Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (3 page)

Mason tried to scare up some detectives to assist Detective Arndt, but the crew on duty the morning after Christmas was already spread thin on other assignments related to the case. For two hours and twenty-seven minutes, Arndt was the only officer in the Ramsey house.

At first Mason couldn’t understand why the officers on the scene hadn’t secured the house earlier, separated the Ramseys, and questioned them individually. Then he learned that Commander Eller had ordered that the Ramseys be treated as victims, not suspects.

The Ramseys were an “influential family,” Eller told Mason, who realized that this message must have affected the behavior of all the officers at the scene.

Very early Thursday morning, Gary Merriman, vice president of human resources at Ramsey’s firm, Access Graphics, was already at his desk trying to finish some work in the postholiday lull.

“Hello, it’s John,” the voice said when Merriman answered his phone.

“Good morning. Merry Christmas,” Gary said to his boss. There was a moment of silence. “What’s wrong?” Merriman asked.

“My daughter’s been kidnapped,” Ramsey said.

“Oh my God. Which one?”

“JonBenét.”

Less than an hour later, Detectives Jim Byfield and Michael Everett were in Merriman’s office asking if anyone had ever made threats against the company. Did John Ramsey have enemies? Disgruntled employees? Merriman mentioned Jeff Merrick, an old friend of John Ramsey’s who had been laid off, and Sandra Henderson, who owed Access Graphics a large sum of money.

As Merriman answered questions, he clung to the hope that JonBenét had just trotted over to a neighbor’s house in her PJs and would be trotting home any minute to a scolding. His own son, only three, had once done exactly that—wandered over to a neighbor’s house without telling anyone.

When the police left, they told Merriman not to talk to anyone, especially not the other employees.

In Denver, Tom Haney, chief of the patrol division of the Denver police, was discussing a case with several special agents from the FBI. The agents were obviously distracted. They kept listening to their hand-held radios as he tried to talk to them.

“Hey, what’s the deal?” Haney finally asked.

“There’s been a kidnapping in Boulder,” one agent said. “It’s kind of hinky, crazy. There’s something wrong with this one. The amount of the ransom is a really weird number.”

Just before noon, at Boulder police headquarters, Larry Mason suggested to John Eller that they get tracking dogs. If this was an abduction, the kidnapper might still be close by—in a canyon or in the Chautauqua Park area. Perhaps
the Ramsey girl had been molested but was still alive.

Mason wanted to use Yogi, a tracking dog from the city of Aurora. Eller wanted to use Boulder’s German shepherds. But the Boulder dogs worked from ground scent, Mason protested, and they were easily distracted. The dog Mason wanted was a bloodhound that in 1993 had backtracked nine miles to the base of Deer Creek Canyon and helped find the body of a kidnapped five-year-old girl. That child had been driven part of the way, and it was the kind of trail that might stymie a ground-tracking dog. The likelihood was that JonBenét Ramsey had been abducted in some kind of vehicle, and Yogi, Mason reminded Eller, was an air-scent dog and could handle the situation better.

“Did you learn that at the Academy?” Eller snapped. He was always baiting Mason for having attended the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia.

Later in the morning the Ramseys’ friends were still in the rear of the house consoling Patsy, who clutched a crucifix in her hands. Arndt, who didn’t know that John Ramsey had gone down into the basement before 10:00
A
.
M
., was still the only officer in the house. She was concerned for Ramsey when she saw him sitting alone in the dining room, head down and hands clasped together. He seemed despondent, totally withdrawn.

Everyone was waiting for the kidnappers to call.

A few minutes after noon, the victim advocates decided to leave for lunch. Their experience told them they could best serve the Ramseys if they maintained their own composure.

Just before 1:00
P
.
M
., Arndt asked Fleet White and John Fernie to take John Ramsey on another tour of the house. She wanted to keep Ramsey busy. She also wanted him to check if anything was missing—anything that might have been taken along with JonBenét. White informed Arndt that he had reported his own daughter missing to
the Boulder PD several months earlier. But before the police had arrived he found her hiding inside his house.

John Fernie stayed on the ground floor while Ramsey led Fleet White down to the basement. In Burke’s train room, they looked at the broken window. Ramsey told White that some months ago, he’d found himself locked out of the house and had broken the window, unlatched it, and climbed through.

Before they left the train room, they searched two closets near the entrance to the room. Then Ramsey, with White a few paces behind, turned right into the boiler room. At the rear was a door leading to what the family called the wine cellar, a windowless room with brick walls. Ramsey pulled the door open toward himself, stood at the threshold, and, peering to the left into the darkness, saw a white blanket on the floor just as he reached for the switch on the wall to his right and turned on the light. Then he saw two little hands sticking out from under the blanket.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” he cried.

JonBenét was lying on the floor, partly wrapped in the blanket. Her hands were extended over her head and appeared to be tied together. There was tape covering her mouth.

From a distance of about 12 feet, Fleet White saw Ramsey enter the wine cellar and turn out of sight to his left. As Ramsey cried out a second time, White followed him into the room.

By now Ramsey had ripped the tape off his daughter’s mouth and was untying the cord from around one of her wrists. White knelt beside Ramsey and touched one of JonBenét’s feet. The child was dead cold. A few moments later Ramsey picked up his daughter. Rigor mortis had set in and her body was rigid. Holding her by the waist like a plank of wood, he raced down the short hallway and up the basement stairs, yelling that JonBenét had been
found. White had preceded Ramsey, shouting for an ambulance. It was l:05
P
.
M
.

As Ramsey emerged from the stairwell carrying his daughter with his arms now around her waist, he turned and met Detective Arndt. JonBenét’s hands were still extended above her head. A string hung from her right wrist; a bright red mark, the size of a quarter, was visible at the base of her throat. Ramsey placed JonBenét on a rug, just inside the front doorway. Arndt could see the child’s lips were blue.

It was obvious that JonBenét was dead. There was an odor of decay, and dried mucus from one of the child’s nostrils was visible. Around her neck was a ligature with a small stick attached to one end. A similar ligature was around her right wrist. On the palm of her left hand was a red ink drawing of a heart. John Ramsey began to moan.

Arndt ordered Fleet White to guard the door to the basement and not let anyone in. Then she asked Ramsey to go back to the den, call 911 and tell his wife. The detective moved JonBenét’s body away from the front doorway to just inside the living room, at the foot of the Christmas tree. Arndt then covered the wound on JonBenét’s neck with the child’s long sleeved shirt. From the back of the house a guttural moan and an aching wail could be heard.

While John Ramsey and others rushed back to the front of the house, Patsy sat for a moment on a couch in the rear of the house looking out a window. She did not move despite all the shouting that JonBenét had been found. In the living room, John Ramsey grabbed a throw blanket off a chair and placed it over JonBenét’s body. He knelt on the floor next to his daughter, stroked her hair, and then laid down next to her, placing an arm around her. As he hugged his daughter, he began to cry, referring to JonBenét as “my little angel.” Then he rolled away from JonBenét’s body, and looked toward the hallway leading from the back of the house.

Finally, Barbara Fernie led Patsy by the hand toward JonBenét. Patsy threw herself on her daughter’s body. She pleaded with Rev. Hoverstock to bring her daughter back to life. Then Patsy raised herself onto her knees, lifted her arms straight into the air and screamed, “Jesus, you raised Lazarus from the dead, please raise my baby!” Fleet White was so upset he went into the kitchen. Arndt asked Hoverstock to lead everyone in the Lord’s Prayer. All the voices were lifeless with shock and despair. Patsy’s was broken by sobs.

It was 1:12
P
.
M
. when Detective Arndt grabbed a cellular phone in the kitchen, and returning to the living room, dialed 911. The operator dispatched the fire department and notified police communications, which transmitted the news to the officers working the case: a child’s body had been found at the Ramsey house.

At police headquarters, Larry Mason got a page from the crime scene: “We’ve got a body.”

“Oh fuck,” Mason said, half aloud. “Ron, we don’t have a kidnapping,” he told Agent Walker. “It’s a homicide. Do you want to go?”

“Of course.” Walker knew that finding JonBenét’s body in her own home meant there had probably never been a kidnapping.

After Arndt’s 911 call, John Ramsey told the detective that no one knew about the wine cellar in the basement and therefore his daughter’s murder “has to be an inside job.” Meanwhile, Fleet White decided to go back downstairs to the wine cellar where her body had been found. He had looked into the same room early that morning when he made a quick search of the house. Now that there was a
light on, he saw clearly for the first time a white blanket in the center of the cement floor. A piece of black duct tape was lying on it. He picked up the tape, which felt sticky, and then placed it back on the blanket for the police. He looked around the room cluttered with paint cans, lumber and window screens before he went back upstairs to guard the door.

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 some
thing 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’.