by Bill James
From my standpoint, there are no problems whatsoever with Smit’s scenario. There is nothing about it that doesn’t sound right, there is nothing about it that is terribly unusual, there is nothing about it that doesn’t work. There is a substantial amount of evidence to suggest that this is what happened.
The police scenario, on the other hand, is bizarre, and—my own term—perversely naïve. Naïveté is an unrealistic belief in a highly improbable scenario, based on unquestioning faith. Perverse naïveté is an unrealistic belief in a highly improbable scenario, based on unrestrained cynicism. The belief in the Ramseys’ guilt is perversely naïve. The police saw the Ramseys as this too-perfect couple, rich and attractive people who went to church, had lots of energy, got involved in countless activities, and were totally in control of their lives. Being the experienced investigators that they were, they “knew” that every family had secrets, that there was a dark side to the brightest of lives.
The only thing was, they weren’t experienced investigators, at all. They were just a bunch of almost-amateur cops who had romanticized their life experiences to convince themselves that they were shrewd and savvy police veterans.
The Lou Smit interpretation of the case is now the mainstream view among those who are still involved in the effort to bring JonBenet’s killer to justice. Before the point was reached at which it became the mainstream view, unfortunately, the Ramsey family—on the heels of their tragedy—was hounded by the press, and ridiculed by comedians. It is perhaps the ugliest spectacle in the 200-year history of the American news media. It is my view that something had to have happened here which should never be allowed to happen. I wish I could tell you what it was.
Alex Hunter, who was a fine man and an exceptional District Attorney, had a long-standing policy of being open and cooperative with the press. This had always worked for him, dealing with local media; it had given him a reputation for honesty and accessibility, and it had given him some control of the story.
In the opening months of the Ramsey investigation Hunter tried to deal with the tabloid press as an extension of the way he had always dealt with the local press. The national tabloid press was as different from the local media as a tiger is from a housecat, vastly larger, angrier, more aggressive and more cynical. They ate him alive.
John Ramsey, who was a very fine man and an exceptionally competent manager, tried to take control of the situation and “manage” it toward the most successful outcome that was still possible after JonBenet’s death. He did this because that was what he did; he took control of things, and steered them toward chosen objectives—but it wasn’t appropriate under the circumstances. It wasn’t his place to manage the case. To gain control of the case, he had to try to rip the controls out of the hands of the police. The police had no intention of surrendering control over the case and intensely resented the effort to take control away from them, and this triggered a war between Ramsey and the police. Ramsey tried to control—and did control—when and where and under what conditions the Ramseys gave interviews. He pulled his family out of Boulder to give him control of the situation. He hired investigators, and he hired expensive lawyers who gave him bad advice.
The police—and in particular John Eller, who was the head of the investigation until his career in Boulder was destroyed by it—tried harder than anyone to keep control of the investigation. Eller engaged on the one hand in a tug-of-war with John Ramsey for control of the investigation, on the second hand in a battle with his subordinates (especially Detective Larry Mason) for control of the investigative squad, on the third hand in constant skirmishes with his boss, Chief of Police Tom Koby, on the fourth hand in hostile combat with the media, and on the fifth hand in an extremely unusual if not historically unprecedented War to End All Wars with the District Attorney’s office. He didn’t have enough hands. Eller was like a man who finds himself locked in a cage with a tiger, a gorilla, a bear and an elephant, but he does have a nightstick. Every time he succeeds in hitting the elephant in the balls with the nightstick, he thinks he’s scored a point. The more points Eller scored, the worse his situation became.
The case was lost early because the police didn’t take control of the things they could have and should have taken control of. It was lost late because Eller was determined to take control of things that he had no chance to control. What Eller needed to do was to go to the District Attorney’s office and say, “I need your help. I can’t control this situation. It’s too big for me; I simply cannot handle it.” Instead, in part because he hated the District Attorney’s office so much and in part because he had no overview of the situation, no Big Picture, and no experience with any investigation remotely like this, he continued, until he was forced to resign, to flail madly with his nightstick at the bear, the elephant, the tiger and the gorilla.
That’s the essential lesson of the Ramsey case: you don’t put a choke chain on a tiger. It just pisses him off.
XXXIII
The only thing I know for certain about the JonBenet Ramsey case is that the Ramseys are innocent, and I know that only because the arguments to the contrary are fantastic and irrational. What I have to offer you now is speculation, with which I hope you will be patient. It is my understanding of the rules of fine literature that I am allowed to speculate as long as I have the permission of the audience.
If you make three left turns you have made a right. The experts all assure us that the JonBenet crime scene was “staged” (No Shit, Sherlock), and that the perpetrator was “criminally unsophisticated.” He was criminally unsophisticated because he asked for an amount of money that, to the Ramseys, was kind of like asking for a candy bar and a new T-shirt, and also because he made any number of claims that nobody would take seriously, much less believe (i.e., “we represent a small foreign faction”). This is criminally unsophisticated.
Or is it?
The criminal asked for an amount of money that was very small to the Ramseys, yes, but the criminal also knew something. The murderer knew that JonBenet’s body was in the basement, where it would be discovered within hours. Therefore, the criminal knew that he had a very short period of time to collect the money. He asked for a small amount of money—small to John Ramsey, but three years’ salary for an average person—because he knew that John Ramsey could get that amount of money together quickly. John Ramsey could have raised much more than $118,000, true—but not in an hour. As it was, John Ramsey had the money by nine o’clock in the morning.
People assume that the perpetrator had no intention of actually collecting the money; that was all a charade. In fact, I believe that he very probably did intend to collect the money—and that he came within a whisker of actually doing so.
The criminal’s plan, I think, was this. He would watch the Ramsey house from somewhere in the neighborhood—his apartment, most likely, or a vacant house that he had broken into. He would “monitor” the Ramsey house—as he said in the ransom note that he would—and see if the police were called, and see if the Ramseys were scrambling around to get the money. If Ramsey returned from the bank carrying an attaché case and the police were not in evidence, he would call John Ramsey on a stolen cell phone, and tell Ramsey to take the money and his cell phone and start walking west on Aurora Avenue. When he walked past a certain point—alone—the criminal would call him on the cell phone, and tell him to put down the money and keep walking. In about 300 feet he would find an envelope that would tell him where JonBenet could be picked up.
Three things had to happen for the plan to work:
1) John Ramsey had to get the money together very quickly,
2) JonBenet’s body had to be not found for a few hours, and
3) The Ramseys had to not call the police.
Two of the three did happen. John Ramsey did get the money together very quickly, and the body was not found for several hours. The only thing that went wrong was that the police were called. Once the perpetrator saw that every cop in Boulder was going by the Ramsey h
ouse, of course, he abandoned his effort to collect the money. But the rest of the plan worked.
The “staging” of the crime scene was not designed to “work”; it was designed to fail. Obviously the crime scene was staged; a fourth-grader could tell you that. Who is really going to believe that there is a small foreign terrorist group, the SBTC, that is asking for $118,000 by kidnapping a millionaire’s daughter? Nobody is going to believe that; it is intended to be seen as nonsense.
The perpetrator’s central goal was to destroy the life of John Ramsey. His secondary goal was to come out of it with $118,000. Suppose that there was a person—an intelligent, organized person, but sick with envy—who hated John Ramsey with an all-consuming passion. He envied Ramsey his money, and his beautiful house, and his beautiful wife, and his beautiful children, and his boats and his airplanes. He hated Ramsey, and he was determined to destroy him.
Such a person would have known that the worst thing that had ever happened to Ramsey was the death of his daughter, and that the worst thing that could ever happen to him would be the death of his other daughter. I am going to arrange the death of that other daughter, he thought—and do it in such a way that the police will think Ramsey did it. I’ll make it look like she died in a sex game or something; the police will blame him.
Is there any way to make this any worse for him? I know—I’ll get his wife, too. I’ll make it look like she was involved, fake her handwriting or something. I’ll get some of her handwriting, learn to copy it, and make police think she wrote the ransom note.
What’s the worst time you could possibly do something like that to a man? How about Christmas? I’ll do it on Christmas day.
The ransom letter is directed at John Ramsey. We’re assuming that’s real.
In all of the books about JonBenet there is this line that comes up over and over again: It had to be an inside job. Somebody had to know things, personal things. OK; let’s assume that’s true.
One of the things that has to bother you about the case is, the handwriting really is very similar to Patsy’s. It could be a coincidence, I guess, and it could be Patsy’s actual handwriting, but nobody will testify that it is, and I don’t believe it is. What it really looks like, to be honest, is somebody faking Patsy Ramsey’s handwriting. He got most of the letter constructions right, missed on a few of them. Some little things aren’t exactly right, and quite a few of the things like how letter combinations are put together aren’t right, but there are some words that appear to be exact matches for Patsy Ramsey’s handwriting.
What if the killer wrote the ransom letter inside the house precisely because he knew that the police would figure this out and would jump to the conclusion that the Ramseys had staged the scene?
Ordinarily I am suspicious of the theory that the result of a crime was the intention of the criminal. But ordinarily, we at least consider the possibility that what happened was what the criminal intended to happen. It seems to me that in this case we have so routinely dismissed the criminal as a blundering incompetent that we have failed to consider the possibility that what he accomplished was exactly what he intended to accomplish: the systematic destruction of John Ramsey’s life.
Three left turns. The money was too small; that couldn’t be real. The body was in the basement. The crime scene was transparently staged.
But if you put them all together, they all work together. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but three lefts will.
We read about crime, we write about crime, we think about crime because we are concerned about crime. To persons who have not been the victims or collateral victims of a serious crime, this concern may seem excessive. To persons who have, the suggestion that we worry too much about it seems preposterous.
As an expert in nothing, I have two suggestions about how our system of justice could be improved. Well … I have 250 suggestions about how our system of justice could be improved; I just thought there was some chance you might read two.
First, there is something we could do, as a nation, that would cut our crime rate in half, and incidentally save us some money.
Build smaller prisons.
I hate to sound like I am proposing a panacea, but it is my view there would be wide-ranging benefits to us from getting rid of these huge, horrible prisons that we have become fond of building, and replacing them with a nationwide network of small prisons. My suggestion: A law, applying to every state, every county, every level of government, that no incarceration facility may be used to house more than 24 persons at any time.
Obviously it would take us many years to transition to a system of small prisons, but think about the benefits that it would provide. Large prisons become “violentocracies”—places ruled by violence and by the threat of violence. In a violentocracy, the most violent people rise to the top.
In any prison of any size, the prisoners are going to be pushed toward the level of the most violent persons in the facility. If you have a three-person prison and one guy is a thug, the other two are going to have to defend themselves against the thug. They’re going to have to get tougher in order to defend themselves, and by “tougher” what we mean right now is “more inclined to use violence.”
But the operation of this “violence virus” in a large prison is very different than it would be or could be in a small prison. In a prison of 3,000 people, the entire prison is pushed toward the level of violence created by the five most violent people in the joint. The most violent person finds the second-most violent person and the third-most violent person, and they form an alliance to exploit the weak. Everyone else is compelled to avoid looking weak.
We are designed by nature to resist violence, and our first instinct is to resist violence with violence. Do you ever watch any of those shows about people locked up in prison? There are a hundred of them. If you watch any of those shows with this thought in mind, it should be obvious to you that the pathologies that breed in these places could not survive and could not exist in a small facility.
Large prisons promote paranoia in the prisoners. You never know who in here is waiting for you with a homemade knife. There are 1500 people here, and 500 of them are crazy people who will kill you because you look at them funny; that’s the way a prisoner in a large facility naturally thinks. This paranoia propels the institution toward violence.
A prison of 20 people is, by its very nature, extremely different. You know who is in there with you; you know who you have to stay away from. It gives you a measure of control over your environment, which is necessary for mental health. Plus, if you have many small prisons, you can contain the violent people in a limited number of those prisons, thus preventing their violent tendencies from infecting the rest of the prison population.
In a prison of 2,000 prisoners and 250 guards, a canyon develops between the camps. The prisoners develop a way of thinking about the guards; the guards develop a way of thinking about the prisoners. The prisoners develop an ethic about how guards are supposed to be treated; the guards develop an ethic about how the prisoners are supposed to be treated. It is an unhealthy relationship.
In a prison of 24 prisoners and 3 guards, you have a very different interpersonal dynamic. The guard sees and treats each prisoner as an individual. The prisoner sees and treats each guard as he is treated. From a mental health perspective this is a thousand times better.
By transitioning to a system of small prisons, we could also save large amounts of money. In a prison of 1,000 persons there will be 100 or 200 who are determined to escape, 200 or 400 who are determined to get their hands on some drugs, and 100 or 200 who are crazy people who will stab you with an ice pick just to see the blood come out.
A large prison has to assume that every prisoner desperately wants to escape, that every prisoner is trying to obtain drugs, and that every prisoner is a crazy person who will stab you with an ice pick for no reason. The prison has to assume that—but it’s not true. This is fantastically inefficient. A large prison spends 50 or 60% of its r
esources protecting itself against threats that are not real—against the escape risk of prisoners who have little inclination to escape, against the threat of physical violence from people who are not violent or anyway would not be violent were they not incarcerated in a place that was pushing them constantly to become more violent.
What you would do, with a network of small prisons, would be to place each prisoner in a facility that is appropriate to the threat that he represents. You grade the prisoners on the threat of violence that they represent, one through ten. You put the tens with the tens and the ones with the ones.
The “tens”—the most violent prisoners—those guys, obviously, need to be locked in their cells 23 hours a day and closely monitored for the other hour. The “ones”—the most docile prisoners who have no history of violence anywhere, anytime—can be allowed to wander around the facility and interact with guards and other prisoners.
But when you put them all in one large facility, you have to lock them all down 23 hours a day and monitor them all closely the other hour. This is crazy. Plus, when you move to a system in which some prisoners have more rights and live in more humane conditions, you create a powerful incentive to get into one of the less restrictive prisons.
In a large and horrible prison, the new prisoner thinks “I’ve got to show everybody here how tough and vicious I really am, so that nobody will mess with me.” But when you put a new prisoner in a 24-man prison with 23 other tough guys, and he knows that there are other prisons that are not like this, his natural thought is “I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to show these people that I am not a crazy, vicious sociopath, so they will move me to some other facility that is not populated by crazy, vicious sociopaths.”