But before we leave this point, we have to go back to the supposed inciting incident itself. Patsy lost it when she found out that JonBenét had wet herself and smacked her across the bathroom. Why? First of all, we don’t even know that the child had an accident that night. The urine stains in her underwear and long johns could also have been a result of bladder tension release at time of death. But let’s say she did wet her pants that night. JonBenét was a habitual bed wetter. It was such a commonplace occurrence that Patsy commonly stripped her bedsheets in the morning before her housekeeper arrived and put them in the stacked washer-dryer unit near JonBenét’s bedroom.
So what happened?
On this particular night, because of all the pent-up stress involving Christmas and travel arrangements and having John’s older children coming and whatever else, JonBenét wet the bed one too many times and Patsy snapped? She snapped so completely that she hauled off and knocked her child across the room? Is this believable—that a mother who had calmly dealt with hundreds of bed-wetting incidents suddenly acted so violently that she cracked her daughter’s skull? Is it any more believable than as she’s being put to bed, JonBenét tells her mother that she doesn’t want to do any more pageants, so Patsy goes berserk and hits her daughter hard enough to open a seven-inch gash on the right side of her head?
In this scenario, overwhelmed by remorse at having done such a horrible thing, Patsy and/or John would have dragged the little girl down to the farthest room in the basement, covered her mouth with duct tape and bound her neck and wrists with cord. Then either one or both parents grabbed a paintbrush from Patsy’s painting-supply box, broke off the handle and inserted it into the neck binding to make a garrote they could twist so tightly it compressed the neck. Or maybe this part was intentional—some kind of bizarre ritual sacrifice.
Then one of them would go back up to the kitchen to compose the weird ransom note. “Let’s see, John, what movies have we seen recently that we can use in the writing?”
Not finished yet, they’d have to get rid of the rolls of duct tape and cord so that these items were nowhere in the house. But no doubt, in the general panic and confusion of the whole process, they would forget to get rid of the remains of the paintbrush and the pad that the ransom note was written on, leaving them for the police to find. (In fact, to make themselves look even more innocent, they would hand over the pad as an example of Patsy’s handwriting and then feign surprise when it had a first attempt at the note on one of the lower pages.) They would also have to head back upstairs to clean up all the blood in the bathroom.
Or let’s say that Patsy did all this herself, without John’s knowledge. We know for a fact that she was good at cleaning up urine. Maybe that experience helped her clean up all the blood that would have gushed out of so large a head wound (more on that a little later). In this variation, she would have been truly clever, because in the ransom note she would have been sending John a veiled message with the $118,000 reference and Saved By The Cross, but she must have figured no one else would pick that up and she could disguise her handwriting on her very own legal pad. It’s amazing to think that a wife and mother with no prior experience could summon forth such a high degree of criminal sophistication at the very moment she needed it. If she’d thought to open a door to the outside or smash a window, she could have made the scene even better.
You can make that all work in the movies. It’s a lot harder in real life.
What I saw the Boulder PD and others in law enforcement doing was taking a statistical fact—that most young children murdered in their homes are killed by someone related who lives in the house—and trying to make the specific evidence fit the statistic.
Some of this meant going down strange pathways with little relevance. For example, there was a bowl of cut pineapple on the kitchen counter, and the autopsy found some undigested pineapple in JonBen ét’s stomach. Yet both Patsy and John denied that they had given her any pineapple during the day, and she was asleep by the time they got home in the evening. Detective Thomas made a big deal out of this; yet what could it ultimately prove? Maybe one of the parents did give her pineapple and forgot. Maybe she got up on her own during the night, went downstairs and ate some on her own. Maybe an intruder gave it to her. So what?
More to the point, if it was a material point in the case that gave the detectives some insight into the parents’ connection to the crime, John and Patsy would know or sense this, and try to give some plausible explanation—very easy to do—instead of leaving the question hanging. But they didn’t try, because it didn’t seem to mean anything.
This assumption is typical of mistakes inexperienced investigators make when approaching a complicated case. I used to tell agents who had just come to work for me: “Don’t start out looking at the case from too close-up. Step back and look at it in its entirety before you focus on details.” Here, the police selectively emphasized certain aspects that they thought bolstered their theory.
On the other hand, they were quick to dismiss unidentified DNA under JonBenét’s fingernails, in her panties and in her long johns—DNA that matched no one in the house. The police speculated that some of it might have come from the manufacturing and packaging process of the clothing itself; therefore, it was a red herring.
Okay, maybe it was. Maybe JonBenét was playing in the dirt and got some organic material under her fingernails. Maybe she and another little girl had worn each other’s clothing at some point and the genetic material was her friend’s. It’s unlikely, though certainly possible. But doesn’t it seem to be a strange unbalancing and prioritizing of evidence? You make a big deal out of the pineapple and don’t consider that the foreign DNA might point to an intruder?
Then there was the pubic hair found on her blanket. Again, it may mean nothing; hair and fiber transfer is routine. But since it didn’t match anyone known to be in the house, shouldn’t it at least be regarded as a possible indication of an outsider?
And then when you factor in that Detective Linda Arndt felt that John was the one capable of violence, you have a very confused and not very compelling police theory of the case. But there is one piece of evidence that to my mind cinches it.
The Medical Examiner’s Report
Dr. John E. Meyer, coroner of Boulder County, board certified in anatomic, clinical and forensic pathology, pronounced JonBenét dead after he’d been called to the house by the police. Once the body had been transported back to the coroner’s lab in the basement of Boulder Community Hospital, he conducted a full autopsy.
A ligature garrote around her neck had been tightened to such a degree with a broken-off paintbrush handle that it created a furrow all the way around her neck. Dr. Meyer had to cut it off with a pair of angled bandage scissors. A gold cross and chain were tangled in the ligature. There was an abrasion on her right cheek near the ear, and another on the lower left side of her neck. The petechial hemorrhages on the insides of the eyelids and other places about the head were consistent with strangulation.
At the time of her death, JonBenét was wearing long underwear over floral print panties whose crotch, as we have noted, bore a small bloodstain, in addition to the urine stain that also appeared on her long johns. There was dried blood as well around the entrance to the vagina and hyperemia-engorged blood vessels—that might have indicated trauma just inside the vagina opening. There were further abrasions along the vaginal wall, and the hymen was not intact. Petechial hemorrhaging was noted scattered along the surface of both lungs and the anterior surface of the heart.
When Meyer pulled back the scalp from the large head wound on the right side, he noted a seven-by-four-inch hemorrhage. Underneath the hemorrhage area was an even larger fracture of the skull, measuring eight and a half inches from one end to the other. There was further hemorrhaging under the arachnoid membrane, which covers the brain. Underneath that, the gray matter of the brain itself showed substantial bruising.
Dr. Meyer listed the official cause of death as
asphyxia by strangulation associated with craniocerebral trauma.
These findings by a highly distinguished ME, in conjunction with the findings at the scene, became for me the most compelling evidence in the entire case. They represent what Dr. Lester Adelson, longtime Cleveland, Ohio, chief deputy coroner and author of The Pathology of Homicide, famously referred to as the “dialogue with the dead.” Frankly, I didn’t—and don’t—see how the police, the district attorney’s office, my old FBI unit in Quantico and so many others could fail to interpret this information properly with regard to the victim’s parents. It is unfortunately representative of the kind of theory-before-evidence reasoning we’ve seen throughout the cases in this book.
The blunt-force trauma to the head was severe enough to kill anyone. The details are also much more consistent with a blow from a hard and heavy object than the accidental collision with a fixed hard surface. Investigators identified several items found in the house that could have caused this wound. Most prominent among them were a large metal flashlight and a golf club. So we start from the premise that Detective Thomas’s theory of incidental contact with a bathtub or other object is less forensically plausible than an intentional blow to the head with a makeshift weapon.
Should we believe that a mother or father with no prior history of violence, domestic or otherwise, would purposely pick up an object and strike a six-year-old with sufficient force to crack her skull and bruise her brain? And should we believe that this parent would bring the object into her bedroom, planning to hit her with it? If not, should we believe that this mother or father picked up the child and carried her down to the basement with the intention of assaulting her there? It doesn’t work for me.
But here’s the kicker! The entire area inside the house and the yard around it has to be considered a crime scene. Once the initial morning of confusion was past, investigators combed it meticulously. Within that boundary, the primary scene is the area from JonBenét’s bedroom into the hallway and bathroom, down the circular stairs all the way to the basement, then back to the wine cellar—in other words, the setting in which she was last seen alive to the setting where her body was discovered.
So where along that trail was all the blood?
This is perhaps the most important single question of the entire investigation. The scalp is highly vascular and head wounds tend to bleed profusely, even when they’re not serious. This one was deadly serious. A trauma that lacerates the scalp, cracks the skull and causes subdural and subarachnoid bleeding will certainly bleed on the outside, too.
So where was all the blood?
Did Patsy clean it up? And if she did, what did she do with the numerous towels and other cleaning supplies she would have needed? Did she take the car out in the middle of the night and dump them somewhere? It would be virtually impossible to clean up as much blood as would gush from a head wound of this nature and not leave traces that crime scene specialists and/or luminol would pick up. In all of my years of investigative experience, I have never witnessed a crime scene in which the blood from a violent act could be covered up or eliminated completely.
Given all of this, there is only one reasonable explanation: There was no blood because at the time of the blunt-force trauma, JonBen ét was either dead or near death. For her not to have bled profusely at the scene, her heart was not pumping, or was hardly pumping, and her blood pressure was extremely weak or nonexistent. This means that the blow to the head had to have come after the ligature strangulation.
Now, then, what does that suggest to us?
Even if we could imagine a loving mother striking out in a moment of rage, can we imagine a mother binding her young daughter, covering her mouth with duct tape, fitting a cord around her neck and gradually twisting the makeshift handle until she died from asphyxiation? Under what circumstances could this possibly have happened? Was this a severe punishment for her years of bed-wetting? Was it Patsy’s way of getting back at a husband who had been sexually abusing his daughter, or favoring her over his own wife? Were John and/or Patsy secret Satanists, and was this a Christmas ritual they felt compelled to perform? And how does this all fit into the context of the planned trips to Michigan and the vacation cruise?
No matter how you break it out, it just doesn’t make sense. The medical and crime scene evidence is clear that strangulation was the cause of death. I have never come across a case in which parents have done anything like this to a child. Could the Ramseys be the first? And could they be so slick and criminally sophisticated that none of their postoffense behavior would give them away? Unless, that is, you consider Linda Arndt’s sensation that eighteen bullets might not be enough to deal with the “grieving” father staring across his daughter’s rigid body from her.
In Summary
What we’ve tried to do here is approach the murder of JonBenét Ramsey from a number of different angles, just as we would do in a case consultation when I was leading the Investigative Support Unit. No matter which angle we approach it from, we come to the same conclusion: John and Patricia Ramsey did not murder their daughter, either together or separately. And that means it had to be an intruder.
Despite all of this, my old unit in Quantico continued to be convinced that the parents were the prime suspects. Is it possible that one or both of the parents could have killed their young child by progressively tightening a garrote around her neck while her hands were bound? Yes, it’s possible; but so unlikely that given the context, it is the absolutely last possibility you would think of. The only way it would work was if everything else in the case tied directly to the parents. But in this case—other than the statistic we’ve noted that most domestic homicides of children are committed by individuals who belong in the house—nothing tied John and Patsy Ramsey to the murder of their child.
But that didn’t seem to matter.
CHAPTER 16
ENTER LOU SMIT
Once I got involved with the Ramsey case, my public and professional image seemed to change overnight. No longer was I perceived as Agent Jack Crawford, the straight-shooting, justice-seeking character in the trim black suit Scott Glenn had portrayed in The Silence of the Lambs, which was reputedly based on me. Now I was seen as the hired gun that would say anything for a price. Ironically, once I determined that the Ramseys were not offenders but surviving victims, I stopped accepting their money altogether.
Mark and I were stunned by the reactions. Nearly everyone we talked to about the case, either personally or through media interviews, seemed to discount our observations out of hand and implied that we were naive in our belief in the Ramseys’ innocence. Mark talked to several agents at Quantico and came away surprised and confused about why they weren’t looking at the totality of the evidence.
No one, it appeared, agreed with us or even allowed for the possibility that my assessment might be correct.
No one, that is, until Lou Smit entered the picture.
If there was anyone whom I considered a genuine hero in this case, anyone in whom I had complete faith and confidence, it was Detective Andrew Louis “Lou” Smit. By the time he entered the investigation, he was already a law enforcement legend in Colorado, having cleared over 90 percent of the more than two hundred homicide cases he’d investigated. He felt such a personal connection to the victims of the murders he’d handled that he kept small photographs of some of them in his wallet.
In March 1997, three months after the murder with the case at a standstill, with John and Patricia Ramsey still under the glare of prime suspicion, with the police department and district attorney’s office in a Cold War–type relationship, DA Alex Hunter hired Lou Smit to consult on the case. At the time, Smit was retired from the El Paso County Sheriff ’s Office, an area due south of Denver that encompasses Colorado Springs and the United States Air Force Academy. Hunter’s reasoning was solid. This case had shone an international spotlight on Boulder; it needed to be moved forward; and no one could assail the integrity, objectivity, talent and experience
of a man like Smit.
Smit meticulously went through all of the now-voluminous evidence and concluded that JonBenét had been killed by an intruder. It reminded him of a case he had worked six years before—the 1991 murder of thirteen-year-old Heather Dawn Church, killed in her house near Colorado Springs. For four years, the community and police were convinced that someone in the house was responsible, and the case went nowhere. Smit, with a nearly superhuman attention to detail, discovered an overlooked fingerprint that he was able to match to a suspect arrested in Florida. Robert Charles Browne at first pled not guilty. But realizing he was facing the death penalty if Smit’s work held up in court, he took a life plea. Altogether, he may have killed more than forty more. God only knows how many others would have lost their lives but for Lou Smit.
Smit’s working theory was that the UNSUB intruder had gotten in the basement through a loose grate in a window well and gained access to the entire house. While I believed the intruder to be someone who had a grudge against John Ramsey, Smit thought he was probably a pedophile who had seen JonBenét either casually around town, in school or in one or more of her pageants. He used the pad he found in the kitchen to write the strange ransom note and then hid out until the family returned home and went to bed.
Some people may tend to discount this theory because slipping into the house and hiding there for so long is such a bold and gutsy move. But it’s important to remember that while “normal” people may find this unimaginable, it’s what burglars and robbers do for a living. I don’t know how many cases I’ve had over the years in which a woman wakes up to find an intruder standing over her bed, watching her. And I’ve dealt with a large number of break-and-enter guys—many of them essentially nonviolent—who have no problem spending long periods in a target house, sometimes entering when the household is still awake. For some of them, that’s the main thrill of the crime.
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