Foreign Faction: Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet? (33 page)

This latest explanation of how attorneys became involved again appears to be in conflict with the information I had reviewed about the matter. If this information is taken at face value, however, it opens up a Pandora’s Box of other issues.

The day after JonBenét’s murder, the coroner’s office spent most of the day performing the autopsy on her body. A break in the autopsy protocol took place that afternoon when Dr. Meyer called together the Boulder County Child Fatality Review Team. As noted in a previous chapter, the team had collectively established a list of things for Boulder Police and DSS investigators to pursue in their search for possible explanations of the evidence that suggested prior sexual abuse.

At that stage of the game, anything was possible, and I didn’t see anything in the official reports that suggested the focus of the investigation was centering on John Ramsey. So, from my perspective, his reference to a
telephone call
the day
after
his daughter’s murder raises some additional questions:

• Who was the ‘reliable insider’ who purportedly wanted to get this urgent message to John Ramsey?
  
• At what point, from their
  insider’s
  view of the matter, did they decide that John Ramsey needed a criminal defense attorney? Was it when search warrants for the home were being drafted on the afternoon of the discovery of JonBenét’s body? Or was it when evidence of prior sexual abuse became apparent during her autopsy the following day?
  
• Moreover, if he, or she, truly does exist, is it the same individual who was sharing Lou Smit’s intruder evidence with the Ramsey defense team in advance of the Ramsey’s April 1997 interview?
  

This situation gave me pause, and raised the following red flags:

• Why would John Ramsey feel the need to conceal the details about the timeline of his attorney’s first involvement in this investigation?
  
• Why would his original explanation of attorney involvement change between 1998 and 2012?
  
• Was he compelled to safeguard this information from the public because he believed it would somehow be detrimental to his cause?
  

Additionally, I found it difficult to swallow the Ramsey’s response to a question raised during their April, 1997, interviews with BPD investigators. Both John and Patsy had been asked during their interviews if they had the opportunity to review the police reports that had been provided to them in advance of the interview.

Patsy indicated that she had not reviewed the materials, and Johmade to him on n stated that he had only “scanned” the reports prior to his sit-down with authorities. I found these responses implausible under the circumstances. Five-hundred-dollar-per-hour defense attorneys don’t negotiate and demand copies of police reports and witness statements prior to an interview, unless they intend to go through them with a fine-toothed comb as they prepare their clients for questioning.

By the time the Ramseys sat down for their first uninterrupted interview with the detectives investigating the death of their daughter, you can rest assured that each of them was very well-rehearsed and prepared for the questions that would be posed to them.

There were a couple of other behavioral clues exhibited by John Ramsey on the morning of the kidnapping that appeared out of sync with the circumstances at hand.

At one point that morning, while the family and police investigators still awaited the ransom call, pilot Mike Archuleta volunteered to fly to Minnesota to intercept the commercial jet carrying Melinda and Stewart - the suggestion being that he could quickly meet the kids and ferry them back to Boulder, thus avoiding the hassle of their having to arrange a new commercial flight into Denver.

John Ramsey nixed the idea, and I wondered why he didn’t want to take advantage of his pilot’s offer to shortcut the uncertainty of the availability of flights that would divert the kids to Colorado. I gave thought to the idea that perhaps he had declined this offer because he wanted to be assured of his private plane being accessible for a quick departure from the state. What came later seemed to confirm that piece of speculation.

It seemed incomprehensible to me that John Ramsey, within less than an hour of the discovery of the body his daughter, would be making arrangements to take his family and leave the state by private plane. When overheard making these arrangements with his pilot, Ramsey told Detective Bill Palmer that he had an important business meeting to attend in Georgia.

Like many of the Boulder investigators, I pondered the question:

How could a business meeting in Georgia outweigh the need to work with authorities in their attempt to identify the person who had just murdered his daughter?

Red flag: Why was John Ramsey so anxious to leave the state?

I subscribe to the notion that, for the most part, as human beings we tend to act instinctively in certain situations. It is part of the survival instinct of the human “fight or flight” response that has been programmed into our genes over the millennia.

There was one other major discrepancy discovered by investigators as they continued to evaluate John Ramsey’s behavior, and statements. Stewart Long had arrived at the Ramsey home in a taxi with his fiancé, Melinda, and John Andrew, just as police were clearing the house for a search warrant following the discovery of JonBenét’s body. All three of the older kids joined the family in a vehicle that was headed to the home of John and Barbara Fernie.

As they departed the area, John Ramsey told Long that he had found JonBenét’s body at 11:00 a.m. that morning. Long recounted this conversation to Detective Thomas when interviewed as a part of the follow-up investigation.

Thomas, knowing that Ramsey had gone to the basement at the request of Detective Arndt at 1:00 p.m. that day, pressed Long on his recollection of the time of discovery as stated by John Ramsey. Long was adamant that Ramsey had stated that he had found JonBenét at eleven o’clock that morning.

Considering the time-line of events, this was smack dab in the middle of the time frame during which John Ramsey had disappeared from Detective Arndt’s view, and a full two hours
before
she had directed him to search the house.

The red flag here was John Ramsey’s stated timing of the discovery of the body of his daughter. If this was not just a miscommunication and he had truly found her body two hours before he had been directed to check the home, why didn’t he immediately reveal this critical discovery to the police detective on the scene?

What could have accounted for his decision to delay telling authorities about his finding the body of JonBenét?

Barbara Fernie had raised another flag when she decided to contact investigators in early January, 1998. She and her son had seen photographs of golf clubs in a tabloid story about JonBenét while shopping in a grocery store and her son recognized the set of clubs as belonging to Burke. The sight of the golf clubs spurred her memory about an odd comment that John Ramsey had made to someone while the family was staying at the Fernie residence, after the discovery of JonBenét’s body.

It was in this time frame that authorities had granted permission to Pam Paugh, Patsy’s visiting sister from Georgia, to enter the Ramsey home and retrieve a number of JonBenét’s personal belongings. This was during the time that investigators were still processing the crime scene for evidence, and the Ramsey family was permitted access to gather some items that were intended for the funeral services being arranged in Georgia.

Mrs. Fernie recalled that John Ramsey had asked a strange question of the person stopping by her home one evening: He asked if they had remembered to “get his golf bag” from his house.

Mrs. Fernie recalled that the individual replied that they had not been able to retrieve the bag, as the police would not let them downstairs.

Given the emotional condition of everyone in her home after JonBenét’s murder, John Ramsey’s request for his golf clubs seemed out of the ordinary to her. His daughter had just been murdered and it was the dead of winter in Colorado. For what purpose would he be asking that his golf bags be retrieved from his home?

The red flag waving for me was this: I doubted Ramsey was planning to play a round of 18 holes at any time in the near future, even in Atlanta, and I wondered if he were interested in the retrieval of the golf bag because it contained something
other
than sporting equipment.
⁶⁰

Mrs. Fernie shared one additional tidbit of information with investigators that had been bothering her. She indicated that late in the summer, or early fall of 1996, she had observed damages to the latch area of an exterior screen door located on the rear, south side of the Ramsey home. Mrs. Fernie was concerned that perhaps a burglary attempt had been made to the home, and shared this information with Patsy.

They inspected the door, and determined that the interior door exhibited no damages whatsoever. Patsy expressed no concern about the damaged screen door and suggested that perhaps John was responsible for the marks. He reportedly was always forgetting his keys and had broken into the house on other occasions.

Mrs. Fernie indicated that she had seen a photograph of this same screen door displayed in an advertisement running in one of the Denver newspapers shortly after the murder. The advertisement, placed by Ramsey attorneys and taking up at least half of the page of the newspaper, purported that this may have been a possible point of entry used by the kidnapper of JonBenét.

This did not sit well with Mrs. Fernie, because Patsy was fully aware that these damages had been inflicted upon the screen door weeks or months prior to the murder of JonBenét. The use of this particular photograph seemed to be an attempt to mislead the public about the evidence associated with the crime and the Fernies indicated that they severed their contact with the family following their observation of that advertisement.

There were other behavioral aspects of Patsy Ramsey’s actions that didn’t ring true to me and that seemed out of sync for the circumstances.

For example, Patsy indicated during interviews that she initially was confused about whether the ransom note was referring to JonBenét or John’s oldest daughter, Beth. This didn’t quite make sense because Beth had been killed in a traffic accident a couple years prior to the kidnapping.

In any event, Patsy stated that she never finished reading more than the first few lines of the ransom note and immediately went to check on JonBenét. Opening the door of the bedroom, Patsy stated that she did not see JonBenét in her bed, and had immediately screamed John’s name.

It did not make sense to me that a mother would not have screamed her daughter’s name and searched the room for her.

In spite of the presence of a ransom note, maternal instinct and the stress of the moment should have sent her beyond the threshold of the door, and into the entire bedroom and bathroom. Not finding her there, I would have expected a search to have been made of Burke’s room, and that he would have been awakened and asked if he knew his sister’s whereabouts.

The Ramseys stated publicly on more than one occasion that Burke was asleep, and they never asked him if he had seen JonBenét, or whether he had heard anything unusual that night.

More importantly, what parent would not be screaming their child’s name as they searched the house for her?

It was only Fleet White who stated that he had called for JonBenét as he checked the house after being summoned to the home that morning. This specific behavior on the part of the parents lacked a certain legitimacy for me, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but Patsy’s accounting of these events on their first nationally televised interview seemed scripted.

I was also perplexed by Patsy’s behavior exhibited upon the discovery of JonBenét’s body. As noted in police reports, Fleet White charged up from the basement shouting for someone to call an ambulance after he and John Ramsey had found JonBenét’s body in the Wine Cellar.

In this setting, I think it is reasonable to presume that most of us would be thinking that someone was
injured
, and in need of immediate medical attention. Why else would White be shouting for an
ambulance
? Apparently, Barb Fernie and Priscilla White thought the same thing, for they immediately rushed out of the solarium to see what was going on.

Not Patsy Ramsey, however. According to Detective Arndt’s reporting of events, the mother of the missing and kidnapped child remained in the solarium during all of this commotion, and it was not until she directed John to retrieve his wife did she enter the living room to encounter the lifeless body of her daughter.

In Patsy’s interview conducted on April 30, 1997, she stated that she had heard White’s screams for an ambulance. She kept asking, “What is it? What is it?”, but never took the initiative to leave the room to find out. She claimed to have been restrained in the solarium by family friend Barb Fernie.

A big red flag flew up the pole on this particular behavioral clue. I would have expected a mother to have rushed into the fray to determine if her child had been found, and be asking why an ambulance was being called to her home. I didn’t believe
anyone
would have been able to hold back a mother under these circumstances.

To me, Patsy Ramsey’s actions in this specific instance were counter-intuitive.