Foreign Faction: Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet? (14 page)

Trujillo and Thomas began their interview of John at three that afternoon, and he confirmed some of the details about putting JonBenét to bed after returning from the White dinner party, as had been provided by his wife.

He estimated that they had left the Whites around eight-thirty, quarter to nine and had then delivered some presents to the homes of the Walker and Stine families. They arrived home at around nine to nine-fifteen.

JonBenét had fallen asleep in the car, and John carried her to her bedroom upon their arrival home. She remained asleep throughout the process, and Patsy reportedly followed him several minutes later to prepare her for bed. That was the last time John saw his daughter alive.

Burke was interested in putting together some type of toy that he had received for Christmas, and John indicated that he spent a little time with him downstairs helping to assemble it. They spent approximately 15 minutes working on the project. Anxious to get to bed because of their early morning flight, John then had Burke prepare for bed, changing his clothes, brushing his teeth, and getting him settled in for the night.

John did not think that Burke had anything to eat after returning home that evening.

John then prepared himself for bed and took a Melatonin tablet to help him fall asleep quickly. He joined Patsy in their bed sometime around ten. He thought he may have read for a little bit and estimated that the lights were out by ten-thirty or ten-forty. Neither he, nor Patsy, were thought to have gotten up over the remainder of the night.

He rose the next morning at about five-twenty-five, before the alarm went off that had been set for five-thirty. Patsy was still in bed as he headed for the shower.

Part way through his morning ritual, he heard a scream of panic from Patsy, and he could tell from her tone that something was wrong. He ran down the back staircase and met her midway at the landing. He remembered her showing him the note, and he thought that he had run back upstairs to check JonBenét’s room and then on Burke. Burke was still asleep, and reportedly had not been awakened by Patsy’s scream.

John was not certain if Patsy had handled the ransom note, but recalled that it was he who moved it to the hallway floor near the entrance of the kitchen and read it as Patsy called 911. It was spread out across the floor, and he was hunched down over it so he could read it quickly.

After finishing the 911 call, John was aware that Patsy had called the Whites and the Fernies, and he ran back upstairs to finish dressing.

Officer Rick French was the first to arrive on the scene, and he reported that French directed them to the first floor solarium. He couldn’t remember the exact sequence, but other police officers arrived along with the family friends who had been summoned to the home.

When asked about the security of the home, John indicated that the connecting door between the house and the garage was typically left unlocked and that he usually checked the rear door that the kids used to access the back yard.

John indicated that he believed he had checked all of the first-floor doors on the morning of the 26
^th
. He went outside at one point to check an exterior door that accessed the garage. The interior of that door was blocked with boxes, and he couldn’t get to it from inside the garage. He estimated that he was outside no longer than 30 seconds and had gone out a side door to check the security of that door. John did not report finding any other ground floor door open or unsecured.

John walked the investigators through his discovery of his daughter’s body, explaining that Detective Arndt had asked that the home be checked for anything unusual. John led Fleet White to the Train Room of the basement and explained that he had broken in through that set of windows when locked out of the house the previous summer. They inspected the area for broken glass, and then John moved out of the room and down the hallway to the Wine Cellar.

He reported that he unlatched the wood block that secured the door and immediately saw a white blanket on the floor inside the room. John advised that he observed JonBenét lying on the blanket and it was “kind of folded around her legs.” Her arms were tied behind her head, some pieces of black tape were on her legs, and her head was cocked to the side.

John immediately removed a piece of tape that covered her mouth and tried to untie the bindings around her wrists. He was not successful at fully removing them, and grabbed his daughter beneath her arms and carried her upright to the first floor of the house. He noted that her body was stiff, and he placed her on the floor after arriving upstairs.

The big surprise came for investigators when John revealed that he had been to the basement earlier in the morning, before being directed to check the house by Detective Arndt at approximately 1:00 p.m. that day.

John indicated that he had seen the broken Train Room window during his earlier trip. There was no glass around, and he presumed that it had not been repaired from his previous forced entry that summer. He stated that the window was open approximately 1/8” and he latched the window before returning upstairs.

When pressed for a time frame of this first undeclared visit, John thought that it had probably been before ten a.m. Investigators wondered why he would be leaving the room where a trap and trace and recorder had been established to accept the ransom call from kidnappers to explore the far reaches of the basement. To them, it seemed more likely that he had made this trip to the basement a little later in the morning when Detective Arndt first reported losing track of his whereabouts around 10:40 a.m.

John offered the theory that someone had come through the basement window and mentioned the Samsonite suitcase sitting below the window. He pointed out that someone could have gotten into the home without it, but that something would have been needed to step on in order to climb out of the window.†

He noted that the window-well grate would not have been obvious to someone walking by the home. The ground-level grate was not visible from the front, street-side of the home, nor was it readily visible from the rear alley.

John had commented shortly after the discovery of JonBenét’s body that whoever had committed the crime had to have been someone on the “inside” and cited these initial thoughts as one of the reasons housekeeper Linda Hoffmann-Pugh had been first named as a possible suspect. She and her husband were intimately familiar with the Ramsey home and the layout of the basement.

The interview with John Ramsey concluded at approximately five p.m. on the afternoon of April 30, 1997. Patsy’s interview had taken nearly six hours. His lasted a mere ninety minutes. Husband and wife left the building in the escort of a cadre of attorneys.

Investigators would learn some new things that had not been revealed during the “hours of interviews” that had been conducted with parents on the day of JonBenét’s kidnapping. A number of topics were broached over the course of the day including the use of polygraphs. A later chapter will speak to that particular issue.

Patsy seemed to handle the questions with composure, but in some instances appeared to be evasive, according to the personal observations of the investigators. A number of questions were answered with “I don’t remember,” or “I can’t recall,” something that could have been reasonably expected given the time delay between the event and the date of this interview.

It was Thomas’s opinion, however, that Patsy had been well-rehearsed in advance of the interview, and that a different woman sat before him than what he had experienced during the December 28
^th
non-custodial evidence collection procedure.

Some minor inconsistencies had developed during the interview, and a few other important details were pinned down by investigators.

The initial reporting of JonBenét going to bed wearing a red turtleneck top had changed between the time of Patsy’s first interview on the morning of December 26
^th
and that conducted on April 30
^th
. It is not clear from Patsy’s April interview what became of the red sweater, but crime scene investigators had located the top balled up on the bathroom counter of JonBenét’s bathroom during their processing of the crime scene.

Photo 16 - JonBenét’s bathroom. Note toothbrush, toothpaste, and red sweater on right counter. (Not pictured is toilet paper in the bowl of the toilet to the left of counter.) Source: Boulder PD Case File

Additionally, Patsy was now indicating that she had found the note first
before
checking JonBenét’s bedroom. This conflicted with the information that she had provided to officers on the morning of December 26
^th
, where she indicated that she had stopped by her daughter’s bedroom on the way downstairs to the kitchen. The bed had been empty at that time, and it wasn’t until she continued to the kitchen that she found the note.

Was this an important discrepancy or merely hysterical confusion on the part of the mother of a missing child?

Investigators were also concerned about the statement that she had only read the first few lines of the ransom note before charging back upstairs to check on JonBenét. During the panic of the moment, Patsy had been able to tell the 911 dispatcher that the ransom note was signed off with the word “Victory,” and the initials “SBTC”.

How would she know that if she had never truly handled the ransom note, or read through all three pages? This information suggested prior knowledge of the content of the note.

John had revealed a previously unknown trip to the basement that took place before the discovery of JonBenét’s body. He had never mentioned this exploration to officers on the morning of the reported kidnapping.†

John also provided specific details about immediately observing a white blanket, and his daughter’s body upon opening the cellar room door that afternoon. He reported that he saw the white blanket, in which JonBenét was wrapped, the “instant” he opened the door of the Wine Cellar. This observation purportedly took place before he flipped on the light switch.

This didn’t jive with details provided by Fleet White during his interviews with detectives. White had opened the cellar door earlier that morning and reported that it was too dark to see anything without a light being turned on in the room. He had stepped partially through the door and couldn’t find a light switch, let alone see the blanket and body.

Investigators pondered the question: How could John Ramsey have immediately recognized the blanket and the body under the same conditions?

When all was said and done, investigators went away from the interviews with more than a few unanswered questions and continued to feel that JonBenét’s parents could not be eliminated as possible suspects in the crime.

The Ramseys immediately held their own press conference the following day, May 1, 1997, and invited a select few from the Denver media stations to attend. Ramsey media publicist Pat Korten coordinated the event in a Boulder hotel conference room.

Each of the seven local reporters had been hand-picked by the Ramsey team, and many others who had been covering the story from early on were covetous of an invitation. The Ramseys had not spoken to the media since their January 1
^st
CNN interview, and reporters were anxious to see what they had to say, especially after their interview with Boulder Police investigators.

Carol McKinley, a reporter working for Denver KOA Radio at the time, received a last-minute invitation on the morning of the press conference. Apparently, Korten had forgotten to include anyone from the radio community, and had called McKinley not long before the Ramseys were preparing to issue their statement.

Korten provided McKinley with the
secret
location of the conference, and even gave her a
password
that she would need to gain entry to the room where the Ramseys would be speaking.

McKinley had taken the telephone call while in the company of other reporters, and they had been discussing the possible location and timing of the family press conference. Based upon her cell phone conversation, some of her peers immediately sensed that she had been granted access to the inner sanctum. She had to drive in a roundabout fashion to lose the tail of reporters who were trying to follow her to the secret location of the Ramsey press conference.

Once she arrived in the lobby of the hotel, McKinley was approached by someone who asked her to recite her secret password. She muttered the word “subtract,” and she was then adorned with a bright green, circular sticker. “Don’t let that fall off.” she was warned. The sticker granted her access to the small conference room that contained the Ramseys.