JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (10 page)

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The body of JonBenét Ramsey was embalmed in Boulder, then put aboard Delta Air Lines flight 584 for Atlanta, where the Mayes Ward-Dobbins Funeral Home in the suburb of Marietta prepared her for a private viewing, with burial the following day, December 31.

Cosmetics and a pageant gown concealed the deep furrow around her neck. She wore a tiara, and Sister Socks was at her side. One person who was there told us that John and Patsy were in a receiving line to greet the several hundred people who came to pay their respects. Patsy’s mother, Nedra Paugh, “flitted about,” taking people by the arm and leading them to the open casket to see her beautiful granddaughter in her crown and gown.

Detective Sergeant Tom Wickman arrived back in Boulder after learning about the murder while visiting in-laws in Chicago. He was immediately put in charge of the crime scene, and Larry Mason was shifted to supervise the investigative work. I was glad to see Wickman on the job, for he was sharp, technically competent, and knowledgeable about the latest technology. In his forties, he was competitive and mercurial, and it was best to catch him at just the right moment if you had bad news. With Eller in the office and Wickman on the ground, a bit of order was being restored, although I thought it was much too late for anyone to rescue this crime scene.

Father Rol Hoverstock came by the police department to give hair and handwriting samples—we were even checking out the family minister—and we asked his opinion about Psalms 35 and 36, without revealing why. That started him thinking about that book of the Bible, and when Detective Gosage and I met him later in the day at his home, Father Rol suggested that we take a look at Psalm 118. He thought it might be the origin of the $118,000 ransom figure. And in his sonorous voice, he read aloud one of the verses, which contained the phrase “bind the sacrifice with cords.”

Before long, the media, fed by the Ramsey forces, were promoting Psalm 118 as a key to the case. As incredible as it was, the verse was only an odd coincidence, for the Bible on John Ramsey’s desk was both a different edition, with different wording of even that verse, and open to a different place.

Defense lawyers love Pete Hofstrom, chief of the felony division in the office of District Attorney Alex Hunter and a consummate deal-maker who seldom sends a case to trial. That Hofstrom was working so closely and so quickly with the Ramsey lawyers scared the hell out of us. We felt things were being done behind our backs.

Originally from Brooklyn, Hofstrom moved to California, where he went to college and worked as a guard at San Quentin prison, then came to Colorado, graduated from law school in 1973, and went to work for Hunter. A short, five feet, four inches tall fireplug guy with a shiny bald crown that he tends to rub when nervous and a gravel voice from years of smoking cigars, Hofstrom’s preferred mode of dress is not a suit and tie but khaki pants and tennis shoes. He has nurtured a toughguy persona and massages a San Quentin story into almost every conversation.

As Hofstrom rose in rank through the DA’s office, so did his eccentric philosophy that the law is not “simply a set of rules that people are supposed to observe.” In his opinion, as stated in a newspaper interview, the law allows him room to “advance society’s interest,” and he is the one to define those interests.

One thing his vision did not require was spending a lot of time in the courtroom trying cases, when gentlemanly attorneys could agree to avoid such nastiness with plea bargains that traded a watered-down sentence for a conviction on lesser charges. Pete Hofstrom was dealing down more than 90 percent of the felony cases in Boulder County, including some of the most heinous crimes one could imagine—murders, rapes, and cocaine dealing.

In just one example, a man sliced the throat of another man from ear to ear outside a Pearl Street bar in 1981, then fled. Somehow the victim survived. The suspect was found on the Caribbean island of St. Croix eleven years later and extradited back to Boulder to face attempted murder charges. The sentence after the plea bargain was three years’ probation, which he was allowed to serve in St. Croix.

In the 1990s Hofstrom dominated the district attorney’s office. Being “fair” to defendants was preferred to trials, and the result was a lack of courtroom confidence and grand jury experience among a staff of prosecutors that earned the questionable reputation of not being able to bring home the big ones. Police called it the “3-D Shop,” where everything was dismissed, deferred, or dispositioned.

During Alex Hunter’s first campaign for district attorney in 1972, he was highly critical of the incumbent for plea-bargaining some 65 percent of his cases. By the mid-1990s, Hunter admitted the figure for his office was about 93 percent, although one newspaper put it nearer 97 percent of the felony cases. At the start of the year 2000, one of his own deputies, Mary Keenan, was campaigning to become district attorney herself and claimed that only seven-tenths of 1 percent of the cases filed in Boulder go to trial. That meant an astounding 99.3 percent of the cases were being plea-bargained!

We had long been aware of the close relationship between Hofstrom and one of the new Ramsey attorneys, Bryan Morgan of Boulder. Proof of just how close their links were came when Commander John Eller went out to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation on December 30.

Eller wanted to discuss some possible evidence that would soon be coming to the CBI for testing, but he was interrupted by one of the examiners, who said they had already been contacted by the office of the district attorney and told not to begin any such tests.

Before Eller could even ask why, Hofstrom walked in, almost as if on cue, to deliver a letter ordering the CBI not to test certain types of evidence, particularly very small samples. The instructions came not from the DA’s office or the police department but from Bryan Morgan.

No one had been arrested or charged with anything, so by law, until a suspect became a defendant, they had no right to observe the testing, much less dictate how it was to be done. The fact that the DA’s top prosecutor was hand-delivering mail for a defense attorney instead of fighting the unreasonable demand was outrageous.

Morgan wrote a letter of thanks that day to Hofstrom for disclosing the major findings made by the coroner. The Ramseys had the autopsy results almost as soon as we did.

Such instances would broaden the gap of distrust that existed between the police department and the DA’s office. At times, I didn’t know whose side they were really on.

Even before my first visit to the Ramseys’ home at 755 Fifteenth Street, I realized that the house itself was a player in this drama. At 6,500 square feet, it had been chopped and added to over the years until it was a maze of rooms. Witnesses who said a stranger could not easily find his way around were telling the truth.

Just finding the light switch to the basement stairwell was a challenge, for it was not on the wall just inside the door where switches are usually placed. Instead I had to reach behind me to another wall. It would be impossible for someone unfamiliar with the house to know that.

Downstairs I checked the little room where the body was found, again a difficult journey just to get there.
Had to know where they were going
. Police had started calling it the “wine cellar” to differentiate it from the overall basement area, although no wine was stored in it. Four concrete walls, no windows, a fluorescent lighting fixture laid sideways on a shelf, with two switches near the outward-opening white door. Cold and claustrophobic.

I tried to imagine what her last thoughts may have been as she sustained the devastating blow to her head. I hoped she was unconscious after that, unable to experience the panic and fear of having the garrote tighten around her neck. I hoped the vaginal trauma happened after death.

From another basement storage closet, a crime scene tech pulled a plaque denoting that John Ramsey had served in the navy at Subic Bay in the Philippines. The media erroneously added the words
Training Center
to Subic Bay and obtained an explanation for the SBTC acronym, although Subic Bay was a massive naval installation, not a training base. Everybody had a theory.

Back upstairs, I walked through each room and was struck by the paradox that although the home seemed planned for a
House & Garden
photo shoot, the clean lines, antiques, rich wood, and designer colors seemed to have gone too far and crossed into overdecorated gaudiness. The farther I moved from the front door and showcase living and dining rooms, the messier it got. Dirty clothes on the upstairs floors, toys scattered everywhere, clutter in the corners, various items seemingly pushed out of the way rather than neatly stored, cobwebs in some corners.

I wondered just how many people had been through this house: home tours, social guests, church events, parties, construction workers, domestic help, friends, family, crowds of visitors during an open house tour the previous Christmas. Thousands. Fingerprints galore. How would we possibly identify them all?

Although some of the house was a frilly showplace, the alcove containing John Ramsey’s study was strictly masculine. Dark walls, dark patterned drapes, furniture of heavy wood. Arched bay windows framed a classic view of the Flatiron Mountains. I sat at his big L-shaped desk, which stood solid on emerald carpet and bespoke power and control. In here he kicked off shoes and worked in private. A model airplane rose from one corner, and a multibutton black telephone connected him with his business world. A brass-hinged cigar humidor sat near the small sculpture of a sturdy lion. A drawer was filled with family photographs.

A handwritten ledger reflected his increasing wealth over the years. Later I would find records showing that as of May 1, 1996, Ramsey had assets of $7,348,628, and a total net worth of $6,230,628. Total liabilities were an even $1,118,000, and the similarity of that figure to the ransom demand of $118,000 jumped out at me. I noted it as a possible source.

In the bedroom of JonBenét. I stood looking at the formal portrait in the ornate gold frame above her dresser, gripped by a haunting feeling that she wanted me to look harder. Later, strips of black duct tape similar to what had been taped over her mouth were discovered on the back of that picture. She was a beautiful child, but the pageant videos were disturbing. Trained, rehearsed, and packaged at six years old.

I would spend many hours at that house over the next year and a half, and I always left with more questions than answers. What kidnapper would come to steal a child in the night without first having written a ransom demand, then be so brazen as to take the time to begin one or two, discard them, and compose a complicated three-page letter on a pad conveniently found in the house, with a pen found there too, and fashion a handy paintbrush into part of a murder weapon? Would an intruder take the trouble to fake an elaborate kidnapping to disguise a murder? Why tuck a blanket around the corpse, almost as if to protect her from the basement chill? In a locked room like the wine cellar, why cover the body at all? This would have taken even more time, which again pointed to the murderer being in no hurry and unafraid of being caught while lugging the child through the dark house. And the ransom note was suspicious to everyone who read it. What kidnapper would insert a commercial plug—“We respect your bussiness” —in a ransom demand? Or advise sleeping people to “be rested.” Did the kidnapping stop for a while to let the victim eat some pineapple? There was no apparent forced entry, so how could someone come through that little broken window without disturbing spiderwebs and the dust on the sill? Would it have made any difference if someone had a key?

And how did the intruder know intimate family details such as John Ramsey’s bonus or that he had “good southern common sense”?

There were so many questions, so few answers.

I felt certain about only one thing: Anyone who had ever known JonBenét would do anything they could to help us find her killer.

I had never been so wrong in my life.

While I was still in Boulder going through the house on the last day of 1996, the funeral services were held in Atlanta’s Peachtree Presbyterian Church. The Reverend Dr. W. Frank Harrington told the mourners, “I can tell you that the heart of God is broken by the tragic death of JonBenét.”

In the front row, Patsy Ramsey wept and John Ramsey rubbed her back as the organist played “In Christ Alone.” There was a Bible reading from Thessalonians 4:13 (“We want to know the truth”) and the congregation sang the children’s hymn “Jesus Loves Me.” Harrington raised his arms and said, “The mind cannot grasp and the heart refuses to accept the death of one so young, who is suddenly taken from us by cruelty and malice by some unworthy person.”

The small coffin was taken from the church to the St. James Episcopal Cemetery, which was carpeted with floral tributes. A hole had been dug in lot 352 beside the grave of Beth Ramsey, and JonBenét was laid to rest in a Wilbert Continental burial container beside her stepsister.

Later a friend, who had come out from Boulder for the services, recalled that she was asked by Patsy to retrieve the black jeans Patsy had worn on the morning of December 26. Although the friend said Patsy really liked those jeans, I could only think of another reason why she would want those particular jeans from fifteen hundred miles away, since she had plenty of money and credit cards with her: fiber evidence.

After the funeral Ramsey’s friend and financial adviser, Rod Westmoreland, took him aside for a private moment and expressed concern that the public was viewing John and Patsy more as uncooperative suspects than as grieving parents. People couldn’t understand why parents whose daughter had been killed would not talk to the cops.

The message would be repeated more strongly later that day by Fleet White in a tense meeting that became one of the most curious incidents of the case.