Perfect Murder, Perfect Town Page 3

  Barry Weiss was the first of several officers to return to the Ramsey home. The next to arrive was Detective Michael Everett. He searched the basement to see if anyone was hiding there. He found no one. In the wine cellar, Everett discovered on the white blanket the piece of tape Fleet White had handled. Next to the blanket was a child-size pink nightgown with the word Barbie embossed on it.

  When Rick French, the first officer on the scene after Patsy’s report of a kidnapping, later saw the spot where the body had been found, he remembered his search of the house in the early morning. In the first minutes, French, seeing from where he stood that the door was latched shut, had thought there was no need to open it. Now he was baffled by his own decision. How hard would it have been to open the door? Had JonBenét still been alive when he stood just a few feet away and decided not to open the door? The thought devastated him.

  Fifteen minutes after Detective Arndt’s page, at around 1:30 P.M., Ron Walker entered the Ramseys’ living room with Larry Mason and saw JonBenét’s body lying at the foot of the Christmas tree.

  The room was empty, but they could hear the mother sobbing. She was at the rear of the house, surrounded by friends.

  Mason and Walker went downstairs to the wine cellar, where they saw the white blanket, the duct tape, and the pink Barbie nightgown. Mason noticed that there was something about the crime scene—he couldn’t put his finger on what it was—that made it look unnatural. In the train room he noticed a suitcase standing next to the wall, just under a broken window.

  Mason knew there was no time to lose in clearing the house, securing the crime scene, and getting a search warrant. He decided he would move the Ramseys and their friends to the Holiday Inn at 28th and Baseline. He wanted everyone in separate rooms so that he could interview them independently.

  In the study, however, another detective overheard John Ramsey talking on the phone to his private pilot. He was making plans to fly somewhere before nightfall. Moments later, Ramsey told Mason that he, his wife, and his son would be flying to Atlanta that evening. He said he had something really important to attend to. At first Mason thought Ramsey was planning to leave the country.

  “You can’t leave,” Mason told him. “We have a lot of unfinished business here. We have to talk to you.”

  “OK,” Ramsey said. He didn’t protest.

  “You’re going to have to postpone that kind of stuff,” Mason added. “You can’t go.”

  Larry Mason had witnessed many SIDS* deaths and fatal accidents to children, but he had never once seen a father as callous as Ramsey appeared to be. Still, the detective tried to withhold judgment. He knew he might be projecting his own emotions onto the situation—how he would act in Ramsey’s place.

  Ramsey then told Mason that he and Patsy wouldn’t go to the Holiday Inn. He didn’t seem defensive or adversarial—just stoic. Resigned, almost. His family would go to the home of their friends the Fernies. “Give us a day,” Ramsey said quietly. “We just lost our child.”

  Mason consulted Arndt, who felt that every consideration should be weighed, then Eller. Everyone was still reluctant to push the parents. The family wasn’t going anywhere, and besides, the department had to get organized. The police would wait to talk to the parents.

  Minutes later, John Ramsey’s older children from a previous marriage, John Andrew and Melinda, arrived. They had just flown in to Denver. Originally they were going to meet their father’s private plane in Minneapolis that morning, and then the entire family would have continued on to their vacation home in Charlevoix, Michigan. But John Andrew had called his father from Minneapolis and learned about the kidnapping, and he and Melinda had taken a United Airlines flight to Denver. Now, outside in the early afternoon chill, Ramsey told his son and daughter that their little sister had been murdered. Minutes later, a patrol car escorted the Ramseys to the Fernies’.

  After the family left, Detective Michael Everett, designated the lead crime scene investigator, and Larry Mason started to prepare a search warrant. By 1:50 the house was secured. Forty minutes later, Detective Arndt went to see the Ramseys at the Fernies’ house, while Detective Patterson went to the Whites’ house to speak with JonBenét’s nine-year-old brother, Burke. Patterson confirmed what he had been told earlier—that the boy had slept through the events of the previous night.

  When Larry Mason returned to police headquarters at midafternoon, he found John Eller upset that the FBI was still involved in the case. Eller had spent eleven years with the Dade County police before joining the Boulder PD as an administrator in 1979. He resented guys who hadn’t come up from the street; they couldn’t possibly know what he knew. Eller told Mason the Bureau was no longer needed.

  In the case of a homicide where the dead child is found in the parents’ home, the FBI’s standard procedure is to investigate the parents first and then move outward in circles. The first circle of suspects would comprise the immediate family. Then would come people who had frequent access to the child—baby-sitters and domestic help. The next circle would contain the parents’ friends and business associates. The outermost circle would be strangers. The technique was to avoid leaping over these concentric circles too quickly. For example, investigators shouldn’t concentrate too early on a stranger, the least likely possibility. Agent Ron Walker hoped the Boulder police would do the job progressively and methodically. He also hoped they would ask for help from the FBI or the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which had both the experience and the resources for a case like this.

  But John Eller felt differently. He believed the Boulder detectives could handle the investigation alone.

  Earlier, at 1:30 P.M., the phone in Gary Merriman’s office at Access Graphics rang. It was John Ramsey. He seemed close to tears.

  “We found her little body. She’s been murdered,” Ramsey said.

  Merriman, too, began to cry.

  When the police showed up at Merriman’s office an hour later, for the second time that day, they grilled him. Who are you? What’s your relationship to John Ramsey? Do you know of anybody with connections to a foreign country who might have a grudge against the company? Against Ramsey? Who are the key players at Access Graphics?

  Merriman felt he had become a suspect. For the next five weeks, not only would the firm’s computers be searched but as many as thirty employees would be questioned.

  Later that evening, Merriman called Laurie Wagner, who had worked for Ramsey for ten years and was now vice president of worldwide market development. He told her what had happened, then he called the other executives. Some had already heard about JonBenét’s death. Those who hadn’t were horrified to find out.

  At about 2:30 P.M. Pete Hofstrom called Bill Wise again to tell him that the DA’s office now had a murder on its hands. Everyone was justifiably upset that Officer French hadn’t found the body in his initial search of the Ramsey house early that morning. Hofstrom, who generally had a poor opinion of the Boulder police, told Wise he thought the police had lost control of the crime scene before the body was found by allowing so many people into the house.

  Wise decided not to disturb his boss, Alex Hunter, the district attorney of Boulder County, who was on vacation in the Hawaiian Islands with his wife and two youngest children. Hunter was sure to call in within a day or two anyway. Wise would tell him then. There was no need for Hunter to rush back. For now, the police were in charge of the investigation.

  By early afternoon, the Ramseys’ property was surrounded by police cars and vans. Yellow police tape encircled the large brick house. Inside, the house was empty except for JonBenét’s body, which was being guarded by an investigator for the coroner and a single police officer. The coroner would arrive only after the search warrant had been obtained. Outside, other police officers waited until the law allowed them to reenter the house. It would take the Boulder PD six hours to prepare a five-page search warrant and have it reviewed by the DA’s office and signed by a judge. While the detectives huddled outside in
the cold of the early evening, garlands and white Christmas bulbs lit up the snow on the lawn. A double row of red-and-white wooden candy canes bordered the front walk.

  Meanwhile, the investigation continued elsewhere. The ransom note and the writing pads the Ramseys had voluntarily given to the police were sent to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which housed the state’s forensic science lab.

  It turned out that FBI special agent John Gedney knew the mother of one of JonBenét’s schoolmates, Annie Smartt. In the late afternoon, Agent Gedney and Detective Jeff Kithcart went to see Mary Smartt and her husband, Bob, and asked if JonBenét had any unexplained absences from school. Mary didn’t know of any.

  At the same time, the Whites and the Fernies began to notify the Ramseys’ other friends that JonBenét had died. Patsy told Pinky Barber, the mother of one of JonBenét’s school friends, “Somebody came to my house and murdered my baby.”

  When Patsy’s friend Pam Griffin got home in the early evening after exchanging some Christmas gifts at the Crossroads Mall in Boulder, she found several frantic messages on her answering machine: “I need to talk to you. Call the Ramsey house.” The voice sounded like Patsy Ramsey or one of her sisters, Polly or Pam.

  Then there was a quieter message, almost a whisper, from Patsy’s friend Priscilla White: “I can’t talk to you about it over the phone—please call.” Pam called Patsy’s house and got her answering machine.

  At dusk, the Ramseys had their son, Burke, picked up from the Whites’ house and he was brought to the Fernies’ place in the Shanahan Ridge development on Table Mesa, below the foothills. There was room for all of them to stay overnight. The victim advocates, who had gone with them to the Fernies’, left at 5:00 P.M. Shortly afterward, Detective Arndt left too. One patrol officer was left behind for security.

  Michael Bynum, John Ramsey’s close friend and corporate attorney, who had been away snowshoeing, now arrived at the Fernies’ house. As he walked in, the family was kneeling in the living room praying with Rev. Hoverstock. Around 7:00 P.M. John Ramsey went for a walk with John Fernie and Dr. Francesco Beuf, JonBenét’s physician, who had brought over some medication for Patsy. When they returned a half hour later, Ramsey asked Bynum to represent him.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Ramsey told his friends over and over. Then, just after 8:00, he left alone to take a walk in the nearby foothills.

  Earlier, at 7:00 P.M., Detectives Fred Patterson and Greg Idler knocked on the door of the Ramseys’ housekeeper, Linda Hoffmann-Pugh. When she first saw the police, she thought something had happened to one of her children. They asked her to take a seat at the kitchen table, and then they took her husband, Merv, downstairs to the TV room. He wasn’t allowed to leave the room—even to get a beer—unless an officer accompanied him.

  In the kitchen, the police told the housekeeper that JonBenét had been murdered. She screamed and couldn’t stop shaking. After Hoffmann-Pugh settled down, they asked her to print some words on a sheet of paper—Mr. Ramsey, attache, beheaded, and the number $118,000—but Linda was too upset to write. Upon hearing the words, she assumed that JonBenét had been beheaded. She figured she and her husband were suspects.

  The police spent three hours talking to the Pughs that night. Had Linda ever witnessed any signs of sexual abuse in the Ramsey household? Had JonBenét ever wet the bed? Had Linda seen semen, blood, or anything unusual on the child’s bed? On anyone else’s bed?

  Hoffmann-Pugh confirmed for the police that the day after the Ramseys’ December 23 Christmas party, she had called Patsy to ask for $2,000 that she desperately needed to pay the rent.

  In the basement TV room, Merv Pugh told the police that the previous night he had fallen asleep on the couch in front of the TV and that Linda had said she went to sleep upstairs in their room. This morning, Pugh said, he had been up at 5:00 A.M. and the family had left the house at about 10:00.

  Linda Hoffmann-Pugh would know for sure she was a suspect when the police returned the next day to search her house and fingerprint her. At a local doctor’s office, she cried as the police yanked strands of hair from her head. As Linda gave saliva and blood samples, she wondered if JonBenét had been beheaded.

  Meanwhile, Detective Jim Byfield had obtained a search warrant, and by 8:00 P.M. the police were allowed to begin searching the crime scene. Twenty minutes after they began, coroner John Meyer arrived. JonBenét’s body was still lying at the foot of the lighted Christmas tree in the living room, but now she was covered with a blanket and a Colorado Avalanche sweatshirt. Meyer and his chief investigator, Patricia Dunn, noted the ligature around the child’s neck and around one wrist. The cord around her neck had been pulled through a knot almost like a noose, and a broken, lacquered stick was tied to one end. They could also see a small abrasion or contusion on her right cheek, below her ear. Meyer had left the house by 8:30 P.M. Dunn stayed on to prepare the body for transport to the morgue.

  At around 9:00 that evening, Patsy Ramsey lay down for a nap on an air mattress on the floor at the Fernies’ home, while Fleet White and John Ramsey drove to Denver International Airport to pick up Ramsey’s brother, Jeff, and his friend and broker, Rod Westmoreland. Patsy woke up an hour later. She discovered that her husband wasn’t there, and she began to sob, asking anyone near her, “Why did they do this? Why did they do this?” Patsy’s sisters, Pam and Polly, just in from Atlanta, arrived at the Fernies’ house to find Patsy still on the mattress on the floor. A few minutes later, John arrived with his brother and Westmoreland.

  At 10:00 P.M., Pam Griffin was watching the local news when they said something about the body of a little girl being found in a basement. When JonBenét’s picture flashed on the TV screen, Pam grabbed her daughter, Kristine, told her guests she’d be back in a while, and drove to Patsy’s house.

  Pam and Kristine stood behind the yellow tape in the cold clear winter night and waited for Patsy to come outside. As they watched, a tiny black body bag was wheeled out on a stretcher. Pam asked about Patsy. Detective Larry Mason told her the Ramseys weren’t there. Pam told Mason she was a friend of Patsy’s—that she made beauty-pageant costumes for JonBenét. Mason asked her to come to police headquarters the next morning. Then Pam and Kristine left for their home in Longmont, twenty miles northeast of Boulder. No one had told them where Patsy was.

  Earlier that day, Pete Hofstrom had assigned deputy DA Trip DeMuth to work with the police. DeMuth arrived at the Ramsey house in midafternoon and was soon troubled by the reluctance of the police to consider his advice on the preservation of evidence. Now, after spending only an hour and a half collecting evidence, the police announced that they were almost ready to release the house as a crime scene and return it to the Ramseys. DeMuth insisted that much more investigative work had to be done. In this huge house, the police had concentrated mainly on two rooms—the wine cellar and JonBenét’s bedroom. When DeMuth found himself at an impasse with Commander Eller, he called his boss, Hofstrom, who phoned Eller immediately.

  Eller made it clear to Hofstrom that he wanted the DA’s office to get out of the crime-scene-analysis business. It was his call to make, Eller said, and if he said the police were finished at the Ramsey house, then they were finished. Twenty years earlier, in Dade County, Eller had been taught that a crime scene belonged to the police. A district attorney was there to give legal advice. Cops should never let prosecutors tell them who to interview or how to investigate. Those were tactical decisions, Eller had learned, and strictly police business.

  Hofstrom, just as gruff and stubborn as Eller, bluntly explained to the commander how much work still had to be done at the crime scene. The officers and technicians hadn’t even scratched the surface, he said. He wanted the entire house fingerprinted, shoeprint impressions taken, hair and fibers collected, drainpipes ripped out, floorboards removed. He wanted every drawer, every closet, every nook and cranny searched. The evidence, Hofstrom insisted, must be in a form that could be properly presented in court when the time
came.

  To Eller, the prosecutor’s demands seemed a challenge to his authority. The commander made it clear once more that he was in charge. Hofstrom had better stay out of it or chaos would follow.

  Commander Eller had been rotated into his job as head of the detective division only eleven months earlier, and he had never once directed a homicide investigation. Pete Hofstrom had twenty-three years behind him in the DA’s office, fifteen of them as head of the felony division. In the last four years, he had overseen twenty-three murder cases in Boulder County.

  Rather than argue any longer, Hofstrom went over Eller’s head. He called police chief Tom Koby, who had been given periodic briefings since JonBenét’s body was found. Late that night, Koby suggested to John Eller that he consider the recommendations of the DA’s office very seriously and continue to search the scene. In the coming weeks it would become apparent that Eller could neither forgive nor forget Pete Hofstrom’s questioning his skill, professionalism, and his authority.

  In the end the police would continue their work at the crime scene for ten days, during which there would be constant disagreement between them and the DA’s office. Hofstrom wanted three times what was needed—according to the cops. The police wanted half of what was necessary—according to Hofstrom. Differences of opinion between branches of law enforcement are to be expected, but nothing like this.

  At 10:45 P.M. Larry Mason stepped outside the Ramseys’ house and made an official statement to the two local reporters there. The TV crews had left earlier, to get on the air by 10:00. The dead child’s name was JonBenét Ramsey, age six, said Mason. He refused to answer any questions.