Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (41 page)

This letter became the number-one story in Colorado and was publicized nationally as well. For the next several days, even mainstream media headlines had a sensational tone:

INTERVIEW PLAN BLOWS UP

SNARLING STARTED BEFORE

FBI SAVES PROBE FROM DISASTER

RAMSEYS DENOUNCE POLICE

WAR OF WORDS ESCALATES RAMSEY STANDOFF

COPS, DA RESPOND TO RAMSEYS

BOULDER AUTHORITIES, RAMSEYS NEGOTIATING

Every TV outlet scrambled for any scrap it could get about the battle between the police and the Ramseys. Phil LeBeau, of Denver’s KCNC, Channel 4 TV, snagged an interview with Patrick Burke and Hal Haddon at their respective law offices in Denver. He wanted to know: What kind of police department would withhold the body of a child and delay her burial?

When LeBeau concluded his live report at 4:15
P
.
M
., the newsroom staff told him that Patsy Ramsey had called the station and asked to talk to him. They’d given her the news van’s direct phone number.

A minute later, the phone rang.

“I’m glad that our side of the story is finally getting out,” Patsy said. “We’ve been sitting here taking it for three months, keeping our mouths shut while the cops are basically portraying us to be a couple of killers—uncaring parents, uncooperative.”

LeBeau asked to call back since he was about to do another broadcast.

“You call [a third party], and they’ll get to me,” Patsy replied.

LeBeau broadcast his 5:00
P
.
M
. report, in which he didn’t mention Patsy’s call, and then called the person Patsy had named.

“Thank you again for your report,” Patsy told him when she came to the phone. “John is here, and he appreciates the fact that you’re being honest about what’s happening.” LeBeau made a pitch for an on-the-record interview the next morning.

Patsy called early the following day.

“Are the Boulder police framing you and your husband?” LeBeau asked her.

“I can’t talk about that. I pray we can still work this out, that the killer of JonBenét be found.”

“Why won’t you cooperate with the police?”

“We’ll sit and talk with them for twenty-four hours a day,” Patsy replied, “if that’s what they want.” The police had just called off the interviews, she added. “You’d think if they think we’re guilty, they’d want to talk to us.”

Finally LeBeau told Patsy he was going to put together a report based on their on-the-record conversation. The station started promoting “A Conversation with Patsy Ramsey” the same day.

Meanwhile, Pete Hofstrom, Alex Hunter, John Eller, Tom Wickman and Tom Koby worked all night and into the next day to save what was left of their relationship with the Ramseys’ lawyers. “We acknowledge the unfortunate miscommunication,” Hunter and Koby said in an open letter to the attorneys, “and we’re encouraged to hear you indicate a continued willingness to accomplish the critical interviews with Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey.”

The police listed their requirements and released them to the media so as to preempt a charge of Hofstrom’s so-called “chummy” negotiations with the Ramseys’ attorneys. Eller, who had never liked Hofstrom’s style, was now dealing directly with the Ramseys’ attorneys by way of the media. It was Eller’s way of reminding everyone that this was his case.

On Friday, April 25,
The Denver Post
published a list of police demands:

After this was published, Hunter told the press again that though the Ramseys were the focus of the investigation, they were not the only suspects. It was a deliberate attempt to appease the Ramseys so that negotiations could continue. By Saturday evening, the Ramseys had agreed to all but two of Eller’s conditions. The interviews would take place at the DA’s offices, which they considered more neutral, and Pete Hofstrom would be present during the questioning.

On Monday all parties were back on board with an
agreement that the interviews would take place on April 30 beginning at 9:00
A
.
M
. Charlie Russell, another of the Ramseys’ media representatives, called handpicked members of the media to tell them that everything was back on track.

On April 23, Detective Melissa Hickman returned to Boulder from the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California. In addition to its work for the government, the company did sound and photographic enhancement on a nonprofit basis for law enforcement agencies, using state-of-the-art technology. Hickman had taken the audio tape of Patsy Ramsey’s 911 call to the Southern California firm. The tape included a few additional seconds of sound along with Patsy’s frantic call for help, sounds that may have been recorded when she replaced the headset improperly. The police had been unable to decipher the additional sounds.

In February, Detective Trujillo had sent a copy of the tape to the U.S. Secret Service, but their attempt to enhance the recording had not succeeded. Aerospace used a different technology, and voices in the background could now be heard more clearly.

Hickman listened to the tape and wrote down what she heard.

“Help me Jesus, help me Jesus.” That was clearly Patsy’s voice. Then, in the distance, there was another voice, which sounded like JonBenét’s brother.

“Please, what do I do?” Burke said.

“We’re not speaking to you,” Hickman heard John Ramsey say.

Patsy screamed again. “Help me Jesus, help me Jesus.”

And then, more clearly, Burke said, “What
did
you find?”

This snippet of conversation was obviously important. Patsy and John had told the police, and CNN on January 1,
that when they found JonBenét missing, they checked Burke’s room for their daughter, who sometimes slept there. They had never said what they found in Burke’s room. Later, Patsy said they did not awaken Burke until about 7:00
A
.
M
., when her husband roused him to have him taken to the Whites’ home.

In Boulder, Hickman and her colleagues debated the scenarios. They couldn’t believe that John Ramsey would have forgotten to mention to the police that his son had gotten up and spoken to him and his wife that morning after Patsy checked on him and before the police arrived. Perhaps it was conceivable that
she
didn’t remember because she was so distraught. But on the tape, John had directed a statement directly to Burke. How could he have forgotten talking to his son? The Ramseys’ credibility was now seriously in question.

The police decided not to tell Hunter or anyone on his staff what they had learned. They feared leaks of this valuable evidence. The police also decided not to ask John or Patsy Ramsey about the 911 call in their scheduled interviews, for fear of tipping their attorneys to what they had discovered. More than a year would elapse before the police told Hunter’s staff about the enhancement tape of the 911 call.

When Burke had been interviewed on January 8, he was not questioned about his whereabouts that morning. But even in that interview, the boy had not told the police that he was asleep when the 911 call was made. The police needed to know what he remembered about that morning and if his memory differed from Patsy’s. The detectives would have to wait until June 10, 1998, when Burke was interviewed again, to ask him.

James Thompson, known to his friends as J. T. Colfax, worked for M&M Transport in Denver. His job was to pick up cadavers and deliver them to funeral homes. On April 28, he went to pick up a body from the morgue at Boulder Community Hospital. The cadaver was having its eyes removed for donation to an eye bank, and Colfax was told to come back later.

At around 1:00
A
.
M
., Colfax went back to the morgue, just to hang out. On a whim, he leafed through the log book, came to the month of December, and tore out the pages with an entry about JonBenét. Later that morning, he photocopied the log pages, wrote “All in a Night’s Work” on the copies, and mailed them to friends in New York and California.

That afternoon, low on cash, Colfax tried to shoplift a photo-finishing order he had placed at Safeway Photo Processing. He was arrested. The police looked at the evidence—twenty-seven photos—and discovered that the pictures were of cadavers. Colfax found himself in a police car en route to the Denver PD. Which one of those people had he murdered, the cops wanted to know. None, Colfax said, he just liked to photograph dead people. Did you murder JonBenét Ramsey? No, he said, he had been in Vancouver, Canada, on December 26, at the Royal Hotel on Granville Street. One officer shouted that he was a pervert.

Two days later Colfax made bail, was given a court date, and became an item in the Denver papers. Mike O’Keeffe, a reporter for the
Rocky Mountain News
, was told by a friend of Colfax’s about the morgue log pages. O’Keeffe passed the information on to his colleague Charlie Brennan, who was covering the Ramsey case. Brennan in turn called the morgue to inquire about the log pages, not mentioning Colfax’s name. That afternoon, when the pages were discovered missing, the sheriff was called. Until then, no one had noticed
they were gone.

Meanwhile Colfax, who was becoming a minor media celebrity, confessed to the press that he’d stolen some morgue log pages containing JonBenét’s entry—as a souvenir. When the Boulder police heard Colfax’s tale, they assigned Detective Ron Gosage to pay him a visit.

It was raining when Gosage arrived at Colfax’s Denver apartment. The log pages from the morgue were lying on the floor. Within minutes he was arrested. On the way to Boulder, Gosage chatted with Colfax. Out of the blue, Gosage asked, “What do you think—are people born gay or do they become gay?” The conversation was so casual, it was like talking to someone at a party. “I was born gay,” Colfax replied. “Nobody wants to be gay.” Suddenly it occurred to Colfax that homosexuality might have something to do with JonBenét’s death. Gosage asked him if he knew JonBenét’s brother, Burke. No, Colfax replied. What about John Andrew? He didn’t know either of them, Colfax said.

Colfax understood he was a suspect. Later that afternoon he was formally interviewed. The police asked him to describe the morgue. It was orange, he said—no, it was governmental green or gray—shit, he couldn’t remember the color. Then they got around to JonBenét’s death. Did you know the Ramseys in Boulder? In Denver? Colfax said he’d lived in Atlanta but that he didn’t know Patsy Ramsey. Gosage grilled him for two hours. Then Colfax gave the detective the hair evidence he requested.

Gosage cut his hand pulling hair samples from Colfax’s head. While Colfax completed his handwriting samples, the detective sat there wringing his hands while blood flowed from between his fingers. Next, Colfax’s inner cheek was swabbed for a DNA sample. Then he was booked for criminal mischief and theft. Bond was set at $1,000.

Two months later, Colfax still had not been sentenced for stealing the morgue log pages. He was out on bail.
One morning he visited Alli Krupski at the offices of the
Daily Camera
and told her she’d look good as a dead body. He’d been drinking. Then he walked 2 miles to the Ramseys’ house. Along the way, two tourists stopped and asked him where Patsy Ramsey lived. “I think it’s up here,” he said, motioning them to follow him. When they arrived, the tourists took his picture in front of the house. Then he walked down to University Hill and tried to call Gosage through 911. Believing that the police were after him, he wanted to meet the detective. After he left the message, he walked back to the Ramseys’ house. At around 11:30
P
.
M
., he considered breaking in and spending the night but then decided against it. Better to write the Ramseys a note.

“If you hadn’t killed your fucking baby,” Colfax wrote, “this wouldn’t have happened.” He stuffed the note and some pages from a paperback book,
Interview with the Vampire
, into the front door mail slot, took a matchbook, printed Gosage’s name on it, and set fire to the paper. He watched it scorch the inside wall from a nearby window, hoping that because it was made of brick, the house wouldn’t burn down.

The next morning he called Gosage again. This time he confessed to trying to burn down the Ramseys’ house, which the police knew nothing about. Within an hour he was arrested. Six months later, on January 16, 1998, Colfax was sentenced to twenty-four months’ probation for first-degree arson, a class-three felony. For stealing the morgue log pages, he was sentenced to two years in the county jail, with no credit for the seven months he had sat in jail after turning himself in for the arson. By then, Lou Smit and Trip DeMuth had interviewed him several times. Colfax’s alibi for December 26 checked out.

On Tuesday, April 29, the day before the scheduled police interviews, all of the Ramseys’ attorneys walked into the
Access Graphics offices on the Pearl Street Mall and went directly to John Ramsey’s fourth-floor office, with its view of the Rockies. They were soberly dressed in black and navy. Shortly afterward, Patsy and John arrived. They seemed nervous as they made their way upstairs.

Before long Patsy left her husband’s office and walked aimlessly down the hall. Then she went back in. Forty-five minutes later she was pacing the halls again. Before noon, she left the building by a fourth-floor exit to the alley. When she returned, she found the door locked. She banged on it, but a security guard refused to admit her—she didn’t have company ID. She had to walk around the building and enter through the front door, where the receptionist knew her.

By dinnertime, the meeting had disbanded.

Meanwhile, Steve Thomas and Tom Trujillo were at police headquarters consulting with the FBI’s Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit personnel, who had come to Boulder to assist the detectives. The Boulder PD had waited months for this opportunity to question the Ramseys.

Along the way, the detectives had been divided in their opinions about the parents’ culpability. For example, Trujillo and Wickman had at one time speculated that John Ramsey and JonBenét had some type of sexual relationship, but Thomas and Gosage didn’t believe it for one moment. By now, however, all the detectives felt that Patsy was involved in JonBenét’s death and that although John Ramsey had nothing to do with the actual murder, he was likely to have contributed to its cover-up.

All the detectives agreed that one major mistake had been made in the first weeks, even before the CBI determined that there was no semen on JonBenét’s body: Patsy had not been arrested. The detectives were sure that if only Hunter had agreed to jail Patsy—even for a short time—she would have caved in. Every time they themselves walked into a cell
and heard the heavy steel doors clang shut behind them, a fear of never being able to return to the outside world hit them. If Patsy’d had to face that kind of dreadful uncertainty about her future, she would have broken down and the case would have been solved that very day, the detectives believed.

The detectives and Hofstrom had also long been divided on how to deal with the Ramseys—whether to push them or soften them up. Now that the interviews were imminent, they had to talk strategy. Thomas and Gosage met with Hofstrom. As expected, the police and the DA’s office still had opposing views on how to handle the questioning. Hofstrom wanted to use the interviews to “build bridges” with the Ramseys. It would be wrong, he indicated, to challenge them during the interviews and let them see that they were the sole target of the investigation. Better to make them feel that the police were sincerely interested in finding the killer—as they were. Then sometime in the future, if they were the killers, they would let their guard down and be caught.

The police had a different approach. They thought it was better to lock the Ramseys into their stories of what they remembered about Christmas night and the morning after. Then take them through every minute and make them prove that they were innocent. For example, on December 26 John Ramsey had told Rick French that he’d carried a sleeping JonBenét to her room and then read her a book. Patsy had told the same officer that JonBenét never woke up after being put to bed, even when Patsy changed her clothes. Which story was correct? Since this was the first—and maybe the only—interview that the police would conduct with the Ramseys, the detectives were in favor of using a tough approach: challenge everything the Ramseys had said and would say.

Everyone agreed it was imperative that the detectives not reveal to the Ramseys and their attorneys what had been uncovered in the police investigation. At the same
time, they had to find out what the Ramseys knew and remembered—and, most important, see how it stacked up against what the police had learned. The detectives had to decide which questions to ask and which to avoid.

They agreed, for example, that they wouldn’t directly mention the pineapple found in JonBenét’s intestines. The police thought it was better to lock the Ramseys into the story they had told on December 26—that the sleeping child had been taken upstairs and put right to bed for the night—and confront them later with any possible conflicts. The audiotape of Patsy’s 911 call would also be off-limits for the interview. Better to leave the Ramseys—and the DA’s office—unaware of what the detectives now knew.

The detectives also wanted to hear once more from Patsy what she had done after she left her bedroom that morning. She’d told Officer French that after leaving her room, she first checked JonBenét’s room and found it empty; then she went downstairs to see if her daughter was there and instead found the ransom note; then she returned to the second floor, cried out for her husband, and went to see if JonBenét was in Burke’s room. Later that day, however, Patsy told Detective Arndt a different version of the story—that she’d first stopped just outside of JonBenét’s bedroom to do some washing in the sink and had then gone downstairs and found the ransom note. Only then, she said, did she return to JonBenét’s room and find it empty.

Which was the truth? That, among other questions, preoccupied the detectives as they prepared for the minefield of the interviews.

On April 30 at 9:05
A
.
M
., Patsy Ramsey began her scheduled formal interview with the police. Detectives Steve Thomas and Tom Trujillo asked the questions. Pat Furman, Patsy’s attorney, led her by the hand into the DA’s conference room at the Justice Center. He seated her, then pulled
up a chair next to her. Ramsey investigator John Foster sat with his back to the wall on Patsy’s side of the room. Pete Hofstrom observed from a corner of the room.

John Ramsey would be interviewed later in the day, when the detectives were done with his wife. The other attorneys for the Ramseys waited in Hofstrom’s office.

For six hours Thomas and Trujillo sat face-to-face with Patsy Ramsey and led her through the pertinent events of the days leading up to and following Christmas. More often than not, her answers were ambiguous and selective.

The detectives asked her about what had happened when the family returned from the Whites’. She said that JonBenét had been carried directly to her room and put to bed for the night. She hadn’t awakened. What was the last thing JonBenét ate that night? Patsy didn’t remember. Earlier in the year she had answered the same question posed to her in writing by Detective Arndt. She had replied in writing through her attorneys, “Cracked crab at the Whites’.” Two hours later, after a break in the interview, Trujillo returned to the same question, and this time Patsy remembered that her daughter had eaten cracked crab at the Whites’. The detectives now had her locked into an answer in conflict with the findings of the autopsy. Asked whether anyone in the family had snacked after they returned home that night, Patsy said she knew nothing about any food eaten by anyone. The detectives did not reveal that fingerprints—hers and Burke’s—had been found on the bowl containing pineapple on the dining room table. Later they speculated that the only explanation for the discrepancy was that the children—either alone or together—had eaten the pineapple without their mother’s knowledge and that Patsy’s fingerprint dated from an earlier time. It was also possible, however, that Patsy now knew about the pineapple—the information had been released in the edited autopsy report—and thought it was better that she stick with her earlier written statement.

The detectives asked Patsy what happened after she found the ransom note—whether she turned the light on in Burke’s room when she went to look for JonBenét. She didn’t remember. Did she awaken Burke to find out if he knew where his sister was, or did he awaken by himself? No, she was sure he stayed asleep until John got him up for the move to the Whites’. The detectives asked her the same question several times during the six hours, and each time she gave the same story, though it conflicted with what they had just discovered on the enhanced audio tape of Patsy’s call to 911.

Since fibers had been found on the duct tape, JonBenét’s body, the white blanket, and the floor of the wine cellar; Patsy was asked about her clothes. She said that she wore the same red sweater, black slacks, and jacket on Christmas night and the morning after. She said she had put them on that morning because they were lying where she had left them the night before. The police thought it was odd that a well-groomed woman like Patsy would wear the same clothes two days in a row—they had understood that she hardly ever left her bedroom without fresh makeup.