Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [188]
The second route to the basement from the spiral staircase would first lead toward the patio doors, then veer left, right by where the flashlight was kept, through a 25-foot-long kitchen, where a fleeing JonBenét or an intruder would past an island counter and three high chairs.
At the end of the kitchen was a short hallway, into which they would have to make a left turn, and there, immediately to the right, was the door to the basement. Opening that door, however, the detectives discovered that they were in total darkness. There was no light switch on either wall at the top of the stairs or immediately outside the basement door. Any stranger would grope in vain for a light. Eventually, he might discover it set high on the wall behind his back, inconveniently located opposite the door.
Once in the basement, a stranger would find no fewer than four closets, two storage rooms, and a hobby room. The wine cellar, where the Ramseys typically kept construction materials and their Christmas trees, was at the end of one basement corridor—past a utility sink, past the boiler room, and behind a door.
The investigators considered the possibility that JonBenét fled from her bedroom to this remote hideaway in the middle of the night to elude someone. If so, she would have run a straight path from the bottom of the basement stairs directly to the boiler room, winding up in front of the latched wine cellar door. Only someone who knew the house intimately could make this journey quickly. Or, as one officer suggested, a mischievous JonBenét may have been playing a game of catch-me-if-you-can and led her killer to the spot outside the wine cellar.
If JonBenét had been hit with the flashlight in or near the kitchen and was carried unconscious to the basement, the perpetrator would have followed the same route into the boiler room, winding up in front of the wine cellar door.
The detectives felt that in every scenario, JonBenét spent the final moments of her life just outside the wine cellar door, where the police had found wooden shards from the broken paintbrush that was tied to the cord at one end of the noose. That was also where they found Patsy’s paint tote. The tote contained the unused portion of the paintbrush and additional brushes similar to the one used in the murder. After JonBenét was murdered, the police surmised, her body was taken inside the windowless room.
In an attempt to recreate the final acts of violence, the detectives screamed at different locations in the house, taking an intruder into account. At one point, Thomas ran from the house and slammed the door behind him. He wanted to know how long it would take someone to leave the house by the shortest route.
Just before midnight, Frank Coffman joined Shapiro. They stood on a wooden fence in the backyard and watched as lights in the house were turned on and off. They saw Detective Gosage, with a flashlight in his hand, performing a pantomime in which someone found John or Patsy and JonBenét, attacked one or the other, but ended up fracturing JonBenét’s skull instead. With the flashlight still in hand, Gosage recreated a slightly different scenario in the kitchen. It looked as if the detectives thought the flashlight was the murder weapon.
After midnight, Shapiro saw the garage door open. Gosage pulled out in his Blazer. Steve Thomas and Lou Smit stayed until the early hours of the morning.
The next day, Trip DeMuth and Tom Trujillo maneuvered the basement window-well grate while Gosage inspected some spiderwebs to see if the grate could be moved without breaking the webs completely.
Watching the police that night, I thought about that movie Manhunter where William Peterson talks to an unknown killer while hunting him down. One night I went back to the Ramsey house, looked up at JonBenét’s window, and spoke to Patsy: “I know you walked in. I know you did it. Didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
I found myself driving past the Ramsey