The Cases That Haunt Us

by Mark Olshaker

  At several points during my conversation with both Ramseys, I glanced at Bryan Morgan and found him moved to tears. This confirmed for me that he did really believe in his clients’ innocence and was full of compassion for the incredible loss they’d suffered. One time, he asked John to show me a photo of Beth. John took the picture from his wallet and began crying. Morgan put his hand on John’s shoulder, began crying himself, and said, “John, I’m so sorry.”

  Could this have been more staging for my benefit? I quickly concluded it was not. I think after interviewing hundreds of offenders and victims, I’m experienced enough to recognize genuine tears when I see them.

  MEETING WITH THE PD

  When we finished talking, Morgan asked the Ramseys to go into another office while I briefed Ellis Armistead and media consultant Pat Korten on my impressions. Morgan wanted to discuss the upcoming meeting that afternoon with Boulder police. He said he wanted to be able to offer them my consultative services and to get Chief Tom Koby to make some public statements that would neutralize the large amount of misinformation Morgan felt was out before the public.

  At police headquarters, about a ten-minute drive away, scores of media people surrounded the front steps, so we were escorted in through a side door and into the commander’s conference room. I was introduced to Chief Koby, Commander Eller, and a police legal adviser. Accompanied by the media adviser and three attorneys—Morgan, Hal Haddon, and Patsy’s attorney, Patrick Burke—I saw immediately that Koby had not been expecting this large a group.

  Koby said he was prepared to discuss leaks, but did not want to discuss material details of the case under these circumstances. He was scheduled for a 7 P.M. press conference and was anticipating heat from the media regarding the commonly held belief that the police had botched the search for the victim by not looking through the entire basement, had lost control of the people in the house, and had therefore critically damaged the crime scene.

  The chief came across to me as soft-spoken and professional. On the other hand, Eller’s facial and physical cues communicated an attitude of “Don’t bother me.” Koby left for a meeting with his own people, then returned about ten minutes later to tell me that they wanted to hear what I had to say. I was told the police had been given a copy of my CV beforehand.

  Koby then left to prepare for the press conference, leaving Eller in charge of the meeting. He looked indifferent and gave the impression that this wasn’t a productive use of his time.

  He began by saying they were going to treat me as a witness. During the conversation it came out that I had spoken with the Ramseys that morning.

  His eyebrows rose, and in a voice that seemed to me dripping with sarcasm, he said, “Oh, so you interviewed the Ramseys!”

  I finally got fed up with his attitude and said, “Look, I’m here to try to help. If you’re not interested, so be it. I’ve got other things to do and I’ll be on my way.” It was almost the exact same thing I’d said to Atlanta police sixteen years earlier when I was down there for the child murders investigation.

  No, they were interested, Eller countered, and they would set up an interview with me the next day with two of their detectives. He asked me if I was part of the Academy Group, a consulting firm made up primarily of former and retired agents from Quantico. I said I wasn’t but that I had trained many of their people. I had heard the police might have contacted Pete Smerick, one of the agents who’d been in my unit and subsequently worked with the group to take a look at the ransom note for content analysis.

  About this time I started hearing that when I’d first been contacted by Ellis Armistead, the Ramsey attorneys had also contacted Gregg McCrary, whom I had brought into the unit and who had distinguished himself on many important cases while he was at Quantico. Morgan told me they never actually got to talk to McCrary personally, but Gregg had announced publicly that he did not and would not accept an assignment in this case because such situations usually turn out to be a parent or someone close to the family, that that was the way this one looked to him, and that he did not want to risk being in the camp of the killer.

  Neither do I, but I was disappointed and somewhat distressed by the way Gregg approached this. It was as if he had made a prediagnosis of disease without first examining the patient, going on the statistical likelihood that the patient was sick. Gregg has since become a frequent media commentator on the case. I certainly don’t question his motives in making the decisions he did. But I have to say that when I was heading the Investigative Support Unit at Quantico, I would have been very concerned if I felt that any of my agents had evaluated a case beforehand or were leaning in a certain direction to try to please the local investigative agency. I always wanted our consultations and opinions to be as unaffected by outside influence as possible. That’s why, when a local department would send us all of the facts and case materials for a given crime, the standing rule was that the one thing they were not to provide us with was their suspect list. We didn’t want to be influenced.

  As the case progressed, Gregg offered his opinions. At the same time, he criticized me for coming to my conclusion without having complete information. Since he didn’t have anything but public sources, I kept wondering where his analysis came from. Like Gregg, I went into the case believing there was a strong possibility that one of the Ramseys could be involved based on the statistics of this sort of crime. But I reserved judgment until I saw the evidence.

  Contrary to what has been reported, I was not called upon to do a profile of the killer and have never done so. I never had all of the material I would need for that. I saw it as my role with the attorneys to do an assessment of whether their clients were involved, and with the police to give them the benefit of my experience in analyzing and researching thousands of homicide investigations. I made a point of telling Eller that if they hadn’t done so already, they should get in touch with Ron Walker in the FBI’s Denver Field Office. Eller remained poker-faced, not letting on whether he had contacted Ron or not. I had the impression he wasn’t too keen on bringing in the Bureau on any greater level than he had to.

  Let me mention here that I had not been in touch with Ron on this case. In fact, my recommendation that Boulder PD contact him was the extent of my “contact” with the FBI on this case. I have spoken to no one in the Bureau about it, have not asked for, wanted, nor have any “inside” information from the FBI.

  The meeting lasted no more than forty-five minutes, and when it was over, we were escorted out the side door, as far as possible from the media.

  That evening, Chief Koby surprised the Ramsey team by really taking the media to task for unfair and misleading reporting. He went off on one particularly aggressive reporter, lecturing him that he could not imagine what it was like to lose a child to crime. The chief said they were looking at a number of potential suspects and that the public had a need to know some information, but not all. He added that the results of forensic tests would be coming in in pieces over the next several weeks. What no one could predict was that by the time some of the important results came back, relations would be so poor between the police and DA Alex Hunter’s office that the police would not even tell the prosecutors what they had.

  THE DETECTIVES

  On Friday morning, January 10, accompanied by Bryan Morgan, I met at police headquarters with Detectives Steve Thomas and Thomas Trujillo. They were both well-groomed, good-looking guys who appeared to be in their late twenties or early thirties. They were cordial in their introductions. We went to an interview room furnished with a table and four chairs.

  Morgan laid out the ground rules, which were that I would answer any specific questions regarding the Ramseys and that I would talk generally about what I did, how I did it, and what my impressions were. The detectives said they had no trouble with this. They asked if either of us had any recording devices on our persons, and we told them we did not.

  For the record, they asked me my full name, date and place of birth, home address a
nd phone number, etc. When I said I was born in Brooklyn, one of them commented that he could detect a little bit of an accent. I described my background and experience for about fifteen minutes, after which both men said they were impressed. Morgan added, “John’s the best at what he does and that’s why you have to listen to what he has to say.” I was somewhat embarrassed by this testimonial but let it pass.

  I gave them my analysis thus far and why I believed the Ramseys’ stories. The nonverbal cues Thomas and Trujillo were giving off indicated that they were interested in what I was telling them. I said it was my belief at this point that the motive of the crime was personal and directed at Mr. Ramsey. I thought the $118,000 figure demanded in the note had to be significant, as that was virtually the exact net amount of his bonus from the company ($118,117.50), deposited electronically into his retirement plan account. His paycheck stubs for the entire year would have reflected that amount. Though I couldn’t be sure, I didn’t sense that they knew that.

  I told them it was my opinion that the writer of the note was a white male in his thirties or forties with some business background. (Once I had the opportunity to study the note in more detail, I revised my age prediction somewhat downward. Age is one of the most difficult factors in criminal investigative analysis because chronological age and behavioral age do not always match.)

  I said the letter was written in a businesslike fashion and at some points the extortionist could not fully disguise himself. They wanted to know if I thought the crime was perpetrated by one individual. I said I thought so, and it had to be someone who was either intentionally or inadvertently given the information on the bonus amount. If it was inadvertent, the UNSUB could have seen a pay stub or retirement plan printout on John Ramsey’s desk in his office or a desk, counter, or dresser top at home.

  This crime and crime scene was a mixed presentation, with elements of both organization and disorganization, which strongly suggested a criminally unsophisticated individual. However, even though not a professional criminal, the subject had to have the boldness to enter a home and kill a child with the parents inside. Even the letter itself showed mixed organization. Very long for a ransom note, it had all kinds of extraneous stuff in it, which took some planning and organization to put together. On the other hand, the paper and writing implement came from inside the house. This either suggested lack of planning or superplanning—using only materials inside the house so as not to leave additional clues. But if that was the case, then the subject had to know that the family would be out long enough for him to take the time to write the note.

  I said that regardless of who committed the murder, a family member or intruder, I did not believe the note could have been written after the fact; it had to have been written before the murder. In my entire career, I had never seen anyone with that kind of control and presence of mind to write out so long and involved a letter. It just didn’t make any sense.

  I had found nothing to suggest that the parents had any reason or motive to kill their child. From what I’d been able to gather, JonBenet was everything to Mrs. Ramsey. And after losing one daughter, if anything, Mr. Ramsey would be overprotective of this one.

  I have to say that whatever either detective has said since then, I sensed that they were paying close attention and giving serious consideration to my analysis. I said that to catch this subject, the public comments made by the police and DA’s office should be positive and confident. I took them step-by-step through proactive measures I’d employed in the past. A profile per se would not necessarily be that valuable, but what could be effective was to try to get the media’s cooperation in publicizing likely pre- and postoffense behavior patterns that someone close to this individual might recognize. This ought to be done as soon as possible before memories faded.

  “Look at the Unabomber case,” I said. “The downfall of the Unabomber was when he wrote the communiqués. Then we had something to assess. We could begin to understand what his motive was.” And now we had the opportunity to make this writing public in the hopes that someone would recognize it and come up with a name for us. Had the “manifesto” not been published by the New York Times and the Washington Post, I believe Theodore Kaczynski could well still be living in a cabin in Montana terrorizing the country.

  One technique that could produce immediate results would be to use newspapers and billboards to reproduce the actual ransom note. In 1989, Special Agent Jana Monroe (now assistant special agent-in-charge of the Denver Field Office) had worked a case for my unit down in Tampa, Florida, in which a woman and her two teenaged daughters visiting the area had been found dead in Tampa Bay. They were obviously the victims of sexual murder. The only tangible piece of forensic evidence was a scribbled note found in the woman’s car, giving directions from her motel to the spot where the car was found. When other leads didn’t pan out, Jana got the local police to blow up the note and put it on local billboards to see if anyone recognized the handwriting. Within a couple of days, three separate individuals who had never met each other called the police and identified the handwriting as belonging to an unlicensed aluminum-siding installer who’d produced unsatisfactory work for all three of them. He was arrested, tried, and found guilty of first-degree murder.

  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.