Perfect Murder, Perfect Town Read online

  The Ramseys lived in University Hill, a neighborhood that boasted many older, stately houses. A half mile or so east of their home was the University of Colorado campus. An equal distance to the west was the entrance to Chautauqua Park, with sweeping meadows, a hundred-year-old dining hall, cottages, and a rustic concert facility. Beyond that were the towering Flatirons and the foothills of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains.

  When Detective Linda Arndt arrived at the Ramsey house at 8:10 A.M. with fellow detective Fred Patterson, she found a crowd. Friends of the child’s parents, Priscilla and Fleet White and Barbara and John Fernie, were there, along with the family’s minister, Reverend Rol Hoverstock. Patrol officer Rick French and crime scene investigator Barry Weiss were also there with two victim advocates, Mary Lou Jedamus and Grace Morlock. Detective Arndt learned that the Ramseys had another child, nine-year-old Burke, who had been taken to the Whites’ home by John Fernie and Fleet White.

  The mother, Patsy Ramsey, was out of control. She kept saying she wanted to trade places with her daughter. “Please let her be safe. Oh please, let her be safe.” She was tormented, incoherent. Her husband, John Ramsey, was saying he should have set the burglar alarm.

  Earlier, Arndt had stopped at police headquarters to pick up a hand-held tape recorder and her notebook. There, she had read the ransom note which had just been brought in by Officer Veitch. It was written on white lined paper with a black felt-tipped pen. Arndt had three copies of the note made before it was booked into Property. She gave one copy to Paterson, another was placed in a sealed envelope and left on her desk and the third she took with her. Later the original note would be shown to the FBI.

  After Arndt attached her tape recorder to the phone in the family’s den, John Ramsey was instructed to answer all telephone calls. When the kidnappers called, he was to say he couldn’t get his hands on the ransom money until 5:00 P.M. and had to talk to his daughter. At the same time, the police ordered a trap on the Ramseys’ phone.*

  Some officers were already upstairs checking the bedroom of the missing child, whose name was JonBenét, for fingerprints. Detective Arndt began to question John Ramsey about whether he could think of anyone who might be involved in the kidnapping. Ramsey gave the detective the names of several ex-employees of his company, Access Graphics. Patsy Ramsey, who was sitting with Rev. Hoverstock in a corner, was at times confused and dazed. She mentioned to Arndt that her housekeeper, Linda Hoffmann-Pugh, had asked to borrow some money just a few days before. Linda had a key to the house and had major money problems. Patsy planned to make out a check for $2,000 that morning and leave it on the kitchen counter for Linda to pick up on her next scheduled cleaning day, December 27.

  Later that morning, the police would obtain copies of checks endorsed by Hoffmann-Pugh from the Ramseys’ bank for handwriting comparison. The Ramseys’ housekeeper would become the first suspect.

  As the morning wore on, the victim advocates, Jedamus and Morlock, decided to go out and get bagels and fruit for everyone. With fewer people hovering around, Arndt noticed for the first time that Patsy and John rarely sat together.

  When Larry Mason’s pager went off at 9:45 A.M. he was at home, relaxing over a cup of coffee and a cigarette. Looking down, he read: “FBI agent is looking for Bob Whitson.” Mason didn’t stop to wonder why he had received a message for somebody else on his pager. He called police communications immediately and learned of the kidnapping. Light snow was on the ground when Mason left his home in Lyons for the twenty-five-minute drive to police headquarters in Boulder.

  At headquarters, Mason met Special Agent Ron Walker, who had just arrived from the Denver FBI office with a four-man kidnapping team. The special agents were working with some police officers to set up phone taps and traps, which would give them immediate access to all incoming and outgoing calls at the Ramsey house. Agent Walker was treating the case as a kidnapping, but the ransom note was unusual. It made him wonder.

  Walker was an experienced FBI profiler. He knew this was not the time to decide whether or not the ransom note was genuine. Certainly, the amount demanded was strange—not the usual round numbers. The reference to “a small foreign faction” was another red flag. How many ways would a group—foreign or not—divide up $118,000?

  Then there was the length. At two and a half pages, it was the War and Peace of ransom notes. To Walker this suggested that the author might be trying to leave a false trail. Walker knew a ransom note required only a few sentences. We have your kid. It’s going to cost you x millions. We will be in touch. Period.

  At the house, John Ramsey gave the police a roll of undeveloped film taken at their Christmas party on December 23. He said it might contain an image of Linda Hoffmann-Pugh. A few minutes later, it was taken to Mike’s Camera on Pearl Street for processing. The photos would be ready at noon.

  Right before 10:00 A.M., alone, John Ramsey went downstairs to the basement, where Officer French had searched for his daughter. In the room where his son Burke’s train set was kept, Ramsey found a broken open window. He closed it before going back upstairs.

  When 10:00 A.M. came and went without a call from the kidnappers, Arndt thought it strange that nobody in the house commented. It wasn’t long before John Ramsey became more distraught. He sat by himself nervously tapping his foot, leaning his face on one hand as if he was trying to figure something out. Patsy Ramsey kept repeating, “Why did they do this?”

  At the detectives’ request, John Ramsey provided a handwriting sample as well as shopping lists and writing pads that contained his and his wife’s handwriting. One of the pads contained ruled white paper similar to the ransom note paper.

  Just before 10:30 A.M., Detective Patterson ordered JonBenét’s bedroom to be sealed. Then he and Detective Arndt decided to clear the house of nonessential persons. The six other police officers would leave. Patterson himself would return to headquarters to brief Commander Eller. Arndt, the Ramseys, the Whites, the Fernies, Rev. Hoverstock, and the two victim advocates would stay. They were all to remain on the first floor, in the rear study—behind the kitchen, breakfast, and dining room area. Before Patterson left, he declared the rest of the house off-limits to everyone.

  Very soon after Patterson’s departure, Arndt began to have trouble keeping everybody confined to the designated area. John Ramsey wandered out of sight. Arndt had to find him and lead him back into the study, leaving the others unsupervised. Meanwhile, Priscilla White was trying to keep her friend Patsy from fainting. She seemed to be in shock; she was vomiting and hyperventilating. Arndt was supposed to keep her eye on everyone and at the same time monitor the phone for a possible call from the kidnapper.

  Half an hour after Larry Mason arrived at police headquarters, he was paged by Detective Arndt. She said she needed detective backup—urgently. She was now the only police officer in a fifteen-room, three-story house with nine civilians, all of whom were in emotional distress.

  During this period of time Fleet White left the house to obtain a roll of film he’d taken at the Ramseys’ Christmas party, returning 30 minutes later. At the same time John Ramsey began to open his mail in the kitchen. A short time later Arndt asked Ramsey and his friends to review the contents of the ransom note with her. Ramsey said little. One person said the amount of $118,000 was odd. John Fernie told Arndt the amount was relatively insignificant compared to John Ramsey’s wealth. The ransom could have easily been $10,000,000, and that amount could be obtained, he added. Someone said the author of the note had to be educated, since the note contained words like “hence” and “attache.” To another, the reference to John Ramsey being from the South indicated the writer didn’t know John since he was originally from Michigan. Nobody could understand the meaning of “Victory! S.B.T.C.” Later Patsy asked Arndt why the author of the note had not asked for a larger sum of money, or at least a round sum of money. She also couldn’t understand why the author of the note thought her husband was a Southerner. Then she started to again cry. �
��Why didn’t I hear my baby?”

  Mason tried to scare up some detectives to assist Detective Arndt, but the crew on duty the morning after Christmas was already spread thin on other assignments related to the case. For two hours and twenty-seven minutes, Arndt was the only officer in the Ramsey house.

  At first Mason couldn’t understand why the officers on the scene hadn’t secured the house earlier, separated the Ramseys, and questioned them individually. Then he learned that Commander Eller had ordered that the Ramseys be treated as victims, not suspects.

  The Ramseys were an “influential family,” Eller told Mason, who realized that this message must have affected the behavior of all the officers at the scene.

  Very early Thursday morning, Gary Merriman, vice president of human resources at Ramsey’s firm, Access Graphics, was already at his desk trying to finish some work in the postholiday lull.

  “Hello, it’s John,” the voice said when Merriman answered his phone.

  “Good morning. Merry Christmas,” Gary said to his boss. There was a moment of silence. “What’s wrong?” Merriman asked.

  “My daughter’s been kidnapped,” Ramsey said.

  “Oh my God. Which one?”

  “JonBenét.”

  Less than an hour later, Detectives Jim Byfield and Michael Everett were in Merriman’s office asking if anyone had ever made threats against the company. Did John Ramsey have enemies? Disgruntled employees? Merriman mentioned Jeff Merrick, an old friend of John Ramsey’s who had been laid off, and Sandra Henderson, who owed Access Graphics a large sum of money.

  As Merriman answered questions, he clung to the hope that JonBenét had just trotted over to a neighbor’s house in her PJs and would be trotting home any minute to a scolding. His own son, only three, had once done exactly that—wandered over to a neighbor’s house without telling anyone.

  When the police left, they told Merriman not to talk to anyone, especially not the other employees.

  In Denver, Tom Haney, chief of the patrol division of the Denver police, was discussing a case with several special agents from the FBI. The agents were obviously distracted. They kept listening to their hand-held radios as he tried to talk to them.

  “Hey, what’s the deal?” Haney finally asked.

  “There’s been a kidnapping in Boulder,” one agent said. “It’s kind of hinky, crazy. There’s something wrong with this one. The amount of the ransom is a really weird number.”

  Just before noon, at Boulder police headquarters, Larry Mason suggested to John Eller that they get tracking dogs. If this was an abduction, the kidnapper might still be close by—in a canyon or in the Chautauqua Park area. Perhaps the Ramsey girl had been molested but was still alive.

  Mason wanted to use Yogi, a tracking dog from the city of Aurora. Eller wanted to use Boulder’s German shepherds. But the Boulder dogs worked from ground scent, Mason protested, and they were easily distracted. The dog Mason wanted was a bloodhound that in 1993 had backtracked nine miles to the base of Deer Creek Canyon and helped find the body of a kidnapped five-year-old girl. That child had been driven part of the way, and it was the kind of trail that might stymie a ground-tracking dog. The likelihood was that JonBenét Ramsey had been abducted in some kind of vehicle, and Yogi, Mason reminded Eller, was an air-scent dog and could handle the situation better.

  “Did you learn that at the Academy?” Eller snapped. He was always baiting Mason for having attended the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia.

  Later in the morning the Ramseys’ friends were still in the rear of the house consoling Patsy, who clutched a crucifix in her hands. Arndt, who didn’t know that John Ramsey had gone down into the basement before 10:00 A.M., was still the only officer in the house. She was concerned for Ramsey when she saw him sitting alone in the dining room, head down and hands clasped together. He seemed despondent, totally withdrawn.

  Everyone was waiting for the kidnappers to call.

  A few minutes after noon, the victim advocates decided to leave for lunch. Their experience told them they could best serve the Ramseys if they maintained their own composure.

  Just before 1:00 P.M., Arndt asked Fleet White and John Fernie to take John Ramsey on another tour of the house. She wanted to keep Ramsey busy. She also wanted him to check if anything was missing—anything that might have been taken along with JonBenét. White informed Arndt that he had reported his own daughter missing to the Boulder PD several months earlier. But before the police had arrived he found her hiding inside his house.

  John Fernie stayed on the ground floor while Ramsey led Fleet White down to the basement. In Burke’s train room, they looked at the broken window. Ramsey told White that some months ago, he’d found himself locked out of the house and had broken the window, unlatched it, and climbed through.

  Before they left the train room, they searched two closets near the entrance to the room. Then Ramsey, with White a few paces behind, turned right into the boiler room. At the rear was a door leading to what the family called the wine cellar, a windowless room with brick walls. Ramsey pulled the door open toward himself, stood at the threshold, and, peering to the left into the darkness, saw a white blanket on the floor just as he reached for the switch on the wall to his right and turned on the light. Then he saw two little hands sticking out from under the blanket.

  “Oh my God, oh my God,” he cried.

  JonBenét was lying on the floor, partly wrapped in the blanket. Her hands were extended over her head and appeared to be tied together. There was tape covering her mouth.

  From a distance of about 12 feet, Fleet White saw Ramsey enter the wine cellar and turn out of sight to his left. As Ramsey cried out a second time, White followed him into the room.

  By now Ramsey had ripped the tape off his daughter’s mouth and was untying the cord from around one of her wrists. White knelt beside Ramsey and touched one of JonBenét’s feet. The child was dead cold. A few moments later Ramsey picked up his daughter. Rigor mortis had set in and her body was rigid. Holding her by the waist like a plank of wood, he raced down the short hallway and up the basement stairs, yelling that JonBenét had been found. White had preceded Ramsey, shouting for an ambulance. It was l:05 P.M.

  As Ramsey emerged from the stairwell carrying his daughter with his arms now around her waist, he turned and met Detective Arndt. JonBenét’s hands were still extended above her head. A string hung from her right wrist; a bright red mark, the size of a quarter, was visible at the base of her throat. Ramsey placed JonBenét on a rug, just inside the front doorway. Arndt could see the child’s lips were blue.

  It was obvious that JonBenét was dead. There was an odor of decay, and dried mucus from one of the child’s nostrils was visible. Around her neck was a ligature with a small stick attached to one end. A similar ligature was around her right wrist. On the palm of her left hand was a red ink drawing of a heart. John Ramsey began to moan.

  Arndt ordered Fleet White to guard the door to the basement and not let anyone in. Then she asked Ramsey to go back to the den, call 911 and tell his wife. The detective moved JonBenét’s body away from the front doorway to just inside the living room, at the foot of the Christmas tree. Arndt then covered the wound on JonBenét’s neck with the child’s long sleeved shirt. From the back of the house a guttural moan and an aching wail could be heard.

  While John Ramsey and others rushed back to the front of the house, Patsy sat for a moment on a couch in the rear of the house looking out a window. She did not move despite all the shouting that JonBenét had been found. In the living room, John Ramsey grabbed a throw blanket off a chair and placed it over JonBenét’s body. He knelt on the floor next to his daughter, stroked her hair, and then laid down next to her, placing an arm around her. As he hugged his daughter, he began to cry, referring to JonBenét as “my little angel.” Then he rolled away from JonBenét’s body, and looked toward the hallway leading from the back of the house.

  Finally, Barbara Fernie led Patsy by the hand toward J
onBenét. Patsy threw herself on her daughter’s body. She pleaded with Rev. Hoverstock to bring her daughter back to life. Then Patsy raised herself onto her knees, lifted her arms straight into the air and screamed, “Jesus, you raised Lazarus from the dead, please raise my baby!” Fleet White was so upset he went into the kitchen. Arndt asked Hoverstock to lead everyone in the Lord’s Prayer. All the voices were lifeless with shock and despair. Patsy’s was broken by sobs.

  It was 1:12 P.M. when Detective Arndt grabbed a cellular phone in the kitchen, and returning to the living room, dialed 911. The operator dispatched the fire department and notified police communications, which transmitted the news to the officers working the case: a child’s body had been found at the Ramsey house.

  At police headquarters, Larry Mason got a page from the crime scene: “We’ve got a body.”

  “Oh fuck,” Mason said, half aloud. “Ron, we don’t have a kidnapping,” he told Agent Walker. “It’s a homicide. Do you want to go?”

  “Of course.” Walker knew that finding JonBenét’s body in her own home meant there had probably never been a kidnapping.

  After Arndt’s 911 call, John Ramsey told the detective that no one knew about the wine cellar in the basement and therefore his daughter’s murder “has to be an inside job.” Meanwhile, Fleet White decided to go back downstairs to the wine cellar where her body had been found. He had looked into the same room early that morning when he made a quick search of the house. Now that there was a light on, he saw clearly for the first time a white blanket in the center of the cement floor. A piece of black duct tape was lying on it. He picked up the tape, which felt sticky, and then placed it back on the blanket for the police. He looked around the room cluttered with paint cans, lumber and window screens before he went back upstairs to guard the door.