Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [9]
In the study, however, another detective overheard John Ramsey talking on the phone to his private pilot. He was making plans to fly somewhere before nightfall. Moments later, Ramsey told Mason that he, his wife, and his son would be flying to Atlanta that evening. He said he had something really important to attend to. At first Mason thought Ramsey was planning to leave the country.
“You can’t leave,” Mason told him. “We have a lot of unfinished business here. We have to talk to you.”
“OK,” Ramsey said. He didn’t protest.
“You’re going to have to postpone that kind of stuff,” Mason added. “You can’t go.”
Larry Mason had witnessed many SIDS* deaths and fatal accidents to children, but he had never once seen a father as callous as Ramsey appeared to be. Still, the detective tried to withhold judgment. He knew he might be projecting his own emotions onto the situation—how he would act in Ramsey’s place.
Ramsey then told Mason that he and Patsy wouldn’t go to the Holiday Inn. He didn’t seem defensive or adversarial—just stoic. Resigned, almost. His family would go to the home of their friends the Fernies. “Give us a day,” Ramsey said quietly. “We just lost our child.”
Mason consulted Arndt, who felt that every consideration should be weighed, then Eller. Everyone was still reluctant to push the parents. The family wasn’t going anywhere, and besides, the department had to get organized. The police would wait to talk to the parents.
Minutes later, John Ramsey’s older children from a previous marriage, John Andrew and Melinda, arrived. They had just flown in to Denver. Originally they were going to meet their father’s private plane in Minneapolis that morning, and then the entire family would have continued on to their vacation home in Charlevoix, Michigan. But John Andrew had called his father from Minneapolis and learned about the kidnapping, and he and Melinda had taken a United Airlines flight to Denver. Now, outside in the early afternoon chill, Ramsey told his son and daughter that their little sister had been murdered. Minutes later, a patrol car escorted the Ramseys to the Fernies’.
After the family left, Detective Michael Everett, designated the lead crime scene investigator, and Larry Mason started to prepare a search warrant. By 1:50 the house was secured. Forty minutes later, Detective Arndt went to see the Ramseys at the Fernies’ house, while Detective Patterson went to the Whites’ house to speak with JonBenét’s nine-year-old brother, Burke. Patterson confirmed what he had been told earlier—that the boy had slept through the events of the previous night.
When Larry Mason returned to police headquarters at midafternoon, he found John Eller upset that the FBI was still involved in the case. Eller had spent eleven years with the Dade County police before joining the Boulder PD as an administrator in 1979. He resented guys who hadn’t come up from the street; they couldn’t possibly know what he knew. Eller told Mason the Bureau was no longer needed.
In the case of a homicide where the dead child is found in the parents’ home, the FBI’s standard procedure is to investigate the parents first and then move outward in circles. The first circle of suspects would comprise the immediate family. Then would come people who had frequent access to the child—baby-sitters and domestic help. The next circle would contain the parents’ friends and business associates. The outermost circle would be strangers. The technique was to avoid leaping over these concentric circles too quickly. For example, investigators shouldn’t concentrate too early on a stranger, the least likely possibility. Agent Ron Walker hoped the Boulder police would do the job progressively and methodically. He also hoped they would ask for help from the FBI or the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which had both the experience and the resources for a case like this.
But John Eller felt differently. He believed the Boulder detectives could handle the investigation alone.