We Have Your Daughter Page 24

  Portion of unsolicited letter to Patsy from Vassar professor she didn’t know saying he knows she didn’t write the ransom note. He was later hired by BPD and said she did write the ransom note.

  At this time, however, Dr. Foster failed to disclose to the Boulder District Attorney that he had not only previously and “unequivocally” concluded that Patsy was innocent, but had written to her that he was so certain she had not written the ransom note that he “would stake his personal reputation” on that conclusion.

  In Dr. Foster’s elaboration of his opinion for Boulder law enforcement officials, he went so far as to say that it was not possible that any individual other than Patsy Ramsey had written the ransom note. He announced his conclusion to a group of investigators from both the Boulder District Attorney’s Office and the Boulder Police Department. Law enforcement officers in attendance said some detectives stood up and cheered and clapped when Foster ended his presentation.

  After Foster had given his presentation, a prosecutor in the Boulder District Attorney’s Office told John’s attorney, Bryan Morgan, about the BPD’s “new and expert” language analyst, and the expert’s conclusion that Patsy had written the note. He concluded by stating that, due to this new development, the BPD’s case against Patsy was gaining momentum.

  At that point, it would have been easy for the Ramsey defense attorneys not to tell the Boulder District Attorney’s Office about Foster’s letter to Patsy in which he stated that he knew she was innocent. The Ramsey attorneys knew that if they withheld that information, it would eventually be publicly disclosed that Foster had duped Boulder law enforcement officials, and that disclosure would cause substantial embarrassment for the police and for the prosecution. Yet the Ramsey attorneys told the attorneys at the District Attorney’s Office about Foster’s 180-degree decision because Morgan stated, “We still wanted them to consider someone other than the Ramseys as their suspects and we thought this show of good faith would help.” Foster was subsequently dropped from the BPD list of expert witnesses and hustled out of Boulder.

  When I wrote to Dr. Foster in 2010 asking for an explanation of his opinions, he replied only after I had sent five e-mails to him. He said he couldn’t comment on his complete reversal because of a confidentiality agreement he had signed with the Boulder Police Department. However, that confidentiality agreement hadn’t covered the letter he’d written to Patsy Ramsey stating that he was certain she had not written the ransom note. Still, Dr. Foster refused to comment and thanked me for “understanding.”

  CHAPTER 19

  THE CASE—BOULDER POLICE DEPARTMENT

  Overview of Boulder from hill to the east of the city. The city is nestled in a valley. © Dan Weaver.

  THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS with all their majestic heights have a thousand different moods that change with the time of day, the angle and intensity of the light, the weather, the season. The Rockies can be vividly serene, welcoming and beautiful. They can also turn menacing, hurling down violent storms that sometimes spin into tornados and rake the eastern plains of Colorado. Winter blizzards and spring storms can bring many feet of snow, creating havoc from the side streets of Front Range towns to Denver International Airport.

  Boulder is very much defined by the Rockies, and not solely as a matter of topography. Along with the city’s signature Flatirons, which rise just to the south and west of Boulder, the Rocky Mountains play a large role in the town’s identity, giving it a Magic-Kingdom sense of isolation that allows residents to perceive themselves as the beneficiaries of a multifaceted grandeur. The great peaks all around, the nearby forests, and the tumbling, clear mountain creek that bisects the city all contribute to the general understanding among residents that they live in a special place.

  Beyond that commonly shared assumption, Boulder is also defined by a liberalism typical of most university towns. To live in Boulder and embrace this outlook is one thing, but to be on the outside looking in or to live in Boulder and fundamentally disagree with a liberal point of view can lead to conflicts and tension on numerous levels. In outside circles, the city had been labeled the “People’s Republic of Boulder” due to long-held public opinion that the people who live here consider themselves to be enlightened, are self-absorbed and/or overly concerned with environmental issues, and prefer not to interact with those who do not share their particular outlook.

  The Boulder Police Department has long operated in a community often perceived by officers as politically out of touch with the nuances of law enforcement. Boulder government leaders do not always seem willing to work with the BPD to accomplish its goals and do not always show public appreciation for BPD efforts by pursuing charges and trials when arrests are made.

  There is a common understanding in the metropolitan Denver area that you have to be from Boulder in order to successfully do business in Boulder. In the mid-1990s, this undercurrent affected every one of the police officers who worked in Boulder, and yet were not from Boulder.

  Virtually all Boulder Police Department officers lived outside city limits at that time because they simply could not afford housing prices in town. Since the late 1970s, Boulder’s growth rate cap limiting the number of new residential units that could be built in the city annually had contributed to skyrocketing housing costs. To some extent, the fact that the city’s police patrolled streets in neighborhoods where they couldn’t afford to live reinforced the disconnect they felt with the townspeople. The people who lived in Boulder weren’t their neighbors.

  As with every police department, BPD had its own culture, and it was one of being outsiders who were isolated and lacked support in the town they were sworn to protect. In early 2002, after several years of small riots on the University of Colorado campus during which college students dragged their old sofas off their porches and set them on fire to protest or celebrate something, the Boulder City Council showed its true colors. Instead of going after the students with arson or criminal mischief charges as the BPD would have preferred, the Boulder City Council simply passed an ordinance forbidding upholstered furniture from being outside, including on a porch. The officers at the Boulder Police Department were stunned.

  That thought process has continued. In early 2014, a Boulder City Councilwoman suggested researching if licensed dogs in Boulder should be required to get a DNA test. The reason? To explore any left-behind canine waste in order to determine which pet owners are not picking up after their dogs in public areas.

  In the mid-1990s, the BPD worked in what Boulderites considered to be their safe “little town.” A few weeks before the Ramsey murder, Boulder Police Chief Tom Koby had actually warned people to please not leave their keys in their cars because vehicles had been stolen right out of driveways.

  Yet at that time Boulder was also the home of high-tech companies, government labs, and a major university with a Nobel Prize winner on staff. One requirement of being hired by the Boulder Police Department was to have a college degree. Until 2001, BPD was organized differently than most others. Under the Boulder police union contract, officers regularly rotated through the various units including patrol, traffic, and investigations, an arrangement that effectively denied officers the ability to gain the expertise and experience they needed to perform their jobs in any department well. Since the Ramsey murder, that structure has changed in order to allow officers longer periods of time in individual units.

  Some of the officers who worked for the Boulder Police Department in December 1996 have said that the department’s culture and its attitude toward the city and its inhabitants affected the first steps taken on the Ramsey murder investigation. Initially, Boulder Commander John Eller wanted to be cautious and considerate with the Ramseys. According to an officer inside the department who was involved in the case, Eller had no homicide experience but was aware of the political risks involved when wealthy people found themselves at the center of a horrendous murder investigation.

  In the first six hours following Patsy Ramsey’s 911 phone ca
ll, when the case was effectively bungled and law enforcement did an about-face from sympathy for the parents to suspicion, the out-of-touch atmosphere at the BPD and the fact that the police were operating in isolation had a dramatic impact on the investigation. Meanwhile, BPD officials’ initial decisions to not personally respond to the media and public about the case helped fuel the building media frenzy. Speculation reigned.

  Boulder Police Chief Mark Beckner and former Chief Tom Koby declined requests to be interviewed about the Ramsey murder investigation for this book. Retired Adams County District Attorney Bob Grant, however, agreed. Adams County is in the northeastern greater Denver metropolitan area. Grant was term-limited out of office in 2005 after fourteen years as district attorney. Since then, he has served as executive director with the Colorado District Attorney’s Council and serves on the board of directors of CASA, court-appointed special advocates. CASA recruits and trains volunteers to assist and represent abused and neglected children in court and other places. Grant was involved in the Ramsey case at the request of then Colorado Governor Roy Romer and Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter, who was told point-blank by Romer to avail himself of outside help.

  “I and three other district attorneys were asked to review the case, be able to consult with Alex and his team and to provide expertise to analyze the investigation. I also dealt with the media and was readily accessible for perspective,” Grant has said. “The four of us met with Boulder Police for their presentation on the case and to consider and coordinate a possible grand jury.”

  Grant is a straightforward and blunt Scots-Irishman who is well known for his many media appearances related to the Ramsey case. As a district attorney, he was all law and order, and defense attorneys who worked with him still speak of him with nostalgia. They liked his tough yet consistent way of dealing with them. Grant was candid, a trait that has stayed with him into retirement.

  “There was a lot of distrust between Boulder Police and the District Attorney’s Office when the Ramsey murder happened,” Grant said. “There is always the possibility of that disconnect in police/prosecutor relations, but there the connection between the two was a festering problem that continued to need attention. Police and prosecutors have to be vigilant about maintaining communications. There are always going to be disagreements, but there has to be a way to air those disagreements productively, and there wasn’t in Boulder at that point.”

  Some law enforcement officers thought that Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter’s constant plea bargains on charges coupled with the documented lack of trials in Boulder represented a form of liberal permissiveness that put “getting along” ahead of getting the end results that the police felt their efforts merited.

  “The reputation of the Boulder District Attorney was that he didn’t try cases,” said Grant. “They had this plea bargain deal where they’d make a deal before charging. ‘We won’t file this charge, but we will file this charge’ kind of thing. The police hated it. But Alex had his finger on the pulse of his community. He understood the community, the voters and the jurors. His decisions were right for the Boulder community, but often didn’t seem right to the Boulder Police Department.”

  While BPD officials didn’t trust Hunter as a matter of course, Boulder prosecutors were deeply concerned with the police department’s flawed efforts that began on the first day of the Ramsey case and impacted almost every aspect of the investigation.

  That privately held opinion was made very public in early 1997, when Boulder First Assistant District Attorney Bill Wise went before the Boulder County Commissioners to ask for money to hire an experienced homicide detective and a full-time deputy DA exclusively for the Ramsey murder investigation. During his presentation, Wise publicly criticized the BPD investigation of the case. In the volatile atmosphere already created by the Ramsey investigation, Wise’s public criticism of the Boulder Police Department poured gasoline on the embers and created a heated blowback from the BPD. Wise was subsequently removed from the case, and retired Colorado Springs Homicide Detective Lou Smit was hired.

  At this early stage in the Ramsey murder investigation, District Attorney Hunter did not have criminal investigators in the true sense. According to a detective familiar with the structure of responsibilities in the Boulder District Attorney’s Office at the time, Hunter’s investigators conducted criminal background checks and made phone call checks, but they were not on-the-scene investigators.

  Grant would not give an opinion about who he thinks killed JonBenét Ramsey. “I was never able to convince myself that it was an inside job with Patsy, John or Burke being responsible. And I was never able to convince myself that it was an intruder.”

  He said detectives from the BPD had theorized that one or both of JonBenét’s parents had killed her. In a scenario painted by Grant with input from former and current police investigators, one can grasp why members of the Boulder Police Department believed as they did:

  • From the BPD’s viewpoint, the people who had been inside the home at the time of the murder would necessarily be the first suspects. This reflects standard procedure in a homicide investigation. However, some of the Ramsey case detectives broke a basic rule of conducting a homicide investigation by not following the evidence. Instead, BPD officials decided that their primary suspects were John and Patsy Ramsey and then looked primarily for evidence that fit that theory. (WHYD Investigative Archive.)

  • BPD officials were concerned about contradictions in John and Patsy’s separate statements about what happened early on Thursday, December 26, 1996. Such contradictions included Patsy not remembering whether she saw the ransom note or JonBenét’s empty bed first, and John and Patsy not knowing whether one or both of them went to Burke’s bedroom. (WHYD Investigative Archive.)

  Ramsey attorneys insisted that Patsy and John Ramsey had both been in shock when they spoke with different Boulder Police Department investigators about these events, and that some contradictions in their statements from that morning were to be expected. Certain that BPD officers had made errors in citing information from their clients, the Ramsey attorneys also asserted that if BPD officials had taken charge immediately after JonBenét’s body was found and conducted formal interviews with John and Patsy at that point, they would have obtained a clear picture of what had transpired. The attorneys also pointed to details related to when Patsy saw the note and her daughter’s empty bedroom that had been described concisely in Detective Linda Arndt’s police report, which states that Patsy saw the ransom note first and then went to her daughter’s room.

  • Confusion also existed as to whether the blanket on which JonBenét’s body was lying when her body was found by her father had been wrapped around her loosely or tightly. If it had been wrapped tightly, this would have signified to experts that someone had been trying to take care of JonBenét after she was killed. This would also signify to the police that at least one of the parents had been involved in the murder. In a July 1998 interrogation of John Ramsey by Chief Deputy District Attorney Mike Kane, who had been appointed to the position by Colorado Governor Roy Romer’s Special Council, and Homicide Detective Lou Smit, who had been hired by Boulder DA Alex Hunter after an extensive vetting process, more was revealed about how JonBenét’s body had been positioned in relation to the blanket. John’s attorney, Bryan Morgan, and an investigator with his office, David Williams, were with John during the interrogation.

  According to the transcript, when questioned by Lou Smit about the blanket, John answered that it “was crossed in front of her as if someone was tucking her in.” He also said with additional questioning that his daughter’s arms had been outside the blanket and raised above her head, and her feet had been uncovered. Further on in the interrogation, when questioned once more about the blanket, John said, “It was like an Indian papoose.” This information was leaked to the media and only hardened the law enforcement’s determination that the Ramseys had been involved in their daughter’s death, because the kill
er had tried to take care of JonBenét after she’d been killed.

  At the time, the Ramsey attorneys asserted that how the blanket was situated could also have indicated that the sexual predator who had killed JonBenét had shown brief remorse and tried to take care of her after she’d died. They added that any blanket theories represented “guessing” by Boulder Police Department officials and asked why John Ramsey would have incriminated himself when he’d been the only one to see how his daughter had been wrapped when he discovered her body? They also noted that a “papoose-style” of wrapping a child in a blanket sometimes encloses the feet as well, which in this case hadn’t been covered.1 The attorneys concluded that there were just too many assumptions being made related to the blanket, that John had been in shock, and that no factual basis existed that would allow anyone to conclude anything about the blanket. Lou Smit later said he believed the blanket had been tossed loosely around JonBenét’s body.

  • “John Ramsey said he’d read a story to both Burke and JonBenét out in the sitting room until 10:30 pm on Christmas night.” (Officer Rick French, Date of Formal Interview 1-10-1997.)

  Officer French wrote this in his first police report. Detective Arndt’s report said that John had read to JonBenét and Burke and then gone to bed. Both reports contradicted later police information that stated John Ramsey had carried JonBenét to bed when the family first arrived home that night, and John played briefly with Burke before they each went to bed.

  • The Boulder Police Department initially suspected John of incest, but there was no prior evidence for that, according to JonBenét’s pediatrician, the coroner and the specialist he brought in from Children’s Hospital in Denver, and the director of the Kempe Child Abuse Center. Other family suspects were considered, but when those didn’t work out because of lack of evidence, police focused on Patsy Ramsey. Some BPD investigators theorized that Patsy had flown into a rage over JonBenét’s possible bedwetting or something else, struck JonBenét, mortally wounding her, and then staged a cover-up that involved the torture, sexual assault and death of her daughter. Others imagined Burke had somehow injured his sister, and his parents covered up for him. Burke weighed 68 pounds as recorded in his medical records from August 1996, four months before his sister’s murder. (WHYD Investigative Archive.)