Perfect Murder, Perfect Town

by Lawrence Schiller

  At first Haney had the impression that Patsy might be acting, but she was hard to assess. She seemed to have moments of real emotion. Still, he doubted her sincerity.

  The videotapes of the ongoing interviews were sent to the Boulder police headquarters twice daily, where the case detectives screened them. They thought Haney was doing a good job, considering what little he knew. Patsy often seemed to retreat into herself. She’d close her eyes as she talked, not wanting to look directly at Haney or DeMuth. Steve Thomas noted many inconsistencies in what he called “Patsy’s southern belle routine.” One minute Haney would be talking to a sophisticated, articulate Miss America contestant, Thomas observed, the next, she’d be trying to charm him. One moment she’d be earnest and naïve; the next, she’d be chattering away as if holding court with her friends over lunch.

  On the second day, Haney asked Patsy if she had talked to her husband about the previous day’s interviews. “No,” she said. “We didn’t talk about what went on.”

  “You didn’t talk about anything I asked you or about anything John was asked, what kind of questions he got?” Haney inquired. “You didn’t say, ‘How did it go, John?’”

  “Yes, we did. But we never discussed what was asked,” she replied.

  Patsy’s performance was not making a good impression on Tom Haney. On the third day, he went all-out.

  What would you do if I told you we had evidence that shows you’re not being truthful? he said, looking directly into her eyes.

  Let’s see it, Patsy said, as if she had been brought up on the streets of Brooklyn.

  We’re not in a position to show it to you now, Haney replied. You have lied to me, he added.

  Pal, you don’t want to go there. Don’t start that, she snapped.

  The tougher the questions became, the tougher Patsy became. Once, she raised her hand across the table in front of Haney’s face and said, You’re going down the wrong road.

  When Haney took the offensive, Patsy Ramsey was ready for him. She had the answers, and she didn’t care if he liked them or not.

  When the detectives viewed the tapes of the third day, they gave Haney four stars. He’d gotten to the real Patsy, they believed. She had exhibited the hard side of her persona. A side, they believed, capable of doing harm to her daughter.

  By contrast, Thomas and his fellow detectives were outraged to see Lou Smit shake John Ramsey’s hand and engage him in chitchat. He was so friendly with Ramsey, it was if the two men were on the same team. Smit had his pet intruder theory written all over him. Meanwhile, when Ramsey was taken through the photos of his home, he claimed to find something out of place in almost every one. More than once, he said that what he saw in the photo was evidence that an intruder had been there. In a photo of the basement bathroom window, he pointed to a smudge on the window frame and said it looked like the dust had been disturbed. He wanted to know if the police had checked it out. In a picture of the broken basement window, he saw some messed-up dirt near the window frame, also an indication that someone might have entered the house at that point.

  Looking at a photograph taken near his upstairs desk, Ramsey suddenly asked, “What’s that, what’s that?” Pictured was a copy of a local journal, the Boulder Business Report. Clearly visible on page 1A of the October 1995 issue was a story, “People vs. Profits,” that featured photographs of Mary Ellen Vernon, Jirka Rysavy, Jeffrey Kohn, and Ramsey, winners of the journal’s Esprit awards. Someone had drawn a “NO” over each of the faces except Ramsey’s, which had a flower design around it. Startled, Ramsey said he’d never seen that in his house. He had no way to explain it, but it was something out of the ordinary, he told the investigators. He was sure it had been brought in by a stranger. That evening the police remembered that Chris Wolf, who was a suspect at one time, had worked for the newspaper. He would have to be reinterviewed.

  When Ramsey was asked about JonBenét, he would introduce his remark by saying, How could I do something like that to a loving, beautiful child that I cared so much about? I didn’t kill her. To the cops, it looked as if Ramsey was selling an image of himself as a father. Only rarely did he answer with a straightforward “No” or “I didn’t.” He seemed to ask almost as many questions during the interviews as were asked of him.

  Asked whether Burke had talked to him at the time of the 911 call, he said he was sure Burke was in his room and asleep. There had been no conversation between them. Asked about the pineapple, Ramsey said that he took his daughter directly to bed and that he was sure she hadn’t eaten any pineapple.

  On the second day, Ramsey began by telling Kane and Smit that he wanted to correct a statement he’d made the previous day about the pineapple.

  Last night it hit me like a brick, Ramsey said. I remembered hearing that there was an agreement between Santa and JonBenét to meet that night, he continued. If an intruder had come into her room, she would have kicked and screamed, but she knew Santa and she would have hopped out of bed and gone with him. One person who might have been able to coax his daughter downstairs to eat some pineapple without his or Patsy’s knowledge was Santa—Bill McReynolds, Ramsey said. JonBenét trusted him and would have done whatever he suggested. The police should question McReynolds again. According to profilers he had hired, Ramsey said, McReynolds fit the description of a possible kidnapper. He doesn’t have two nickels to rub together, he added.

  Asked about the cord, Ramsey said, “It’s not mine. Fleet White knows about cords, lines, and sailing.” Asked about the duct tape, he replied that it was something White would own: “Fleet had some special tapes, possibly black duct tape.” Asked about the stun gun, he said he didn’t have one, but he knew that women from California sometimes carried them for protection. Maybe Priscilla White had one, he suggested.

  Watching the videotape, Thomas was enraged that Ramsey had taken control of the questioning. The detectives screamed at the TV monitor and banged their fists on the table.

  “Shut him up.” “Ask him this!” they yelled. Gosage threw his remote control at the TV. “That’s not the way to ask the fucking question!”

  By Thursday night, June 25, the interviews were over. The twenty hours Tom Haney had spent interviewing Patsy were unlike anything he’d ever experienced. He didn’t believe in the baloney about multiple personalities, but having interviewed Patsy for all those hours, he was sure that she was not who she pretended to be—ever. That was what he believed. Still, it was almost impossible to believe that she’d turned from a normal mother, which until then she had given every indication of being, into a murderer that night. Haney had never been able to come up with a motive for the killing, and now, after three days of questioning, he had not been able to find a trigger that might have set Patsy off—if she was the killer. All he knew for sure, based on his years of experience, was that the person who killed JonBenét was not afraid of discovery in the house. The ransom note alone convinced him of that. Someone had sat down after the murder and written the note. Haney was sure of it.

  One deputy DA viewing the videotape felt it would be unreasonable to assume that Patsy Ramsey, out of the blue and cold-bloodedly, placed a noose around her daughter’s neck and used it. Logic suggested, however, that Patsy might have hit her daughter on the head with a heavy object by accident and rendered her unconscious. Then, believing JonBenét was already dead—and unable to face the horrifying idea that the world would see her as her child’s murderer—she might have set about to cover it up. If that was true, at that moment Patsy Ramsey became her daughter’s killer. Coming from Atlanta, where most murder cases are charged as first-degree death penalty offenses, it was likely Patsy Ramsey had never considered Boulder’s more liberal climate.

  Of course, the deputy DA had to admit that there were holes and unanswered questions in his theory. What was the motive that might have caused Patsy, who had never been seen so much as slapping her kids, to hit—deliberately or accidently—JonBenét on the head? If she did hit the child by accident, why not
take her pulse or call 911? If Patsy was together enough to engage in a cover-up, she had to have been capable of seeking medical attention.

  Over Thanksgiving break in 1994, the Ramseys went to Georgia. I was working for them as their housekeeper. They were due home on Sunday but were a day late because Atlanta was fogged in. When I came to work Monday morning, the house was flooded. It was really bad. A window in John’s third-floor bathroom had been left open by a painter. Then the wind blew the shutter, which apparently hit the hot water control on the shower and turned it on. The water must have been running for three days. It destroyed the bathroom floor, ran down into John Andrew’s closets and out into his room on the second floor, and all the way down into some rooms on the ground floor. It was so bad that I called Don Paugh at Access Graphics.

  When John and Patsy showed up, they went straight upstairs. We were all standing in the bathroom. There was water everywhere. John was in his stocking feet; he always took his shoes off when he came into the house.

  He slammed the window shut. Then he realized his socks were wet. That made him furious. He was more mad about his socks being wet than about the house being ruined. I looked into his eyes and they’d almost changed color. He was so angry. Really angry. I don’t know how to explain it. It was like this light switch had come on behind his eyes. It was the last straw.

  He didn’t freak out, didn’t throw things. It wasn’t even in his voice. But you could see the rage. You could feel it. I mean, it was powerful. I wanted to get out of the room, but Patsy was standing between me and the door. I’m not saying he didn’t have a right to be angry. I’m just saying I saw him angry. I saw the coldest eyes. He never said a word, but it was right there in his face. It was palpable. You could cut it with a knife.

  Patsy was freaking out. It was, “What are we going to do? We’re having the Christmas house tour…” He was angry, but she was in a total panic. The flood had ruined Patsy’s image of what her perfect house should look like.

  —Linda Wilcox

  After the interviews were over, Hunter’s staff met in his office. Some thought the Ramseys were guilty; others were sure they were innocent.

  Kane, Smit, DeMuth, and Haney found that their opinions were divided. Smit and DeMuth thought the intruder theory was more viable now and that no one could say for sure that the Ramseys had killed their daughter. Tom Haney, however, couldn’t see any suspects besides the Ramseys. The door hadn’t been closed on an outsider committing the crime, he said, but he thought it was a very distant possibility.

  Kane saw no alternative but to go to a grand jury. Smit didn’t like what he was hearing. He realized that Kane had made up his mind that at least one of the Ramseys was guilty.

  Hunter agreed with Kane: they would take the case to the grand jury.

  They discussed how to proceed, and decided to use the Boulder police as primary investigators. Each officer would be sworn in. The grand jury wasn’t like a courtroom trial, where the police were only advisory witnesses. Tom Wickman would sit in during all the testimony in the grand jury sessions. He’d be allowed to whisper in Kane’s ear, “Be sure to get this in,” and “Don’t forget that this cop did that.” Officers who had worked the case would be called as witnesses, and as the grand jury moved along, Kane said, he would use the detectives as investigators for special assignments. Haney, who had known Kane for years, knew he would present everything, including exculpatory evidence.

  But they were putting the cart before the horse with all this talk of a grand jury. There was a lot of work to do before they got there.

  The next day, Lou Smit told Hunter that his wife had recently had a recurrence of cancer and he wanted to be by her side. They were in their sixties, he said, and they wanted to travel before she began chemotherapy. Smit said he wouldn’t leave the case but that he’d like to work out of his home in Colorado Springs, cut his time back to twenty hours a week, and come to Boulder only for weekly meetings. “I’m in this for the duration,” he assured the DA.

  With the Ramseys’ interviews over, a full-scale public relations war broke out. The first official word of the interviews was published in the local dailies on June 25, even as they were taking place. The DA’s office told the press that the interviews didn’t preclude the Ramseys appearing before a grand jury and that the current questioning was part of an ongoing investigation. The same day, Beckner told one reporter that “significant” test results from the Ramseys’ clothing had surfaced; he didn’t say, however, that the fibers on the duct tape were found to be consistent with Patsy’s jacket. In The Denver Post, Chuck Green noted that the Ramseys were talking now because in this interview situation, they were allowed to ask their attorneys’ advice. Green also speculated that “by submitting to interviews now, they should be able to detect the direction of the investigation and anticipate what jeopardy they might be in if a grand jury summons their testimony.”

  Denver attorney Larry Pozner, president-elect of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, confirmed for the media that the Ramseys had given Hunter’s office medical records and confidential documents that even a grand jury would be unable to obtain. “All the Ramseys ever wanted was a competent, objective set of investigators,” Pozner told The Denver Post, “and they now believe it is in the hands of such investigators. They will cooperate fully.” Pozner was speaking for the Ramseys just as Bob Grant had often spoken for Hunter’s office.

  Grant told one journalist, “The fact of the matter is that people who are under the umbrella of suspicion or who are suspects are more likely to wait to talk to prosecutors, because prosecutors are in a decision-making capacity and police are not.”

  Hal Haddon released a prepared statement, which said in part, “We have honored every request for information which has been made by the district attorney’s office over the past 18 months.” This outraged several members of Hunter’s staff, who had made numerous requests on behalf of the Boulder PD that were never honored. Hunter, displeased by Haddon’s spin, issued a statement of his own.

  DA: RAMSEYS’ HELP WAS LIMITED

  Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter on Friday disputed claims by defense lawyers that his office conducted numerous formal and informal interviews with John and Patsy Ramsey for more than a year.

  Hunter also indicated the number of documents given to investigators by the couple has been limited.

  His claims came a day after Ramsey attorney Hal Haddon indicated the couple had been quietly cooperating with the district attorney’s office for about 18 months…in stark contrast to earlier reports. Haddon made the statements Thursday, after three days of investigators’ intensive questioning of his clients.

  Hunter told The Denver Post the idea of this week’s interviews came April 15, when he was given a letter from John Ramsey indicating he was willing to be interviewed.

  —Howard Pankratz and Karen Auge

  The Denver Post, June 27, 1998

  Dan Glick learned about one exchange of words during the Ramseys’ interviews, and Newsweek published the snippet on June 28:

  LOU SMIT: John, look, it was an accident. This could all be a lot easier for everybody.

  JOHN RAMSEY: Look, somebody bashed my daughter’s head in, Somebody strangled her. It wasn’t any accident.

  A few days later, freelance writer Frank Coffman spoke to Lou Smit on the phone.

  “People think that because your beliefs are similar to the Ramseys’ religious beliefs, you might be sympathetic to them.”

  “I’ve put just as many Christians in jail as anybody,” Smit retorted.

  “Don’t you think the motive is difficult?” Coffman asked.

  “Yes,” Smit said.

  “I just don’t see why anybody had to kill that little girl,” Coffman said.

  “Yeah, really,” Smit sighed.

  When Coffman told a friend he thought Smit was on the Ramseys’ side, his friend said, “He’s just jerking your chain. He’s buttering up the Ramseys so he can get cl
ose to them.”

  On June 23, during the Ramseys’ interviews, Mark Beckner was named Boulder’s new director of police services.

  “Because Commander Beckner and I have worked closely on the Ramsey case this past half year,” Alex Hunter told the Daily Camera, “I can say that we are on the way to forging the sort of cooperative relationship that will serve this community as well.”

  Tom Koby, who’d had his retirement accelerated, agreed to stay with the Boulder city manager’s office to work on special projects. Among them was an expansion of the Restorative Justice program, which handled community-service sentencing. By year’s end, however, callers would hear the following message on his voice mail: “This is Tom Koby. I don’t live here anymore. Those of you I’ve worked with, I’ve enjoyed it. I wish you all well.” Alex Hunter told the Daily Camera, “Tom Koby was a great fit for the city of Boulder. This community and what it stands for took Tom and his wife by storm. He loved Boulder.”

  RAMSEY COOPERATION MITIGATES SKEPTICISM

  Who ever would have guessed that we would be so easy to manipulate?

  The Ramseys did, I suppose. Or their team of experts.

  News that JonBenét’s parents and her brother finally are providing long-sought insight into what happened on the night of her murder already has gone a long way toward rehabilitating the family’s relationship with the public and the media.

  Even some of the couple’s harshest critics have been overheard discussing the return of the Ramseys’ reputation.

  It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, how things would have gone if they’d done this from the start.