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  • Some items used in the murder were not found in the home:

  • Police never found an unused section of the rope used to bind JonBenét. (WHYD Archive.)

  • The roll of black duct tape vanished. Only a torn-off section covering her mouth was left behind. It had been torn on both ends, according to crime scene photos. The killer either took the roll of tape out of the home, disposed of it in some manner or only brought or had the amount of tape used. (WHYD Investigative Archive.)

  • Seven blank pages from the middle of the tablet used to write the ransom note that were also ripped out of the tablet were never found. Detective Smit regarded them as possible practice pages for the ransom note because of their original location in the tablet.

  • The unused portion of the paintbrush that was part of the garrote was not found. (WHYD Investigative Archive.)

  • Police never determined what weapon was used to fracture JonBenét’s skull and whether it came from inside or outside the home. (WHYD Investigative Archive.)

  • Investigators never located a stun gun or an object that definitely caused the marks on JonBenét’s skin. (WHYD Investigative Archive.)

  • The cloth or fabric used to wipe off and clean up JonBenét’s body was never found. (WHYD Investigative Archive.)

  • The liquid used to clean and wipe off her body was never found. (WHYD Investigative Archive.)

  • No other beaver hairs were found in the home, except for the one on the duct tape. (WHYD Investigative Archive.)

  • There were no hairs in the home that matched the animal hairs found on JonBenét’s hands. (WHYD Investigative Archive.)

  • Items matching the brown cotton fibers on JonBenét, the paintbrush, duct tape and ligature were not found elsewhere in the home. (WHYD Investigative Archive.)

  • The two different bits of paper found on JonBenét’s cheek were not matched to anything inside the home. (WHYD Investigative Archive.)

  So how were all those items removed from the Ramsey home?

  By mid-1998, residents of Boulder were pressuring their police department and district attorney’s office to get the hordes of media with their negative publicity out of Boulder. Eighteen months after the murder of JonBenét Ramsey, however, that would not happen because, according to one attorney familiar with the case, nothing had worked well enough in the investigation to provide enough evidence to build a foundation for a prosecution.

  Former Adams County District Attorney Bob Grant has said that, given a choice, he’d much rather have been a defense attorney than a prosecutor on the Ramsey case. He said he didn’t ever expect there to be a prosecution and called it a “very difficult” investigation.

  In spite of continuing problems with the Boulder Police Department, Lou Smit supported them publicly in July 1998. When John Ramsey was interrogated again by the prosecution side with Michael Kane and Lou Smit present, Smit (whom the family trusted) told John he understood John’s concerns about his family being targeted. He also, however, stood up for the Boulder Police Department, telling John, “I know there’s been a lot of focus on you, but I looked at every one of those reports. There’s been a lot of [police] work done in other ways. And I know from your perspective it seems like that … but they have done a lot of work.”

  Two months later, though, Smit resigned from the Boulder DA’s office with a public letter saying the case was focused in the wrong direction—on the Ramseys.

  CHAPTER 20

  ADDITIONAL EVIDENCE

  Picture from hired Santa Claus McReynolds to Burke at the 1996 Ramsey Christmas party. Front and back.

  MYSTERY TRUMPS FACT in the case of JonBenét Ramsey’s murder.

  Parts of the JonBenét Ramsey Murder Book Index and the WHYD Investigative Archive offer a compilation of ominous and detailed facts and evidence ranging from excerpts of interviews with registered sexual predators to notations about bagels. “The victim advocates left the residence to get bagels, brought them back and served them to individuals in the residence with some fruit,” says one part of the WHYD Investigative Archive.

  This material also offers an organized and invaluable summary of: data and quotes from police reports; portions from formal police interviews of officers involved in the Ramsey murder case; interviews with witnesses from the morning of JonBenét’s disappearance; lists of evidence collected; crime scene photographs; summations of interviews with family, friends, neighbors and acquaintances of the Ramseys; notes on the emotional conditions of John and Patsy and their children; a compilation of possible evidence found and admitted into BPD custody; detailed lists of people who could be called as witnesses and why, in case of a trial. There’s also a list of all the officers in the Boulder Police Department who were involved in the case and brief summaries of their participation. Interviews with key people in the case over the years and their perspectives are also included. Innumerable clues point in every direction, and there is factual data that is irreplaceable. While most of the material is based on documentation, some is just plain strange.

  For example, the unusual connections with Santa Claus.

  At every Christmas party at the Ramseys, the home was filled with several Christmas trees, lots of presents, decorative angels, a myriad of colors coming from brightly lit and shining decorations, holiday excitement, lots of little kids and Santa Claus.

  “This was the best of times with children,” Patsy observed. “I wanted to continue their excitement and wonderment. It was just plain fun. We [had] met a lot of parents whose children went to school with Burke and JonBenét, and so we invited them and their children, too. It was magical. What I loved the best, I think, was the laughter of the children.”

  For two years at the Ramseys’ annual Christmas children’s party, Santa Claus was Bill McReynolds, a retired University of Colorado journalism professor hired by Patsy to play the part. But behind the jolly Santa was a chilling story.

  On December 26, 1974, twenty-two years before JonBenét was reported kidnapped on December 26, 1996, the nine-year-old daughter of Janet McReynolds, the wife of Bill McReynolds, was kidnapped. (BPD Report #1-568, Source.) Janet’s daughter and a friend were taken to an unknown location, where Janet’s daughter was forced to watch her friend being sexually molested. Both children were then released. Two years later, Janet McReynolds wrote a book that became a play in which a girl is sexually assaulted and tortured in a basement. The victim in the story later dies in a hospital. (BPD Report # 1-645.)

  Is all of this linked to JonBenét’s murderer or just a macabre coincidence?

  The Boulder Police Department investigated McReynolds as a suspect because they found pornography in his possession and because of the similar events that had happened to his step-daughter. (BPD Report #1-580.) No pornography was ever found in the Ramsey home, according to two separate housekeepers and police investigators. (BPD Reports #5-983, #5-1331, #5-2164.)

  Police took hair and handwriting samples from both Bill and Janet McReynolds. Their DNA did not match the foreign DNA left behind on JonBenét. The police also did not consider McReynolds a viable suspect because of his weakened physical condition from recent heart surgery and because one of his lungs had been accidentally punctured and partially removed. (BPD Reports #1-376, 1-576.) McReynolds and his wife moved away from Boulder after JonBenét’s murder because of rumored suspicions that he might have been involved. He died in 2002 from a heart attack.

  Then there is the statement from the mother of a friend of JonBenét’s. The woman said that on Christmas Eve day in 1996, JonBenét said Santa had told her he was going to make a secret visit to her after Christmas. (BPD Reports #1-1874, #26-144, #1-41, #1-162, #1-204, #1-304, #1-2622, #5-297, #5-371, #5-2202) Could that Secret Santa have been the killer and someone JonBenét knew? Another mother also stated to BPD investigators that JonBenét had told a playmate about a Secret Santa. (BPD Report #1-1149.)

  With regard to physical evidence found at or near the Ramsey family’s home and noted in the arch
ives, Boulder Police Department officials remain unsure whether some of it was related to the case:

  • Two BPD detectives who had “measured the three crawl spaces in the basement of the Ramsey home” (BPD #1-137) found an unidentified canvas bag in one of the crawl spaces. (BPD Report #2-16.) That would support those who believed an intruder could have hidden in one of the three Ramsey home crawl spaces.

  • An earring was found by a BPD police officer along the curb directly in front of the Ramsey home a day after JonBenét’s body was discovered. (BPD Report #2-16, #1-104.)

  • A broken Christmas ornament was found in the wine cellar storage area where the Ramseys stored some of their Christmas decorations and where JonBenét’s body was found. (BPD Report #3-143.)

  • A red pocket knife was discovered near the broken ornament. (BPD Reports #2-17, #1-104.)

  • A neighbor who lived a few homes away from the Ramseys found a latex glove in her trashcan in the alley. (BPD Report #1-1924.) She didn’t know how it had gotten there. (Latex gloves are used by law enforcement officials to avoid contaminating evidence with their fingerprints.) The glove, if part of the case, could have been used by an intruder. Or it could have been discarded there by a BPD officer. (BPD Report #2-37.)

  • A neighbor reported “someone dropped off a high-tech [sic] hiking boot on New Year’s Eve in the front of home on the front walk.” (BPD Report #1-1221, Source.)

  • Boulder Detective Jane Harmer contacted that same neighbor and “received a high-tech [sic]hiking boot and cord.” (BPD Report #1-1221.)

  • According to Colorado Bureau of Investigation reports, no fingerprints were found on the black duct tape that had covered JonBenét’s mouth, on the broken paint brush or on the black felt-tip pen suspected to be the instrument used to write the ransom note. (BPD Report #3-45.)

  • On February 13, 1998, photos of a bound and gagged Barbie doll that was left in the yard of the Ramsey residence were sent anonymously to the Boulder District Attorney’s office with a letter postmarked Hickory, North Carolina. (BPD Report #33-1874.)

  Near the time of JonBenét’s murder, there were reports of suspicious activity in the Boulder area that also may or may not have been related to the crime:

  • In November 1996, a man was reported to be exposing himself outside High Peaks Elementary where JonBenét and Burke Ramsey went to school. (BPD Report #5-3153.)

  • On November 16 and December 8, 1996, two separate people in Boulder with no known connections to the Ramseys reported to police what sounded like someone knocking on their basement windows. (BPD Reports #21-60, #21-62.)

  • Between December 12 and December 25, 1996, police investigated a series of home break-ins in the northwest part of Boulder on a case called “The Midnight Burglar.” Police did not relate the burglaries to the Ramsey case. Most of the residents were home and sleeping during the break-ins. The burglars, who usually took jewelry, credit cards and cash, were able to enter fourteen homes, most of which were occupied, without discovery. (WHYD Investigative Archive.)

  • Three days before Christmas 1996, a congregation member at the Ramseys’ church reported to police that another attendee had said to him, “Don’t you just want to strangle her?” The congregation member had felt the man was referring to JonBenét Ramsey, who was at the church with her mother at the time. The churchgoer said he had seen the attendee near the Ramsey home the previous summer. Police later learned the man who had made the report was on heavy anti-psychotic medication. (BPD Report #5-1942.)

  • The Sunday before the murder, a man representing himself as a process server arrived at another man’s home in Boulder, told the absent man’s girlfriend “these aren’t bad papers, they’re good papers,” and added, “he’ll want them.” The alleged process server never returned. The absent man’s mother, who was also at the home, envisioned that the alleged process server had been casing the home. (BPD Report #21-63.)

  • On Christmas Day 1996, someone inside a Ramsey family friend’s home noticed that a Jaguar convertible drove by that home at least five times. The Ramseys joined close friends for dinner inside that home on Christmas Day night. (BPD Report # 26-125.)

  • That same evening, a Ramsey neighbor saw a person outside the Ramsey house. The person was described in a police report as a “tall thin blond male wearing glasses [and] thought to be John Andrew.” (BPD Reports #1-690, #5-690.) It was later established by the Boulder Police Department that John Andrew Ramsey had been in Atlanta for Christmas with his sister and mother at the time. Another police report states that “an unknown neighbor supposedly saw a person outside the door of the Ramsey house (during the night).” (BPD Report #1-771, Source.)

  • Another Ramsey neighbor “stated that she heard one loud incredible scream [that] was the loudest most terrifying scream she had ever heard. It was obviously from a child and lasted from three to five seconds at which time it stopped abruptly. She thought surely the parents would hear that scream. The scream came from across the street south of the Ramsey residence.” It happened “between midnight and two AM” the morning of December 26, 1996. (BPD Reports #1-1390, #1-174, #1-175.) This neighbor lived across the street and one home south of the Ramseys. The scream was first reported publicly, and then a BPD detective interviewed the woman, who said she actually heard it on January 3, 1997.

  Another neighbor who lived south of the Ramsey home contacted a BPD detective on December 31, 1996 because of the scream the first neighbor had heard. This neighbor said she had also heard a scream. She was interviewed on February 26, 1997. (BPD Reports #1-174, #1-481, #1-1548.)

  A separate BPD report stated that, “According to Burke, he woke up at about 11:30 [p.m. on December 25, 1996] because he heard the water heater squeaking a little. Did not hear any screams.” (BPD Report #5-100.)

  Audio experts hired by the Ramsey defense attorneys conducted tests inside the Ramsey home and concluded a scream from the basement “would not have been heard” on the third floor but could have been heard by a neighbor because an exterior basement vent could have amplified the sound. (WHYD Investigative Archive.)

  The intruder theory related to the murder of JonBenét Ramsey needed an explanation for how someone might get into the house. Evidence that might provide such an explanation includes:

  • John and Patsy Ramsey had given several keys to subcontractors (BPD Reports #1-6505, #1-1264), friends and neighbors (BPD Report #1-1104), most of which were not returned. The Ramsey family did not keep an accurate count of the keys they gave out. Several Boulder Police Department reports indicate that investigators talked with more than thirty-five people outside the family about whether they had keys to the home. (JonBenét Ramsey Murder Book Index.)

  Also: “Patsy Ramsey while preparing for the tour of homes openly told a variety of people where a key was hidden outside the home under a statue.” (BPD Reports #5-3920, #5-3921.) The key was not found during a check for it after JonBenét’s murder.

  “There are literally hundreds of people who have been through that house.” (BPD Report # 5-421.) In a reference to the Ramsey Home Tour—Christmas 1994, another police report states, “About a thousand people went through her house that weekend.” (BPD Report #5-331.) “1994, December—The Ramsey home was on a Christmas tour with house captains in charge of the volunteers. There were approximately 10 volunteers every hour in the house. Printed flyers are in the basement with the names of all the domestic help people.” (BPD Report #1-203.)

  • The Ramsey housekeeper plus a long-time babysitter both said the family left some doors unlocked and never used the alarm. (WHYD Investigative Archive.)

  • The Ramsey housekeeper did not remember anything about the broken glass in the train room, the scuff mark on the wall or cleaning up glass underneath the broken window. (BPD Report #1-1068.) (BPD Reports #1-101, #1-90 re: scuff mark on the wall.) The housekeeper’s husband “supposedly washed the windows at Thanksgiving time and supposedly went down in the basement and washed the basement win
dows.” (BPD Report #5-29.) “Last time [housekeeper’s husband] was there was around Thanksgiving. Cleaned all of the windows inside and out.” (BPD Report #5-607.)

  In the months following the Ramsey murder, tip line phone calls to the Boulder Police Department resulted in many leads. BPD officers considered most of them false.

  • Several people claiming to be psychic called the telephone tip line with tips ranging from “Sam did it” (BPD Report #1-1535) and the “parents are involved” (BPD Report #1-1678) to the “possible involvement of [a] John Andrew look-alike and a female.” (BPD

  Report #25-92.) BPD officials were unable to determine who “Sam” might be.

  • An unidentified female called Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter’s home phone in October 1997 and left a message saying, “I did it” and “I want to confess.” (BPD Report #26-244.)

  • An inmate incarcerated in the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta wrote the following to the Boulder Police Department:

  Detective you do not have a family member or a terrorist killer here. You have a very specialized pedophile. He is sadistic and he is a killer who only preys on young girls. It’s obvious to me. I’ve been there but hidden to others. (BPD Report #8-141.)

  Atlanta is where John and Patsy Ramsey had spent most of their married lives.

  This was information typical of the Ramsey case: unusual, possibly connected, and impossible to definitively attach to the case.