Law & Disorder

by Douglas, John

  The house had been added onto by the Ramseys and had a somewhat choppy layout, suggesting that whoever the killer was, he or she probably had some familiarity with the interior to maneuver around, enter JonBenét’s bedroom and ultimately find the wine cellar.

  I tried several experiments to find out what could be heard in the parents’ third-floor bedroom from elsewhere in the house. Not much. On the other hand, given the complicated layout of the house and the location of the body, this was a high-risk crime on the part of the perpetrator. Had he been confronted in the wine cellar, there would have been no other route out. He would have been trapped.

  There were also about six entry doors on the first floor and a balcony off JonBenét’s room, which wouldn’t have been difficult to reach with a stepladder or by climbing on a garbage can. So as far as the house layout was concerned, this crime could have been committed by either an insider or an intruder.

  The next day, I met with the Ramseys at the Haddon, Morgan, and Foreman offices. First, I asked to meet alone with John Ramsey. He seemed appropriately sad and depressed. Five years earlier, John’s oldest daughter from his first marriage, Elizabeth (“Beth”), had been killed in an automobile accident in Chicago with her friend Matt Darrington. Beth was twenty-two, and John had gone into the depths of an extended mourning. This might have accounted for the books I had noticed in his house on grieving and loss. And about two years after the accident, Patsy had been diagnosed with stage III ovarian cancer, soon downgraded to stage IV. She had undergone months of rigorous and debilitating treatment at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. She was currently in remission from this deadly specter. (Sadly, the cancer ultimately returned and she passed away in 2006.)

  John had run a computer distribution company in Atlanta called Microsouth. A divorced man, with older children, he had met Patricia Paugh and they had married. Patsy’s father, Donald, a former Union Carbide executive, worked for John’s company. It had merged with two other companies to form Access Graphics. John moved with Patsy, son Burke, daughter JonBenét and father-in-law Donald to Colorado, to become chief executive. The company topped a billion dollars in annual sales and was sold to Lockheed Martin. John stayed on as chief. At this point, he and Patsy had been married for sixteen years.

  John took me through the entire day of Christmas: the children waking up early to open their presents while he and Patsy took photographs ; their 4:00 P.M. dinner at Fleet and Priscilla White’s house, six blocks away; two brief stops to exchange gifts with other friends; then they went back home, where he carried a sleeping JonBenét up to her bedroom, played a game with Burke and set the alarm for 5:30 A.M. They would pick up his two older children and his prospective son-in-law at the airport, who were coming in to join them for the family’s flight to Michigan. After that, they were heading to Florida with Burke and JonBenét for a cruise on Disney’s Big Red Boat. John described the horror and panic of finding the ransom note, the arrival of Officer Rick French, then other police personnel responding, as well as the Whites and other friends, John and Barbara Fernie, coming to the house. And he recalled finding JonBenét’s body, ripping off the black duct tape that covered her mouth and carrying her upstairs to the living room.

  That detail interested me just as much as John being the one to discover the body. If he, or he and Patsy, had killed their daughter, then staged it to look like some other kind of crime, why would he unstage it before authorities got to see it? Not only did he rip off the duct tape, he tried hard to loosen the cord that bound her wrists.

  The more I learned about this case and the prime suspects, the less the police theory held together.

  After about two hours of our conversation, John Ramsey excused himself to use the restroom. I turned to Bryan Morgan and said, “I believe him.”

  “Oh, God, what a relief!” Morgan responded.

  A personal interview doesn’t tell you everything you want to know about an individual, but when you’ve talked to as many suspects and convicts as I have over the years—in the depth that I’ve dealt with them—you get a pretty good feel for whether they are telling the truth and telling the whole truth. Some of it is speech and hesitation; some is body language; some is just the look in their eyes. In fact, when asked about our parenting skills, most of my FBI and detective colleagues admit that while we’re probably no better than other mothers and fathers at bringing up our children, we’re head and shoulders better at interrogation. We can usually get to the truth pretty quickly with our kids and their friends.

  “Look me in the eye and say that” is usually enough to send a preteen into a cowering confession, and our teenaged daughters often complain that their dates don’t stand a chance against us.

  With John Ramsey, there was just no indication he was lying or holding anything back, or that his professed grief was other than genuine. Particularly in light of his reaction to Beth’s death, it seemed inconceivable that he could have taken part in the murder of JonBenét by either strangulation or blunt-force trauma, or even a cover-up of such a crime by his wife without giving it away in an extensive conversation with me.

  Also, keep in mind that this was not an individual used to lying, like a habitual offender would be. If he were now trying to lie about something as monstrous as his daughter’s murder, there would likely be a number of “tells” that would be obvious to any experienced investigator. And there were not.

  I know what I have just stated is not proof of anything, but the interview was the tipping point for me. Once a good and responsible investigator has an informed opinion on a case, he or she will subject it to as much opposing evidence and logic as possible. That is: I went into this figuring the parents were probably guilty, so I would be looking for anything I could find to tell me otherwise. Now that I thought they were probably innocent, I would start looking for evidence to see if I could convince myself that I was wrong.

  Bryan Morgan asked if I would participate in a meeting scheduled for the afternoon with Boulder police chief Tom Koby and others directly concerned with the case. I agreed.

  The meeting was cordial enough, but the police seemed to have little interest in what I had to say. Several times, Chief Koby left, leaving in charge Commander John Eller, head of the detective division. Eller appeared not to want to be bothered by outside influence of any kind. This idea was confirmed for me when he seemed indifferent to my suggestion that Boulder PD contact Special Agent Ron Walker in the FBI’s Denver Field Office. I had no particular ax to grind, and even though I was working with the Ramseys’ attorneys, the only thing I really cared about was that this case be solved and this little girl’s killer brought to justice. I thought using Ron Walker might give them just the boost they needed.

  Ron was a longtime colleague of mine and, in fact, had saved my life. In December 1983, during a period of tremendous professional and personal stress, I had been out in Seattle working on the Green River Murders case. After addressing the police and the regional task force on a Wednesday, I hadn’t been feeling well and asked the two young agents working with me, Ron Walker and Blaine McIlwain, to cover for me with the police on Thursday. I went to my room at the Hilton, hung out the DO NOT DISTURB sign, and went to bed to try to sleep it off.

  When I didn’t show up at breakfast Friday and didn’t answer their calls, they demanded my room key from the manager. They opened the lock, but the security chain was on. Without hesitation, they broke open the door. They found me on the floor, comatose and near death, with what turned out to be viral encephalitis. Several times in Swedish Hospital that week, I almost died. I didn’t return to work until the following May and still have lasting effects of the illness.

  I had not contacted or talked to Ron about the Ramsey case, but I thought his input could be tremendously valuable. We use the analogy of rare or unusual diseases in medicine. Your normal primary-care physician is a highly competent and effective generalist who knows your situation and history well and will give you good medical ca
re. But if he or she is presented with something that only comes up once every couple of years, or perhaps never before, the standard of care is to bring in a specialist in that particular discipline. If you need complicated heart surgery, you want to bring in a highly experienced cardiothoracic surgeon.

  In the same manner, most small to medium-size law enforcement agencies don’t deal with many homicides, particularly ones that appear to involve kidnapping and sexually oriented violence. But we in the Behavioral Science Unit, and those we’ve trained, are specialists. We see those cases every day; we know how to investigate them; we know how to keep those investigations from getting bogged down, off-track or seriously compromised.

  Had the body not been found and the case therefore continued to be classified as an abduction, the Federal Kidnapping Statute of 1932 would have gone into effect and the FBI would have had primary jurisdiction. That statute, unofficially known as the “Lindbergh Law,” was enacted after the kidnapping of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s baby son from their home in Hopewell, New Jersey. It holds that after twenty-four hours have passed, there is a legal presumption that the kidnapper has crossed state lines. Therefore, it becomes a federal rather than state crime. But once the body was discovered, it became a murder, and murder is a state matter. The only way the FBI or other federal agency could enter the case was on request.

  Boulder was averaging only about one homicide a year and therefore didn’t even have a dedicated homicide detective staff. While the police department did ultimately get some input from Ron Walker and the FBI, as well as offers from Denver PD and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, they essentially decided to go it alone. Normally, when a small department does this, it’s because they are pretty confident that they already have the suspect in focus.

  As far as I was concerned, this was their first critical mistake.

  At nine o’clock on Friday morning, Bryan Morgan and I met with Detectives Steve Thomas and Thomas Trujillo in an interview room at police headquarters. Thomas and Morgan agreed that the meeting was not to be adversarial, nor would we exchange information. We were meeting to see if I could offer anything useful to the detectives as they carried out their investigation.

  I told them that after touring the house, I was convinced the UNSUB had been in it before and knew his way around. Otherwise, the crime would have been too high-risk for him to be confident of pulling it off. I told them I felt this was primarily a personal-cause homicide directed against John Ramsey, and I thought that was supported by the degree of overkill.

  This was most likely one offender, I said, because two or more would have been able to control the child and the plan would not have gone to hell as it did.

  Once the child was dead, he covered her up quickly and left her where she was with a blanket halfway covering her. I didn’t think this looked like evidence of a parental killing, either. There was no care taken with the body, which, as I’ve said, we almost always see when a parent murders a child.

  The most fruitful direction for the investigation, I thought, was first to examine anyone who could have had access to the house—including cleaning people, all the way up to employees of John’s company. The crime showed a lot of anger. Who had that kind of anger for John or the family?

  I gave them some interrogation suggestions, which I won’t divulge here because they are useful in a variety of cases. I also said I thought it would be helpful to have the police chief describe the kind of postoffense behavior we would expect and ask anyone who notices it in a friend, family member or acquaintance to get in touch with the investigators. Undoubtedly, the UNSUB would be following the media coverage closely; the more tension and anxiety you could create in him, the better.

  CHAPTER 15

  WHAT WE KNOW, AND HOW WE KNOW IT

  With that background, let’s analyze the case as I did, element by element. These are the factors that made a difference in the way the case developed. If any loose ends stick out along the way, we’ll try to deal with them as they come up.

  The 911 Call and the Ransom Note

  At 5:52 A.M., on December 26, 1996, the following call was received by the police dispatcher in Boulder, Colorado, from Patricia Ann Ramsey:

  Patsy Ramsey: (inaudible) police.

  Dispatcher: (inaudible)

  Patsy Ramsey: 755 Fifteenth Street.

  Dispatcher: What’s going on there, ma’am?

  Patsy Ramsey: We have a kidnapping. Hurry, please.

  Dispatcher: Explain to me what’s going on, okay?

  Patsy Ramsey: There we have a . . . There’s a note left, and our daughter’s gone.

  Dispatcher: A note was left, and your daughter is gone?

  Patsy Ramsey: Yes.

  Dispatcher: How old is your daughter?

  Patsy Ramsey: She’s six years old. She’s blond . . . six years old.

  Dispatcher: How long ago was this?

  Patsy Ramsey: I don’t know. I just found the note and my daughter’s (inaudible) .

  Dispatcher: Does it say who took her?

  Patsy Ramsey: No. I don’t know. . . . It’s there . . . there’s a ransom note here.

  Dispatcher: It’s a ransom note?

  Patsy Ramsey: It says “S.B.T.C. Victory.” Please—

  Dispatcher : Okay, what’s your name? Are you . . . ?

  Patsy Ramsey: Patsy Ramsey. I’m the mother. Oh, my God, please . . .

  Dispatcher: I’m . . . Okay, I’m sending an officer over, okay?

  Patsy Ramsey: Please.

  Dispatcher: Do you know how long she’s been gone?

  Patsy Ramsey: No, I don’t. Please, we just got up and she’s not here. Oh, my God, please.

  Dispatcher: Okay.

  Patsy Ramsey: Please send somebody.

  Dispatcher: I am, honey.

  Patsy Ramsey: Please.

  Dispatcher: Take a deep breath (inaudible).

  Patsy Ramsey: Hurry, hurry, hurry (inaudible).

  Dispatcher: Patsy? Patsy? Patsy? Patsy? Patsy?

  What can we glean from this call?

  Well, first, understandably, the caller is very upset and agitated. But this, in itself, tells us nothing about her possible involvement or whether the crime was staged. For that, we have to go a level deeper, to what we in profiling refer to as “psycholinguistic analysis”—the actual choice and use of words.

  The first thing we notice is that she gives the dispatcher disjointed, random pieces of information that make little sense out of context, such as, “It says ‘S.B.T.C. Victory,’ ” as if she is just scanning it for the first or second time and discovering new elements in it. She announces that there has been a kidnapping, but she doesn’t immediately follow it up with helpful facts. She has to be prodded for information that comes out in a disorganized way: “She’s six years old. She’s blond . . . six years old.” She is trying to get everything out as quickly as possible rather than in a methodical, coherent narrative.

  Had Patsy authored the note herself, as many investigators and much of the public came to believe, she would have been more specific on the phone. The information would have been more coherent ; she would have given a better and more organized description of her daughter. Here, she doesn’t even offer her daughter’s name, a basic piece of information.

  Surprisingly, extreme emotional distress is a very difficult sensation to fake. Try it with a friend if you don’t believe me and see if you sound phony or rehearsed to them.

  Officer Rick French arrived a few minutes later at the redbrick Tudor-style house in the fashionable University Hill neighborhood, where he was met by Patsy Ramsey. She was three days shy of her fortieth birthday. She was clearly agitated and distraught. Her husband, John Bennett Ramsey, fifty-three, came into the hallway. He appeared tense but under control.

  Patsy said that she had come down from her third-floor bedroom, at about 5:45 A.M., to awaken six-year-old JonBenét and nine-year-old Burke to get them ready for a private plane flight to their vacation home in Charlevoix
, Michigan. When she entered JonBenét’s room, it was empty. She took the spiral back staircase down to the first floor to look for her. On one of the lower steps, she found three sheets of lined white paper, side by side. On them was written the now-famous ransom note.

  It was written with a black felt-tip marker and appeared to be penned by someone either extremely nervous or trying to disguise his or her handwriting.

  In rambling, semicoherent prose, the note, addressed to Mr. Ramsey, purported to be from S.B.T.C.: a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction. They claimed to have his daughter “safe” and “un harmed” [sic] and asked for $118,000 in hundreds and twenties. It had all of the normal threats about not involving the police or FBI and warned: [We] are familiar with Law enforcement countermeasures and tactics. You stand a 99% chance of killing your daughter if you try to out smart [sic] us. Follow our instructions and you stand a 100% chance of getting her back.

  Now, by ransom note standards, this one is very peculiar. I had initially suggested to the Ramseys’ attorneys and the police that I thought the UNSUB was a white male in his midthirties to midforties. But when I had the opportunity to study the note closely, I revised my age estimate downward. It is what we would call a mixed presentation—containing both organized and disorganized elements—that generally suggests a younger and less sophisticated offender.

  So does the amount of money demanded: $118,000. Normally, we would expect to see a much larger amount asked for from someone with the real or perceived wealth of the Ramseys, so the police rightly fixed on the amount as a clue in itself.

  There are several possible explanations for the sum. One is that it represents around 1 million Mexican pesos at the prevailing exchange rate, suggesting that the intruder or intruders planned to escape to Mexico. A more prevalent theory is that it referred to the amount of money John Ramsey was given as a performance bonus. If this is true, it suggests an offender with some sort of inside knowledge. The Boulder Police Department fixed on Patsy as the only one who would have had such knowledge.