Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [158]
The police had a different approach. They thought it was better to lock the Ramseys into their stories of what they remembered about Christmas night and the morning after. Then take them through every minute and make them prove that they were innocent. For example, on December 26 John Ramsey had told Rick French that he’d carried a sleeping JonBenét to her room and then read her a book. Patsy had told the same officer that JonBenét never woke up after being put to bed, even when Patsy changed her clothes. Which story was correct? Since this was the first—and maybe the only—interview that the police would conduct with the Ramseys, the detectives were in favor of using a tough approach: challenge everything the Ramseys had said and would say.
Everyone agreed it was imperative that the detectives not reveal to the Ramseys and their attorneys what had been uncovered in the police investigation. At the same time, they had to find out what the Ramseys knew and remembered—and, most important, see how it stacked up against what the police had learned. The detectives had to decide which questions to ask and which to avoid.
They agreed, for example, that they wouldn’t directly mention the pineapple found in JonBenét’s intestines. The police thought it was better to lock the Ramseys into the story they had told on December 26—that the sleeping child had been taken upstairs and put right to bed for the night—and confront them later with any possible conflicts. The audiotape of Patsy’s 911 call would also be off-limits for the interview. Better to leave the Ramseys—and the DA’s office—unaware of what the detectives now knew.
The detectives also wanted to hear once more from Patsy what she had done after she left her bedroom that morning. She’d told Officer French that after leaving her room, she first checked JonBenét’s room and found it empty; then she went downstairs to see if her daughter was there and instead found the ransom note; then she returned to the second floor, cried out for her husband, and went to see if JonBenét was in Burke’s room. Later that day, however, Patsy told Detective Arndt a different version of the story—that she’d first stopped just outside of JonBenét’s bedroom to do some washing in the sink and had then gone downstairs and found the ransom note. Only then, she said, did she return to JonBenét’s room and find it empty.
Which was the truth? That, among other questions, preoccupied the detectives as they prepared for the minefield of the interviews.
On April 30 at 9:05 A.M., Patsy Ramsey began her scheduled formal interview with the police. Detectives Steve Thomas and Tom Trujillo asked the questions. Pat Furman, Patsy’s attorney, led her by the hand into the DA’s conference room at the Justice Center. He seated her, then pulled up a chair next to her. Ramsey investigator John Foster sat with his back to the wall on Patsy’s side of the room. Pete Hofstrom observed from a corner of the room.
John Ramsey would be interviewed later in the day, when the detectives were done with his wife. The other attorneys for the Ramseys waited in Hofstrom’s office.
For six hours Thomas and Trujillo sat face-to-face with Patsy Ramsey and led her through the pertinent events of the days leading up to and following Christmas. More often than not, her answers were ambiguous and selective.
The detectives asked her about what had happened when the family returned from the Whites’. She said that JonBenét had been carried directly to her room and put to bed for the night. She hadn’t awakened. What was the last thing JonBenét ate that night? Patsy didn’t remember. Earlier in the year she had answered the same question posed to her in writing by Detective Arndt. She had