Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [283]
Let’s see it, Patsy said, as if she had been brought up on the streets of Brooklyn.
We’re not in a position to show it to you now, Haney replied. You have lied to me, he added.
Pal, you don’t want to go there. Don’t start that, she snapped.
The tougher the questions became, the tougher Patsy became. Once, she raised her hand across the table in front of Haney’s face and said, You’re going down the wrong road.
When Haney took the offensive, Patsy Ramsey was ready for him. She had the answers, and she didn’t care if he liked them or not.
When the detectives viewed the tapes of the third day, they gave Haney four stars. He’d gotten to the real Patsy, they believed. She had exhibited the hard side of her persona. A side, they believed, capable of doing harm to her daughter.
By contrast, Thomas and his fellow detectives were outraged to see Lou Smit shake John Ramsey’s hand and engage him in chitchat. He was so friendly with Ramsey, it was if the two men were on the same team. Smit had his pet intruder theory written all over him. Meanwhile, when Ramsey was taken through the photos of his home, he claimed to find something out of place in almost every one. More than once, he said that what he saw in the photo was evidence that an intruder had been there. In a photo of the basement bathroom window, he pointed to a smudge on the window frame and said it looked like the dust had been disturbed. He wanted to know if the police had checked it out. In a picture of the broken basement window, he saw some messed-up dirt near the window frame, also an indication that someone might have entered the house at that point.
Looking at a photograph taken near his upstairs desk, Ramsey suddenly asked, “What’s that, what’s that?” Pictured was a copy of a local journal, the Boulder Business Report. Clearly visible on page 1A of the October 1995 issue was a story, “People vs. Profits,” that featured photographs of Mary Ellen Vernon, Jirka Rysavy, Jeffrey Kohn, and Ramsey, winners of the journal’s Esprit awards. Someone had drawn a “NO” over each of the faces except Ramsey’s, which had a flower design around it. Startled, Ramsey said he’d never seen that in his house. He had no way to explain it, but it was something out of the ordinary, he told the investigators. He was sure it had been brought in by a stranger. That evening the police remembered that Chris Wolf, who was a suspect at one time, had worked for the newspaper. He would have to be reinterviewed.
When Ramsey was asked about JonBenét, he would introduce his remark by saying, How could I do something like that to a loving, beautiful child that I cared so much about? I didn’t kill her. To the cops, it looked as if Ramsey was selling an image of himself as a father. Only rarely did he answer with a straightforward “No” or “I didn’t.” He seemed to ask almost as many questions during the interviews as were asked of him.
Asked whether Burke had talked to him at the time of the 911 call, he said he was sure Burke was in his room and asleep. There had been no conversation between them. Asked about the pineapple, Ramsey said that he took his daughter directly to bed and that he was sure she hadn’t eaten any pineapple.
On the second day, Ramsey began by telling Kane and Smit that he wanted to correct a statement he’d made the previous day about the pineapple.
Last night it hit me like a brick, Ramsey said. I remembered hearing that there was an agreement between Santa and JonBenét to meet that night, he continued. If an intruder had come into her room, she would have kicked and screamed, but she knew Santa and she would have hopped out of bed and gone with him. One person who might have been able to coax his daughter downstairs to eat some pineapple without his or Patsy’s knowledge was Santa—Bill McReynolds, Ramsey said. JonBenét trusted him and would have done whatever he suggested. The police should question McReynolds again. According to profilers he had hired, Ramsey said, McReynolds fit the description of a possible kidnapper.