We Have Your Daughter Page 9

  Reichenbach read portions of the ransom note over the phone to Whitson. He also told him the police, the victim’s father and the father’s friends had all searched parts of the home, but the little girl had not been found there. Whitson asked that patrol cars in front of the house be moved out of sight, since the ransom note threatened to hurt the missing child if the police were called.

  During this phone call, Whitson asked a lot of questions about the Ramsey family. He’d never heard of them. Reichenbach told Whitson the family was composed of a father, mother, a nine-year-old son and the missing six-year-old daughter. He said the family appeared to be wealthy based on the appearance of their home. He also told Whitson there was a recent newspaper article in the home about the extraordinary success of the company where John Ramsey worked.

  There was an alarm in the home, but it hadn’t been set.

  Police had searched the records and learned the Ramseys had no criminal history. But there was some glamour attached to the family. Patsy was a former Miss West Virginia in the Miss America Pageant, and her daughter had performed in child beauty pageants. From what Reichenbach communicated, Whitson envisioned the Ramseys as an “All-American family.”

  Commander-Sergeant Whitson lived in Loveland, a town twenty-five miles north and east of Boulder. After he finished his call with Sergeant Reichenbach, he showered, dressed and started the forty-five-minute drive to the Boulder Police Department.

  It was cold and dark. Sunrise wasn’t until 7:20 that morning, and the sky would remain cloudy.

  Before he left his house, Whitson called two detectives to report to the Ramsey home. As he was driving in, he heard the two detectives use the police radio to contact Sergeant Reichenbach. They asked to meet the night-shift sergeant a few blocks away before they responded. Whitson thought then it was a mistake for them to use their police radios. A kidnapper could have easily been monitoring police radio calls. In 1996, personal cell phones were not in wide use.

  While driving, Whitson remembered the just-released movie Ransom and thought someone might be copying the movie. He thought about the child who had been kidnapped and how they would get her back. If someone was copying Ransom, Whitson thought, “The Boulder Police Department did not have the experience or the equipment to handle the case.”

  He was thankful that since the kidnapping of aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby in 1932, new laws had been passed that resulted in all kidnappings of children nationwide being handled by the FBI. He called them the moment he arrived at BPD headquarters.

  But there were jurisdictional questions that had to be satisfied. The person he spoke to at the FBI told Whitson an agent would page him back. At this point, Whitson called the Boulder commander in charge of the detectives. The commander couldn’t come in because his family was sick, but he told Whitson to rely on the department’s new kidnapping policy. Whitson called the city’s press information officer. He put out an emergency page to all command staff and detectives about the apparent kidnapping and then tried to locate a copy of the new policy, which was being developed for all law enforcement officials in the county.

  The police detective who had a copy of the policy was on vacation, as were about half of the other detectives who might have had it. It was the day after Christmas, and a lot of people were off. Whitson couldn’t find the policy. He called a Boulder County Sheriff’s lieutenant he thought might have it. The lieutenant was off-duty that day. He told Whitson where to find it in his office, which was a few miles from the Boulder Police Department.

  Whitson drove frantically to the Boulder Sheriff’s Department, and then it took him at least twenty more minutes to find the paper he was looking for. He knew he was using up valuable time. He stopped by the Boulder District Attorney’s Office, which was, at the time, in the same building as the Sheriff’s Department, to advise two district attorneys about what was happening. While at the DA’s office, he got a page from an agent with the FBI Emergency Response Unit in Denver. They set up a meeting for ten that morning at the Boulder Police Department.

  Whitson arrived at the Ramsey home, conducted a brief investigation and left at 9:45 a.m. with Detective Patterson, one of the two on-scene detectives. Patterson needed to provide information, answer questions and be debriefed by the FBI at the Boulder Police Department Command Center. Whitson released the other officers from the home, except Detective Linda Arndt. In retrospect, he would later say, that was a mistake.

  Whitson was forthright in admitting other mistakes to me, including not clearing the home of all non-official personnel when he first arrived. He would also admit that he told police officers they could leave when he should have instructed them to stay and support Detective Arndt. He realized later that he should have “ensured for himself the home had been searched and photographed, even though he was told it had been.” The detectives and the night-shift supervisor should have asked the same questions about a house search, he said. The much-sought-after kidnapping protocol that he finally found at the Boulder Sheriff’s Department was never studied or used that morning.

  Then Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter’s most trusted professional confidant, then First District Attorney Bill Wise, is still angry about the investigation even to this day:

  It was the most screwed-up investigation. It was just terrible. They shouldn’t have had marked police cars and officers out in front. They left the one detective up there at the house. Her very sophisticated equipment to track and tape any kind of call that might be from a kidnapper was a small recorder and a little suction cup that you lick and you stick on a telephone. It was just silly that they left her there with that house full of people and her trying to figure out how to put the people to work and keep them out of her hair. And then, of course, they find the body. Is there any way in its initial stages that the investigation could have been botched more badly? Not that I know of.

  The Boulder Police Department’s behavior was a “mess” according to then Adams County District Attorney Bob Grant. It was “chaos.”

  According to Wise and Grant, the mistakes made by BPD officials from the very beginning of the Ramsey murder investigation have marred and shaped it to this day.

  Marked police cars were parked in front of the Ramsey home, and uniformed officers responded when the ransom note author had warned John Ramsey not to contact police.

  When the first police officer arrived, he should have had Patsy and Burke removed from the home and taken to the police department for interviews and physical forensic examinations. John Ramsey should have been left behind for interviews and to answer the kidnapper’s promised phone call referenced in the ransom note.

  The home was a crime scene. Only law enforcement officers involved in the investigation should have been inside and the only ones to search the premises. Family friends and Victim Advocates should not have been allowed in the home at all. That is underscored by the fact that, according to numerous Boulder Police Department reports (#5-447, #5-461, #5-397, #5-873, #5-445, #5-447, #5-451, #1-363, #5-4134, #5-4128, #5-448, #5-239, #5-240), the following took place beginning at approximately 6:20 a.m.:

  Within approximately 10 to 15 minutes of his arrival, [John and Patsy’s friend] searched the basement of the Ramsey residence. He noticed the lights were on [in the main basement area], saw the broken window in the train room and suitcase and looked for broken glass and found a small piece of glass. The latch on the window was in the unlocked position and his impression was that the window was closed.

  The friend moved the suitcase under the window, which would cause confusion for investigators. He also “looked in the storage room but could not see anything and went back upstairs.”

  The reports also state that the friend “did not turn on lights in the wine cellar” during his search, which may have been why he didn’t see JonBenét’s body. (For some reason, the storage room where JonBenét’s body was eventually discovered was at times referred to as a “wine cellar” in police reports, although no wine
was stored in it.) The light switch in the storage room was right next to the door, not on an adjacent wall. According to scene officers, it was “difficult” to find in the dark. (BPD Reports #5-447, #5-461, #5-397, #5-873, #5-445, #5-447, #5-451, #1-363, #5-4134, #5-4128, #5-448, #5-239, #5-240.)

  This friend and others shouldn’t have been in the home or searching it, even though they were trying to help, yet police didn’t prevent them. When he went back upstairs from the basement, that friend “told an officer about the suitcase and broken window.”

  “After JonBenét’s body was found in the wine cellar later that day by her father, the same friend picked up and dropped the duct tape that her father had torn off her mouth,” further affecting the crime scene. (BPD Report #5-887.)

  Light switch in wine cellar/storage room.

  When the forensic investigators arrived, everyone should have left the home, including the detectives. The forensics investigators need to get what information they can from an uncontaminated crime scene. “It is essential to maintain a proper chain of custody for evidence.”3

  All major crime scenes have an official police entry-exit log. Every person going in and out of the scene logs entry and exit times, then initials each. The log at the Ramsey home was poorly kept based on its conflicting and duplicate arrival times for certain people and discrepancies related to how many people were in the home as documented in the JonBenét Ramsey Murder Book Index.

  Police officials should have made a thorough top-to-bottom search of the home immediately upon arrival that included a complete inspection of every door, window, cabinet, closet and drawer. This is a basic premise of a police investigation, yet none of the law enforcement officers on the scene took the responsibility for ensuring that this was done. The fact that police had failed to search the basement storage room and it was the father of the victim who discovered his own daughter’s body changed the whole course of the investigation.

  According to the National Institute of Justice,4 the following mistakes occurred:

  • No one was in charge that morning. In order of arrival, first the patrol officer, the sergeant, and then the detectives should have taken over, removing all non-essential people in the home and maintaining an accurate entry-exit log.

  • The first two on-call detectives should have gone to the home immediately. Instead, they arrived anywhere from two hours and ten minutes to two hours and thirty minutes after they were first called, having stopped by BPD headquarters first.

  • The detectives were not properly equipped. Together, they had one tape recorder between them, so they were unable to record their interviews with the Ramseys.

  • If a kidnapping had occurred, as was first assumed, yellow crime scene tape should have been used for the entire home, not just for JonBenét’s bedroom, and the entire home should have been photographed and inspected for fingerprints.

  • The one detective who was left by herself in the home after 10 a.m. should have had other law enforcement support. There was still the question as to whether the kidnapper would call, and more interviews with John and Patsy were necessary.

  • John should never have been allowed to search the home unless a police officer was with him. As the parents of the victim, the Ramseys had a proprietary interest in the scene and could have changed it. Although there was nothing at that time to suggest that they were suspects, there was nothing to support that they were not. Also, since no law enforcement officer was with John when he found his daughter’s body, his reaction could not be noted.

  Error compounded error. Later, experienced officers within the BPD who were not on the scene that day would react with shame and disbelief about such humiliating and ongoing mistakes. Detective Lou Smit, hired by the Boulder District Attorney’s Office during the investigation, later shared his concerns: “The lone detective should not have moved JonBenét’s body from the main floor hallway to the living room after John brought his daughter’s body upstairs from the basement, as this served to further contaminate the crime scene.”

  • The Ramsey family should have been taken to the police station immediately after JonBenét’s body was found for videotaped interviews, collection of clothing, physical forensic examinations of their bodies and immediate tests for drugs and alcohol. The examinations of their bodies were critical to determine whether any of them had injuries that could have been caused when JonBenét fought back against her attacker.

  According to correspondence between the Boulder Police Department and a Ramsey defense investigator, clothing John and Patsy were wearing on the evening of December 25, 1996 wasn’t requested by investigators until one year later in December 1997. On March 3, 1998, “Detective Trujillo of the Boulder Police Department met with [a Ramsey private investigator] during which time Det. Trujillo collected clothing purported to belong to the Ramsey’s [sic].” (BPD Report #1-1429.) A letter from the investigation commander on the case at that time supports the request for clothing one year after the murder.

  However, another police report indicates some pieces of clothing belonging to Patsy and John were turned over to the police on January 28, 1997, approximately four weeks after their daughter’s murder: John— two black shirts; Patsy—black pants and a red and black sweater. (BPD Report #1-1430.) There is no indication if one or both of these reports may be correct or if there is a mistake related to the date discrepancy.

  Response letter to BPD about getting clothing Patsy and John wore the day JonBenét’s body was found.

  The parents should have also been interrogated thoroughly and separately after JonBenét’s body was found. The Ramseys have said they would have continued to talk with police if they’d been asked. They have repeatedly said they didn’t know what to do after their daughter’s body was found but leave their home and go to a friend’s home. No one from law enforcement insisted or suggested that they go to the Boulder Police Department. At that time, they had no defense attorneys.

  One BPD investigator has said that Commander Eller wanted to turn the home back over to the family that afternoon but the investigator on the case said no, explaining that he would need two to three weeks of unrestricted access to the home.

  When FBI agents arrived at the Boulder Police Department at approximately 10 a.m. on the day of JonBenét’s reported kidnapping, they were unaware so many mistakes had already been made related to the investigation. Police Chief Tom Koby wanted their help, and one of the first questions he asked the special agent in charge of the FBI Emergency Response Team was, “When are you going to take over the investigation?” While this would not happen immediately, this transition would occur within a few hours. FBI Supervisory Special Agent Ron Walker needed to gather facts, determine that the case was a kidnapping and “get the massive movement of other FBI resources underway.” He and his agents had responded to the Boulder Police Department, instead of the home, because the department’s headquarters was the site of the incident command post. During the next three hours of fact gathering and getting FBI resources into place, the agency would transition into taking control of the case.

  “I made calls to FBI headquarters in Denver, to the FBI Special Operations Group and the Swat Team,” Walker has stated. “The ransom money package needed to be put together. An airplane was put on standby to track devices with the ransom money. The technical agents who would manage the telephones for a possible ransom call were on their way. The focus was a kidnapping investigation and it took valuable, but necessary, time to get people in place. A Boulder Police sergeant and I were headed out the door to go to the Ramsey home in response to requests for help from the detective on the scene. That’s when we got the call the child’s body was found.”

  The murder meant the case jurisdiction went immediately to the Boulder Police Department. Even so, FBI agents went to the scene to offer initial law enforcement assistance. One agent has said he was “stunned” by the number of people in the home when he arrived and the “completely compromised crime scene.”


  Within a few days of the murder, Boulder Police Chief Koby appeared to change his mind about help and rejected outside assistance. When the chief of the Denver Police Department called to offer his own experienced homicide detectives’ help, according to him, Chief Koby’s response was, “What for?”

  They would all soon learn they were dealing with a murder that would mesmerize the nation and play out in the media for years.

  CHAPTER 8

  FIRST ON-SCENE POLICE OFFICER’S REPORT

  Signature of Boulder Officer Rick French on his police report detailing the events of December 26, 1996. French was the first officer on the scene.

  CHRONOLOGY

  DECEMBER 26, 1996—THURSDAY

  6:00 a.m.—The first Boulder Police Department official to arrive on the scene, Officer Rick French, arrives.

  6:02 a.m.—The second BPD official to arrive on the scene, Sergeant Paul Reichenbach, arrives.

  1:00 p.m.—Officer French begins writing his report about the Ramseys.

  1:06 p.m.—Approximate time JonBenét’s body found. Officer French returns to the Ramsey home after the discovery of JonBenét’s body is reported.

  10:54 p.m.—Officer French resumes writing his report.

  DECEMBER 27, 1996—FRIDAY

  The second officer on the scene, Sergeant Paul Reichenbach, files an amended report. His first report from the Ramsey home was one paragraph long.

  FOR YEARS, MEMBERS OF THE MEDIA, the public and law enforcement agencies have asked why the first two on-scene officers failed to find JonBenét’s body. They arrived only two minutes apart.

  The answers were in first responder Officer French’s police report and also in a statement made to Officer French by the second officer to arrive. Despite a case littered with police leaks, this information was not leaked and was known by only a few officers and attorneys.