Death of a Pageant Queen: JonBenet Ramsey

 

There is nothing so upsetting as the murder of a child, and nothing so alarming as a child murder that goes unsolved; the idea of a child killer on the loose, unpunished and free to kill again is not just a personal nightmare but society’s worst nightmare. This is an horrific case of the cruel and cold-blooded murder of a six-year old girl. The case was so horrific that it distorted the judgement of the police and led to suspicion falling on the wrong people. The murder eventually went unsolved.

On Christmas night in 1996, a couple in Boulder City, Colorado, found that their daughter was missing from her bedroom. John and Patsy Ramsey were alarmed, then terrified when they found a hand-written ransom note left for them to read on the stairs by their daughter’s kidnapper. It began, ‘Mr Ramsey, Listen carefully! We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction. We do respect your business but not the country that it serves. At this time we have your daughter in our possession . . . You will draw $118,000 from your account . . .’

Apart from bearing all the hallmarks of the criminally insane, the amount demanded was an odd figure. Why $118,000 and not $100,000 or $150,000? The eccentricities of the note alone must have made John Ramsey realize he was dealing with a madman, which was frightening in itself, and his little girl was in the clutches of that madman. Moments later Patsy Ramsey called the police, who arrived within minutes. The police carried out a brief search of the main rooms in the house, did not find the girl and did not find any sign of a forced entry. The tone of the ransom note implied that the collection of the ransom would be monitored and that the girl would be returned once the money had been paid. John Ramsey made arrangements to pay the ransom and a friend of his, John Fernie, picked up the ransom from the bank during the morning.

That afternoon, Linda Arndt, one of the Boulder Police detectives, asked Fleet White, who was a friend of the Ramseys, to search the entire house with John Ramsey for ‘anything unusual’. This was an odd request in that police detectives should have undertaken the search. Ramsey and Fleet decided to begin their search in the basement. First they searched the bathroom and ‘train room’. Then they went into the room they called the wine cellar although the Ramsey’s did not use it for that purpose. It was there that John Ramsey discovered his daughter’s body under a white blanket.

The post mortem showed that JonBenet had died as a result of strangulation and skull fracture. She had been garrotted with a length of nylon cord and the handle of a paintbrush. She had also been sexually assaulted, though not raped. It was noted that the method of garrotting required a special knowledge of knots. A peculiarity of the post mortem was the revelation that JonBenet had eaten pineapple a few hours before the murder, yet her mother was unaware of this; it is difficult to understand how a six-year-old child could have consumed anything without her parents knowing. Photos taken of the Ramseys’ home the day JonBenet’s body was found show a bowl of pineapple on the kitchen table with a spoon in it. Neither Patsy nor John could remember putting the bowl on the table – or feeding it to JonBenet. Was this something the murderer did?

The police interpreted everything as indicating that the Ramseys were guilty. The odd sum of $118,000 showed up on his home computer as his annual bonus. His financial liabilities came to exactly $1,118,000. It looked to the police as if the figure of $118,000 might have stuck in John Ramsey’s mind; it looked as if he had drafted the ransom note. The police also thought the ransom figure was pitched too low in relation the Ramsey’s income and capital. The household’s net worth, also visible on the Ramsey computer screen, was over $6 million. The handwriting on the ransom note did not really match that of any family member, though it bore some resemblance to Patsy’s.

From the very beginning the police suspected that John and Patsy were responsible for their daughter’s disappearance. By the time the little girl’s body had been removed from the house a few hours later the Boulder Police had made up their minds. The Ramseys were guilty of killing their daughter.

To compound this injustice, the police leaked to the local media a few key facts about the case. One fact was that there was no evidence of a break-in. Another was that there was no possibility of anyone from outside the house getting in. This disinformation was intended to signal clearly to the people of Boulder that the Ramseys must be guilty. It ensured that they could not have a fair trial. It also ensured that their lives in Boulder would be unendurable from that moment on.

Further leaks to the press revealed the discovery of child pornography and evidence of child sex abuse at the Ramsey house. This misinformation was based on the completely unfounded hypothesis that John Ramsey had been abusing his daughter and murdered her to escape detection. Another leak included the idea that Patsy had accidentally killed her daughter in a fit of temper over JonBenet’s bedwetting and made up the kidnap story to avoid detection. When police are investigating a serious crime they need to have working hypotheses about what happened. But leaking these speculations to the press is very destructive, as it turns speculation into pseudo-fact. Leaking the working hypothesis about the death of JonBenet seriously damaged the Ramsey’s future lives and the truth, which may have lain somewhere else altogether.

The conviction that the Ramseys had killed their daughter blinded the police to the implications of some of the evidence. Photographs of the child’s body show the distinctive paired burn marks left by a stun gun. The very fact that JonBenet was cold-bloodedly stunned before she was killed is far more in keeping with a planned abduction than with murder or accidental killing by the parents. This was forensic evidence that did not fit the police scenario, so it was ignored.

A videotape of the police interrogation shows a police officer outlining the police hypothesis to a bewildered and angry Patsy Ramsey. Patsy listens, shaking her head in anger, frustration and disbelief, saying very emphatically, ‘You’re on the wrong path, buddy.’ The police officer tries bluff, telling her there is ‘trace evidence, scientific evidence’ that proves Patsy’s connection to the murder. This infuriates Patsy, who knows perfectly well that this cannot possibly be true, because she knows she didn’t commit the murder. She tells the officer that her daughter was the most precious thing she had and that her life has been hell ever since she died. She erupts: ‘Quit screwing around asking me questions and find the person who did this!’ The tape is a moving document, a compelling piece of evidence in itself that Patsy Ramsey was innocent.

But the police would not budge from their scenario. As in so many other cases, they had decided what had happened, and it was just a question of wearing down the suspects until they went along with it. A move was made to indict the Ramseys, but the indictment was dropped because it was seen that the case would not hold up in court. A great deal of the alleged evidence was spurious and untrue. There was, for example, no evidence whatever of child pornography or child abuse at the Ramseys’ house; that was pure invention. Police photos taken on the day of the crime show clear evidence of a break-in at the cellar window. The post mortem evidence showed that JonBenet was not killed by a single blow to the back of the head, which was necessary to fit the police hypothesis, but had died a more complicated and tortured death. The little girl had been immobilized with a stun gun, sexually assaulted, strangled and finally hit over the head. That (real) scenario did not fit the case the police had been struggling to build against the Ramseys. The indictment had to be dropped ‘for lack of evidence’.

The actions of the police up to this point meant that, as far as the community was concerned, the Ramseys were not only guilty but had been in effect condemned and convicted by the law. It was trial by mischief-making rumour. The calculated leaks and the consequent media frenzy meant that the lives of the unfortunate couple and their eleven-year-old son had been wrecked. Not only had they lost JonBenet, a delightful little girl who had won beauty contests: they now stood to lose everything else, too.

A few people went on having faith in the Ramseys. A television documentary drew attention to the solid evidence from the crime scene, which pointed clearly and unequivocally to a break-in. It went on to suggest that the abductors may have intended to take the child out through the window where they broke in, but for some reason decided not to abduct her but to kill her there in the cellar. The ransom note implies a change of mind, as it proposes a finely judged figure for the ransom. Or it may have been that more than one person was involved in the attack and the two (or more) men had different motives. Perhaps while one man, economically motivated, was writing the ransom note another, sexually motivated, was assaulting and strangling the child. The documentary led to a new investigation co-ordinated through the District Attorney’s office, though on limited funds.

The new investigators were concerned that there were several other suspects who had not been pursued by the police in 1996, simply because they had decided the Ramseys were guilty. No routine house-to-house search of the neighbourhood had been carried out, for the same reason. There had been two men living close by, both with criminal records, who moved away straight after the murder. There were also two paedophiles in the area who were not checked out. The police had prematurely decided on Patsy and John Ramsey as their prime suspect – their only suspects – when there was plenty of evidence pointing elsewhere.

There were two small spots of blood on JonBenet’s clothing. One of the bloodspots contained her DNA, but also traces of some DNA belonging to someone else. There was similar ‘alien’ DNA under one of her fingernails. The ‘alien’ DNA belonged to neither John nor Patsy Ramsey, but to someone else. The DNA from the second blood spot was from the same stranger, a white male, who should have been the police’s main suspect. These blood samples were available in 1996 but the implications were not followed through. The investigators tried unsuccessfully to match the stranger’s DNA through the US national DNA database. It looks as if the killer was a first offender, or just an offender who had never been caught. He still hasn’t been caught.

The investigators found a dozen new suspects, and one of those became the prime suspect. Thirty-eight registered sex offenders were living within a two-mile radius of the Ramseys’ home, an area that encompasses half the population of the city of Boulder; the statistic was in itself alarming. The investigators called a press conference at which they gave the impression that they now knew who they were looking for and that the net was closing in on him. They hoped that this pressure might push the suspect into coming out into the open. It had an immediate and melodramatic effect that they could not have foreseen.

A mechanic called John Kennedy lived in Boulder. He went to the police to say that he thought he knew who the killer was – a man called Michael Helgos, who had committed suicide the day after the press conference at which the investigators hinted heavily that they knew their man and would soon have him behind bars. Kennedy thought the timing of the suicide was significant. He also knew that Helgos was a bizarre, deranged, violent man who took pleasure from shooting cats and speculated what it would be like to crack a human skull. Helgos had also said in the period just before the murder that he was going to make a lot of money, which could have been a reference to the ransom he hoped to get.

In fact, the police had been informed about Helgos shortly before the murder. Home videos were found showing him playing with a very young girl. A neighbour had returned home to find him naked with her daughter. He had a video collection containing some very violent scenes, but it also included a Disney film in which a very young girl was shown being woken up by Santa Claus; was this a scenario Helgos wanted to re-enact, and the mainspring of the decision to wake JonBenet up on Christmas night?

Michael Helgos owned several stun guns, one of which was of the same type as was used on JonBenet. Two footprints were found in the Ramsey house. One was a print of a HITEC trainer; Helgos owned a matching pair.

There were peculiar circumstances surrounding the death of Michael Helgos. The fatal shot was fired through a pillow. Why would Helgos have wanted to muffle the shot? It would not have mattered to him, when dead, whether anyone heard the shot. But perhaps Helgos’s death was not suicide at all. Perhaps someone else shot him. The bullet passed right through his chest from left to right, an odd wound for a right-handed man to inflict on himself, especially given that most people killing themselves with a gun shoot themselves in the head.

Given that the ransom note uses the word ‘we’ and there were two different footprints in the house, it looks as if two people were involved in the murder. Michael Helgos was one. Who the other was remains a mystery. Was Helgos sufficiently unnerved after the press conference for his associate to fear that he would give them both away and could not afford to let him live? The associate’s name is known to the case investigators (though not to me) and they even know where he lives. Inevitably there has been endless speculation and accusation over the years, some of it leading to litigation.

As Patsy Ramsey feared, the man or men who attacked her daughter went on to attack again. In an affluent part of Boulder, nine months after the Ramsey murder, a girl of about the same age as JonBenet and who even went to the same dance studio as JonBenet was attacked in her own home. Her parents found an intruder in the house who presumably got in while they were out. The parents went to bed, and then some time later the intruder went into the little girl’s room, put his hand over her mouth, called her by her name and sexually assaulted her. Luckily the mother was a light sleeper and woke up, sensing something was wrong. She went into her daughter’s room and saw the intruder, who ran past her and jumped out of the window and off the roof to get away. He was dressed completely in black. Michael Helgos is known to have liked dressing completely in black and stalking people at night. This attack is very likely indeed to be linked to the Ramsey case, though the Boulder police denied any connection. The later investigators discovered that although the second attack was known in full detail to the police, they had taken no action on it; in view of the seriousness of the offence, this is in itself very strange.

There was an unexpected new development in August 2006. A forty-one-year-old schoolteacher called John Mark Karr was arrested in Bangkok on child pornography charges. Apparently the US authorities traced him by using the Internet after he sent e-mails about the Ramsey case to a professor of journalism. When he was arrested, he confessed to being with JonBenet when she died. He said her death had been an accident. Asked if he was innocent, he said, ‘No.’

But only twelve days after Karr’s arrest it was announced that his DNA did not match that of the ‘stranger’ at the crime scene and the authorities decided that no charges would be brought against Karr for the child’s murder. Even so, four months later it was revealed that federal investigators were still looking into the possibility that Karr was an accomplice.

The case appears to be tantalizingly close to being solved. One of the major suspects, Michael Helgos, is dead, probably killed by his even more dangerous associate. David Williams, one of the detectives involved in the case, says the killer could be taken into custody. They have his DNA. ‘It’s a travesty that it isn’t happening.’ It would take six detectives six months to solve the crime. But the District Attorney’s office does not have unlimited funds and the case may have to be closed before the final solution is reached.

Meanwhile the Ramsey family has had to endure the horrible bereavement inflicted on them by total strangers, the loss of JonBenet. They have also had to endure a painful hostile interrogation by the authorities. They have been vilified in the press. They have been assumed to be guilty by their neighbours. They were forced to move away and try to make a new home for themselves in Atlanta, where they lived in reduced circumstances. Their lives have been destroyed.

Patsy Ramsey died of ovarian cancer in June 2006, at the age of forty-nine. She was aware at the time of her death that the Boulder County District Attorney was investigating a suspect in Bangkok, and this gave her the satisfaction of believing that her daughter’s killer had finally been traced and would be brought to justice. For her, it was a resolution of a kind.