We Have Your Daughter Page 20

Other friends remember the desperation in the aftermath of JonBenét’s murder. The Ramseys’ close friend and business attorney, Mike Bynum, has said it’s still difficult for him to even think about it. Bynum recalled one of his visits to the Stine home, when Patsy woke up from a nap and called for Burke but her son didn’t answer because he’d gone outside to play.

  “She became so hysterical it was painful to watch,” Bynum said. “She was screaming for him and her face was contorted with horror and we were all running to find out where he was. When they found him playing outside with an adult supervising, Patsy just hugged him and cried. It was very painful to see when she didn’t know even for that one minute where he was.”

  Even now, Bynum gets emotional thinking about how terrible John and Patsy’s grief really was. “It was so awful,” he said. “They could pull it together for a few minutes and then would just break down crying. When you think about them collapsing on the floor of their friend’s house the night after her body was found and falling asleep there, it is just so horrifying to me.”

  The lack of privacy continued with reporters knocking on the Stine family’s front door. “They were even searching through our garbage,” Susan said, “so I poured liquid fish fertilizer in it just to give them pause. The fertilizer is beyond nasty smelling.”

  During the months that the Ramseys spent at the Stine home, the churn of publicity and speculation around JonBenét’s murder continued.

  In February 1997, two officially designed leaks hit the Ramseys with such a double-publicity-story-punch that some within the Boulder District Attorney’s Office and the Boulder Police Department were deeply troubled by them. Even though JonBenét’s pediatrician, the Boulder County Coroner, an expert from Denver’s Children’s Hospital and the Director of the Kempe Child Abuse Center in Denver had stated there had been no ongoing sexual abuse of the child (BPD Reports #9-110, #26-182), two new stories were deliberately put into motion just when momentum on the case publicity had begun to abate. The stories were about incest. One insider who was part of the plan to leak these stories to the media wondered years later if this should have been done. “We’re better than to do this, but we did,” he said. According to this source, a small but consistent number of people were involved with continual calculated leaks from both the Boulder District Attorney’s Office and the Boulder Police Department, and “they did a lot of damage.” This source was highly placed in the Ramsey murder investigation.

  The first story:

  February 20, 1997, (Daily Camera)

  POLICE EYE OTHER DAUGHTER’S DEATH

  It was a cruel leak. John’s oldest daughter, Beth, and her fiancé were killed in an auto accident in January 1992, when their car was hit by a semi-trailer truck on a wintry road in Illinois. The article stated that the Boulder Police Department had asked for a copy of Beth’s autopsy and interviewed some of Beth’s friends in case she had mentioned to them any problems she’d had with her father. They actually interviewed twelve friends and acquaintances, traveling to at least four different cities to do so and generating fourteen related police reports. (BPD Reports #1-455, #1-521, #5-3589, #1-397, #1-520, #8-80, #5-2638, #1-424, #1-457, #1-459, #5-2169, #1-472, #1-525, #1-527.) Two close friends of Beth’s interviewed were asked by the BPD and told them there was “no indication of sexual impropriety in the family.” Others said they didn’t know. This part of the investigation led nowhere, other than to leaked headlines.

  The implied accusation that incest had led to JonBenét’s murder was spread further in the days following the publication of the Daily Camera story on multiple talk shows and blogs. CBS Evening News even broadcast the story. Such “coverage” was suggestive, misleading and only served to further distract from the investigation of a child’s murder.

  The second story:

  February 27, 1997 (Daily Camera)

  EX-MISS AMERICA INTERVIEWED TWICE IN RAMSEY INVESTIGATION

  This leak, published just one week later, made it clear what the finely tuned incest publicity campaign against John Ramsey had been designed to accomplish. According to this article, the Boulder Police Department had interviewed Marilyn Van Derbur Atler of Denver about the Ramsey case. A graduate of the University of Colorado in Boulder who was crowned Miss America in 1958, Atler was described by the Daily Camera as “an outspoken victim of incest.” This was due to Atler’s long history as an advocate for incest and child abuse survivors who spoke out publicly about her own personal story of alleged abuse by her father. Boulder DA Alex Hunter verified publicly that he had also spoken with Atler about the Ramsey case.

  Following the publication of the February 27 Daily Camera story, other newspapers as well as television and radio stations interviewed Atler extensively, contributing to public speculation that she had been contacted by the BPD and the Boulder DA’s Office because both had reason to believe John Ramsey was guilty of incest and, for that reason, had likely been involved in his daughter’s murder. Such conclusions made sense to many, especially when the Daily Camera reported that “Boulder city spokesperson Kelvin McNeill confirmed that Atler met with detectives as a ‘noted expert in several areas that may or may not be of interest to our investigation.’”

  “You’ve made the worst accusation you can make about a father,” said Patsy’s attorney, Pat Burke. “That was unforgiveable. They were jerks for having done this.”

  John’s attorney, Bryan Morgan agreed. “It was repulsive beyond words.”

  At the start of a nationally broadcast press conference in February 1997, Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter walked firmly to a podium and looked at the assembled media and their lights, cameras and recorders. He paused, then said, “This may not be a good sign that I already need water.”

  Hunter then continued with, “As I watched the dawn arrive this morning, I was doing my workout, which you don’t allow me to do anymore midday, and I had the local morning paper, the two Denver papers, to see what had transpired about this case overnight.”

  Reporters looked at each other in amazement. This was a live national news conference about the unsolved death of a six-year-old child and its myriad investigative problems, and the DA was starting off with a joke and a chat about his exercise habits. It was in such moments that DA Hunter revealed how out of sync he was with the seriousness of the Ramsey murder investigation. Even though he did eventually change his message to one that was more appropriate for a somber news conference, his initial performance was a strange thing to witness. “It’s very Alex-in-Boulder,” remarked one local Boulder reporter to another reporter.

  The battles that Ramsey attorneys were waging with the Boulder Police Department and the Boulder District Attorney’s Office were continual and troubling. For example: In a previously undisclosed March 4, 1997, defense letter to BPD Chief Tom Koby, John Ramsey’s attorney, Bryan Morgan, asked why Koby’s detectives had used certain questions and made particular statements “during witness interviews.” Morgan said several of the Ramsey witnesses who had been questioned by the Boulder Police Department had relayed concerns to the Ramsey attorneys related to the slant of the BPD detectives’ questions. Morgan said the “statements and allegations by detectives were untrue and designed to smear the Ramseys.” Such questions included:

  “Do you know the Ramseys have named you a suspect in their daughter’s murder?”

  “Do you know anything about an affair John Ramsey had in Amsterdam?”

  “Is John Ramsey having an affair?”

  “We’ve heard that John Ramsey has a split personality; that he can be very quiet and then blow up?”

  “Why won’t the family support John Andrew Ramsey’s alibi?”2

  No prior knowledge or foundation had existed to support the use of such questions in these interviews. These types of questions also would not lead to the development of accurate information and further the search for new evidence in the case. In short, they were not valid.

  Bits of information and misinformation related to the mur
der of JonBenét Ramsey continued to ricochet from one media outlet to another. Even details that were wrong—or perhaps deliberately calibrated as a false leak in order to achieve a certain impact—lost nothing in velocity as they traveled.

  One such story was repeated so often it created an international sensation and a basis upon which many people decided the Ramseys had indeed been involved in killing their daughter.

  The story came from police “sources” and was initially reported in the Rocky Mountain News by reporter Charlie Brennan. It hit driveways and front porches the morning of March 11, 1997:

  SNOW AT RAMSEY HOUSE LACKED FOOTPRINTS: ABSENCE OF TRACKS AMONG FIRST CLUES THAT LED POLICE TO SUSPECT MEMBERS OF FAMILY

  “That is one of the earliest details that caused investigators to focus their attention on the slain girl’s family, police sources said.”

  Yet, according to several different sources of information, the south sidewalks and patio of the Ramsey home were clear of snow on the morning of December 26, 1996.

  The following portion of a Boulder Police Department search warrant affidavit dated March 1997, states what the second officer on the scene, Sergeant Paul Reichenbach, saw regarding snow and grass and footprints. He was the first law enforcement officer to search outside the Ramsey home:

  Sergeant Reichenbach states in his report that he had arrived at the Ramsey home at approximately 0600 hours on December 26, and that he had examined the exterior of the Ramsey home as well as the yard. Sergeant Reichenbach noted that the air temperature was approximately 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Sergeant Reichenbach noted in his report that there was a very light dusting of snow and frost on the exposed grass in the yard outside the Ramsey home. Some of the grass and yard was covered with snow from previous snowfalls and this snow was described as being crusty and measuring one-two inches deep.

  Sgt. Reichenbach states that he saw no fresh footprints in any of the snow or in the frost on the grass. (BPD Search Warrant Affidavit, March 1997.)

  The concentration of this portion of the search warrant affidavit is on snow and frost in the “grass and yard.” The sidewalks and driveway are not mentioned in the portion of the affidavit obtained. But they are in this BPD police report:

  “Sgt. Reichenbach does not believe there was snow on the sidewalks or driveway.” (BPD Report #5-3916.)

  In Detective Linda Arndt’s original police report about activities at the Ramsey home on December 26, 1996, she wrote:

  “Sgt. Reichenbach said there was a light dusting of snow on the ground when he arrived at the Ramsey residence. Sgt. Reichenbach did not notice any footprints or other tracks in the snow. Sgt. Reichenbach personally checked the exterior of the Ramsey residence.” (Detective Linda Arndt—Date of Report 1-8-1997.)

  But what about the sidewalks? There was no mention of them in this report, either.

  Exterior crime scene photographs were taken that Thursday morning, according to police records. One detective on the case told me he and an attorney from the Boulder District Attorney’s Office had seen the photographs from that morning and they showed no snow on the driveway or southern sidewalks.3

  John Ramsey’s attorney, Bryan Morgan, said he and John were shown a photograph by police from the morning of December 26 during an interrogation. The photograph was taken early that morning, they were told, and showed the south entrance and the south door of the home, the round patio outside John’s home office and the driveway on the west end of the house. The sidewalks and driveway in the photos were dry and had no snow on them, according to both Morgan and Ramsey.

  JonBenét had ridden her new Christmas bicycle on the dry south-side patio, according to separate statements from each of her parents. Because the porch had been dry the afternoon of December 25, her bicycle left no tracks near the grated window well located above the broken window that some would later consider a possible entry point for an intruder.

  Documents obtained from two local weather reporting stations in the Denver metropolitan area said there was “no precipitation” in Boulder overnight from December 25 to December 26. At the time, the closest weather information was from Jefferson County Airport, which is located approximately fourteen miles from Boulder.4

  A meteorologist interviewed by the Boulder Police Department said if there had been any snow overnight from December 25 to December 26, “the snow probably would not have stuck to the pavement because of the high daytime temperature because the pavement would tend to hold the heat in.” (BPD Report #26-263.) He was referring to the temperatures on Christmas Day and on the next day, December 26, 1996. Another meteorologist told the BPD “there was insufficient information to tell what the condition of the ground would have been around the Ramsey residence on December 25, 1996.” (BPD Report #1-1100.)

  In the only judicial review of the evidence to date, US Court District Judge Julie Carnes analyzed the evidence during depositions in a civil trial and, in March 2003, wrote a 93-page report that concluded, “Contrary to media reports that had discredited an intruder theory based on the lack of a ‘footprint in the snow,’ there was no snow covering the sidewalks and walkways to defendants’ home on the morning of December 26, 1996.” (SMF 139; PSMF 139 Wolf v. Ramsey, Judge Julie Carnes.)

  Therefore, a person walking along these paths would have left no footprints.

  When I interviewed Rocky Mountain News reporter Charlie Brennan about his “footprints story,” he said he did “not regret doing the March 1997 story.” From what he knew at the time, “it was correct.” He said, “I thought my police sources believed it to be true.” The story was published two and a half months after the murder of JonBenét Ramsey. The police sources, if they were intimately involved in the case, would have known that the south sidewalks had been dry the morning of December 26, 1996. Brennan did not get the other side of the story from the Ramseys or from their attorneys before publishing his article.

  As with so many other leaks from inside the Ramsey murder investigation, the “no footprints in the snow” leak served the essential purpose of keeping the public in step with the Boulder Police Department’s theory that JonBenét’s murder had to have been an inside job.

  And the false report became an urban and international legend.

  In February 2011, fourteen years after JonBenét’s death, CNN reported incorrectly that one of the details in the case that had pointed to the Ramseys was the “fact” that there had been “no footprints in the snow” outside the Ramsey home on December 26, 1996.5

  Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter knew he had big troubles with the Ramsey case. He liked to talk, muse and try ideas out on some people, including reporters. To me, he’d say it was off the record for now, but gesture and with a smile say, “But you can use it in ten years, if there isn’t a trial by then.”

  “I don’t know how to get through to Commander Eller and his detectives,” he said to me in one 1997 conversation. “They are so stuck on their Ramsey theory, and I’m not seeing it yet either way. There isn’t enough for a case.” But then he would vacillate and tell others that either Patsy or John should be the focus of the case.

  The spectacle was affecting Hunter’s reputation, and that was something he wouldn’t tolerate. His strategy was to consult with some “top nationally known guns” to help in the investigation. In February and March of 1997, Hunter also decided to hire his own detective to work with his attorneys and with the Boulder Police Department.

  Interviews began with the goal of finding that detective. Investigators from the BPD and the Boulder DA’s Office were so alienated from each other, however, that they wouldn’t even sit near each other when interviewing prospective candidates for the new job. Retired Denver Homicide Lieutenant Tom Haney remembers walking into a conference room for his interview. “The district attorney people were huddled up on one end of the room and the police detectives were on the other end, and they weren’t talking,” Haney said. The two agencies weren’t headed into distrust and dislike, they were already ther
e.

  Ultimately, the two agencies couldn’t reach a consensus about the new hire despite interviewing thirty people who had applied for the job. Finally, one of the BPD detectives suggested retired Detective Lou Smit, who had worked homicides for thirty years with the Colorado Springs Police Department and the El Paso County, Colorado Sheriff’s Department. In 1995, Smit had also solved the high-profile child kidnapping and murder case of Heather Dawn Church. Heather had been thirteen years old when she was kidnapped in 1991 from her home at night in an area known as Black Forest north of Colorado Springs. Her dad had been the main suspect. Smit found a fingerprint on a window screen where the suspect had entered the home and kidnapped, then killed, Heather. Robert Charles Browne confessed and was sentenced to life in prison. Brown also confessed to killing a total of forty-eight people, but that was never proven. Only a portion of Heather’s skeleton was ever recovered.

  Even though Smit hadn’t applied for the job in Boulder, Hunter hired him at the suggestion of the BPD detective and with the approval of the Boulder Police Department. He also expected the plainspoken cop would be a huge help in the Ramsey investigation. Hunter counted on things getting better. He wrote a letter to Smit defining his assignment as “concentrating the totality of his energy and ability on inventorying and organizing and analyzing the investigative file developed by the Boulder Police Department concerning the investigation into the murder of JonBenét Ramsey.” (BPD Report #30-446.)

  “I felt from what I had read and knew about the case, none of it first-hand, that someone in this family was guilty,” Smit would later say while reflecting on his first days at his new job in March 1997. “But after spending months organizing the police files, the evidence just wasn’t there. I also made a point to befriend the Ramseys to get to know them better. It’s how I worked as a detective on at least a hundred cases; to get as close to the suspects as I possibly could to get information and perspective for the case. One morning, the Ramseys saw me outside their old home. They stopped, talked and we even prayed together. You can learn a lot that way, and I needed to get to know them better. As the months went on, I continued to review and coordinate evidence from police reports. I became convinced it didn’t point to the Ramseys. It pointed to an intruder. My theory wasn’t popular with the Ramsey case investigators.”