JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation

by Steve Thomas

Patsy Ramsey was in the den with her friends, and when White shouted, Priscilla White and Barbara Fernie hurried toward the sound. Patsy did not move from the couch. John Ramsey emerged from the basement carrying the body of JonBenét, not cradled close but held away from him, his hands gripping her waist. The child’s head was above his, facing him, her arms were raised high, stiffened by rigor mortis, and her lips were blue. The child was obviously dead.

Two possible practice notes and one real one covering three pages led me to believe that the killer had spent more time in the house composing the ransom note than we originally thought.

What the CBI examiner told them, very privately, was astounding: Twenty-four of the alphabet’s twenty-six letters looked as if they had been written by Patsy. When taken together, the tablet, the Sharpie pen, and the writing formed a powerful base of evidence. And that evidence pointed directly at Patsy Ramsey.

The family spaces in their house were a mess, but the front room was showplace clean. Her little daughter’s bed-wetting was private; the pretty gowns and a winning smile were what the public saw. Life inside the family was not the perfect image portrayed for the outside world.

Burke Ramsey had returned to classes, without police escort, a few weeks after a “small foreign faction” killed his sister.

John Douglas was almost denying his own writings in order to give the Ramseys a pass. The dust jacket of his next book identified him as a consultant on the JonBenét Ramsey case. It did not say for which side.

When Deputy DA Mary Keenan announced several years later that she was a candidate to succeed Alex Hunter, she mentioned that the history of plea bargaining by his office had eroded the courtroom skills of Hunter’s prosecutors. That was the catch. There was no prosecutor in Boulder who could take the Ramseys into court, fight off their defense team, and bring the pieces of the puzzle together for a jury. Years of plea bargaining had made them paper tigers.

I didn’t have to listen to their words, for the real message was visual. As soon as I saw Patsy, it made sense why this time had been set up for television so quickly. The day before, I had surprised them with our knowledge that the clothes she was wearing on the morning of December 26 were the same she had worn to the Christmas party the previous night. This indicated that she had not changed clothes, and possibly had not even gone to bed that night. My guess was that she had been up all night, dealing with the death of JonBenét. Today, on television, she wore the identical ensemble she had on during the interview—blue suit with white trim, white sweater, even the silver angel pin on her lapel. I could almost hear a defense attorney’s question at trial: Detective Thomas, what was Mrs. Ramsey wearing. … . ?

In her bathroom I examined every item—the faucets, the side of the tub, the countertop where the rolled-up red turtleneck was found, everything—trying to imagine what surface could have crushed her skull.

How would any stranger know the writing implements were so handy, and why take the time to put it in the cup when he wanted to flee from a murder scene? Why not just leave them on the table when finished writing? Why not bring a completed ransom note with him?

In mid-September, a panel of pediatric experts from around the country reached one of the major conclusions of the investigation—that JonBenét had suffered vaginal trauma prior to the day she was killed.

One expert summed it up well when he said the injuries were not consistent with sexual assault but with a child who was being physically abused.

A much more likely cause of the injuries to my thinking was some sort of corporal punishment being meted out as discipline if JonBenét wet or soiled the bed. That possibility was buttressed by the absence of semen on the body and an expert’s opinion that the vaginal and hymenal damage was not due to an act of sexual gratification.

As anticipated, Detective Trujillo’s presentation of the DNA evidence led to a long discussion between Scheck, Lee, and an expert from the CBI that sounded like Latin to the rest of us. Unknown DNA was present, but it could have been from anybody, and there were serious issues of possible contamination of the samples. The use of the same clippers for all of her fingers during the autopsy, and maybe even other subjects’ as well, could have caused a problem. More work clearly needed to be done, but we needed subpoena power to do it. Scheck said later that he saw a lot of potential questions but felt by instinct that some sort of “contaminant” may have caused the unidentified DNA.

As an aside, he remarked lightly that his attorneys get nervous when he recalls exact details. They should have been nervous, for Patsy was telling her interviewers about the same time that she did not pick up the note, which had no fingerprints. It was a direct contradiction.