Foreign Faction: Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet? (22 page)

M
ark Beckner had turned over the Ramsey case to the D.A.’s office in 2002 when he decided that his department had finally exhausted every viable lead available to them. He once explained to me that he felt they were building the defense team’s case by continuing to chase down dead-end perpetrator leads. In his opinion, the D.A.’s office could either file the case or take over responsibility for chasing down all of the weird stuff that continued to stream into his office.

The media painted the story a different color at the time, suggesting that the D.A.’s office had taken the case
away
from the Boulder Police Department for a variety of reasons, but primarily because they had mishandled the investigation. I thought that story line laughable, for it must be pointed out that Mary Lacy’s office had no statutory authority to take away anything from the Boulder Police Department.

But I don’t think that Beckner cared one way or the other. After all of the meetings and presentations that his office had arranged over the years, it was obvious to him that the D.A.’s office would never bring charges against any family member involved in the death of JonBenét. He was ready to chalk up his losses and move on to other things.

A search was initiated to locate an investigator who would take over the lead role for the D.A.s office, and Lacy chose retired Arvada, Colorado Police Department investigator Tom Bennett. Tom had initially started out part-time in his role as chief investigator in the case, but it was not long before he was working a full caseload and supervising the other investigators in the office.

He had been working for the D.A.’s office for nearly a year when I arrived on the scene, and I worked by his side for another 12 months. It wasn’t long before I began to take note of the signs that his workload and the Ramsey case had been taking a toll. He would frequently disappear behind the locked doors of the office dubbed the “Ramsey Room” and spend hours checking phone messages left on the tip line, checking email, and collating other leads that had been sent to the office.

When he finally emerged from the room, he would sometimes mutter references about the necessity to keep on “whacking moles.” It was a private joke shared between the two of us that referenced the “whack a mole” game. This was played in pinball parlours before the advent of electronic gadgets, where gophers would randomly poke up their head through a hole in the game-board and the player was charged with “whacking” as many of them as they could with a bludgeon before they disappeared back down their hole. Points were scored by direct hits landed on the heads of the quick little critters.

Tom apparently thought the nature of the game reflected the environs of the criminal justice system. The criminals just kept popping up, no matter how skilled we had become at knocking them down.

His frustration with the case first came to my attention in the late summer of 2004, not many months after I had joined the D.A.’s office. Tom advised me that John and Patsy Ramsey had scheduled a visit to the office and were requesting copies of the D.A.’s investigative files. He asked me confidentially what I thought about the matter.

I was dumbfounded. “Aren’t John and Patsy still considered possible suspects in the death of their daughter? How did Mark phrase it…the parents remain under an ‘umbrella of suspicion’?”

Tom nodded.

“Then why in the hell would anyone in their right mind consider handing over confidential files from an active investigation to a potential defendant!?”

Tom shrugged his shoulders wearily and thanked me for sharing my thoughts.

The Ramseys came for their visit, and Tom spent some time updating them on the status of his inquiry. He later told me that he had prevailed upon Mary Lacy, and no files were reportedly copied for the Ramsey family or their defense team.

In the meantime, I continued to work on a variety of cases that included Belinda King’s homicide. I had obtained Jeffery’s cell phone records and discovered that he liked to talk on the phone. He liked to talk a lot. Not having full time work, he seemed to spend a lot of time on the phone, and some of the folks he was talking to had arrest records for trafficking in cocaine and weapons offenses.

Belinda appeared to be the primary wage-earner in the family at the time, and they were having a difficult time financially. She had started a relatively new job, but had a positive outlook on life and was looking to improve her situation.

Things had been a little rocky over their 5-year relationship, but Jeffery and Belinda had finally picked out an engagement ring. A deposit of approximately $75.00 had put it on layaway at Walmart. Belinda had intended to pay off the balance quickly, so they could move forward with their plans of marrying. At some point, however, Jeffery’s plans took a turn south.

The Walmart receipt discovered in the back seat of his car revealed signs of Jeffery’s duplicity. He had withdrawn the cash down-payment for the ring on Saturday afternoon. Video surveillance at the jewelry counter, coupled with his cell phone records, documented him calling a man who had an arrest history of trafficking in cocaine, from inside the Walmart store.

By all appearances, Jeffery was cashing in his fiancé’s engagement ring for a line or two of coke.

We were unable to determine exactly when the television and VHS player went missing, but these presumably also went to feed Jeffery’s drug habit. I suspected that they were part of the package that made up the difference for a $100.00 price tag for a gram of cocaine.

We never had another opportunity to interview Jeffery after police took his initial confession, but putting two and two together led me to some conclusions about what may have happened between him and Belinda that holiday weekend.

The argument started when Belinda came home from work to discover the electronic equipment missing from the apartment. There was a verbal confrontation, and it came to light that Jeffery had funded his cocaine purchase by pulling the ring deposit from Walmart.

Cashing in the engagement ring became the last straw for Belinda. I suspect that she told Jeffery she was leaving him for good and told him to get out. That sparked a heated confrontation and what followed was a knock-down, drag-out fight that resulted in Belinda’s demise.

Jeffery’s cell phone records revealed that he frequently was up late at night conversing with people, and the call detail indicated he had been up until nearly 2:00 a.m. on Friday night. He began again late the next morning, and by Saturday afternoon we were able to pin down his exact location for one telephone call: the jewelry counter at Walmart.

His use of the cell phone ceased around 7:00 p.m. on Saturday evening – unusually early based on the track record of his cell phone records. I believed that this signified the end of Belinda’s life, and the beginning of a long weekend, where Jeffery attempted to muster up the courage to call his mother and tell her that he had killed his girlfriend.

Neighbors reported seeing him chain-smoking outside the apartment on several occasions over the course of the weekend, but he had not been overly communicative.

Authorities were eventually summoned to the home after Jeffery called his parents on Monday morning, Memorial Day. He had called them to report that something bad had happened to Belinda.

They responded immediately to discover the body of their future daughter-in-law laying supine on the floor of the guest bedroom. The blanket remained in place over her upper torso.

Criminal profilers will tell you that the placement of the blanket over Belinda’s upper torso and face was most likely due to Jeffery’s feelings of shame and remorse. He was unable to deal with the consequences of the violent actions directed toward his fiancé, and though he left her body in its final resting place on the floor, he was compelled to hide the results from view.

The use of a blanket in JonBenét’s murder took a different meaning, and will be discussed a little more in detail in a later chapter.

Jeffery would subsequently enter a guilty plea to the charges of murder, and was sentenced to 30 years in the Colorado Department of Corrections.

It was a sad and tragic affair for all involved, and I counted it as another one in the books for those who don’t believe illegal drugs destroy people’s lives.

It was late June 2005 when Tom Bennett pulled me aside one morning and asked if I was interested in taking over the chief investigator’s position for the office. He indicated that he wanted to spend more time with his wife and was ready to “hang up his spurs” for the second time in his lengthy law enforcement career.

For the most part, Tom had been fairly tight-lipped about the Ramsey leads that streamed into the office, but, based on several conversations we had had over the year, I knew that he felt most of the things coming into the office were a colossal waste of time.

Tom was now asking if I would be interested in taking over that lead role in the Ramsey investigation and run the team of investigators who worked for the Twentieth Judicial District Attorney’s office. In my wildest dreams, I had never imagined that I would one day be responsible for overseeing this investigation. I considered it to be a tremendous responsibility, and it took only a moment of consideration before I said “yes.”

I found myself having lunch with D.A. Mary Lacy and her first assistant Pete Maguire within a few days of that decision, and she shared her thoughts on how she wanted to see the Ramsey investigation proceed. The primary message was that she wanted to scale back the time spent by her staff on the case, and we discussed several different options to accomplish this task.

During a follow up meeting with Tom and First Assistant District Attorney Bill Nagel, Tom proceeded to advise that the volume of information (letters, email correspondence, telephone calls, and walk-in interviews) that was being received was extremely large and a time consuming to process. He characterized most of the information coming from the public as being of little value in moving the case forward and suggested that it was impossible for one investigator to manage a caseload and pursue Ramsey leads at the same time.

He advised that there were approximately two-dozen frequent callers and writers who had nothing material to offer to the case and indicated that he had specifically requested a handful of those individuals to cease their calls and correspondence. Despite those requests, telephone calls, letters, and emails continued to pour into the office.

It was eventually decided that the first thing to be cut was the responsibility of returning phone messages left on the tip line. We determined that one way to cut down on the amateur closet detectives was to deny them access to the time of a working criminal investigator. The message on the telephone tip line was changed to inform callers that if they believed they had a viable lead to present in the case that they reduce it to writing and submit it via the U.S. Mail or other carrier.

The second thing to go was the email. A generic email address was established on the D.A.’s website that was designed to provide the same message as that left on the telephone tip line. People who wished to provide information on the case were instructed to reduce it to writing and were informed that all leads would be evaluated on an individual basis.

A memorandum outlining these changes was circulated through the office and to the Boulder Police Department. Receptionists were advised to instruct citizen callers to forward their information in written form. They were also instructed to inform walk-in visitors that unannounced visits would not be granted interviews: that their information should be sent to the Investigations Division in written form and that after review and evaluation, it would be up to the chief investigator to determine if a follow-up interview would be conducted.

Law enforcement personnel calling with information were to be forwarded directly to my telephone extension.

All correspondence received in the matter would continue to be logged into the system that had been established by Tom when he first came to the office in 2002. I prepared a generic letter that would be sent back to those individuals submitting information that acknowledged receipt of and thanking them for their tendered lead in the case.

Letters of introduction were prepared and sent to Ramsey attorneys Lin Wood and Bryan Morgan advising them of the change in investigative assignment. I also spoke to Denver CBI Supervisory Agent Ron Arndt and Denver Police Department Crime Lab Director Greg Laberge to advise them of my new assignment. Both labs had been involved in the collection and analysis of the DNA involved in this case.