Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [38]
“Why did you decide to talk now?” I began.
“We have been pretty isolated…but we want to thank those people that care about us,” John answered. “For our grief to resolve itself, we now have to find out why this happened.”
I tried not to ask my questions in an accusatory tone. For all I knew, they were entirely innocent. Eventually I asked, “How did you happen [to find the body] in the basement?”
“One of the detectives asked me and my friend to go through every inch of the house to see if anything looked out of place. In one room in the basement—I opened the door—there were no windows in that room, and I turned the light on, and I—that was her.”
From time to time Patsy would start to answer a question, and John would complete the sentence or the thought before Patsy could finish. He seemed to dominate the interview to a small but noticeable degree.
“Most laymen who don’t understand would say, ‘Why?’” I said. “Why [retain] an attorney?”
“It’s not just the attorney,” John replied. “We are also assembling an investigative team. I want the best minds this country has to offer to help us resolve this.”
“Mrs. Ramsey, you found the note.”
“I couldn’t read the whole thing. I’d just gotten up. We had a back staircase and I always come down that staircase. The three pages [were] across the run of one of the stair treads. It was kind of dimly lit. I started to read it and it was addressed to John. ‘We have your daughter’—it just wasn’t registering. I don’t know if I got further than that, and I immediately ran back upstairs and pushed open her door and she was not in her bed and I screamed for John.”
John Ramsey said, “I read it very fast. I was out of my mind. It said, ‘Don’t call the police,’ you know, that type of thing; I told Patsy to call the police immediately, and I think I ran through the house a bit. We checked our son’s room; sometimes she sleeps in there.”
Then Patsy continued: “We were just frantic, and I immediately dialed the police, 911, and [the operator] was trying to calm me down and I said our child had been kidnapped. I was just screaming, ‘Send help, send help.’ I dialed some of my very closest friends. ‘Come quickly.’ [Then] an officer was there. It seems like an eternity, but I know it was just minutes.”
“Have the police interviewed you?” I inquired.
“I had questions all day the day of her death,” Patsy replied. “For hours they asked us questions trying to get a chronology. I can scarcely recall exactly what happened. They were very compassionate, trying to help us help them. Boulder is a small, peaceful town, unlike Atlanta or New York or LA, where this, God forbid, is a much more frequent occurrence. This does not happen in Boulder.”
Toward the end of the conversation, I broached the issue of their possible involvement: “The police said there is no killer on the loose. Do you believe it’s someone outside your home?”
Patsy answered, “There is a killer on the loose.”
John added, “Absolutely.”
“I don’t know who it is,” Patsy continued. “I don’t know if it’s a he or a she…. But if I was a resident of Boulder, I would tell my friends to keep…”
Patsy started to cry.
“It’s OK,” John Ramsey said.
Then she continued, “Keep your babies close to you. There’s someone out there.”
Patsy’s answer seemed dramatic, if not melodramatic. I was taken aback by it. But as a TV correspondent, I thought, Boy, there is a sound bite.
Then I began, “Speculation on talk shows will focus on you—”
“It’s nauseating beyond belief,” John cut in.
Then Patsy added, “America has just been hurt so deeply with this—the tragic things that have happened. The young woman who drove her children into the water, and we don’t know what happened with O. J. Simpson—America is suffering because [it has] lost faith in the American family.”
A minute later, speaking about JonBenét, Patsy said, “She’ll never have to know the loss of a child. She will never have to know cancer or the death of a child.”
“We learned