Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [39]
Soon afterward, I ended the interview. They had spoken for almost forty minutes, and it wasn’t as if they were eager to leave. They’d done more than I had expected from a husband and wife who had just buried their daughter.
Then they took a taxi back by themselves.
When the interview aired that afternoon throughout the states, I added that John Ramsey had confirmed that duct tape was found on his daughter’s mouth. Yet he said he didn’t see cord around her neck—maybe because he panicked in picking up her body, screaming, running upstairs, hoping she was still alive.
—Brian Cabell
The interview took up half of the network’s news broadcast and was a major scoop for CNN. By that evening, stations in Denver wanted Brian Cabell to go live from Atlanta to discuss the interview, and CNN’s affiliates across the nation said they needed more footage of the Ramseys in Atlanta.
Reporters in Boulder and Denver started asking Cabell, “Why were the Ramseys afraid to face us here? Why did they talk to a reporter who hasn’t really covered the case?” Cabell couldn’t answer. He wondered the same thing.
Charlie Brennan, a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News who was assigned to cover the Ramsey story, was at a New Year’s Day party when a law enforcement source alerted him to the CNN interview. Brennan switched channels from the football game he was watching and heard Patsy Ramsey say that a killer was loose. He thought immediately of Susan Smith, the South Carolina housewife who had accused a black man of carjacking and kidnapping her two little boys but was later found to have killed them herself.
Two days later, at a January 3 news conference, Boulder’s mayor, Leslie Durgin, after consulting Police Chief Tom Koby, would say, “People have no need to fear that there is someone wandering the streets of Boulder looking for someone to attack. Boulder is safe.”
JONBENÉT STRANGLED WITH CORD
SOURCE SAYS GIRL’S MOUTH TAPED SHUT; SEXUAL ASSAULT CONSIDERED A POSSIBILITY.
JonBenét Ramsey’s killer placed duct tape over the 6-year-old’s mouth and tightened a cord around her neck until she died. Authorities also found evidence that the killer may have sexually assaulted the little girl.
Patricia “Patsy” Ramsey, 39, JonBenét’s mother, has also retained an attorney. Patrick J. Burke of Boulder will represent her.
—Charlie Brennan and Lynn Bartels
Rocky Mountain News, January 1, 1997
Late in the afternoon of January 1, Detectives Larry Mason, Steve Thomas, Tom Trujillo, Ron Gosage, and Jane Harmer left Boulder for Atlanta, where they had arranged to work out of the Roswell Police Department. The detectives had learned about Fleet White’s heated arguments with John Ramsey, and they were shocked by the Ramseys’ CNN interview. It seemed to contradict what they were being told—that the Ramseys were grieving and unavailable. The police had originally planned to leave for Atlanta the next day to check alibis and start background interviews with the Ramseys’ extended family. Now, however, Commander Eller felt that someone in the household might be ready to talk, so he gave the detectives his own credit card to use for purchasing airplane tickets and ordered them to be in Atlanta by midnight.
The next morning, January 2, at 8:30 A.M., while Steve Thomas went to a Super Cuts to get rid of his goatee and long hair, vestiges of his stint in the narcotics division, Detectives Harmer and Trujillo interviewed Fleet and Priscilla White in their Atlanta hotel room. White now seemed to be replaying in his head everything he’d seen and experienced on December 26. Pacing, White told the officers he was confused and wondered why he hadn’t seen JonBenét’s body in the wine cellar when he’d looked in earlier that morning and Ramsey had seen it hours later. Then he recounted to the detectives what had happened at the Paughs’. Patsy’s father, Don, had to intervene and