American Murder Houses

by Steve Lehto

  One aspect of the case puzzled many people and still is the source of much confusion. The case was tried in the downtown Los Angeles court rather than the court in Santa Monica, which was technically the court closest to the crime scene. Any other crime committed in that neighborhood would have been tried in Santa Monica. And each court drew its potential jurors from within the area around the court. Why did they choose to try the case downtown? Many people assumed that the district attorney had made the conscious decision to try the case with a more racially diverse jury. The district attorney never explained the rationale behind the trial’s location, but the California appeals court judge who oversaw that district later told a reporter that the decision had not been made by the prosecutor. It had been made by court administrators and the prosecutor had simply not explained the process publicly. At the time, the downtown court was better equipped to handle the expected media crush. The Santa Monica courthouse had also been recently damaged by an earthquake and was in need of repair. Still, there is no question that a jury from Santa Monica would probably not have been as racially mixed as one from downtown. The recent Rodney King trial had preceded some ugly events, and it had been an all-white jury sitting in judgment on a matter of race.

  During the trial there were fireworks, but they were overshadowed by the sheer volume of evidence presented. The prosecution called seventy-two witnesses. There were even a few more they should have called but couldn’t. One was the woman named Jill Shively who said she saw Simpson fleeing the scene in his white Bronco. She testified before the grand jury and was to be a key witness until she sold her story to Hard Copy and a tabloid for a combined $30,000. Prosecutors had told her to not speak to the press before she testified, but she had found the easy money too tempting. Likewise, Jose Camacho testified before the grand jury that he had sold Simpson a large knife just a few weeks before the murder. Prosecutors believed this was the murder weapon, but Camacho reportedly accepted $12,500 to sell his exclusive story to the National Enquirer.

  There were also mistakes made by the prosecution. The biggest blunder of all was the prosecution asking Simpson to try on the gloves found the night of the murder. The gloves had been soaked in blood and dried, and Simpson was asked to put rubber gloves on first, then to try pulling the dried-blood-infused gloves over them. The gloves wouldn’t fit.

  One of the last famous quotes from the trial was delivered by Johnnie Cochran, Simpson’s attorney. Referencing the bloody gloves that Simpson couldn’t squeeze over another pair of rubber gloves in the courtroom, Cochran told them, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” By the time the case got to the jury—October 3, 1995—most Americans had formed opinions of Simpson’s guilt. It mattered very little, though. The jury found him not guilty after only three hours of deliberation.

  Simpson was later sued on behalf of the two murder victims’ estates, and a civil jury ordered Simpson to pay $33.5 million for killing Goldman and Nicole. Despite the best efforts of the attorneys for the victims, very little of the judgment has been paid. Afterward, Simpson moved to Florida where he had further scrapes with the law, but his luck started turning on him. In 2006, it was announced that Simpson had written a book describing how he would have committed the murders hypothetically, titled If I Did It. The publisher had also swung a deal for Simpson to appear on a television special with the Fox network to be called, “If I Did It, Here’s How it Happened.” A storm of outrage and public criticism soon caused the publisher to cancel the book’s publication, and the television special was also scrapped. After some legal wrangling, the Goldman family—who still held the largely unpaid judgment against Simpson—acquired the rights to the book and published it with a cover design that downplayed the word If, making it appear to read I Did It.

  Then, in September 2007, Simpson was involved in a bizarre incident at a Las Vegas hotel where he and several accomplices entered the room of another man and grabbed sports memorabilia that they claimed was owned by Simpson. Simpson denied it, but the men with him would later testify that they had used a gun in the incident. Simpson claimed he was simply retaking possession of items that had been stolen from him. It is unclear why, if the victim really was in possession of Simpson’s stolen property, Simpson couldn’t just call the police.

  The jury in his Las Vegas case was not as understanding of Simpson as the jury had been in the Goldman-Brown case in Los Angeles. He was found guilty of all charges, including kidnapping and armed robbery, and in December 2008 he was sentenced to a thirty-three-year prison term. He has the possibility of parole after nine years. After the trial in Los Angeles, the condo where Nicole and Goldman were murdered was placed on the market for a little under $800,000. Over two years, the price was gradually reduced, and eventually someone bought the condo for $590,000, substantially less than what it probably would have been worth without the notoriety. The new owners changed the address and overhauled the property’s appearance. In 2006, the condo sold again for almost $1.7 million. The notoriety seemed to be wearing off. O. J.’s mansion on Rockingham, where police had found socks soaked in Nicole’s blood and a bloody glove, was sold by Simpson. The new owner razed everything on the property, including the main house.

  In 2012, the Discovery Channel aired a documentary called My Brother the Serial Killer, about a convicted killer named Glen Rogers. Rogers was convicted of murdering a woman in Tampa but claimed that he had also been the one who killed Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman. According to the documentary, Simpson asked Rogers to go to the Bundy condo and steal a pair of $20,000 earrings. According to Rogers, Simpson told him to kill Nicole if necessary. While O. J. was reportedly delighted that the documentary had been made and aired, the families of the victims condemned it as being inaccurate and said that Rogers was just seeking attention. At the time the documentary aired, he was on death row in Florida. According to police, he admitted to killing seventy women but authorities do not believe he killed anyone at the Bundy condo. An official from the Los Angeles Police Department was quoted as saying, “The LAPD is quite confident that we know who killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. We have no reason to believe that Mr. Rogers was involved.” They also pointed out that the two murders at Bundy did not match the behavior of Rogers in his other killings.

  Then why might someone claim to be the one who killed two people? When he made the claim, Rogers was on death row in Florida and had exhausted all of his appeals. Perhaps he was hoping California might decide to investigate his claims and delay his execution in the meantime.

  Meanwhile, the Bundy condominium is privately owned and the front walk is getting increasingly overgrown, perhaps to keep prying eyes away.

  *Vincent Bugliosi, Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O. J. Simpson Got Away with Murder (2008).

  *Jeffrey Toobin, The Run of His Life (2013).

  The Unsolved Christmas Murder of the Child Beauty Queen

  JONBENÉT RAMSEY

  1996

  755 15th Street (now 749 15th Street)

  Boulder, Colorado 80302

  One of the most controversial and well-known murder cases in America took place in a huge house in Boulder, Colorado, at Christmastime 1996. JonBenét Ramsey was a six-year-old girl who lived with her parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, and her older brother, Burke. The morning after Christmas, Patsy came downstairs and found a ransom note on the stairs to the kitchen. The note indicated that JonBenét had been kidnapped and was being held for ransom. Patsy found JonBenét’s room empty and quickly took action. The Ramseys notified the police and began taking steps to obtain the ransom money.

  The police had been called shortly before 6:00 A.M. and soon arrived and began preparing for what they assumed would be negotiations with the kidnappers. After they had set up and briefed everyone, an officer suggested that John Ramsey and a friend should look through the rest of the house thoroughly to see if there was any evidence that might help them. It had been six hours since the police had arrived. The house had several floors and
a convoluted floor plan, so an extensive search of the house would actually take a good amount of time.

  After going through a few rooms, the two men entered a room in the basement. There they found the lifeless body of JonBenét. She had been strangled and her skull was fractured. John Ramsey, reacting instinctively, removed tape that had been placed over his daughter’s mouth and then carried her body upstairs. It was later determined that she had probably been dead since late the night before. Detectives would only be able to speculate about the crime scene since it had been disturbed when JonBenét’s father had carried her upstairs.

  JonBenét was the one and only murder victim in Boulder in 1996, and much of what the police did next appeared to be the result of simple incompetence. After the Ramseys had called the police, they also called friends for help. The house was the scene of a lot of activity and foot traffic and was not secured as a crime scene until after the body had been found. The contaminated crime scene did not seem to bother the police all that much, though. They would focus almost exclusively on the Ramseys as their murder suspects. What followed became a media circus fueled by law enforcement leaks and rabid tabloids.

  Tabloids revealed that JonBenét had competed in child beauty pageants, and newspapers and television talk shows soon splashed images of the six-year-old JonBenét strutting in front of judges on stages, made up and dressed like an adult beauty queen with coiffed hair, heavy makeup, and fancy evening gowns. The images, of a child made up as an adult, stunned many Americans who had no idea that beauty pageants even existed for little children. Many people made the leap in their minds that JonBenét’s mother must have been a domineering stage mother to push a child into pageants at such a young age. Worse, the papers soon began reporting that the Ramseys were the only suspects in the case as far as the police were concerned. Unsure of how to handle the media glare, the Ramseys hired an attorney. Although they continued to cooperate with law enforcement, the Ramseys were criticized for hiring legal assistance, which many people assumed was a sign of belligerence—or guilt—on the part of the family.

  Several oddities about the case confounded investigators. The ransom note demanded $118,000, an unusual amount of money that was almost exactly the same as a bonus John Ramsey had recently received at work. How many people would have known that? The note claimed it had been written on behalf of “a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction.” No other clues to the writer’s identity were given; the note was signed Victory! S.B.T.C. Investigators hinted that the note appeared to have been written by Patsy Ramsey, although handwriting experts with law enforcement quietly admitted they could not make any such conclusion.

  Pressure mounted on the Ramseys to speak to the press, which they eventually did, giving an interview to CNN. Patsy famously told the interviewer, “There is a killer on the loose. I don’t know who it is, I don’t know if it’s a he or a she but if I were a resident of Boulder I would tell my friends to keep their babies close to you.” The very next day the mayor of Boulder held a press conference in response to Patsy’s statement. She said, “People in Boulder have no need to fear that there is someone wandering the streets of Boulder, as has been portrayed by some people, looking for children to attack. Boulder is safe, it’s always been a safe community and it continues to be a safe community.” Her message was clear: The Ramseys had killed JonBenét. The Colorado governor even said the Ramseys ought to “quit hiding behind their attorneys [and] quit hiding behind their PR firm.”

  The investigation dragged on. Even though the police focused on the Ramseys, they were hard-pressed to come up with clues or a motive. They had theories but no evidence linking the parents to the killing. The case stymied investigators. A grand jury was called and took testimony, even calling JonBenét’s brother to the stand. The grand jury prepared indictments naming the Ramseys of “two counts each of child abuse resulting in death in connection to the first-degree murder of their six-year-old daughter,” but the district attorney refused to sign it, saying the evidence was not sufficient to support the charges. The actions of the grand jury were secret, however, and the public was not told about any of this until 2013. Eventually, the Ramseys moved out of the home.

  Patsy Ramsey passed away from ovarian cancer in June 2006. In August of that year, the case was thrust back into the headlines when a man came forward and claimed he was somehow involved in JonBenét’s death. John Mark Karr was a forty-one-year-old former teacher who was being sought on child pornography charges out of California. Authorities tracked him to Thailand and brought him back to the United States. Somewhere along the way he told authorities he had been present when JonBenét had died but that her death was an accident. The claim rekindled the media frenzy surrounding the case; some headlines screamed that the case was solved and that Karr was the culprit. But authorities found Karr’s story unbelievable after they began checking the details. Apparently he could not convince them that he was ever inside the Ramsey’s house, and his DNA did not match a sample found at the crime scene. Karr was later released, apparently not even being prosecuted for the original charges that had brought him to the attention of the authorities in the first place. The police had originally charged Karr with possession of child pornography after they said they had found such images on his computer, which they seized. By the time Karr had been taken into custody and made his claims about JonBenét, the police had lost the computer that had been the basis of the charges against him.

  Two years later, officials announced that neither of the Ramseys had been involved in the murder of JonBenét. Advances in testing had allowed for the identification of small amounts of DNA recovered from the crime scene. The DNA did not match anyone in the family and belonged to someone as yet unknown to police. The profile has been placed into the FBI database, which is checked every few weeks. It is possible JonBenét’s killer will be identified one day after a routine search of the database, but until then, the trail remains cold.

  Upon receiving the results of the DNA testing, the Boulder district attorney did the unheard-of and issued a written apology to John Ramsey. After outlining the DNA conclusion, the letter stated: “To the extent that we may have contributed in any way to the public perception that you might have been involved in this crime, I am deeply sorry. No innocent person should have to endure such an extensive trial in the court of public opinion, especially when public officials have not had sufficient evidence to initiate a trial in a court of law.” The letter went on to state that the district attorney’s office would handle such situations differently in the future. Of course, the letter came too late for Patsy Ramsey, who had gone to her grave proclaiming her innocence.

  The home where JonBenét Ramsey was murdered was built in 1972 and is 7,240 square feet. It sits on a quarter-acre lot and contains three fireplaces along with five bedrooms and six and a half baths. The Ramseys sold it for $650,000 to an investment group, which then resold the house and donated the profits to the JonBenét Ramsey Children’s Foundation. In May 2004, a new family moved in. More recently, the house was listed for sale with an asking price of $1.985 million. The address of the house has been changed to limit gawkers, but they still come by. Perhaps eventually people will stop driving by and having their pictures taken in front of the house where the little beauty queen was murdered.

  *Mary George, “DA Says He’ll Wait for Evidence,” Denver Post, February 28, 1997.

  *Karen Ange and John Ingold, “DA Clears Ramsey Family,” Denver Post, July 10, 2008.

  *Kirk Mitchell and John Ingold, “JonBenét Ramsey Grand Jury Indictment Accused Parents of Child Abuse Resulting in Death,” Denver Post, October 25, 2013.

  Murdered in the Haunted Inn

  THE GENERAL WAYNE INN

  1996

  625 Montgomery Avenue

  Merion, Pennsylvania 19066

  On the day after Christmas, 1996, James E. Webb sat in the upstairs office of the General Wayne Inn, working on the books for the restaurant and hot
el business he ran with his partner, Guy Sileo Jr. Business was not good. The two were having trouble paying their bills because revenue in the business was down, perhaps by over a half a million dollars from what they had projected for the year. The venture was in peril, but could the General Wayne Inn really be in serious trouble? It had been operating as a business in this location continuously since 1704, making it one of the longest-running commercial enterprises in the United States. It was a miracle that the three-story building even stood, this many years later. In its life, it had played host to the great and famous, people like George Washington and General Lafayette, Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe, and General “Mad Anthony” Wayne, the man for whom it was named. Wayne had served his country well, including a major supporting role at Valley Forge with Washington. Countless others had passed through the inn, and many said that some had stayed, in the form of ghosts. Particularly noteworthy were the Hessians, mercenaries hired by the British to fight the colonists during the American Revolution, who were said to haunt the place centuries after they had died in the area.

  As Webb studied the numbers for the inn, someone entered the office quietly and placed a gun against the back of his head. A moment later he was dead, from a single gunshot. His body fell backward onto the floor of the office. The small wound was almost undetectable but once the police realized the man had been shot, they focused their attention on the business partner. The two men had taken out life insurance policies on each other. If one of them died, the insurance proceeds would more than make up for the bad year suffered by the General Wayne Inn. The survivor could make a go of it as a sole proprietor.