Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [31]
When Arndt returned to headquarters, she told Eller about her conversation with White and Fernie. Clearly, the Ramsey family was concerned about preserving John Andrew’s and Melinda’s presumption of innocence. Arndt suggested that maybe the department should make a public statement to pacify the Ramseys, that it might help the police get their cooperation. Eller agreed to the concept, but he said that at this early stage of the investigation, no one could be exonerated completely. That afternoon, at a scheduled press briefing, a police spokesperson said that both of John Ramsey’s older children had been out of state at the time JonBenét was murdered but had not been eliminated as suspects. Forty minutes after the press conference ended, Arndt called the Ramseys in Atlanta and told them about the media briefing.
That same day, Eller placed Detective Sgt. Tom Wickman, who had a master’s degree in psychology, in charge of the crime scene investigation. Of the thirty officers now working on the case, seventeen were detectives.
DA Alex Hunter would be in Hawaii for the next several days, but Bill Wise kept him informed. Some of the news was not good. Wise was troubled that John Ramsey had carried JonBenét’s body upstairs and that evidence might have been contaminated. Also, he told Hunter, the media were starting to criticize the Boulder police for not having secured the crime scene.
5
Over the next several weeks, the police would reconstruct piecemeal the events leading up to the murder. They learned that on Christmas Eve, the Ramseys had dinner at Pasta Jay’s restaurant on Pearl Street, then stopped by the Whites’ house, and then drove around Boulder looking at Christmas lights before going home. After the children were in bed that night, John Ramsey went across the street to their neighbors the Barnhills’, to pick up a bike he had been hiding in their basement. When he got home, he placed it under the Christmas tree in the living room. On Christmas morning, JonBenét and Burke gave gifts to their parents and each other, and in the early afternoon, JonBenét rode her new bicycle around the patio before the family went to the Whites’ house for dinner. Fleet White, forty-seven, was retired, having made his money in the oil business. His daughter, Daphne, was the same age as JonBenét, and Fleet White Jr. was a year older. When the Ramseys left the Whites’ house, they stopped off at their friends the Walkers’ to drop off some presents and then stopped briefly at the home of the Stines, who were also friends. Glen Stine, forty-eight, was vice president for budget and finance at CU. The Stines’ son, Doug, was about Burke Ramsey’s age. Patsy talked to Susan Stine for about ten minutes. By that time, JonBenét was asleep in the backseat of the car.
During a conversation between John Ramsey and Detective Arndt on the morning of December 26, Ramsey said that the family arrived home at about 10:00 P.M. Christmas night. Ramsey parked their Jeep Cherokee next to their Jaguar in the garage, he said. According to a police report, he carried JonBenét, who was still asleep, upstairs to her room, where he took her shoes off and read to her. Patsy undressed her, remembered singing a bedtime song to her while she slept, and kissed her good night. Meanwhile, Burke was downstairs playing with a model he’d gotten for Christmas and didn’t want to go to bed. John helped his son finish what he was doing and then took him upstairs and put him to bed before he himself retired
At about midnight, Scott Gibbons, a neighbor, looked out his kitchen window toward the Ramseys’ house and saw a light on in the kitchen area. Sometime later, Adam Fermeire, another neighbor, who was up watching TV, said he didn’t notice anything strange through the window that faced the Ramseys’ house.
Diane Brumfitt, another neighbor, told Detective Barry Hartkopp on December 31 that on Christmas night she did not see a light on at the southeast corner