by Bill James
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. Ramsey—the CEO of a company with sales of a hundred million dollars a month—was entirely knocked off his feet by the crime, reduced for several weeks to something near the level of a babbling idiot. His friends and advisors closed ranks around him, and—with his permission, but with minimal participation from him—hired teams of private investigators, squads of the most expensive lawyers, and also consultants of every stripe—profilers, forensic analysts, and spokesmen.
This backfired on the Ramseys in the worst possible way. The harder the Ramseys worked to force the attention of the investigators away from themselves, the harder the police worked to force the attention of the investigation back on them. This became a battle of wills, during which the police essentially failed to notice that the actions they were alleging on the part of the Ramseys were fairly preposterous.
4) The tabloid press invaded Boulder in overwhelming numbers, creating extraordinary pressures on the investigation. The case developed immediately into a tabloid sensation, but was ratcheted up to another level in the following weeks by two events:
a) Video emerged of JonBenet singing and dancing in child beauty pageants, and
b) The Ramseys unwisely decided to do an interview with CNN.
There had been cases before which had received as much attention as the Ramsey murder—not many of them, but there had been some. The O. J. Simpson case received even more media coverage, but that was in LA. Los Angeles could absorb the media; they were used to it. The people of Boulder were caught off-guard by the invasion, and were utterly unprepared to deal with it.
5) Simmering animosities between Boulder police and prosecutors boiled over into an all-out public feud.
The Boulder District Attorney at the time of the crime was Alex Hunter, a liberal and progressive D.A. who had held office for almost a quarter-century before the crime, and who would represent the one power center to emerge from the debacle largely unscathed.
The Chief of Police, Tom Koby, was also a positive and progressive new-age cop, who led his department with a light touch and a gentle hand. Koby’s motto, which he had framed and distributed to his department heads, was “Police unto others as you would have others police unto you.” His outgoing phone message talked about it being a lovely day in Boulder, and expressed the hope that it was a lovely day where you were, too.
The head of Koby’s homicide investigation unit was John Eller, an old-line, up-from-the-bottom cop, suspicious of the FBI, paranoid about the media, and inclined to distrust people who got too much edjacashun and thought they had the world all figgered out. This is surely an unfair description of Eller, for which I apologize, but Eller is the person most responsible for making the investigation an unmitigated disaster, and he doesn’t come off well in the books about the case.
One of Eller’s investigators was a detective, Steve Thomas, who would eventually become the public face of the investigation. Koby, Eller and Thomas would be among the many whose careers were derailed by the investigation.
Alex Hunter, District Attorney.
Tom Koby, Chief of Police.
John Eller, head of the investigation.
Steve Thomas, a cop on the investigative team.
As the case began, Koby and Hunter were good friends, the progressive D.A. and the progressive cop. Koby probably respected Eller, or at least treated him with respect. Detective Thomas referred to Koby and Hunter (and their coterie) as “the beads and sandal types,” and said that the beads and sandal crowd were in command positions. Eller and those below him did not particularly like Koby and actively disliked Hunter, but it is common for people to have some emotional distance from their superiors, and Eller and Thomas and those like them accepted Koby and got along with him well enough.
As the pressures of the case heated up, Eller became aggressively paranoid about leaks of the case evidence, and this led him into endlessly escalating confrontations with those above him. When tensions between police and prosecutors seemed in danger of getting out of control, a joint war room was set up to which the two sides would both have access. The prosecutors were soon locked out of the war room, and were publicly accused of leaking critical information about the investigation (of which they were almost certainly guilty, except that the information leaked was nowhere near as critical as Eller and Thomas thought it was. And many of the leaks came from those below Eller, rather than those above him). Eventually police and prosecutors were ripping one another limb from limb in the newspapers and in magazine articles. The prosecutors hired their own outside investigators. The police responded by bringing in their own outside attorneys. Police called publicly for prosecutors who had leaked information to be arrested.
The feud between police and prosecutors burned through a long series of efforts to control it. Hunter and Koby would constantly say, “We’ve got to get a handle on this,” and would arrange some new and yet more visible show of mutual support—which would be followed, within days or hours, by yet more irresponsible actions on the part of Commander Eller, ratcheting the war up to a yet-more-unimaginable level of hostility.
6) The Boulder command structure, from the city manager to the street cop, crumbled and collapsed into a group of warring clans.
Eller fired one of his top assistants, who threatened to sue the department and was paid damages not to sue. Koby concluded that Eller had lied to him about the firing, and forced Eller to retire. Eller and Koby blamed one another for turning away the help that had been offered them at the beginning of the case. Koby was given a vote of no confidence by the police department’s rank and file, and was forced to resign. Koby and Hunter’s friendship was strained and probably destroyed. The city manager was forced to resign. Many cops left the department in disgust, and there were numerous lawsuits about the conditions under which they had left. Linda Arndt, who had been “in charge” of the crime scene, wound up suing the department.
The Hall-Mills case, 1922–1928, had also degenerated into ugly factionalism pitting police against prosecutors. However, the all-out, all-in warfare of the Ramsey case is, to the best of my knowledge, unprecedented in American history.
My greatest fear, in writing this book, is that I will be unable to convince you that John and Patsy Ramsey had nothing to do with the death of their daughter. The Ramseys, having suffered a horrendous loss, then became the victims of a fantastically botched investigation which spent several years pointing fingers at them, and of public scorn, condemnation and ridicule stemming from that. I feel a responsibility to do what I can to clear their names, and I fear that I will be unequal to the challenge. I will do my best.
Let me begin by re-tracing for you the route by which I realized that the Ramseys were innocent. Nothing about my theory of this case is new or unique to me. I am advocating a position here and explaining how I came to accept that interpretation, but I didn’t invent any of this.
Like most people who followed the case only in passing in its first year, I assumed that the Ramseys were most likely guilty. Once books about the case began to appear and I started to read and study those books, I became hopelessly confused about what might have happened. One of the theories about the case is that JonBenet’s involvement in child beauty pageants may have made her a target for a pedophile. “OK,” I thought. “Let’s read the ransom note carefully, and see what it reveals about the writer’s knowledge of beauty pageants.”
The ransom note contains no reference whatsoever to the world of beauty pageants, but this was not what struck me. Reading the letter carefully with that question in mind, I was stunned to note that the ransom letter actually contains no reference to JonBenet Ramsey whatsoever. It does not mention her name. It does not mention her age. It does not mention, discuss, suggest or refer to her in any way as a beautiful little girl, a cute little girl … nothing.
The letter is a
diatribe directed at John Ramsey, JonBenet’s father, and it contains some information about him. All it really says about JonBenet is “your daughter.” The impression one gets, in reading the note carefully, is that the author of the note really didn’t know anything about JonBenet. He knew that John Ramsey had a little girl, and … that was it.
The police theory of the case was that Patsy Ramsey, having accidentally killed JonBenet or participated in her killing, had written the ransom note as part of staging the crime scene. But if that was true, it struck me as quite extraordinary that she had, in the hours after the death of her little girl, apparently suppressed all awareness of her. Yes, murderers do tend to “de-personalize” their victims, but when a parent loses a small child, that child becomes the all-consuming center of their consciousness. Many parents accidentally kill their children and try to cover it up. But ordinarily, those parents can’t stop talking about the dead child, can’t stop weeping about her, can’t stop going on and on about what a wonderful child he or she was. Patsy Ramsey’s ransom note—if it was hers—had not only limited the significance of the murdered child, but had virtually eliminated any awareness of her.
Does this mean that Patsy Ramsey is innocent? No, of course not; it simply struck me as extraordinarily odd—as many things about the case do.
My next step toward understanding came when it was pointed out to me that the ransom note contains numerous allusions to a certain type of movie. There is a genre of “action” movies in which a villain captures a child, several children or other innocent victims and uses the captives as pawns to gain power over their parents, the police or the community. There are people who believe that the ransom note contains references to several of these movies. I believe this theory may have been created or popularized by the internet writer Jameson.
The murderer of JonBenet Ramsey, so goes this theory, was a person who watched those movies, probably repeatedly, but identified not with the heroic men of action who rescue the children, but with the villains gaining power by seizing control of the innocents. Feeling victimized by his life, he had fantasized about becoming a powerful criminal genius, and was acting out his fantasy at the time that he wrote the note.
When I first heard this theory I thought, as you probably did, “yeah, yeah … right. I’ll believe that when I see it.” But when you follow it through, the movie references are there, and some of them are vague and open to interpretation, and some of them are fairly clear.
The police theory of the case, then, was (apparently) that Patsy Ramsey, within two hours of witnessing or causing the brutal death of her young daughter, had sat down and created this “persona,” this “imaginary speaker” who was addicted to these type of movies, and who expressed himself in the language of the criminal masterminds of these movies, directing his anger at John Ramsey as these malefactors had addressed it at their targets. With all due respect, that’s ridiculous. To create a persona like that, and write from the psychic perspective of that persona, would be the act of a literary genius, re-working his (or her) material through generations of edits. It is not the act of a panic-stricken beauty queen, scrawling on a legal pad in the middle of the night.
Again, does this prove that the Ramseys are innocent? Well, no, I suppose it doesn’t. There are a lot of things here that I don’t understand. It is unlikely that Patsy Ramsey had ever seen any of those movies; they’re not marketed to middle-aged couples with children. Still, we have to respect the possibilities that lie within the vast realm of what we don’t understand, and I suppose it is possible, somehow, that Patsy Ramsey could have found that place in her soul where this imaginary person lived, or it is possible that the references to five or six movies of this type are just a weird coincidence.
Third stage of the realization. To believe that the Ramseys were guilty of this crime, you have to believe simultaneously that they were fantastically stupid, and that they were fantastically brilliant. They were not one of these things or the other; they were both.
If you were John and Patsy Ramsey, and you accidentally killed your daughter, and you then decided to try to get by with it, what would you do?
Within a mile of their house were snow-covered mountains. What you would do, if you were even moderately composed, would be to take the body out somewhere to the snow-covered mountains, and dispose of the body in such a way that it wouldn’t be found for months, if ever. You would return to the house, you would clean up everything that could possibly be cleaned up, and then you would tell the police that you had absolutely no idea what had happened. You woke up in the morning and a door was wide open and JonBenet was gone.
What you quite certainly would not do, unless you wanted to spend the rest of your life in prison, would be to write a long, rambling phony ransom note, every penstroke of which would become evidence against you. You wouldn’t tie the body up, in some bizarre way, with duct tape and rope, because, again, this would be manufacturing evidence against you. You certainly would not put the body in the basement, call the police and invite them to search the house.
And yet, in the theory of the police, the Ramseys were such fantastically accomplished criminal masterminds that they were able to do everything wrong—and yet escape prosecution because they had left the police with essentially no evidence whatsoever!
In my view, it is not all that easy to commit a murder and get by with it. To commit a murder in which one is the obvious first suspect and leave no evidence to hang yourself … it’s damned near impossible. A fingerprint on the duct tape, a drop of blood on your nightgown, a hair, a shred from your coat … you’re always going to leave something.
The crime scene was a virtual riot of clues. The police had rope (or cord), duct tape, a garrote, a footprint, a palm print, a long letter, the note pad on which the letter was written, the marks of a stun gun, a pubic hair, an unidentifiable teddy bear, DNA under JonBenet’s fingernails, the same DNA in her underpants, and the same unidentified DNA on the back of her long johns, where a person would normally put their hand to pull them off. The problem is, none of this evidence points toward the Ramseys, except (to an extent) the handwriting of the letter. What “points” to the Ramseys is a lot of generic crap like a bowl of pineapple, which the police want to spin as evidence, but which doesn’t give the appearance of evidence on an intuitive level.
Once again … is this proof that the Ramseys are innocent? No, I suppose it isn’t. I suppose it is conceivable, barely, that the Ramseys could have been both stupid enough to leave so much evidence and clever enough to avoid leaving evidence that could incriminate them. I suppose.
Argument four. The police liked to point out that, when a child is murdered inside his or her home, it is almost always a relative or close associate who has committed the crime. The number we read is 92%.
Yes, that’s true. And it is also true that, in virtually 100% of those cases, there is a long history of child abuse before the crime is committed. Usually, when a child is beaten to death by the parents, there have been prior accusations of child abuse against the parents, before the fatal event. Sometimes there is no such criminal record before the murder—but in essentially all such cases, prior child abuse can be later documented.
The extent of the abuse of JonBenet on the night of her murder is off the charts. A young child was carried to the basement of her house, sexually assaulted, bound with duct tape, garroted, and hit over the head hard enough to crush her skull. More severe abuse is difficult to imagine. But not only is there no documented history of abuse in the Ramsey family, but it is extremely clear that they had never been abusive to their children, at any level. The Ramseys’ life has been subjected to quite extraordinary levels of scrutiny by the police and by the press. It is very clear that, other than the allegations about JonBenet, they never abused any of their children to any extent whatsoever.
Is it conceivable that the Ramseys suddenly transformed from loving, supportive parents into off-the-charts psychotic abusers, and then presented th
emselves as sane and reasonably normal people some hours later?
Well … no; it’s not conceivable. The belief that such a thing is possible rests upon a pervasive cynicism, founded on the statement that “you never know what goes on within the privacy of the home.” Decent, upstanding, churchgoing, high-earning, high-functioning husbands beat their wives and dress up like harlots and molest their children; happens all the time. Ministers and rabbis have affairs and murder their wives, and sweet-faced little old ladies poison their husbands and have carnal adventures with motorcycle gangs; this stuff happens all the time.
Well, I’ve read a thousand crime books, and I have never, ever heard of people even remotely like the Ramseys committing any crime remotely like this. Yes, apparently upstanding people do commit horrible crimes sometimes—but
a) the vast majority of murders are committed by persons routinely involved in criminal activity, and
b) when apparently upstanding people commit murder, there is virtually always a hidden side to their lives which is exposed after the fact.
Show me the case, anywhere in the history of the world, where people like this committed a crime like this. I simply don’t believe that it has ever happened.
Well then, what did happen? In the four books that I have read about the case, there are three theories advanced. The four books are:
Perfect Murder, Perfect Town, by Lawrence Schiller,
The Death of Innocence, by John and Patsy Ramsey,
JonBenet, by ex-Detective Steve Thomas, and
Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey?, by Charles Bosworth and Cyril Wecht.
There are also numerous books about the case that I have not read, and there are some that I actually don’t believe anybody has ever read. Of the four books on which I rely, the Schiller book is easily the best. Although written quickly in the months after the murder, the book is exhaustively researched and impeccably balanced, without going to the extreme of trying to pretend that John Eller knows what he is doing.
