Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [83]
Douglas told Dateline’s Chris Hansen that he had sat across the table from some of the country’s, if not the world’s, greatest liars and that when he had met with the Ramseys for four hours, he left with the opinion that they did not kill their daughter.
In his new book, he wrote that parents who kill their children usually report them missing and leave a staged scene. When asked by Hansen if this fit the Ramsey case, Douglas said he couldn’t see any staging by the Ramseys. In his entire career, he had never seen a case where a parent put a ligature around a child’s neck or duct tape over a child’s mouth. Also, Douglas told Hansen, parents who kill their children take pains to avoid being the person to find the body.
“From what I’ve seen and experienced [in this case],” Douglas said, “I say they [the Ramseys] were not involved.”
Asked about the unusual amount of the ransom demand—$118,000—Douglas said that Patsy didn’t even know the amount of her husband’s yearly bonus. It was deposited electronically into a 401-K pension plan account. “This begins to tell me more about the person who’s responsible,” Douglas said. “This person has a very unique, intimate knowledge about his [Ramsey’s] financial workings. Therefore, the person would have to be somehow related to his employment.” This left a strong intimation that the murderer was probably someone John Ramsey knew.
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On January 30, deputy county attorney Madeline Mason petitioned the court to seal the contents of the autopsy report. The coroner was still working on it, she said, and could not make it public.
Mason also argued, in a three-page motion, that the police investigation would almost certainly still be in progress when the report was completed and that its immediate public disclosure would probably hurt the investigation. The report, Mason pointed out, would corroborate or debunk various witness statements. If the public—including, of course, the murderer—had all the information, it would be far less useful to the police.
John Meyer planned to complete his report by February 11, one day before the scheduled hearing on the motion to seal the document.
EXPERT: KILLER KNEW JONBENÉT
JonBenét Ramsey knew her killer, and the killer had ready access to the family home, a renowned criminologist told The Denver Post.
Robert Ressler, who for 16 years was a profiler for the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit and the first manager of the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, told the Post that his study of the case—including a visit to Boulder this week—convinces him that the 6-year-old was not killed by a stranger.
—Howard Pankratz
The Denver Post, January 31, 1997
When the Star received a tip on February 5 that John Andrew Ramsey had tried to arrange the death of his half-sister, JonBenét, they passed the information to the Boulder police.
A sometime police informant had told the tabloid that on the weekend of either Memorial Day or July Fourth 1996, while the Ramsey family was vacationing in Michigan, John Andrew had offered him $10,000 to ram a power boat into a smaller boat that would be carrying him and JonBenét. Supposedly, John Andrew would jump overboard to safety just before impact and JonBenét, he hoped, would be killed. The informant told the Star that he had rejected the offer.
Detective Jane Harmer was assigned to follow up on the tip. The informant was interviewed by local police in Waterford, Michigan, where he repeated the story he’d told the tabloid. Two weeks later, the Boulder police discovered that the informant had a dubious history. A check of Michigan police agencies revealed that he had come under suspicion—first for possibly planting drugs in an alleged dope house and second for refusing to take a polygraph test to confirm information he had provided in a cocaine investigation. By the end of February, Boulder police had decided that the informant’s accusations were unfounded, and yet another lead in the Ramsey case would go nowhere.
In Denver, on Wednesday, February 5, Michael Tigar, the