Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (72 page)

The following week, Detective Arndt told the grand jury that behavior was the key to finding the killer of JonBenét. She painstakingly told how each of the Ramseys conducted themselves after she arrived on the morning of December 26. John Ramsey’s actions, in her opinion, were not consistent with someone whose daughter had been kidnapped. Arndt would later characterize his demeanor as cordial. After JonBenét’s body was discovered, Ramsey scared her, she said. Then Arndt gave the grand jury an emotional account of being left alone in the Ramsey house that morning for over two hours, one law enforcement officer with the near-impossible task of supervising the distraught Ramseys and their equally distraught friends. She emphasized that her urgent calls for assistance had gone unanswered. The prosecutors were furious; it was obvious that she was attacking the
investigation. Within days the grand jury was told that their job was not to investigate the investigation. On March 18, 1999, Arndt resigned from the Boulder PD.

On the afternoon of Friday, October 16, Randy Simons, who had photographed JonBenét in June 1996 and whose photographs had subsequently appeared on many magazine covers throughout the world, was found walking naked along a residential street in Genoa, Colorado, a town of two hundred residents on the eastern plains, where he lived. Approached by a sheriff’s deputy, Simons blurted out, “I didn’t kill JonBenét.” The sheriff, who had no idea who Simons was, hadn’t even mentioned the subject.

Simons was taken into custody and then transferred to University Hospital in Denver. No charges were filed. When the story was reported, the Ramseys’ investigators immediately interviewed Simons at the hospital. It would be a week before the Boulder police arrived to talk to the photographer. Even though Simons didn’t have a good alibi for the evening of JonBenét’s murder, this incident didn’t provide any new information and he was released.

By October 27,1998, the grand jury had been sitting for five weeks, had met ten times, and had taken one ten-day break. Coroner John Meyer and experts from the CBI presented their evaluations of the evidence, including Chet Ubowski, the handwriting expert, who had reported to the police that Patsy could not be excluded as the writer of the ransom note. He had also told Pete Mang, his boss at the CBI, that his gut told him it was her handwriting.

Alex Hunter attended every session. For the first time in his career as DA, Hunter was giving his full attention to a case. He knew that his legacy and reputation would depend on his evaluation of the evidence being presented to the grand jury. If an indictment was handed down, it would be his responsibility to sign it if he believed there was a case against either of the Ramseys. If he didn’t see the evidence—well, that was a bridge Hunter might have to cross later.

The police also worried about their legacy. In November 1998, Tom Wickman asked a journalist, “Why does the media keep talking about how we screwed up?” Before the reporter could answer, Wickman said, “We’ve been looking outside the Ramseys since the beginning. We are doing the best we can to look at other leads and I don’t know why this story keeps perpetuating.” Then he suggested that they have coffee. They didn’t talk about the grand jury—only about Wickman’s background as a psychology major and his interest in law enforcement and how different this case would have been if the press had gone away after the first few weeks.

That evening, Jay Leno did a routine about an imaginary phone call:

In many respects, the case was “scene-dependent”—could a person have lifted the window-well grate and climbed through the broken window to the basement and still leave a partial spiderweb intact? How well could someone hear from one room to another?

On October 29, the grand jury toured the Ramseys’ fifteen-room house. By 9:10
A
.
M
. some jurors were already combing the property, going in and out through the side doors on the north side of the house and in and out the front door and peering in through the windows on the ground level. Each juror carried a notepad and several pages of photocopied material.

Kane, Levin, Morrissey, Wise, and Hunter lingered in the yard while the jurors spent several hours in the house, working mostly alone, almost never speaking to one another, each moving along at his or her own speed. The house was now unfurnished, and without the aid of photographs, it was hard to visualize how it had once looked. Still, the tour was sure to have an impact on the jurors. It was, after all, the crime scene.

Before the group left, one male juror tested the drainpipes on the exterior of the house, to see how strong they were. Possibly he wondered whether the pipes could support someone trying to scale the outside of the house. Another juror looked at the duct that led from the boiler room to the front of the house. Probably the jurors had been told Lou Smit’s theory about how the scream might have been heard by the neighbor but not on the third floor, by JonBenét’s parents.

At 11:20 the jurors left, two hours and twenty minutes after they arrived.

As the sheriff’s van pulled away from the house, Wise said to Kane, “We’ve got a problem. Sixteen of them went
in and only fifteen came out. I think we lost one.” Wise saw a momentary flicker of panic cross Kane’s face before the prosecutor realized that Wise was pulling his leg.

That afternoon, the grand jury began hearing from Tom Trujillo, who had been sworn in as a grand jury investigator. CBI analyst Debbie Chavez was the next to give testimony. Her areas of expertise included the ink on the ransom note, the paintbrush, and Patsy’s paint tray. Chavez was followed by CBS fingerprint expert George Herrera. Even as the grand jury was working, the police were still taking palm prints from witnesses in the hope of finding a match to the print on the wine cellar door.

Alex Hunter can just say at some point, “I’ve developed the evidence and I see the case.” He doesn’t have to wait for a grand jury to reach a verdict. He can indict and arrest his target. There are some technical problems, but it can be done.

He would have to show a good reason to do that. In my view, it would be easy for the prosecution to say, “I want this evidence you’ve developed to be presented at a public preliminary hearing.”

A preliminary hearing, to a limited degree, is an adversarial proceeding. A defense attorney can cross-examine. There might be probable cause, but maybe there isn’t a reasonable likelihood of a conviction. So maybe the DA says, “I want a judicial officer to review the evidence.” And there is some public benefit in that, because all the evidence gets aired.

There’s a downside and an upside. You might have a judge who is well versed in criminal law saying that some evidence is admissible at a preliminary hearing and before a grand jury but will never be admissible in a
trial. Depending on the nature of the evidence, a prosecutor might want to have that unbiased judicial arbiter.

That may be the reason you take the case to a preliminary hearing.

—Bob Grant

On November 14, the grand jury met for the fourteenth time. That week the CBI leaked to a journalist that the DNA of a second person—and possibly a third person—had been discovered on JonBenét’s underpants. Even though the police and the CBI had known this since February 1997, the CBI was now using a new PCR 21-band DNA testing method in the hope of finding a match. The CBI was also trying to match the foreign DNA on JonBenét’s underpants with the DNA found under her fingernails. The journalist did not report the leak.

That same week, a reporter covering the case had an off-the-record lunch with an attorney connected with the Ramseys. By now, the lawyer had become so embittered that it was visible in his eyes. He said his clients were going to be a human sacrifice to the media culture that now prevailed in the world. “It’s the LaBrea tar pits,” he told the journalist. “You get in it, you can’t get out, and you die.” He was sure there was at least a 50-50 chance that his clients would be indicted. He was also sure that the majority of Americans had already convicted them. The attorney said he wasn’t so sure that Patsy would survive a trial. Not that she’d commit suicide, but she might suffer a relapse of her cancer from the stress. In fact, he was surprised that Patsy, exhausted as she was, hadn’t already had a relapse.

Later, a different writer had lunch with another attorney representing the Ramseys. At times, the writer raised his voice above the ambient noise of the restaurant, loud
enough to be overheard from nearby tables. At 2:00
P.M
., the attorney said he had to leave but suggested that the writer finish his meal, which he did. Moments later, a woman approached his table and sat in the booth where the writer’s guest had been seated. She was well dressed and spoke in a soft voice.

W
OMAN
: I hope you don’t mind. You see I’m a friend of a grand juror. This case is so complicated. I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk to you or if my friend should have been talking to me.

W
RITER
: I’m sure she knows the law better than I. Someone must have explained it to her.

W
OMAN
: I don’t know. It’s so confusing that she has had to go to her astrologer for help.

W
RITER
: Is that so?

W
OMAN
: Do you know about that secret room the Ramseys built for $150,000? I don’t know what they did in that room, the one on the ground floor.

W
RITER
: I didn’t know.

W
OMAN
: And you must know about the dumbwaiter on the second floor. That’s where they found some of her blond hair. Caught in the door. And you know they used chloroform on her? They think she was taken that way.

W
RITER
: I didn’t know about the dumbwaiter.

W
OMAN
: I didn’t know either until I was told.

With that, the woman got up and went back to her table.

“The system will put it right,” John Ramsey had often said. And each time they failed, he was confident that at the next juncture, things would be put right. He had begun to think that way while waiting for their April 1997 police interviews. When those interviews failed to diminish the police’s interest in him and Patsy, he waited for the next chance to put things right. A second set of interviews with the DA’s office in June 1998 had changed nothing, and now the grand jury was meeting. At this point his lawyers had told him it was likely Patsy would be charged. He just didn’t know how to tell her. Nevertheless, Ramsey didn’t lose faith in the process.

He knew they would have to wait for a jury to decide. Only then would he and Patsy be exonerated.

Like many Americans, Steve Thomas and Lou Smit, waited for the grand jury to finish hearing the case. Smit and Thomas, both intimately familiar with it, had different opinions about the meaning of the evidence. Smit hoped that the evidence would exonerate the Ramseys, while Thomas believed that it would cast enough doubt to let them off. The two detectives agreed, however, that all conclusions about the case—as well as the grand jury’s verdict—hinged on seven major items of evidence.

The first was the pubic hair found on the white blanket that had partly covered JonBenét’s body. There was only one test—called advanced mitochondrial—that could still be done to tie the pubic hair to someone. There was so little of the hair left after the previous tests, however, that this mitochondrial test would destroy what remained. Some of the detectives believed that the hair belonged to some family member, but the couple’s attorneys had objected to doing the destructive test at this time. They insisted that it should be conducted only when a suspect had been
matched to other elements of the crime—and, of course, no one, including the Ramseys, had been conclusively matched to any element of the crime. It was also possible that the hair had adhered to the blanket in the Ramseys’ dryer, left there by another garment on some earlier occasion.

The shoe imprint found near JonBenét’s body was the second piece of evidence. Ron Gosage had compiled a list of more than six hundred people who had been in the Ramseys’ house during the six months prior to JonBenét’s death. He had gotten in touch with more than four hundred of those people, and not one of them had ever worn or owned that kind of Hi-Tec hiking shoe. The imprint was of the “poon”—the area on the sole at the heel where the brand name is stamped. The size of shoe couldn’t be determined from the imprint, since the poon is the same size in all shoes, the better to advertise brands. Unless the detectives could match the shoe to someone who had been cleared of the crime by other means, the possibility existed that it was the killer who had left the shoe imprint.

The third piece of evidence was related to the window in the basement train room. It had been open, there was a scuff mark on the wall under it, and pieces of glass had been found on the suitcase just beneath it—possibly the result of Fleet White’s visit to the basement window that morning when he picked up the broken glass from the floor under the window and replaced some of it on the windowsill. The partial spiderweb on the window-well grate was not conclusive proof that nobody had entered though the window opening. The sudden rise in temperature the morning after the murder allowed for a spider to come out of hibernation and drop its first lines of a new web, and some people argued that the strands of the web itself were elastic enough to survive disruption.

The fourth area of evidence consisted of the unidentified palm prints—one smear of a partial print found on the ran
som note and a full palm print found on the wine cellar door. The print on the note covered such a small area of a hand that it could never be matched to anyone. The print on the door had not been matched to anyone whose prints were taken for this case, and the national crime-scene fingerprint database doesn’t include palm prints. Clearly, the print on the door did not belong to John or Patsy Ramsey. If it could be matched to a person who had a legitimate reason to be in the basement, it might mean nothing; but in the absence of such a match, the print was compelling evidence of an intruder.

The fifth element was the stain on JonBenét’s underpants containing mixed (foreign) DNA. The first component was JonBenét’s. Testing showed that the second or—possibly, third—component did not seem to match either parent or any relative, friend, playmate, or acquaintance whose DNA sample had been taken. How could the foreign DNA have gotten onto the underpants? It was possible that it belonged to the person—as yet unknown—who had killed JonBenét. It was also possible, however, that it came from a known person who had not given DNA samples and did not want to reveal that he or she had had contact with JonBenét in a manner that left DNA on her underpants. Such a person could be someone who had helped wipe JonBenét while she was on the toilet. The person might have been afraid that no truthful and innocent explanation would satisfy those who were eager to find a murderer.

The sixth element—in Lou Smit’s opinion only—was the possible use of a stun gun on JonBenét. The autopsy photos seemed to show marks consistent with those left by such a device, and the marks were fresh enough to have been caused during the murder. So little support had been given to this theory, however, that nobody had tried to have JonBenét’s body exhumed for the necessary testing of the skin tissue.