Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [37]
John Ramsey’s former friend remained a suspect.
When Commander Eller debriefed his detectives that evening at police headquarters, he learned that they hadn’t yet interviewed all the Access Graphics ex-employees on the list. Some were traveling, and others lived out of town. For the time being, the attention of the police would shift to the Ramsey family and their friends.
This New Year’s Eve, John Eller would not be hosting his annual party for the rank-and-file officers of the department. He and most of them were working the Ramsey case.
6
During the final days of ’96, I read about a little girl who had been murdered in Colorado—JonBenét Ramsey. I work in Atlanta for CNN as the network’s Southeast correspondent. In the news business, it was the sort of story you’d quickly dismiss—it didn’t have a national feel to it. But when it emerged that the child had been a beauty pageant queen, the story became sexier. That’s what we played up.
It had a local angle for us too—the child was being buried in Marietta, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. On December 31, I was assigned to cover the church service. We call it “sidewalk” duty—watching people who come to pay their respects.
That same evening, New Year’s Eve, I was at home with my family when the phone rang. Tom Johnson, the president of CNN, told me that the Ramseys had told CNN through a friend that they wanted to appear on national TV to explain why they weren’t talking to the media and to discuss the suspicions that were being raised about their possible involvement. They were taking a beating in the Colorado papers and some of the national press, and they didn’t like it. We scheduled the interview for late the next morning, New Year’s Day. It would be a coup for CNN because the Ramseys had said nothing publicly since their daughter’s death.
For security reasons, we decided that I’d go out to Patsy’s parents’ home and escort the Ramseys to CNN headquarters in Atlanta. I’d be interviewing them, and this way I could get a feel for them, and they might get a better sense of me.
During the taxi ride out to Roswell, I found myself ambivalent about doing the story. The news reports out of Denver seemed a little sordid. As a parent, I wasn’t crazy about the prospect of confronting another parent about the death of a murdered child. But as a journalist, I knew that the story had some titillating elements.
First I met Jeff Ramsey, John’s brother, and when John and Patsy came in, I offered my condolences. Patsy looked like she’d been crying for the last forty-eight hours, but you could see her personality through the grief. John looked like an ordinary guy, but he was clearly subdued. As one of his friends later described him, “He’s like wallpaper; he just sort of disappears sometimes.”
Patsy, John, and Jeff sat in the back of the taxi while I joined the driver up front. John Ramsey responded to some of the few questions I asked during the forty-minute trip. There were awkward silences, long stretches where we all said absolutely nothing. Occasionally Jeff Ramsey would answer the questions I directed to John and Patsy.
Once we were in the sixth-floor conference room of the CNN Center, Jeff sat off to the side, lending moral support, as mikes and cameras were adjusted. I checked the eight to ten basic questions I had scribbled down. But in fact, I had no idea if the Ramseys were going to read a prepared statement or just take my questions. Distraught, seeming uncomfortable and a little frightened, the Ramseys nonetheless seemed ready. They sat there not as two individuals but as a couple.
My plan was to let them explain why they were talking to CNN since they’d been avoiding the media, then take them through the story chronologically.