Popular Crime

by Bill James

  John and Patsy’s book is unremarkable, and will not convince you that the Ramseys are innocent. It advances the theory that JonBenet was killed by an intruder, and gives the Ramseys’ slant on the many controversies that complicate the case.

  JonBenet, by ex-Detective Thomas, attempts to convince the reader that Patsy Ramsey killed JonBenet and John Ramsey conspired to cover it up. The book is well worth reading, essentially because it exposes the investigation as a naked emperor. Detective Thomas makes argument after argument about the Ramseys’ guilt—all of them palpably false, and most of them ludicrous. At some point the reader realizes that the police investigating the murder simply have no case, but have so convinced themselves of the Ramseys’ guilt that they will interpret anything as being evidence against them.

  The theory that JonBenet was killed by her parents is really two separate and incompatible theories: 1) that JonBenet was killed by the Ramseys in a deliberate and pre-planned act, and 2) that JonBenet was accidentally killed by the Ramseys, who then staged the crime scene.

  That JonBenet was killed by her parents in a pre-planned murder is utterly irrational, and no one believes this, including Detective Thomas, who explicitly states that he believes in the other option. Yet having said this, the good Detective then attempts, not once but many times, to sneak into his shopping cart what can only be interpreted as evidence of pre-planning.

  To begin with the most ridiculous example … the duct tape. The black duct tape found on JonBenet’s mouth was not found anywhere else in the Ramsey house, despite an exhaustive search for it. The obvious conclusion is that the tape was brought into the house and carried out of the house by the murderer.

  Detective Thomas can’t find any evidence that the Ramseys had ever owned, used, or touched this type of black duct tape on any other occasion. He can, however, show that the duct tape was sold at a local store. He can find evidence that the Ramseys shopped at that store (as did everyone else in Boulder). He can find a receipt showing that Patsy Ramsey, several weeks before the crime, bought something at that store for $1.99, and that this store sold the duct tape for $1.99.

  The problem is, the $1.99 item purchased by Patsy Ramsey several weeks before the crime could be duct tape, light bulbs, Scotch tape, an extension cord, drain cleaner, scouring pads, pliers, a houseplant, a Christmas knick-knack, or any of hundreds of other items. Not only that, but the store also sold the same duct tape in different sizes at several other prices. That means that, had Patsy Ramsey purchased something at the store for $1.19 or $4.79, that also, in Detective Thomas’ mind, could have been taken as evidence that she had purchased the black duct tape. By Thomas’ logic, 100% of the people who shopped at that store—which was everyone in Boulder—could be shown to have perhaps purchased a roll of black duct tape. It was evidence against everybody.

  The information about the duct tape has no value toward incriminating the Ramseys, and yet Detective Thomas returns to it over and over, ranting about the failure of the District Attorney’s office to take this “evidence” seriously, and there is some similar nonsense about nylon cord that could also have been purchased at the same store. Or some other store. Page 179:

  Among the dossiers we found … were the very things the DA had been blocking us from obtaining: the Ramseys’ long-distance telephone and itemized credit card records … I walked around for days thinking of what I had seen on those records from hardware stores and marine supply outlets in various states. Such places sell duct tape and cord like that used in the murder.

  The Ramseys shopped at some store that sold duct tape? Wow; what a revelation. But I have not yet touched on the central absurdity of the Detective’s argument, which is: that were it grounded in something other than speculation, this would be evidence of careful pre-planning, weeks before the event, of a crime that Detective Thomas explicitly concedes was not pre-planned. And, not to be unkind, but anyone who believes that this is “evidence” has no business being involved in a homicide investigation.

  A Vassar Shakespeare professor, trying to establish a field of knowledge we might call forensic textual analysis, wrote a letter to Patsy Ramsey early on in the case stating that, as a result of studying the language of the note, “I know you are innocent—know it absolutely and unequivocally. I will stake my professional reputation on it.” Later on the professor was able to push his way into the case, convincing first Alex Hunter and later the cops that he knew what he was doing. The police met with the professor, and brought him over to their way of seeing things. The professor then wrote a 100-page report concluding that Patsy Ramsey clearly did write the note, and offering to testify under oath that she had.

  Once Hunter learned of the earlier communication, of course, he immediately dismissed the professor. Obviously, in view of the earlier comments, the professor could not testify against the Ramseys. And, again not wishing to be unkind, but anyone who has any difficulty understanding why this is true is not a homicide detective.

  Thomas’ statement about this—I swear I am not making this up—is “To me, that only strengthened his position, not weakened it, for it showed he had no anti-Ramsey bias. Once the professor had access to the actual case documents, he changed his mind.” Page 284 in Thomas’ book; I swear he said that.

  Almost every page of Detective Thomas’ book contains these kind of inane allegations of “evidence.” Patsy Ramsey wore a red sweater to Christmas celebrations the day before the crime, and was wearing a red sweater the next morning. Detective Thomas thinks it could be the same sweater!

  And, if it is the same sweater? She had a new Christmas sweater; it had a lifespan of about four days. She wore it to visit friends on Christmas, and she wanted to wear it to travel in the next day. This is entirely normal behavior, even for rich people who have lots of clothes.

  The medical examiner placed the time of JonBenet’s death at 6 to 12 hours before she was found, a little after 1:00 in the afternoon of the 26th of December. Since the Ramseys called police before 6:00 in the morning, that pushes the most likely time of death backward—according to Thomas (p. 147)—to sometime between 10 o’clock and 1 AM.

  This, of course, is transparently false. It places the time of death between 1 AM and 5:52 AM. Thomas moves the timeline backward, contradicting the evidence, because the earlier time frame fits better with the theory that Patsy Ramsey killed her daughter, whereas a later time frame works better with the intruder theory. If Patsy Ramsey had a conflict with her daughter and lost her temper, that most likely would have occurred shortly after the Ramseys got home Christmas night, about 10 o’clock. If an intruder committed the murder, that most likely would not have occurred until after everyone was asleep.

  On the duct tape that had covered JonBenet’s mouth, there was found a single hair, a beaver hair. Not a pubic hair; an actual beaver. When Patsy Ramsey shows up at an interview months later wearing fur-lined boots, the police begin demanding a search warrant to seize the boots, and Thomas—who apparently slept through the class on “probable cause”—is angry that the D.A.’s office will not cooperate with this request.

  But the source of the beaver hair should hardly bedevil a good detective. JonBenet was murdered in the basement, right next to where Patsy Ramsey’s paintbrushes were stored, and the garrote was fashioned using one of the paintbrushes. Artist’s paint brushes are very often made from beaver hair.

  Not that the police are entirely to blame for the mess. The Ramseys, as we noted, sealed themselves off from the investigation at a very early date, which made it impossible for the police to check them out and move on with the investigation. And the District Attorney’s office, at times, seemed to have grown so antagonistic toward the police investigation that they looked for reasons to meddle.

  A neighbor reported hearing a scream about 2 o’clock in the morning of December 26. It is reported on the internet—although this fact does not appear in any of the books I have read—that a houseguest of this same neighbor distinctly heard the sound of a
grate scraping against concrete about ten or fifteen minutes later. However—or so it is unreliably reported on the internet—the police never talked to the neighbor’s houseguest.

  Detective Thomas seems unaware of this report, but he does say something interesting related to it. Subsequent audio tests revealed that, while the Ramseys might or might not have been able to hear a scream from the basement of the house, the neighbor quite certainly could have. The police thus wanted to immediately re-interview the neighbor. The District Attorney’s office inexplicably ordered them not to, on the theory that this might interfere with their trial preparation of this witness. This would be odd reasoning if a trial were at hand. Since no trial was ever on the horizon, it seems a stretch. But this lends credibility to the allegation that the neighborhood was not thoroughly canvassed by police.

  Detective Thomas says (p. 23) that Patsy Ramsey “changed a very important part of her story,” in that she initially told a police officer that she checked JonBenet’s bedroom before heading downstairs and finding the note, whereas later she would say that she first went downstairs.

  First, only a person determined to find the Ramseys guilty could possibly interpret this as “chang[ing] a very important part of her story,” since it makes no conceivable difference.

  Second, who is to say whether Ramsey or the police officer correctly remembered the earlier conversation? Whenever two people talk about anything, each will remember details of the conversation differently. It is inevitable that this would happen in this case, and these inevitable small discrepancies cannot be used to substitute for actual evidence.

  Detective Thomas says (p. 23) that John Ramsey told three police officers that he had “personally checked the doors the previous night and all were secure,” and insists that Ramsey is lying, since Ramsey later would say that he does not remember checking the locks or saying that he had.

  Since it seems immensely likely that the intruder was in the house before the Ramseys returned home that evening, it is immaterial whether Ramsey did or did not check the locks. And as to saying that he had, who would remember every word that he said under such bewildering and terrifying circumstances?

  Detective Thomas insists (p. 15, and many times subsequently) that, in the tape recording of Patsy Ramsey’s 911 call, Burke Ramsey can be heard in the background saying “What did you find” and John Ramsey saying “We’re not talking to you.” Since the Ramseys have insisted that Burke never woke up during the phone call, Detective Thomas insists that they are lying.

  But no one except some corporation in Los Angeles hired by the Boulder police can make anything out of the background noise. The FBI crime labs and the U.S. Secret Service studied the tape, and stated specifically that there was nothing there. I am aware of numerous cases in which police “heard” things on tapes that were later determined to be hallucinations. And assuming for the sake of argument that Burke Ramsey did wake up at this time and the Ramseys somehow blanked out on it, again, what would that prove?

  Detective Thomas argues that, if the Ramseys got out of bed that morning at the time they say they got out of bed, they wouldn’t have had time to make their 6:30 AM flight to Michigan. But the Ramseys got out of bed at 5:30. The flight (according to everybody but Detective Thomas) was set for 7:15, and according to Google it was an 18-minute drive to the airport. And it wasn’t a scheduled flight; it was a private flight, leaving from an airport that was never busy. It would leave whenever the Ramseys got there and were ready to go.

  Detective Thomas states over and over that there is no evidence of a stun gun being used in the crime, as if saying this often enough would make it true. In fact—as a court ruled in 2003—there very clearly is evidence of a stun gun being used. There are marks on her neck and on her back like those left by a stun gun, which are at the correct spaces to indicate that they are stun gun marks. There are Christmas photos of JonBenet showing clearly that those marks weren’t there the day before. Police responded to this by trying to tie John Ramsey to a stun gun, just as they had tried to tie Patsy to the duct tape. They found, at his office, a catalogue that offered for sale a stun gun, but it was the wrong type of stun gun. That failing, they then began to insist that there was no stun gun; those were just bruises.

  They don’t look like bruises.

  Boulder police released a statement that “there were no footprints in the snow” leading away from the house, which is taken to mean that there was no evidence of an intruder leaving the house. Photos taken early that morning show that the sidewalks were clear, and that there was a patchy snow left from two days earlier on the ground. In any case, the duct tape, cord, the stun gun and the murder weapon (whatever it was that JonBenet was hit over the head with) were not in the house at the time of the discovery of the body. If no one left the house, what happened to them?

  There was a window near where JonBenet’s body was found, with a suitcase sitting under the window, a scuff mark on the wall, broken glass from the window, and a grate outside the window. A crime scene photo taken on the morning of the murder clearly and unmistakably shows fresh vegetation trapped underneath the edge of the grate, as if the grate had been recently lifted and replaced. Police insisted:

  1) That the window had been broken months earlier,

  2) That the suitcase had been moved under the window, for an obscure and improbable reason, on the morning after the crime,

  3) That the window was too small for an intruder to crawl through (which was later shown to be flatly untrue; in fact, a large man could quite easily crawl through the window), and

  4) That there were spider webs on the grate, which, in the opaque logic of the police, proved that the grate had not been pushed open recently, despite the fact that it obviously had.

  The ransom note is signed “SBTC.” Police argue that this is evidence against Patsy Ramsey because she liked to use acronyms. This is also evidence against John Ramsey, because he was once stationed at the Subic Bay Training Center in the Philippines (although the place he was stationed was never actually called the Subic Bay Training Center).

  The room in which JonBenet’s body was found had been latched shut with a peg on a screw. Detective Thomas wonders (p. 308), “Would an intruder … have taken the time to relatch the obscure cellar door peg that police and Fleet White found in the locked position?” But had the cellar door been left unlatched, JonBenet’s body would have been found at about six o’clock in the morning. Because the door was latched, it was not found until one o’clock in the afternoon. By taking three seconds to relatch the door, the murderer bought seven hours to flee the scene or to collect the ransom.

  Detective Thomas can’t understand why the killer would write the ransom note in the house, rather than bringing it with him, and Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey? refers to “the idiocy of a kidnapper who forgot to bring a ransom note” (p. 327). But had the intruder been arrested breaking into the house, the possession of the ransom note would have been evidence of the intent to commit a far more serious crime, and might well have made the difference between a weekend in jail and a twenty-year prison sentence.

  When you break through the clutter and boil off the anger, Detective Thomas’ case against the Ramseys comes down to three things:

  1) That Patsy Ramsey wrote the ransom letter,

  2) That the Ramseys lied to investigators about any number of small points, and

  3) That the Intruder theory is highly improbable, whereas the Ramsey case is straightforward.

  On the first point, I do agree that the handwriting of the ransom letter is quite similar to Patsy Ramsey’s handwriting.

  On the second and third points, I think he is simply wrong.

  Some weeks into the investigation, mindful of the lack of experience on the police investigative team, the D.A.’s office hired a veteran detective to participate in the investigation, bringing the number of people involved who had some idea how to actually investigate a homicide up to a total of one. Lou Smit was a retired homicid
e cop who had participated in hundreds of homicide investigations in a long career.

  Within days of joining the investigation, Smit realized that it was unlikely that the Ramseys had committed the murder. Over the following weeks he developed a theory of what had happened. This theory, with a little of my own inference and extrapolation, is as follows. As the Ramseys left their house about 5 o’clock on Christmas Day, someone was watching the house. He broke into the house, probably through the basement window, and immediately explored the area where he had entered the house, thus finding the wine cellar where the body was found the next day, which was near the point of entry. He brought with him the cord with which JonBenet was bound, duct tape, and the stun gun.

  The killer hid in the house for several hours while the Ramseys were away, and wrote the ransom note on a legal pad that he found in the house while waiting for the Ramseys to return. When the Ramseys returned he hid in the house, probably under a bed in an empty bedroom near JonBenet’s room. Once the family was asleep he crawled out of hiding, crept into JonBenet’s room, and zapped the sleeping girl with the stun gun, immobilizing her. He then bound her wrists, put duct tape on her mouth, and carried the girl down to the basement, to the room outside the wine cellar, where Patsy Ramsey’s paintbrushes were stored along with a lot of other junk. He put her down for a moment while he placed the ransom note on the stairs, her head resting against the banister, thus getting the green decorations from the staircase into the girl’s hair.

  In the basement he fashioned a garrote from a paintbrush handle and the cord he had brought with him. He put this around JonBenet’s neck, pulled off her clothes or some of her clothes, and sexually abused her. At some point she awakened, and, despite the duct tape over her mouth, managed to get off a scream. The murderer instinctively hit her hard on the top of her head with something handy, perhaps the stun gun, thus crushing her skull. He hastily re-applied the duct tape over her mouth, hid JonBenet’s body in the adjoining wine cellar, and immediately turned his attention to getting out of the house.