Perfect Murder, Perfect Town Read online

  On the afternoon of December 27, when Pam Griffin got home from her interview with Detective Mason, she found a telephone message from Patsy’s sister Polly. “Patsy needs you right now!” Polly had left directions to the Fernies’ house.

  At the Fernies’, Pam and Kristine found that Patsy was overdosing on Valium. She’d been taking the powerful tranquilizer every few hours and had probably lost track of the amount. Pam, a former registered nurse, touched Patsy’s skin and realized she was dehydrated. She brought Patsy some water and made her drink it.

  Later that afternoon, Kristine and Pam sat on either side of Patsy, holding her hands. “You know,” Patsy said quietly to Pam, as if she were telling someone for the first time, “they’ve killed my baby.” Pam noticed that Patsy used the word they.

  “You need to brush your hair,” Pam told her. “You need to lie down a little bit.” But Patsy stood up to greet each new person who arrived, and as she did, tears streamed down her face. These friends, Pam observed, were entirely different from the people she and Patsy knew in common—their pageant friends. The people visiting her here were strangers to Pam. Hours later, Patsy finally took Pam’s advice and lay down in the Fernies’ bedroom.

  Kristine went to the bathroom to get a cool washcloth for Patsy’s forehead. While she was gone, Patsy reached up and touched Pam’s face. “Couldn’t you fix this for me?” she asked. Pam thought she was delirious. It was as if Patsy were asking her to fix a ripped seam. “Patsy said something like, ‘We didn’t mean for that to happen,’” Pam would say later.

  After Patsy napped for almost an hour, Pam took her into the shower and washed her hair. Patsy was unable even to dry herself, and Pam wrapped a towel around her. Later, Pam couldn’t say why, but she remembered feeling as if Patsy knew who killed JonBenét but was afraid to say.

  Kristine, a former pageant winner, had been JonBenét’s role model. Patsy in turn had become one for Kristine and had been planning to groom the girl for the Miss America pageant. That afternoon Patsy asked Kristine, “Why couldn’t she have grown up? All Jonnie B ever wanted was to win a crown like yours.”

  While Patsy slept, Pam found John in the living room holding Burke. To Pam, Ramsey seemed to be in a trance. His face was blank. His eyes were red. “I don’t get it,” he said over and over. Then he got up, walked outside, shook his head, and asked aloud, “Why?”

  The next morning, Kristine brought one of her crowns to Patsy. It had been JonBenét’s favorite.

  In the early afternoon on Friday, December 27, a dozen or so reporters and photographers gathered in a ground-floor conference room in Boulder’s Public Safety Building for the first press briefing on the Ramsey case. Formerly the telephone building, the two-story structure, which housed the Boulder Police Department, was located two miles from the Justice Center and downtown Boulder.

  John Eller, a stranger to nearly all the reporters who jammed the room, seated himself at a table. Not the typical trim and fit officer, he held a few sheets of paper in his hands and was introduced by Leslie Aaholm, the city’s press representative. To the journalists, Eller seemed depressed, tired, and obviously reluctant to address them. Pinned to a bulletin board behind his right shoulder was a picture of JonBenét Ramsey. She was wearing a pink pullover. Her shoulder-length hair and bangs framed a sweet face and a radiant smile.

  Eller spoke softly—he sounded like a whispering Baptist preacher, according to one reporter—and didn’t say much. He pointed out that his detectives were facing a “delicate and sensitive” investigation. “The death was clearly the result of a criminal act,” he stated. No one had been identified or eliminated as a suspect yet.

  The commander wouldn’t tell reporters where in the basement JonBenét’s body had been found, what she was wearing, or the condition of her body. He confirmed that she had been discovered by a family member, although he didn’t say which one.

  Reporters pressed him. Why didn’t the police find her earlier if she was in the house?

  “We had no reason to believe the child would be in the house at the time,” Eller replied. “The initial efforts of the police were directed toward preparing to comply with the instructions in the ransom note.”

  So far, no reporters had spoken to the Ramseys, but they all knew that the family was staying with “friends.” Eller stated that a police officer was staying with them for “security,” and he revealed that his detectives had not yet conducted interviews with the family.

  “The parents are going through a tremendous grieving process, we expect,” was all Eller would say. “We’re going to have to work our interviews and those kinds of things around it.” While he said very little about the Ramseys themselves, reporters noted that Eller said the “victim’s family was well connected with Boulder society.”

  As for JonBenét, he said, “It truly is a tragedy. This was a beautiful little girl, as you can see—very vibrant and, from what we can tell, very precocious and a wonderful child.”

  When reporters asked about the ransom note, Eller said little. He insisted the police hadn’t ruled out the possibility that JonBenét might have been killed during a “bona fide” kidnapping. “We have no reason to believe that it was [a kidnapping] or not at this time,” he explained. “It’s too early in the investigation to start ruling things out.” When reporters pressed for more details, Eller said only that the note had demanded money and referred to “future demands.”

  “The ransom note was a typical—if there is such a thing—kidnapping ransom note, the kind you’d find in any movie,” he added.

  After Eller concluded the press briefing, one reporter looked in his notebook. He’d jotted down the commander’s description of the ransom note. He’d called it “typical” but in the same breath likened it to something in “any movie.” What was Eller really saying? Was he unwittingly revealing something?

  At Boulder Community Hospital, John Meyer concluded his autopsy at 2:20 P.M., and after the press conference, Eller was briefed by Detectives Arndt and Trujillo about the coroner’s findings.

  There was a linear fracture on the right side of the child’s skull, running about 8½ inches from the front to above her right ear. Near the back of her skull, at one end of the linear fracture, there was a displaced rectangular section of skull, about ¾ by ½ inch. A heavy blow had caused the fracture.

  The coroner had found small amounts of dried and half-dried blood at the entrance to JonBenét’s vagina and reddening in the vaginal walls, most notably on the right side and toward the rear. What remained of the hymen was a rim of tissue running from the 10 o’clock to the 2 o’clock position. There was also an abrasion on the hymeneal orifice at about the 7 o’clock position.

  During the autopsy, Meyer had told Arndt and Trujillo that JonBenét had suffered an injury consistent with vaginal penetration—digital or otherwise. In his opinion, she’d sustained some kind of genital trauma that could be consistent with sexual contact.

  Arndt told Eller that before the internal examination began, Tom Trujillo had passed a black fluorescent lamp over JonBenét’s naked body. This would reveal traces of semen—if there were any—not visible to the naked eye. The light also revealed numerous traces of dark fibers scattered over her pubic area, similar to fibers found on the outside of JonBenét’s outer garment. Under the black light, the coroner saw a residue on the child’s upper thigh that could have come from semen, though residue from blood and even from certain kinds of soaps could appear the same way under the black light. Nevertheless, the detectives conjectured that they were semen traces.

  In addition, JonBenét’s underpants bore stains that appeared to be blood. The corresponding areas of her skin in the pubic area, however, showed no matching stains. The coroner told the police that the blood smears on the skin and the fibers found in the folds of the labia indicated that the child’s pubic area had been wiped with a cloth. The blood smears also contained traces of fibers.

  Eller knew the police had found no evidence that
an intruder had entered the Ramsey home, and John Ramsey had said to Fleet White it was he who had broken the basement window—months earlier. Also, one officer had noticed three strands of a spiderweb at that spot. It extended from the edge of the grate covering the well outside the broken window to the window itself. This seemed to indicate that nobody had entered through the broken basement window recently. Other doors and possible points of entry had been locked or covered by spiderwebs. Outside, much of the grass was topped with snow, and Sgt. Paul Reichenbach had noted in his report that there were no footprints. A south-facing door in the solarium showed a fresh pry mark near the dead-bolt, but detectives had found no corresponding wood chips or splinters. They concluded that the door hadn’t been breached. Pry marks were also found on the exterior door leading to the kitchen, but detectives told Eller the lock had been set from the inside. So far, no clear sign of forced entry had been found anywhere on the premises.

  The Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which was studying the ransom note and the writing samples John Ramsey had given the police before JonBenét’s body was found, called the Boulder PD with an initial finding: the ransom note had been written on paper torn from one of the pads that John Ramsey had given to Detective Patterson. The pad contained a sample of Patsy Ramsey’s writing.

  Given the apparent presence of semen on JonBenét’s body, Eller concluded that he had no choice but to consider John Ramsey the most likely perpetrator. Now he knew that the parents had to be questioned without delay. The Ramseys were the prime suspects.

  So long as the Ramseys were not taken into custody Eller knew they could be questioned without a Miranda warning,* and any admissions they made could be used as evidence. Later Eller admitted that he had always felt intimidated by the Miranda decision; Miranda warnings can turn the search for criminals into a fox hunt in which a clever suspect might escape capture, he said.

  After the autopsy briefing, Eller ordered that John Ramsey’s office at Access Graphics be sealed and an officer be posted until a legal search could be conducted. The Ramseys should be interviewed without delay, he told Mason and Arndt.

  At 9:30 that evening, Detectives Mason and Arndt arrived at the Fernies’ house to interview John and Patsy Ramsey. Patsy was heavily sedated. She was in shock, could barely talk, and couldn’t sit up or stand. An interview was out of the question.

  In the Fernies’ basement office, the detectives sat with John Ramsey, his brother, Jeff, Dr. Francesco Beuf and his friend and broker, Rod Westmoreland. Michael Bynum, Ramsey’s lawyer, sat at the opposite side of the room but close enough to hear what Mason was saying. The detectives decided that under the circumstances, it would make more sense to schedule later interviews with the Ramseys. Earlier Mason had told Ramsey how important his and Patsy’s contribution to the investigation would be. Now he said their assistance would be vital to finding their little girl’s killer. Ramsey said he could not set a time and date for the interview. Arndt asked him a few questions, but his answers were so vague that the detectives soon left.

  After the police departed, Bynum and Westmoreland sat beside their friend, holding him as he wept. It was 2:00 in the morning before Ramsey fell asleep. A few minutes later he was up again, sobbing.

  That night, John Meyer returned to the morgue. With the coroner was Dr. Andrew Sirotnak, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado’s Health Sciences Center. The two men reexamined JonBenét’s genitals and confirmed Meyer’s earlier findings that there was evidence of vaginal injury. Meyer knew that JonBenét’s death could be traced to strangulation and a blow to the head, but the facts surrounding the sexual assault of the child were unclear. In the event of a trial, the physical evidence about that would be open to interpretation.

  4

  On Saturday morning, December 28, seventy parents and children showed up at High Peaks Elementary School. The administrator had arranged for therapists to come in to talk to the kids and their parents. The school was in a U-shaped red brick building whose interior had been scrubbed clean and spruced up by dedicated parents. Now, many of these same adults gathered around the small tables in the library and talked in groups. Some of them were grateful to be temporarily separated from their children. It would give them a chance to express their own sadness and anxiety freely.

  In the kindergarten classroom, children of various ages were gathered, some of them hyper, some of them relaxed, all of them full of questions. Charles Elbot, the principal, got their attention and then sat in one of the little chairs and read aloud from a book entitled Lifetimes, the Beautiful Way to Explain Death to Children.

  All round us, everywhere, beginnings and endings are going on all the time. With living in between.

  Sometimes, living things become ill or they get hurt.

  Mostly, of course, they get better again but there are times when they are so badly hurt or they are so ill that they die because they can no longer stay alive.

  This can happen when you are young, or old, or anywhere in between.

  He told the children that there was no right or wrong way to feel at a time like this and that they should not be afraid to talk to their parents or teachers. “You need to know that tonight you should feel safe,” he said. “What happened doesn’t usually happen in Boulder.”

  “Yeah,” one third grader responded, “JonBenét’s parents would have told her that too.”

  “That’s true,” Elbot said. “But you need to understand it’s a rare occurrence.”

  He told the children that this was like crossing the street—an accident can happen, but it’s not likely to happen.

  Elbot knew the children were terrified.

  He suggested to them that they make some drawings. Jo-Lynn Yoshihara-Daly, the school’s social worker, helped the younger children. Some of the kids painted pictures of JonBenét’s family. Some drew JonBenét. Some added words to their pictures.

  A few of us parents thought we should only tell our children that JonBenét died. Others thought we should say she had been murdered but not that she had been murdered in her own house. By Saturday morning there was a huge amount of speculation about the cause of JonBenét’s death. Some parents had heard JonBenét was strangled. My daughter was in JonBenét’s kindergarten class and hadn’t heard anything. But some of the older children had seen news reports on TV.

  The school psychologist told us he would tell the kids the facts that were known, but he assured us he wouldn’t go near the subject of whether JonBenét was sexually assaulted. He would talk mostly about safety, about how you could feel safe. He wanted to focus on what the kids needed most.

  The art therapy took forty-five minutes, maybe an hour. There were about twenty-five kids in two groups—younger children in one group, the older kids in another. Jo-Lynn dealt with the kindergartners.

  The kids decided what had happened. They figured it out all by themselves. They drew pictures of JonBenét and her house. Then they came back to us parents with their drawings and their conclusions.

  They said that JonBenét’s family went to bed and forgot to make sure that all the doors were locked. Then a bad man had snuck in and murdered JonBenét. They decided that if a bad man came into their homes, they would have to make a lot of noise to scare him away. They decided they all wanted whistles. They said that no bad man could stand having a huge whistle blowing in his ear.

  On the way home, I bought my daughter a whistle that she could hook to her pillow. She wanted her friends to have them too, so I bought whistles for them. Other parents I know got whistles for their kids. Our kindergarten kids latched on to the whistle idea pretty strongly.

  For weeks, my daughter wouldn’t go to sleep without the light on, the bedroom door open, and the whistle clipped to her pillow.

  She didn’t sleep through the whole night for months afterward.

  Now I always make sure I turn on the house alarm that I hadn’t used in two years. I don’t think there’s a night that’s gone by since this happen
ed that I haven’t had our alarm on.

  I was happy that my child grasped that whistle. It was something that gave her some comfort, some sense of power. You realize that it’s absolutely futile, but you’re never going to tell your child how futile it is.

  —Barbara Kostanick

  By Saturday morning, having been present at Mason and Arndt’s abortive attempt at an interview the evening before, Michael Bynum realized that the police were targeting his friend and client John Ramsey. His instincts told him to make sure the Ramseys had every protection the law provided. Bynum, in his early fifties and a longtime resident of Colorado, was born in Arkansas and retained faint overtones of the South in his soft-spoken speech. Like so many who eventually settled in Boulder, he had attended the University of Colorado. Bynum also got his law degree at CU and worked briefly as a deputy DA in Boulder before becoming a specialist in business planning, acquisitions, and commercial transactions. Bynum had a saying: when it comes to murder, it doesn’t matter if you’re guilty or innocent—you need an attorney.

  Shortly after noon that Saturday, without consulting John or Patsy, Bynum told Detective Arndt that the Ramseys would not give any more testimonial evidence without a criminal attorney present, and they would no longer share privileged information with the police. Since he was no longer a criminal attorney, Bynum called Bryan Morgan of Haddon, Morgan and Foreman in Denver, one of Colorado’s top firms. By Saturday evening, the Ramseys had retained Morgan.

  Arndt then checked with Pete Hofstrom in the DA’s office about the non-testimonial evidence the police still wanted from the Ramseys.* It was likely, Arndt knew, that according to court rulings, the Fifth Amendment and its protection against self-incrimination did not include physical evidence such as blood, hair, saliva, fingerprints, and handwriting samples.