The Cases That Haunt Us (52 page)

The Boulder detectives seemed to like this idea.

I asked them if they wanted any advice from me on how to interrogate a subject once an arrest was made. They said yes. This was a strange situation. Here I was with John Ramsey’s attorney, telling the cops what techniques to use, knowing there was an excellent chance they’d be used against this attorney’s client. I suggested dressing the interview room with props and artifacts from the crime and scene, saying that the killer would inevitably be drawn to them and would help give himself away with his nonverbal cues. It was awkward because this is how I really felt it should be done, but I knew that if Bryan Morgan went back and told John and Patsy what I’d said, and they were called in for questioning and were guilty, then they’d have even more trouble avoiding the “props” than if they knew nothing of the technique. Anyway, the chips were going to fall wherever they fell.

I added that the Ramseys genuinely seemed to want to talk extensively to the police, but the attorneys were concerned that the chief wanted them polygraphed, even though polygraphs were not admissible in court in Colorado. I explained that my unit and I had never set much store in polygraphs and considered them more in the realm of interrogation techniques than anything else. I said there were too many inconclusive results, and anyone who feels guilty about not sufficiently protecting his child, as John Ramsey clearly did, would likely show a false positive so soon after the event. The other side of the coin was that sociopaths often did well on lie detector tests. If you have no conscience and can lie to other people without a problem, lying to a box isn’t any big deal. And even when they were “effective,” polygraphs indicated belief more than truth. I said I was reasonably convinced O. J. Simpson could pass such a test this far after the fact when he had convinced himself that he was justified in what he did. In fact, when I consulted with attorney Daniel Petrocelli on the Goldman family’s civil suit, I advised Petrocelli not to push for a lie detector test.

In early spring of 2000, another round of controversy on this subject occurred when the Ramseys declared on national television that they had never formally been asked to take lie detector tests and were perfectly willing to under fair circumstances. I believe what happened here is that, trying to prove their innocence, they “got out front” of their attorneys without understanding as much as the attorneys and I know about the nature of polygraphs. Once the declaration was made, the lawyers couldn’t pull them back from it without another public relations fiasco, so they ended up with a solution that didn’t really satisfy anyone: a privately administered test that they passed, but which was done without the FBI’s participation. I believe enough time had gone by that John Ramsey would have some perspective on the case and so would not fail for misleading reasons, but I don’t think it changed many opinions positively or negatively.

Altogether, on that first trip to Boulder, I spent about two hours with the detectives, and when we were done, Bryan Morgan and I both thought it had been a productive meeting.

I left Boulder that afternoon, with Morgan saying he’d probably want to call on me again.

THE
CASE
MATURES

Despite a massive investigative effort in the ensuing months and years, the outlines and contours of the case remained pretty much what they had been almost from the start: a police concentration on John and Patsy Ramsey as the prime suspects in the homicide of their daughter, and evermounting tension between the police and the district attorney’s office. The police could reasonably say that their prime focus remained on the Ramseys because that was who they believed did it, just as the focus of the
LAPD
in the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman remained on O. J. Simpson—there was no evidentiary reason to look elsewhere. The police certainly believed this. It has been reported that my former unit at Quantico believed this. And certainly that is what the tabloid press, most of legitimate journalism, and the vast majority of the public believed. But as the case matured, a number of people—myself included—became increasingly troubled that it just wasn’t adding up the way it should if the identity of the
UNSUB
were as clear-cut as Boulder PD supposed.

The disarray of the investigation was pretty clear. Before I even got to Boulder, Sergeant Larry Mason had been removed by Eller as lead investigator for leaking inside information to the media. He was later cleared. By May of 1997, detectives Linda Arndt and Melissa Hickman had also been removed from the case.

One of the issues with the police and the Ramseys was that, despite the belief that either John or Patsy did it, the investigators disagreed about which one. The initial report had been that semen was found on the victim, which would suggest a male offender. But that report was not panning out, and by March handwriting analysts brought in by the police had eliminated John Ramsey as the writer of the note, but said they could not eliminate Patsy. So a lot of the speculation shifted to her.

In September, a search of the Ramsey home uncovered fibers that appeared to match the cord used to bind JonBenet. But the roll the duct tape had come from and the remainder of the cord were not found, which suggested to me that, unlike the notepad and pen from the ransom note and the broken paintbrush handle from the neck ligature, the cord and duct tape originated outside the house.

Only weeks after this search, lead investigator John Eller was replaced by Commander Mark Beckner. A little over a month after that, the police union passed a no-confidence motion against Chief Tom Koby, who later announced he would resign. Within a few days, Eller also announced that he planned to resign. Ultimately, Koby was replaced by Beckner. But by the one-year anniversary of the murder, despite the focus on the Ramseys, no suspects had been named and no arrests had been made.

While a murder always has horrible and long-term fallout for the family and friends of the victim, I have never seen another case that became so devastating and destructive to the investigating agency itself.

Alex Hunter brought in famed forensic scientist Dr. Henry Lee and attorney and
DNA
legal specialist Barry Scheck as consultants. So far as I can tell, neither has been able to advance the case. And rather than narrowing the focus, new pieces of potential evidence often raised more questions than they answered. Detective Steve Thomas placed great store in the fact that JonBenet had apparently ingested pineapple the evening of her death, contrary to what the Ramseys said, yet seemed to discount what I consider to be a major finding: that
DNA
, definitely not belonging to JonBenet and definitely not belonging to either of her parents (or anyone else tested, for that matter), was found in her panties and under her fingernails.

To me, the relative weight given to these two possible clues says a lot about the unbalanced nature of the Ramsey murder investigation. What are the implications of Patsy saying that she did not feed her daughter, nor did she see JonBenet eat, cut pineapple on the night she died? Why would Patsy lie about something like that? What is the strategic advantage?

How about “JonBenet woke up and she was hungry so I gave her some pineapple”? That’s completely innocent; it doesn’t imply, “Oh, and while she was awake, I killed her.” It would be too easy for Patsy to explain it away to bother lying about it. And yet she stuck and continues to stick to her story. Maybe the child got up and had some pineapple on her own. Maybe Patsy or John gave it to her and forgot. Maybe an intruder gave it to her. If this advances the case in any way, it is only likely to be a minor one.

Yet what about that DNA? Foreign
DNA
found under the victim’s fingernails and in her underpants certainly suggests at least
the strong possibility
of another participant. Maybe the material under the nails came from her digging in the dirt (in the Colorado winter) and coming into contact with some organic material. Maybe at some recent point another little girl had worn her underwear and it was her genetic material.

A pubic hair of unknown origin was also found on her blanket. Again, maybe there is a completely natural explanation for it, such as someone else having slept in her bed and the hair never having been cleaned away. Evidence can come from some strange and off-the-wall places. But we’re jumping through hoops to come up with alternative explanations for some very strong points of evidence.

And yet the police and public continued to believe the Ramseys did it, largely for the simple reason that no solid outside suspect had surfaced. This is remarkably similar to the events of the Sheppard murder case in Cleveland in 1954. Dr. Sam Sheppard, an osteopath, was accused, tried, and convicted of murdering his wife, Marilyn, on the Fourth of July. Sheppard claimed a mysterious stranger broke into the house, knocked him unconscious, and killed his wife. He eventually received a second trial and was released from prison, but the prevailing attitude has always been that he did it. Only recently has evidence surfaced that strongly indicates that the late Dr. Sheppard was innocent and his life ruined by false allegation. If nothing else, the Sheppard case is a cautionary tale about assuming something simply because you don’t have evidence to the contrary.

One of the avenues of investigation was for an indication of any kind of child sexual abuse or inappropriate behavior in John Ramsey’s background. Absolutely nothing surfaced. Not with his first set of children, not with his second set of children, not from his first wife or anyone else. Nothing. This is a very, very important point, because as I’ve found throughout my career and as my colleague Dr. Stanton Samenow has so articulately stated, people don’t act out of character. If they appear to, it is only because you don’t understand the character well enough.

No one suddenly becomes a child abuser … or anything else. There is always evolutionary behavior, a pattern of thought and act. Not only did the police scrutinize Ramsey’s life and every relationship, so did the tabloid press, which has a lot less in the way of scruples. And this is not the kind of guy he was.

So what did happen? None of us knows, but let’s look at some of the possibilities that have been considered or implied.

WHAT-IFS?

None of the scenarios makes perfect sense or is without loose ends, either those involving the Ramseys or one or more intruders. If one did, the case would have been solved long ago, the Boulder PD’s relative inexperience with homicide notwithstanding. The only thing we’re going to say definitively to begin is that the little girl did not write the ransom note herself, then commit suicide by garroting herself, and she didn’t die as the result of a botched alien abduction, though some of the theories are nearly as bizarre. We are going to try to follow Sherlock Holmes’s dictum that “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable
, must be the truth.” Let’s see how far we can get with this approach.

First scenario: Patsy accidentally kills JonBenet in a fit of anger. Why? Well, maybe Patsy was completely fed up with the bed-wetting. She smacked the little girl across the face, JonBenet lost her footing and maybe hit her head on something hard. Or, same scenario, except the motive is a little deeper: JonBenet gets ornery and sassy and tells her mom she’s tired of the beauty pageants and doesn’t want to do them anymore. Patsy gets hysterical because now she’s living her own fantasies vicariously through JonBenet. Patsy snaps, strikes out at the child in a momentary loss of reason and control. JonBenet hits her head just as we’ve described above; it’s one of those fluke things and she dies or is severely injured.

So now what? Patsy’s got to do something in her panic. She races up to the bedroom and awakens John. “Honey, I accidentally killed JonBenet in a fit of anger. I don’t know what came over me. What should we do?”

John pulls himself together enough to ask how it happened. Patsy describes how JonBenet was sent flying across the room and struck her head on the edge of her dresser. “Okay,” John says. “We’d better take her to the emergency room and say she had an accident.”

“No,” Patsy disagrees. “What if they see my handprint across her face [or shoulder, back, bottom, whatever] and realize what really happened?”

“Okay, you’re right. We’d better make it look like a botched kidnapping.”

“How do we do that?”

“We’ll need a ransom note, and we need to make it look like the kidnapper killed her. Let’s tie her hands together and fashion a garrote tightly around her neck to strangle her.”

“Just in case the kidnapping isn’t believable enough, I guess we’d better make it look like she was sexually molested.”

And it could have gone on from there.

Now as you read this, I hope you felt it sounded at least slightly absurd. And if it did, why? We’ll analyze what doesn’t work here and see if it tells us anything about the case itself.

Let’s begin with the basic premise. Was Patsy capable of killing her six-year-old daughter, and if so, why and how?

We’ll set aside the motive question for a moment. For now, we need to deal with the forensic findings.

As we noted earlier, the coroner’s report describes a seven-by-four-inch temporoparietal hemorrhage over an eight-and-a-half-inch skull fracture, over an eight-by-one-and-three-quarter-inch contusion of the brain itself. This is a severe blunt-force trauma. It was estimated for me that a blow this hard could bring down a three-hundred-pound man. And this was a forty-five-pound, six-year-old girl.

So if Patsy caused the fatal blow, albeit accidentally, how did she do it? Was it with her open hand? Her fist? There is no evidence or testimony to suggest that John or Patsy even spanked JonBenet. What would suddenly cause Patsy to lash out forcefully enough to deck a three-hundred-pounder? But let’s say she did hit her daughter. Presumably JonBenet would have been facing her. Did the blow send her sprawling and she just happened to hit her head on an edge or hard surface sufficient to cause the hemorrhaging, fracture, and gray matter contusion the coroner reported? Yes, it’s possible, but the description of JonBenet’s head wound is much more consistent with a direct blow to the head
with anobject
than it is with an injury caused by secondary impact after being struck with a hand or fist.