Photo 16 - JonBenét’s bathroom. Note toothbrush, toothpaste, and red sweater on right counter. (Not pictured is toilet paper in the bowl of the toilet to the left of counter.) Source: Boulder PD Case File
Additionally, Patsy was now indicating that she had found the note first before checking JonBenét’s bedroom. This conflicted with the information that she had provided to officers on the morning of December 26th, where she indicated that she had stopped by her daughter’s bedroom on the way downstairs to the kitchen. The bed had been empty at that time, and it wasn’t until she continued to the kitchen that she found the note.
Was this an important discrepancy or merely hysterical confusion on the part of the mother of a missing child?
Investigators were also concerned about the statement that she had only read the first few lines of the ransom note before charging back upstairs to check on JonBenét. During the panic of the moment, Patsy had been able to tell the 911 dispatcher that the ransom note was signed off with the word “Victory,” and the initials “SBTC”.
How would she know that if she had never truly handled the ransom note, or read through all three pages? This information suggested prior knowledge of the content of the note.
John had revealed a previously unknown trip to the basement that took place before the discovery of JonBenét’s body. He had never mentioned this exploration to officers on the morning of the reported kidnapping.†
John also provided specific details about immediately observing a white blanket, and his daughter’s body upon opening the cellar room door that afternoon. He reported that he saw the white blanket, in which JonBenét was wrapped, the “instant” he opened the door of the Wine Cellar. This observation purportedly took place before he flipped on the light switch.
This didn’t jive with details provided by Fleet White during his interviews with detectives. White had opened the cellar door earlier that morning and reported that it was too dark to see anything without a light being turned on in the room. He had stepped partially through the door and couldn’t find a light switch, let alone see the blanket and body.
Investigators pondered the question: How could John Ramsey have immediately recognized the blanket and the body under the same conditions?
When all was said and done, investigators went away from the interviews with more than a few unanswered questions and continued to feel that JonBenét’s parents could not be eliminated as possible suspects in the crime.
The Ramseys immediately held their own press conference the following day, May 1, 1997, and invited a select few from the Denver media stations to attend. Ramsey media publicist Pat Korten coordinated the event in a Boulder hotel conference room.
Each of the seven local reporters had been hand-picked by the Ramsey team, and many others who had been covering the story from early on were covetous of an invitation. The Ramseys had not spoken to the media since their January 1st CNN interview, and reporters were anxious to see what they had to say, especially after their interview with Boulder Police investigators.
Carol McKinley, a reporter working for Denver KOA Radio at the time, received a last-minute invitation on the morning of the press conference. Apparently, Korten had forgotten to include anyone from the radio community, and had called McKinley not long before the Ramseys were preparing to issue their statement.
Korten provided McKinley with the secret location of the conference, and even gave her a password that she would need to gain entry to the room where the Ramseys would be speaking.
McKinley had taken the telephone call while in the company of other reporters, and they had been discussing the possible location and timing of the family press conference. Based upon her cell phone conversation, some of her peers immediately sensed that she had been granted access to the inner sanctum. She had to drive in a roundabout fashion to lose the tail of reporters who were trying to follow her to the secret location of the Ramsey press conference.
Once she arrived in the lobby of the hotel, McKinley was approached by someone who asked her to recite her secret password. She muttered the word “subtract,” and she was then adorned with a bright green, circular sticker. “Don’t let that fall off.” she was warned. The sticker granted her access to the small conference room that contained the Ramseys.
All of the reporters present were advised of the ground rules for the conference. It would only last thirty minutes. John and Patsy Ramsey would make a short introductory statement, and then reporters could ask their questions. They could not, however, ask any questions about the murder investigation. They were not permitted to ask any questions about, or refer to other people that were in the room. These were family attorneys and friends who reportedly were accompanying the family for this endeavor.
Any violation of the ground rules would result in the immediate termination of the press conference.
McKinley and her fellow reporters entered a darkened hotel conference room to see John and Patsy Ramsey sitting by a well-lit table. A beautiful floral arrangement sat upon the table, and seemed to draw attention away from about a dozen people who stood in the shadows out of view of the cameras.
Photo 17 - Patsy and John Ramsey display the reward poster that had been prepared in advance of their May 1, 1997 press conference. Courtesy: The Denver Post.
As the press conference began, Patsy Ramsey held up the reward poster that had been published in the Boulder Daily Camera several days earlier and asked for the help of the journalists who had been invited to attend the press conference.
“I’d like to say that we would, one of the reasons we asked all of you to be here this morning is that we need your help from this moment on. I know you have been diligently covering this case and we appreciate some of what you’ve said…not all of what you’ve said. We need to all work together as a team and we need your help.”
The reporters were a little gun-shy, and stumbled through a series of innocuous questions that danced around the issue of the brutal murder of a little girl. True to their word, the press conference ended precisely at the 30-minute mark.
McKinley later described the environment as one of the most “bizarre” media events she had ever witnessed. Ramsey attorneys and their friends hovered behind the reporters and their cameras in the darkened corners of the room.
She felt that nothing of substance was discussed, and the conference gave the appearance of being a “fluff” piece intended to the give the family the opportunity to show their continuing effort to “cooperate” with authorities. Many had the clear impression that the Ramseys were attempting to manage the media and spin their own side of the story.
Unbeknownst to the media, however, was that by the time the Ramseys gave their first official interview with police on April 30, 1997, the thirty or so Boulder investigators assigned to the case had already interviewed nearly 400 people. The list included those who were thought to be witnesses who could provide background information, as well as those whom police considered to be potential suspects.
By that time, investigators had also collected sixty-three (63) sets of handwriting exemplars, sixty-four (64) sets of fingerprints, forty-five (45) DNA / blood samples and fifty (50) sets of hair samples.
One (1) polygraph examination had been administered to a non-familial suspect.
In spite of their assurances of wanting to continue to cooperate with authorities, John and Patsy Ramsey wouldn’t participate in another law enforcement interview for another fourteen months.
The next time around, Boulder Police Department investigators would not be invited to the table.
Chapter Twelve
Returning to the Scene of the Crime
It was reported that sometime after Lou Smit joined the D.A.’s office in March of 1997, he began to hold a prayer vigil outside the 15th street Ramsey home. Sitting in his van, Smit prayed for JonBenét and her family. As a devoted Christian, I presume that he also prayed for guidance in his effort to find the killer of this little girl.
A
t one juncture, the family reportedly came by the home as Smit was engaged in his personal vigil. They were invited to join him in the Lord’s Prayer, and some investigators came to suspect that this became a fairly regular occurrence over the late spring, and summer, of 1997.
It was mildly aggravating to some of the detectives, because it appeared that Smit was becoming a little too familiar with the Ramsey parents. Smit may have been trying to become better acquainted with the family so that he might learn something new about the murder, but the Boulder cops thought he was losing his objectivity in the case.
Boulder Police investigators returned to the home in July 1997, with another purpose in mind. By that time, they were trying to reconcile Fleet White’s accounting of events with those stated by John Ramsey. White had told investigators that he had not been able to see a thing when he opened the door of the Wine Cellar on the morning of the kidnapping. Ramsey had told them that he had spotted the white blanket on the floor immediately upon opening the door.
Investigators wanted to see for themselves what exactly could be seen, or not seen, when the door of the Wine Cellar was opened under similar lighting conditions.
Additionally, the neighborhood canvass had produced a witness who reported hearing a child scream on the night of the murder. Investigators wanted to verify whether or not this was feasible, and whether this scream could have been heard from within the confines of the home.
Though Boulder Police had originally requested a search warrant to return to the premises, the D.A.’s office secured the consent of the family and their realtor for the investigators to conduct their inquiries. As was typical of the time, a swarm of media vehicles camped outside the residence as police and D.A. investigators went about their business.
The interior of the old, 1920’s Tudor-style home had changed fairly significantly since detectives had last been through the home. Much of the furniture and personal belongings of the family had been removed. Carpet had been replaced in some areas, and the smell of fresh paint hung in the air. A “For Sale” sign adorned the front yard where there last had stood Christmas decorations.
Not long after arriving in the home, investigators noted something unusual. Small wiring ran from several motion detectors and they seemed to lead to a locked closet beneath the basement stairs. Though the house was old and had been subjected to extensive remodeling, the detectives thought it odd that the wiring to these devices would not have been concealed in the ceiling or walls.
Upon closer inspection, the motion detectors appeared to contain small camera lenses.
Sergeant Wickman kicked in the door of the closet and observed that a VHS recorder was actively recording four different rooms of the interior of the home. He directed Detective Gosage to collect the tape and later confirmed that members of the BPD investigative team had been recorded on the tape as they had moved around the home.
Closer examination of the recorder revealed that it was not set to record upon the activation of a motion detector, but had to be manually turned on to enter a record mode.
Neither the realtor, nor the Ramsey attorneys mentioned a word about the damages sustained to the locked closet door, or the removal of the VHS tape from the recorder. Their team of private investigators later took responsibility for the placement of the recorders, citing burglary concerns for the empty home. No one ever admitted to activating the recorder before the investigators had arrived on the scene that day.13
Investigators spent nearly a week moving through the three floors of the 7,000 square foot home. Police and D.A. investigators debated back and forth the likely scenarios that may have played out on the night of the kidnap and murder. They took turns wiggling through the basement bathroom, and Train Room windows, to determine the type of effort it would have taken to enter the home through those locations.
Debris from outside the bathroom window was dragged along with the faux intruder to the inside of the home, and was not consistent with the crime scene photos that showed an interior shelf below the window to be in pristine condition. The photos had also shown the bathroom window to be securely locked and there were no signs of forced entry at this location.
This particular window was eventually discounted as a possible point of entry, and it was perhaps the only thing that BPD and DA investigators would agree upon after leaving the home that week.
More time was spent debating the possibility that an intruder had made entry through the window-well of the Train Room. Lou Smit held to the belief that this was the perfect location for an intruder to have entered the home. The three strands of spider web anchoring the window grate to the foundation walls of the well seemed to play no significance in his theory of events, and he pointed to foliage between the metal grate and foundation as evidence that the grate had been lifted sometime recently.
Steve Thomas pointed out that the grate did not sit flush to the cement foundation and that it was a natural occurrence for foliage to grow into that space. They continued to argue about the other signs, or lack of signs, of possible entry observed in the dirt silt that covered the exterior windowsill and frame.
A black scuff mark located on the wall beneath the Train Room window also generated some discussion, and Smit thought for certain that it belonged to the intruder who had climbed into the home at that location. The theoretical debate regarding possibilities and probabilities went on all week long.
Detectives sometimes stayed into the wee hours of the night, listening to the creaks and groans of the old home. It seemed that one could not move about the house without being heard from another area of the home. Nearly every step taken seemed to cause some type of audible response from the floor joists of the structure.
Moreover, investigators found it difficult to move around in the darkness, and observed that a descent of the spiral staircase by use of the ambient light was a dangerous proposition. How had a perpetrator managed to do this while carrying a forty-pound child in his arms?
Detective Gosage had moved around to different parts of the home to see if shouting could be heard from the third-floor master suite of the parents. Investigators were trying to determine if the family would have been able to hear the same scream that neighbor Melody Stanton had claimed to hear. BPD investigators reported hearing Gosage’s shouts from various locations of the home, including the basement.
A partially open, street-facing, basement window was thought to have been responsible for Stanton’s ability to hear a scream emanating from the basement. An electrical cord had been run through this window over the Christmas holidays to provide power for the decorations displayed on the front lawn of the residence. This window was of insufficient size to have permitted anyone to have entered or exited the home from this location.
An expert was used to help construct the lighting conditions that would have been present when Fleet White and John Ramsey reported opening the door of the Wine Cellar. A white blanket was placed on the floor where JonBenét’s body had been found and sensitive photographic light meters were used in an attempt to duplicate the conditions of December 26th.
John Ramsey had stated that he observed the white blanket immediately upon opening the door. Investigators noted that the room was pitch-black when they re-created the same drill, and the blanket was unobservable to them.
Gosage noted in his reports that even with the interior lights on, he couldn’t see the blanket until he stepped into the room and had sufficiently cleared the short wall located to the left of the door.
After spending nearly a week exploring the scene of the crime, Boulder Police and D.A. investigators parted company. The many theories that had been discussed and debated during their time together in the home had only served to solidify their earlier positions on the matter.
Law enforcement investigators would not be the only people interested in visiting the scene of the crime. During the one-year anniversary of JonBenét’s murder, a number of people would gather outside her home to offer a prayer, light a candle, or pl
ace a stuffed animal on the lawn of the residence in memory of the little girl who once lived there.
The presence of one particular participant would catch the eye of Smit, however, and convicted sex-offender Gary Oliva14 would soon become the object of his inquiry. Smit would eventually discover that Oliva had written a poem about JonBenét. The fact that he owned a stun gun turned him into even more of a viable suspect as Smit continued his search to identify the intruder responsible for this crime.
Oliva, like many of the other registered sex offenders living in Boulder County, would be carefully scrutinized for possible involvement by police investigators working the case. He would be neither the first, nor the last of the pedophiles who were either intrigued by, or who fantasized about the death of this little 6-year-old girl.
Chapter Thirteen
Mystery Man
Autopsy protocols in this type of investigation calls for the collection of fingernail scrapings that might help identify trace evidence that would link a suspect to the crime. In many instances, a struggling victim may have scratched a perpetrator during the assault, and skin cells or blood from the assailant is left beneath the fingernails.
Scrapings from the fingernails of JonBenét’s hands revealed miniscule samples of DNA that belonged to two different male subjects, and one unidentified female. The samples were too small to identify their biological origin, i.e. blood or skin cells, and investigators came to theorize that the unknown DNA samples had been transferred from contaminated fingernail clippers used in the post-mortem examinations of other bodies processed through the morgue prior to her homicide.
Investigators were able to obtain the DNA samples from eight of the autopsy examinations that preceded that of JonBenét.
These samples were analyzed, but none of these matched the unknown male and female samples collected from JonBenét’s fingernails. Perhaps more disappointing, was the fact that the unknown samples lacked sufficient identifying markers that permitted their entry into the state and national DNA databases.
Foreign Faction: Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet? Page 12