Foreign Faction: Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet? (30 page)

I
watched with interest the continuing news coverage of Karr’s extradition proceedings. It was reminiscent of the feeding frenzy from the early days of the investigation, and I couldn’t help but read Tom Bennett’s displeasure of having to stand in the wings behind his boss as they spoke about the circumstances leading to the arrest of the man thought responsible for JonBenét’s murder.

We’d had no further correspondence about the case since that brief email exchange, but Bennett’s expression and demeanor seemed to say it all. This was not a time of celebration, and he held no illusion that this was the intruder we’d all been chasing for years.

The photographs and videotape of Karr sipping champagne on his flight to the U.S. was almost too much to bear. Oh, this was not going to end well, I thought.

It didn’t take long for the media to pull up their archived files on the case and locate Dorothy Allison’s composite sketch of her vision of the murderer. Side-by-side photographic comparisons were displayed for the public that revealed Karr’s uncanny resemblance to Allison’s psychic rendering of the perpetrator.

There were more than a few who seemed to consider the similarity of Karr’s features to that of the man portrayed in the psychic sketch as proof that the D.A.’s office had finally found their man. In many corners, and in spite of the fact that DNA tests had not yet been completed, people were celebrating the fact that JonBenét’s killer had finally been caught.

Some went so far as to renew their criticism of the Boulder Police Department’s previous handling of the investigation, apparently thinking that Karr’s DNA would seal the case against him.

In response to some of these comments, the members of Boulder PD’s legal
Dream Team
prepared a statement that was released on August 31, 2006. It read as follows:

Recent events in the nearly 10-year- old homicide of JonBenét Ramsey have rekindled the firestorm of accusations about how the Boulder Police Department handled the investigation into her death. The department had remained silent in recent years, as the effort to correct inaccuracies seemed futile.

In the fall of 1997, three prominent Denver-area attorneys, Dan Hoffman, Robert Miller, and Richard Baer, assisted the Boulder Police Department with the investigation. After reading comments made by Trip DeMuth in today’s Rocky Mountain News, all three felt compelled to contact the police department to provide support. They have authorized the Boulder Police Department to release this statement on their behalf:

We assisted the Boulder Police Department in their investigation of the murder of JonBenét Ramsey. Throughout our involvement and to this day, we have never spoken to the media about this case because we feel that comments by anyone involved in the investigation could only compromise the ability to prosecute the perpetrator or perpetrators of this horrible crime. However, we are compelled to respond to the irresponsible statements of one of the deputy district attorneys who worked on the case, Trip DeMuth. Some ten years after the fact, DeMuth claims that he was somehow prevented by the Boulder Police Department from pursuing leads in the investigation. Based on our knowledge of this matter, DeMuth’s claim is ridiculous. Mr. DeMuth’s assertion that the Boulder Police Department refused to pursue a variety of theories is also ludicrous. In our opinion, the Boulder Police Department, as well as Michael Kane, an experienced prosecutor, conducted an exhaustive and wide-ranging investigation of this matter. If Mr. DeMuth truly cares about seeing justice done, he should act responsibly and refrain from making inaccurate statements that could further jeopardize this investigation.

The Boulder Police Department, over the years, investigated more than 160 potential suspects in the case.

“A few people have accused the department of focusing too narrowly in its investigation of this homicide when that was not the case” said Chief Mark Beckner. “People who have spoken out that way have relied on the department’s inability to discuss case specifics, but I cannot allow the misperceptions to go unanswered any longer.”

Daniel Hoffman has practiced law in Colorado since 1958 and he was the dean of the University of Denver, College of Law from 1978 to 1984. He is now in private practice at a firm in Denver. Robert Miller was the U.S. Attorney for Colorado from 1981 to 1988. Before that, he was the Weld County district attorney for 10 years. He is now in private practice in Denver. Richard Baer was a state prosecutor in New York before joining a law firm in Denver. He is now the executive vice president and general counsel for a large corporation in Denver.

—Julie Brooks,

PIO
City of Boulder

It was painful to watch the follow-up press conference declaring John Mark Karr innocent of this crime. Though Lacy had initially cautioned the public not to rush to judgment about Karr’s arrest in the matter, the time had finally come to announce that his DNA did not match the genetic materials found in JonBenét’s underwear. Mary Lacy reported, that despite their best efforts, they had not found their man.

I was embarrassed for the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office and for the Boulder Police Department. Chief Beckner apparently had only been told about this lead in the hours before Karr’s arrest, and no investigator from his agency had participated in the investigation that brought Karr back to U.S. soil. Nevertheless, Beckner had issued a press release the day after Karr’s arrest, stating that the department was pleased with the recent development in the case, and that his investigators were hopeful that the arrest of John Mark Karr would lead to closure in the case.

Beckner went to state that he knew there were still many questions that needed to be answered in the case, but that his department stood ready to assist the D.A.’s office in tracking down those answers.

It was reported that approximately thirty-five thousand ($35,000.00) had been expended in pursuit of this lead. I later learned that Tom Bennett had worked approximately three (3) months straight putting this thing together for Lacy. He took not a solitary day off in that entire time frame. He was ever still the dependable workhorse.

I wondered if the results would have been different if Lacy’s office had been willing to put forth the effort in pursuing the direction I suggested to her earlier that year. In my humble opinion, there was much more substance present in the details I had shared with her than in the delusionary musings of this particular child molester.

I decided that I really needed to finish my written analysis of the theory I had developed earlier in the year and set about in earnest.

I delivered a single binder to Tom Bennett on October 8, 2006, that contained a detailed synopsis of my findings, accompanied by the supporting materials that made up the Power-Point presentation.

As was my practice when writing investigative reports for the D.A.’s office, I presented copies of my work product to the law enforcement agency holding primary jurisdiction for the crime. I hand-delivered a copy of the binder to Mark Beckner.

While my interest in the Ramsey case may have waned during the summer, it had become re-energized after the completion of my written synopsis. Among other things, I was genuinely convinced that there was merit to the exploration of Burke’s psychiatric records.

I had received no word from Bennett that my materials had been reviewed or that my efforts in completing this task for Lacy’s office were even appreciated. Based on my view of her efforts in the Karr debacle, I felt that it was unlikely that anyone had cracked the cover on my work. She seemed unwilling to consider any lead that would explore family involvement.

I decided to query her office with a request to have the materials / theory presented to the prosecutors who had been most familiar with the details of the case and who had participated in the 1998 grand jury investigation. I was politely requesting an objective review by these distinguished attorneys.

The following is a redacted version of the correspondence I sent to D.A.’s office in the fall of 2006:

October 31, 2006

Honorable Mary Lacy

District Attorney

Twentieth Judicial District Attorney’s Office

1777 6
^th
Street

P.O. Box 471

Boulder, CO 80306

Dear Mary,

As you may be aware, I recently provided chief investigator Tom Bennett with the final version of a written outline of my analysis of the investigation and circumstances surrounding the death of JonBenét Ramsey. This outline was completed for the purposes of accompanying the Power Point presentation of the case theory that I provided to you in January of this year. The underlying premise of this theory suggests that no intruder participated in the premature death of JonBenét Ramsey.

I would advise you that I did not arrive at this decision casually, nor was it due to preconceived notions held prior to my involvement in the investigation of the case. It was my responsibility to acquaint myself with the details of the investigation when I assumed the lead investigative role for your office in July 2005 and I set about reviewing what I considered to be the core documents of the investigation. I felt I needed to get ‘up to speed’ with the facts of the case so that I could properly evaluate new leads that were continuously streaming into our office.

I have to admit that the circumstances surrounding the death of JonBenét were very perplexing and it presented as a very complicated and unusual case. Nevertheless, I was intent on bringing an objective viewpoint to the inquiry and I continued my research into the circumstances of this crime. In search of motive, opportunity and a better understanding of the events, I pursued many questions that led to dead-end. I took another look at suspects who had previously been cleared and I continued to examine the statements and behavior of the Ramsey family.

It was only after approximately five months of intensive examination of these documents did I come to believe that the family was somehow involved in the death of JonBenét. I did not quite know how or why, but at that juncture, I no longer felt it was likely that an intruder had participated in this crime. While continuing to evaluate new leads coming into our office, I began to narrow the focus of my review on the family. Over the course of the following months, I began to discover things that tended to support my belief and as I evaluated behavioral clues, statements and physical evidence, a plausible theory of family involvement and cover-up began to take form.

Although I left your office in the late spring of this year, the details of this investigation have ever been in the forefront of my mind and the written outline presented to Tom Bennett several weeks ago is a culmination of the deliberative process that has been ongoing since the day I first reviewed a Ramsey homicide report.

As a distant observer to the events surrounding the arrest of John Mark Karr, I initially was cautiously optimistic that he might prove to be the intruder who was responsible for the murder of JonBenét. By all accounts he was presenting as a dangerous pedophile and, until a case is solved, all things should be considered possible. Unfortunately, it soon became apparent to me, based upon statements attributed to him by the media, that Mr. Karr did not know what he was talking about. When his correspondence with Mr. Tracy was finally revealed, it was clear that his stated version of events were inconsistent with autopsy findings and physical evidence discovered during the processing of the crime scene.

From the perspective of a 30-year veteran of law enforcement, I can understand that you wanted to be absolutely certain that Mr. Karr was not the perpetrator of this offense and felt it necessary to eliminate him by comparing his DNA to the forensic sample found in this case. Nevertheless, I would suggest that the DNA in this case is only one artifact of evidence and its evidentiary value must be considered in light of all of the other pieces of physical, testimonial and behavioral evidence that have been collected and analyzed over the course of this investigation. Technological advances in science now allow us to collect and identify microscopic evidence that had once not been available to the criminalist. As you know, this type of evidence can be very helpful in identifying a perpetrator or solving a crime, but I am concerned that one piece of trace evidence, to the exclusion of everything else, is dominating the theory and the investigative construct of this crime. If I am correct in my assessment, there may be a plausible explanation for the presence of the DNA in the underwear and it may have nothing whatsoever to do with the death of JonBenét.

Therefore, after much reflection and having enduring many sleepless nights, I am requesting that I be permitted the opportunity to present my case theory to Mitch Morrissey and Michael Kane, the special prosecutors who were most familiar with the investigation when the case was presented to the grand jury in 1998. I believe there are specific records and testimony that were not sought during the first inquiry that are key to solving this case and these are things that could be obtained through the investigative powers of the grand jury.

For that reason, I am forwarding a copy of this letter to Governor Bill Owens and Colorado Attorney General John Suthers, in that there is a state grand jury already sitting that could hear this matter. It would be my hope that, at least initially, an inquiry at the state level would allow prosecutors to avoid the media attention that accompanied the first announced inquiry that took place in Boulder. I am of a mind that the criminal investigation into this death should not be played out in the media on an hourly basis.