We Have Your Daughter Page 33

  Defendants further aver that the undisputed physical evidence is not consistent with an “accidental killing” followed by staging … but instead is more consistent with a theory that the intruder subdued JonBenét in her bedroom and then took her to the basement, where she was sexually assaulted and subsequently murdered. First, JonBenét’s body was found bound with complicated and sophisticated bondage devices, namely neatly-made rope slipknots and a garrote designed to give control to the user … The parties agree that such devices necessarily were made by someone with expertise in bondage … While it is certainly possible that defendants possessed such unusual and specialized skills, there is no evidence that establishes this fact. Obviously, if defendants lacked the skills to fashion the bondage device, then it necessarily had to be an intruder who crafted the implement.

  Of course, plaintiff’s primary theory, taken from Detective

  Steve Thomas’s book, is that Mrs. Ramsey murdered her daughter and staged the scene. According to this theory, Mr. Ramsey becomes complicit only the next day, after the Note was discovered, when he realized that the handwriting on the Note was his wife’s … Under this proposed timeline, he would not have been involved in making the bondage device.

  Although most of Detective Smit’s conclusions derive from his analysis of physical evidence, he has also testified that he has been unable to find any motive for defendants to murder their daughter … Absent from the defendants’ family history is any evidence of criminal conduct, sexual abuse, drug or alcohol abuse or violent behavior … In addition, there was no evidence that JonBenét’s bed was wet on the night of her murder.

  Defendants point to evidence from the autopsy report indicating that a stun gun was used on JonBenét … Because it is logical to assume that JonBenét would struggle against an attacker she did not already know, the use of a stun gun helps to explain why no evidence of a struggle was found in any of the bedrooms in defendants’ home. Further, defendants state that they have never owned nor operated a stun gun … In addition, no stun gun was ever located at defendants’ home, nor is there any evidence that defendants have ever owned such a gun. Further, the parties agree that a stun gun could be used and not heard in other rooms of a house.

  Plaintiff does not agree that a stun gun was used, however, arguing that the evidence establishing the same is inconclusive. Yet although plaintiff disputes that a stun gun was used in the murder, he has failed to produce any evidence to suggest what caused the burn-like marks on JonBenét.

  Admittedly, it is not unprecedented for parents to kill their children, sometimes even brutally. Yet plaintiff’s theory of the motivation for the crime—that Mrs. Ramsey accidentally hit JonBenét’s head on a hard object, presumed she was dead, and then tried to stage a hoax kidnapping—seems at odds with his belief that although Mrs. Ramsey later became aware that JonBenét was alive, she nonetheless proceeded to garrote, torture, and sexually assault her child. If Mrs. Ramsey had accidentally hit her child’s head, one would think that, upon becoming aware that the child was still alive, the mother would have been just as likely to call an ambulance, as to commit a depraved torture/murder of the child.

  Detective Smit states JonBenét was a “pedophile’s dream come true” … JonBenét received considerable public attention as “Little Miss Colorado” and through several beauty pageants in which she participated … On December 6, 1996, three weeks before the murder, she was in the Lights of December Parade, an event thousands of people attended.

  When she threw out the lawsuit, Judge Carnes faulted the Boulder Police Department and former detective Steve Thomas and censured the plaintiff’s attorney, Darnay Hoffman.

  Judge Carnes explained only once why she wrote the ruling. In 2009, in an article for The National Law Journal, “Fulton County Daily Report,” she commented on the Ramsey case, saying the media “had played the story very differently.”

  “What it teaches,” she added, “is that drawing broad information based on very limited and selective evidence is a very dangerous thing to do.”1

  On January 1, 2009, Federal Judge Julie Carnes was promoted to Chief Federal Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.

  Patsy and John Ramsey read the decision and were encouraged. Patsy said, “Finally someone in authority at the highest level knew we didn’t kill our daughter.” John reflected, “I wonder if it will make a difference with Boulder police and cause them to rethink their theories about us.” Years later he added, “It didn’t make a difference to them. They were still after us as our daughter’s killers.”

  CHAPTER 26

  WHO?

  Hi-Tec boot print found in wine/storage cellar next to JonBenét’s body. Courtesy Boulder Police and Boulder County District Attorney.

  ONE OF THE MOST PERPLEXING MYSTERIES about the killing of JonBenét Ramsey is the absolute dichotomy between the style and length of the rambling ransom note and the seemingly precise, methodical way in which the six-year-old was tortured and killed.

  Who would write a note that was two and a half pages long, possibly using quotes from movies about kidnappings, who wasn’t particularly sophisticated, yet included words like attaché with the accent correctly placed? Who would also have shown no great anger in the note, and why would they write it at all if in fact no actual kidnapping was planned?

  Who would make a garrote with unusual knots and use it to slowly strangle a child to unconsciousness, taking every last breath from her and then bringing her back, only to strangle her a second time? And was the garrote used both times? Something was pulled so tightly that it not only left two different rope furrows/ligatures in the skin on her neck, but left the rope embedded in her neck.

  Who would sexually penetrate a six-year-old with a wooden object? Who would hit her so hard in the head that a portion of her skull caved in and an 8.5-inch crack was left in her skull and would have left her with only minutes to live according to two coroners on the case?

  What was the motive? Was it a sexual homicide, a kidnapping gone wrong, an accident or a genuine kidnapping attempt? Why was JonBenét tortured and killed? Only the killer likely knows.

  (The profiles and psychological background of the possible killers in the different scenarios presented in this chapter come from discussions and interviews with psychologists, forensic psychiatrists, forensic coroners, behavioral specialists, profilers and homicide investigators.)

  Let’s look at the strongest possibilities of who that killer might have been by looking at what evidence is known. Some evidence is presented here for the first time:

  SCENARIO #1

  PATSY RAMSEY KILLED HER DAUGHTER, JONBENÉT

  Patsy was tired and in bed. It had been a long and fun Christmas Day, but her family had arrived home late, and they all needed to be up early for a trip to Michigan. John, who had taken a sleeping pill after playing with Burke and putting their son to bed, was asleep in bed beside Patsy.

  Patsy heard JonBenét cry out for her. She knew she was the one who needed to get up to attend to her daughter, but getting out of bed was almost more than she could bear. She became angry. Finally, she got up and went to JonBenét’s room to see why her daughter was crying.

  At this point, something happened that led Patsy to become enraged with her daughter.

  A variety of possible situations in this scenario have been considered by law enforcement officials since JonBenét was found murdered. But the case evidence never supported most of those initial theories. According to one theory, JonBenét had wet her bed, and Patsy lost control and eventually murdered her daughter because of her daughter’s accident. That theory was questioned for various reasons, including the fact that it was contradicted by evidence—including the presence of fibers from JonBenét’s clothing on her sheets that indicated those sheets (which showed no sign that a child had recently urinated on them) had not been changed during any kind of cover-up attempt.

  Did Patsy learn John was assaulting their daughter
that night and hit her daughter for this reason? Not according to the evidence. JonBenét’s pediatrician, the coroner and a colleague of the coroner with firsthand knowledge of JonBenét’s physical condition all said there had been no ongoing sexual abuse. JonBenét’s teachers also reported no signs of suspected physical or sexual abuse.

  What about the pineapple, grapes and cherries found in JonBenét’s stomach during her autopsy? Discussions about when JonBenét had eaten these foods and how long it had taken her to digest them ran rampant in the months following her murder. Did Patsy become so furious over something to do with JonBenét and the food she’d eaten that she hit her daughter? A small bowl of pineapple was found in the Ramsey kitchen on the Thursday morning of JonBenét’s disappearance. The bowl had Burke’s and Patsy’s fingerprints on it. Patsy would later tell Boulder Police Department investigators that she had not fed JonBenét pineapple at any time on Christmas Day or that evening, and that her sleeping daughter had been taken out of the family’s car and put to bed upon their arrival home Christmas night. Patsy also said that JonBenét and Burke were allowed to get food from the refrigerator whenever they were hungry, so she may not have known about JonBenét getting such a snack. After JonBenét’s autopsy, many different estimates on how long it would take to digest the fruit were offered, but no definitive answer was provided.

  So, in the theory that Patsy killed her daughter, she became so outraged that she struck JonBenét with some sort of heavy, blunt object or pushed her daughter with such force that JonBenét hit her head on something hard enough to cave in part of her skull and cause an 8.5-inch crack in her skull. The skull fracture, however, did not break her skin and couldn’t be seen until her skull was exposed when the autopsy was performed.

  After harming her child so seriously that she believed she may have killed her, the theory continues, Patsy became at once horrified and devastated and yet cold and detached. In a flash frame of reality, she realized she was not willing to lose everything and must do something drastic in order to ensure that didn’t happen. She knew her life and family would all vanish if JonBenét was indeed dead. Yet Patsy didn’t want to go to prison, and she didn’t want her husband to leave her. A smart woman, she decided to think through a way to blame her daughter’s death on someone else. But who would that be? The only people in the home were John and Burke. So it had to be someone from the outside, she reasoned … an intruder who had been after JonBenét. Better yet, someone who had broken into her family’s home and kidnapped JonBenét. By staging things to look like an intruder had killed her daughter and even dumping her daughter’s body outside their home, Patsy could convince everyone, including the police, that she’d had nothing to do with her child’s death.

  At some point during that night, this theory continues, Patsy wrote the ransom note, peppering it with lines from various action movies. Critics of this scenario have said it was unlikely Patsy would know quotes from these movies because she and her husband did not go to movie theaters; they had told the police this fact, and their friends had supported it. Furthermore, all the movies found in the Ramsey home had been made for children. Boulder Police Department investigators had even checked movie rental stores and learned the Ramseys had never rented any of the action movies featuring quotes consistent with those used in the ransom note.

  Why did Patsy write a ransom note that included phrases that very likely came from thriller movies? How long did it take her to write it, or was the note premeditated and written several days before? If she wrote the note beforehand, why had she planned ahead to hurt and kill her daughter? Why did she leave a partially finished greeting in the tablet and tear out seven pages after that greeting and then the three pages for the ransom note? Had she been practicing in those seven missing pages? Investigators determined the number of pages that had been torn out because of the page tears at the top of the tablet, including those that matched the tears at the top of the ransom note pages.

  Only one fingerprint was found on the ransom note, and that was later traced to a police investigator, so Patsy must have worn some sort of gloves to hide her fingerprints and DNA while she wrote the note. While no expert involved in the case was ever able to identify Patsy as the note writer, the theory that asserts her guilt also suggests she was so crazed from the pressures of her daughter’s death or near-death that she became a different personality, a development that affected her handwriting to the degree that it wasn’t easily recognizable by experts. Some Boulder Police Department investigators operated on this theory in the late 1990s, and still do.

  To summarize this theory, Patsy was shocked by the initial harm she’d caused to her child but able to think through a complicated plan to take what she thought was her dead daughter out of her home to abandon her. When she realized that JonBenét was still breathing, Patsy once again became furious (instead of relieved) and realized her plan to dump her daughter’s body somewhere wouldn’t work. Somehow Patsy determined that she must muster the strength to finish what she knew at this point was inevitable, because her daughter was either going to die or be terribly damaged, and there was no reason to further destroy her family over this.

  At this point, Patsy’s actions under the scenario that she killed her daughter became even more bizarre. She made a garrote using rope that was never found in her home. How many people even know what a garrote is? Devising one would surely be a deliberate and time-consuming act for anyone, especially a distraught parent. The garrote used to kill JonBenét was considered unusual by those who studied it, including a knot expert from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, especially due to the slipknots it contained. Could that mean that the person who had made it was not an experienced killer, because an experienced killer would have kept it simple? While at least one homicide expert has suggested this possibility, who can explain the reasoning of this killer’s mind?

  The Boulder County Coroner described the garrote and the rope used to make it in his official report: “Tied loosely around the right wrist, overlying the sleeve of the shirt is a white cord. At the knot there is one tail end which measures 5.5 inches in length with a frayed end. The other tail of the knot measures 15.5 inches in length and ends in a double loop knot. This end of the cord is also frayed.

  “Wrapped around the neck with a double knot in the midline of the posterior neck is a length of white cord similar to that described as being tied around the right wrist. This ligature cord is cut on the right side of the neck and removed … The posterior knot is left intact; extending from the knot on the posterior aspect of the neck are two tails of the knot, one measuring 4 inches in length and having a frayed end, and the other measuring 17 inches in length with the end tied in multiple loops around a length of a round tan-brown wooden stick which measures 4.5 inches in length … Blonde hair is entwined in the knot on the posterior aspect of the neck as well as in the cord wrapped around the wooden stick. The white cord is flattened and measures approximately ¼ inch in width. It appears to be made of a white synthetic material.”

  According to homicide experts and profilers and testimony from retired homicide detective Lou Smit, garrotes are used in murder and sexual bondage activities. A garrote can be as simple as a wire or rope looped around the neck from behind a person to pull the head back and, as both hands pull on the wire or rope, tighten pressure on the front of the throat. The first Godfather movie, released in 1972, showed a garrote used as a method of killing, and garrotes have been used in other movies as well as television series since then.

  The rope garrote used to kill JonBenét was described by some as complex and by others as simple. It had a loop with a slipknot at the back of its open noose portion so it could be tightened at the back of the neck. Then the garrote rope extended to the wooden paintbrush stick, where several tight loops were made around the stick in order to strengthen it and allow for more pressure against the child’s neck. Another slipknot was made at the bottom of those loops on the stick. The knots were used to alternately loosen a
nd tighten for strangling. What kind of person would make a garrote and then use it as described?

  Evidence also showed two distinct furrows in JonBenét’s neck, one with a rope still embedded in it, leading the coroner to state that there had to have been at least two instances of near strangulation. According to a forensic psychiatrist, such findings indicate JonBenét suffered through an excruciatingly painful and torturous death, and her killer was not only cruel but sadistic.

  This theory continues to suggest that, at some point, Patsy would also have had to sexually penetrate her daughter with a broken-off portion of her paintbrush forcefully enough to cause her to bleed. None of Patsy’s DNA was found on any part of the garrote, rope or duct tape. Nor was anyone’s.

  With her dead daughter’s body on the floor of the basement storage room alongside JonBenét’s favorite nightgown, according to this theory, Patsy then had to stage not only a kidnapping but a cover-up of a gruesome murder.

  Considering the stressful situation and all she’d already been through that night, Patsy must have made her next decisions with impressive exactness and thoroughness. First she wiped her daughter’s body with an unknown and never-found substance to ensure she hadn’t left any of her own DNA behind. She then left a boot print from a Hi-Tec shoe next to her daughter’s body and tossed some personal items next to it, too. She also left a partial footprint (with a different shoe) nearby on the floor of the storage room and on the northeast basement bathroom toilet lid.

  Patsy then unlocked various doors and windows in her home so they would be considered possible entry or exit points for “her intruder.” Back in the basement, she went in the storage room where her son’s train set was kept and adjusted the window that John had broken the summer before so it also looked like another possible point of entry. She even moved debris in the window well to the sides so it appeared as though the center section of the three-paned window had been entered. But she forgot to make marks on the window sill to make it look like a person had entered there. How did she move the debris inside the window well without making marks on the window sill? And how did she lift the heavy basement window well grate and mash the grass underneath it, just as evidence indicated, so it would look like the grate had been recently opened?