We Have Your Daughter Page 8

  Patsy was “afraid, yet … desperate to get started.” “I felt like every minute wasted was in favor of the cancer. I needed to do something to fight.” She and John went to the floor designated for ovarian cancer patients and found there were 75 people ahead of them at the information/reception area. Most of their time that day was spent sitting in line, hoping they would get to the front to see who could help them. There were other people hurting in the line, too. “We never got to the head of the line that day and left pretty defeated,” John later remembered.

  The next day, John tried a different strategy, stopping nurses and approaching clerks on the floor where ovarian cancer specialists were located, asking who could help, whom they could even see, who might point them in the right direction. It worked. They found the offices of the right group of doctors where the “experimental protocol” was taking place. Patsy was appraised. The results were devastating. According to her medical records, the doctors told her that her ovarian cancer was actually Stage IV, and she was eligible for experimental treatment.

  Stage IV is the last stage of ovarian cancer. There is no Stage V. The cancer had spread to her lymph nodes. The doctors at NCI also found an additional tumor behind her pubic bone. “We only take the ones who really have no chance, except for this experimental program,” Patsy later recalled one doctor telling them. “You qualify because you’re dying. We don’t know if the treatment will work. It will be painful. You will be very sick, and you still may die. The doses we are using for the chemotherapy are double what are usually used.”

  Patsy wept. John fought his own tears. As scared as he was, however, he also heard the words “she’s been accepted into the experimental protocol.” Whatever dwindling chance his beloved wife had, she at least would have this last desperate bid to live.

  Patsy later said this “was the kick-start” she needed. “All I heard was the treatment might work. I would work [as] hard as one of their lab mice. I decided I was being given a chance, and my goal was to fight with every good cell in my body. That’s when my whole attitude changed. This treatment was the base I would build on regardless of how tough it was. But I would also utilize groups of people to pray together for me, meditation, positive thought and my love for my family to fight.” She had her head shaved before starting chemotherapy, because it would fall out from the treatment.

  It took Patsy a while to fully embrace that attitude and, even then, it ebbed and flowed. “I cried, was exhausted and was almost paralyzed by the fear of the chemotherapy and dying.” Patsy began the first treatment within a week of her first appointment with the doctors at the NCI in July 1993. There would be eight treatments, with each given every three weeks, and three toxins would be used at the same time to try to kill the cancer.

  The treatments were absolutely brutal by anyone’s definition. Patsy’s whole body was ravaged from being pumped full of poison to try to kill the cancer cells, and the chemo would cause collateral damage on her good, or normal, cells. Her doctors gambled that enough of her normal cells would survive, and she would live. It was a delicate balancing act. A port was implanted in her chest for direct access to her veins for the duration of the treatment. The port provided access for chemotherapy administration, IVs and blood transfusions. The blood transfusions would refortify the cells that had been destroyed and help keep Patsy alive. Each session of chemotherapy lasted thirty-six to forty-eight hours.

  For each session, Patsy was admitted to the NCI hospital, where dedicated people took care of her. The people, she would say, “who try to make the impossible better.”

  Her room at NCI was white with pale tan walls. There were two beds in her room and a pull-curtain between the beds for privacy. The atmosphere was as soothing as it could be. There were paintings on the walls. Some were standard hospital prints. Others were pictures and paintings donated by those who had been at NCI as patients in the past or by patients’ families. Patsy would later say that the presence of these donated paintings emphasized to her that “someone else understood, too.” Her room was a sterile environment with no plants or flowers allowed, yet it gave her comfort and a sense of belonging. For the short while she was there for each treatment, this was her room and her bed. “I welcomed it and dreaded it,” she said, reflecting on the paradox; the treatment that might give her life could also kill her. The room was imbued with confidence and pessimism. She felt more responsibility than she probably should have about whether she lived or died. “I sometimes felt I should be awake to fight it instead of sleeping when sleep was the recovery I needed,” she noted.

  Patsy’s treatment involved being tested on Monday and beginning continuous chemotherapy on Tuesday morning. She would finish by Thursday afternoon. Then, before the impact of the chemotherapy set in, even though she felt sick, she usually flew back to Boulder on Saturday for her three weeks off from chemotherapy. Her goals came in increments. Prior to each trip home, the goal was to get an airplane seat with no one sitting next to her so she could lie down during the flight.

  “The person who kept me alive was Dr. Pat Moran,” she would say. Moran is an oncologist in Boulder. John had researched the best oncologists in Boulder and the metro Denver area, and Dr. Moran was one of those at the top of the list. He was experienced, calm and helpful, and he and Patsy got along well. Each time she returned to Boulder from Bethesda, Patsy would almost immediately check into Boulder Community Hospital for a week to recover and ensure that she didn’t get an infection from her weakened condition. At home after these Boulder hospital visits, Patsy would stay in a bedroom, only five steps away from the bathroom because of her constant nausea.

  “This wasn’t a normal treatment,” said Dr. Moran. “Patsy was on an experimental protocol. That meant the Washington D.C. doctors were trying out new medications, and combinations of them, to see which combination might work for her.”

  Dr. Moran added that Patsy was “a tough lady.” “There were a number of times she needed to be hospitalized because of a fever or a low white cell count,” he said. “It’s very risky when that happens. People can clearly die in that situation. Her chemotherapy was very fatiguing. She had received a death sentence. The cure rates were quite low. The expectation was that the vast majority of people in this experiment would die. Averages [were] measured in one to three years.”

  But, Dr. Moran continued, “Patsy … was extremely determined. This was something that she was going to fix. She was exhausted, had significant nausea, hair loss. She developed anorexia because she didn’t want to eat. It was easier not to, because eating made her nauseous.

  “I thought she was very intelligent, had a good handle on her disease and what it meant and the potential implications. She really had it together. Cancer can be a real devastating experience. It causes some to lose their moorings. Patsy seemed very grounded. She would tell me, ‘This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to fly to DC and get my treatments, and then I’ll fly back and you’ll help keep me alive here in Boulder.’”

  Dr. Moran projected confidence. He was a young doctor, a specialist in cancer and diseases of the blood. Patsy felt he was always very pleasant and professional, and he was “dedicated” to helping her live through the chemotherapy from NCI. He was quiet and reassuring. He wore glasses, and Patsy noticed when he was especially concerned about her condition, he would adjust his glasses with one hand and then tell her what she needed to know.

  Dr. Moran knows about the illnesses afflicting patients, but he also seems to have a natural grasp of the person within the illness. He is always inspired by how deep some of his patients dig to find the resources to fight. “Everyone has their own way,” he says. “But ultimately, people want to live. They rely on friends, family and children. How people survive is a combination of their own inner strength. The medical profession tries to help where it can. A lot is self-driven. Patsy definitely had that drive to live.

  “What struck me about Patsy was, despite how wiped out she was from the treatments … [s]he
was barely able to take care of herself … yet, she maintained a pretty good sense of humor. She could smile. She could crack a joke. In spite of how very, very sick she was, she’d get as well as she could during the three weeks between treatments. And then she’d go back for more.”

  “Patsy’s battles with cancer give insight into her personality and faith,” her attorney Pat Burke has said. “To understand what she went through helps [one] get to know her and brings into question, in my mind, why one would think someone this determined to live because of her family and the differences she could make with them would be a suspect in her daughter’s horrible murder.”

  Patsy’s family, especially her parents, understood that Patsy’s cancer and frequent absences for treatment would affect her children. They just didn’t know how. JonBenét, who was three years old when her mother’s treatments began, was lonely when her mother was away. Neither Burke nor JonBenét could understand why their mom wasn’t with them at home. At one point, JonBenét went to Atlanta and spent five weeks with Patsy’s family, but for the most part the two children stayed in Boulder. John tried not to travel so he could spend more time with them. “JonBenét,” he said, “needed reassurance and asked for her mommy a lot. At times, she would cry, this little girl, just inconsolable, because she needed her mom with her.”

  Patsy once recalled “Johnnie-Bee” playing quietly in her mother’s bedroom at home while she (Patsy) lay in bed recovering from her latest round of chemotherapy. “It was another thing we could do together when I was too weak to do much else,” Patsy explained. “She would talk and play with her toys, and I would just listen. At times, she would do a sort-of somersault and it was just being together. I loved it, and so did she.”

  JonBenét and Burke would wear protective masks, and so would their mother. The rare play times in their mother’s bedroom were allowed as long as Patsy didn’t have a fever. Patsy couldn’t have physical contact with them, so her children weren’t allowed their familiar hugs. Patsy’s most vivid memory of that time is of her two children walking down the long hospital hall in Boulder, holding hands, being there for each other. That’s when she knew she had to live, for them, but she didn’t know if she would.

  In Bethesda, Patsy usually had a roommate who was in the same delicate balance between life and death. They would become close during their short time together. Even if they were too weak to talk, too nauseous to hold their heads up, they shared the same fight and desperation to live. They tried not to give the cancer any more power than it already had, and fought their fears together. Desperation would visit in many forms. “There were times I lost faith. There were times when I was so sick I questioned living,” said Patsy, whose life was based on living through Christianity. At times, she felt as though she had lost her soul.

  With one roommate, Patsy would practice a meditation that prompted her to concentrate on killing one cancer cell in her body at a time. “It would take a lifetime, which we didn’t know if we had, but it was something to try and keep our minds off the after-effects of the chemotherapy.”

  One of her cancer friends was Vicki. Of all Patsy’s roommates, Vicki was most often scheduled for chemotherapy at the same time as Patsy. They were always at their worst while becoming friends. They got their chemo together and then fell into a “nightmare of sickness.” Patsy was “kind, caring and giving,” Vicki once said. “She fought as hard as the rest of us, and she tried very hard not to become too involved in the ‘why me?’ that we all went through.” Vicki felt the treatment protocol was agonizing. Yet she also believed there was a reason she met Patsy during the treatment. Patsy encouraged Vicki to be baptized and was with her in Bethesda in the hospital chapel when she was. Vicki died in 1997.

  In December 1993, after eight treatments, Patsy was ready for surgery to determine her new prognosis. Although Patsy had already undergone several encouraging CAT scans, her doctors needed to operate in order to determine whether any cancer cells remained. Her CAT scans were clear, but for a thorough exam, surgeons cut a twelve-inch opening from her breastbone to her pubic bone. They then rinsed out her pelvic area and checked it and other organs for microscopic traces of cancer. Patsy would vividly remember waking up from the four-hour surgery to an excruciating rush of pain. And then there was the thirteen-day wait while all her tests were analyzed and she recovered from the brutal surgery. After those thirteen days, one of her nurse friends walked into her room and sat down beside her. “Her eyes sparkled,” Patsy later said, “and then she said, ‘I’m not supposed to tell you, but I can’t wait. It’s gone. The cancer is gone.’” The pain seemed to lessen with that news. “There was serenity in hearing that,” Patsy said. “A release of the fear. Hope became a friend again.”

  Her doctors decided to give Patsy two more chemotherapy treatments “just to make sure.” Her total treatments with the experimental protocol that began in July 1993 lasted nine months.

  She always lived knowing it could come back. “I felt every second I was alive was a blessing because at the edge of it all, even though I’d beaten it this time, it could still win. And I was so afraid it would,” Patsy said. “I’ll never know that I would have changed much of how I lived my life if I hadn’t gotten cancer, but I do know that because I did, all that mattered was family, my beliefs and friends. I pray daily for all those who have it because now I know what they endure.”

  Looking back at the cancer, the treatments and the brutal suffering, Patsy knew she’d become a different person. “I learned after a while not to be affected by the little stuff in life. The details mattered, but not to the extent that I would worry or get upset about them. My perception of life and living changed, and my attitude about what really mattered was reinforced.”

  In 2002, Patsy called one of her dear friends. Linda Boss and Patsy had an advertising business together in Charlevoix. Linda remembers Patsy saying, “Are you sitting down?” Patsy was sobbing. Linda said, “What’s wrong?”

  Patsy answered, “It’s back.” Her reprieve had lasted eight years. “The cancer,” she said. “It won’t give up.”

  CHAPTER 7

  POLICE MISTAKES

  Two Boulder police detectives at the Ramsey home searching the crime scene outside. December 28, 1996.

  A SIX-YEAR-OLD HAD BEEN SAVAGELY MURDERED, and the Boulder Police Department was in charge of finding her killer. Yet the department had no homicide unit. Boulder Police Chief Mark Beckner talked about that in 2001, when he testified in a deposition in a civil case called Wolf vs. Ramsey. Under questioning, Beckner said, “In our department, we don’t have a specific homicide unit. Our detectives handle a variety of cases. They aren’t specialists in homicide, per se.” The attorney questioning Chief Beckner asked, “Has that been true the entire time that you’ve been involved with the Boulder Police Department from 1978 until the present time?” Beckner answered “Yes.”

  So Boulder Police had no homicide department when JonBenét was killed. Then Boulder Police Chief Tom Koby had never worked on a homicide case as a homicide investigator. The commander of the investigation, John Eller, had never worked on a homicide. One of Eller’s friends, Detective Steve Thomas, who was available and brought in from the BPD Narcotics unit, had no homicide experience. The city of Boulder had reported no homicides in 1996 until the Ramsey murder. Very few of the investigators ultimately assigned to the Ramsey investigation had homicide experience, and what they had was limited. Very few of them had children, an experience that could have aided them in dealing with the parents.

  “The type of power that was inevitable in this case can corrupt, or provide wisdom and compassion,” said one district attorney. “It can allow for greatness or magnify incompetence. One never knows what kind of person will turn up until the shake-out on who has it emerges.” Commander Eller had an extremely high-profile type of power that demanded immediate answers. Chief Koby allowed Eller free run of the investigation, according to those who worked it. The investigative approach was much like that us
ed in drug investigations like those Narcotics Detective Steve Thomas had experienced. In a narcotics investigation, a suspect is targeted and a case is built as evidence is gathered to prove the suspect’s guilt.1

  Homicide investigations are different from narcotics investigations. Homicide detectives follow the evidence. “Death investigation requires strict adherence to guidelines … In the case of homicide, investigators must carefully collect evidence to help identify suspects.”2 The crime is identified, the evidence gathered and analyzed and only then is a potential suspect identified. But within the first few hours of JonBenét’s murder, some investigators on the case voiced their opinions to other case officers and a few members of the media that the Ramseys had been involved in their daughter’s death. And then they set out to prove it.

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 26, 1996

  When Commander-Sergeant Bob Whitson’s pager went off shortly after six the morning after Christmas, it woke him from sleep. Whitson, a narcotics sergeant with the Boulder Police Department, was also the on-call supervisor for that day.

  The page had been sent from Sergeant Paul Reichenbach, who was on night shift. When Whitson returned the call, he was told there had been a reported kidnapping of a six-year-old girl complete with a ransom note. Whitson was surprised by the nature of the crime. During his twenty-two years with the Boulder Police Department, he had answered no calls for reported kidnappings. Kidnappings in Boulder were always related to custody disputes. And there were never any ransom notes.