The Cases That Haunt Us (48 page)

POSTMORTEM

The postmortem exam was conducted by Dr. John E. Meyer, a pathologist and coroner of Boulder County. Meyer had been called to the Ramsey house around 8 P.M. on December 26 to conduct a brief examination and officially pronounce JonBenet dead. During that ten-minute look, he noted a ligature around the right wrist and, when the body was turned over, another around the neck, so tight it had dug a furrow into the skin. It was a garrote, knotted in the back and fastened to a broken four-inch stick that had been used to tighten it. JonBenet was wearing a gold cross and chain, which were tangled in the ligature. A small area of abrasion or contusion was on the cheek near the right ear, and a prominent dried abrasion was on the lower left side of the neck. The broken stick turned out to be part of a paintbrush handle from Patsy’s painting kit in the basement. The kit itself was right outside the wine-cellar door, meaning it was the first handy implement the killer would have noticed.

JonBenet was wearing long underwear over floral print panties, both of which were stained with urine. A red stain consistent with blood was also in the crotch of her panties. At the time it was believed that semen deposits were found in the panties and on her leg. This report later turned out to be erroneous.

The actual autopsy took place in the coroner’s lab in the basement of the Boulder Community Hospital. In addition to the observations he made at the house, Meyer noted tiny petechial hemorrhages on the eyelids. Further hemorrhaging appeared on either side of the ligature furrow around the neck.

Dried blood was found around the entrance to the vagina, as well as hyperemia, or engorged blood vessels, indicating possible trauma in the tissue around and just inside the vagina. The hymen was not intact, and abrasions along the vaginal wall were visible. The fingernails were clipped for lab analysis. Meyer reported occasional scattered petechial hemorrhaging on the surface of each lung and the anterior surface of the heart.

When he made an incision and pulled back the scalp, Meyer saw a large—seven-by-four-inch—area of hemorrhage on the right side. Underneath was an even larger skull fracture, approximately eight and a half inches long. A thin film of subarachnoid hemorrhage (that is, bleeding under the membrane covering the brain) overlay the entire right cerebral hemisphere. Underneath, the gray matter of the brain itself was bruised.

The small intestine contained fragmented pieces of semidigested fruit that Meyer believed might be pineapple. This detail became important in the investigation because neither John nor Patsy recalled JonBenet’s eating anything after they left the Whites’. In fact, she fell asleep in the car and did not wake up when John carried her upstairs or when Patsy prepared her for bed. Yet the state of the pineapple in the intestines suggested it was eaten that day or evening, and a bowl with cut pineapple was noted in the Ramsey kitchen. The bowl was processed for prints; Patsy’s and Burke’s were found, but not JonBenet’s. Police picked this out as an inconsistency in Patsy’s story. Patsy and John said they were perplexed by the finding and had no explanation for it. I would expect guilty people to come up with some explanation.

The bottom line was that JonBenet had been strangled with a garrotestyle ligature and had suffered massive blunt-force trauma to the right side of her head. Though there was and still is some question about which injury occurred first, either would have been sufficient to kill her. The petechial hemorrhages on the insides of the eyelids as well as other places, coupled with the lack of substantial bleeding from the head wound, suggest that the strangulation was first, so that by the time of the head injury her heart was no longer pumping or was pumping only weakly.

The official cause of death was listed as asphyxia by strangulation associated with craniocerebral trauma.

EVIDENCE

Everything that had touched JonBenet’s body was collected—clothing, the blankets, even the silk blouse and jeans Linda Arndt was wearing when she had leaned over the dead child.

In the house, police technicians reviewed the scene in the basement where the body was discovered and the area around the broken window. There were pieces of glass outside the window and a scuff mark on the wall. During this search Detective Michael Everett found Patsy’s painting box, from which the wooden stick used in the garrote had come. Splinters on the floor next to the box indicated that this was where it had been broken. It was then logical to surmise that here or near here was where the garroting had taken place, rather than upstairs in the bedroom.

On the second floor, in the bathroom off JonBenet’s bedroom, investigators found a balled-up red turtleneck, which Patsy said JonBenet had been wearing when she went to bed. No one seemed to know how it ended up there. Next to the spiral staircase and opposite JonBenet’s bedroom, there was a stacked washer/dryer unit and laundry-room-type wall cabinets. One of the cabinets was open with a package of pull-up diapers visible. This seemed odd in a household with a nine-year-old and a six-year-old, but JonBenet, advanced for her age in most other ways, had a fairly chronic problem with wetting the bed and, to a lesser extent, her pants. The bed-wetting was so common that Linda Hoffmann-Pugh reported that before she even got to work in the morning, Patsy would routinely strip JonBenet’s bedsheets and put them into the washer/dryer.

The bed-wetting became critical in the investigation because it suggested a possible motive for one parent and hinted at possible behavior from the other. It would be suggested that Patsy had accidently fatally injured her daughter when she lost it with her over the bed-wetting. It would also be suggested that JonBenet’s wetting and occasional soiling were a reaction to sexual advances and abuse by her father.

The police also searched the area surrounding the house.

WHAT
KIND
OF
PEOPLE
ARE
THEY?

Several things happened in relatively quick succession that helped open a seemingly unbridgeable rift between the Ramseys and the police and ultimately created the enduring public perception of the couple.

First of all, the statistics pointed to them being involved in the murder, particularly in a house where they were the only known adults present and there was no clear-cut sign of forced entry. Second, they didn’t appear to behave the way parents in this situation are “supposed” to behave. John was quiet, controlled, and stoic and Patsy often hysterical, but they didn’t cling together and constantly comfort and reassure each other. They didn’t make a big deal out of waiting for the ransom call that never came, and they didn’t overwhelm the police with requests or demands that they find the killer or killers of their child—all of the things “normal” parents would be expected to do. Along with that, they refused to go into the police station the next day and submit to separate interviews. And finally, they “lawyered up” almost right away. If they were innocent and had nothing to hide, why would they decline to answer questions and why would they need an attorney, much less a separate one for each of them?

We can approach these issues in several ways, all of them inconclusive. As we noted in the Lindbergh kidnapping, each individual is going to react differently. Many people thought Charles Lindbergh might be involved in the disappearance of his toddler son because of his seeming coldness and emotional aloofness. In fact, this was a man who knew he reacted best to crises when he maintained complete control. The same could be said of John Ramsey, a self-made business executive, navy veteran, and pilot who had already experienced the devastating loss of one child and had gone through the emotional and spiritual journey of despair and renewal that entailed. Much like John, Anne Morrow Lindbergh had been publically stoic during the crisis and its aftermath, doing her crying strictly in private. And like the Ramseys, Charles and Anne were never seen comforting each other or even having much to do with each other. Anne’s subsequently published journals, though, made clear the depths of both parents’ despair. So on this first point, remember that each person reacts differently. This is important not so much to defend the Ramseys as to give due consideration and compassion to any individual who suffers such a loss to violent crime.

That they took on lawyers so quickly could be interpreted as a sign that they knew they “needed” them. Or it could be because their friend Mike Bynum realized the perils of going into the criminal justice system unprotected, especially when Bynum believed—rightly, as it turned out—that the Ramseys had already become the focus of the police investigation. He has since confirmed that the lawyering was his idea. The Ramseys were wealthy, sophisticated people and were totally used to working through attorneys and other professionals in many aspects of their lives, much like Charles Lindbergh, who called Henry Breckinridge as soon as he discovered his son’s abduction. And being such types to begin with, they quickly became “good clients,” letting their attorneys call the shots and following their advice. The attorneys would have no real way of knowing whether their new clients were innocent or guilty, and their task would be to limit potentially jeopardizing exposure. This, in turn, might easily reinforce the message the cops already thought they’d received.

If I were still with the
FBI
and had been called in on this case, my first instinct, even before I’d seen any of the evidence, would be to look seriously at the parents. This, of course, was just the advice that Ron Walker gave.

But another factor that had been brewing long before the murder, of which the Ramseys had no knowledge or control, contributed to the investigative nightmare this case became: the Boulder Police Department, under chief Thomas Koby, and the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office, under longtime elected DA Alex Hunter, were enemy camps. They did not see eye to eye on how the law should be administered in this well-off, very liberal, freethinking community that was often referred to as “the People’s Republic of Boulder.” The crime rate was low, and what crime there was, the DA’s office was usually able to keep out of court with what the police considered absurdly generous and inappropriate plea bargains. This is an oversimplification of the issue, but rather than working together, the two agencies were often at cross-purposes.

This antagonism reached a boiling point within a few days of the murder and contributed incredibly to the mutual mistrust between the police department and the Ramseys.

Once Dr. Meyer completed the autopsy, Commander Eller and Chief Koby still had questions, mainly relating to the actual cause of death, the weapon used in the blunt-force trauma, and the meaning and significance of the vaginal abrasions. On the other side, the Ramseys wanted their daughter’s body returned to them for burial. This message came to the police through the district attorney’s office via assistant DA and felony division chief Pete Hofstrom.

According to Steve Thomas’s account, Hofstrom informed John Eller that the Ramseys wanted the remains back. The police were already annoyed because direct communication between the Ramseys and the DA’s office, rather than the PD, meant they were dealing through lawyers rather than directly. They particularly didn’t like the fact that Haddon, Morgan had close ties with several members of Alex Hunter’s staff. Eller told Hofstrom that he, the police chief, and the coroner had decided to hold the body for further tests. Eller was also irritated by his inability to get the Ramseys in for individual formal interviews.

Hofstrom then told Eller that the police could not “ransom” the body in exchange for an interview. Eller didn’t see it this way. Mike Bynum did, and the consequent bad blood between the police and the Ramseys on one hand, and the police and the district attorney on the other, would never go away.

The Ramseys “won” this round when, through their attorneys’ and Hofstrom’s insistence, the police did release the body, which the Ramseys brought back to Georgia for burial next to Beth. But unquestionably, the battle was joined.

GOING
GLOBAL

A memorial service was held for JonBenet on Sunday, December 29, at St. John’s Episcopal Church, not far from John’s office at the Pearl Street Mall in downtown Boulder. It was Patsy’s fortieth birthday. The family then flew to Atlanta for the funeral and burial on Tuesday, December 31.

On Saturday morning, the day before the memorial service, Linda Arndt and Larry Mason had gone to the Fernies’ home wanting to set up formal questioning with the Ramseys. John spent about forty minutes with them there, with two lawyers in attendance, but said Patsy was still highly medicated and in no condition to speak. In giving the officers some family background, he told them something about Patsy that, apparently, they had not known.

In June of 1993, after complaining of severe back and shoulder pains and a progressively distending belly on her normally trim and well-cared-for figure, Patsy was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Originally labeled as stage
III
, she was soon downgraded to stage IV, the worst and most ominous designation, when it was found how far the cancer had spread. The Ramseys were once again devastated, so soon after Beth’s death, to be facing death yet again. Patsy said she questioned why God would give her two beautiful young children, only to take her away from them when they would most need her.

She was enrolled in a rigorous experimental program at the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. The protocol called for a week of chemotherapy treatment in Bethesda every month, followed by recovery and a battery of tests in Boulder, before returning for another depleting treatment in Bethesda. She lost her hair and was often too weak to get out of bed, the specter of death always close. This routine went on for many months, during which she saw many of her new friends and fellow cancer battlers in the program weaken and die.

She eventually made it, attributing her miraculous cure (if such a word can be used with regard to cancer) to a combination of first-rate medical care, emotional support from her husband and children, and God’s grace and intervention.