Perfect Murder, Perfect Town

by Lawrence Schiller

  “You’re not to ask them anything about the murder,” Zimmer told him but did not say who “they” were. “There will be lawyers present. You can’t photograph them. And you can’t ask the attorneys any questions.” The list of restrictions went on: Don’t ask about yesterday’s interview with the police. Don’t disclose today’s location, even afterward. The interview would last thirty minutes, Zimmer added before hanging up.

  A private security guard met Brennan and six other reporters at the side door of the Marriott Hotel in Boulder. They had all been given the same password. They were shown to a small, tastefully appointed ground-floor lounge. A lavish bouquet on a low table separated the media from an empty couch.

  As they waited, Paula Woodward, an investigative reporter for KUSA, NBC’s Denver affiliate, asked Carol McKinley a question: “Who do you think killed JonBenét?”

  “This isn’t the place to talk about that,” McKinley replied.

  “You think they did it, don’t you?” Woodward insisted.

  “That’s not something I want to talk about—not right now,” McKinley said as she returned to her seat.

  Rachelle Zimmer, who had been hovering about the room, made a final check before John and Patsy Ramsey entered with their lawyers and Patsy’s father. John was neatly dressed in a tweed jacket and paisley tie; Patsy wore a blue suit, with a silver angel pin on her right lapel. Her eyes were clear; her smile, warm. She sat to John’s left, exactly as she had during their January CNN interview.

  Most of the reporters, who had never seen the Ramseys in person, found their quiet grace impossible to reconcile with the rumors building around them.

  John Ramsey spoke first: “We’ve been anxious to do this for some time, and I can tell you why it’s taken us so long.” Ramsey explained that their first obligation had been to talk to the police. Now that they had, they wanted to “clear up some issues.”

  Ramsey discussed how and why his attorneys had been hired, explaining his close relationship to Michael Bynum. Then he raised the subject the reporters had been told to avoid: “Let me address it very directly: I did not kill my daughter JonBenét. There have also been innuendoes that she had been or was sexually molested. I can tell you that those were the most hurtful innuendoes to us as a family. They are totally false. JonBenét and I had a very close relationship”—Ramsey stumbled over his dead daughter’s name. Then he added: “I will miss her dearly the rest of my life.”

  Then Patsy spoke: “I’m grateful that we are finally able to meet together face-to-face. I’m appalled that anyone would think that John or I would be involved in such a hideous, heinous crime. But let me assure you that I did not kill JonBenét and did not have anything to do with this.” She added, “We feel like God has a master plan for our lives and that in the fullness of time, our family will be reunited again and we will see JonBenét.”

  John said, “I have corresponded several times with a little girl about our son Burke’s age in southern Illinois. She was very distressed by this. I have received a card from an elderly lady. I think she said she was eighty-five. She said she had to wait until she got her Social Security check so she could buy stamps to send us a letter. It’s just been wonderful.”

  Patsy continued. “I know you have been diligently covering this case,” she said, “and we have appreciated some of what you’ve said—I’ll be frank, not all of what you’ve said.”

  Some of the reporters chuckled as Patsy continued. “We need to work together as a team. And we need your help.”

  Then Patsy held up the newspaper advertisement that had appeared four days earlier, in the Sunday edition of the Daily Camera, offering a $100,000 reward for information.

  “We feel like there are at least two people on the face of this earth that know who did this,” Patsy continued. “That is the killer and someone that that person may have confided in. We need that one phone call. We need the one phone call to this number that may help the authorities come to a conclusion with this case.”

  As Patsy repeated “one phone call,” the reporters exchanged glances among themselves.

  With less than twenty minutes left, Patsy asked for the first question. Phil LeBeau, who weeks before had received an unsolicited call from her, was first. “This is the same plea, I think,” LeBeau began, “that you and John made in your CNN interview four months ago.” The reporter wanted to know why the public had seen little evidence of other efforts by the Ramseys to catch the killer.

  John responded, even though the question had been directed to Patsy.

  “We’ve been distressed that the [original] reward [offer] wasn’t better publicized,” he answered.

  Reporter Bertha Lynn, whose husband was a Denver district judge, wanted to know why two grieving parents had dragged their feet in giving police an interview if they wanted to catch their child’s killer.

  “The impression that we haven’t spoken with police is totally false,” John Ramsey replied. He detailed the time he and Patsy had spent with police on December 26 and 27.

  “What has been delayed has been this formal interrogation of us as suspects,” he went on. “Frankly, we…were, as you might imagine, insulted that we would even be considered suspects in the death of our daughter. And felt that an interrogation of us was a waste of our time and a waste of police time.”

  “Mr. Ramsey, what do you want to say to the killer of your daughter?” Paula Woodward asked

  “We’ll find you,” Ramsey said evenly. “We will find you. I have that as a sole mission for the rest of my life.”

  “Patsy?” Woodward asked.

  “Likewise. The police and investigators have assured us that this is a case that can be solved. You may be eluding the authorities for a time”—Patsy jabbed her finger toward the cameras as she spoke directly to the killer—“but God knows who you are, and we will find you.”

  Those words would comprise the front-page headline of the Rocky Mountain News the next day.

  Charlie Brennan asked the next question: Did the Ramseys fear a life spent under a permanent cloud of suspicion?

  John replied that they weren’t concerned: their true friends knew what they were made of. Then he added, “An arrest is absolutely necessary in our lives for closure…an arrest must be made for us to go on with some semblance of a life and hope for the future.”

  Both John and Patsy clasped and unclasped their hands as they spoke, and Patsy often had both palms pressed together as if in prayer. The two of them didn’t touch each other as they sat side by side on the love seat.

  Clay Evans of the Daily Camera wanted to know whether they were now second-guessing anything they had done or not done to date. They said no. LeBeau then asked, “John, would you recommend the death penalty for the person convicted of killing JonBenét?”

  Meeting LeBeau’s eyes directly, Ramsey said: “I would absolutely want the most severe penalty to be brought.”

  “Patsy?” LeBeau asked.

  She nodded slightly, then looked down. Her eyes welled with tears and her lips trembled, but she did not make a sound.

  Then Bertha Lynn, pointing to the contrast between the JonBenét pictured in the advertisement and the child cavorting onstage in a provocative costume, asked the Ramseys whether involving their daughter in pageants now seemed a mistake.

  “Those were beautiful pictures,” Patsy said. “I’m so happy that we have those pictures. They’re all that we have now.”

  John added, “That was just one very small part of JonBenét’s life.”

  “A few Sunday afternoons,” Patsy said.

  “If you could,” Phil LeBeau asked Patsy, “what would you say to JonBenét right now?”

  “I’d tell her that I love her and I will be seeing her real soon. It won’t be long.”

  Abruptly, Rachelle Zimmer brought the session to a close. Within moments, the Ramseys and their lawyers were gone.

  Out in the parking lot, the photographer for the Rocky Mountain News turned his key in the igniti
on and told Brennan, “If those people are guilty, then I don’t know anything about people.” Brennan agreed. Their gentleness allayed any suspicion that they had killed JonBenét. To Brennan, they seemed trustworthy.

  As he drove back to Denver to write his story, he heard Carol McKinley and Mike Rosen talking on the radio. The host of a morning talk show on McKinley’s station, Rosen was a moderate conservative. Now he questioned McKinley aggressively.

  “There was nothing substantial,” Rosen protested. “None of you pushed them. Now you know why they didn’t invite people like me or Peter Boyles,” he said, referring to another controversial Denver talk show personality.

  Back in his office, Charlie Brennan turned on the TV mounted over the city desk. Switching from channel to channel, he watched key passages from the Ramseys’ news conference appear again and again. Some critics were already calling it an infomercial for the Ramseys. With repeated viewings, Brennan noticed that John Ramsey’s eyes were focused somewhere in the middle foreground, on the floral arrangement. That seemed normal, Brennan decided. But Patsy’s demeanor troubled him. She would shut her eyes for several seconds while she spoke. It was an odd little tic, Brennan thought. It suggested that she might be lying.

  “I’m appalled that anyone would think that John or I would be involved in such a hideous, heinous crime.” Patsy said. Then she closed her eyes and added, “I loved that child with my whole of my heart and soul.”

  Maybe it meant nothing, but she did it again when she said, “We would like to think that we don’t know anyone that we ever met in our lives that could do such a thing to a child.”

  She shut her eyes again when she said: “I feel like [the police] are doing a broad investigation, and that is all I need to hear.”

  As Brennan wrote his story for the next day’s paper, the confidence he’d felt in the Ramseys while in their presence began to recede.

  We’ve been able to convict the Ramseys because they were outsiders.

  Usually a crime like this will bring the community together, but we really didn’t adopt them as one of our own. They were just one of dozens of families who came here to escape other cities. That made things easier on us.

  —Peter Adler

  Professor of Sociology, University of Denver

  Now that they had completed police and media interviews, the Ramseys began to cooperate to some degree with the DA’s office. They had met Pete Hofstrom earlier in the year and trusted him. Introduced to Lou Smit when they gave their police interviews on April 30, they came to believe he wasn’t looking to target them. He didn’t seem to have an agenda. It was likely that they were impressed not only by Smit’s religious faith but also by his telling them that he intended to let the evidence lead him to JonBenét’s killer. Not long afterward, Smit made the same statement to a colleague, adding: “If the evidence led to Jesus Christ, I would follow it.” Experience had taught Lou Smit that an investigator had to get to know his target, look him in the eye from time to time. It was important to build a positive relationship with the target, not alienate him. Smit believed that after a bridge was forged with the Ramseys, he would be able to rely on his gut to tell him what the evidence couldn’t.

  Two weeks later, Smit, Ainsworth, and Hofstrom met with the Ramseys and showed them a photo lineup. Included were Kevin Raburn, his mother and sister, and two sex offenders the investigators were checking out. The Ramseys couldn’t identify any of them. Without blood and hair samples from Raburn, who still hadn’t been located, Hunter’s office began to process the few handwriting samples they had culled from his prison files.

  While Smit and Ainsworth continued investigating Raburn, unknown to them, the Longmont police were also looking for him. Back in March, when Smit and Ainsworth had first tried to locate him, Raburn was forging checks. A Longmont detective had tracked him down, unaware that Hunter’s office was looking for him. Raburn agreed to turn himself in for check forgery and, still unknown to Smit and Ainsworth, appeared on May 13 at the police department, where he was released pending a court date. After that he became a fugitive, and Smit and Ainsworth were still unaware of his run-in with the Longmont police.

  STUDENTS RIOT ON HILL BONFIRES BURN AS 1,500 FACE OFF WITH POLICE OFFICERS

  It began as a simple end-of-the-semester party.

  But soon, more than 1,500 people—mostly students from the University of Colorado—were overturning Dumpsters, setting bonfires and pelting law enforcement officers with rocks, bricks and bottles.

  Police called the five-hour standoff in the University Hill section of Boulder late Friday and early Saturday the worst riot in the city in 25 years. Participants said it was the result of a year of simmering tensions between police and students over alcohol consumption.

  The riot ended with 11 people arrested on various charges of assault and rioting. Twelve officers were injured—two of them hurt seriously enough to go on temporary disability leave.

  When officers from the Boulder Police Department Hill team arrived at the scene, a crowd charged their Suburban truck, smashing the windows and caving in the side of the truck, [Police Chief] Koby said.

  “(The crowd) came right at them,” said Koby. “The crowd surged to upwards of 1,500, so we called for additional help.”

  More than 100 officers from 10 agencies, including the Boulder police, the Boulder, Jefferson and Adams county sheriff’s departments, the Colorado State Patrol and police from Golden, Broomfield, Lafayette, Longmont and Louisville police departments—most clad in full riot gear—gathered on the Hill.

  —Elliot Zaret

  Daily Camera, May 4, 1997

  This was not the first time there had been a ruckus on the Hill, a few blocks from the Ramseys’ house. The Hill was a lot like San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district of the 1960s. Since that so-called psychedelic revolution, recognizable hippie types had been camping out on University Hill’s sidewalks in front of coffee shops and clubs, while Boulderites and students from the CU campus, a few blocks away, hung out in the bars, record shops, and movie theater. The mixture of street people, students out for a good time, and alcohol was often combustible, and the Boulder police had opened a substation in the area.

  Now Tom Koby, whose detectives were resentful that he hadn’t spoken up for them against the media attack on their handling of the Ramsey investigation, faced outrage from the rank and file. His officers were furious that Koby refused to let them respond as they saw fit to the rioters on May 2. At first he ordered them to stay out of sight. Then they were pelted with rocks.

  There had been confrontations between the police and students over their underage and public drinking throughout the winter of 1996–97 and into the spring. In July 1990 the drinking age had been raised from eighteen to twenty-one because the governor believed it could save ten to fifteen lives a year and because the federal government threatened to withhold $27 million in highway funds if the age limit was not raised. In 1992 five hundred people had been involved in an incident where bottles, rocks, and burning branches were tossed at firefighters. More near-riots broke out in 1994, when three hundred people threw furniture and street signs into a bonfire and tossed bottles and rocks at police.

  A week after the May 2 riots, the Boulder Planet, a weekly newspaper, quoted Koby as saying, “My officers would have been justified killing some of these young people.” Koby hailed the restraint of his officers during the riots and said that a lack of education about alcohol abuse was one cause of the disturbance. Two weeks later, the Rocky Mountain News took him to task in an editorial.

  RIOTERS EARN EXPULSION

  The University of Colorado has begun to expel and suspend some of the students arrested during the early May riots that endangered lives, injured dozens of people and cost the city and property owners hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  The university is wise to move so fast in meting out punishment.

  In this case, the most commonly cited cause—the city’s strict attitude toward underage dr
inking—was trivial, if it really existed at all in the minds of some rioters. As Boulder Police Chief Tom Koby has pointed out on several occasions, the rioters put lives at genuine risk.

  Having said that, however, we do take issue with another of Koby’s remarks, whose melodramatic quotient was wild and irresponsible. The chief told the Boulder Planet that his officers would “have been justified in killing some of these young people…. Somebody attacks you with a lethal instrument, you have the right to use lethal force.”

  Get a grip on yourself, chief. If Boulder officers had mowed down protesters with live ammunition it would have been a national scandal that would have ended more than a few careers.

  Koby suggested that his officers, primed emotionally “to get in there and mix it up” with protesters, exercised extraordinary restraint…and they should be commended, but no police chief should run around implying that any other outcome in such a confrontation even given extreme provocation might have been “justified.”

  At the end of May, the rank and file raised their grievances against Koby at a special union meeting. Regardless of his praising them in the newspaper, officers felt he had shown dismal leadership during the Hill riots. “Community policing” was the hot topic at the meeting. Officers claimed they were spending more time serving ice cream to kids than arresting criminals. It was an exaggeration, but they felt hampered in their ability to respond to the public’s needs.

  As Steve Thomas listened to the arguments, he remembered an incident that spoke to the cops’ underlying resentment. In the hot summer of 1993, Boulder’s undercover narcotics detectives worked in stakeout vans videotaping the drug deals at Boulder’s San Juan Del Centro low-income housing units. At the same time, Koby was trying to clean up the city’s drug problem through education and meetings with community leaders.