Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [22]
On the afternoon of December 27, when Pam Griffin got home from her interview with Detective Mason, she found a telephone message from Patsy’s sister Polly. “Patsy needs you right now!” Polly had left directions to the Fernies’ house.
At the Fernies’, Pam and Kristine found that Patsy was overdosing on Valium. She’d been taking the powerful tranquilizer every few hours and had probably lost track of the amount. Pam, a former registered nurse, touched Patsy’s skin and realized she was dehydrated. She brought Patsy some water and made her drink it.
Later that afternoon, Kristine and Pam sat on either side of Patsy, holding her hands. “You know,” Patsy said quietly to Pam, as if she were telling someone for the first time, “they’ve killed my baby.” Pam noticed that Patsy used the word they.
“You need to brush your hair,” Pam told her. “You need to lie down a little bit.” But Patsy stood up to greet each new person who arrived, and as she did, tears streamed down her face. These friends, Pam observed, were entirely different from the people she and Patsy knew in common—their pageant friends. The people visiting her here were strangers to Pam. Hours later, Patsy finally took Pam’s advice and lay down in the Fernies’ bedroom.
Kristine went to the bathroom to get a cool washcloth for Patsy’s forehead. While she was gone, Patsy reached up and touched Pam’s face. “Couldn’t you fix this for me?” she asked. Pam thought she was delirious. It was as if Patsy were asking her to fix a ripped seam. “Patsy said something like, ‘We didn’t mean for that to happen,’” Pam would say later.
After Patsy napped for almost an hour, Pam took her into the shower and washed her hair. Patsy was unable even to dry herself, and Pam wrapped a towel around her. Later, Pam couldn’t say why, but she remembered feeling as if Patsy knew who killed JonBenét but was afraid to say.
Kristine, a former pageant winner, had been JonBenét’s role model. Patsy in turn had become one for Kristine and had been planning to groom the girl for the Miss America pageant. That afternoon Patsy asked Kristine, “Why couldn’t she have grown up? All Jonnie B ever wanted was to win a crown like yours.”
While Patsy slept, Pam found John in the living room holding Burke. To Pam, Ramsey seemed to be in a trance. His face was blank. His eyes were red. “I don’t get it,” he said over and over. Then he got up, walked outside, shook his head, and asked aloud, “Why?”
The next morning, Kristine brought one of her crowns to Patsy. It had been JonBenét’s favorite.
In the early afternoon on Friday, December 27, a dozen or so reporters and photographers gathered in a ground-floor conference room in Boulder’s Public Safety Building for the first press briefing on the Ramsey case. Formerly the telephone building, the two-story structure, which housed the Boulder Police Department, was located two miles from the Justice Center and downtown Boulder.
John Eller, a stranger to nearly all the reporters who jammed the room, seated himself at a table. Not the typical trim and fit officer, he held a few sheets of paper in his hands and was introduced by Leslie Aaholm, the city’s press representative. To the journalists, Eller seemed depressed, tired, and obviously reluctant to address them. Pinned to a bulletin board behind his right shoulder was a picture of JonBenét Ramsey. She was wearing a pink pullover. Her shoulder-length hair and bangs framed a sweet face and a radiant smile.
Eller spoke softly—he sounded like a whispering Baptist preacher, according