Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (9 page)

In his letter to Hofstrom, Morgan said he wanted to be
informed in advance when it looked as if evidence might be destroyed by forensic tests. He asked for approval and participation in the tests of the physical evidence being provided by the Ramseys. Morgan also requested copies of the ransom note, the autopsy report, the affidavits for the search warrants, and copies of keys to the Ramsey house that were in the possession of the police.

Meanwhile, in Marietta, Georgia, Gary Mann, John Ramsey’s boss at Lockheed Martin, attended the visitation service at the Mayes-Ward-Dobbins Funeral Home on Monday afternoon, December 30. Then he went to see Ramsey at the home of Patsy’s parents, Don and Nedra Paugh, in Roswell. Mann, who stayed until 1:00 in the morning, was impressed with Ramsey’s inner strength. He hoped that if he were ever faced with a tragedy of this magnitude, he could handle himself as well. Mann had worked with Ramsey for almost a year and knew he was deeply religious, with a good Christian foundation. Nevertheless, he wondered what it was in Ramsey’s background that gave him such strength.

Three hours before JonBenét’s funeral was to begin on Tuesday, December 31, the Boulder police asked the police in Marietta, Georgia, to take tracings and measurements of the child’s hands at the funeral home.

At the Peachtree Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, mourners passed by JonBenét’s open casket, where she lay with a pageant crown on her head and Kristine Griffin’s crown in her hands. Some caressed her hair. Others kissed her cheek. In his eulogy, Reverend Frank Harrington, who had married John and Patsy in 1980 and had baptized JonBenét, told the congregation, “The mind cannot accept, and the heart refuses to grasp, the death of one so young, who is suddenly taken from us by the cruelty and malice of some unworthy person…. When a child is lost, one feels part of
the future is gone.”

Throughout the service, John stroked Patsy’s back as they sat in the front row with Burke. Afterward, Patsy knelt and touched her face to the wooden casket. Just after noon, JonBenét was buried at the foot of a large dogwood tree in St. James Episcopal Cemetery in Marietta. John Ramsey cried, his grief as fresh as if he had just carried her lifeless body up the stairs from the basement.

After the funeral, about forty people went to the home of Patsy’s parents in Roswell. Nedra Paugh noticed that everyone responded differently to her granddaughter’s dreadful death. Some people cried. Some couldn’t stop talking, it seemed. Some sat silently. Others had to make a great effort to compose themselves.

Nedra looked at John Ramsey sitting alone and saw a mature man who had endured other tragedies. He had lived through the death of his oldest child, Beth, who was killed in an auto accident in Chicago in 1992. When Patsy had been diagnosed with aggressive stage-four ovarian cancer in 1993 and the doctor said there was nothing that could be done, it was John who had said to her with conviction, “This too shall pass, and we will manage.” It was John who had searched nationwide for the best treatment program, and a year later Patsy was declared cancer-free. Nedra remembered Patsy’s doctor telling her, “Go have fun.” Then John had his scare with prostate cancer just this past fall. The tests had proved negative. But now he was being cruelly tested again.

Nedra kept asking herself why such a horrifying thing should happen. All she could think was that someone had come in the middle of the night and killed her granddaughter. She had no idea who it could have been. She knew the police had a list—neighbors, enemies, disgruntled employees, the housekeeper, even poor old Santa Claus from the Christmas party. It could have been anyone.

What Patsy’s sister Polly noticed at her parents’ home was that Fleet White was quarreling angrily with her brother-in-law John. Patsy was standing to one side of them while Fleet hovered over John, telling him he had to go back to Boulder and help the police. It was wrong for him to hire his own investigators and criminal attorneys, said Fleet. His job was to cooperate with the police, not stonewall them. John’s face reddened. It was obvious that he was embarrassed to have this conversation in front of his wife and family. But Fleet kept at him. What was this he’d heard about John contacting CNN for an interview? His daughter had just been buried! How could Patsy and John even think about going on television? Even if they wanted to respond to rumors that were going around, a TV appearance was unthinkable. By that point, Fleet had his hands at John’s face, but John wasn’t saying much. Then the room fell silent. The two friends separated, knowing they would never speak to each other again.

Fleet White’s behavior seemed odd to some of the Ramseys’ friends too. John Fernie felt uncomfortable speaking to Fleet, who seemed too focused on John’s behavior. Others at the house felt that Fleet’s behavior was so out of character for him that maybe he was involved somehow in JonBenét’s death. Nedra, however, thought it was silly to judge anyone’s conduct as inappropriate at a time like this. Who could act normally under these circumstances?

Meanwhile, in Boulder, Detectives Steve Thomas and Ron Gosage interviewed the Ramseys’ neighbors Joe Barnhill, seventy-seven, and his wife, Betty, who lived across the street. The Barnhills had a key to the Ramseys’ home, since they were taking care of JonBenét’s dog, Jacques, a Bichon Frise. The detectives learned that the Barnhills had a boarder, Glenn Meyer, who lived in their basement.

Joe and Betty Barnhill had been guests at the Ramseys’ Christmas party on December 23 and had chatted with Patsy’s father, Don Paugh, a retired engineer. Paugh had worked as his son-in-law’s first director of human resources at Access Graphics and still worked most of the time for John in Boulder, while Nedra, his wife, ran John’s Atlanta office. Paugh told the Barnhills he had a new position at Access—manager of inventory tracking. The firm’s market niche was “the Lincoln and Cadillac part of the industry,” he said proudly.

Barnhill confirmed to police that at about 9:00
P
.
M
. on December 24, John Ramsey had come to their house to pick up JonBenét’s bicycle, a Christmas gift. The Barnhills said they were home the night JonBenét was killed. The police asked Joe for a handwriting sample, but his palsy made it impossible for him to give one. A week later he signed a waiver and his doctor confirmed Barnhill’s illness to the police.

The detectives then interviewed the boarder, Glenn Meyer. He said that he had been at home on Christmas night and had watched television in the den with the Barnhills until 9:00
P
.
M
. He then went downstairs to his basement room and spent the rest of the evening nursing a stomach flu. Meyer was also at the Ramseys’ Christmas party, but he said he hadn’t been introduced to Patsy or JonBenét.

“Do you mind taking a lie detector test?” Detective Thomas asked him. Meyer didn’t, and on January 1, at 5:30
P
.
M
., a polygraph test was administered. Most of the questions were about the Ramseys, and the examiner told him he had answered the questions truthfully. A few weeks later, Detective Thomas asked Meyer for several handwriting samples and took his fingerprints.

Now, the police decided, everyone who disliked John Ramsey for any reason had to be interviewed without delay.

While Thomas and Gosage were interviewing the Barnhills, Detective Carey Weinheimer met with Denise Wolf, John Ramsey’s executive assistant at Access Graphics. She gave him the names of other employees who might have grievances.

Jeff Merrick was someone Ramsey had mentioned to the police on December 26. Ramsey had met Merrick in 1971, when they both worked as supervisors for AT&T. In 1993 Ramsey hired Merrick as director of distribution for Access Graphics. Merrick, who didn’t fit in, was eventually demoted to director of security and facilities while Ramsy let him keep his six-figure salary. Unknown to Merrick, in March on 1996, Ramsey could no longer justify Merrick’s salary to Lockheed Martin and told Merrick he would have to take a large pay cut or leave by April 30. Merrick chose to leave. Later, he claimed the company owed him close to $118,000. He settled for close to half that amount, but one director of the company heard him say he was going to get Ramsy. Merrick then sent a long fax to Lockheed Martin, denouncing Ramsey for the way he dealt with employees.

On the afternoon of Tuesday, December 31, Detectives Patterson and Weinheimer interviewed Merrick at police headquarters. Merrick told the police that he and his wife, Kathy, had spent Christmas with Kathy’s relatives in Aurora and spent the day with their friends Dick and Diane Foote. The Merricks went home at about 8:00 and watched TV until they went to bed. His wife hadn’t been feeling well, Merrick said. At 6:30
A
.
M
. on December 26, he left for work in Littleton.

John Ramsey’s former friend remained a suspect.

When Commander Eller debriefed his detectives that
evening at police headquarters, he learned that they hadn’t yet interviewed all the Access Graphics ex-employees on the list. Some were traveling, and others lived out of town. For the time being, the attention of the police would shift to the Ramsey family and their friends.

This New Year’s Eve, John Eller would not be hosting his annual party for the rank-and-file officers of the department. He and most of them were working the Ramsey case.

During the final days of ’96, I read about a little girl who had been murdered in Colorado—JonBenét Ramsey. I work in Atlanta for CNN as the network’s Southeast correspondent. In the news business, it was the sort of story you’d quickly dismiss—it didn’t have a national feel to it. But when it emerged that the child had been a beauty pageant queen, the story became sexier. That’s what we played up.

It had a local angle for us too—the child was being buried in Marietta, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. On December 31, I was assigned to cover the church service. We call it “sidewalk” duty—watching people who come to pay their respects.

That same evening, New Year’s Eve, I was at home with my family when the phone rang. Tom Johnson, the president of CNN, told me that the Ramseys had told CNN through a friend that they wanted to appear on national TV to explain why they weren’t talking to the media and to discuss the suspicions that were being raised about their possible involvement. They were taking a beating in the Colorado papers and some of the
national press, and they didn’t like it. We scheduled the interview for late the next morning, New Year’s Day. It would be a coup for CNN because the Ramseys had said nothing publicly since their daughter’s death.

For security reasons, we decided that I’d go out to Patsy’s parents’ home and escort the Ramseys to CNN headquarters in Atlanta. I’d be interviewing them, and this way I could get a feel for them, and they might get a better sense of me.

During the taxi ride out to Roswell, I found myself ambivalent about doing the story. The news reports out of Denver seemed a little sordid. As a parent, I wasn’t crazy about the prospect of confronting another parent about the death of a murdered child. But as a journalist, I knew that the story had some titillating elements.

First I met Jeff Ramsey, John’s brother, and when John and Patsy came in, I offered my condolences. Patsy looked like she’d been crying for the last forty-eight hours, but you could see her personality through the grief. John looked like an ordinary guy, but he was clearly subdued. As one of his friends later described him, “He’s like wallpaper; he just sort of disappears sometimes.”

Patsy, John, and Jeff sat in the back of the taxi while I joined the driver up front. John Ramsey responded to some of the few questions I asked during the forty-minute trip. There were awkward silences, long stretches where we all said absolutely nothing. Occasionally Jeff Ramsey would answer the questions I directed to John and Patsy.

Once we were in the sixth-floor conference room of the CNN Center, Jeff sat off to the side, lending moral support, as mikes and cameras were adjusted. I checked the eight to ten basic questions I had scribbled down. But in fact, I had no idea if the Ramseys were going to
read a prepared statement or just take my questions. Distraught, seeming uncomfortable and a little frightened, the Ramseys nonetheless seemed ready. They sat there not as two individuals but as a couple.

My plan was to let them explain why they were talking to CNN since they’d been avoiding the media, then take them through the story chronologically. Like any newsman, I was afraid that after some question they might say, “Enough. I won’t answer anything else,” and walk out.

“Why did you decide to talk now?” I began.

“We have been pretty isolated…but we want to thank those people that care about us,” John answered. “For our grief to resolve itself, we now have to find out why this happened.”

I tried not to ask my questions in an accusatory tone. For all I knew, they were entirely innocent. Eventually I asked, “How did you happen [to find the body] in the basement?”

“One of the detectives asked me and my friend to go through every inch of the house to see if anything looked out of place. In one room in the basement—I opened the door—there were no windows in that room, and I turned the light on, and I—that was her.”

From time to time Patsy would start to answer a question, and John would complete the sentence or the thought before Patsy could finish. He seemed to dominate the interview to a small but noticeable degree.

“Most laymen who don’t understand would say, ‘Why?’” I said. “Why [retain] an attorney?”

“It’s not just the attorney,” John replied. “We are also assembling an investigative team. I want the best minds this country has to offer to help us resolve this.”

“Mrs. Ramsey, you found the note.”

“I couldn’t read the whole thing. I’d just gotten up.
We had a back staircase and I always come down that staircase. The three pages [were] across the run of one of the stair treads. It was kind of dimly lit. I started to read it and it was addressed to John. ‘We have your daughter’—it just wasn’t registering. I don’t know if I got further than that, and I immediately ran back upstairs and pushed open her door and she was not in her bed and I screamed for John.”

John Ramsey said, “I read it very fast. I was out of my mind. It said, ‘Don’t call the police,’ you know, that type of thing; I told Patsy to call the police immediately, and I think I ran through the house a bit. We checked our son’s room; sometimes she sleeps in there.”

Then Patsy continued: “We were just frantic, and I immediately dialed the police, 911, and [the operator] was trying to calm me down and I said our child had been kidnapped. I was just screaming, ‘Send help, send help.’ I dialed some of my very closest friends. ‘Come quickly.’ [Then] an officer was there. It seems like an eternity, but I know it was just minutes.”

“Have the police interviewed you?” I inquired.

“I had questions all day the day of her death,” Patsy replied. “For hours they asked us questions trying to get a chronology. I can scarcely recall exactly what happened. They were very compassionate, trying to help us help them. Boulder is a small, peaceful town, unlike Atlanta or New York or LA, where this, God forbid, is a much more frequent occurrence. This does not happen in Boulder.”

Toward the end of the conversation, I broached the issue of their possible involvement: “The police said there is no killer on the loose. Do you believe it’s someone outside your home?”

Patsy answered, “There is a killer on the loose.”

John added, “Absolutely.”

“I don’t know who it is,” Patsy continued. “I don’t know if it’s a he or a she…. But if I was a resident of Boulder, I would tell my friends to keep…”

Patsy started to cry.

“It’s OK,” John Ramsey said.

Then she continued, “Keep your babies close to you. There’s someone out there.”

Patsy’s answer seemed dramatic, if not melodramatic. I was taken aback by it. But as a TV correspondent, I thought, Boy,
there
is a sound bite.

Then I began, “Speculation on talk shows will focus on you—”

“It’s nauseating beyond belief,” John cut in.

Then Patsy added, “America has just been hurt so deeply with this—the tragic things that have happened. The young woman who drove her children into the water, and we don’t know what happened with O. J. Simpson—America is suffering because [it has] lost faith in the American family.”

A minute later, speaking about JonBenét, Patsy said, “She’ll never have to know the loss of a child. She will never have to know cancer or the death of a child.”

“We learned when we lost our first child,” Ramsey said, “that people would come forward to us and that sooner or later, everyone carries a very heavy burden in this life. And JonBenét didn’t carry any burdens.”

Soon afterward, I ended the interview. They had spoken for almost forty minutes, and it wasn’t as if they were eager to leave. They’d done more than I had expected from a husband and wife who had just buried their daughter.

Then they took a taxi back by themselves.

When the interview aired that afternoon throughout the states, I added that John Ramsey had confirmed that duct tape was found on his daughter’s mouth. Yet
he said he didn’t see cord around her neck—maybe because he panicked in picking up her body, screaming, running upstairs, hoping she was still alive.

—Brian Cabell

The interview took up half of the network’s news broadcast and was a major scoop for CNN. By that evening, stations in Denver wanted Brian Cabell to go live from Atlanta to discuss the interview, and CNN’s affiliates across the nation said they needed more footage of the Ramseys in Atlanta.

Reporters in Boulder and Denver started asking Cabell, “Why were the Ramseys afraid to face us here? Why did they talk to a reporter who hasn’t really covered the case?” Cabell couldn’t answer. He wondered the same thing.

Charlie Brennan, a reporter for the
Rocky Mountain News
who was assigned to cover the Ramsey story, was at a New Year’s Day party when a law enforcement source alerted him to the CNN interview. Brennan switched channels from the football game he was watching and heard Patsy Ramsey say that a killer was loose. He thought immediately of Susan Smith, the South Carolina housewife who had accused a black man of carjacking and kidnapping her two little boys but was later found to have killed them herself.

Two days later, at a January 3 news conference, Boulder’s mayor, Leslie Durgin, after consulting Police Chief Tom Koby, would say, “People have no need to fear that there is someone wandering the streets of Boulder looking for someone to attack. Boulder is safe.”

J
ON
B
ENÉT
STRANGLED WITH CORD

SOURCE SAYS GIRL’S MOUTH TAPED SHUT; SEXUAL ASSAULT CONSIDERED A POSSIBILITY.

Late in the afternoon of January 1, Detectives Larry Mason, Steve Thomas, Tom Trujillo, Ron Gosage, and Jane Harmer left Boulder for Atlanta, where they had arranged to work out of the Roswell Police Department. The detectives had learned about Fleet White’s heated arguments with John Ramsey, and they were shocked by the Ramseys’ CNN interview. It seemed to contradict what they were being told—that the Ramseys were grieving and unavailable. The police had originally planned to leave for Atlanta the next day to check alibis and start background interviews with the Ramseys’ extended family. Now, however, Commander Eller felt that someone in the household might be ready to talk, so he gave the detectives his own credit card to use for purchasing airplane tickets and ordered them to be in Atlanta by midnight.

The next morning, January 2, at 8:30
A
.
M
., while Steve Thomas went to a Super Cuts to get rid of his goatee and long hair, vestiges of his stint in the narcotics division, Detectives Harmer and Trujillo interviewed Fleet and Priscilla White in their Atlanta hotel room. White now seemed to be replaying in his head everything he’d seen and experienced on December 26. Pacing, White told the officers he was confused and wondered why he hadn’t seen JonBenét’s body in the wine
cellar when he’d looked in earlier that morning and Ramsey had seen it hours later. Then he recounted to the detectives what had happened at the Paughs’. Patsy’s father, Don, had to intervene and get everyone to quiet down, White said. After the interview, the Whites flew back to Boulder.

In Boulder that same morning, Detective Patterson met Gary Merriman in his Access Graphics office. Now, the questions focused on John Ramsey. “Did John do this?” “Did John feel…?” “Isn’t it a fact that John resented JonBenét’s being in pageants?”

“I don’t find those questions legitimate,” Merriman told Patterson.

Gary Merriman had spent fourteen years working in the criminal justice system as an institutional psychologist, including several years at the Florida Department of Corrections. He knew a leading question when he heard one.

Merriman had to keep reminding the detective that his knowledge of John Ramsey was limited to his conduct at the office. “I’ve never been in John’s house,” Merriman repeated. When the interview was over, he was photographed and fingerprinted. Merriman also agreed to give the police handwriting, hair, and blood samples.

Meanwhile, Pete Hofstrom had received a fax from Bryan Morgan. The attorney restated his objection to testing that would destroy physical evidence. Morgan noted that this would include tests of bodily fluids and secretions.

Hofstrom realized that the Ramseys’ attorneys did not want to deal directly with the police and that he was becoming their go-between. He could only assume that John and Patsy Ramsey had been told about Eller’s plan to withhold their daughter’s body. Hofstrom felt that any cooperation the Ramseys gave the police would be highly guarded.

At midmorning on January 2, LaDonna Griego, a director
of All Star Pageants, supplied ABC’s Denver affiliate with JonBenét’s December 17 All Star pageant video. Meanwhile, an amateur video of JonBenét’s December 22 shopping mall appearance sponsored by America’s Royal Miss popped up on local TV. Sunburst Pageants in Atlanta provided another television outlet with its video of JonBenét performing in a white Ziegfield Follies outfit.

That evening in households across the country, video clips of an angelic-looking six-year-old posturing suggestively in elaborate costumes appeared on network news programs. The televised images drew the public into a world that most Americans never knew existed. The CNN interview had made JonBenét’s death a national issue. The pageant videos added a sexual element to the story, which would transfix the country.