THE UNIQUE, UNPRECEDENTED CRIME SCENE
Let’s start with the fact that the case, as a supposed break-in-kidapping-pedophile-murder, presented unusual features not seen before or since. FBI agents observed to local officials that kidnappers of children are either motivated by perversion, or monetary reward, but never in their experience both in the same package. Thus, a crime scene involving a supposed attempt at kidnap-for-ransom (complete with an odd multi-page ransom note written at leisure, in the home!), soon turning into murder by violence and molestation, was strange, almost eerie, right out of the box. Forensic analyst Dr. Cyril Wecht spoke for myriad experts when he observed that “this hybrid of sexual predator and kidnapper was unprecedented, and incredibly unlikely. Those two very divergent sets of characteristics just don’t intersect in the same person.”
Add to that the fact that numerous detectives reacted to the scene they encountered as “staged” and that the ransom note appeared to be written by some sort of insider—a family member or someone intimate with family facts—and suspicion naturally fell inside the home.
It is however not, repeat not accurate that investigators focused such exclusive attention on John and Patsy Ramsey that outsiders–the possible intruder(s) during the night of December 25-26–were ignored. Reliable testimony indeed exists that detectives felt pressured to follow up thin leads regarding scores of possible “intruders,” and spent countless hours excluding them, when they felt the evidence continued to point inward, not outward. A neighbor asked to sign releases for information had to steer the pen with both hands, due to the old man’s palsy, but he was a “suspect” and had to be “cleared.”
One especially foolish article about the murder (and there have been thousands) posited that JonBenét’s remark regarding plans to meet a “secret Santa” had been all but ignored and provided a rich trail to follow. The facts are quite different: the “secret Santa” track was followed for hundreds of hours of detective time and the most likely “Santa,” Bill McReynolds, who had played the role at Ramsey parties, was so thoroughly hounded, while recovering from surgery in his retirement years, that he felt persecuted, if not prosecuted, by police. Authorities ultimately concluded he could not have been the perpetrator that night.
In his second book to set the record straight, “The Other Side of Suffering,” John Ramsey again retreads the family experience in which the horror of living as suspects was piled on top of the brutal loss of their young daughter. Indeed, it must have nightmarish, an agony that has never fully ended. That doesn’t mean, however, that we should not challenge statements in the book as spin when we find them mis-aligned with the truth.
One of the milder false assertions Ramsey makes regards the notion that police subjectively decided upon family guilt based only on family behavior while they were in shock, grieving losses that no one should have to endure. “The entire police case against us was based on their sole conclusion that ‘we didn’t act right.’ ” With all respect for a man who’s surely been subjected to the trials of Job, his statement is critically inaccurate. As Ramsey is well aware but does not discuss in his book, the police became deeply suspicious of the Ramseys because the entire scene-not just the Ramseys-didn’t look right, didn’t pass the basic smell test.
Although Ramsey asserts a few pages later that “the Boulder Police…have tried, from the moment they walked in to our home on December 26, 1996, to convince others that Patsy or I or Burke killed JonBenét,” that’s nonsense. It was not an instantaneous rush to judgment. Officers early on asked about possible note writers, about possible suspects, and by numerous accounts the Ramseys began serving up names immediately (and the leads were followed for hundreds of hours). Police judgment that the Ramseys were the most logical suspects developed and solidified over time, in concert with decades of profiling experience from law enforcement veterans. The Boulder Police themselves were unschooled in handling this type of murder case, but more experienced opinions were readily available, and overwhelmingly the suspicion held among experts that the scene was phony.
For example, agents at the FBI’s CASKU unit (child abduction and serial killers unit) strongly suspected staging of the crime, noting that in their data-base of over 1,700 cases not one fit the profile that was presented by the actions in the Ramsey home that night. There’s truly a first time for everything, but a perpetrator showing the personality traits, and exhibiting the precise behaviors, of the supposed intruder was simply hard for the experts to imagine. Besides a very unusual intruder, the only other possibility was some fatal calamity in the home, with one or both adults then crudely, desperately attempting to stage an alternate reality. The inside-job, cover-up theory may not be correct and apparently isn’t provable in court, but Ramsey was disingenuous in suggesting that police suspicions were as shallow as their superficial impressions. His book offers a number of similar falsehoods, regrettably. All that dishonest spin detracts from the account of a poignant, and probably quite genuine, spiritual journey of a man subjected to more tragedy than any of us should have to endure, even in ten lifetimes.
THE RANSOM NOTE
Ransom Note
Mr. Ramsey,
Listen carefully! We are a group of individuals who represent a small foreign faction. We respect your bussiness (sic) but not the country that it serves. At this time we have your daughter in our posession (sic). She is safe and unharmed and if you want her to see 1997, you must follow our instructions to the letter.
You will withdraw $118,000.00 from your account. $100,000 will be in $100 bills and the remaining $18, 000 in $20 bills. Make sure that you bring an adequate size attaché to the bank. When you get home you will put the money in a brown paper bag. I will call you between 8 and 10 am tomorrow to instruct you on delivery. The delivery will be exhausting so I advise you to be rested. If we monitor you getting the money early, we might call you early to arrange an earlier delivery of the money and hence a earlier pick-up of your daughter.
Any deviations of my instructions will result in the immediate execution of your daughter. You will also be denied her remains for proper burial. The two gentlemen watching over your daughter do not particularly like you so I advise you not to provoke them. Speaking to anyone about your situation, such as Police, FBI, etc., will result in your daughter being beheaded. If we catch you talking to a stray dog, she dies. If you alert bank authorities, she dies. If the money is in any way marked or tampered with, she dies. You will be scanned for electronic devices and if any are found, she dies. You can try to deceive us but be warned that we are familiar with Law enforcement countermeasures and tactics. You stand a 99% chance of killing your daughter if you try to out smart us. Follow our instructions and you stand a 100% chance of getting her back. You and your family are under constant scrutiny as well as the authorities. Don’t try to grow a brain John. You are not the only fat cat around so don’t think that killing will be difficult. Don’t underestimate us John. Use that good southern common sense of yours. It is up to you now John!
Victory!
S. B. T. C.
Now, there was a lot in this case. A brutal murder scene and the equally brutal realities revealed by the autopsy report.
Enough physical evidence of potential significance to fill a small warehouse. Sufficient written reports to fill many a large filing cabinet. There were hundreds of potential suspects, and a media circus like we’ve rarely seen. A police department, and national police community, who looked at the case one way while the District Attorney’s office pushed it another. There was a lot to it, but the blazing sun in the middle of the case, far outshining everything else, was that astonishing, confounding ransom note.
If there were a Hall of Fame for Ransom Notes, that note would have moved immediately to the top of the chart, and stayed there. It will never be forgotten.
The provenance and meaning of the ransom note are hotly debated by both intruder theorists and Ramsey-guilt theorists. It’s taken so seriously because of it’s remarkable nature, but even more so because of the obvious: whomever wrote that note is responsible for the child’s death, or knows who is. There’s essentially universal agreement on that straightforward proposition.
We’ve seen video tape from years ago where counsel for the Ramseys, during depositions concerning handwriting characteristics, attack the notion of Patsy’s authorship with a vengeance. The only writing experts who believe Patsy wrote the thing are “liars for hire,” the attorney insisted. In those depositions Patsy kept looking at family photographs on which she’d made notations, it appeared, but she did not “recognize” the handwriting, she asserted again and again. Examples of hand printing on those particular pictures show striking similarity to printing in the ransom note, the allegation goes. It was writing from the past, which can’t be fudged and altered, the way a suspect could while giving fresh writing exemplars to authorities.
Predictably, Ramsey counsel treat discussions of the note quite aggressively. True, if Patsy Ramsey had nothing to do with the note, any notion that she had should be chased from the scene each time it emerges.
But can Patsy be excluded as the note’s author? Most handwriting experts think not. And more powerful than penmanship, there’s content: beyond the technicalities of handwriting, analysts can judge the content with their own common sense. To most observers, the note seems as phony as a plastic three-dollar bill. To review a few highlights, even a “small foreign faction,” if such existed, would never describe itself as a small foreign faction. Early on, “bussiness” and “possesion” were deliberately misspelled, it would appear, by an educated writer who found it too tedious to continue that ruse. Phrases like “and hence,” which are in very, very few personal vocabularies, were in Patsy’s record of note writing. There’s the matter of the $118,000 figure for ransom, laughably low for a real extortion and not coincidentally the figure of a recent John Ramsey bonus. A Ramsey business enemy might taunt John with such trivia, but would someone of that cruel bent suggest that the parents “be well rested,” an odd thing to advise sleeping people in any event? Would a business enemy compliment John’s business, along the way to threatening to behead his daughter? “An adequate size attaché?” “Law enforcement counter-measures?” “Don’t try to grow a brain, John.” Seriously?
The longer you study the note, also considering it was written in the home on Patsy’s tablet with her felt-tip pen, considering that a couple of false starts preceded the final version, the harder it becomes to imagine an intruder writing it (taking time to generate different drafts while risking discovery). It becomes easier and easier to envision an agonized Patsy producing all the false smoke. At M.O.Mystery we don’t often quote miscellaneous comments from the internet, but a 2007 post from Topix caught our eye as unusually apt:
“Desperate times call for desperate measures. Take a creative person with a flair for drama like Patsy, place her in a situation where she’s backed up against a wall with prison as a promise, and watch something as ridiculous as the Ramsey ransom note, complete with lines from movies, become the result….What else was she going to say, if she didn’t parrot movie lines? She had no experience with crime, kidnapping, or ransom notes. That’s all she knew, what she’d seen in movies. It’s pretty obvious.”
Most law enforcement observers have found the provenance of the note “pretty obvious,” while of course Ramsey supporters disagree. “The Ransom Note is a Confession” read a placard at a rally for justice for JonBenét. We wouldn’t go that far, but we can understand the detective, intimate with the case, who felt the note was so clearly Patsy’s that it lacked only her signature.
There are, nonetheless, many who concede that the note is phoney baloney from start to finish, but who believe that an intruder might have had reason to concoct the document for his own odd staging of the crime.
THE BROADER LIST OF SUSPECTS
Devotees of the intruder theory maintain, perhaps with some reason, that every hour throughout 1997 that police interviewed family intimates and otherwise tracked the Ramseys was an hour not devoted to the huge list of potential perpetrators from the outside. And that does beg the question, just where should that list of potential suspects begin and end, how should it be comprised? Georgia-based Ramsey attorney Lin Wood, talking to Katie Couric years later about the travesty of sole focus on the Ramseys, asserted that “anyone in Boulder who does not have an alibi, who is capable of committing a brutal, perverted murder of a small child, legitimately still should remain under suspicion and be investigated.” A reasonable sounding assertion, at first blush. But of the tens of thousands of persons who live in, or might have been passing through Boulder at Christmas 1996, just how are we to determine who is capable of “brutal, perverted murder?” What are the criterion for such criminal capability, and how do we assemble a master list? (The most logical specific lists, such as Ramsey business enemies, or known pedophiles who might have met the child, were checked through by detectives early on.)
Do we try to ascertain who may have ever passed through the ballroom during one of JonBenét’s pageants because someone could have developed an instant, unhealthy liking for the child? Those persons, like the pageants, would be spread around the country, so do we track down every person ever in JonBenét’s presence, and require them to prove they were not in Boulder the night of the 25th? Can we begin to estimate how many thousands of detective hours, and ultimately what staggering public cost, would be required to fly investigators everywhere, to track down everyone, who might have had any connection, however tenuous, with the Ramsey family? And don’t forget that Boulder, a bustling medium-size town with a huge, transient college population has thousands of folks move out of town each year. Should every male who decamped from Boulder in the first half of 1997 be tracked and carefully vetted, after all, why did he leave town, what was he running from?
It becomes quickly apparent that the standard being pushed, and apparently thrust at Boulder Police numerous times over the years–that is, anyone who might have been aware of JonBenét and might have been within striking distance of Boulder, December 25 of 1996, must be investigated–rises as utterly unrealistic. It’s a standard never applied to any other case. Imagine watching a movie in which a murdered woman is discovered in downtown L.A., with no truly hard evidence but DNA traces here and there suggesting an unknown male. The DNA does not hit on any database. The police commander bellows to his troops, “Okay guys, there’s no clear perpetrator here, but I want every able-bodied male who lives in greater Los Angeles, and every guy visiting at the time, or traveling through LAX or one of our bus or train stations, thoroughly investigated!” You would be watching less police thriller than police comedy.
But it does illustrate: the list of potential child murderers who might have been in Boulder at the time is truly huge. We’re not pushing the intruder theory per se, but it’s true you could almost never eliminate all the possibilities.
So there are and always will be competing allegations. Ramsey defenders will always claim that legitimate potential suspects were inadequately investigated, and some leads not followed at all. Detectives on the case complain that they followed long lists of very tenuous leads far more aggressively than they would have in any other case, always coming up empty. It’s Ramsey spin and deflection, they claim, to play the card that untracked suspects are out there still. Defense strategists in murder cases have always played that game, they say. It can go on forever–you can always invoke other categories of suspects and ask, Have all these people been thoroughly checked out?
ARGUMENTS AGAINST, AND TOWARD, THE INTRUDER THEORY:
THE CASE (BRIEFLY) FOR AN INTRUDER:
We at M.O.M. believe it should be clearly understood that an intruder could have gained access to the home and the victim and committed the murder, because no absolute physical or even logical impediment precludes that possibility. True, entry through the notorious basement window, still showing its spider webs and debris the morning after, seems unlikely by even an agile soul, but the house had myriad windows, several doors, and the list of those with keys was fairly long. Keys are easily copied. In sum, the house was porous.
It can be hypothesized that the stalker was in the home long enough to have encountered some written reference to the figure of $118,000 as a special work bonus received by Ramsey, or had contacts from Ramsey’s workplace, and turned it into a ransom figure by whatever twist of mind. Other references in the ransom note are harder to explain, that is to say even more dramatically unusual, but by definition an unusual event occurred that night, perpetrated by someone with an abnormal mind. Had normality prevailed, everyone and especially a precious six-year-old would have lived through the night in peace and safety.
There is no reason to believe a stun-gun was used before grabbing the child, and evidence and logic mitigate against it.
Nonetheless, capturing a small, light person perhaps surprised in her sleep should not be impossible for a large, strong adult.
Even a hand firmly over the mouth could keep matters relatively quiet until she could be removed even farther from her sleeping parents, who were on the third floor of a large home. Forensic evidence concerning how much might have transpired in JonBenét’s second floor bedroom before her removal to lower levels is not clear, much less dispositive.
Some interpretations of the autopsy evidence maintain that the garroting of the victim came first, followed by the severe blow to the head. If so, this would be more consistent with a sexual predator-intruder, delivering the coup-de-grace at the end of the abuse for whatever reason, then hiding the body away in a remote room with some staging built into the scene. The ransom note may have been only a sick and sadistic tweak of John Ramsey, accompanied by no intention of ever removing JonBenét from the scene to collect ransom money.
It’s entirely possible the note was written first, perhaps while the intruder waited for the house to go completely quiet, but after the kidnapping went awry and the child ended up clubbed to death, a shaken perpetrator beat a hasty exit. The murderer might have been too rattled to realize that carrying the forty-five pound body along out of the house would both remove forensic evidence of murder, and maintain a bargaining chip for ransom. Of course, someone stealing to a getaway car before dawn, attempting to move quickly and yet look inconspicuous, could rightly feel that carting a body along, even a small one, made the getaway more difficult and uncertain.
Boulder District Attorney Mary Lacy, who succeeded Alex Hunter in 2001, was of the view that there was no “innocent explanation” for the trace DNA of an unknown male on JonBenét’s panties and other places on her clothing. In Lacy’s opinion the forensics pointed away from the Ramseys, whose fingerprints, clothing fibers, and the like were everywhere in the their own home including the crime scene, but quite expectedly so. Lacy noted the lack of touch-DNA on the body and clothing from any of the Ramseys, potentially a significant point.
This is critical: there was nothing in the history of either John or Patsy to suggest perversions that would lead to a murder scene as severe pedophilia: when John said he couldn’t lead you to a porn shop in Denver if his life depended on it you should believe him, not because he said it, but because of no evidence to the contrary. Had he been a patron of such places, surely someone would have related to the tabloids–for a nice payday mind you–how they’d spotted him in the pornography world. It simply never happened. The Ramsey’s were never known to even swat their kids. A sudden night of murder, skull smashing, strangulation and molestation, out of nowhere? That would be essentially unheard of, and certainly didn’t happen here.
And what would Patsy be doing writing a ransom note, anyway? Even if some inexplicable, accidental tragedy had claimed JonBenét’s life that night, and a mortified Patsy was tempted to stage another look to the events, why not put your energies into staging an intruder’s entry, complete with a window or door pried open, perhaps debris from the yard coming in with the “intruder?” Wouldn’t even a stressed, suffering, and irrational Patsy have thought of those basics, and not spent time on a preposterous note? How much presence of mind does it take to see that “ransom note” and “dead body left behind on the property” just don’t go together? Moreover, why make items like the duct tape and nylon cord disappear, but put the pen and paper back in the kitchen? It’s always tempting for law enforcement to claim an inside job, but really, the Ramseys doing this to their child and themselves…for heaven’s sake it just makes no sense, and the more you look at it, the less it makes.
So what are the odds that the Ramseys staged all this? That, in a nutshell, is the case for an intruder as perpetrator.
THE CASE (BRIEFLY) AGAINST AN INTRUDER
The case against intruder-as-perpetrator serves as well as a serious accusation. If no intruder created the crime scene, then the Ramseys lied to authorities, and at least one adult in the family was undoubtedly involved, in one fashion or other, in the tragedy.
The best way to demonstrate the very tall odds against an intruder-as-perpetrator might be the scenario method: offer a reasonable scenario, but see if it’s really plausible at all when considered in light of known facts.
Someone close enough to the Ramsey family to know some fundamentals of their business, and habits, and most of all their four-level home, despised John but also had a pedophile’s drive to harm the child. This person, never identified or questioned by police, slipped into the neighborhood without being noticed or alarming a dog, and slipped into the house either just before or just after the Ramseys came back for the night. They left no trace of outdoor debris on floor or carpet as they entered, in fact across a long evening’s crime they left no forensic memory of themselves with the possible exception of touch DNA traces. While they waited for the house to grow entirely quiet they found paper and a pen in the kitchen and wrote a ransom note to John Ramsey, just to tweak his nerves. If you’re going to play the Devil why not go all out, so the note was full of melodramatic threats and odd turns of phrase. (He worked by penlight in a darkened kitchen, because full illumination seemed risky for obvious reasons.) Our perpetrator even worked hard to make the writing in print form a bit different from his usual strokes, he misspelled a couple of words on purpose, thinking to throw everyone off the scent. It felt slightly diabolical and less like leaving real clues behind. He didn’t realize that his penmanship in part bore an uncanny resemblance to Patsy Ramsey’s, or that he shared several peculiarities of expression with her.
After the note was written and left on the kitchen table (with pen and paper carefully put back where he’d found them) he quickly ascended to JonBenet’s room on the second floor. He was strangely calm yet realized he didn’t have forever before someone might wake and circulate. He knew the house a bit but hadn’t remembered how every step creaked, and thus his nerves were active by the time he slipped into the little girl’s room. A hand over the mouth as the other swept her up and close to his body, the struggle and kicking were instantaneous, but his size and strength allowed him to move back toward the spiral stairs to the kitchen, penlight in mouth, and get her downstairs without falling. He passed through the main floor and went straight to the cold, remote basement–at that time of night and time of year a basement with at least one broken window was a miserable place–but his perversion powered him to all the activities of the next half hour or so. It was half rape and half staging, the better to confound the authorities as to exactly who he was. Fashioning an odd garrote to choke the child from some materials lying around the basement, now that was a masterstroke, he felt for some reason, so he spent another fifteen minutes just on that artistic touch.
When done with the kid, choked to death, he picked up a larger flashlight and smashed her hard on the skull, something he felt oddly driven to do. He then whipped the duct tape he had out of his pocket and placed a piece across the dead child’s mouth. He turned off the light in the basement room where she would lie until discovered, and hopped back upstairs. The flashlight needed to be deposited on the kitchen counter, and the note needed to be moved to the stairs that entered the kitchen from above. It just wouldn’t do to leave it on the counter, for some reason.
He hadn’t panicked for those last hours, but was aware that a creaky old place like this could reveal a prowler at any time, so he left through a door and closed it behind him. In the pre-dawn darkness he noted a bricked walkway and followed it to the street, from the street down to an alley and his car. Not that many dogs were awake at that hour, at least none that barked at him. He drove away apparently unseen, off, gone, safe, never suspected or questioned much less prosecuted.
So, the analyst must ask, what are the odds that someone who knew the family and could navigate the home, took time to write the note as we know it using materials from the house, produced a note of astounding similarity to many Patsy Ramsey writing and phrasing mannerisms, then killed the child without a usual rape, and with a lot of apparent staging? Why the staging at all, by someone who murders and flees? (Why an actual murderer would feel a need, or take the time, to add phony effects of staging to the crime scene has never been adequately explained, to our knowledge, by intruder theorists.) And the chances that there would have been a gratuitous double-kill, that is a choking that would have been unnecessary after such a head-blow, or a head-blow that would have been redundant after asphyxiation? That both a ransom note, and the body of the ramson-ee, would be left behind? That the perpetrator would be there all that time, through all that crime, and not leave significant traces of himself behind, if only leaves dragged in from the yard as he entered? All without being noticed in the neighborhood, suspected, all without ever having been questioned by police? Just how likely is this phantom intruder?
What are the odds? The answer to that question is the case against an Intruder, in a nutshell.