Chapter 5 (continued)

The Police Who Bungle the Investigation…

Anyone who has seen even a single episode of Law & Order knows this is an absurd excuse for police procedure, never mind atrocious investigative technique. Aside from the statistical likelihood that they were involved in the crime, the Ramseys were, at the very minimum, critical witnesses, and their recollections were essential to nailing down the timeline of events leading up to their daughter’s disappearance.

Any competent investigator would have secured the crime scene and immediately sequestered each of them at an alternate location, ideally at the police department, to prevent contamination of their recollections. Then, they should have each been questioned separately.

Miranda Isn’t Just a Character from Shakespeare

Moreover, from the minute the 911 call reached the Boulder Police Department, John and Patsy Ramsey should have been considered possible suspects in JonBenét’s disappearance. Stereotypical kidnappings for ransom are exceedingly rare. According to an article in the October 3, 2005 issue of Parents magazine, 49 percent of child abductions at that time were perpetrated by a family member. According to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s October 2001 Juvenile Justice Bulletin:

Most homicides of young children are committed by family members through beatings or suffocation. Although victims include approximately equal numbers of boys and girls, offenders include a disproportionate number of women.

In the early hours of the investigation, JonBenét was theoretically presumed to be alive and the victim of a kidnapping. So, any detective should have realized that there was basically a fifty-fifty shot that the parents were involved in her disappearance. After the body was discovered, the overwhelming statistical likelihood was that a family member was involved in the death. Suspects, especially those who could be accomplices, should immediately be questioned separately and never be given an opportunity to get their stories straight.

Does the Boulder PD Really Care What Time It Is?

The ransom note said a call would take place between 8:00 and 10:00 a.m., but when it failed to materialize, the two senior Boulder detectives left the Ramsey house and returned to the police station to conduct discussions with the FBI, leaving Detective Linda Arndt in charge.

Why the senior detectives left the crime scene is a mystery. The claim that they needed to meet with the FBI back at the office is absurd. It’s hardly like the FBI doesn’t make house calls to kidnapping scenes. If the detectives needed to speak with the FBI agents privately, why not conduct their conversations in a car so they would be available in the event a ransom call came through after the appointed time?

Bad enough that the most critical witnesses and possible suspects were either allowed to leave the location outside of law enforcement supervision (Burke Ramsey) or spend hours together collaborating on their version of events (John and Patsy Ramsey), but worse, the crime scene was not preserved.

Everyone should have been removed from the home as soon as the first officer arrived at the location. The crime scene should have been secured, and a careful log of every entry and exit from the location should have been kept starting from the very beginning of law enforcement’s involvement. Instead, the Ramseys took Burke off the premises without even notifying the police, and John and Patsy were left together while a gaggle of friends milled around the house, contaminating evidence that could have potentially led police to the perpetrator.

Now John Has Left the Building

The chaos at the house on 15th Street came to a head around noon when Detective Linda Arndt called the police department and informed her colleagues that John Ramsey had been missing from the house since approximately 10:30 a.m. Mr. Ramsey reappeared at the home sometime before 1:00 p.m., claiming that he had gone to get the family’s mail. Police later determined their mail was delivered through a slot in their front door.

But just think that through for a second—your six-year-old child is missing, theoretically in the hands of a group of kidnappers who are demanding a ransom. The call promised in the ransom note doesn’t come at the appointed time. Wouldn’t you be huddled with police, glued to the phone, praying every second that a call would come with instructions for retrieving your precious child? Or would you go off somewhere to get your mail—mail that’s delivered through your door anyway? And do it without telling the cops where you were going—the cops your wife so desperately begged for help? This gap represents at least two hours that no one knew where John Ramsey was while his daughter was supposedly in the hands of a small foreign faction of kidnappers threatening to behead her.

Chapter 6

DISCOVERY OF THE BODY

Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are!

Apparently, Detective Arndt was never taught that kidnapping investigations are a lot more complicated than playing hide and seek. She allowed the contamination of the crime scene to continue throughout the morning and early afternoon as she permitted Fleet White to wander through the house, ostensibly looking for JonBenét, who he thought might be “hiding.” When White discovered a broken window in the basement, he moved some of the glass shards and crawled around the area inspecting the damage, further contaminating potentially important pieces of evidence.

Again, this is absurd. Why would Fleet White think JonBenét was hiding when Patsy found a note explicitly stating that she had been kidnapped? It appears that Mr. White didn’t believe the note was real, either.

Around 1:00 p.m., Detective Arndt instructed Fleet White and John Ramsey to conduct a “top to bottom” search of the house. It was during this unsupervised search that John Ramsey shouted out his discovery of the body of his dead daughter in a basement room the family referred to as the “wine cellar.”He then removed the duct tape from her mouth, carried her body upstairs, and laid her on the floor.

For reasons that are still not clear, Detective Arndt then moved the child’s body again, placing it next to the Christmas tree, where someone covered it with a sheet. Patsy Ramsey reportedly took her dead daughter in her arms and held her as she sobbed. This series of events further corrupted the collection and interpretation of potentially valuable forensic evidence on the child’s body and clothing that could have possibly broken the case.

Again, what was Detective Arndt thinking? Why would she task a parent and one of his friends, both civilians without law enforcement experience, to search the house for a kidnap victim? If Detective Arndt felt a search of the residence was appropriate, why didn’t she conduct it herself or call in other detectives to do it? At the very least, why didn’t she accompany the men while they searched? Instead of this amateur-hour version of detection, from the very beginning, police should have secured the home and had a crime scene crew combing every inch of the house for clues.

Leaving on a Private Jet Plane

At 1:40 p.m., less than an hour after he discovered his daughter’s dead body, John Ramsey was allegedly heard on the telephone calling his pilot and arranging for the family to travel to Atlanta via their private plane. Plans for the trip were canceled when law enforcement advised Mr. Ramsey that his family’s presence was required in Boulder.

The Cause of Death

The autopsy report indicated that JonBenét had been bludgeoned in the head, resulting in an 8 ½” crack in her skull. Sometime after the poor child was struck, she was killed by strangulation accomplished with a garrote, which was still in place when her father brought her body up from the basement. The garrote was likely fashioned from part of the handle of a paintbrush the perpetrator may have found in the Ramsey basement.

THE RANSOM NOTE

Transcript of Note

Mr. Ramsey,

Listen carefully! We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction. We do respect your bussiness [sic] but not the country that it serves. At this time we have your daughter in our posession [sic]. She is safe and unharmed and if you want her to see 1997, you must follow our instructions to the letter.

You will withdraw $118,000.00 from your account. $100,000 will be in $100 bills and the remaining $18,000 in $20 bills. Make sure that you bring an adequate size attache to the bank. When you get home you will put the money in a brown paper bag. I will call you between 8 and 10 am tomorrow to instruct you on delivery. The delivery will be exhausting so I advise you to be rested. If we monitor you getting the money early, we might call you early to arrange an earlier delivery of the money and hence a [sic] earlier delivery pick-up of your daughter.

Any deviation of my instructions will result in the immediate execution of your daughter. You will also be denied her remains for proper burial. The two gentlemen watching over your daughter do not particularly like you so I advise you not to provoke them. Speaking to anyone about your situation, such as Police, F.B.I., etc., will result in your daughter being beheaded. If we catch you talking to a stray dog, she dies. If you alert bank authorities, she dies. If the money is in any way marked or tampered with, she dies. You will be scanned for electronic devices and if any are found, she dies. You can try to deceive us but be warned that we are familiar with law enforcement countermeasures and tactics. You stand a 99% chance of killing your daughter if you try to out smart [sic] us. Follow our instructions and you stand a 100% chance of getting her back.

You and your family are under constant scrutiny as well as the authorities. Don’t try to grow a brain John. You are not the only fat cat around so don’t think that killing will be difficult. Don’t underestimate us John. Use that good southern common sense of yours. It is up to you now John!

Victory! S.B.T.C

The Handwriting on the Stairs

The ransom note was written on paper taken from a pad belonging to Patsy Ramsey, which was found in the kitchen of the Ramseys’ Boulder home. The ink used to write the note was chemically determined to have come from a specific pen also found in the Ramsey kitchen. (Yep, that’s the same kitchen that was scrubbed after the coffee and bagels were served.) Multiple handwriting samples were taken from John and Patsy Ramsey. Additionally, previous samples of Patsy’s handwriting were confiscated from the family vacation home in Charlevoix, Michigan.

John Ramsey was eliminated by handwriting experts as the writer of the note, but Patsy Ramsey was determined to be a possible source of the writing. Many analysts are of the opinion that, especially on the first page of the note, there had been an effort by the writer to disguise their handwriting.

Handwriting analysis is much more of an art than a science. The practice is a subjective process in which the examiner searches the questioned document and identifies specific characteristics of the writing that are, in the examiner’s view, unique to the writer. Then, exemplars and samples of writing from suspected writers are obtained and searched for these characteristics. Also, the questioned document is searched for unique characteristics identified by the examiner in the exemplars contributed by suspected authors. Scores of analyses have been made of this writing over the past twenty years, but no firm consensus has ever been reached regarding the author beyond saying that Patsy Ramsey may have written the note or could not be eliminated as the writer of the note.

All the House Is a Stage…and the Ramseys Are Merely Players

Other characteristics of the ransom note have contributed to the general conclusion that the note was part of a staging of the crime scene.

The note demanded a ransom of $118,000, the exact amount that John Ramsey had just been paid as an annual bonus. The Ramseys lived in a 7,000-square-foot home and had their own private jet. They were obviously wealthy. Why would a kidnapper ask for only $118,000? And why ask for such a specific amount?

Move Over, War and Peace

The note is much longer than traditional ransom notes. In a demonstration shown in the 2016 CBS documentary The Case Of: ,JonBenét Ramsey four investigators handwrote the contents of the note as fast as they could and took approximately twenty-one minutes to accomplish the task. This time was required to simply copy the note. Composing it would have logically slowed down the process even more.

This means that an intruder would have supposedly spent at least half an hour in the Ramsey home composing the three-page ransom note either while two adults and at least one surviving child were asleep upstairs or while he or she was alone in the home awaiting the Ramseys’ unscheduled return from Christmas dinner. Interestingly, after the note was written, the pad and pen were returned to their regular storage places. Why wouldn’t the kidnapper simply bring the note with them or send the note later? This aspect of the intruder scenario seems highly unlikely to even the most casual observer.

If the child was killed during what started as an actual attempted kidnapping for ransom, then why didn’t the kidnapper take the child’s body with them when they left the home? The perpetrator would have logically had a plan for removing the victim from the home and transporting her away from the scene. This plan should have worked equally well for a living or deceased victim.

The Bruno Hauptmann Playbook

Consider the case of the Lindbergh kidnapping. The Lindbergh child was killed in the course of the abduction or shortly thereafter, but Bruno Hauptmann hurriedly buried the child four and a half miles from the Lindbergh home, then proceeded with his plan to collect the ransom. The Lindbergh ransom was paid on April 2, 1932, forty-one days before the baby’s badly decomposed body was discovered on May 12.

However, it is important to keep in mind that garrotes do not end up around the necks of six-year-olds accidentally. JonBenét’s death was clearly intentional. Purposely killing the kidnap target before collecting the ransom is inherently illogical, as the victim’s life is the leverage in the negotiation.

Any possibility of the kidnapper successfully obtaining the ransom would have been eliminated when the child was found dead. Placing JonBenét’s corpse in the basement of her parents’ home as opposed to removing it from the premises substantially reduced the chances that the ransom would be paid before the body was discovered.

On the other hand, if the kidnapper believed the body would not be found before the ransom was paid, why didn’t they place the ransom call between 8:00 and 10:00 a.m. on December 26 as promised in the note—a note they supposedly spent at least a half hour at great peril writing inside the Ramsey home?

In fact, the body had not been found (or at least its presence in the wine cellar had not yet been revealed) and the cash to pay the ransom had already been prepared in time for the call that morning. The theoretical kidnapper would have likely gotten away with the cash just like Hauptmann did, but no call was ever forthcoming.

Maybe because there never was a kidnapping attempt.

To be continued…

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