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  When Arndt returned to headquarters, she told Eller about her conversation with White and Fernie. Clearly, the Ramsey family was concerned about preserving John Andrew’s and Melinda’s presumption of innocence. Arndt suggested that maybe the department should make a public statement to pacify the Ramseys, that it might help the police get their cooperation. Eller agreed to the concept, but he said that at this early stage of the investigation, no one could be exonerated completely. That afternoon, at a scheduled press briefing, a police spokesperson said that both of John Ramsey’s older children had been out of state at the time JonBenét was murdered but had not been eliminated as suspects. Forty minutes after the press conference ended, Arndt called the Ramseys in Atlanta and told them about the media briefing.

  That same day, Eller placed Detective Sgt. Tom Wickman, who had a master’s degree in psychology, in charge of the crime scene investigation. Of the thirty officers now working on the case, seventeen were detectives.

  DA Alex Hunter would be in Hawaii for the next several days, but Bill Wise kept him informed. Some of the news was not good. Wise was troubled that John Ramsey had carried JonBenét’s body upstairs and that evidence might have been contaminated. Also, he told Hunter, the media were starting to criticize the Boulder police for not having secured the crime scene.

  5

  Over the next several weeks, the police would reconstruct piecemeal the events leading up to the murder. They learned that on Christmas Eve, the Ramseys had dinner at Pasta Jay’s restaurant on Pearl Street, then stopped by the Whites’ house, and then drove around Boulder looking at Christmas lights before going home. After the children were in bed that night, John Ramsey went across the street to their neighbors the Barnhills’, to pick up a bike he had been hiding in their basement. When he got home, he placed it under the Christmas tree in the living room. On Christmas morning, JonBenét and Burke gave gifts to their parents and each other, and in the early afternoon, JonBenét rode her new bicycle around the patio before the family went to the Whites’ house for dinner. Fleet White, forty-seven, was retired, having made his money in the oil business. His daughter, Daphne, was the same age as JonBenét, and Fleet White Jr. was a year older. When the Ramseys left the Whites’ house, they stopped off at their friends the Walkers’ to drop off some presents and then stopped briefly at the home of the Stines, who were also friends. Glen Stine, forty-eight, was vice president for budget and finance at CU. The Stines’ son, Doug, was about Burke Ramsey’s age. Patsy talked to Susan Stine for about ten minutes. By that time, JonBenét was asleep in the backseat of the car.

  During a conversation between John Ramsey and Detective Arndt on the morning of December 26, Ramsey said that the family arrived home at about 10:00 P.M. Christmas night. Ramsey parked their Jeep Cherokee next to their Jaguar in the garage, he said. According to a police report, he carried JonBenét, who was still asleep, upstairs to her room, where he took her shoes off and read to her. Patsy undressed her, remembered singing a bedtime song to her while she slept, and kissed her good night. Meanwhile, Burke was downstairs playing with a model he’d gotten for Christmas and didn’t want to go to bed. John helped his son finish what he was doing and then took him upstairs and put him to bed before he himself retired

  At about midnight, Scott Gibbons, a neighbor, looked out his kitchen window toward the Ramseys’ house and saw a light on in the kitchen area. Sometime later, Adam Fermeire, another neighbor, who was up watching TV, said he didn’t notice anything strange through the window that faced the Ramseys’ house.

  Diane Brumfitt, another neighbor, told Detective Barry Hartkopp on December 31 that on Christmas night she did not see a light on at the southeast corner of the Ramseys’ house, though there had been a safety light in that spot for years. She remembered thinking that it was unusual. Melody Stanton, up the street at 738, told the police on January 3 that she was certain she had heard a child’s scream at about 2:00 A.M. on the night of the murder. Her bedroom window, which looks toward the Ramsey house from across the street, had been partly open. When questioned by the police, Stanton said that there had been only one scream but it was horrifying. If it came from the child, she assumed the scream had awakened her parents.

  Patsy Ramsey told Rick French, the first police officer to arrive at the scene on the morning of December 26, that her husband got up before her, at around 5:30 A.M., and took a shower. She got up a few minutes later, got dressed, and put on her makeup. From the third-floor master bedroom, she then went down the back spiral stairs, which were decorated with green garlands and red Christmas ribbons, and stopped on the second floor at a laundry area just outside JonBenét’s room, where she washed a soiled jumpsuit of her daughter’s in the sink.

  The door to JonBenét’s room was about 10 feet away, but Patsy said she didn’t look in on her daughter. After doing this bit of laundry, she continued down the spiral staircase to the first floor. As she reached the bottom, Patsy saw three sheets of paper spread across one of the steps.

  Patsy said she didn’t remember but must have stepped over the papers, and police forensics later confirmed that no one appeared to have stepped on the ransom note. At the bottom of the stairs she turned around and, without picking up the papers, began to read them. After getting through a few lines, she realized the note was about JonBenét. She ran back upstairs, pushed open the door to her daughter’s room, and found her bed empty.

  Patsy screamed for her husband. Within seconds, John Ramsey reached the second floor. He was still in his underwear. Patsy told him there was a note downstairs that said JonBenét had been kidnapped. She ran to Burke’s room, she said, turned on the light, and saw her son sleeping. Then she went downstairs, where she found her husband hunched over the three pieces of paper.

  John told Officer French that as he read the pages, he realized someone had taken JonBenét. He had no idea where she was. It was still dark outside. Later Ramsey would tell a British TV interviewer that he knew he had to do something. But how could he close the airports and block the roads out of Boulder? Those were the first thoughts that went through his mind, he said. He soon realized that only the police could do what needed to be done.

  Before he finished reading the ransom note, he told Patsy to call the police. Immediately afterward, Patsy called the Whites and Fernies and told them something terrible had happened. “Barbara, get over here as fast as you can,” she said to her friend. Seven minutes after Patsy’s call to 911, Officer French was at their front door.

  John Fernie told the police that he was the first of the Ramseys’ friends to arrive. His wife, Barbara, came later in her car. As Fernie drove over, he thought that John must have had a heart attack, since Patsy hadn’t told his wife what had happened

  Fernie parked his car in the alley behind the Ramseys’ house and ran to the patio door on the south side, which he always used. It was locked. When he looked through the glass-paneled door, the lights were on and he could see some papers lying on the wooden floor. They were not facing him, but from where he stood, he could read the first few lines of one page. That was all he needed. He understood immediately that JonBenét had been kidnapped. Once inside the house, he read the entire ransom note. At first he thought it was bizarre, then later he saw it as perverse.

  A few minutes later, John Ramsey tried to phone his pilot, Mike Archuleta, to tell him what had happened and learned that the pilot was already on his way to the airport for the Ramseys’ scheduled flight to Michigan. When Archuleta returned Ramsey’s call, Patsy answered. Archuleta told the police that Patsy had been hysterical, barely coherent. She was now being consoled by her friends when a second officer, Karl Veitch, arrived. The police then paged Mary Lou Jedamus, a victim advocate.

  By 6:45, three more officers—Barry Weiss, Sue Barcklow, and Sgt. Paul Reichenbach—had arrived. Now there were twelve people in the house, including five police officers, the Ramsey family, and their friends. John Ramsey told Officers French and Veitch that he believed the house had been
locked when he went to bed.

  Just after 7:00, Detective Fred Patterson, one of Boulder’s most experienced officers, arrived at the Basemar Shopping Center, a mile from the Ramseys’ home. He had arranged to meet Detective Linda Arndt, who was driving in from her home in Louisville. Arndt and Patterson were briefed by Reichenbach, who had come from the Ramsey home for this meeting.

  Reichenbach told the detectives that there was light, crusty snow and frost on the Ramseys’ lawn and he had seen no fresh footprints in the snow. The brick walkways were clear of snow. He had examined the exterior doors and windows and had seen no signs of forced entry. Other than that, all Reichenbach knew for sure was that there was a ransom note, the parents said the child was missing, and now they were praying. A short time later, when Arndt and Patterson arrived at the house, Fleet White and John Fernie had just returned from dropping Burke and the Fernies’ kids off at the Whites’ house.

  Scott Gibbons, the Ramseys’ next door neighbor, told police that at about 8:00 A.M. he saw the door on his side of the Ramseys’ house open. But by then, anyone inside the house could have opened the door. A few minutes later, Officer Larry Burton found an earring at the curb directly in front of the Ramseys’ house. It didn’t seem to belong to anyone inside.

  That morning, Officer Weiss noticed a heavy police-style flashlight on the Ramseys’ kitchen counter. By the end of the day, none of the cops had claimed it, so it was taken into evidence. Sometime that morning, Detective Arndt found a paper bag with children’s clothing next to the den door, and she moved it into the cloakroom.

  Around noon, at police headquarters, Detective Jim Byfield received the first of several printouts listing the calls made to and from telephones the police had targeted. After the list was reviewed, additional phone traps were ordered.

  During the next seven days, the police would trap calling information from phones belonging to suspects, neighbors, family friends, doctors, business associates, corporate offices, and public officials. Even the telephones at United Airlines Red Carpet airport lounges and the mortuary that held JonBenét’s body were trapped. In all, there were traps on more than sixty-seven telephone numbers belonging to fifty-nine individuals, including Lt. Governor Gail Schoettler and her husband, Don Stevens, who knew John Ramsey from the days when they both attended Michigan State University.

  After JonBenét’s body was found, victim advocate Grace Morlock told detectives, John Ramsey said more than once that he didn’t think the kidnapper meant to kill his daughter, because she was wrapped in her blanket. When Patsy saw her friend Susan Stine at the Fernies’ house later that day, she kept asking, “Who would do this to my baby?” Susan responded, “I don’t know.”

  The police interviewed Linda Hoffmann-Pugh for a second time on Friday, December 27, and they came with a tape recorder. The Ramseys’ housekeeper told the police that the day after Thanksgiving, she, her daughter Ariana, and her husband were at the Ramseys’ house washing the windows and getting the house ready for Christmas. Hoffmann-Pugh brought the Christmas decorations in from the garage but couldn’t find the artificial trees that had been brought to the house from the Access Graphics storage hangar. There should have been a tree for the playroom and one for each of the five bedrooms. Hoffmann-Pugh even checked the basement, but she couldn’t find them, so she continued cleaning the windows.

  After they had washed the windows, Hoffmann-Pugh and her daughter started searching the house for the missing trees. She saw a closed door in the basement just past the boiler room, which she had never noticed before. She tried to open the door, but it was stuck shut, apparently from a recent painting. She pulled at it hard and the door finally opened. Feeling around in the dark, she found a light switch on the wall to her right.

  The room was full of trees, some still covered with last year’s decorations, replicas of Burke’s model airplanes and John Andrew’s cowboy hats, boots, and red scarves. The next day the housekeeper had her older daughter, Tina, her son-in-law Mike, and her husband, Merv, take all the trees upstairs and place them in their proper rooms.

  The police asked Hoffmann-Pugh if she had closed the door to that storage room securely. She didn’t know. She couldn’t even tell the police what the room looked like empty because she wasn’t the last person to leave, she said.

  When the police asked if she’d seen a broken window in the basement or had ever cleaned up broken glass from a broken window, she said she couldn’t recall anything like that.

  That same Friday, December 27, the police fingerprinted the housekeeper’s entire family, including her daughters and sons-in-law.

  On Monday morning, December 30, several of Sheriff George Epp’s detectives met with him in his office at the Justice Center. Sheriff Epp had jurisdiction over the entire county, which included the city of Boulder. Even though the Boulder PD had primary responsibility for the city, the sheriff’s department and the Boulder PD often loaned each other officers. The day after JonBenét’s body was found, the Boulder police had requested four of Epp’s detectives to work on the Ramsey case. Epp’s officers had been involved with kidnappings in the past, including the Tracy Neef case, in which a child had been abducted from Bertha Hyde Elementary School and found dead near Barker Reservoir at the top of Boulder Canyon.

  This morning Epp’s detectives were upset with what they’d seen over the weekend. Eller, they said, wasn’t organized. He wasn’t running things efficiently. Some officers were just sitting around when they should have been canvassing the Ramseys’ neighborhood. One of the detectives said that Eller’s attitude was, We’ll just vacuum up all the evidence, pull together everything, and give it to the DA to make a case out of it.

  Epp was also troubled to learn that Larry Mason was working for Eller. Larry was the kind of cop who needed to be nurtured by his supervisor. But Eller’s reputation was that he wouldn’t accept input from anyone. Mason and Hofstrom could work well together, but Eller and Mason were bound to be trouble.

  After the meeting with his detectives, Epp called police chief Tom Koby and offered his department’s continued assistance. He had a couple of detectives available who wanted to help, he said.

  “We’re fine,” Koby told him. “We can handle it ourselves.”

  A few weeks later, one sheriff’s detective made T-shirts for his department, stenciled with WE’RE THE OTHER GUYS in bold letters. When the case dragged on, a second set of T-shirts appeared, bearing the slogan WHEN IT ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY HAS TO BE SOLVED OVERNIGHT.

  That Monday afternoon, December 30, Pete Hofstrom received a letter from Bryan Morgan, one of the Ramseys’ attorneys. A gracious gentleman in his midfifties with a passion for tough cases, Grady Morgan preferred to be known by his middle name as a tribute to his birthplace, Bryan, Texas. A proper defense, he believed, included addressing a client’s emotional needs.

  In his letter to Hofstrom, Morgan said he wanted to be informed in advance when it looked as if evidence might be destroyed by forensic tests. He asked for approval and participation in the tests of the physical evidence being provided by the Ramseys. Morgan also requested copies of the ransom note, the autopsy report, the affidavits for the search warrants, and copies of keys to the Ramsey house that were in the possession of the police.

  Meanwhile, in Marietta, Georgia, Gary Mann, John Ramsey’s boss at Lockheed Martin, attended the visitation service at the Mayes-Ward-Dobbins Funeral Home on Monday afternoon, December 30. Then he went to see Ramsey at the home of Patsy’s parents, Don and Nedra Paugh, in Roswell. Mann, who stayed until 1:00 in the morning, was impressed with Ramsey’s inner strength. He hoped that if he were ever faced with a tragedy of this magnitude, he could handle himself as well. Mann had worked with Ramsey for almost a year and knew he was deeply religious, with a good Christian foundation. Nevertheless, he wondered what it was in Ramsey’s background that gave him such strength.

  Three hours before JonBenét’s funeral was to begin on Tuesday, December 31, the Boulder police asked the polic
e in Marietta, Georgia, to take tracings and measurements of the child’s hands at the funeral home.

  At the Peachtree Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, mourners passed by JonBenét’s open casket, where she lay with a pageant crown on her head and Kristine Griffin’s crown in her hands. Some caressed her hair. Others kissed her cheek. In his eulogy, Reverend Frank Harrington, who had married John and Patsy in 1980 and had baptized JonBenét, told the congregation, “The mind cannot accept, and the heart refuses to grasp, the death of one so young, who is suddenly taken from us by the cruelty and malice of some unworthy person…. When a child is lost, one feels part of the future is gone.”

  Throughout the service, John stroked Patsy’s back as they sat in the front row with Burke. Afterward, Patsy knelt and touched her face to the wooden casket. Just after noon, JonBenét was buried at the foot of a large dogwood tree in St. James Episcopal Cemetery in Marietta. John Ramsey cried, his grief as fresh as if he had just carried her lifeless body up the stairs from the basement.

  After the funeral, about forty people went to the home of Patsy’s parents in Roswell. Nedra Paugh noticed that everyone responded differently to her granddaughter’s dreadful death. Some people cried. Some couldn’t stop talking, it seemed. Some sat silently. Others had to make a great effort to compose themselves.

  Nedra looked at John Ramsey sitting alone and saw a mature man who had endured other tragedies. He had lived through the death of his oldest child, Beth, who was killed in an auto accident in Chicago in 1992. When Patsy had been diagnosed with aggressive stage-four ovarian cancer in 1993 and the doctor said there was nothing that could be done, it was John who had said to her with conviction, “This too shall pass, and we will manage.” It was John who had searched nationwide for the best treatment program, and a year later Patsy was declared cancer-free. Nedra remembered Patsy’s doctor telling her, “Go have fun.” Then John had his scare with prostate cancer just this past fall. The tests had proved negative. But now he was being cruelly tested again.