma in my Seattle hotel room from viral encephalitis while working the Green River murders, it had been Ron and fellow agent Blaine McIlwain who’d gotten worried when they couldn’t reach me and broken down the door and rescued me.
Ron advised the Boulder police to look closely at the parents; this was the highest-percentage shot in a case like this. He also pledged whatever assistance from the FBI the police would like. Similar offers would soon come from Denver PD and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
Just so we get this straight, since the passage of the Lindbergh law, the FBI has primary jurisdiction in a kidnapping case. But once a body is found, it becomes a local matter because homicide is a state crime. Then, the Bureau can do no more than offer whatever assistance the local agency wishes to have. The FBI can provide an evidence response team, profiling and criminal investigative analysis, lab facilities, legal advice, major-case computer management, cover out-of-state leads and liaison, whatever. But they have to be requested. Unfortunately, none of these services was used early on to an extent that could have made a difference in the investigation.
This is an important consideration in all of law enforcement. Just as in medicine, where doctors refer patients to other doctors with specialty training in a given field, no law enforcement official is going to be expert in everything. And the smaller and less experienced the department, the less specialized expertise they’re going to have. This is completely understandable and there is no shame in it.
What is understandable but not acceptable is when a department refuses to accept assistance from another agency that does have the expertise and the experience. The Boulder PD was
—and is—full of dedicated, hardworking officers. But it is also true (as well as fortunate) that the city has only suffered, on average, a single homicide a year. Regardless of their dedication, there’s no way they could have the depth to work a homicide the way a major department such as New York or Denver could. Evidently, this one looked pretty straightforward to them, even though the crime scene itself was already a mess.
I’ve had it both ways, and I’ve often found that when a local department calls us in willingly and early, as opposed to when the investigation has already gone south and the media and the public are screaming for results, it means that the guy or woman in charge generally has a fair degree of self-confidence and therefore is not threatened by outsiders trying to help. Two out of many such individuals who come immediately to mind are Lexington County, South Carolina, sheriff Jim Metts, who asked for my unit’s assistance when a young woman and a little girl were abducted from in front of their houses, and Rochester, New York, police captain Lynde Johnson, who asked us to help solve a series of prostitute murders. I personally worked the South Carolina case on scene, and my associate Gregg McCrary went up to Rochester. In both cases, a highly effective working relationship between local law enforcement and the FBI led to successful apprehensions and trials. I wish the same had happened in Boulder.
Linda Arndt and Larry Mason came back to the Fernies’ house several times the following day to talk to the Ramseys. At one point Arndt asked John and Patsy to come down to the police station and answer questions more formally.
I don’t mean to implicate either officer, but it was probably around this time that the antagonism and animosity between the Ramseys and Boulder Police really took root, and I don’t think it was the conscious doing of either side.
Patsy was distraught, heavily sedated, and proclaiming she wanted to die. John didn’t feel she was in any shape to leave the house and be subjected to the rigors of a police interview. The police had a high-profile murder investigation on their hands, the kind that often or usually ends up with parental involvement, and they wanted to lock the parents each into his or her own story.
The Ramseys’ friend Michael Bynum was at the Fernies’ paying a condolence call when Linda Arndt made the interview request of John. Bynum was an attorney who had been a prosecutor in the Boulder district attorney’s office and was now in private practice with a large local firm. He told John he was wary of how they were now being treated by the police and asked if John and Patsy would trust him to make some decisions on their behalf. John said he was only too grateful to have the help of a close friend.
Bynum immediately told the police that the Ramseys would not be going down to the police station to be interviewed at this time because he didn’t feel they were in shape for it. Then he contacted Bryan Morgan, a prominent Denver attorney and one of the name partners of Haddon, Morgan and Foreman, and asked him to represent John. Bynum got another attorney, Patrick Burke, to represent Patsy. Bynum had enough experience with the criminal justice system to believe that anyone who became enmeshed with it needed to be personally represented by counsel.
POSTMORTEM
The postmortem exam was conducted by Dr. John E. Meyer, a pathologist and coroner of Boulder County. Meyer had been called to the Ramsey house around 8 P.M. on December 26 to conduct a brief examination and officially pronounce JonBenet dead. During that ten-minute look, he noted a ligature around the right wrist and, when the body was turned over, another around the neck, so tight it had dug a furrow into the skin. It was a garrote, knotted in the back and fastened to a broken four-inch stick that had been used to tighten it. JonBenet was wearing a gold cross and chain, which were tangled in the ligature. A small area of abrasion or contusion was on the cheek near the right ear, and a prominent dried abrasion was on the lower left side of the neck. The broken stick turned out to be part of a paintbrush handle from Patsy’s painting kit in the basement. The kit itself was right outside the wine-cellar door, meaning it was the first handy implement the killer would have noticed.
JonBenet was wearing long underwear over floral print panties, both of which were stained with urine. A red stain consistent with blood was also in the crotch of her panties. At the time it was believed that semen deposits were found in the panties and on her leg. This report later turned out to be erroneous.
The actual autopsy took place in the coroner’s lab in the basement of the Boulder Community Hospital. In addition to the observations he made at the house, Meyer noted tiny petechial hemorrhages on the eyelids. Further hemorrhaging appeared on either side of the ligature furrow around the neck.
Dried blood was found around the entrance to the vagina, as well as hyperemia, or engorged blood vessels, indicating possible trauma in the tissue around and just inside the vagina. The hymen was not intact, and abrasions along the vaginal wall were visible. The fingernails were clipped for lab analysis. Meyer reported occasional scattered petechial hemorrhaging on the surface of each lung and the anterior surface of the heart.
When he made an incision and pulled back the scalp, Meyer saw a large—seven-by-four-inch—area of hemorrhage on the right side. Underneath was an even larger skull fracture, approximately eight and a half inches long. A thin film of subarachnoid hemorrhage (that is, bleeding under the membrane covering the brain) overlay the entire right cerebral hemisphere. Underneath, the gray matter of the brain itself was bruised.
The small intestine contained fragmented pieces of semidigested fruit that Meyer believed might be pineapple. This detail became important in the investigation because neither John nor Patsy recalled JonBenet’s eating anything after they left the Whites’. In fact, she fell asleep in the car and did not wake up when John carried her upstairs or when Patsy prepared her for bed. Yet the state of the pineapple in the intestines suggested it was eaten that day or evening, and a bowl with cut pineapple was noted in the Ramsey kitchen. The bowl was processed for prints; Patsy’s and Burke’s were found, but not JonBenet’s. Police picked this out as an inconsistency in Patsy’s story. Patsy and John said they were perplexed by the finding and had no explanation for it. I would expect guilty people to come up with some explanation.
The bottom line was that JonBenet had been strangled with a garrotestyle ligature and had suffered massive blunt-force trauma to the right side of her head. Though there was and still is some question about which injury occurred first, either would have been sufficient to kill her. The petechial hemorrhages on the insides of the eyelids as well as other places, coupled with the lack of substantial bleeding from the head wound, suggest that the strangulation was first, so that by the time of the head injury her heart was no longer pumping or was pumping only weakly.
The official cause of death was listed as asphyxia by strangulation associated with craniocerebral trauma.
EVIDENCE
Everything that had touched JonBenet’s body was collected—clothing, the blankets, even the silk blouse and jeans Linda Arndt was wearing when she had leaned over the dead child.
In the house, police technicians reviewed the scene in the basement where the body was discovered and the area around the broken window. There were pieces of glass outside the window and a scuff mark on the wall. During this search Detective Michael Everett found Patsy’s painting box, from which the wooden stick used in the garrote had come. Splinters on the floor next to the box indicated that this was where it had been broken. It was then logical to surmise that here or near here was where the garroting had taken place, rather than upstairs in the bedroom.
On the second floor, in the bathroom off JonBenet’s bedroom, investigators found a balled-up red turtleneck, which Patsy said JonBenet had been wearing when she went to bed. No one seemed to know how it ended up there. Next to the spiral staircase and opposite JonBenet’s bedroom, there was a stacked washer/dryer unit and laundry-room-type wall cabinets. One of the cabinets was open with a package of pull-up diapers visible. This seemed odd in a household with a nine-year-old and a six-year-old, but JonBe
net, advanced for her age in most other ways, had a fairly chronic problem with wetting the bed and, to a lesser extent, her pants. The bed-wetting was so common that Linda Hoffmann-Pugh reported that before she even got to work in the morning, Patsy would routinely strip JonBenet’s bedsheets and put them into the washer/dryer.
The bed-wetting became critical in the investigation because it suggested a possible motive for one parent and hinted at possible behavior from the other. It would be suggested that Patsy had accidently fatally injured her daughter when she lost it with her over the bed-wetting. It would also be suggested that JonBenet’s wetting and occasional soiling were a reaction to sexual advances and abuse by her father.
The police also searched the area surrounding the house.
WHAT KIND OF PEOPLE ARE THEY?
Several things happened in relatively quick succession that helped open a seemingly unbridgeable rift between the Ramseys and the police and ultimately created the enduring public perception of the couple.
First of all, the statistics pointed to them being involved in the murder, particularly in a house where they were the only known adults present and there was no clear-cut sign of forced entry. Second, they didn’t appear to behave the way parents in this situation are “supposed” to behave. John was quiet, controlled, and stoic and Patsy often hysterical, but they didn’t cling together and constantly comfort and reassure each other. They didn’t make a big deal out of waiting for the ransom call that never came, and they didn’t overwhelm the police with requests or demands that they find the killer or killers of their child—all of the things “normal” parents would be expected to do. Along with that, they refused to go into the police station the next day and submit to separate interviews. And finally, they “lawyered up” almost right away. If they were innocent and had nothing to hide, why would they decline to answer questions and why would they need an attorney, much less a separate one for each of them?
The Cases That Haunt Us Page 36