CHAPTER 17

VANITY FAIR

John and Patsy in Michigan. © John Ramsey.

SOME BROADCASTERS, TALK SHOW HOSTS AND THEIR GUESTS, newspaper editorial writers and the public said that in her January 1, 1997 CNN interview, Patsy Ramsey, who was on anti-anxiety drugs at the time, did not look like a grieving mother. And according to BPD Detective Linda Arndt’s police report regarding the events of December 26, 1996, a report that included second-hand information (i.e., hearsay), one Boulder Police Department officer noted to another that the Ramseys weren’t “acting right.” (Detective Linda Arndt—Date of Report 1-8-1997.)

This statement by Arndt was contradicted, however, in multiple then-unreleased and still-confidential BPD officer statements and reports. The speculation that the Ramseys weren’t “acting” like grieving parents because they had somehow been involved in the murder of their daughter continued to be leaked to the media for months. In September 1997, it was explored in painstaking detail in a controversial Vanity Fair article1 written by Ann Louise Bardach.²

Journalists use the first paragraph of an article to grab readers by including in it enticing, or even explosive, information that makes them want to read more. Bardach used that technique in the first paragraph of her Vanity Fair article about the Ramsey case:

Subsequently, French [first responding officer] told colleagues that he had been struck by how differently the two parents were reacting. While John Ramsey, cool and collected, explained the sequence of events to him, Patsy Ramsey sat in an overstuffed chair in the sunroom sobbing. Something seemed odd to French, and later he would recall how the grieving mother’s eyes stayed riveted on him. He remembered her gaze and her awkward attempts to conceal it—peering at him through splayed fingers held over her eyes.

In the second paragraph of the article, Bardach wrote about Officer French not finding JonBenét’s body:

French told fellow officers that he felt awful that he had not discovered it in his search of the house. For months he berated himself as he relived every moment of his hours there. While Patsy Ramsey had wept inconsolably, a dry-eyed John Ramsey had paced incessantly. Later, French recalled that the couple had barely spoken to or looked at each other. Though they were faced with the most calamitous tragedy of their lives, he did not see them console each other. But it was the image of Patsy weeping and watching him that haunted French, especially after he learned that she had been sitting directly over the spot—less than 15 feet below—where her child’s body lay.

The details from the article about Patsy “peering at [Officer French] through splayed fingers held over her eyes,” and “watching him” quickly went international on wire services and in newspapers, on radio, on the Internet and in television broadcasts. Repeatedly broadcast and re-published, these details played a key role in fueling public opinion against Patsy, especially since initial statements of other BPD officers, and of French himself, that countered these claims had not been released. Most people were reading in newspapers and hearing in television and radio broadcasts personal reflections from one police officer that were not supported by as-yet-unpublished official police records. According to one reporter covering the Ramsey murder investigation, the prevailing sentiment related to the Ramseys among several in the Boulder Police Department and some in the Boulder District Attorney’s Office was that they were “uncaring, cold and unnatural in their feelings.”

Nowhere in the initial Boulder Police Department reports or excerpts of officer interviews obtained since 1997 does Officer French refer to Patsy Ramsey as “peering at” or “watching” him on the morning of December 26, 1996.

In fact, French says just the opposite about the family’s emotions that morning in a later formal interview that was also kept confidential for some time: “Officer French thinks the Ramseys are acting appropriately at the scene.” (BPD Report #5-3851.)

That statement is from the formal interview with Officer French conducted by two senior BPD officers on January 10, 1997.

French made several other statements about the Ramseys’ behavior during that same formal police interview that were consistent with how emotional each parent was on the morning of December 26, 1996:

“Patsy is loosing [sic] her grip at the scene.” (BPD #5-3851.) “John Ramsey would break down and start sobbing at the scene.” (BPD #5-3839.)

“Every time the phone rings, Patsy stands up and just like takes a baseball bat to the gut and then gets down on her knees and she’s hiding her head and crying as soon as that phone rings and it’s like a cattle prod.” (BPD #5-3859.)

Statements from family friends to police are consistent related to Patsy’s behavior:

“Patsy was literally in shock. Vomiting, hyperventilating.” (BPD #5-433.)

“Patsy cries all the time.” (BPD #1-640.)

“During the initial ransom demand time Patsy was hysterical, just absolutely hysterical.” (BPD #5-230.)

“She is hyperventilating. She is hallucinating. She is screaming. She was hysterical. John was pacing around. [Close family friends] were trying to keep Patsy from fainting. She was vomiting a little.” (BPD #5-404.)

“I thought Patsy was going to have a heart attack and die. I thought she was going to kill herself.” (BPD #5-437.)

The police reports from that day continued with the same types of descriptions of Patsy’s and John’s emotional states. These were obtained from the JonBenét Ramsey Murder Book:

In the second paragraph of her Vanity Fair magazine article, Ann Louise Bardach included another statement that was contradicted by police reports and WHYD statements:

“Later, French recalled that the couple had barely spoken to or looked at each other. Though they were faced with the most calamitous tragedy of their lives, he did not see them console each other.” In the second paragraph of Bardach’s article, she says that French recalled the couple barely speaking to one another. This, too, was contradicted by police reports. French had said in his January 1997 formal interview with senior BPD police officers: “John Ramsey does do some touching of Patsy at the scene.” (BPD Report #5-3844.)

And: “One of the victim advocates who was present on the scene said, ‘In fact, Patsy and John had been in the formal dining room together for some time holding each other or talking . . .’ I [didn’t] know they were in there alone together.” (BPD Report #5-2630.)

In a separate formal debriefing of the second officer on the scene, Sergeant Paul Reichenbach supported French’s initial police debriefing with regard to how Patsy was acting emotionally that morning: “Sgt. Reichenbach felt Patsy was a complete emotional mess.” (BPD Report #5-3917.)

Detective Linda Arndt provided more details in her report about Patsy that supported the initial statements provided by French and Reichenbach that Patsy was very emotional that morning:

[Patsy] was sitting on a chair in the sitting room. This room is located at the southeast corner of the house on the first floor … Patsy spoke softly when she talked to me. At times Patsy seemed to be staring off into the distance. Patsy seemed to have a vacant look, and seemed dazed. Since Patsy was situated in a room at some distance from the den, I had limited contact with her. I asked Ofc. French to remain with Patsy. I did ask Patsy a few questions and was able to receive some information.

While I was talking to Patsy she would repeatedly start crying. Patsy would be unable to speak. Patsy repeatedly asked, “Why didn’t I hear my baby?” … Patsy looked physically exhausted. Patsy would close her eyes, but was not able to rest or sleep. Patsy seemed to be much less focused when I spoke with her. Patsy seemed to have a far-off look in her expression. Patsy’s thoughts were scattered and it was difficult to get her to stay focused on one thought. Patsy would collapse in tears and repeatedly asked why had she not been able to hear her baby. (Detective Linda Arndt—Date of Report 1-8-1997.)

After JonBenét’s body was found, Detective Arndt also wrote about Patsy:

Patsy Ramsey appeared to be swooning and I was concerned for her health. The paramedics did physically check Patsy Ramsey. The paramedics did not examine nor touch JonBenét. I was told that Patsy Ramsey was obviously very distraught, however she physically did not need to have medical attention. The two paramedics cleared the scene after Patsy was checked. (Detective Linda Arndt—Date of Report 1-8-1997.)

The Vanity Fair article also included criticism of John Ramsey via a quote from Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter: “As for John Ramsey, whom [Alex Hunter] referred to as an ‘ice man,’ he wondered aloud whether ‘someone as smart as Ramsey would write such a long note.’”

The magazine article also said this about John Ramsey: “A Ramsey friend who met the elder Ramsey [John’s father] in the mid-80’s [sic] recalls, ‘He was very cold, like John was with everybody.’”

And included this quote from a Ramsey business associate, Mike Glynn, with whom the article stated John Ramsey had “a close relationship”: “But John could really get angry. I saw this on a few occasions involving business. Shouting and threatening. His eyes bulging like you cannot believe. It seemed like Jekyll and Hyde.”

John has disagreed that Glynn was a friend, saying he was an acquaintance, and added that Glynn’s statement was “simply not true.”

“I don’t shout or threaten,” he said. “It’s not my nature.”

In her police report regarding December 26, 1996, Detective Linda Arndt was also critical of John’s behavior that morning: “When I talked briefly with John Ramsey during the morning of Dec. 26 he was able to carry on a conversation and articulate his words,” Arndt wrote. “John Ramsey had smiled, joked, and seemed to focus during the conversation.” (Detective Linda Arndt—Date of Report 1-8-1997.)

Recently John responded to Arndt’s report and said it was “untrue” that he would have joked when his daughter was missing. He says he was “dazed and numb” that morning. According to the Boulder Police Department and the WHYD Investigative Archive, the people with John at that time only emphasized his grief when they were interviewed by BPD officers: “During the initial contact [one friend] had during the ransom demand period of time, he stated that ‘John Ramsey was not only visibly distressed he was absolutely, just the pain that John was feeling was just palpable. I could feel it. This was John in a way I’ve never seen him before. He was absolutely at the end of his rope. He just put his head in his hands and cried and shook, you know.’” (BPD Report #5-234.)

Hours after John found JonBenét’s body, a friend said, “John wailed, pounded his legs, sank to knees on the floor … completely transported by grief.” (WHYD Investigative Archive.)

Other friends describe John as “wailing, pounding legs, collapsing on floor, holding his family Bible.” (WHYD Investigative Archive.)

Sergeant Paul Reichenbach’s statements also differ from the statements made by Detective Arndt in her January 8, 1997 report and by Officer Rick French as quoted in the Vanity Fair article. The following note was included in reports on Reichenbach’s formal debriefing: “Sgt. Reichenbach did not think John Ramsey said anything that was odd.” (BPD Report #5-3918. “Sgt. Reichenbach spoke very little to John Ramsey, but he [Ramsey] seemed composed except for when he told someone his daughter was kidnapped during a phone conversation.” (BPD Report #5-3917.)

The Vanity Fair article also stated that when John carried JonBenét’s body upstairs and laid her down as Detective Arndt instructed him: “‘What was interesting was when Ramsey brought the body upstairs he never cried,’ relayed a source present at the time. ‘But when he laid her down, he started to moan, while peering around to see who was looking at him.’”

The information about John “peering around” is not in the January 8, 1997 report filed by Detective Linda Arndt, the person in closest physical proximity to John Ramsey at that time.

The article by Ann Louise Bardach published in the September 1997 issue of Vanity Fair magazine also contained factual errors:

• “The [close family friends] were awakened by John Ramsey, who told them to hurry right over.”

According to police reports and Patsy Ramsey, Patsy placed the phone calls to friends that morning.

• “Ramsey decided that his wife should have her own lawyers, and he retained Patrick Burke and Patrick Furman.”

John and Patsy didn’t hire their own lawyers. Mike Bynum, John’s business attorney and friend, did without the knowledge of the Ramseys.

• “Why would a grieving couple go on national television while refusing to speak to the police?”

This speculation on the part of Bardach referred to the January 1, 1997 appearance of John and Patsy Ramsey on CNN. And yet the Ramseys had already talked with investigators from the Boulder Police Department. They have said they would have talked to the police as much as the police wanted them to that Thursday afternoon after their daughter’s body was found, except Boulder Police Department officials did not ask them to continue being interviewed at BPD headquarters. In fact, BPD officials did not give the Ramseys any direction that afternoon, which is why they went to a friend’s home.

• “The Ramseys have been provided with copies of all ‘the most sensitive critical police and detective reports’ as well as reproductions of both the ransom note and the ‘practice’ note found the same day.”

Provided by an unnamed source who supposedly had “firsthand knowledge of the investigation” and “said that a flow of privileged, confidential information critical to a case against the Ramseys has been leaked from the D.A.’s office to the Ramseys’ lawyers with the efficiency of a sieve,” this information gave the impression that the Ramseys had been given significant amounts of material within the first six months of the investigation into the death of their child. This was simply not true.

With regard to the ransom note, Detective Linda Arndt gave the Ramsey attorneys a copy of the ransom note on her own authority without approval of the Boulder Police Department. Bardach mentioned this fact later in her article.

Regarding the other documents, the article also stated that “the Ramseys gave in to separate interviews, but they held fast to their demand for a copy of the entire police file.”

According to Patsy’s attorney, Pat Burke, however, the Ramseys’ attorneys never asked for the entire police file, and never would have. “That wasn’t reasonable,” he said.

Prior to the first Boulder Police Department interrogations of John and Patsy on April 30, 1997, “portions of police reports from the first day” were given to the Ramseys’ attorneys. Case documents show that Pat Furman, Patsy’s other attorney, signed for thirty-two pages of police reports relating only to what had happened the morning of December 26, 1996. Case documents detail the page numbers of the reports supplied to Furman on April 21, 1997.

According to attorney Burke, “only prior statements the Ramseys had made to police were given to us as a condition of the interrogations scheduled for April 30. For perspective, in Colorado, persons appearing before a grand jury have the right to prior statements before they testify. We wanted to ensure BPD and the DA’s office weren’t setting traps by misquoting what was in the actual prior Ramsey statements.”

• “On December 29, the family flew to Marietta, Georgia in a private jet piloted by John Ramsey, for JonBenét’s funeral.”

This incorrect information was taken from an equally incorrect Rocky Mountain News article published more than eight months earlier.

• “The ligatures around her neck and right wrist were, investigators say, ‘very loose,’ consistent with staging.”

This was wrong. According to the autopsy report, the rope was “embedded” in JonBenét’s neck. The Boulder County autopsy report was released to the public in August 1997, weeks before the Vanity Fair article was published. The coroner’s report could easily have been used for fact-checking.

• “John Ramsey’s children from his first marriage … arrived at the Ramsey house at 7:55PM on December 26.”

According to multiple Boulder Police Department reports, John Ramsey’s children arrived at the Ramsey home at 1:30 p.m.

• “Lou Smit offered the theory that a grown man had sneaked through a broken window so narrow that even [Boulder District Attorney] Hunter discounted the possibility.”

The window was also mentioned in the article in this quote attributed to an anonymous “investigator”:

• “‘[N]o one but a small child or midget could have crawled through that space.’”

According to video from the WHYD Investigative Archive, however, Detective Lou Smit and a Boulder detective both crawled through the window in question to see if they could get through, and did. The videotape of Smit climbing through the window can be viewed online.

• “‘The only time I ever saw John really lose his temper was about Patsy and money,’ says Marino. ‘He would throw the credit cards on his desk and say, “She’s gonna spend every last penny I make.”’”

This quote was attributed to Jim Marino, described by Bardach as an old friend whom John Ramsey hired to work at Access Graphics.

According to John, this allegation was “totally false.”

“Money wasn’t a problem,” he explained. “Patsy was aware the budget wasn’t unlimited. I would never say that about her.” John has questioned Marino’s other quoted perceptions of him and his family in the article, adding that while Marino was an acquaintance, he would not have known details about their personal life. Ramsey said he’d hired Marino at Access Graphics after a motorcycle accident had left Marino disabled, and he called Ramsey and asked for a job. “I hired him partly out of compassion,” John said, “and he ended up being a heck of a good salesman.”

• “Most stunning, according to some experts, was the revelation that the child had evidently been ‘re-dressed’ after her murder. JonBenét’s parents told investigators that she was wearing a red turtleneck pajama top when they put her to bed. She was found in a white one.”

Evidence in the case included fibers from the “white” top found on JonBenét’s bed sheet that supported Patsy’s statement that her daughter was wearing a white top when she was put to bed that Christmas night. Furthermore, such a discrepancy in what a murder victim was wearing at the time of a murder and what others say the victim was wearing does not automatically point to any sort of re-dressing on the part of the killer.

Complete police records from the Ramsey murder case were not then, nor are they now, public record. The erroneous information Bardach reported would have had to have been leaked to her by the Boulder Police Department or the Boulder District Attorney’s Office. Ex-detective Steve Thomas has admitted in a sworn legal deposition and in his book that he was a source for Bardach. One of many, he said.

After the Ramsey attorneys expressed outrage at the Vanity Fair article, BPD Chief Tom Koby demanded polygraphs of the primary detectives on the case to find out who had leaked to Bardach. Those polygraphs never happened. Chief Koby was not in good stead with his officers, and the police union pressured him to back down from having the polygraphs done.

On September 16, 1997, when Vanity Fair published the Bardach article, Chief Tom Koby sent a letter to Boulder Chief Deputy District Attorney Pete Hofstrom, apologizing for statements attributed to BPD officers in the Vanity Fair article. (BPB Report #90-241.)

Three days after Bardach’s article was published, Chief Koby sent a letter to Ramsey defense attorneys Bryan Morgan, Hal Haddon and Pat Burke in response to a letter from them demanding an investigation into the information published in the article. Koby stated in his letter that there was no evidence the Boulder Police Department had authorized or condoned any improper releases of information. (BPD Report #90-243.)

Also on that same day, September 19, 1997, the interim City Manager of Boulder, Chris Japenski, wrote to Ramsey attorney Pat Burke in response to Burke’s request for an investigation, saying the city “will not investigate” to find the source for the Vanity Fair story. (BPD Report #90-245.)

Twelve days prior to Bardach’s article on the Ramsey murder investigation, on September 4, 1997, limited information had been released from Vanity Fair about the upcoming piece. At least forty-four newspapers and wire services throughout the country published this information, guaranteeing a great readership for the article.3

In early February 2012, when Ann Louise Bardach learned that official case records refuted some of her reporting about the homicide of JonBenét Ramsey, she responding by stating that she did not remember a lot about the story because she hadn’t kept up with it. She added that, for her, “This is just another murder case and I’ve covered many murder cases and I know for a lot of people this [Ramsey case] is their whole life. I don’t have a dog in this fight.”

She also defended her reporting for the article. “We went through a variety of lawyers and fact checks representing Vanity Fair from various aspects. There were one hundred reporters on it,” she said, “and everybody was working with their sources, but I know that no one compares to the level of fact-checking that we did. So that’s all I can tell you.”