The Cases That Haunt Us

by Mark Olshaker

  One of the issues with the police and the Ramseys was that, despite the belief that either John or Patsy did it, the investigators disagreed about which one. The initial report had been that semen was found on the victim, which would suggest a male offender. But that report was not panning out, and by March handwriting analysts brought in by the police had eliminated John Ramsey as the writer of the note, but said they could not eliminate Patsy. So a lot of the speculation shifted to her.

  In September, a search of the Ramsey home uncovered fibers that appeared to match the cord used to bind JonBenet. But the roll the duct tape had come from and the remainder of the cord were not found, which suggested to me that, unlike the notepad and pen from the ransom note and the broken paintbrush handle from the neck ligature, the cord and duct tape originated outside the house.

  Only weeks after this search, lead investigator John Eller was replaced by Commander Mark Beckner. A little over a month after that, the police union passed a no-confidence motion against Chief Tom Koby, who later announced he would resign. Within a few days, Eller also announced that he planned to resign. Ultimately, Koby was replaced by Beckner. But by the one-year anniversary of the murder, despite the focus on the Ramseys, no suspects had been named and no arrests had been made.

  While a murder always has horrible and long-term fallout for the family and friends of the victim, I have never seen another case that became so devastating and destructive to the investigating agency itself.

  Alex Hunter brought in famed forensic scientist Dr. Henry Lee and attorney and DNA legal specialist Barry Scheck as consultants. So far as I can tell, neither has been able to advance the case. And rather than narrowing the focus, new pieces of potential evidence often raised more questions than they answered. Detective Steve Thomas placed great store in the fact that JonBenet had apparently ingested pineapple the evening of her death, contrary to what the Ramseys said, yet seemed to discount what I consider to be a major finding: that DNA, definitely not belonging to JonBenet and definitely not belonging to either of her parents (or anyone else tested, for that matter), was found in her panties and under her fingernails.

  To me, the relative weight given to these two possible clues says a lot about the unbalanced nature of the Ramsey murder investigation. What are the implications of Patsy saying that she did not feed her daughter, nor did she see JonBenet eat, cut pineapple on the night she died? Why would Patsy lie about something like that? What is the strategic advantage?

  How about “JonBenet woke up and she was hungry so I gave her some pineapple”? That’s completely innocent; it doesn’t imply, “Oh, and while she was awake, I killed her.” It would be too easy for Patsy to explain it away to bother lying about it. And yet she stuck and continues to stick to her story. Maybe the child got up and had some pineapple on her own. Maybe Patsy or John gave it to her and forgot. Maybe an intruder gave it to her. If this advances the case in any way, it is only likely to be a minor one.

  Yet what about that DNA? Foreign DNA found under the victim’s fingernails and in her underpants certainly suggests at least the strong possibility of another participant. Maybe the material under the nails came from her digging in the dirt (in the Colorado winter) and coming into contact with some organic material. Maybe at some recent point another little girl had worn her underwear and it was her genetic material.

  A pubic hair of unknown origin was also found on her blanket. Again, maybe there is a completely natural explanation for it, such as someone else having slept in her bed and the hair never having been cleaned away. Evidence can come from some strange and off-the-wall places. But we’re jumping through hoops to come up with alternative explanations for some very strong points of evidence.

  And yet the police and public continued to believe the Ramseys did it, largely for the simple reason that no solid outside suspect had surfaced. This is remarkably similar to the events of the Sheppard murder case in Cleveland in 1954. Dr. Sam Sheppard, an osteopath, was accused, tried, and convicted of murdering his wife, Marilyn, on the Fourth of July. Sheppard claimed a mysterious stranger broke into the house, knocked him unconscious, and killed his wife. He eventually received a second trial and was released from prison, but the prevailing attitude has always been that he did it. Only recently has evidence surfaced that strongly indicates that the late Dr. Sheppard was innocent and his life ruined by false allegation. If nothing else, the Sheppard case is a cautionary tale about assuming something simply because you don’t have evidence to the contrary.

  One of the avenues of investigation was for an indication of any kind of child sexual abuse or inappropriate behavior in John Ramsey’s background. Absolutely nothing surfaced. Not with his first set of children, not with his second set of children, not from his first wife or anyone else. Nothing. This is a very, very important point, because as I’ve found throughout my career and as my colleague Dr. Stanton Samenow has so articulately stated, people don’t act out of character. If they appear to, it is only because you don’t understand the character well enough.

  No one suddenly becomes a child abuser . . . or anything else. There is always evolutionary behavior, a pattern of thought and act. Not only did the police scrutinize Ramsey’s life and every relationship, so did the tabloid press, which has a lot less in the way of scruples. And this is not the kind of guy he was.

  So what did happen? None of us knows, but let’s look at some of the possibilities that have been considered or implied.

  WHAT-IFS?

  None of the scenarios makes perfect sense or is without loose ends, either those involving the Ramseys or one or more intruders. If one did, the case would have been solved long ago, the Boulder PD’s relative inexperience with homicide notwithstanding. The only thing we’re going to say definitively to begin is that the little girl did not write the ransom note herself, then commit suicide by garroting herself, and she didn’t die as the result of a botched alien abduction, though some of the theories are nearly as bizarre. We are going to try to follow Sherlock Holmes’s dictum that “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Let’s see how far we can get with this approach.

  First scenario: Patsy accidentally kills JonBenet in a fit of anger. Why? Well, maybe Patsy was completely fed up with the bed-wetting. She smacked the little girl across the face, JonBenet lost her footing and maybe hit her head on something hard. Or, same scenario, except the motive is a little deeper: JonBenet gets ornery and sassy and tells her mom she’s tired of the beauty pageants and doesn’t want to do them anymore. Patsy gets hysterical because now she’s living her own fantasies vicariously through JonBenet. Patsy snaps, strikes out at the child in a momentary loss of reason and control. JonBenet hits her head just as we’ve described above; it’s one of those fluke things and she dies or is severely injured.

  So now what? Patsy’s got to do something in her panic. She races up to the bedroom and awakens John. “Honey, I accidentally killed JonBenet in a fit of anger. I don’t know what came over me. What should we do?”

  John pulls himself together enough to ask how it happened. Patsy describes how JonBenet was sent flying across the room and struck her head on the edge of her dresser. “Okay,” John says. “We’d better take her to the emergency room and say she had an accident.”

  “No,” Patsy disagrees. “What if they see my handprint across her face [or shoulder, back, bottom, whatever] and realize what really happened?”

  “Okay, you’re right. We’d better make it look like a botched kidnapping.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “We’ll need a ransom note, and we need to make it look like the kidnapper killed her. Let’s tie her hands together and fashion a garrote tightly around her neck to strangle her.”

  “Just in case the kidnapping isn’t believable enough, I guess we’d better make it look like she was sexually molested.”

  And it could have gone on from there.

  Now as you read this, I hope
you felt it sounded at least slightly absurd. And if it did, why? We’ll analyze what doesn’t work here and see if it tells us anything about the case itself.

  Let’s begin with the basic premise. Was Patsy capable of killing her six-year-old daughter, and if so, why and how?

  We’ll set aside the motive question for a moment. For now, we need to deal with the forensic findings.

  As we noted earlier, the coroner’s report describes a seven-by-four-inch temporoparietal hemorrhage over an eight-and-a-half-inch skull fracture, over an eight-by-one-and-three-quarter-inch contusion of the brain itself. This is a severe blunt-force trauma. It was estimated for me that a blow this hard could bring down a three-hundred-pound man. And this was a forty-five-pound, six-year-old girl.

  So if Patsy caused the fatal blow, albeit accidentally, how did she do it? Was it with her open hand? Her fist? There is no evidence or testimony to suggest that John or Patsy even spanked JonBenet. What would suddenly cause Patsy to lash out forcefully enough to deck a three-hundred-pounder? But let’s say she did hit her daughter. Presumably JonBenet would have been facing her. Did the blow send her sprawling and she just happened to hit her head on an edge or hard surface sufficient to cause the hemorrhaging, fracture, and gray matter contusion the coroner reported? Yes, it’s possible, but the description of JonBenet’s head wound is much more consistent with a direct blow to the head with an object than it is with an injury caused by secondary impact after being struck with a hand or fist.

  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 sugg
estion 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.