Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (11 page)

The next day, January 3, I met with the Ramseys at the home of one of their friends. I was struck by their grief. It was so enormous, so emotional. In that first meeting, John tended to accept the recommendations of his attorney on strategy. In the coming days and weeks, he became more assertive about making deci
sions that might not have been what his lawyers would have preferred.

By then I had seen their CNN interview on January 1. They were sincere, grieving parents who were terribly upset. That came through with crystal clarity. Within twenty-four hours, the networks and news organizations had purchased rights to the pageant video and still photos. They paid a hell of a lot of money, and there wasn’t much we could do about it.

On January 4, I was at Peter Hofstrom’s house with Patsy when she gave her second handwriting sample to the police. They had her sit down and write the precise wording of the note. “Speaking to anyone about your situation, such as the police, FBI, etc., will result in your daughter being beheaded.” For all the anguish it caused, I don’t think it helped the police one bit. They were taking a woman who had just lost one of the most precious things in her life and rubbing her nose in it, almost gratuitously. Patsy wasn’t able to write it. The whole episode just sickened me.

Our strategy from the very first day of my involvement and for some weeks thereafter was to minimize the opportunities for the Ramseys to be photographed. Our highest priority was to keep a low profile—let them grieve privately and work their way through all of this. That’s why we agreed they should stay with their friends.

John Ramsey had a strong desire to track down the killer, through newspaper ads, public appeals, or whatever was necessary. That has been his desire from the very first day.

He hired several investigators, along with John Douglas, an ex-FBI profiler. Douglas was very emphatic about putting some of the ransom-note handwriting out there to try to get people to pay attention and pass along tips that might lead to the killer.

Keep in mind that you reach a point where, without police powers, you can’t go further. For legal reasons, a lot of what I’m talking about had to be put on the shelf.

—Pat Korten

On Saturday, January 4, Alex Hunter returned from his vacation in Hawaii. The DA knew he wasn’t coming home to a case that would be solved in a few weeks. That same day, the police finished their search of the Ramsey house. For nine days they had fingerprinted, vacuumed, and gathered evidence. All of it would be analyzed and tested by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and the FBI in the coming months. The initial search warrant had been extended three times, and over eight hundred items were taken into custody. Detective Byfield, for example, had found duct tape that looked similar to the tape found in the wine cellar on the back of two paintings, one of which hung in JonBenét’s bedroom. The police would later learn that this tape had been placed on the frames by Better Light Photography Studio in 1993 and didn’t match the tape Ramsey said he had ripped off JonBenét’s mouth.

The Ramseys’ home, which had a red brick Tudor façade, contained 6,866 square feet of living space, and nearly filled a half-acre lot. There was no fence surrounding the property. The front of the house was built in 1927, and the rear was added later and had been remodeled several times over the years. A back elevator had been replaced with a spiral staircase when the Ramseys renovated the house in 1992. The floor plan was a maze, and the decorating was unusual: flowered carpets, thick white moldings, vivid colors.

The living room furniture was reproduction French provincial, and the walls were hung with 19th-century French and English oil paintings. A floor-to-ceiling Christmas tree stood on a handmade rug. Just beyond the living
room was the sun room, with leaded-glass windows, which looked out on the street. Its walls were covered with a forest landscape mural. A Chippendale dining table was 10 feet long. A wrought-iron sideboard had a marble top. Patsy told many of her guests that it had been purchased from Tiffany’s in New York, though Tiffany’s sells jewelry, table settings, and decorative pieces but no furniture. At the rear of the house was the family room, with a Chinese needlepoint rug, silk-covered club chairs, and wall units in which family memorabilia were displayed.

In the white-and-gray kitchen there was a large built-in refrigerator and an island counter. Copper pots hung from a ceiling fixture, and there was an eating area with three bar-height chairs. To the side was a butler’s pantry. The garage held the usual assortment of drills, saws, and tool chests. Skis hung from a ceiling rack.

Behind the kitchen, just inside the patio door, a spiral staircase led to the second floor. On the second floor landing were a stacked washer and dryer in a closet, a sink, an ironing board, and a microwave on a countertop. From this landing there was direct access to two bedrooms and a playroom. A staircase led to the third-floor master bedroom.

JonBenét’s second-floor bedroom, with a porch overlooking the south yard and patio, was closest to the spiral staircase. The room had a hand-painted hat motif, and the nursery rhyme “Hey, Diddle, Diddle” was painted on a carved corner cabinet. The police had removed a small piece of carpet in front of the night table between the matching English burl walnut single beds. To the left of the bed, the detectives had removed two additional pieces of carpet. At the foot of JonBenét’s bed there was a hand-painted locker that matched the fabrics in the room. All of JonBenét’s sheets, pillowcases, and bedcovers were taken into custody by the police. Fingerprint powder was everywhere except on the painted hooks of a trompe l’oeil hat rack sten
ciled on the closet doors.

JonBenét’s closet was stuffed with clothes. A small TV set with a built-in VCR sat on a shelf inside her closet. Other shelves held dozens of cartoon and Shirley Temple videos. To the right of the closet stood a pageant trophy as tall as the light switch. Another trophy was even taller. There was a floor-to-ceiling Christmas tree in the room too. In her bathroom hung an original pastel, called
Tea for Two
, by a Boulder artist.

JonBenét’s pageant costumes were stored in her half-sister Melinda’s bedroom. There, skirts, hats, boots, and dresses filled the closets and shelves. The drapes, daybed, and walls were done in a matching pattern of pink bows and vines. The book
The 7 Spiritual Causes of Ill Health
lay on a hand-painted table. John Andrew’s room, color coordinated with vertically striped fabrics, was next door to JonBenét’s. There, the police removed two more pieces of carpet.

Burke’s bedroom was also on this level but was separated from the landing by the children’s playroom. His wallpaper depicted World War I fighter planes, and a large wooden propeller hung over the small windows, which afforded minimal daylight. Two TV sets and a VCR shared a bookcase with a fish tank. Learning programs such as
Practicing Landing
and
First Few Hours of Voyage
sat beside his computer on a shelf.

The third-floor master bedroom had a cathedral ceiling and a view of the Flatirons. A framed print of red flowers hung over the fireplace. The king-size bed had a 4-foot-high hand-carved headboard. A Rider workout machine sat beside an exercise bicycle. A corner desk held a computer. Displayed on the floor and shelves were twenty-three of JonBenét’s pageant trophies. In a children’s play area stood a 5-foot-tall pageant trophy next to one that measured 8-feet-1.

A bookshelf contained such titles as
Children at Risk,
Children All Wide World Straight Talk
, Tom Clancy’s
Red Storm Rising
,
It Ain’t as Easy As It Looks
, and
The National Geographic Society Index
. On another shelf:
The Cancer Conqueror: Incredible Journey to Wellness
,
New Cures for Almost Every Major Disease
, and FBI profiler John Douglas’s 1995 memoir,
Mind Hunter
. On a night table were
When Goodbye Is Forever: How to Deal with the Death of a Child
and
Learning to Live Again after the Loss of a Child
, by John Bramblet. Apparently John Ramsey had explored a good deal of popular literature on death and mourning since the loss of his oldest daughter, Beth.

In every room of the cluttered basement, the police found the cast-off possessions of six people: old lamps, toys, beach balls, Easter bunny outfits, pageant decorations, a painter’s easel from Patsy’s recent art classes at CU, a Halloween lantern. Nothing was put away neatly. In the basement hallway, a scarecrow was pinned to a wall.

The police removed the suitcase they had found beneath the three side-by-side windows at the rear of Burke’s train room. They also removed the windows themselves and the exterior window grate. The suitcase had no dust on it, yet a few pieces of broken glass lay on top of it. Inside, they found a blanket with what turned out to be John Andrew’s semen on it.

A little carousel rocking horse and child-size blue-and-red chairs stood against one wall. The train set was mounted on a platform in the center of the room. On one wall were three framed movie posters:
Star Trek, Somewhere in Time
, and a third poster of Spencer Tracy and Frank Sinatra in
The Devil at 4 O’Clock
. Leaning against the wall was a poster of
Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile
. In the small storage closet where Fleet White and John Ramsey had looked just before JonBenét’s body was found, the police found a plaque with the words Subic Bay on it.

Down a short hall was the boiler room, which had a chest freezer and an exposed ventilation duct leading to the
street. At the rear of that room, a door led to the wine cellar. The door and its painted jamb and frame were removed by the police. Just outside the room, they found two partial sets of golf clubs belonging to John Ramsey. Inside the room was a large corrugated box with six partly used cans of interior paint and seven more gallon-size interior paint cans. Built into the floor was a safe. A greenish-blue tarp lay over it. A bicycle missing its front wheel was propped up in one corner beside some lumber and other construction material. Throughout the house the police had ripped out every toilet, looking for evidence in the plumbing traps.

The evidence taken in the search was itemized on thirteen handwritten pages, which were signed by Detective Byfield. Every notepad and pen in the house was taken. Among the 132 items in the first inventory were the Avalanche sweatshirt and the blanket that had covered JonBenét’s body. Detective Everett photographed a shoe imprint that was discovered in a powder-like substance next to where JonBenét’s body had been lying. Inside the wine cellar, fibers, hair, and the pink
Barbie
nightgown were collected. Just outside the room, there were wooden shards near an artist’s paint tray that also held part of a broken paintbrush; several paintings, one of which Patsy had done in Michigan, of flowers in a box on her porch; rope; string from a sled; and down the hall on a counter, a red pocket knife. Black sheet metal, wire, vacuumed hair and fibers from almost every room of the house, bedding, street clothes, underwear, prayer books, Christmas gifts, pieces of glass from the broken window, toilet tissue, toilet seats and lids, books, and newspapers were also collected. The list grew longer by the day. Patsy’s and John’s clothing, camera, computers, and 180 videotapes were hauled away in box after box. Before the police left, they photographed every inch of the house and all its remaining contents. On January 30,1997, a judge signed another warrant allowing the police
to search for pornography on the hard drives of the seized computers. During the last days of June 1997, there would be a third search of the Ramseys’ house.

In Atlanta, the visiting Boulder detectives found they couldn’t escape the media even in that city. If they so much as drank coffee in a restaurant, some reporter would appear beside them. When they called CNN producer Mike Phelan to request transcripts of the Ramseys’ New Year’s Day interviews, Art Harris, an investigative reporter for the network, called back. Harris told Larry Mason he’d be more than happy to deliver the transcripts. That evening, January 2, in the restaurant of the detectives’ hotel, Harris sat down, opened his laptop, and started questioning Mason about the Ramsey case as Detectives Thomas and Trujillo looked on. Mason scolded Harris for misrepresenting his intentions, and Harris apologized. Then he handed Mason a transcript of the edited videotape, which the police could easily have downloaded from the Internet.

Steve Thomas, a former SWAT team officer and a by-the-book detective who was conducting his first murder investigation, was furious when he saw Mason and the CNN reporter together. That evening, in his phone report to Eller, Thomas mentioned Mason’s meeting with the CNN reporter.

Thomas and Mason had already been quarreling. Soon after they arrived in Atlanta, Thomas needed some colored pens and paper and asked Mason to get them. Mason refused. “Look, I’m the supervisor,” Mason said. “If you don’t like it, I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is.” The case was nearly a week old, and with the pace and pressure, tensions were getting to both officers. They had known happier times together. When Thomas was involved in a shooting as a member of the SWAT team, it was Mason who signed the
recommendation for Thomas to receive a medal of valor.

During the three days that the Boulder detectives were in Atlanta, they interviewed John Andrew and Melinda Ramsey. Then they visited Lucinda Johnson, John Ramsey’s first wife and Melinda and John Andrew’s mother; Lloyd Sandy, a friend of Nedra’s; Rod Westmoreland; and several former neighbors of John and Patsy Ramsey. Before they went back to Boulder, they also spoke with Nedra and Don Paugh and with Rev. Harrington at the Peachtree Presbyterian Church and visited the funeral home in Marietta and JonBenét’s grave.

On Saturday, January 4, when the detectives’ work was almost completed, Mason, with Eller’s approval, gave an interview to a local reporter and issued a press release provided to him by the Boulder PD.