Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [7]
Everyone was waiting for the kidnappers to call.
A few minutes after noon, the victim advocates decided to leave for lunch. Their experience told them they could best serve the Ramseys if they maintained their own composure.
Just before 1:00 P.M., Arndt asked Fleet White and John Fernie to take John Ramsey on another tour of the house. She wanted to keep Ramsey busy. She also wanted him to check if anything was missing—anything that might have been taken along with JonBenét. White informed Arndt that he had reported his own daughter missing to the Boulder PD several months earlier. But before the police had arrived he found her hiding inside his house.
John Fernie stayed on the ground floor while Ramsey led Fleet White down to the basement. In Burke’s train room, they looked at the broken window. Ramsey told White that some months ago, he’d found himself locked out of the house and had broken the window, unlatched it, and climbed through.
Before they left the train room, they searched two closets near the entrance to the room. Then Ramsey, with White a few paces behind, turned right into the boiler room. At the rear was a door leading to what the family called the wine cellar, a windowless room with brick walls. Ramsey pulled the door open toward himself, stood at the threshold, and, peering to the left into the darkness, saw a white blanket on the floor just as he reached for the switch on the wall to his right and turned on the light. Then he saw two little hands sticking out from under the blanket.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” he cried.
JonBenét was lying on the floor, partly wrapped in the blanket. Her hands were extended over her head and appeared to be tied together. There was tape covering her mouth.
From a distance of about 12 feet, Fleet White saw Ramsey enter the wine cellar and turn out of sight to his left. As Ramsey cried out a second time, White followed him into the room.
By now Ramsey had ripped the tape off his daughter’s mouth and was untying the cord from around one of her wrists. White knelt beside Ramsey and touched one of JonBenét’s feet. The child was dead cold. A few moments later Ramsey picked up his daughter. Rigor mortis had set in and her body was rigid. Holding her by the waist like a plank of wood, he raced down the short hallway and up the basement stairs, yelling that JonBenét had been found. White had preceded Ramsey, shouting for an ambulance. It was l:05 P.M.
As Ramsey emerged from the stairwell carrying his daughter with his arms now around her waist, he turned and met Detective Arndt. JonBenét’s hands were still extended above her head. A string hung from her right wrist; a bright red mark, the size of a quarter, was visible at the base of her throat. Ramsey placed JonBenét on a rug, just inside the front doorway. Arndt could see the child’s lips were blue.
It was obvious that JonBenét was dead. There was an odor of decay, and dried mucus from one of the child’s nostrils was visible. Around her neck was a ligature with a small stick attached to one end. A similar ligature was around her right wrist. On the palm of her left hand was a red ink drawing of a heart. John Ramsey began to moan.
Arndt ordered Fleet White to guard the door to the basement and not let anyone in. Then she asked Ramsey to go back to the den, call 911 and tell his wife. The detective moved JonBenét’s body away from the front doorway to just inside the living room, at the foot of the Christmas tree. Arndt then covered the wound on JonBenét’s neck with the child’s long sleeved shirt. From the back of the house a guttural moan and an aching wail could be heard.
While John Ramsey and others rushed back to the front of the house, Patsy sat for a moment on a couch in the rear of the house looking out a window. She did not move despite all the shouting that JonBenét had been found. In the living room, John Ramsey grabbed a throw blanket off a chair and placed it over JonBen