A search was initiated to locate an investigator who would take over the lead role for the D.A.s office, and Lacy chose retired Arvada, Colorado Police Department investigator Tom Bennett. Tom had initially started out part-time in his role as chief investigator in the case, but it was not long before he was working a full caseload and supervising the other investigators in the office.
He had been working for the D.A.’s office for nearly a year when I arrived on the scene, and I worked by his side for another 12 months. It wasn’t long before I began to take note of the signs that his workload and the Ramsey case had been taking a toll. He would frequently disappear behind the locked doors of the office dubbed the “Ramsey Room” and spend hours checking phone messages left on the tip line, checking email, and collating other leads that had been sent to the office.
When he finally emerged from the room, he would sometimes mutter references about the necessity to keep on “whacking moles.” It was a private joke shared between the two of us that referenced the “whack a mole” game. This was played in pinball parlours before the advent of electronic gadgets, where gophers would randomly poke up their head through a hole in the game-board and the player was charged with “whacking” as many of them as they could with a bludgeon before they disappeared back down their hole. Points were scored by direct hits landed on the heads of the quick little critters.
Tom apparently thought the nature of the game reflected the environs of the criminal justice system. The criminals just kept popping up, no matter how skilled we had become at knocking them down.
His frustration with the case first came to my attention in the late summer of 2004, not many months after I had joined the D.A.’s office. Tom advised me that John and Patsy Ramsey had scheduled a visit to the office and were requesting copies of the D.A.’s investigative files. He asked me confidentially what I thought about the matter.
I was dumbfounded. “Aren’t John and Patsy still considered possible suspects in the death of their daughter? How did Mark phrase it…the parents remain under an ‘umbrella of suspicion’?”
Tom nodded.
“Then why in the hell would anyone in their right mind consider handing over confidential files from an active investigation to a potential defendant!?”
Tom shrugged his shoulders wearily and thanked me for sharing my thoughts.
The Ramseys came for their visit, and Tom spent some time updating them on the status of his inquiry. He later told me that he had prevailed upon Mary Lacy, and no files were reportedly copied for the Ramsey family or their defense team.
In the meantime, I continued to work on a variety of cases that included Belinda King’s homicide. I had obtained Jeffery’s cell phone records and discovered that he liked to talk on the phone. He liked to talk a lot. Not having full time work, he seemed to spend a lot of time on the phone, and some of the folks he was talking to had arrest records for trafficking in cocaine and weapons offenses.
Belinda appeared to be the primary wage-earner in the family at the time, and they were having a difficult time financially. She had started a relatively new job, but had a positive outlook on life and was looking to improve her situation.
Things had been a little rocky over their 5-year relationship, but Jeffery and Belinda had finally picked out an engagement ring. A deposit of approximately $75.00 had put it on layaway at Walmart. Belinda had intended to pay off the balance quickly, so they could move forward with their plans of marrying. At some point, however, Jeffery’s plans took a turn south.
The Walmart receipt discovered in the back seat of his car revealed signs of Jeffery’s duplicity. He had withdrawn the cash down-payment for the ring on Saturday afternoon. Video surveillance at the jewelry counter, coupled with his cell phone records, documented him calling a man who had an arrest history of trafficking in cocaine, from inside the Walmart store.
By all appearances, Jeffery was cashing in his fiancé’s engagement ring for a line or two of coke.
We were unable to determine exactly when the television and VHS player went missing, but these presumably also went to feed Jeffery’s drug habit. I suspected that they were part of the package that made up the difference for a $100.00 price tag for a gram of cocaine.
We never had another opportunity to interview Jeffery after police took his initial confession, but putting two and two together led me to some conclusions about what may have happened between him and Belinda that holiday weekend.
The argument started when Belinda came home from work to discover the electronic equipment missing from the apartment. There was a verbal confrontation, and it came to light that Jeffery had funded his cocaine purchase by pulling the ring deposit from Walmart.
Cashing in the engagement ring became the last straw for Belinda. I suspect that she told Jeffery she was leaving him for good and told him to get out. That sparked a heated confrontation and what followed was a knock-down, drag-out fight that resulted in Belinda’s demise.
Jeffery’s cell phone records revealed that he frequently was up late at night conversing with people, and the call detail indicated he had been up until nearly 2:00 a.m. on Friday night. He began again late the next morning, and by Saturday afternoon we were able to pin down his exact location for one telephone call: the jewelry counter at Walmart.
His use of the cell phone ceased around 7:00 p.m. on Saturday evening – unusually early based on the track record of his cell phone records. I believed that this signified the end of Belinda’s life, and the beginning of a long weekend, where Jeffery attempted to muster up the courage to call his mother and tell her that he had killed his girlfriend.
Neighbors reported seeing him chain-smoking outside the apartment on several occasions over the course of the weekend, but he had not been overly communicative.
Authorities were eventually summoned to the home after Jeffery called his parents on Monday morning, Memorial Day. He had called them to report that something bad had happened to Belinda.
They responded immediately to discover the body of their future daughter-in-law laying supine on the floor of the guest bedroom. The blanket remained in place over her upper torso.
Criminal profilers will tell you that the placement of the blanket over Belinda’s upper torso and face was most likely due to Jeffery’s feelings of shame and remorse. He was unable to deal with the consequences of the violent actions directed toward his fiancé, and though he left her body in its final resting place on the floor, he was compelled to hide the results from view.
The use of a blanket in JonBenét’s murder took a different meaning, and will be discussed a little more in detail in a later chapter.
Jeffery would subsequently enter a guilty plea to the charges of murder, and was sentenced to 30 years in the Colorado Department of Corrections.
It was a sad and tragic affair for all involved, and I counted it as another one in the books for those who don’t believe illegal drugs destroy people’s lives.
It was late June 2005 when Tom Bennett pulled me aside one morning and asked if I was interested in taking over the chief investigator’s position for the office. He indicated that he wanted to spend more time with his wife and was ready to “hang up his spurs” for the second time in his lengthy law enforcement career.
For the most part, Tom had been fairly tight-lipped about the Ramsey leads that streamed into the office, but, based on several conversations we had had over the year, I knew that he felt most of the things coming into the office were a colossal waste of time.
Tom was now asking if I would be interested in taking over that lead role in the Ramsey investigation and run the team of investigators who worked for the Twentieth Judicial District Attorney’s office. In my wildest dreams, I had never imagined that I would one day be responsible for overseeing this investigation. I considered it to be a tremendous responsibility, and it took only a moment of consideration before I said “yes.”
I found myself having lunch with D.A. Mary Lacy and her first assistan
t Pete Maguire within a few days of that decision, and she shared her thoughts on how she wanted to see the Ramsey investigation proceed. The primary message was that she wanted to scale back the time spent by her staff on the case, and we discussed several different options to accomplish this task.
During a follow up meeting with Tom and First Assistant District Attorney Bill Nagel, Tom proceeded to advise that the volume of information (letters, email correspondence, telephone calls, and walk-in interviews) that was being received was extremely large and a time consuming to process. He characterized most of the information coming from the public as being of little value in moving the case forward and suggested that it was impossible for one investigator to manage a caseload and pursue Ramsey leads at the same time.
He advised that there were approximately two-dozen frequent callers and writers who had nothing material to offer to the case and indicated that he had specifically requested a handful of those individuals to cease their calls and correspondence. Despite those requests, telephone calls, letters, and emails continued to pour into the office.
It was eventually decided that the first thing to be cut was the responsibility of returning phone messages left on the tip line. We determined that one way to cut down on the amateur closet detectives was to deny them access to the time of a working criminal investigator. The message on the telephone tip line was changed to inform callers that if they believed they had a viable lead to present in the case that they reduce it to writing and submit it via the U.S. Mail or other carrier.
The second thing to go was the email. A generic email address was established on the D.A.’s website that was designed to provide the same message as that left on the telephone tip line. People who wished to provide information on the case were instructed to reduce it to writing and were informed that all leads would be evaluated on an individual basis.
A memorandum outlining these changes was circulated through the office and to the Boulder Police Department. Receptionists were advised to instruct citizen callers to forward their information in written form. They were also instructed to inform walk-in visitors that unannounced visits would not be granted interviews: that their information should be sent to the Investigations Division in written form and that after review and evaluation, it would be up to the chief investigator to determine if a follow-up interview would be conducted.
Law enforcement personnel calling with information were to be forwarded directly to my telephone extension.
All correspondence received in the matter would continue to be logged into the system that had been established by Tom when he first came to the office in 2002. I prepared a generic letter that would be sent back to those individuals submitting information that acknowledged receipt of and thanking them for their tendered lead in the case.
Letters of introduction were prepared and sent to Ramsey attorneys Lin Wood and Bryan Morgan advising them of the change in investigative assignment. I also spoke to Denver CBI Supervisory Agent Ron Arndt and Denver Police Department Crime Lab Director Greg Laberge to advise them of my new assignment. Both labs had been involved in the collection and analysis of the DNA involved in this case.
Tom set about the task of briefing me on the status of the investigation and the leads that he had pursued over the course of his involvement in the case. A few weeks later, I was being sworn as a grand jury investigator so I could review materials gathered in 1998 and 1999 when there had been a grand jury inquiry into the murder of JonBenét.
Tom took me on a tour of the Ramsey room and explained how the materials and binders had been stored in the cabinets lining the walls. It was my first glimpse into the “library” of investigative documents that had been compiled by the Boulder Police Department. It would be an understatement to say that I was awestruck by the sheer number of binders that filled the room.
The “murder book” that documented the investigation into the death of this little girl had evolved into a full-blown mini-library of materials. The last count of pages, revealed during the Cold Case Task Force meeting held in February 2009, indicated that approximately sixty thousand (60,000) pages of documents had been collected during the course of the investigation.
Tom proceeded to show me how to operate the I-Legal computer program that contained all of the investigative files. Every piece of paper in the case had been scanned to this program, and it held an incredible search engine that permitted an investigator to find anything in the massive file by just entering a few keystrokes on the computer screen. It would prove to be an incredible time-saving resource as I began to familiarize myself with the details of the case.
It seemed a blink of the eye before Tom had parted company with the office and I was filling his shoes as chief investigator for the D.A. in the Ramsey case. I was continuing to carry a full felony caseload for the prosecutors in our office, supervise the other members of our investigative unit and soon began to learn of Tom’s frustration. The leads that streamed into my office on JonBenét were nothing less than goofy and bizarre:
A woman sent in a child’s craft kit for a small loom that made kitchen hot-pads. No explanation provided.
Lengthy, indecipherable audio tapes were accompanied by dozens of unreadable chicken scratches of handwriting.
What could only be described as “manuscripts” were submitted that outlined intruder theories, identified traders of child sex pornography, and participants engaged in kinky sex rings.
The names of ex-boyfriends and spouses were provided because they were acting “weird” around the 1996 Christmas holidays.
I could go on, but I think you probably get the nature of the majority of “leads” that were being sent to our office.
There were a few things that came in that seemed to deserve further inquiry, however. In one instance, a local merchant called my office to explain that a customer had left some papers with him during a business transaction. I can’t recall the exact details at this writing, but he described handwritten notes on the back of the papers that described details about the death of JonBenét. They apparently were disturbing, and he thought he should report the information to our office.
I subsequently contacted the author of the notes, an elderly gentleman living in a retirement complex in south Boulder. It turned out he was thinking about writing a book about JonBenét and had been scribbling notes about his theory of events. He didn’t have all of his facts straight. The lead was a dead-end, but one of those that I felt deserved a little more attention than just surrendering it to a file box after applying a date stamp.
There were a couple of other leads that were generated by the public, but none that were particularly noteworthy once they had been chased down.
In any event, what is important to note is that when I first inherited the responsibility of handling this case, I felt it was necessary for me to become fully acquainted with the details of the investigation. I believed that I needed to know these details first-hand and not fall into the trap of assuming something based on a previously held perception. Moreover, I felt it was my responsibility to fully understand all of the elements of the case so that I would be in a position to fully evaluate all of the leads coming into my office.
I decided to get a fresh start by reviewing events that began at day one.
Chapter Twenty-One
Journey of Discovery
From the outset of my involvement in this case, I felt it was absolutely critical that I bring an objective viewpoint to the inquiry into this matter, and I did not take that responsibility lightly.
Despite my previous affiliation with the Boulder Police Department, I felt it was my professional obligation to fully evaluate all of the evidence that had been gathered over the course of the investigation into JonBenét’s murder, and to reach my own conclusions as to who may have been involved in her untimely death. To have moved forward in any other fashion would have been irresponsible.
Stepping into this role, I was aware that there existed two different and
contrasting theories that accounted for the events surrounding JonBenét’s death. The first theory outlined her mother’s obsession with perfection, and her anger with JonBenét for returning to a pattern of bed-wetting. In a fit of anger, Patsy was purported to have struck out in rage, killing her beloved daughter. A cover-up of the circumstances then followed in an attempt to lead investigators away from the embarrassment of family involvement. The ransom note, for which Patsy could never be eliminated as authoring, became a focal point for this hypothesis.
The other camp favored the intruder – pedophile theory. A clever man, intimately familiar with the family, had entered the Ramsey home on Christmas night and sexually assaulted the object of his desire. To throw investigators off his trail, he took the time to craft a ransom note from writing materials found in the home, pointing police to a disgruntled group of foreigners who had originally intended to take John Ramsey’s daughter for ransom. A stun gun had been used to render JonBenét unconscious during the kidnapping, and this is why no one else in the household had been alerted to her abduction.
There may have been some other theories floating around out there at the time, but these seemed to be the two primary and prevailing theories that explained the circumstances surrounding JonBenét’s death.
I determined to set aside any misconceptions, and prior thoughts I may have had about the case, and began the task of reviewing the investigative files that had accumulated over approximately nine (9) years’ worth of effort. It was my intention to review and evaluate the evidence that had been gathered up to that point in time, with the primary objective of becoming sufficiently familiar with the details of the case so that I could intelligently and properly screen the new leads regularly streaming into my office.
I began the process by reading the reports of the officers and investigators who were first on scene that morning. I wanted to know first-hand what they saw and what they did. This included the reports completed not only by uniformed officers, investigators, and crime scene technicians, but the recorded statements of the Victim Advocates and civilians who were present in the home that day…the family friends who had been summoned to the Ramsey home for a “family emergency” by Patsy.
Foreign Faction: Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet? Page 19