Foreign Faction: Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet? (11 page)

John Fernie reiterated a tale similar to that of Fleet White: the early morning phone call of some emergency taking place at the Ramsey home and the request that they come immediately. Fernie had arrived by way of the back alley and had approached the rear kitchen door to see the ransom note spread out upon the floor inside the home. It was upside down from his perspective, but he was able to read the salutation, “Mr. Ramsey,” and the sentence of the first page before heading around to the front of the house.

Fernie joined the company of two uniformed officers and the Whites at the street-side entrance to the home. He was directed to the solarium, and later that morning, was able to read a photocopy of the full three pages of the ransom note that had been brought back to the home. He thought the note was very personal, and written in a “condescending” manner towards John Ramsey. He noted at one point during his interview with detectives that the note didn’t make sense to him, and that it seemed to contain “some kind of fakey stuff.” Things just weren’t adding up to him.

Fernie seemed to recall that someone, John Ramsey he thought, had said that the doors to the home had been checked the previous evening and that all had been dead-bolted and securely locked. Ramsey had checked the doors again that morning to be certain that JonBenét had not gotten out of the house. At one point that morning, the time uncertain, but as police were processing the scene, Fernie reported that a draft was coming through the house, and he located the source: the door on the north side of the house by the Butler Pantry was standing open, and he shut it.

Over the course of interview, conducted on January 1, 1997, Barb Fernie shared a concern that had raised a question for her. As things were developing in the house on the morning of December 26
^th
, she had begun to ask if Burke had awakened yet. She was aware that like her son, Burke was an early riser and typically got up in the morning around 5:30 a.m. She and her husband had been at the house for a while, and like others, were beginning to wonder if Burke was sitting up in his bedroom, awake and alone, while all of the commotion was going on downstairs.

She pointed out a discrepancy that created some additional concern for her. She told the investigators that Patsy Ramsey had told her on the morning of December 26
^th
that she had just “given the ransom note to John,” after finding it on the spiral staircase.

More importantly, however, Mrs. Fernie stated that she didn’t know Patsy had screamed out for her husband that morning. She apparently was under the impression, based on her conversation with Patsy on the morning of the kidnapping, that she had somehow just handed off the note to her husband. Several days later, it didn’t make sense to her that Burke would not have been awakened when Patsy screamed John’s name.

Mrs. Fernie had been pondering the question: If John Ramsey had been able to hear Patsy scream from his bathroom on the 3
^rd
floor of the house, why not Burke?
His
bedroom was just down the hall.

The Fernies offered their home as temporary shelter to the Ramsey family after police secured
their
home for search warrants. Barb Fernie would be interviewed again by BPD detectives not long after returning from the Georgia funeral services, and details of some of her observations are covered in a later chapter.

Father Rol Holverstock, pastor at the St. Johns Episcopalian Church, had been called to the Ramsey home on the morning of December 26
^th
by John Fernie. The Fernies had earlier recruited the Ramseys to the church, and the pastor was well known to Patsy.

Interviewed by detectives on December 30
^th
, Father Holverstock indicated that he had been summoned to the home to help calm Patsy, and estimated that he had arrived between 6:30 and 7:00 a.m. He described his observations of the activities taking place at the time of the discovery of JonBenét’s body.

Father Holverstock advised he had been heating a glass of water in the kitchen microwave when things began to happen. Fleet White had a look on his face that he’d “never seen before,” and racing past him through the kitchen, exclaimed that JonBenét had been found.

The next thing he knew, he was standing in the foyer area near the top of the basement stairs, and John Ramsey had his daughter in his hands. It was Holverstock’s recollection that Ramsey blurted out, “I don’t think he meant to kill her, because she was wrapped in a blanket,” or that “she was warm, she was wrapped in a blanket.”

Ramsey told Father Holverstock that he had taken “the tape off her mouth,” and mentioned something about removing something from JonBenét’s wrists or hands.

The scene was described as being “frantic” and “out of control” once JonBenét’s body had been found. He did his best to lead the group in prayer after JonBenét had been moved to the floor of the living room. Father Holverstock described JonBenét’s body as being cold and stiff, and that he had tried to conceal the ugly bruise on her neck by moving a blanket over her torso. He shared with the detectives that he was having a difficult time letting go of that image.

In their effort to continue to gather possible leads, Boulder investigators interviewed a number of other people. Some were family friends, employees of Ramsey’s business and those involved in the beauty pageant circuit. One interview took place with family friend Barb Kostanick.

She reported that JonBenét had told her about a “secret Santa Claus,” who was going to make a special visit to her after Christmas. This bit of information seemed to suggest that someone who had access to JonBenét may have been responsible for setting up this “secret” arrangement.

Investigators had to consider the possibility that JonBenét had gone willingly with her abductor because he was known, and familiar to her. Some began to point the finger at Santa Claus himself, Bill McReynolds.

“Santa Bill” was an elderly man who had played Santa Claus at several of the Ramsey holiday parties in previous years. He was not in the best of health in December 1996, but had somehow convinced Patsy to hold another Christmas party where he again was able to play the starring role for the children in attendance.

Boulder Police detectives would subsequently clear Santa of any involvement in the crime, but that didn’t mean that other intruder theorists didn’t resurrect his name from time to time.

A neighborhood canvas was also conducted to determine if anyone, or anything suspicious had been seen on the night of the kidnapping.

The Colby family, who lived in the alley behind the Ramsey home, had a 10-year-old son who sometimes played with Burke. They also had two dogs that reportedly barked every time they heard someone in the alley. Mrs. Colby indicated that her dogs did not bark at all Christmas night.

The Brumfit family, who lived directly south of the Ramsey home, reported that a southeast corner, ground-floor room light typically left on during the night had been observed to be out around 0230 – 0300 hours on the night of the murder.

The neighbor on the immediate north, Scott Gibbons, told detectives that he had been in his south-facing kitchen around midnight on Christmas night. He observed that the upper lights in the Ramsey kitchen were on, but dimmed low.

Gibbons didn’t observe anyone inside the residence at the time, and noted that it was not unusual for lights to be on in the home at night. The following morning, around 0800 hours, he had seen the north kitchen door standing open. Investigators noted that this would have been during the time that CSIs were photographing and processing the home for latent fingerprints.

Investigators were initially told by Melody Stanton, who lived across the street and southeast of the Ramsey home, that she didn’t want to become involved in the investigation and reported that she had heard nothing unusual that night.

During a follow-up canvass, Stanton appeared to be more willing to cooperate. She told detectives that she had gone to bed around 2200 hours on Christmas night. Her open bedroom window faced in the direction of the Ramsey home, and she thought she had heard a child scream sometime between the hours of midnight and 2:00 a.m.

The scream of a child at that time of night was of definite interest to the investigators, and they would subsequently return to the Ramsey home to conduct simulated tests on the possibility that Stanton was correct in her observations. For unknown reasons, however, she would later recant her statement, and it was a clue that only seemed to add to the confusion of the investigation.

A number of neighborhood doors were knocked upon during Boulder PD’s canvass of the area. Unfortunately, no one came forward with any probative information that could help identify the person(s) responsible for JonBenét’s kidnap and murder.

T
he ransom note is undeniably one of the most important pieces of physical evidence that was left at the scene by the person responsible for either murdering JonBenét, or having had a hand in the circumstances surrounding her death. No other explanation has been produced that would otherwise account for its presence in the home.

Given the manner in which events unfolded in this crime, the question arises as to what real purpose was intended in the crafting of this document. As explained in later chapters, the motive for a kidnapping typically involves an exchange of a victim for something of value. In this instance it appears as though no true effort was made to remove the kidnapped victim from the home so that an exchange could eventually be made for the one-hundred eighteen thousand dollars ($118,000.00) demanded in the note.

Since the motive may have been something other than monetary gain, it was theorized that a pedophile may have been responsible for authoring the note and had done so to throw investigators off the true path of motive.

In spite of a demand for ransom, some investigators theorized that the perpetrator of this crime was a disturbed child molester who had developed a raging obsession with this beautiful little girl.

It had also been theorized that it was someone who was intimately familiar with the family and extremely angry over some perceived wrong committed by John Ramsey. Had this individual set out to destroy Ramsey’s life by torturing and murdering his daughter?

Or, was there another motive? Had someone in the immediate family crafted the note to draw suspicion away from a family member’s involvement in the death of JonBenét? If this was the case, was JonBenét’s death an accident or one of premeditation?

Those were the perplexing questions facing investigators as they attempted to piece together the puzzling aspects of this child’s murder.

Patsy Ramsey described the circumstances under which she first found the note but she was not clear as to whether she had carried it upstairs to John when she rushed to JonBenét’s bedroom, or if he alone had been responsible for removing it from the spiral stairs tread. Under these circumstances, one or both sets of their fingerprints should have been found on the note.

One thing is certain, however. The only latent fingerprints found on the note belonged to Colorado Bureau of Investigation forensic handwriting examiner Chet Ubowski. No other latent fingerprints were located, either for Patsy or John Ramsey, or for the “kidnapper” who had left the note behind to clarify their alleged motive for the commission of the crime.

The origin of the note was called into question within the first few hours of the kidnap investigation. When Sgt. Bob Whitson
asked John Ramsey for samples of handwriting for him and his wife, Ramsey grabbed a pad of paper and wrote out the following: “Now is the time for all good men.”

He also produced another pad of paper from the kitchen that he described as belonging to Patsy. Sgt. Whitson subsequently transported these handwriting exemplars to the police department and gave them over to Detective Jeff Kithcart, the department’s fraud and handwriting examiner. Kithcart was charged with conducting a preliminary analysis of comparing known handwriting samples to the ransom note for elimination purposes.

During his examination of Patsy Ramsey’s note pad, Kithcart made a startling discovery. As he thumbed through the pad, looking at the handwriting, he noted what appeared to be the start of another ransom note. The words started out at the top of the page, as the addressing of a name would be written, “Mr. and Mrs. l”.

The “l” looked like the down stroke of the capital letter “R” that could signify that the writer was preparing to address the note to “Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey.” It was an important discovery because it appeared to him that the note pad identified as belonging to Patsy Ramsey may have been used by the kidnapper(s) to write the original ransom note. Moreover, it suggested that the ransom note may have been composed from materials within the home and not prepared before the kidnapper(s) had entered the residence.

Kithcart headed to the briefing room where police investigators and FBI agents were discussing the investigation to share his discovery, but ended up walking into a chaotic scene. The group had just received word that JonBenét’s body had been found in the basement of the Ramsey home. It would be several hours before he would be able to share this information with people in charge of the investigation.

The entire notepad would eventually be examined by agents of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, and they determined that the ransom note had indeed been written on Patsy Ramsey’s pad of paper.

Chet Ubowski determined that the first 12 pages of the notepad were missing. Police never found these pages, and it was presumed that they had been discarded as a matter of routine and not necessarily germane to the criminal investigation at hand.

The next four pages, 13 through 16, were intact and contained miscellaneous writings, doodling and some lists.

The next sequence of pages, 17 through 25, were missing and had been torn from the pad and were never found by police. The “practice note,” discovered by Kithcart, was located on page 26. Ubowski observed on page 26 signs of ink bleed-through from the missing 25
^th
page.

The perforated tabs at the top of the sheets of paper on which the ransom note had been written were matched to the torn tabs remaining on the notepad. Comparison of the torn segments of the 3-page ransom note matched the missing pages 27, 28, and 29.

To investigators, it appeared that at least one, and perhaps two attempts had been made at starting a ransom note on pages 25 and 26 before the final product was completed on pages 27 through 29.

Ubowski further advised investigators that, based upon his examination of handwriting on the ransom note, and known samples collected from Patsy Ramsey, he believed 24 out of the 26 letters of the alphabet matched her handwriting style.

Seven (7) latent fingerprints were able to be developed on the notepad, and CBI technicians identified one print as belonging to BPD Sergeant Robert Whitson, the person who had collected the pad from John Ramsey on the morning of the kidnapping. A print belonging to CBI Technician Chet Ubowski was identified, and the remaining five (5) latent prints were identified as belonging to Patsy Ramsey.

Boulder investigators called upon the expertise of the United States Secret Service for an examination of the felt tip pens collected from the Ramsey residence during the execution of their search warrants. Three felt tip pens had been seized from a cup
holder located on the kitchen counter beneath the telephone that Patsy Ramsey had used to call 911.

The Secret Service, responsible for investigating counterfeit currency and forgery cases maintains the largest database of ink exemplars in the world. They examined the ink from each of the writing instruments submitted by Boulder authorities and eventually identified a pre-November 1992 water-based Sharpie felt tip pen as the instrument that had been used to write both the practice and ransom notes.

The ink on the ransom note exclusively matched the ink from one of the Sharpie pens found in the kitchen of the Ramsey home and was not far from where John Ramsey had produced the note pad belonging to his wife.

The combination of the CBI and Secret Service forensic findings were significant. It meant that the author of the note had used instruments found within the home to craft their ransom demands. To investigators, this information meant that the perpetrator(s) had not been very well prepared. Who goes to the trouble of planning an elaborate kidnapping and forgets to bring a ransom note to the scene?

It was apparent that it had taken some time to write the note and given the possible existence of a practice note and additional missing pages from the pad, investigators wondered why an intruder would take such an extraordinary risk of being discovered by taking the time to write the note while in the home. The author either was a sociopath who had no fear of confrontation with the family or they had to feel very much at ease in their surroundings.

The “hard” forensic examinations completed, Boulder authorities now turned their attention to the “softer” science of handwriting mechanics and linguistics. They were sometimes criticized for their efforts of “shopping” for a handwriting expert, for over the course of the investigation no fewer than five nationally recognized handwriting experts would compare known handwriting samples of potential suspects to the writing of the ransom note.

One by one, experts eliminated the handwriting exemplars of one potential suspect after another. This included the early exclusion of JonBenét’s father and her siblings.

And while opinions varied as to their certainty, no one could eliminate Patsy Ramsey as the possible author of the ransom note. There continued to be indications that she was altering her handwriting exemplars, and she eventually would provide five different sets of handwriting samples over time.

CBI agent Chet Ubowski would tell investigators privately that he believed Patsy Ramsey was responsible for authoring the note, but seemed unwilling to testify to that opinion in an open court of law.

Vassar Professor Donald Foster was brought into the case by D.A. Alex Hunter mid-year in 1997. Foster, unlike the other handwriting experts utilized up to that point in time, focused his examination of written materials on the “textual analysis” of the content of the document. This involved more than studying and comparing the mechanics of how a letter of the alphabet was
written,
but what he described as the “distinctive linguistic fingerprint” that each individual forms over the course of their lifetime.

Foster’s hypothesis is that we are unable to falsify who we are when we compose our written words. Our sentence structure, use of punctuation and spacing, word usage and a combination of other identifying features create a signature unique to each individual. He has been quoted as saying that, “No two people have the same vocabulary or writing style….a writer’s use of language is as distinctive, as inimitable, as unique as one’s DNA.”

Professor Foster first made a name for himself as a graduate student at the University of California in 1984 where he was studying Renaissance literature. He found an anonymous poem eulogizing a murdered actor and after some period of extended research proved it to be a lost 1612 work of William Shakespeare.

Years later, after having further refined his techniques, he discovered the identity of the author who anonymously wrote the
highly publicized book,
Primary Colors.
Foster utilized a computer program to search for similarities of the sentence structure and phrases used in the book and compared them to the known writings of other individuals.
Newsweek
columnist Joe Klein’s published writings stood out, and Foster identified Klein as the anonymous author of the work.

The textual analysis and syntax discovered over the course of the computer search revealed Klein’s favored use of adjectives like “lugubrious” and “puckish.” More specifically, Foster discovered that Klein had used the phrase “tarmac-hopping” in both a column and in
Primary Colors
.
⁸

It took Klein six months of denial before he finally admitted to authoring the book.

Though Foster was primarily a scholar, his “detective” work regarding textual analysis would eventually lead to his participation in many criminal cases, including the infamous Unabomber investigation. Originally hired by the defense to refute the FBI’s analysis of Theodore Kaczynski’s writings, Foster eventually confirmed their findings. He issued the opinion that he believed Kaczynski had in fact authored the Unabomber’s lengthy manifesto.
⁹

Foster was one of the leading authorities on the technique of “textual analysis” and Hunter may have first become aware of his expertise after his office received some correspondence from Susan Bennett, a North Carolina JonBenét Internet junkie who blogged under the alias of “Jameson.”

Bennett reportedly sent a package of Internet materials to the D.A.’s office in July 1997 that included some correspondence that took place between “Jameson” and Professor Foster in an Internet chat room. It was during these exchanges with “Jameson” that Foster purportedly had mistakenly identified the writings as belonging to John Andrew Ramsey, JonBenét’s older step brother. He felt that “Jameson’s” writings belonged to John Andrew and that he was responsible for the murder of JonBenét, a belief he later discarded.

Foster had also written a letter to Patsy Ramsey in June 1997 suggesting that he thought she was innocent, offering his assistance in the matter.
¹⁰
Hunter decided to send to Foster the handwriting samples of a couple other key suspects in the case, “Santa” Bill and Janet McReynolds. Foster examined these samples and subsequently advised Hunter that he didn’t believe either of these people were responsible for authoring the ransom note.

Hunter reportedly lost interest in the value of the professor’s skills at that juncture and turned him over to Boulder Police investigators, failing to inform them of Foster’s Internet involvement with “Jameson.” Boulder investigators then supplied him with a variety of handwriting exemplars from other possible suspects, including those of Patsy Ramsey. For the first time he now had an opportunity to review handwriting collected from the mother of the murdered child. After a couple months of review, Professor Foster was ready to share his findings and travelled to Boulder in March 1998 to give a presentation on the documents.