Perfect Murder, Perfect Town

by Lawrence Schiller

  If JonBenét had been hit with the flashlight in or near the kitchen and was carried unconscious to the basement, the perpetrator would have followed the same route into the boiler room, winding up in front of the wine cellar door.

  The detectives felt that in every scenario, JonBenét spent the final moments of her life just outside the wine cellar door, where the police had found wooden shards from the broken paintbrush that was tied to the cord at one end of the noose. That was also where they found Patsy’s paint tote. The tote contained the unused portion of the paintbrush and additional brushes similar to the one used in the murder. After JonBenét was murdered, the police surmised, her body was taken inside the windowless room.

  In an attempt to recreate the final acts of violence, the detectives screamed at different locations in the house, taking an intruder into account. At one point, Thomas ran from the house and slammed the door behind him. He wanted to know how long it would take someone to leave the house by the shortest route.

  Just before midnight, Frank Coffman joined Shapiro. They stood on a wooden fence in the backyard and watched as lights in the house were turned on and off. They saw Detective Gosage, with a flashlight in his hand, performing a pantomime in which someone found John or Patsy and JonBenét, attacked one or the other, but ended up fracturing JonBenét’s skull instead. With the flashlight still in hand, Gosage recreated a slightly different scenario in the kitchen. It looked as if the detectives thought the flashlight was the murder weapon.

  After midnight, Shapiro saw the garage door open. Gosage pulled out in his Blazer. Steve Thomas and Lou Smit stayed until the early hours of the morning.

  The next day, Trip DeMuth and Tom Trujillo maneuvered the basement window-well grate while Gosage inspected some spiderwebs to see if the grate could be moved without breaking the webs completely.

  Watching the police that night, I thought about that movie Manhunter where William Peterson talks to an unknown killer while hunting him down. One night I went back to the Ramsey house, looked up at JonBenét’s window, and spoke to Patsy: “I know you walked in. I know you did it. Didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

  I found myself driving past the Ramsey house five to ten times a day. Sometimes I’d go into the backyard and eat lunch on the patio or in the playground. I would just hang out to get a feel for it, the way Thomas did. “Home Sweet Home” is what I started calling the Ramsey house—my home away from home.

  A few days later, Thomas called me and asked me to come in and meet Sgt. Wickman.

  “Jeff, is your loyalty to the DA’s office, the police, or the Globe?” Thomas asked.

  I looked at him seriously. “My loyalty is to JonBenét. I will work with whoever I have to work with to do whatever it takes to avenge that girl.”

  At that moment I saw a look in Thomas’s eye that I’d never seen before in my life. It was a look of total respect and admiration.

  Thomas had told me they couldn’t get to Hunter through the normal chain of command. They needed my help. That was when I decided to tell them some of the things that were going on in Hunter’s office. I related to them some of my conversations with Hunter.

  As Thomas questioned me about the things that were going on in the DA’s office, I sensed he was trying to get negative information. They wanted to know all about Lou Smit. I called him “the fox,” “the ace detective”—something I’d picked up from Hunter—and told them about his intruder theory.

  Finally Wickman stood up and thanked me for coming in. Steve Thomas left with him. A moment later, he returned alone.

  “That was good,” he said. “Wick was totally impressed—especially the stuff about Smit.” Then Steve continued, “I fuckin’ can’t stand Smit. Sometimes I’m in the DA’s office talking to Smit and DeMuth. They’re telling me about the intruder theory, and it’s like—I just look down at my piece and I think to myself—well, I’ve got one in the chamber and seven in the clip.”

  We started laughing.

  Thomas told me that he believed John and Patsy killed JonBenét. I said I thought it was Patsy who actually did it. Thomas just smiled. “You’re on the right track,” he said. Then we started talking more about Lou Smit.

  “Jeff, this guy is convinced the Ramseys are innocent. He is obsessed with his Christian values. We’re ready to arrest the Ramseys—and he’s looking for intruders.”

  Then I tried to tell Thomas that Hunter is a good guy and that Hunter thinks Eller is the problem. I told him what he had said about Eller.

  “That’s because Eller is the only guy over here who challenges him,” Thomas said.

  “Isn’t Eller kind of an asshole?”

  “Jeff, Eller is a fuckin’ good guy,” Thomas shouted. “I wish I could just take you in the back and show you our files.”

  I could feel we were bonding.

  “Just keep it between us, and we’ll keep talking,” he said. “We have to get Hunter off the intruder path.”

  I understood that I was the messenger from the cops to Hunter, and from Hunter to the cops. Soon I would become the messenger from God reminding Thomas and the cops that they were needed.

  That was how we left it: my job was to get Hunter off that path.

  —Jeff Shapiro

  While the detectives seemed to be having doubts about Lou Smit, the veteran investigator was gaining admiration for them. Most of them were top-notch, Smit thought—honest to a fault. Their major problem was their lack of experience. How many murder cases did they have to solve in the last five years? Also, there was no devil’s advocate in their ranks to keep them objective, a situation aggravated early in the case when the DA’s office took the position that the cops weren’t doing their jobs right.

  One detective stood out in Smit’s mind. Steve Thomas was a professional. He was dedicated and, like Smit, only wanted justice for the victim. Thomas knew the case from every angle, and he was in the field, where detectives should be. The only fault Smit could find in Thomas’s thinking was that he’d started, like Eller, from the position that the Ramseys must have been involved in JonBenét’s murder. Like most narcotics officers once he found his target he never let go. Thomas’s lack of experience as a homocide detective seemed to prevent him from stepping back and looking at all the evidence from a different perspective. It was a shame, Smit thought, because under different circumstances, they might have made a team.

  3

  PORN EXPERT CALLED IN TO RAMSEY CASE

  Authorities have asked an Arvada Police Department detective to investigate child pornography computer databases in connection with the JonBenét Ramsey homicide, sources said Wednesday.

  Investigators searched for pornography in the Ramseys’ home after obtaining search warrants.

  “They were out (at the Ramseys’ house) looking for every type of pornography you can imagine,” a source said. “They were looking for things like pornographic movies, books, magazines and photographs.”

  The girl’s autopsy report verified she suffered head injuries and that sections of her vagina showed chronic inflammation and epithelial erosion, or tissue damage.

  The Ramseys have denied a history of sexual abuse in the family involving JonBenét or others.

  —Alli Krupski

  Daily Camera, July 3, 1997

  RAMSEY PRESS ADVISORY

  To:

  Media covering the Ramsey case

  Contact:

  Rachelle Zimmer

  Date:

  July 3, 1997

  An article in today’s Boulder Daily Camera reflects a despicable new low by some member or members of the Boulder Police Department who are engaged in a concerted and vicious smearing of character of John and Patsy Ramsey. Any suggestion or hint by such persons that John and Patsy Ramsey may somehow be connected with child pornography, and thereby implicated in the death of their daughter is totally outrageous.

  The results of such searches were not revealed to the reporter for the most obvious reason: no pornography was found, nor has a
ny evidence of any sort been found which in any way would link the Ramseys to pornography.

  When the police had finished the four-day search of the Ramsey home, the couple wanted some independent reporters to determine how easy it would have been for an intruder to enter their house. Just before the Ramseys went to Atlanta, a Ramsey attorney contacted Dan Glick of Newsweek and offered him a tour of the house. That same week, Clay Evans of the Daily Camera was asked if he’d like a tour. Both reporters were told that they could not publish what they had seen or what their conclusions might be until the Ramseys gave them permission—if ever. Both reporters agreed to the conditions.

  Evans found many of the family’s personal effects—furniture, books, wall hangings, and even some food—still in the house. What interested him most was the basement. In his notes, he described it as “unfinished,” with walls that had been repainted just before the murder. It had a claustrophobic feel, with low ceilings and small rooms. There were no lighting fixtures—just bare bulbs everywhere. Toilets and sinks were still disassembled from the various police searches. At the back of Burke’s train room, Evans saw the place where the police had found the broken window. He saw that a full-grown person could have crawled through an opening of that size. Just past the boiler room was the unfinished, windowless room where JonBenét had been found. It didn’t look like a wine cellar. The room was “dark and bunker-like, with waterstained cement walls and floor.” The door and its frame had both been removed by the police.

  After his tour, Dan Glick considered the relationship of JonBenét’s bedroom to her parents’ and Burke’s rooms. To him, the path from the second floor down the spiral staircase to the basement didn’t seem difficult, and though a stranger to the house, he easily found the wine cellar. He agreed that a grown man could have climbed through the basement window and escaped through any of several doors. An intruder with a key could have entered the house easily, and someone without a key could have entered through any of the doors that had pry marks. Of course, at the time, neither reporter knew that the doors with pry marks had been found latched from the inside and that a partial spiderweb extended across the grate at the broken basement window.

  Just weeks before Glick’s visit to the house, Newsweek had published an article by him and Sherry Keene-Osborn titled “Complications in the Case.” The writers insisted that previously published information—that there was no sign of forced entry at the house and that semen had been found on JonBenét’s body—was completely false. The article attempted to set the record straight on behalf of the Ramseys and their attorneys, since the police had made no attempt to do so.

  Glick had turned a corner in his thinking. Balancing what little he knew of the evidence with his own investigation into the family’s background, the fact that JonBenét told her friend’s mother that Santa would visit her the day after Christmas, and now the house itself, Glick concluded that Patsy and John Ramsey were unlikely to have been involved in JonBenét’s death. A few days after he saw the inside of the Ramseys’ home, Glick told his friend Charlie Brennan that an intruder could well be the answer. He now thought the Ramseys were probably blameless. From then on, Glick’s articles gave far more space to exculpatory evidence than to evidence pointing to the Ramseys’ guilt.

  On July 8 and 9, a moving crew packed the remainder of the Ramseys’ belongings from the house on 15th Street for transport to Atlanta. Their new suburban home, which cost $700,000, was located near the cemetery where JonBenét was buried. The house where JonBenét died was put on the market for $1 million.

  HANDWRITING TEST FAILS TO CLEAR PATSY RAMSEY

  Handwriting analysts can’t rule out Patsy Ramsey as the author of the ransom note in her daughter’s murder case, the Rocky Mountain News has learned. They can’t say for sure that she wrote it either, sources said.

  Results from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation analysis of Patsy Ramsey’s handwriting have been in the hands of Boulder police since last June, but hadn’t been disclosed publicly until now.

  Earlier handwriting analysis eliminated John Ramsey, 54, as a possible author of the note.

  —Charlie Brennan

  Rocky Mountain News, July 9, 1997

  Lou Smit had a hard time reconciling the grief-stricken Patsy, who reportedly was unable even to comb her own hair in the days after her daughter’s death, with the person who was able to compose and write a two-and-a-half-page ransom note while her daughter lay dead in the basement. Smit was now ready to believe that John and Patsy could not have killed their daughter.

  During the first days of June, the DA’s office received a phone call from Patsy Ramsey. Alex Hunter was out. Patsy left a message that the family was leaving for Charlevoix on June 6 now that Burke was done with school for the year. Lou Smit, who had been driving by the Ramsey’s house each morning at 7:00 A.M. to look around and say a prayer for JonBenét, happened to be at the their home when Patsy and John drove by on June 6. Seeing an opportunity to develop a relationship with the Ramseys, he waved to them. John stopped his car and got out. Smit greeted Ramsey and the two men stood on the front lawn chatting. It was the first time the investigator had met either of the Ramseys. A moment later Patsy joined them and Smit invited the couple into his van to continue the conversation. Just before the Ramseys departed, Patsy told Smit that she and her husband had nothing to do with the death of JonBenét. They wanted the killer to be caught, she repeated. Then the Ramseys and Smit joined hands and prayed together that the detective would find JonBenét’s killer and this nightmare would soon end. Smit continued to stop each day at the scene of the crime on his way to work to pray for JonBenét.

  It wasn’t long after that Smit received a letter from John Ramsey. The worst thing that I have ever done in my life, Ramsey wrote, is that I once committed adultery when I was married to my first wife. I wanted you to hear it from me, Ramsey continued, before you read it in some tabloid.

  As he had always done in the past, Smit was letting the evidence lead him to the murderer. At this point, he saw no hard evidence against Patsy or John, but there were several strong indications that pointed to an intruder. One was the print of a Hi-Tec shoe that the police had found in the dusting on the cement floor near JonBenét’s body.* Another indicator was a partial, smeared palm print that was found on the ransom note. Third was another unidentified palm print, this one found on the wine cellar door. Fourth were some pieces of glass found on top of the suitcase under the broken basement window that was found open and the scuff mark on the wall below the window. Fifth was the possibility that a stun gun had been used on JonBenét. Sixth was the pubic hair found on the blanket JonBenét’s body was wrapped in.

  Smit also took into account the many outstanding copies of the house key. Then there was the strange fact that every object used in the crime—except the roll of duct tape and the remainder of the cord—was found in the house. Did it mean that the tape and cord were brought into the house for the purpose of kidnapping JonBenét? If so, then it was logical that the intruder had taken them with him so that they couldn’t be traced back to him. And if the roll of tape and the cord had belonged to the Ramseys, why weren’t they left in the house with the other crime elements? This seemed to indicate that the intruder had come to kidnap JonBenét and that the murder somehow grew out of the planned abduction.

  Since visiting the basement with the police on June 30, Smit had also been bothered by something he’d seen in the boiler room just to the left of the wine cellar door. There he had observed an exposed ventilation duct several paces from where the shards of wood, the paint tote, and the remnant of the broken paintbrush had been found. The duct vented through an opening at the front of the house where there had once been a window. If JonBenét had screamed near the duct, the sound could have traveled outside and been heard by the Ramseys’ neighbor, Melody Stanton, although possibly not by Patsy and John, asleep on the third floor inside the house. In July, sound tests conducted by the police confirmed that sound traveled m
ore easily from the basement to the street than it did up through the three floors of the house. If JonBenét had screamed in the basement, it was likely that she was down there when she was hit on the head, either with the flashlight or with, say, a golf club—John Ramsey’s golf bags had been found nearby with their partial set of clubs. An intruder might have used a flashlight to find a hiding child if he hadn’t discovered the light switch for the basement stairs. Since no fingerprints were found on the flashlight or its batteries, it seemed to Smit that it might have been brought into the house by an intruder, though the Ramseys had never denied that they owned a flashlight like it.

  The basement was so cluttered, such a mess—if JonBenét’s parents had killed her, they would not have taken her to this dark, damp pig sty to do it, Smit theorized.

  All of his conjectures were very tenuous, Smit knew, and nothing that he wanted to mention to anyone just yet. Months later, however, he discussed his ideas with Steve Thomas. Thomas asked Smit the following question: after the scream—which the intruder had to assume was heard by the parents—would the intruder have hung around, taking the time to strangle JonBenét with the noose and then move the body into the wine cellar? After all, someone, having heard the scream, might be coming down the basement stairs, thereby cutting off the most accessible exit. Why move the child from one hidden place, the boiler room, to the equally hidden wine cellar? And, of course, there wasn’t any evidence that JonBenét had ever even been in the boiler room. When Smit mentioned this theory to another detective, the detective asked, What if the scream wasn’t JonBenét’s? Maybe it was her mother’s. Male, female, young, old—could anyone being wakened out of a sleep really tell who had emitted the scream? These questions, among others, made the detectives skeptical of Smit’s scenario.