JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation

by Steve Thomas

Bynum also said the pediatrician, Dr. Beuf, had determined that Burke Ramsey could not be interviewed by police.

Combined with the lackluster record of the DA’s office, we had a textbook example of how a justice system can rot from within to the point of being virtually ineffective.

was blown away. We had just found a credible witness who heard John Ramsey say he’d discovered the body two hours earlier than we previously believed.

He questioned why a six-year-old girl, who could easily have been manually strangled, had been choked with a garrote. Such complicated violence did not fit the crime.

The information I gave wasn’t about evidence in a murder investigation but about possible malfeasance in government.

In turn, the CASKU agents noted that of the more than seventeen hundred murdered children they had studied since the 1960s, there was only one case in which the victim was a female under the age of twelve, who had been murdered in her home by strangulation, with sexual assault and a ransom note present—and that was JonBenét Ramsey.

The FBI deemed the entire crime “criminally unsophisticated,” citing the child being left on the premises, the disingenuous $118,000 demand in relation to the net worth of the family, the description of the accomplices as “gentlemen,” and the concept of a ransom delivery where one would be “scanned for electronic devices.” Kidnappers prefer isolated drops for the ransom delivery, not a face-to-face meeting.

Their bottom line was that there had never been a kidnapping attempt.

When the chief heard what was recorded during our “sting,” he stepped into the realm of questionable activity himself by ordering the evidence destroyed.

Shapiro said that Hunter, Bill Wise, and another Ramsey attorney, William Gray, owned a building together. “This is a serious Boys’ Club,” the reporter commented, then read from his notes a list of the DA’s political and financial relationships. In Colorado, a district attorney should recuse himself at the mere appearance of conflict of interest. In my opinion, Hunter had gone far beyond the mere appearance.

We gathered affidavits stating in clear language that there were injuries “consistent with prior trauma and sexual abuse” … “There was chronic abuse” … “Past violation of the vagina” … “Evidence of both acute injury and chronic sexual abuse.”

To my mind, what Spitz described was consistent with someone being out of control. It was not consistent with someone trying to kidnap a child for ransom.

The experience demonstrated how deeply John Ramsey was now plugged into the Democratic Party power structure. Colorado Governor Roy Romer was chairman of the Democratic National Committee and advised by the politically astute Hal Haddon, one of John Ramsey’s attorneys.

The internal resistance reached a pinnacle of absurdity when Detective Linda Arndt and Detective Sergeant Larry Mason claimed they had been stricken with amnesia about the Ramsey case. That introduced an unbelievable element of chaos and left us unsure about what our own people would say in sworn testimony.

Following a line of inquiry about who did what on that first morning, she had gone to see Sergeant Larry Mason. The detective said the sergeant told her, “I don’t remember a thing about the Ramsey case.”

For good measure, he threw in his loyal supporter Jim Marino as a possibility. Later in January, Marino received a voice mail message from his old pal, complimenting him for “doing such a good job [defending Ramsey] on TV.” Ramsey ended the call with, “Love ya, brother!”

“Steve,” said Foster, “I believe I am going to conclude the ransom note was the work of a single individual: Patsy Ramsey.”

Don Foster from Vassar, the top linguistics man in the country, made his conclusion firm in March. “In my opinion, it is not possible that any individual except Patsy Ramsey wrote the ransom note,” he told a special briefing in Boulder, adding that she had been unassisted in writing it. With his sterling academic reputation and a track record of 152—0 in deciphering anonymous writings, this should have been a thunderbolt of evidence, but the DA’s office, without telling us, had already discredited and discarded the professor. His coming to Boulder was a big waste of time.

For the first time I put my personal theory into words.

discussed the possibility of investigating the district attorney’s office for obstruction of justice! I volunteered to be the first witness.

I felt Smit was being totally used.

Last year, when we discovered hidden cameras inside the Ramsey house, only to realize the detectives had been unwittingly videotaped, we allowed that, too, to pass without challenge.

After carefully arranging for their own self-sponsored polygraph session to be administered by their hand-picked questioner, something no law enforcement officer would consider genuine, they failed to pass it; the Ramseys explained the results were “inconclusive.”