JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (2 page)

After graduating from the University of Colorado in Boulder, I spent a few years with the nearby Wheat Ridge Police Department, learning my trade, and was awarded a medal for rescuing an elderly couple from a burning building. Eventually I was assigned to a special investigations unit that introduced me to undercover work. But when the opportunity came in 1991 to join the Boulder PD, with its high salaries and top-of-the-line equipment, I took it and, like Alice in the fairy tale, tumbled through the mirror and into another world.

Not long after arriving in Boulder, I noticed the huge number of escort services advertising in the local papers and set up a prostitution sting in the city’s nicest hotel. The department had not worked such an operation in twenty years. In no time we nabbed several girls, some pimps, cocaine, cash, and guns. When the newspapers reported the story, city officials quickly declared there was no prostitution problem in Boulder. When I tried to arrange another such sting, a memo was posted mandating that unless there were public complaints, we were not to work prostitution. It taught me the early lesson that Boulder did not want its boat rocked.

After my first year with the department, I was among several officers who confronted an enraged, psychotic suspect who was waving two butcher knives in a busy downtown intersection on a hot summer day and screaming that “someone is going to die.” Ranting and out of control, he charged at me, and the decision was textbook. I shot him twice and still had a struggle putting handcuffs on the fighting, bleeding man.

I had become the first BPD officer in over a decade to be involved in a shooting, and got my first real taste of the Boulder County District Attorney’s office. Pete Hofstrom, chief of the felony division, asked me, “Couldn’t you have just hit him with a stick or something?” Using any sort of force against a suspect in Boulder was viewed as extraordinary.

Hofstrom’s response was typical of the distance between a cop on the street and a prosecutor in the entrenched bureaucracy of the Office of the Boulder County District Attorney. We dealt with the law on real terms, while to me they seemed more concerned with justice as some kind of test-tube experiment. In many other jurisdictions, an assistant DA would have been among the first to support a street cop in such a life-or-death situation. In Boulder, they wanted me to bop him with a stick.

Less than a year later, I had to do it again. As a member of the SWAT team, I was covering fellow officers trying to apprehend a suicidal, armed suspect who had already shot at his wife. He charged, pointing a pistol right at me, and again I had no choice, and brought him down with three quick shots. I was hustled back to the police department for an internal investigation while Police Chief Tom Koby rushed to the emergency room bedside of the suspect, consoled him, and told him everything was going to be all right. Officers were embarrassed by the chief’s action. I did not expect a commendation, because Koby would not award a decoration to any officer who used deadly force against a citizen. Instead I was sent off to “verbal judo” school to learn how to resolve critical situations with words.

By then I had begun to understand the locker-room talk. When we traded war stories, we shrugged and said, “Hey, this is Boulder.” We were subjected to Internal Affairs investigations for raising our voices to suspects, and the beans-and-sandal types were in command positions. Cops hesitated to be confrontational.

Still, I found a niche in police work that I thoroughly enjoyed, working on a small undercover narcotics team. We did our own thing and were mostly left alone, but being a drug cop in a city where drugs were almost universally accepted had its moments, too. One day, in my beard and long hair, I drove an unmarked pickup truck loaded with tall marijuana plants through downtown Boulder to the police department, cheered along the way by honking motorists. “Dude, you’re far too brave!” called one fan. The police received not a single tip about the load of dope being hauled through the city streets.

Shortly thereafter, the local paper printed a letter to the editor denouncing the War on Drugs. It was written by a judge who often signed my narcotics warrants.

Of course, this was Boulder, where drugs were a very, very low priority. Two of us went to the office of the district attorney one day to discuss a search warrant for a drug bust and listened to a couple of the prosecutors mock our operation and joke about their own previous drug use. Cases involving substantial quantities of heroin and cocaine were routinely plea-bargained, including one in which the arrested suspect was a deputy district attorney found with syringes in her bathrobe and what appeared to be cocaine in her dresser drawers. Claiming the drugs and paraphernalia belonged to her live-in boyfriend, she was allowed to plead to lesser crimes. But plea bargains weren’t handed out just in drug cases, for even people accused of the most heinous crimes could negotiate a deal. Defense attorneys were big fans of the DA. It was the way business was done.

More than once, when I insisted on contesting a plea, a prosecutor would ask me, “Why do you want to ruin somebody’s life?” I made hundreds of arrests in Boulder but went to court exactly twice in seven years.

I couldn’t help but compare passive Boulder to the hard-charging task force I worked with in neighboring Jefferson County for most of 1996. There, we were about to bring home more than a dozen grand jury indictments in a racketeering case. An assistant Jeffco DA was even assigned full-time to the drug task force to give the cops on-the-spot guidance and legal advice and expedite needed warrants, a usual practice in many counties where the DA actively supports the police investigative process. That was not the usual practice in Boulder, where the DA’s office usually waited on the sidelines until we “presented” a case to them.

In December 1996 I laid the badge aside for a while and went off to hunt quail with my father on a plantation in south Georgia. Days in the field with the sunshine, the dogs, and the quiet were a pleasant respite from the peculiarities of Boulder. The holiday over, we returned to Atlanta and boarded the plane for home.

There was no way to know that these would be some of my last idle moments for the next two years. In a few weeks my life would be turned upside down, and I would be flying back to Atlanta as a detective investigating the terrible murder of a little girl named JonBenét.

2

There was no television camera watching or videotape running in the house at 755 Fifteenth Street in Boulder on the night of December 25, 1996, so only two people really know what happened when JonBenét Ramsey was murdered: the victim and the killer. JonBenét took whatever she knew to her grave, and the person who killed her has remained stone silent. It is often that way with murder.

But rarely is there such a thing as a perfect homicide, and a wise man once told me, “Murders are usually what they seem.” After spending twenty months in the churning cauldron of the Ramsey investigation, after examining all the evidence, I now agree with him. Others disagree, but to me the simplest explanation for what has gone into the books as one of the most perplexing and notorious murders of the decade is also the truth.

At one point my partner, Detective Ron Gosage, stood in the dark of the former Ramsey home, after we had spent almost a week searching it, and voiced the central question that had baffled everyone: “What the hell happened in this house?” Short of a confession, which is unlikely, the actual events will never be known.

But there are only two possible answers. One is that an intruder, known or unknown to the family, crept into the house, killed JonBenét in a botched kidnapping attempt while the family slept, then vanished, leaving behind what has been called the
War and Peace
of ransom notes. The other scenario is that the little girl was killed by a family member, whom I believe to have been her panicked mother, Patsy Ramsey, and that her father, John Ramsey, opted to protect his wife in the investigation that followed.

The district attorney and his top prosecutor, two police chiefs, and a large number of cops, although so at odds on some points that they almost came to blows, all agreed on one thing—that probable cause existed to arrest Patsy Ramsey in connection with the death of her daughter. But due to a totally inept justice system in Boulder, no one was ever put in handcuffs, and the Ramseys were never really in serious jeopardy.

What follows is the story of how someone got away with murder.

The first word of what had happened came at 5:52 A.M. on the morning after Christmas Day, when Patsy Ramsey dialed the 911 emergency number.

PATSY RAMSEY: (inaudible) police.

BOULDER POLICE DISPATCHER: (inaudible)

PATSY RAMSEY: Seven fifty-five Fifteenth Street.

DISPATCHER: What’s going on there, Ma’am?

PATSY RAMSEY: We have a kidnapping … Hurry, please.

DISPATCHER: Explain to me what’s going on, OK?

PATSY RAMSEY: There we have a … There’s a note left and our daughter’s gone.

DISPATCHER: A note was left and your daughter is gone?

PATSY RAMSEY: Yes.

DISPATCHER: How old is your daughter?

PATSY RAMSEY: She’s six years old … she’s blond … six years old.

DISPATCHER: How long ago was this?

PATSY RAMSEY: I don’t know. I just found the note and my daughter’s (inaudible).

DISPATCHER
:
Does it say who took her?

PATSY RAMSEY: What?

DISPATCHER: Does it say who took her?

PATSY RAMSEY: No … . I don’t know it’s there … there’s a ransom note here.

DISPATCHER: It’s a ransom note.

PATSY RAMSEY: It says SBTC Victory … . Please.

DISPATCHER: OK, what’s your name? Are you …

PATSY RAMSEY: Patsy Ramsey. I’m the mother. Oh my God, please …

DISPATCHER: I’m … OK, I’m sending an officer over, OK?

PATSY RAMSEY: Please.

DISPATCHER: Do you know how long she’s been gone?

PATSY RAMSEY: No, I don’t. Please, we just got up and she’s not here. Oh my God, please.

DISPATCHER: OK.

PATSY RAMSEY: Please send somebody.

DISPATCHER: I am, honey.

PATSY RAMSEY: Please.

DISPATCHER: Take a deep breath (inaudible).

PATSY RAMSEY: Hurry, hurry, hurry (inaudible).

DISPATCHER: Patsy? Patsy? Patsy? Patsy? Patsy?

The telephone call gave us a cornerstone of evidence, not so much for what was easily heard but for what was found when experts washed out the background noise. It has been my experience as a police officer that such emergency calls are virtually unchallengeable. They are tape recorded, and either something was said or it was not. Tapes can be so powerful that prosecutors regularly play them so a jury can hear the actual voices and emotions of the participants.

In preliminary examinations, detectives thought they could hear some more words being spoken between the time Patsy Ramsey said, “Hurry, hurry, hurry” and when the call was terminated. However, the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service could not lift anything from the background noise on the tape. As a final effort several months later, we contacted the electronic wizards at the Aerospace Corporation in Los Angeles and asked them to try and decipher the sounds behind the noise.

Their work produced a startling conclusion. Patsy apparently had trouble hanging up the telephone, and before it rested in the cradle she was heard to moan, “Help me, Jesus. Help me, Jesus.” Her husband was heard to bark, “We’re not talking to you.” And in the background was a young-sounding voice: “What
did
you find?” It was JonBenét’s brother, Burke.

The Ramseys would repeatedly tell us that their son did not wake up at any point throughout the night of the crime. We knew differently.

3

Watch III, the graveyard shift, was almost over when the dispatcher called for patrol unit 273 of the Boulder Police Department to respond to 755 Fifteenth Street. A ransom note had been found, and a six-year-old girl was missing. With little traffic on the roads an hour before sunrise, Officer Rick French got to the house on University Hill within minutes. His mere arrival was the first of many mistakes that police would make in the coming hours. An unmarked car or undercover officers should have responded to the kidnapping call, not a black-and-white, but French had no idea of the warnings in the ransom note. If the alleged kidnappers were watching the house, they would have known police had been contacted.

French walked up a curving sidewalk lined with Christmas decorations and large candy canes, small lights glittering in the darkness, and was met at the front door by a distraught dark-haired woman in black pants and a red sweater. He noted that although it was still before dawn, her hair was neatly done and her makeup was in place. They were joined at the door by a man in a long-sleeved blue-and-white-striped shirt and khaki slacks. Patsy and John Ramsey told the officer that their daughter, JonBenét, was missing and their nine-year-old son was asleep upstairs. They escorted French through a foyer and kitchen area to a back hallway, where three pages of white legal tablet paper covered with blocky handwriting were spread out on the wooden floor. The note read:

Mr. Ramsey,

Listen carefully! We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction. We do respect your bussiness [
sic
] but not the country that it serves. At this time we have your daughter in our posession [
sic
]. She is safe and unharmed and if you want her to see 1997, you must follow our instructions to the letter.

You will withdraw $118,000.00 from your account. $100.000 will be in $100 bills and the remaining $18,000 in $20 bills. Make sure that you bring an adequate size attache to the bank. When you get home you will put the money in a brown paper bag. I will call you between 8 and 10 am tomorrow to instruct you on delivery. The delivery will be exhausting so I advise you to be rested. If we monitor you getting the money early, we might call you early to arrange an earlier delivery of the money and hence a [
sic
] earlier delivery pick-up of your daughter.