Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [192]
Smit also took into account the many outstanding copies of the house key. Then there was the strange fact that every object used in the crime—except the roll of duct tape and the remainder of the cord—was found in the house. Did it mean that the tape and cord were brought into the house for the purpose of kidnapping JonBenét? If so, then it was logical that the intruder had taken them with him so that they couldn’t be traced back to him. And if the roll of tape and the cord had belonged to the Ramseys, why weren’t they left in the house with the other crime elements? This seemed to indicate that the intruder had come to kidnap JonBenét and that the murder somehow grew out of the planned abduction.
Since visiting the basement with the police on June 30, Smit had also been bothered by something he’d seen in the boiler room just to the left of the wine cellar door. There he had observed an exposed ventilation duct several paces from where the shards of wood, the paint tote, and the remnant of the broken paintbrush had been found. The duct vented through an opening at the front of the house where there had once been a window. If JonBenét had screamed near the duct, the sound could have traveled outside and been heard by the Ramseys’ neighbor, Melody Stanton, although possibly not by Patsy and John, asleep on the third floor inside the house. In July, sound tests conducted by the police confirmed that sound traveled more easily from the basement to the street than it did up through the three floors of the house. If JonBenét had screamed in the basement, it was likely that she was down there when she was hit on the head, either with the flashlight or with, say, a golf club—John Ramsey’s golf bags had been found nearby with their partial set of clubs. An intruder might have used a flashlight to find a hiding child if he hadn’t discovered the light switch for the basement stairs. Since no fingerprints were found on the flashlight or its batteries, it seemed to Smit that it might have been brought into the house by an intruder, though the Ramseys had never denied that they owned a flashlight like it.
The basement was so cluttered, such a mess—if JonBenét’s parents had killed her, they would not have taken her to this dark, damp pig sty to do it, Smit theorized.
All of his conjectures were very tenuous, Smit knew, and nothing that he wanted to mention to anyone just yet. Months later, however, he discussed his ideas with Steve Thomas. Thomas asked Smit the following question: after the scream—which the intruder had to assume was heard by the parents—would the intruder have hung around, taking the time to strangle JonBenét with the noose and then move the body into the wine cellar? After all, someone, having heard the scream, might be coming down the basement stairs, thereby cutting off the most accessible exit. Why move the child from one hidden place, the boiler room, to the equally hidden wine cellar? And, of course, there wasn’t any evidence that JonBenét had ever even been in the boiler room. When Smit mentioned this theory to another detective, the detective asked, What if the scream wasn’t JonBenét’s? Maybe it was her mother’s. Male, female, young, old—could anyone being wakened out of a sleep really tell who had emitted the scream? These questions, among others, made the detectives skeptical of Smit’s scenario.
Nevertheless, Smit knew he had to ask the Ramseys if they had ever owned or possessed a stun gun and whether they owned or had ever worn Hi-Tec shoes.
On Saturday morning, July 12, Smit, Hofstrom, the Ramseys, and