Excerpts from Vanity Fair regarding Ramsey case

It is amazing to me how well Ann Bardach's article has held up over the years:



Patrol Officer Richard French got to the home of John and
Patsy Ramsey in the neighborhood adjacent to Chautauqua
Park in Boulder, Colorado, within seven minutes of Patsy
Ramsey's 911 call reporting that their six-year-old
daughter, child-beauty-pageant winner JonBenet, had been
kidnapped. It was 5:52 A.M. on December 26, and the
distraught and weeping mother, a former Miss West Virginia
and Miss America contender, let French in.

"John Ramsey directed me through the house and pointed out
a three page handwritten note which was laid on the wooden
floor just west of the kitchen area," French reported.

Subsequently, French 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
attempt to conceal it-peering at him through splayed fingers
held over her eyes. Seven hours later, the strangled,
bludgeoned body of the child was found in a storage room in
the basement. French told fellow officers that he felt awful
that he had not discovered it himself in his search of the
house. For months he berated himself as he relived every
moment of his hours there. While Patsy 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 Ramseys, with JonBenet and their son, Burke, had
Christmas dinner at the home of their best friends,
Priscilla and Fleet
White Jr., a mile or so away. After Ramsey had moved his
computer company from Atlanta, Georgia, to Boulder, in 1991,
the
Whites and the Ramseys found that they had much in common.
Fleet White was also a successful tycoon, in the oil
business.
Both couples enjoyed sailing and had six-year-old girls with
older brothers. Neither Patsy nor Priscilla worked, but both
were
committed volunteers. When John Ramsey had decided to throw
his wife a surprise 40th-birthday party a month earlier, on
November 30, he turned to Priscilla to organize the event at
the swank Brown Palace in Denver.
According to police reports, the Ramseys arrived home from
the Whites' about 10 PM. At 5:55 AM. the Whites were
awakened by John Ramsey, who told them to hurry right over.
By 6:20 the Whites were there, joined by other friends, John
and Barbara Fernie, and later by the Ramseys' minister,
Father
Hoverstock.
Several uniformed policemen assisted Rick French until 8:10
A.M., when Detective Linda Arndt arrived. Arndt's supervisor,
Detective Sergeant Larry Mason, would get to the house later
that day.
The initial team assumed that the troubled, affluent couple
were victims, not potential murder suspects. They even
summoned
two victim advocates to the house to comfort them. Arndt in
particular, who was described by fellow officers as having
"bonded" with Patsy Ramsey, made several critical and
possibly irreparable errors in judgment.
The ransom note warned the couple not to contact the police
but to await a phone call between 8 and 10 that morning.
Arndt
wrote in her report that "between 10:30 and noon, John
Ramsey left the house to pick up the family mail," which she
later saw
him open and read.
At one PM., when no call had come, Arndt asked Ramsey and
Fleet White to follow her to the kitchen. An investigator
describes the scene: "She said, 'I want you to search this
house. From top to bottom.'
She had barely finished speaking when John Ramsey bolted
from the kitchen and headed down to the basement. Fleet White
told us that Ramsey went directly to a small broken window
on the north side of the house and paused. Fleet said to
Ramsey,
'Hey, John, look at this.' And John said, 'Yeah, I broke it
last summer.' He wanted Fleet to see the window to set up an
intruder theory, but no one but a small child or a midget
could have crawled though that space.
While Fleet is looking at the window, John disappears down
the hall directly to the little room where the body is. It's
a huge
basement with a lot of rooms and corridors, but Ramsey went
directly to that room. He screamed, and Fleet ran to him.
White
had previously peered into that windowless storage room but
had not seen the body.
Lying on the cement floor was the lifeless JonBenet, dressed
in white knit shirt and long underwear. There was duct tape
over
her mouth. A garrote made of white cord and a broken
artist's paintbrush handle was around her throat, and there
was cord
around her right wrist.
The body was covered with a white blanket from her bed..
Nearby was her red "pageant nightgown," described by a
relative
as "her favorite possession."
Ramsey yanked the tape from her mouth, and, according to the
investigator, "holding her with both hands around her at the
waist, the way you would hold a doll," carried her upstairs
and laid her on the hard-wood floor in the living room.
"What was interesting was when Ramsey brought the body
upstairs he never cried," related 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."
Linda Arndt lifted the child from the floor and placed her
alongside the Christmas tree. "Patsy collapsed right on top
of
JonBenet,"said the source, "and then she got on her knees
and screamed, 'Jesus, you raised Lazarus from the dead.
Please
raise my baby!"'
Arndt asked Father to gather everyone into a circle around
the child and lead them in a prayer. Numb with grief and
horror,
they bowed their heads and said the Lord's Prayer.
The following evening, at the Fernies' house in south
Boulder, Linda Arndt approached John Ramsey, but Ramsey's
lawyer
friend Mike Bynum cut off the conversation, telling Arndt
that legal advisers had been retained to speak for the
Ramseys.
The next day the police were informed that the Ramseys had
nothing more to say and would answer no further questions.
Although John Ramsey was a life-long conservative
Republican, he turned to Haddon, Morgan & Foreman, a law
firm almost
synonymous with Colorado's Democratic political machine.
"Take a look at their offices here in Denver," says Chuck
Green, a
columnist at The Denver Post, referring to the gated mansion
that houses the firm "Then take a walkover to the Governor's
Mansion a few blocks away and tell me which one is bigger,
and I'll tell you which one is more powerful."
During the 70sand 80s, Hal Haddon ran Gary Hart's campaigns
for senator and was an adviser on his presidential campaign.
Haddon became known as a power broker and king maker, and
had a reputation for socializing with clients such as Hunter
S.Thompson Governor Roy Romer, former governor Richard Lamm,
and Congressman David Skaggs are all political allies of
Haddon's, as is Alex Hunter, Boulder's longtime district
attorney. Haddon's partners, Bryan Morgan and Lee Foreman, by
arguing a controversial intruder theory, won an acquittal in
the celebrated 1980 trial of Lee Bibb Lindsley, who was
accused of murdering her husband, a prominent Colorado pediatrician.

Ramsey decided that his wife should have her own lawyers,
and he retained Patrick Burke and Patrick Furman Within a
week
of the murder, a media consultant named Pat Korten was also
brought aboard, later to be replaced by Rachelle Zimmer and
Laurie Wagner.
In July, Denver's premier publicist, Charles Russell, was
added to the payroll. In addition to his lawyers' team of
private
investigators, Ramsey retained the Denver firm of H. Ellis
Armistead, as well as a former F.B.I. criminal profiler and
two
handwriting analysts.
After the police tried to question Ramsey's first wife in
Atlanta, he also hired a lawyer there named James Jenkins.
Comparisons are inevitably made to 0. J. Simpson, but John
Ramsey is far wealthier. And unlike the Simpson Dream Team,
Ramsey's lawyers have sought invisibility. (Ironically, two
Simpson defenders, Barry Scheck and forensic scientist Henry
Lee,
have made themselves available to the Boulder D.A.-some say
in an effort to refurbish their post-Simpson image.)
The one press conference Haddon's team has permitted the
Ramseys, in the Boulder Marriott
on May 1, was so elaborately orchestrated that it was called
the "Ramsey infomercial" by Denver talk-radio host Peter
Boyles.
The Ramsey team of lawyers and publicists stood against a
back wall, but the selected reporters had agreed not to
question
them. It was not the first time that a carefully packaged
appearance had backfired.
On Sunday, January 5, media consultant Pat Korten had
arranged to have television crews outside St. John's
Episcopal Church
in Boulder During the service, "there was a special
handout-personalized for the Ramsey family, offering prayers
for them," says
a parishioner who was present. "We were appalled, because a
lot of people had qualms about believing them by then."
Outside the church was a throng of photographers waiting to
capture a sobbing Patsy, exiting on the arm of Barbara
Fernie.
"They totally used the church as a photo opportunity," says
the parishioner.
The Ramseys' appearance on CNN in Atlanta on January I had
also raised questions. Why would a grieving couple go on
national television while refusing to speak to the police?
What did John Ramsey mean by saying, "I don't know if it was
an
attack on me, on my company . . ."?
Eight months after the murder - to the bafflement of the
public, the F.B.I., and the police- Haddon's team has been
singularly
successful in dissuading Boulder D.A. Alex Hunter from
filing charges. "The public perception-whether true or
not-is that Hal
Haddon can knock out Alex Hunter blindfolded with his hands
tied behind his back," says columnist Chuck Green.
Hunter's team is led by trial attorney Peter Hofstrom, a
former prison guard at San Quentin who has worked with
Hunter for 23
years; Trip DeMuth, Hofstrom's handsome assistant; and Lou
Smit, a retired homicide detective. The police followed up
their
initial ineptitude by rapidly assembling a group of six
experienced detectives Led by Tom Wickman, they were Ron
Gosage,
Jane Harmer, Melissa Hickman, Steve Thomas, and Tom
Trujillo.
Hofstrom's and Wickman's teams are supposed to be working
together in their high security war room, but trust between
the
two was quickly shattered. Peter Boyles, whose daily
coverage of the Ramsey case has won him national celebrity,
has an
admittedly personal interest. Pioneer talk-radio host Alan
Berg, his "best friend and mentor," was gunned down in 1984
by
neo-Nazi thugs. Ramsey lawyers Pat Burke and Lee Foreman
represented two of the accused.
Boyles says that Alex Hunter, whom he calls Monty Hall (of
Let's Make a Deal fame),"has never met a criminal he thinks
is fit
for jail." Chuck Green, who calls Hunter "Mr. Plea Bargain,"
has savaged his office as "the Hunter-Ramsey team."During a
three-hour interview with me in June, Alex Hunter, an
affable man of 61, acknowledged that much of the Ramseys'
postmurder
behavior was unusual. "No question about it. They lawyered
up early on," he said. "Normally, it is true, such victims
throw
themselves at the police and district attorney, offering and
begging for information. The fact that they do not cooperate
is most
compelling, but it is not really evidence."
Hunter asked me if I knew that Patsy Ramsey was a college
graduate and had talent as a painter. He passed on the
information
that "she ran the science fair" at her son's school, and
that she had impressed lawyers with her outspokenness when
she served
on a recent jury. "She was fused with ," said Hunter. "It
was more than mere love.'
As for John Ramsey, whom he referred to as an "ice man," he
wondered aloud whether "someone as smart as Ramsey would
write such a long note." Toward the end of our talk, he
said, "These are not bad people," then hastily added, "Of
course, we
know that good people can do bad things."
When I asked Hunter whether pressure from the Haddon team
had gotten to him, he said, "I'm in the first year of my
seventh
term and have zero interest in running for state dog catcher
or congressman ... so this business about me sinking my
political
fortune is nonsense.... 1 don't feel any intimidation."
However, one insider says that Hunter "is twice removed from
the case," and Hunter admits that he depends on Peter
Hofstrom
for his information "He's the one that's keeping me
advised.... He's what I consider to be the lead guy." Which,
some say, is the
problem.
The burly Hofstrom is an old friend of several of the
Ramseys' lawyers, and he often socializes with Haddon's
partner, Bryan
Morgan Confronted by police officials about such a seeming
impropriety, Hofstrom reportedly fumed, "I'm not stopping any
breakfasts with Bryan. I've known him for 20 years."
Patrick Burke, one of Patsy's lawyers, has also been
sighted, says an investigator, "standing at the door of the
off-limits war
room," chatting with Hofstrom and DeMuth. And when
investigators finally coaxed the Ramsey team into having its
clients
provide handwriting samples, it was done not at the police
station but at Hofstrom's house, "as if it were a goddamn
afternoon
tea."
Assisting Hofstrom is retired detective Lou Smit, described
by Hunter as an "ace' and "the fox," but by his critics in
the police
department as "a delusional old man." Smit quickly came to
believe that the Ramseys were "good Christians," incapable of
committing such a crime.
Both D.A. and police sources say that it was Hofstrom who
argued to provide the Ramseys with copies of their original
statements and police reports if they would sit down and
talk with the police These actions prompted a firestorm of
criticism
from legal experts. (The district attorney's office, the
Ramsey legal team, and the Boulder police have all refused
numerous
requests for responses to this story.)
One day in early July I was contacted by a source with
firsthand knowledge of the investigation I arranged to meet
him in a
parking lot outside Boulder. Edgy and fearful, he said he
was speaking to me only as a last resort. He 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. He said
that the Ramseys have been provided with copies of all "the
most
sensitive and critical police and detective reports" as well
as reproductions of both the ransom note and the "practice"
note
found the same day.
Haddon's team even persuaded Hofstrom and Hunter to give
them "private viewings" of the original ransom notes and "the
actual ligature and garrote." "The Ramseys' best defense
attorneys are right inside Hunter's office," he mumbled
bitterly. The
sharing of such information, says famed 25-year F.B.I.
veteran Gregg McCrary, "is unprecedented and unprofessional
and an
obstruction of justice It's criminal.... It's possible you
could make a case for prosecutorial malfeasance It completely
compromises the investigation."

 

It certainly does continue to hold up, Spade. But, then, consider its source. IMO, he's the only one who has told the truth in this case. That's why they hate his guts.

 

Thanks for posting this excerpt, Spade, it's very timely. And while I'm not an avid reader of Vanity Fair, the article creates a profound benchmark in this case. Thank God for these kind of "leaks" and those brave enough to have suffered terribly to get the truth told! May they live in peace and one day be exhonerated!!!

 

Easy Writer.........have you ever contacted this author?

i would love for you to write her and
ask her to do an update article on the Ramsey's in
light of John running for office.

you could tell Ann THE TRUTH.....
and i am sure she would write another
incredible TRUE article.

and of course tell her all about our web site
and incredible forum members who just
met with the Govenor's attorney!

why dont you do that?

please,
purr