—Randy Simons
Three weeks later, on March 12, Detective Jeff Kithcart interviewed Mark Fix, who had also photographed JonBenét at various pageants. Fix, who had been a forensic photographer and had gone through 240 hours of police-academy training, was also a “certified protection professional”—a bodyguard. Kithcart was interested in what Fix knew about Randy Simons. Could he be a suspect? He said no.
Fix told the detective that Simons was into high fashion and pageants and had clients from all over the country. His specialty was shooting five- and six-year-olds, and he was known for his creative flair with lighting and retouching. A Randy Simons photo, Fix said, automatically gave a pageant contestant a higher score in the Miss Photogenic competition.
Simons was something of an “odd critter,” though, said Fix. Right now he claimed that people were chasing him and that the Ramseys were pointing the finger at him. Simons had even told Fix that some paramilitary group was trying to ambush him and steal his negatives. He’d shot someone in the leg with an arrow to protect himself, Fix said, shrugging.
Back in May 1996, Fix had been photographing pageant contestants on stage in Denver. One of them was JonBenét.
JonBenét came out in this shocking outfit, and a noticeable murmur went through the room. There were all these feathers, like an ostrich. Someone called it a Ziegfield costume—so much more expensive and elaborate than anyone else’s. You could see it was custom-tailored for her.
It was like showing up in a tuxedo when everybody is wearing sandals and T-shirts. Patsy realized she’d overdone it. She was as shocked as everybody else. I don’t think JonBenét ever wore that outfit again, not even in the national pageant that I photographed two months later.
In July, at the national finals, JonBenét’s costumes were less frilly. They were still on the cutting edge, but they’d been changed to fit the pageant system. By then, her singing and dancing routine had improved. She was really cooking. I don’t know exactly how to describe it…she wanted to win. She was going to win. It showed all the way through.
The photograph I shot of her wearing a crown was just a simple runway photograph, but it appeared on the cover of People magazine. She just walked up, struck a pose, and that was it. End of story.
—Mark Fix
TWO ORDERED TO WRITE APOLOGIES FOR RAMSEY AUTOPSY PHOTO SALE
“It is to be straight from the heart,” said Judge Lael Montgomery, adding the public will not have access to the letters.
Lawrence S. Smith, 36…pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors. Authorities dropped two felonies against Smith. Brett A. Sawyer also pleaded guilty to obstructing government operations.
Montgomery sentenced both men to three days in jail and 64 hours of community service. In addition Montgomery required Sawyer to give the $5,000 he received from the Globe for the photos to the Boulder District Attorney’s office. Sawyer will pay a $500 fine.
“This charge was agreed to between (Chief Trial Deputy) Pete Hofstrom and myself before he was ever arrested,” [defense counsel] Schild added. “Our agreement was that Pete Hofstrom would ask the judge to sentence Brett to what he personally felt was appropriate, and it’s noteworthy that Mr. Hofstrom did not ask the judge to give Brett any jail time.”
—Alli Krupski
Daily Camera, February 21, 1997
The Ramseys were virtually under siege. John Ramsey had to sneak into his office building because he was constantly followed and harassed by reporters, photographers, and people on the street. Guards were now posted at the Access Graphics offices twenty-four hours a day.
At first, Ramsey worked a couple of hours at a time, then a half day or an evening. By the third week in February, he was able to make it into the office two days a week or three days every two weeks. When Gary Mann, his boss at Lockheed Martin, spoke to Ramsey, he heard a man totally consumed by the loss of his daughter. Nobody thought of asking Ramsey to return to work full-time. Mann understood that the company’s management team would have to operate without him for months.
In the office, Ramsey would pace back and forth or stare through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the snow-covered Flatirons. Then, from the corner of his eye, he would spot a reporter or a photographer staking out the offices or going through the company’s trash, and the police would be called. An alarm was installed on his office door to prevent break-ins. Denise Wolf, his secretary, had to do the cleaning in his office because they could no longer trust the janitorial staff not to rifle through—or steal—the papers on his desk.
“How does it feel to work for a murderer?” employees were asked by strangers on the street. Some of them were stalked, followed home. Others were ostracized by their friends for their loyalty to John Ramsey. The firm received obscene phone calls and hate mail and even a bomb threat. One day a photographer was discovered on the back fire escape trying to break into the building. An employee was offered $50, 000 to bug John Ramsey’s office.
With the office and employees of Access Graphics besieged, Lockheed Martin could have used the occasion to get rid of Ramsey, but Mann knew that he had looked out for their interests over the years, and the company was willing to allow the situation to play itself out. No matter what, Mann was going to maintain the billion-dollar business Ramsey had built.
To Gary Merriman, life at the company was now like something out of Night of the Living Dead, especially since Access Graphics had been such a wonderful place to work before the tragedy. The front door to the building was in the heart of downtown Boulder, on the tree-covered Pearl Street Mall. Over the last six years, the company had expanded from twenty-five to more than four hundred employees.
The staff at Access was energetic and fearless. The average age was in the late twenties. The corporate culture was entrepreneurial. Employees were encouraged to take risks, and the company prospered. As it grew, Merriman was hired to head the new human resources department and to structure the company.
Despite its growth, the company had the atmosphere of a small shop. John Ramsey was decent to his employees, more patriarch of a large family than president of a company. He elicited loyalty and dedication from his employees. Introverted by nature, he treated people with respect and concern for their welfare. He often referred to Access Graphics as “four hundred families.” And his staff responded accordingly.
In the office, no one ever heard Ramsey raise his voice—in anger or in delight. Even when frustrated by a setback, he dealt calmly with the problems at hand. Ramsey seemed to know that problems were not solved by being emotional.
What was most noticeable to Ramsey’s colleagues was his sense of ethics. When people made mistakes, he never attacked their integrity. He was, however, offended by failure of character. On this point, he was firm. Business matters came and went, problems would be resolved or not, but character was permanent. If someone fell short in Ramsey’s estimation—even if only in manners—he would remember it.
There was one unwritten rule that everyone at Access Graphics understood: John Ramsey never mixed work with his personal life. No matter how close they were to him or how long they had been associated with him, he almost never invited his employees home. You could have a close relationship with John Ramsey at work and never see him outside the office.
Within three days of the murder of JonBenét, Jane Stobie, a former employee of Access Graphics, called the Boulder police to say that she had important information for them. Two months later they still hadn’t returned her call, so Stobie, an acquaintance of Denver DA Bill Ritter, called him and told him what she knew. A few days later, the Boulder police called.
On February 21 Detectives Arndt and Hickman interviewed Stobie at police headquarters. She told them that she had gone to work for John Ramsey in July 1991 as a specialist in Hewlett-Packard products. For three years she carpooled every day from Denver to Boulder with some of her coworkers. At first, Stobie said, the company was so small—and there was such an overlap of responsibilities—that it was routine for many
of the employees to read each others’ faxes. Then rumor had it that Calcomp, which owned 20 percent of Access Graphics and was itself owned by Lockheed, wanted one of the company’s three founders, Jim Hudson, out. Eventually Lockheed exercised an option to purchase Access Graphics. The word was that John Ramsey got $8 million from the buyout. Overnight, a mom-and-pop operation was reporting to a Fortune 500 corporation.
Stobie saw Don Paugh, Ramsey’s father-in-law, as a nice old southern gentleman and a father figure for some of the young employees. He was called the Andy Griffith of Access. Sometimes he would party with them at Potter’s, a bar on the Mall.
But after John Ramsey’s daughter Beth died in January 1992, employees at Access Graphics started getting “knifed,” Stobie told the police. If an employee happened to offend Sun Microsystems, one of the firm’s large suppliers, the person would be fired without warning. This seemed to happen again and again. At least that’s how it looked to her, Stobie said.
In April 1993, Stobie told the police, Access sent her to Atlanta to manage the office there. Nedra Paugh and her other daughters, Polly and Pam, were running the so-called Atlanta branch. They sold supplies for the most part and were showing minimal profit.
Stobie found the Atlanta office totally unprofessional. There was pageant literature everywhere. Polly spent a lot of the day screaming at her husband. Stobie overheard conversations about oral sex and discussions between Nedra and some employees about the size of Burke’s penis when he was born. All in all, it gave the impression of a place where the family got together rather than a workplace. Stobie felt that the Atlanta “branch” had become a potential embarrassment to John Ramsey now that Access had to answer to Lockheed, and she resented having to straighten out his family. In July 1993, Stobie said, she was ordered by Tom Carson to tell Nedra that the Atlanta office would close and that she would be laid off. Patsy’s mother screamed and then sobbed, saying that she needed the job to keep her arthritis at bay. She had to be active. Stobie felt sorry for her, but the business came first. In 1994, not long after Stobie returned to Boulder, she was let go.
A few months after Stobie’s police interview, she began to tell her story to various reporters.
The snow was still on the ground on February 23 when Geraldo Rivera taped two daytime TV shows at the Alps Boulder Canyon Inn. It was advertised as a “town meeting” but consisted of an invitation-only audience of local journalists, lawyers, pathologists, friends of the Ramseys, and some hotel guests.
In the first hour there was a debate between Dr. Cyril Wecht, a noted forensic pathologist, and Larry Pozner, a Denver criminal defense attorney. Wecht said that JonBenét was a victim of prior sexual abuse. In light of the possibility that semen was found at the crime scene, he said, this was a sex crime, with John Ramsey as the logical “primary suspect.” Pozner was outraged at Wecht’s statement and insisted that the presumed facts on which he based his claim were hardly reliable.
“He [ Wecht ] talks about semen,” Pozner said. “What semen? Nobody’s released a report saying they had found semen.”
The second hour, taped the same afternoon, focused on how the Ramsey case was affecting various Boulder residents. Bill McReynolds, now known publicly as a suspect, proclaimed his innocence to Rivera’s audience. Pam Griffin and her daughter, Kristine, talked about their experiences with Patsy and JonBenét during the previous year.
One local resident told Rivera that when he used to travel out of state and mention that he was from Boulder, people would say, “Oh, that beautiful place in the Rocky Mountains, right next to the Flatirons!” Now, he said, people asked him, “Who did it?”
The next day, on February 24, Detective Arndt reinterviewed the Ramseys’ gardener, Brian Scott. She had already spoken to him earlier in the month.
Scott, who had graduated from the University of Colorado the year before, told the detective that he’d started working for the Ramseys in June 1995 as a landscaper. The last time he was at the house was December 10. The family used large wooden candy canes to decorate the yard during the holidays, and he noticed that they hadn’t been arranged properly. They needed deeper holes, which he dug before pounding them into the ground. Detective Arndt asked him what he remembered about the window-well grate near the rear patio. Scott said he didn’t remember that the window was broken. He’d only been in the basement to fix the sprinkler clock. He didn’t know there was a wine cellar, much less where it was. He did recall a broken window at the front of the house, but it was for the electrical cord for the Christmas lights and certainly not big enough for someone to crawl through—something like 2 inches square.
While Scott adjusted the candy canes along the front walk, he saw a blue Chevy Suburban pull up to collect JonBenét. She was wearing a pair of blue overalls and was being bratty about something. “I think she might have been giving orders,” Scott said, “like, ‘You get in the back. You do this.’ Something like that.” A moment later the car was gone. That was the last time he saw JonBenét.
On December 25, Scott went to the apartment of his girlfriend, Ann Preston, at around 10:30 P.M. and stayed until just after midnight, then went home alone. There was nobody to confirm his alibi for the rest of the night. Arndt asked him for a handwriting sample, and two weeks later he gave the police blood, saliva, and hair samples as well. Only then did he feel he was a suspect.
The Ramseys’ street, 15th Street, was the nicest street in the neighborhood, better than 14th, better than 16th or even 13th. But 7th, 8th, and 6th were pretty nice too.
But the Ramseys’ home could have been anyplace. From the property you couldn’t really see the mountains, not even the Flatirons. As far as I could tell, never being on the top floors of the house, it didn’t seem to have any views. The house didn’t even have a front porch.
Unlike so many homes on the street, it didn’t have a driveway out front. The Ramseys approached their home through an alley that ran behind the house. I never saw them enter through the front door—always through that alley and the side door off the patio. The alley was just wide enough for one car. It was all beat up, lined with trash cans. There was pavement in some places, gravel in others. I don’t think they realized what an eyesore it was when they moved in.
I took it upon myself to trim the other side of the passageway. It could never be an elegant approach. It was not what I thought the Ramseys would want to see every day.
—Brian Scott
Late on the afternoon of February 25, Bill Wise walked into Alex Hunter’s office and told him that two journalists, Dan Glick of Newsweek and Charlie Brennan of the Rocky Mountain News, wanted to see him as soon as possible about something they had uncovered. The reporters told Hunter that on December 26, 1974, Bill McReynolds’s nine-year-old daughter, Jill, had been kidnapped with a friend, who was then sexually assaulted. Jill was released unharmed. In addition, the reporters had discovered that McReynolds’s wife, Janet, had written a play called Hey, Rube, which was about the murder of a young girl that took place in a basement. It was based on the 1965 torture killing of Sylvia Likens in Indiana. Hunter immediately called John Eller and told him these details.
The next day, at police headquarters, Detectives Thomas and Gosage interviewed Janet McReynolds about her play and her daughter’s kidnapping, details she and her husband had failed to mention in their previous interviews. A few days later, the detectives interviewed the McReynoldses’ son Tristan, who had first met Patsy when he delivered a gingerbread house to the Ramseys from his bakery. Once she’d come into the bakery to inquire about his father’s health. Tristan had been in Detroit with his girlfriend between December 24 and 26. The alibi of Jessie, the McReynoldses’ other son, was also verified.
3
It was becoming clear to Pete Hofstrom and the Ramseys’ attorneys that the CBI was not going to allow an outsider to observe its work. Carl Whiteside interpreted the law his way and would not budge. Toward the end of February, as Whiteside had suggested, the police sent some of th
e DNA evidence to Cellmark Diagnostics. The Maryland lab was not governed by Colorado law, and officials there would allow the Ramseys’ representatives to observe their testing procedures if Hunter’s office approved. On February 25, deputy DA Trip DeMuth wrote a letter to the lab approving observation by a Ramsey representative. Once testing began, it would take a minimum of six weeks before the results would be available.
WHAT’S ALEX HUNTER SAYING?
Thursday’s weekly update press conference in Boulder, featuring District Attorney Alex Hunter, could have been titled: “Mr. Plea Bargain Meets Mr. Evidence.”
The solemn D.A., who looks like he hasn’t heard a good joke since New Year’s, Thursday proclaimed himself as Mr. Evidence.
The declaration must have come as a surprise to other prosecutors and to attorneys and judges throughout Colorado, where Hunter has a reputation as a prosecutor whose office is an easy touch for plea bargains.
In fact, the Boulder D.A.’s office even is known to have contacted defense attorneys before an arrest is made to begin the discussions—a rather unusual tactic.
And so it was noteworthy that Hunter said he will not make an arrest in the JonBenét Ramsey murder case until all the evidence is sitting squarely on his desk.
“I am Mr. Evidence,” Hunter said with a straight face.
—Chuck Green, columnist,
The Denver Post, February 28, 1997
When Jeff Hendry of the Boulder Sheriff’s Department read Chuck Green’s column, he smiled. He had more than one story of his own to tell about Hunter’s office. For instance, there was the time the sheriff’s department busted a drug dealer in his house and found a kilo and a half of cocaine, $80,000 in cash, semiautomatic weapons, Mac 10s, Uzis, and various handguns. While Hendry and his fellow officers were searching the house, his pager went off. Bill Wise’s phone number appeared on the screen. When Hendry called, Wise told him the money was being seized under civil statutes and had already been settled: $20,000 of the $80,000 would go to the drug dealer’s attorney. According to the law, proceeds from drug sales were to be confiscated, not given to the charged person. The cash had been sitting on top of the cocaine. It was clear to Hendry that this money represented cash from drug sales and should be seized. It was not covered by civil statutes, Hendry argued, which allowed money to remain the property of the suspect. Wise remained firm: the DA had already decided how it would be handled. Hendry concluded that Bill Wise’s first concern was that the defense attorney be paid. When Hendry asked himself why, the only answer he could come up with was that this was Boulder.
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