Foreign Faction: Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet? (38 page)

No. He asked instead if the brand of wristwatch being worn by the detective was a Rolex.

The demeanor, and continued lack of “affect” exhibited by Burke during this series of interviews was unsettling. It appeared to me that he had no interest whatsoever in the progress of the investigation regarding the death of his sister.

Another item of interest that came to my attention were issues that related to Burke’s late age of bed-wetting. A short-term housekeeper had reported to police investigators that Burke was having problems with urinating in bed in 1993, and the parents were having problems with him at the time. Burke seemed reluctant to acknowledge the extent of the issue to Dr. Bernhard during the DSS interview in early January 1997.

Let me again make it perfectly clear. I was not proposing that what little we knew demonstrated that Burke was sociopathic or had a personality disorder. I fully realized that more than this was needed to prove any theory of his involvement, but at the time, those were red flags that began to pique my attention as I continued my review of investigative files.

I had discovered during my review of case files that, with the apparent consent of prosecutors, there were medical records that Ramsey attorneys withheld from the District Attorney’s Office in 1998, and I believed it conceivable that they spoke to the very issue of family involvement and a cover-up regarding the circumstances of JonBenét’s death.

If the family was involved in any fashion, I believed those records were key to solving the mystery of this child’s death, and it was one of the leads I had attempted to convince Mary Lacy to pursue in January 2006.

There was one more peculiar aspect of Burke’s outward behavior that left me uneasy. At one juncture during my tenure at the D.A.’s office, I had met with Tom Trujillo, and we were going over some materials in one of the investigative binders at his office. We happened upon three individual Polaroid photographs of Burke and his parents. I had previously seen duplicates of these in the D.A.’s files.

I asked Trujillo about them, and he informed me that he had taken the photographs on the afternoon of Saturday, December 28, 1996, when he was collecting non-testimonial evidence from members of the family.

I took a few moments to silently study each of the photographs.

John Ramsey looked tired, haggard, and despondent.

Patsy Ramsey was hard to recognize. Her hair was pulled back tightly against her head; she was pale and without makeup and looked as though she had aged a hundred years. The beautiful woman I had seen in many other photographs was barely recognizable, and there was no doubt in my mind that she was consumed by anguish.

Like his parents, Burke was seated in a chair and he leaned back slightly, with his right arm slung casually over a nearby table.

Burke looked directly into the lens and smiled for the camera.

It was puzzling. Here he was, providing handwriting exemplars, fingerprints, and DNA samples to police investigators in their investigation into the murder of his sister. It had to be a stressful and extremely painful time for everyone.

I couldn’t help but wonder why Burke was smiling.

T
here were several significant developments that took place over the late fall of 2006 and early winter of 2007.

One of them was a tip I had received from a reporter who called from time to time. He had shared some fairly interesting things with me during my work on the case, and he was now informing me that the FBI was considering taking over the investigation. It was reported that there might be a federal angle of some sort that would permit their entry into the case, and they were determined to prevent a repeat of the Karr disaster.

Call me a Doubting Thomas, but this didn’t seem very likely to me. I couldn’t fathom
any
law enforcement agency wanting to step in and take responsibility for this homicide investigation. Nevertheless, he insisted on giving me the name and telephone number of an agent in the Bureau’s Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) located in Quantico, Virginia and urged me to call.

There would be many occasions over that winter when I would ask myself what the hell I was doing. I had left the D.A.s office nearly eight months previous and was somehow still involved in this damn case.

I had already gone out on a limb when I had written Mary Lacy at the end of October 2006 and asked her to permit me the opportunity to present my theory to a set of outside prosecutors. I had requested that members of the BAU participate as well, so it didn’t seem to be out of line to call this agent and chat with him. In for a penny, in for a pound I figured.

I ended up speaking with FBI Supervisory Special Agent James Fitzgerald. I identified myself and work history to the agent and made it clear that I no longer had any investigative authority or responsibility in the matter and that I was calling as a private citizen who once played a lead role in the case.

It didn’t take long to confirm my suspicions. The FBI had no interest in taking over the JonBenét Ramsey murder investigation from Colorado authorities.

We started talking about current events and my attempt to get the D.A.’s office to pursue what I considered to be a handful of viable leads. He soon had me fleshing out the details of my discoveries, and then he dropped the other shoe.

SSA Fitzgerald informed me that, along with being a criminal profiler, his particular area of expertise in the BAU was forensic linguistics and that he had testified as an expert witness in state and federal courts on a number of occasions. One of the investigations he had participated in was the Ted Kaczynski “Unabomb” case.

Though he was aware of Professor Foster’s work on the Ramsey ransom note, and had reviewed the written opinion of the professor’s findings, he had not been provided the opportunity to personally evaluate the note and writing exemplars collected from any of the suspects in the matter.

We spoke about the elements of crime scene staging, and references in the note to the lines of dialogue that were in headliner movies before, or at the time of JonBenét’s murder. Like agents Gregg McCrary, and John Douglas, he felt that the use of movie script dialogue suggested an amateurish attempt to misdirect the course of the investigation. This was not how kidnappers operated in the real world.

SSA Fitzgerald agent expressed his personal views about the contents of the ransom demand, but the extensive analysis required to issue a professional opinion on the possible identity of the author of the note had not yet taken place.

During several discussions with the agent, he expressed disappointment over the outcome of Professor Foster’s involvement in the investigation. Foster had developed a reputation as a literary detective and made some interesting discoveries during his academic research. But the professor was not a trained law enforcement officer, and the letter he sent to Patsy Ramsey before being asked to officially become involved in the investigation had potentially jeopardized his objective standing in the matter. SSA Fitzgerald was not aware of the earlier letter to Patsy Ramsey until notified by the Boulder P.D., after Foster’s report was received by them.

Professor Foster apparently didn’t recognize the need to disclose the previous correspondence, and the agent felt that this probably should have precluded his involvement in the analysis of the writing samples gathered in the case.

SSA Fitzgerald was very interested in my theory and wanted to know if I’d be willing to come to Quantico to share it with the members of his team. The opportunity sounded very attractive, but at that juncture, I was not comfortable with taking that step. My allegiance was still to the Boulder D.A.’s office, and I wanted to give them every opportunity to be the ones who would break this case wide open.

I would have several more conversations with the BAU supervisory staff over the course of that fall and we talked about the manner in which their participation in the case might be accomplished: An official request needed to come from the law enforcement agency of primary jurisdiction, and it had to originate with the FBI’s Denver field office. Only then could the Quantico office participate in the investigation.

I kept Mark Beckner informed about my progress, or lack of progress that winter, but could never convince him to invite the BAU in for another consultation on the case. He had turned over primary investigative authority for the case to the D.A.’s office in 2002, and he seemed to be only mildly amused at my efforts to budge Mary Lacy from her fortified position on the Ramsey case.

One could only imagine the level of my frustration.

[Author’s note: I spoke again to SSA Fitzgerald in March, 2012. He had since retired from the FBI and indicated that he had written to Chief Beckner in early 2009, not long after Boulder Police had taken back the case from the DA’s Office. He was offering to put together a small team of forensic linguistic experts from around the nation to take another objective look at the ransom note. One of his peers from the United Kingdom had volunteered to participate as well, and it was posed to Chief Beckner that the analysis work would be performed pro-bono. Chief Beckner reportedly thanked the agent, but for unknown reasons, turned down the offer.

Fitzgerald continues to practice as a forensic linguist, and went to work for the Academy Group, Inc., located in Manassas, VA following his retirement from the FBI. He has been involved in a number of high-profile cases since leaving the BAU that have involved the field of threat assessment, and textual analysis.
⁶⁹

There have been many intervening cases over the years that have validated the foundation for this type of criminal investigative work, and notwithstanding Chief Beckner’s decision to decline Fitzgerald’s earlier offer, I think it would be interesting to see what a new panel of experts would determine as far as authorial attribution of the ransom note.]

The second important event to occur that winter involved additional discoveries that were related to the behavioral symptoms of a childhood disorder.

While working on the written case outline that was completed in October 2006, I became aware of a childhood behavioral disorder that revolved around the issue of
sexually aggressive children
. I learned about clinical research that had been conducted on the topic of children with a behavioral disorder commonly referred to as “Sexual Behavior Problems”, or “SBP.”

I had obtained a copy of the book,
Sexually Aggressive Children, Coming to Understand Them,
⁷⁰
and other research materials on that topic late that fall and began to review them in my spare time. Araji’s book, in particular, provided a comprehensive overview of national research that had studied sexual abuse perpetrated by children 12 years of age and younger.

Approximately two months had passed since the mailing of my letter to the D.A.’s office, and I had finished my study of the SBP text book. It was incredibly enlightening, and the case studies only served to strengthen my belief that developed from my analysis of the case that indicated some form of family cover-up.

This information is not all-inclusive but provides an overview of the behavioral symptoms seen with this childhood disorder:

• Research into sexually aggressive children was described as being in its “infancy” in the mid1990s. (It appears that the earliest studies on this topic only dated to 1980.)
  
• The average onset of preadolescent sexual behavior problems (SBP) are between the ages of 6-9 years
  
• Although the term “sexual” is used, the children’s intentions and motivations for these behaviors may be unrelated to sexual gratification.
  
• Children act out for many varied reasons. Some may have been the prior victims of sexual abuse. Some may act out due to other behavioral problems related to PTSD, anger, fear, or emotional detachment. Sexual acting out has been linked to anger, rage, loneliness, and fear.
  
• FBI UCR reports in 1979 revealed 249 rape arrests for children less than 12 years of age. Sixty-six of those children were under the age of 10.
  
• Early research conducted in the 1980s provided evidence that preadolescent children’s behaviors can be as aggressive and violent as those of adolescents and adults.
  
• FBI UCR discontinued reporting the age of offenders in 1980, but the National Center for Juvenile Justice reported a forcible rape rate of .02 per 1000 for 10 and 11 year olds in 1988.
  
• 1990 FBI and media reports in this time period indicate that among adults convicted of sex crimes, approximately 30% said they began offending before they were 9 years old.
  
• A 1991 study revealed that some children engaged in behaviors that involved fire-setting, bed-wetting, animal mutilation, and scatological behaviors- (disturbed bodily functions related to urination and elimination).
  
• A 1993 nationwide survey of SBP therapists identified preadolescent behaviors in 222 children that ranged from voyeurism to coercion: The more serious offenses involved digital penetration, penile intercourse, anal intercourse, bestiality, and ritualistic or sadistic sexual abuse.
  
• Another 1993 survey conducted in the Northwest revealed that some offenders used physical coercion that included tying up their victims.
  
• Offenders lack compassion, empathy, and exhibit inadequate social skills.
  
• A victim may be the object of revenge or anger and could be viewed as the parent’s “favored child” by the perpetrator.
  
• Families frequently attempt to portray themselves to the world as the “perfect” family.
  
• Co-morbidity: SBP patients have a higher incidence of psychiatric disorders that include, but are not limited to, attachment disorder and separation anxiety.
  

Revelation of these clinical case studies and the emerging national recognition of this childhood behavioral disorder was in its infancy at the time of JonBenét’s death, but confirmed what I had occasionally witnessed in the District Attorneys’ weekly SART meetings: Children of Burke’s age had been proven capable of sexually abusing their siblings and others.

Moreover, these studies confirmed that children of his age were capable of committing horrendous acts of physical violence typically thought to have been reserved to adults.

It had been stated repeatedly that there had been no prior recorded history / incidents of abuse that would have suggested parental involvement in JonBenét’s death. As I pointed out in the case analysis report and Power Point outline completed in the fall of 2006, Burke had already exhibited one prior incident of violence against JonBenét.

The incident that involved a blow to the head with a golf club that took place in Michigan was claimed to be an “accident” by the Ramsey family, but it is interesting to note that this incident took place within a day or two of JonBenét’s birthday in August 1994.

One can only wonder whether sibling jealousy or envy may have played any part in that instance, and whether these feelings spilled over into the events of the Christmas holidays in 1996.

I had also found it interesting that the Paughs had reportedly purchased several books on childhood behavior for the Ramsey family. The titles of the books were intriguing:

• The Hurried Child – Growing Up Too Fast
  , by David Elkind;
  
• Children at Risk
  , Dobson / Bruer;
  
• Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong
  , Kilpatrick.
  

When exploring the nature of the content of these three books, I wondered what might have been taking place in the home that prompted the grandparents to purchase these types of childhood behavioral books for the family.