Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [284]
Asked about the cord, Ramsey said, “It’s not mine. Fleet White knows about cords, lines, and sailing.” Asked about the duct tape, he replied that it was something White would own: “Fleet had some special tapes, possibly black duct tape.” Asked about the stun gun, he said he didn’t have one, but he knew that women from California sometimes carried them for protection. Maybe Priscilla White had one, he suggested.
Watching the videotape, Thomas was enraged that Ramsey had taken control of the questioning. The detectives screamed at the TV monitor and banged their fists on the table.
“Shut him up.” “Ask him this!” they yelled. Gosage threw his remote control at the TV. “That’s not the way to ask the fucking question!”
By Thursday night, June 25, the interviews were over. The twenty hours Tom Haney had spent interviewing Patsy were unlike anything he’d ever experienced. He didn’t believe in the baloney about multiple personalities, but having interviewed Patsy for all those hours, he was sure that she was not who she pretended to be—ever. That was what he believed. Still, it was almost impossible to believe that she’d turned from a normal mother, which until then she had given every indication of being, into a murderer that night. Haney had never been able to come up with a motive for the killing, and now, after three days of questioning, he had not been able to find a trigger that might have set Patsy off—if she was the killer. All he knew for sure, based on his years of experience, was that the person who killed JonBenét was not afraid of discovery in the house. The ransom note alone convinced him of that. Someone had sat down after the murder and written the note. Haney was sure of it.
One deputy DA viewing the videotape felt it would be unreasonable to assume that Patsy Ramsey, out of the blue and cold-bloodedly, placed a noose around her daughter’s neck and used it. Logic suggested, however, that Patsy might have hit her daughter on the head with a heavy object by accident and rendered her unconscious. Then, believing JonBenét was already dead—and unable to face the horrifying idea that the world would see her as her child’s murderer—she might have set about to cover it up. If that was true, at that moment Patsy Ramsey became her daughter’s killer. Coming from Atlanta, where most murder cases are charged as first-degree death penalty offenses, it was likely Patsy Ramsey had never considered Boulder’s more liberal climate.
Of course, the deputy DA had to admit that there were holes and unanswered questions in his theory. What was the motive that might have caused Patsy, who had never been seen so much as slapping her kids, to hit—deliberately or accidently—JonBenét on the head? If she did hit the child by accident, why not take her pulse or call 911? If Patsy was together enough to engage in a cover-up, she had to have been capable of seeking medical attention.
Over Thanksgiving break in 1994, the Ramseys went to Georgia. I was working for them as their housekeeper. They were due home on Sunday but were a day late because Atlanta was fogged in. When I came to work Monday morning, the house was flooded. It was really bad. A window in John’s third-floor bathroom had been left open by a painter. Then the wind blew the shutter, which apparently hit the hot water control on the shower and turned it on. The water must have been running for three days. It destroyed the bathroom floor, ran down into John Andrew’s closets and out into his room on the second floor, and all the way down into some rooms on the ground floor. It was so bad that I called Don Paugh at Access Graphics.
When John and Patsy showed up, they went straight upstairs. We were all standing in the bathroom. There was water everywhere. John was in his stocking feet; he always took his shoes off when he came into the house.
He slammed the window shut. Then he realized his socks were wet. That made him furious. He was more mad about his socks being wet than about the house being ruined. I looked into