Popular Crime

by Bill James

  If Carol Neulander did indeed say that Fred had told her to expect the delivery of this letter, that ties Fred Neulander into the conspiracy to murder his wife. The problem with this is … well, it’s tenuous. A phone conversation is remembered from a week earlier; what exactly was said?

  I score it at about 5 points—5% of what is necessary to convince me that Neulander was involved in the conspiracy—and maybe that’s low. But it’s the kind of thing, a word out of place has huge consequences. Did Carol Neulander tell her daughter that “Dad told me to expect this letter,” or “He says Dad is expecting this letter,” or “He says Dad should have told me to expect this letter,” or “Dad is expecting this letter” or “I guess Dad is expecting this letter.” Even if Carol Neulander said, “Dad told me to expect a letter,” that doesn’t mean it’s the same letter.

  Neulander’s daughter apparently didn’t decide that he was guilty until years after the fact. She testified in his trial about this statement seven years after the fact. It seems to me that if this was a clear-cut incriminating statement, she would have turned on him years earlier. I’d be very reluctant to find somebody guilty of murder based on the memory, weeks or years later, of the exact wording of a telephone conversation, about an incident that seemed trivial until a week had passed.

  Getting back to point one, which is the massive unreliability of Len Jenoff. Jenoff told his story to Nancy Phillips under a specific deal that she would not print it or report it to police—which gave Jenoff a pass to engage in his usual, and endless, self-aggrandizing bullshit. But later, as his third marriage was breaking up, as he was drifting back into drinking heavily, and as the gorgeous Ms. Phillips pressured him to confess to the police, he found himself finally agreeing to do so.

  But did he do so because he was, for the first time in his life, telling the truth? Or did he do so because, if he didn’t, he would be revealed to Ms. Phillips to be a fraud—not a man conned into murder by a clever rabbi, but a man who had committed a cold-blooded murder to steal a little bit of money? I don’t know—but I think that, on the surface of it, the second explanation works better than the first. Jenoff’s options in life were pathetic—and, by saying that he committed the murder at the behest of the rabbi, he was reducing his own culpability both in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of others, including Ms. Phillips, with whom he was infatuated. He was given a shorter sentence in exchange for his testimony against Neulander. A jailhouse snitch testified for the defense that Jenoff bragged in prison about framing Neulander.

  The book about the Neulander case, The Rabbi and the Hit Man (Arthur J. Magida, HarperCollins, 2003), is OK. (There is a second book, Broken Vows, that I have not read.) Magida’s research is good; his writing is decent. He makes a complicated story easy to understand. I have the sense that, on some level, he doesn’t catch what is remarkable about his story, and I think he damages his book by being too certain that Neulander is guilty. He gets dragged into other people’s research about philandering clergymen. Who cares? Philandering clergymen are unremarkable, and the phenomenon does not call for extended analysis. It’s not what makes this story stand out.

  This is Magida’s description of the meeting at which Jenoff told the story of the murder, in a back booth of a restaurant with a reporter present, six years after the murder:

  The entire situation was so unorthodox—a guy coming forward on his own, six years after the fact, gulping down coffee and puffing his way through half a pack of cigarettes in a family restaurant on a Friday afternoon—that (the district attorney) just kept thinking, “Holy shit! Holy shit!” There was no interrogation, no pressure. In some ways it was too easy.

  Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. The world’s biggest liar had had six years to work up the story he would tell—and it wasn’t quite right yet. Jenoff claimed then that he didn’t realize he was killing the Rabbi’s wife until he heard it on the radio the next day. He had thought he was killing an anti-Israeli terrorist. Yeah, right. He claimed that he took several thousand dollars from Carol Neulander’s purse, and dumped it in a trash bin. Sure you did, Len.

  Neulander testified in his own defense at his first trial, but came off badly. Neulander was supposed to be warm and charismatic. No one is warm and charismatic under hostile cross-examination, and Neulander came across as cold and shifty. Seven years of disgrace had corroded the dynamic personality that Neulander had once had. The jury didn’t like him, and the decision was made that he should not testify at the second trial.

  Elaine Soncini testified again. With an extra year, she was able to remember a couple more devastatingly incriminating remarks that she had forgotten for the first seven years after the murder. Everyone had moved on. Soncini was married. Neulander had found a new girlfriend. His new girlfriend was Ms. Vicki—the same Miss Vicki who had married Tiny Tim on The Tonight Show in 1969. Those of you who are old enough will remember it.

  A year after the Neulander murder, a very similar murder occurred five miles away, in Voorhees, New Jersey. A woman named Janice Bell was stabbed to death in her home. Her husband came home to find her lying in a pool of blood. He became the chief suspect. Len Jenoff approached the family, offering to investigate the case for a reasonable fee. The Bell family hired him.

  A prisoner who was incarcerated with Jenoff claimed that Jenoff told him that he had also murdered Janice Bell. Neulander’s jury was not allowed to hear this testimony.

  Again, I am not arguing that Neulander is innocent. I am arguing that the case against him is not convincing. I believe that the Neulander case, over time, is likely to become much more famous than it is now, and I believe this for two reasons. First, the case of the Neulanders, containing as it does a very large number of fictional elements, will stand up to repeated re-tellings in various venues, and is likely to have these. And second, the guilt of Fred Neulander becomes less clear as one gets more perspective on the crime. The people who knew him and loved him are convinced that he is guilty, because he betrayed their trust. The actual evidence against him, apart from this betrayal, is thin and unreliable. I think that, over time, he may develop a cadre of supporters.

  One final point about the Neulander case. The prosecutor, Jack Lynch, cross-examined Neulander in a very aggressive manner—yelling at him, interrupting him before he could finish his answers, insulting him, confounding him with angles on questions that he could not reasonably react to in the rapid-fire pressure of the cross-examination. The judge, Linda Baxter, allowed this to happen.

  I would argue that it was improper—and further, that at some point in the future, the Supreme Court will rule that allowing such cross-examination is improper. The judge should have said, in my view, that Mr. Neulander was not to be interrupted, not to be yelled at, and not to be intimidated. These practices have no proper place in a court of law. A courtroom is supposed to be an organized, thoughtful and unemotional search for the truth. It is not a place for bullying and emotional badinage. It is not the prerogative of the lawyers in a courtroom to beat up on the non-lawyers. When Lynch stepped over the line, Baxter should have torn him a new one—in full view of the jury. At some point in the future, the Supreme Court is going to throw out a conviction because a judge allowed this to happen. And at some point in the future, we’re going to look back on this practice and cringe, just as we do when we look back on surprise testimony, all-white juries, all-male judiciary, flashbulbs going off during the trial, the names of jurors being printed in the newspapers, and 200 other discredited trial practices of the past.

  (Late note: Len Jenoff now says that Neulander had nothing to do with the murder, which was simply a robbery that went awry.)

  XXXII

  JonBenet Ramsey and Mary Phagan are both buried in Marietta, Georgia, albeit in different cemeteries. At 5:52 AM on December 26, 1996, police in Boulder, Colorado, received a 911 call from Patsy Ramsey, who lived at 755 15th Street. Mrs. Ramsey had discovered a three-page ransom note, addressed to her husband, claiming that “We have you
r daughter,” and demanding a ransom of $118,000. Her six-year-old daughter was missing from her bed.

  The first policeman on the scene, Rick French, arrived within minutes, and quickly searched the house. Although the ransom note threatened that the girl would be beheaded if anyone was alerted about the crime, John and Patsy Ramsey immediately began to phone friends, gathering a support circle around themselves. By 8:10 (when Detective Linda Arndt arrived on the scene), Ramsey had arranged to pick up the $118,000 from the bank, and more than a dozen people were in the house—the Ramseys, four friends, two victim advocates, the Ramseys’ minister, and a shifting and uncertain number of police officers.

  John Ramsey was the wealthy head of a Boulder computer graphics firm, Access Graphics. Patsy Ramsey was a former Miss West Virginia, and JonBenet, active in the little-girl beauty pageant scene, had also won several trophies as a beautiful little girl. The family (parents, JonBenet and a son) lived in a large house, and kept another large house for summers in Michigan. Mr. Ramsey had a son and a daughter from an earlier marriage, and had lost another daughter to a traffic accident. The Ramseys had gotten up early that morning to fly to Michigan on a private plane.

  The FBI arrived about 10:30 AM, setting up a wiretap and recording equipment, then retreating to a nearby command center. Phone calls came from various people, but nothing was heard from the kidnappers. The house became more and more chaotic; friends of the Ramseys came and went, police came and went. No one took charge of the case, and no one secured the scene. Police went to lunch, leaving Detective Arndt, alone, supervising a dozen or so adults in the house. Several times she called her office, requesting backup. No help arrived.

  A little before 1:00, Ms. Arndt suggested to John Ramsey and one of his friends, Fleet White, that they should search the house “top to bottom,” looking for evidence, looking for anything out of place. She was to say later that she was mainly concerned with keeping Ramsey occupied, keeping him from falling apart. In a matter of minutes, however, Ramsey yelled from the basement, and carried JonBenet’s body up the stairs.

  JonBenet was quite dead, although Ramsey seemed not to register this at first. She had been loosely tied up, her mouth had been taped shut, and a garrote had been fastened around her neck. Her body had been wrapped in a blanket. She had been dead for several hours.

  Suppose that you heard about a juggler who had accidentally cut off his hand while juggling six sharp swords. You would have to conclude that he was actually a pretty good juggler; he just wasn’t quite as good as he thought he was. The same should be said of the Boulder, Colorado, police department: it was actually a very good police department. They just weren’t quite as good as they thought they were.

  The likelihood that you will mishandle a challenge increases with the uniqueness of the challenge. If, on Monday morning, you are presented with a problem that is like the problems you deal with every day, it is likely that you will meet the challenge. If, on the other hand, you are presented with an issue that is different from what you normally deal with, then it becomes more likely that the task will give you headaches.

  Without warning and with their resources depleted by vacation schedules, the Boulder police department was confronted with what I believe to be the most unusual crime scene in American history. They made an absolutely fantastic mess of it. Not since the Hall-Mills case in 1922 has a high-profile murder case been so badly investigated.

  Of course, there is no way to quantify to what extent a crime scene is unusual or to what extent an investigation is scrambled, therefore no way to prove that these statements are true or false. That’s how I can get by with making these outrageous claims. But the basic fact of the case is very unusual, the basic fact being that a little rich girl was found brutally and mysteriously murdered inside her large and beautiful home. There are 15,000 homicides a year in America, of which, in a typical year, approximately zero will be little rich kids found mysteriously murdered inside their homes.

  In addition, there are several extremely unusual features of the murder scene:

  1) We have a body and a ransom note both left at the scene of the crime,

  2) We have the longest ransom note in the history of kidnapping (374 words),

  3) We have multiple causes of death—ligature strangulation and a blow to the head, and

  4) We have a demand for $118,000 in ransom—an unusual amount of money to begin with, and an almost trivial amount of money, given the wealth of the family.

  Given this unusual premise, the story of the Ramsey investigation then took a number of remarkable turns.

  1) The on-scene investigation, in the hours after the crime, made a stupefying number of very basic mistakes.

  2) The continuing investigation, in the weeks and months after the crime, was, if this is possible, worse.

  3) John Ramsey used his personal wealth to build a private investigation, attempting to wrest control of the investigation away from police and direct it away from the Ramseys.

  4) The tabloid press invaded Boulder in overwhelming numbers, creating extraordinary pressures on the investigation.

  5) Simmering animosities between Boulder police and prosecutors boiled over under the pressure into an all-out public feud, the likes of which has probably never been seen in this country.

  6) The Boulder command structure, from the city manager to the street cop, crumbled and collapsed under the pressure into a group of warring clans.

  Taking those one at a time:

  1) The on-scene investigation, in the hours after the crime, made a stupefying number of very basic mistakes. Detective Steve Thomas, in his insider’s account of the case, spends several pages laying out in rapid-fire succession a long list of mistakes made by the first responders.

  At the time of the Hall-Mills murders the New Brunswick police failed to secure the crime scene, allowing journalists and curiosity seekers to trash the scene, but in 1922 the practice of securing a crime scene was not well established. While the idea of preserving the crime scene was developed, I believe, in the 1880s, it often takes many years for professional practices to spread throughout the culture, and by 1922 that practice was far from mature. In 1922 most policemen had no formal training, and many police departments had no action plans requiring that a crime scene be immediately secured. One can understand, to an extent, the failure to secure the Hall-Mills murder scene.

  But by 1996 every policeman had grown up in a culture in which securing the crime scene was basic background information. Every police worker, by 1996, had had “securing the crime scene” drummed into him from Day One of his police cadet training—and yet the first responders acted as if they had no idea of this being a crime scene, and it had never occurred to them that they might need to take control of it. This is inexplicable.

  At the same time, one might fail to secure a crime scene 100 times, and 95 times there might be limited consequences to the failure. But in this case—and again, this is quite unusual—in this case Patsy Ramsey had begun calling friends as soon as she got off the phone with the police, so that the house was full of people within an hour. The police made a very large number of mistakes in the first hours of the case—and they didn’t get by with any of them.

  It was the Ramseys’ own actions—calling friends to the scene of the crime—that initially caused the investigation to run off track. Patsy did this because that was what she did; that was who she was. She was a drama queen. When she had an emotional trial, she automatically invited her friends in to help her through it. It’s not what I would do; it’s probably not what you would do. It’s the way she was.

  What the police should have done, finding friends, ministers and others gathering at the crime scene, was to get their attention and announce loudly, “You people have to get out of here. This is a crime scene, and I am a police officer, and this is a direct order. Grab your coats and get out of this house right now. I am not negotiating with you and I don’t care how you feel about it. Get out.”

&n
bsp; Instead, what they did is, they invited more people to come over! They called the “victims’ advocate” division, and requested victims’ advocates to come to the house—which was totally unnecessary, since the Ramseys had already gathered their own support group. This was merely the first of the series of blunders that destroyed the crime scene before basic facts were established.

  2) The continuing investigation, in the weeks and months after the crime, was, if this is possible, worse. The man in charge of the case, John Eller, had never before been in charge of a homicide investigation. Eller was given the opportunity to pick and choose whomever he wanted to form an elite investigative unit, and, after some early struggles, he wound up with a squad of six detectives who were fiercely loyal to him, but most or all of whom were young, inexperienced detectives who had never been within ten miles of a serious homicide investigation.

  In the early days of the investigation Eller and his boss, Tom Koby, were approached by many other police services—the sheriff’s office, the FBI, and Denver homicide, among others—offering to help. They turned them all away, and insisted on investigating the case with their hand-picked team. Like the man juggling six swords, they were certain they could handle it.

  One of those detectives quit the investigation after about twenty months, and wrote a book attempting to place the blame for the failures of the case on the shoulders of the District Attorney’s office and on Chief of Police Koby. What that book clearly demonstrates, contrary to the intentions of its author, is that the investigation was staffed by people who had absolutely no concept of what they were doing.