Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [106]
Patsy was growing anxious about High Peaks, the school JonBenét and Burke were going to. There were children in some classes who would never be self-sufficient, physically handicapped, but they were being mainstreamed into the classroom. They have a right to be educated, but there were these other intelligent little boys and girls who were growing up to make a living, pay taxes, and they were sitting and waiting. The teacher told me her first obligation was to those handicapped children. And you just wonder how much time in the course of a day is spent on the children who need to be learning so that they can take their place in society. I know the teacher wanted to do more, but there was only one of her and an aide.
JonBenét started to read when she was about three. At first she wanted to be a ballet dancer, then an ice-skater, and finally she told someone she might like to be a veterinarian. On her last trip to New York, in November ’96, she saw Grease, and the MC invited her to dance on stage before the show started. Nobody would ever pass her up. She just had that gleam in her eye. She and her partner didn’t win, but they were runner-ups.
I made several trips to Boulder that last month. One was for the Boulder Parade of Lights that JonBenét rode in. It was cold. I didn’t go to John and Patsy’s Christmas party, because I was in Roswell. Don, my husband, was there and flew back standby on the 24th so we could spend Christmas Eve together.
I spoke to JonBenét Christmas morning on the phone. She was excited.
“What do you like the most about Christmas?” I asked.
“Baking cookies.”
Like her mother, JonBenét loved to bake and decorate cookies. That afternoon she was supposed to make some plastic jewelry with her friend Daphne. My daughter Polly got her that gift for Christmas. And she was excited about going on the big red Disney boat after a few days in Charlevoix. Everything was packed.
I can tell you one thing. Whoever killed that child knew JonBenét’s dog wasn’t going to be in the house that evening. Sometimes Jacques would stay at the Barnhills’ for a few hours and then he’d come back. He was always going back and forth. The killer knew the dog had already been taken across the street to stay with the Barnhills since the family was leaving the next morning for their winter vacation.
There were so many beautiful and wonderful people in Boulder, like the Barnhills, but now I can’t tolerate even thinking of that place. It just makes me ill to even think that someone killed JonBenét in that place.
Now Patsy can never be happy on this earth. But she has to live someplace. We all have to live someplace.
—Nedra Paugh
For seven weeks the police had been interviewing the Ramseys’ family, friends, and business associates without turning up any real suspects. They had finished their background checks on John Andrew and Melinda and had verified commercial airline schedules and private plane flight plans and found no record that either of them had traveled the night of December 25. Their alibis were solid. Besides the Ramseys, the only people apparently still under investigation were “Santa” Bill McReynolds and his wife, Janet; housekeeper Linda Hoffmann-Pugh; part-time reporter Chris Wolf; Bud Henderson, who owed $18,000 to Access Graphics; company executive Gary Merriman; and the Ramseys’ friends Fleet and Priscilla White.
Next would come interviews with pageant photographers Randy Simons and Mark Fix, who had taken pictures of JonBenét. The police wanted to check the two men’s whereabouts the night of the murder; they were also interested in finding out more about Patsy’s and JonBenét’s involvement in the pageants.
On February 20, Detective Harmer interviewed Randy Simons. Simons told her that on June 5, 1996, he