The Cases That Haunt Us

by Mark Olshaker

  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.

  When my unit consulted on a potential domestic case or when I was teaching criminal investigative analysis at Quantico or for any other police agency, I used to stress that it is absolutely critical to look closely at what was going on in and around the victim’s family in the days or weeks before the crime.

  The 1996 Christmas season was a happy time for the Ramsey family. They loved Christmas anyway, particularly the excitement of the kids, and this was one of the best times of their lives. John’s company had topped a billion dollars in annual sales. Patsy had recovered from a terrifying and deadly cancer. The children were happy. JonBenet charmed everyone, and she and Patsy loved going to the pageants together, despite whatever judgments any of us might have about their value. The family was looking forward to the vacation in Michigan and then the cruise on the Disney ship.

  Now fast-forward several hours to this beautiful little girl, strangled to death with a garrote, bashed in the side of her head, tied up, and left in the basement wine cellar. How do you get from point A to point B?

  One of the first things we look for in profiling is a precipitating stressor: something that made the offender act or react the way he did. We don’t have any here. There’s nothing going on. No matter how badly JonBenet messed the bed (if she did at all; the urine stains in her panties and long johns could easily have come about when her bladder tension released at death), I don’t believe that Patsy would suddenly lose every instinct and inhibition she’d ever had and strike out violently at the being she clearly loved as much as anyone else in the entire world. And God knows she wouldn’t strangle her daughter to death. It just doesn’t happen that way. There would have to have been some previous behavior to suggest this was possible, and there simply was not.

  I mentioned that when I first met Patsy, she was wearing a large cross around her neck. I’ve often seen people accused of crimes suddenly get religion, and I was wondering if the stress of what she was undergoing had occasioned this necklace. But then when I had the opportunity to examine many of the Ramsey family snapshots, I saw that she had been wearing this same cross for several years. I learned it had been given to her by her minister during her cancer treatments. I saw nothing to imply to me that her religious faith and her belief in her miraculous salvation from cancer were anything but genuine. And I have trouble believing that she could have been so cynical as to assert that her baby’s killer would get his just desserts from God even if he eluded temporal justice if she were
the killer. This is not to say that I have been taken in or influenced one way or another by her religiousness. I am only pointing out a belief structure on her part that seemed to be internally consistent.

  LOU SMIT’S SCENARIO

  I was not alone in my analysis. In March 1997, Alex Hunter hired a retired El Paso County Sheriff ’s Department homicide detective named Lou Smit to conduct an investigation on behalf of the DA’s office. El Paso County is due south of Denver and encompasses Colorado Springs and the U.S. Air Force Academy. Smit, a gentle and soft-spoken man in his sixties, had acquired legendary status in Colorado as a brilliant investigator with an astounding 90 percent clearance rate on more than two hundred homicides. In his wallet he kept a plastic photo folder with pictures of some of the victims for whom he’d obtained justice.

  Smit’s legend was solidified with his working of the 1991 murder of Heather Dawn Church, a little girl who was killed in her house near Colorado Springs. The case went nowhere for four years with the prevailing attitude being that someone in the family had done it, and the police were not aggressively seeking other potential suspects. With dogged determination and an obsessive attention to detail, Smit found a print at the scene that had pretty much been overlooked. He was able to match it to a suspect who was subsequently arrested in Florida. Smit had pulled the proverbial rabbit out of the hat.

  Shortly after Smit came on the Ramsey case, he examined all the evidence and, unlike the Boulder PD, concluded that, as in the Heather Church case, an intruder had killed JonBenet. He believed that a pedophile who had seen JonBenet in public decided to go after her that night and broke into the house while the Ramseys were celebrating with the Whites.

  The offender probably went in through the grate and window well to the basement, then explored the entire house. He used Patsy’s pad and pen to write the ransom note. Then, before the family returned home, he hid and waited for them. Once he was convinced they were all asleep, he went into JonBenet’s bedroom and immobilized her with a stun gun applied twice directly to her skin. He taped over her mouth with duct tape he had brought in with him and carried her unconscious down to the basement, where he could remove her from the house without disturbing the parents on the third floor.

  He found Patsy’s paint box and broke off the brush handle to fashion into a garrote with the cord he’d brought. As he choked the child as part of his erotic fantasy, he simultaneously penetrated her with his fingers. The unidentified DNA under JonBenet’s nails and in her underpants, the unidentified pubic hair, an unidentified palm print on the door, a Hi-Tec brand bootprint on the floor, and a scuff mark on the wall below the window all came from the UNSUB, according to Smit’s theory. The fingernail deposits occurred when JonBenet awakened and tried to fight him off. That was when he panicked and struck her hard in the head, possibly with a flashlight. Believing he’d killed her, he left the body and escaped from the house, taking with him the articles he’d brought in—the cord, the duct tape, and the stun gun.

  Smit also had an interesting alternative theory to the $118,000 figure. If the intruder was planning to flee to Mexico, at the exchange rate in effect at the time, $118,000 would have yielded 1 million pesos.

  After he left the DA’s office, Smit went through his presentation on the case for me. I didn’t necessarily agree with all of his interpretations, but his overall approach made a lot of sense, much more than the twisted logic of the bed-wetting scenario. Many of the other investigators, including, according to Steve Thomas, some from Quantico, objected to Smit’s assertion that an intruder would be bold enough to break in and then hang around a house full of sleeping people. But there is much precedent for this. You can be fearless or mission-oriented without being particularly criminally sophisticated.

  THE STUN GUN THEORY

  Lou Smit pursued the Ramsey investigation with every bit of the dedicated meticulousness with which he had worked the Church case and all the others. His theory took shape when, studying photographs of JonBenet’s body, he noticed two sets of small red welts on her skin. Each set was the same, with the two marks in the same relationship to each other. He thought it highly unlikely that two such regular marks could be coincidental. He pursued this with several people, eventually ending up with Michael Dobersen, the coroner of Arapahoe County, Colorado. Dobersen had worked on a case involving a stun gun. After studying the photographs Smit showed him, he said that they did seem to be consistent with a stun gun, but he couldn’t say for sure without examining the body itself.

  Smit pursued the stun gun possibility and narrowed down the type of weapon that could have produced the telltale marks to an Air Taser brand. According to Steve Thomas, the police discounted the possibility of a stun gun being used in the crime, but I do not know why. I am not an expert on such weaponry, but when Smit showed me his evidence, it looked compelling to me.

  Like the attic floorboard in the Lindbergh kidnapping, this is one of those elements upon which the entire case can hinge. If, in fact, a stun gun was used by the offender, that would virtually rule out the parents by itself, in my view.

  A stun gun could be used on a six-year-old child with only two possible intentions in mind: to torture her for sexual pleasure or to immobilize her. Neither of these fits into any reasonable scenario involving the Ramseys. The presence of a stun gun would show planning and intent, not accident. If the marks on JonBenet’s body did come from a stun gun (and it would be unlikely to have two sets that so match up to an Air Taser that did not), it is interesting to note that while the notepad and the possible head-blow weapon were in plain view in the house, the items intended to control—the duct tape, the cord, and the possible stun gun—were not found, suggesting the offender probably brought them with him. This is also probably true of the flashlight, which would be another natural implement for an intruder to bring. When he found he needed a blunt-force weapon, then, he had it right there.

  THE RANSOM NOTE

  Few would disagree that the three-page ransom note is as important a piece of evidence as exists in this case. Anyone hoping to come up with a theory of who killed JonBenet Ramsey has to come to grips with the significance and meaning of this communication.

  When I saw the note, how long and bizarre it was, my first thought was that, regardless of who wrote it, it had to have been written before the killing, not afterward. No one—family member or intruder—would have had the presence of mind, the mental concentration, to sit down in the house and write this out with the body lying there in the basement. For this reason, I don’t believe the note was part of a staging in the same way that the police and some members of the FBI seem to believe. This does not mean I think monetary gain was necessarily the prime motivator in the case, although it could have been. It just means that the note was written deliberately, not as a hasty cover-up after the fact.

  With very few exceptions, the spelling is correct and the syntax consistent, leading me to believe the note was written by an educated individual. Compare this to the Lindbergh communications or the Jack the Ripper “From hell” note. But it is so strange and the amount of the ransom demand is so small relative to the Ramseys’ wealth and what we would expect an extortionist to ask for that we can rule out sophisticated or professional criminals. If this is a criminal-enterprise homicide, it was perpetrated by an amateur.

  For the sake of convenience, I will use the masculine pronoun in this analysis.

  To begin with, the phrase “Listen carefully!” implies an offender unsure of himself who therefore feels the need to secure attention. Using the plural “we” lends him more strength and credence, as does the suggestion that they are foreign terrorists with a political agenda. However, the silliness and awkwardness of the sentences “We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction. We respect your bussiness [sic] but not the country that it serves” gives him away. What occurs to me is the construction of a teenager or young adult who watches a lot of movies. I can imagine a movie character saying, “They repre
sent a small foreign faction . . .”

  Even the phrase “At this time we have your daughter in our posession” is awkward and unsophisticated. And interestingly, though there are repeated references throughout the note to “your daughter,” she is never mentioned by name. Is it possible the writer of the note did not know her name or, even more likely, did not know how to spell it?

  On the second page, the writer says, “Any deviation of my instructions will result in the immediate execution of your daughter. You will also be denied her remains for proper burial.” This also speaks to the writer’s insecurity. And I don’t believe a mother would refer to her daughter’s death as an execution. In the same way that Patsy wouldn’t physically abuse the body, I don’t believe she would talk about withholding the remains. This would be too painful for the mother to countenance.

  Anyone trying to make up a ransom note as staging would write something as short and to the point as possible. You’d be careful not to give any unnecessary clues.

  I find it equally interesting that the note instructs Ramsey to “withdraw $118,000.00 from your account.” It doesn’t merely demand the money, it gives specific instructions, as if the writer knew that this precise amount of money was available in the account. I therefore think it likely that the writer had been in the house before and seen some documentation, possibly a pay stub, that this amount had been deposited in John Ramsey’s account. To a young adult, this might have seemed like a lot of money and a good amount to ask for.