We Have Your Daughter Page 38

  On September 30, 2010, the Globe tabloid ran this headline:

  CONFLICTING STORIES ABOUT “BOULDER PD QUIZZING BROTHER BURKE RAMSEY”

  On October 25, 2010, the Globe ran another front-page story:

  JONBENÉT MURDER SOLVED

  The National Enquirer, National Examiner and the Star all had varying versions of information about Burke Ramsey. Six months after Boulder police officers made their cold call in Indiana and were told by Burke that he wouldn’t talk with them, the National Examiner headlined its November 15, 2010, edition:

  WHAT JONBENÉT BROTHER TOLD COPS!

  These stories were broadcast or published throughout the world.

  For nineteen years in the Ramsey case, too much fiction had been perceived to be fact. For some reason, exaggerations and false information about the Ramsey family were pervasive, starting as small disturbances but then spreading in an outward, expanding circle until they became entrenched myths. The lies spread much faster than the truth. The truth, John and Patsy Ramsey insisted, was that they and other members of their family were all innocent.

  Fortunately, in the example of Burke and his 2010 encounter with the police, parts of this story began to be corrected via double-checking by some reporters. What was first broadcast on mainstream media by Fox 31 in Denver in the “Burke Interviewed by Police” piece was simply incorrect. Not only were the presented facts false, but they were accompanied by a heavy dose of speculation. During the episode of coverage through several news cycles that this story instigated, more fact than fiction eventually emerged as both sides of the story were actually covered. That hadn’t happened in the early years of coverage of the Ramsey family. Instead, a staggering lack of wisdom had influenced most members of the media, from the field crews to their managers, all of whom seemed driven by the quest to be “first” when it came to reporting about this investigation rather than right.

  During Burke’s September–October 2010 media siege, he got another knock at the door. This time he was offered $20,000 from a tabloid for an interview, a deal he didn’t accept. Eventually, after more than twenty calls from reporters, he changed his phone number. He also consulted his mother’s defense attorney as he was forced to deal once again with the results of front-page and lead stories. “I can handle it, but I don’t like it,” he has said. “There’s nothing more to say. I just worry for my dad and how hard it is on him.”

  A 2010 research study by professors from the University of Michigan and Georgia State University has shown that people are selective about the facts they accept and, when corrected about a misperception or inaccuracy, “corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions.” In some cases, according to the study, those being corrected believe even more strongly in their misperceptions. This tendency, called “backfire,” is related to how facts can do just that. “The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” said Dr. Brendan Nyhan, one of the authors of the study.3

  In Colorado, the backfire related to the Ramsey case still burns. In 2015, some people in positions of power remain convinced that Patsy Ramsey killed her daughter, just as others are convinced she did not.

  Those who are convinced about the Ramseys’ guilt point to the October 2013 judicial order that led to the unsealing of the Ramsey grand jury indictments. The grand jury had asked for child abuse resulting in murder, two charges each, against Patsy and John Ramsey.

  All sides remain bitter. They dislike each other and argue over which side they’re on and why, and the hapless case slogs on, year after fruitless year. And the person who actually tortured and killed six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey in her Boulder, Colorado, home at Christmastime in 1996 remains unidentified and unpunished.

  CHAPTER 29

  JOHN AND BURKE RAMSEY, 2015

  JonBenét ice skating. © John Ramsey.

  FOR MUCH OF 2010 AND THE FIRST HALF OF 2011, John Ramsey lived in a rented doublewide trailer in a small high-desert town in Utah. It’s what he could afford. For those who believe Patsy killed her daughter and that she got what was coming to her when she died an agonizing death from cancer in 2006, they could now believe the same for John.

  What has his life been like since December 26, 1996, when he found his daughter’s body in the basement of his home? More specifically, has he been punished by life? Has he gotten what was coming to him?

  Whether or not you believe John Ramsey was involved in the death of his daughter, his suffering has been immeasurable. He has taken direct body blows of loss. But not, perhaps, in the manner that those who maintain he was involved in his daughter’s murder would anticipate.

  John spent 2010 and the first part of 2011 working in Utah with his former business attorney, Mike Bynum, for an Australian company. He has also worked for the same company, which has since been sold, in marketing and investor communications. In 2013, 2014 and 2015, John worked on real estate projects with Bynum. The jobs he’s held since 2010 have represented the first full-time employment he’s had since being fired in December 1997— one year after JonBenét was killed and at the height of the investigation of his daughter’s brutal murder—as head of Access Graphics by its parent company, General Electric.

  Even John can’t explain how he has survived the grief and torture of his soul.

  “I don’t know if I have,” he has said. “There are still days when it takes a lot of positive to get moving, to get going, decide what I’m going to accomplish that day, keep planning life.” His three children help. So does his new wife, Jan, whom he married in 2011. He has a group of friends who are very loyal and have guarded John’s and his family’s well-being for all these years.

  His oldest son is a protector. When his dad attended the funeral of Detective Lou Smit in the summer of 2010, John Andrew was always close by to make sure everything went well for his father. Many people wanted to talk with John, to offer him understanding, support and thanks for his devotion to Lou Smit.

  List of weekly chores for JonBenét. © John Ramsey.

  John Andrew, who is now married and has children, simply won’t talk about the terrible events his family has experienced.

  And he has a great deal of contempt for what the Boulder Police Department did to those close to him.

  Like her brother, John Ramsey’s daughter, Melinda, is married and has children. She also supports and protects her father. Unlike John Andrew, however, she will share private moments of her family’s tragedy with those she trusts.

  Perhaps due to what she’s seen her family endure, Melinda seems to easily deflect the small things that cause angst to most others in daily life. When her kitchen flooded because her children had accidentally left the stopper in the sink while the water was running, she handled it with a shrug of her shoulders and a mop. She is glad her dad has remarried. She wants him to be happy and knows of his loneliness after Patsy died.

  His marriage with Patsy had been very important to John. “I missed that goodness, that partnership and companionship. Within a good marriage, your spouse is your best friend. That certainly was what Patsy was. I missed that. I missed my best friend. After Patsy died, there was a companionship and love that I wanted to fulfill.”

  Patsy died in 2006 from a recurrence of her ovarian cancer. It metastasized again in 2002 in her abdomen and traveled to her brain. She had treated living as a gift. And while she considered that what had happened to her family shouldn’t have to happen to anyone, she accepted that it had indeed happened to her. “There is always a way through the terrible things that happen in life,” she said. As simple as that may sound, this attitude allowed Patsy to make every minute as positive as she could make it, even though there were times when she simply gave up trying. For the most part, however, Patsy Ramsey focused on the promise she felt for her family and herself. She said her goal was “to love my family,” and added that “what didn’t matter, wouldn’t.” She also said such a focus “takes a lot of constant thought.”

  After their daughter
was murdered and before Patsy died, slowly, the Ramseys’ life evolved into an appreciation for, and contentment with, what they had left. Though still hopeful that they would help find who had killed their daughter, they had learned not to let the need to do so devour them.

  After eight years of Patsy being cancer-free, they cautiously believed she had won that assault. When Patsy was diagnosed with a recurrence of her ovarian cancer, she and John at first decided to treat it as “just an illness that could be controlled and [that] we would live with.” The doctors at the National Cancer Institute treated Patsy initially. She had been their most successful ovarian cancer patient, the one who had lived the longest out of twenty-four other women who had undergone the experimental protocol for their cancer treatments in 1993. This time when Patsy underwent cancer treatments at the NCI, her cancer went into remission for a year, but then came back. Even the doctors at the National Cancer Institute couldn’t help at that point, so the Ramseys went to an oncologist in Atlanta and Patsy had more experimental treatment there, which helped for nearly another year. She then continued treatments in Atlanta and in Charlevoix, Michigan.

  In 2005, doctors found that Patsy’s cancer had moved aggressively into her brain. A new laser surgery obliterated the tumors, but they came back. Friends in Charlevoix, Linda and Susan, would stay with Patsy at night in the hospital because of her confusion and terrible pain. Patsy said her pain from the cancer was like “a migraine times ten.” What amazed her friends, they later said, was that even while they were taking care of Patsy, she would still ask how they were doing and try to take care of them.

  Short months later, Patsy’s oncologist leveled with John, saying “this really is the end for Patsy.”

  “The kindest, least painful alternative is to stop her treatments and enter into palliative care,” the doctor said. “Continued treatments will make no difference in how much time she has left to live.” John, his children and Patsy’s family agreed with the doctor’s recommendation, if only to end Patsy’s suffering. Other doctors they consulted said there were really no other treatments left.

  The Ramseys had already moved from Michigan back to Atlanta to live with Patsy’s parents by the time the doctor suggested no more chemo, no more radiation. Everyone agreed to do what they could to make Patsy comfortable. The disease had started to affect her thinking. She still painted a little, and sometimes couldn’t understand why a picture she had painted didn’t make sense to her. She would often ask John when her next treatment was scheduled. “I’d never lied to her before, but I had to about the treatments,” he said, “and that was impossibly difficult because we had always made decisions together.” Letting his wife die with a measure of peace and comfort was all he could do, however.

  “Patsy was never aware that I had decided to stop any further treatments,” John said. “She wasn’t alert and understanding at that point, and I didn’t want to tell her we had given up. It seemed like that would have taken away her hope.” John still agonizes over this decision. “I knew it was the compassionate thing to do, but it was the hardest decision I have ever been forced to make. We had fought for so long; it was very hard to stop and admit defeat, yet to continue to bombard her with chemo and radiation would have only made her last days very painful ones. Instead, we opted to make her final living as comfortable and peaceful as we could.”

  He doesn’t remember his last words to her. He knows he can’t count the times he told her he loved her in those last days and knows some of that got through to her. As she neared death, he knew it was coming because the doctors had told him what to expect. She died at about two in the morning. She opened her eyes, held them open for a moment, and then was gone. He was right there holding her. It was early on a Saturday morning, June 24, 2006. Patsy was forty-nine years old.

  John and Patsy’s son, Burke, was nineteen when his mother died almost ten years after his sister was killed. For all those years, members of the Ramsey family had worked very hard to keep Burke out of the spotlight. They’d wanted to give him as normal a childhood as they could after JonBenét’s death.

  I first met Burke with his father at a hotel in Atlanta in 2010, where we sat in a vast, quiet and private lobby. It was his first and as of this publishing, his only public interview.

  Burke was twenty-three then, and wore an ever-present smile. His smile looks just like his mom’s smile. When he hears that, he says thank you with a genuineness that is touching, clearly flattered. It’s apparent that he deeply loves and respects his parents, and that he wants his dad to find peace.

  What’s happened in his life has been difficult. “Yeaahh,” he said in a long, drawn-out response. “There’s always something unexpected. Like the police showing up at my university without notice, or at graduation someone walked up to my dad and I saying, ‘Oh you’re JonBenét Ramsey’s family. I’ve seen you on television.’” He said he worries about people he doesn’t know, because it’s possible they might be from the tabloids. The people who approach him about JonBenét are invariably kind, he added, but he would rather that his family not be defined by his sister’s notorious death. I asked if he wonders why two of his sisters were killed and his mom died of cancer. “Sure,” he said. “But there’s nothing I can do about it. I don’t know if it’s bad luck. I don’t know what to call it. You just deal with it, and you don’t dwell on it.”

  He smiled throughout the conversation and admitted it’s his way of dealing with an unpredictable, uncertain world. “I’m a pretty happy, easygoing guy. My mom taught me to always be upbeat and positive. She was a sweet lady. She helped make me who I am today.”

  So did his dad. “My dad taught me to be strong because he’s been so strong through all of this,” Burke said. “I follow his wisdom and kindness by his example. With both my parents, I valued their opinions and took their advice. I watched them go through all the challenges. My dad taught me how to fly, and I got my pilot’s license.” He turned and looked at his dad with pure admiration.

  Burke had never talked publicly prior to this interview. But he agreed to speak this time because he and his father were both convinced that the surprise visits by Boulder police officers to Burke’s apartment and John Andrew’s home earlier in 2010 had been wrong. His father was particularly infuriated that, once again, his family was being harassed by the police. He was especially upset that, by confronting his son with no warning, they had drawn Burke back into the media spotlight after all this time.

  Burke said he views his sister’s murder not with anger, but with sadness and frustration, and he wonders how his life would have been different if she had not been killed or if the police had not targeted his parents. He’s absorbed a lot through the years, warding off attacks directed against his mom and dad from so many directions. And he’s learned to cope by burying some of it, leaving it alone.

  He also said he remembers brother-and-sister stuff with JonBenét: playing in the back seat of their parents’ car when they were driving somewhere, his little sister knocking over his elaborate LEGO creations while trying to help him with them, laughing on the beach with JonBenét and swimming with her in Michigan during their summer vacations. And he remembers not being able to go outside to play because the news cameras were there, and his parents didn’t want pictures of him released to the public. He remembers their house in Atlanta being robbed, too, and news helicopters flying around overhead. He added, though, that his teen years were pretty normal.

  There’s a lot going on behind Burke Ramsey’s smile. He has made choices and grown into a young man who seems to have found balance in his life.

  About those early days after his sister was killed: “I was a little kid and didn’t understand much,” he said simply.

  John Ramsey doesn’t want anyone’s pity. He believes it is his responsibility to tell the story about his little girl. He will not give in to hatred because he thinks it’s a waste of life. He hopes that if he talks about JonBenét’s murder, something he says may give an investig
ator a new lead or may prompt one person who knows something to make a phone call or send an e-mail that leads to an answer regarding his daughter’s death. He becomes revitalized when a credible investigator expresses interest in investigating. Recently, a retired DA and a detective told him they’d like to become involved.

  He won’t walk away. The tears, the torment, the nights when he couldn’t sleep and days when he anguished over nothing else but what he could do to find his daughter’s murderer are less a part of his life now, but they still linger and always will. He understands that none of his family can escape the shadow of suspicion until JonBenét’s killer is caught— or at least positively identified. He wishes “to clear their name” for the sake of his remaining children. He appreciates the strangers who come up to him when they recognize him and wish him well.

  He still has the unusual in his life. He fought off a burglar who was trying to burglarize his home in the late 1990s in a struggle that caused him to suffer a detached retina that led to emergency eye surgery. A used SUV he’d bought from John Andrew was demolished in a collision while it was parked at an airport. Such things he greets with equanimity. What would have been a major ordeal for many is to him an inconvenience from which he simply moves on. John has dealt with so much that he’s clear about what really matters and what doesn’t. And he is now appreciating a fair share of normality and contentment.

  John Ramsey now also has confidence in the futures of his children, and his current marriage has given him a companionship of peace. He enters most days resolved to accept whatever comes his way. He says he knows there will always be people who will never accept that he and Patsy are innocent, but that matters much less now than it once did. He understands fulfillment comes with loving those closest to him.

  In order to survive, John has learned to search for and find joy in his own way, aware that the process is part of the resolution.