Eric: We're going to talk about the JonBenet Ramsey murder investigation and this is a story that really seems like everybody that's followed it even a little bit has a pretty clear opinion of what they think happened. As evidenced by the nasty emails we got over the last week when we even mentioned that we would be talking about this. And uh, before we even get started with the story and John, what your involvement in all this was, I think it's important to mention what, or how you became involved in this case to begin with because one of the things we had in a couple of letters from people was, 'How dare you let John go on the air and talk about this case. He's just a shill for the Ramseys, they paid him off, he's working for them, of course he's going to find that somebody else did it, and so, let's kind of clear the air and explain how you were involved in the case first and then we'll (unintelligible) story.

John: If they paid me off, I wouldn't be doing this uh, this radio(laughs) show if they paid me off and that's what's really interesting over the years people have said that he was paid off, he received monies. What's kind of interesting is when I was an FBI agent I was on a salary too. Does that mean when I go out on cases, that the FBI is paying me money so therefore I'm going to slant my analysis so that the police are going to be really thrilled with my analysis and the FBI's thrilled with my analysis. People that know me, been around me for years, I cause major problems, major headaches when I was in the FBI because I just wouldn't go along with the drumbeat. And I did the same thing, we talked about the case going years back into the early 1980s when I was involved in the Atlanta Child Killing case and I was totally against every else's opinion that the killer was a white male perpetrating those series of cases, crimes down in Atlanta. I said it would be a black offender. Wayne Williams was of course, you know was black.

I'll tell you right off the bat how much I got because I would testify in this case as well to a Grand Jury. I received just under, just under three thousand dollars total on this case starting back in 1997. And uhm, once I realized, in my opinion, that the family was not involved in the case, I did everything pro bono. I do pro bono work today for victims of violent crime. Sometimes going into a case, just like this case, I thought for sure, because of the stuff that I was reading in the papers, just like everyone else when you're standing in Walmart you see The Globe, the National Enquirer and all this crap you know and you think, oh my gosh, these people killed a child; they must have staged the crime scene. So I just happened to be out...

Eric: Before we even go on, I should mention that three thousand dollars is kind of a pittance when you think of what expert witnesses get paid to come out and testify.

John: Yeah, go ask Henry Lee how much money he got.

Eric: How much he got from OJ Simpson.

John: OJ Simpson case and some of his other trials as well as he got, he was paid, he was on the other side in this case. He was brought in by Alex Hunter. Or Michael Baden. Go ask Michael Baden how much they're paid. When I realized, and it didn't take me long, and we'll get into that, and people were critical like I jumped to conclusions quickly. Well, you have to look at me and the work that I have done, its different. How I look at a case is totally different than some other people you see on Court TV, on A&E, on these so-called 'profilers.' I've developed something. I speak to medical doctors around the country. They see a similarity in me as I do in them whereas I'm looking, I'm looking in a specific way, like an illness, and I don't have to have someone tell me what I need to have to come up with a diagnosis. I kind of know after a while what areas to focus in on in an investigation.

Eric: In other words, from your perspective and using your expertise, you may not have to know every little detail about a particular crime. There's certain, kind of, I guess, things that stand out that you would flag in your mind as being, okay, that's one of the critical things that I need to know. Here's another piece of it and based on those things and the research involving the hundreds of thousands of other crimes, we can draw these conclusions without absolutely knowing every single fiber of the case.

John: Right and I've done cases...

Eric: And that's how you've been able, by the way, to help police departments without having been at the crime scene and without being involved in the day-to-day investigation.

John: Yeah. Most of the time, you're not there unless it’s a series of cases and you're in the middle of an investigation, the bodies are being found. And that's happened a lot, but more times than not, you're doing cases. I've done cases strictly telephonic communication between myself and a police department and sometimes not a police department and I'm asking for just basic elements of the case without seeing the crime scene photographs. I'm asking someone who may have been at the scene to describe to me, okay, what-what was the condition of the body, what was the position of the body. And believe me, when I went into this case, the JonBenet Ramsey case, I believed going in, you usually focus in on parents. But I did not know what the crime scene is going to look like. I'm going to be able to interview the family members. I'll be able to go to the house, be able to talk to the medical examiner, certainly hear his verbal results of his autopsy. I happened to be, this is like January 6, I happened to be out in Provo, Utah with Chief of Police, Greg Cooper who used to work with me and for me back at the FBI Academy. He's a real solid guy and when I retired, he actually left the Bureau he was so close to me he didn't even want to stay there and he got a great opportunity being police chief out in Provo.

And I got a call from a former police officer, Ellis Armistead, who contacted me and said that the attorneys, one of which is Hal Haddon, who we know is involved with...

Eric: Sure. The Kobe Bryant case

John: Kobe Bryant case. They would like to talk to me and for me to take a look at this case. They don't know, they don't know what they've got.

Eric: And at the time, Haddon was working for the Ramseys.

John: That's right. Haddon was with the Ramseys, another, Bryan Morgan was there, another attorney I talked with briefly while I was in Provo was an attorney named Foreman. They weren't convincing me, or telling me which way to go, or throwing anything, I mean not even money or anything else. What I did learn later on, which really irritated me, was that there was another colleague of mine who was asked to work on the case.

Eric: To do the same kind of thing.

John: To do the same thing, which is fine, which was fine. And we've talked about how he wrote a nasty letter to KFI months and months ago. We're speaking of Greg McCrary. He made a comment that he would not work for a child killer. Well, first of all he was never, he made that, the invitation was extended but there was never any contact, any telephonic contact between himself and the attorneys out there. And what really disturbed me and bothered me is that, how can you say that you don't want to work for someone who's, say, a child killer, without even having the facts of the case. You're already prejudging someone going into the case, that they are guilty, that they are going to be a child killer, that these parents have killed their child.

Eric: Well, certainly part of the reason for that was the unprecedented media coverage of this case and, we'll get into that also a little bit later on, but this was a story where it wasn't just a matter of reporters going out and covering it. There was certainly evidence in this of reporters going way too, not even reporters really. The publisher of a couple of news outlets went so far as to essentially indict the parents and then gave instructions to some of their own staff to go out and find anything to back this up.

John: Right.

Eric: To make this true. That kind of coverage and the intensity of that coverage certainly affected the opinions of people and I'm, I'm peripherally involved with some of the people that covered that case real extensively but we'll get to that in a little bit but we gotta take a break. Let's break right now a little bit early. When we come back we'll tell the story of what the crime hap-how the crime happened and when you got brought into it and then we'll start going through the analysis of all this. It’s a fascinating story. Please stay tuned. It's the JonBenet Ramsey case on the Mindhunter Show. KFI, AM 640 more stimulating talk radio.

Eric: Welcome back to the Mindhunter Show with John Douglas, the criminal profiler. We're going to begin discussing the JonBenet Ramsey case. John was involved in this case, at first at the request of the Ramsey family. Their attorney had reached out and said, please come out here and look at this. We don't know what happened. The parents, of course, insisted that they were innocent in all this even though a lot of the news coverage at the time really made it look like they were guilty. And the way that that happened is almost a separate story but it will come up as we go through the story.

Let's talk about the crime itself and what happened when you first got involved in this.

John: One of the things before I even jumped out of the plane from Provo, Utah to head over to Boulder, Colorado was to ask them for specific information. They asked me what kind of information would you like to have. So, I know ideally, if you're on the inside, you'll be having crime scene photographs and all that other. I know I wouldn't have access to that. But really, and that's the thing that people don't understand, people who have been critical, my role, my job is to do an assessment, not a profile. I am not doing a profile to come up with, okay this is the sex, this is the race, this is the age, this is the occupation, bippity-bop. I'm doing an assessment. It's totally different when you're doing an assessment. I'm assessing whether or not this mother, whether or not this father is capable of perpetrating a crime, a crime that I am going to get information about by interviewing, not just the family members but interviewing a whole bunch of people on the inner circle. People that were there when this child was found. So I'll have all the gory details of that particular time as well as information from the medical examiner. Based upon this information, I will make a decision, I will make a diagnosis, if you want to call it that, as to whether or not I believe this family is capable of perpetrating this kind of a crime.

Certainly my experience over the years, I've seen plenty of people, plenty of family members who perpetrate crimes and who have killed their loved ones, killed their children. And we've discussed cases over this past year, Eric, of family members and it's not to say that parents don't kill. They do...

Eric: Certainly there have been plenty of examples of that.

John: That's right. So, going over it in the back of my mind, I have to tell you, even talking to Chief of Police in Provo, I had suspicions. I really, my suspicions were more towards the, uh, John Ramseys' son from a previous marriage. The information we all heard and read about was that he happened to be in uh, in Boulder at that time. Those are the kind of offenders, he was in his twenties, that we'll generally, kind of take, you know, a double hard look at. (Cat meowed...missed a few phrases)

Okay, here's JonBenet from Patsy and John Ramsey but now here's John Andrew Ramsey, John's son from another marriage who happened to be there and I'll be looking at him. So I went in there, but when you go in, you go in there with an open mind. But I asked them, what I needed was I had to know the date, date time of the case, when the child was determined to be missing, and uh, who did they call first, and did they call the police and uh, what time was the child located which will be interesting to this case. Where was the child located, by who. I needed information from someone, people to tell me. If I don’t have access to photographs, is the position of the child, where the child was found, the overall crime scene, how the child was dressed. And if there was blood, where was the blood? Is there evidence of any type of sexual assault? Can we know, can we determine through the medical examiner office. And also there was a note, and we'll get into that later, but I knew going in there was a note, and I wanted to know who found the note and how was the note found, under what circumstances. The paper that the note was written on, where did it come from, was it brought to the scene or was it obtained at the scene. The family, victimology. Patient history. If you're a doctor, I want the background of the family. I want to know about the business he runs. I want to know who lives in that house, and I want to know about their prior marriages. John has been married in the past 'cause that's where you look, too. Uh, certainly if he's going to be focused and targeted you want to see, do interviews with his ex-wife and children from his previous wife. And so, how long were they married.

And then, I wanted access to the house, but I also wanted to know who else had access to the house and if they had any kind of a security systems, you know, hooked up at the time.

And uh, then of course, victimology. Who was JonBenet Ramsey? I'd certainly heard that she'd had a modeling career. Like I want to know who the sponsors were, who took her photographs, family photographs, who was involved with her. 'Cause in the back of your mind you're thinking, 'pedophile.' You're also thinking there's a pedophile involved, we know again, Eric, through our discussions in the past that pedophiles will certainly be drawn to occupations that put them in contact with children. What greater occupation would be than to be a photographer...

Eric: Sure.

John: Takes pictures of children. So, I uh, said all that and then I flew...

Eric: That's an exhausting amount of work to do.

John: It is.

Eric: That's a month of investigation.

John: Well it is. It's a lot of stuff and I've done it. I've done thousands of cases and you just have to know and I want to know where to look and what to look at and again, where people make the mistake, and I think with me too, is that this is going to be an assessment and unlike traditional investigations or cases where I've helped police, here I'm not even on the inside. I'm going to be able to interview the primary suspects in this case. I'm going to take a look at them, see how they interact during the daytime. And even later on, I'll be able to, I'll spend days with them when they went back to Atlanta and hung around down there doing this out of my own pocket. I just want to make sure I'm not missing anything, that I'm not being blinded by the family.

Eric: And then years later, I mean after all of this is done, you come back to the case at the request of the district attorney out there and that's kind of part II of the story.

All right, we have to break for the news. When we come back we'll get into the crime itself and your assessment of it.

Break

(I seem to have missed the intro to the next section. I've pick up where the tape starts.)

John: party that she's going to receive a special visit from Santa, you know, after Christmas. So that's really unusual and the parents didn't know where she got that information at all. But now, what happened was is that on December 25th, the Ramseys are getting, uh, it's Christmas morning, opening presents, they're heading out now you have to know to visit friends and their closest friend was a guy by the name of Fleet White who lived about six or so blocks away. They're over there exchanging gifts, the children are playing with their children, uh, they have a glass of wine or two. That's the other thing. They're not drinkers, not big drinkers at all. None of that stuff's involved. Exchanging gifts. They say goodbye around nine o'clock or so and then they start heading back home but on the way home they stop off at a house or two to exchange gifts with other friends 'cause tomorrow morning the Ramseys are leaving on John's own corporate jet. Someone else is going to fly, even though he's capable of flying the plane, to Charlevoix, Michigan where they uh, will be spending a few days there and then they're going to head on down to Disney-Disney World, down in Florida.

So, they're heading home and JonBenet is sleeping in the car, they're son is with them as well. He's awake. And, uh, they get home like around nine-thirty-ish or so, sometime in there. They put the children down to bed. John takes a Melatonin to help him fall asleep. They set the clock, five-thirty-ish or so because they have to get ready and then go to the airplane.

Uh police were suspicious that Patsy Ramsey put her own clothing, the same clothing that she wore that evening thinking that she stayed up all night. Well, uh, I don't think it's very unusual. She was not going, flying commercial. She was going to be flying on her own plane, flying back up to Charlevoix, Michigan.

She starts going downstairs to uh, put on a, uh a pot of coffee on. When she goes, there's two staircases. One's a spiral staircase. She takes the spiral staircase downstairs...

Eric: And this is about 5:30 in the morning.

John: Five-thirty in the morning. Now John, John and Patsy, they live up in an attic. If you can imagine. This is an attic that's been finished off as their living space. It's huge. But it's fifty-sixty feet away from the bedroom door of their daughter's on the second floor. They're that far away. When the air conditioning, heating units, when they're on, you really can't hear anybody on the second floor because I will be doing tests--I'll run tests with some former police officers, and uh, noise level, you really, there would be no way of hearing a thing at all.

They did have a security system, I did mention that the security system was not hooked up on that particular night.

They wind on down. She goes down, right at the bottom of the stairs she sees three pieces of paper that are on like the second to the bottom stair and she starts reading it and it's the, it's the kidnap, so-called kidnap extortion note, ah which we can get into in the next hour. And we can analyze that. In a panic, she calls John upstairs who is sleeping (?), screaming and yelling. There are instructions in there not to contact police or FBI and John decides that they should, they must contact the police or the FBI. But they contact police, I should say first. The police will be the first ones to respond to their house and that's where the problems will begin. It's within the next ten hours, or so...

Eric: Sure. What do the parents do? They go and check their daughter's bedroom obviously.

John: Yeah, obviously they check. She's not in the bedroom. Screaming and yelling, where is the, looking for their child throughout the house. The son, is Burke, he's sleeping in his own bedroom. The house, the other thing, is very, very disjointed. The house has been remodeled two different times and it's the type of house you have to know your way around, you just can't be a total stranger. That you had to be in the house before because you can get lost in the house. You can be walking in the hallway and all the sudden it comes to a dead end. And JonBenet will be found in the basement. So it's really four floors, you have four floors of living space here down in the basement.

Eric: All right. We have to take a break for news. The rest of the story when we come back and continue the Mindhunter Show on KFI, more stimulating talk radio.

Eric: I'm Eric Leonard with KFI news.

John: And I'm John Douglas and welcome back.

Eric: All right. Right back to the story of the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. It's uh Christmas morning and the Ramseys set their alarm clock to wake up very, very early. They were about to leave on a family vacation and uh, Patsy Ramsey walks downstairs on a back staircase, early, early in the morning about 5:30 and finds what winds up being a ransom or extortion note referring to the kidnapping of their daughter. They start looking around the house. Everyone's woken up and of course, JonBenet is gone. And, the police are called pretty quickly even though the letter says not to.

John: Yeah, they called right away and uh, Linda Arndt is the uh, one of the investigators and what begins to happen now is--you're dealing with a potential crime scene here, but people are being allowed into-into the scene. We have uh, victim support groups, victim witness groups, two people are coming within the scene, within the house. We have family members, we have neighbors, we have the minister will be coming into the house as well. There'll be some response from some other police officers and it's being hailed now it's possible that this is a kidnapping and it says you're going to be in contact and they're waiting for a potential contact from uh, you know, the bad guys. The problem here is, the mistake that's made, there will be no search. There won't be any search of the house at all. Just a, just particularly there will be no search down into the lower level, down in the basement.

Fleet White, his friend will go down there, will go down hours later by himself and it's interesting, he'll actually go into the room where she is, will be on the floor, but he can't see her because it's dark and he can't find the light switch. So then he closes the door and heads on, heads on back up the stairs. So, uh, what happens hours upon hours later, and it's nearly, I forget the exact time, it's been years now, but it's over a half a day, twelve hours or so, is that one of the investigators, again is Linda Arndt, tells John, why don't you do a search, why don't you search--she's trying to keep him busy. What just has them do is to contaminate the crime scene. So why don't you take a look around and see if you can find anything and go with Fleet White. So, what they do is head on down to the cellar. And one of the things you look for here is, generally the people responsible for the killings, for the crimes, are not going to be the one who finds the victim. They're going to steer, uh steer someone else with them. If it's you and I, Eric, involved in a homicide, and I did it. I want you to be the one to open up the door where the victim is. I want you to be the--I'm going to be somewhere else.

So, they go downstairs, and uh, it's an unfinished basement, there's a train set and things like that. There's a suitcase near a window, which will later turn out to be a possible entry point 'cause there's broken glass. But also John opens the door to this make-shift wine cellar--there's no wine cellar--it's just for storage. And you hear, oh my God, oh my God, my baby. A light is on in there. And what he finds is, he finds that the child is wrapped around the torso in some kind of uh, a blanket around the torso of the child and uh, this will be, this will be, the whole scene I'm going to describe will be misinterpreted by a lot of people, including Detective Thomas. That this case has been like staged and this is like an undoing of the crime, try to soften the crime, 'cause it's such a horrific crime. The parents will be embarrassed and all like that, you gotta make it look not as bad as it turned out, and there may be some guilt associated with it.

Well, this is what it looks like; she's face up, her head is turned to the side, her hands are tied with ligatures but they're loose ligatures around her wrists. You can see her face, duct tape going across her mouth, her feet were already--she has no shoes on--are turning blue. John removes the duct tape from the mouth and then he loosened one of the ligatures prior to going upstairs.

Now, of course if you're one of the diehards who believe that John Ramsey is responsible, you're saying, well yeah, he put the duct tape on so he's going to remove the duct tape to contaminate the evidence. Well that's, that's BS. Put yourself in his shoes. I put myself in his shoes. If I find my child in a room in that condition, with duct tape, the first thing I'm going to do is to remove the duct tape, hoping my child is still alive. Loosen, perhaps, one of her ligatures, because it appears my child may be in pain. And so, this is normal behavior, but this is how it's been misinterpreted.

The crime scene was not staged, Detective Thomas and others. The crime scene was posed. It was posed in a way to shock and offend.

Mr. Ramsey carries the body upstairs. The child's in full rigor, so has been dead for maybe ten hours or so and figure at least, anywhere from two to ten, twelve hours 'cause after a certain period of time, thirty-six hours, depending on the heat, the body begins to break-down, decomposing, and it relaxes again.

Oh my golly (?) he carried the child up and he put the child on the floor. Everyone gathers around the child, the family members, the minister is there. No one can see that there is a garrote. The garrote is SO imbedded in the neck and, and there's a stick that was used to fashion the garrote, and you can't even see that because her hair is covering that. And they start to--the minister sees the garrote first and they try to loosen that. And then what they try to do is bring the child back to life, by rubbing the child and praying and...

Eric: Let me just interrupt you from an evidentiary perspective. What's the result of all this?

John: You have major contamination, hair, fiber evidence, you can throw that out the window. Just major type of uh, major problems in the case.

So I got a, what, the child is finally going to be removed and taken to a medical examiner's office where Dr. John Meyer will do the autopsy. And I got information from him that the wound around the neck was extremely, extreme force was used to garrote her. The cause of death was asphyxiation, because there's petechial hemorrhages , which means the capillaries were burst in the eyes, around the eyes, coupled with, which will be shocking, there will be a blunt force trauma injury that will not, no one will be able to see this with a naked eye until the autopsy began and that is critical evidence and that, to me, throws out the theory of the bedwetting and accident where Patsy in a fit of rage throws the child down and strikes her head on a bathtub or the floor, cracking the skull.

He's also able to tell me that there's urine in the panties, she has panties, she's clothed. That's not unusual in death you'll have the relaxation of bowel movements, whatever. There is blood in the panties and they believe it could be semen, I'm told at that time.

I did a--as I'm going through this I do a written analysis, I'm writing, and in my notes I would later read before I go before the Grand Jury, I would tell others, I said back then that uh, they will not--if they find DNA it in not going to be semen. It will not be semen. And sure enough, it was not semen, it will, and they believe it's saliva.

Eric: And, uh, how did you know that?

John: Because to me this was not a traditional, this was not a rape/murder. It was definitely, and I'll describe it as we go along, a sexual penetration but with a substitute object. This is a crime of anger, a crime of rage. This killer is angry and getting back at someone, and I believe it's getting back at the family, getting back at particularly at Mr. Ramsey himself.

When they finally remove the skin on the head, and this is the shocking part, what is revealed is that the child's skull, JonBenet's skull is cracked like a coconut. It's cracked eight and a half inches, right over her right eyebrow, all the way to the back. What makes this so unusual is that there was no swelling, no hematoma. There was no blood, bruising at all. There was just a little slight redness on the skin.

What does that tell you? What that tells you is, when the subject, the UNSUB decided, at the last moment to crack her head open, to hit her with a blunt force object, she was dead or she was on her last breath because the heart had stopped beating. Because had she been alive, you would have seen all kind, the skull would have been swollen, major discoloration...

Eric: And what does that mean?

John: What it means is that the person, even after garroting her to death--and it--and so hard that the garrote is imbedded in the neck, that the killer still had this hatred and this anger, this bitterness to hit this child, helpless child over the head with such a force that the medical examiner said it could have taken down a two-hundred and fifty pound man easy--could have taken down a two-hundred fifty pound man. What it's telling me, Eric, is cops you're looking at the wrong people. You shouldn't be looking at the Ramseys here. You should be looking and going off in another direction because the Ramseys aren't responsible.

Eric: All right. The rest of the story when we come back. It's the Mindhunter Show. KFI radio. More stimulating talk radio.

Eric: The inside story of the JonBenet Ramsey murder and the murder investigation which really started going sideways and off track of where you would hope it would go in the initial stages. Her body is found in the basement, in the cellar of the Ramseys' house and the father, in his reaction to discovering the body, moves it and in the process of doing that and in loosening some of the ligature, and uh, manipulating the body probably wound up destroying some evidence that could have helped in the case. And, once the body is taken to the medical examiner's office and an autopsy is done, a tremendous head wound is discovered. The skull is literally cracked, you said about eight inches, with tremendous force and more--almost more interesting than just the fact that she was attacked that way was that it was happening when she was dead or nearly dead, because there was virtually no swelling and no-no outward signs of the injury, which, John, you said in your assessment just suggested tremendous rage and would, in your experience, disqualify the parents as possibly doing this.

John: Right. And there'd be other things, too, but certainly when you started to see that, see the nature of the wounds, a lot of people, too, are just driving me crazy. They start doing assessments of people, how they appear on television, what they're saying publicly and they're basing their assessments on some-like an interview- you know, they should be crying more, they should be showing more emotion. How in the hell do you know that they are not showing emotion? I-I was there. I was there. I was behind the closed doors. I did a show with John Walsh on America's Most Wanted, who lost his child to a tragic homicide. The child was decapitated. He said the same thing. Who the hell are we? Who are we to say how people are to react or respond? God forbid, any one of us would lose a child like this. Who's to say. I've seen people who become very, very outspoken, very, very angry, I've seen others who internalize it, become totally withdrawn. Turn to alcohol, drugs, turn to suicide. You just, you just don't know. I know John, just through his business and how he's been involved in industry, he's a very stoic kind of individual. Here's a man, I also knew that four years earlier, around the same time, he lost another daughter in a traffic accident up in Chicago. When his daughter and her future fiancé were traveling to meet her future in-laws. And it was snowing and getting off a highway, the car went into a spin, hit an abutment and they were both killed. He was, he was just getting over that. And the other thing was when I went around his room, I saw all these self-help books, in his room, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, and he questioned God.

These people did not fit. She had the fourth stage of ovarian cancer. I was suspicious as hell of her, 'cause when I looked at her, she came in on the interview and had a uh, cross, was wearing a cross around her neck. I'm thinking, what is she doing this, John, throwing me a curve, she just found religion here within the last week or two? Then, what I did was went back and found old photographs of her and she's been wearing that cross for four or five years. It was given to her by a minister, she was born again, so it's not something she's playing games with me. It's that she is a very religious person.

Now, do religious persons kill? Yes, they kill. They kill but not this particular way. They don't kill this way at all.

The other thing about the body, which you may or may not know about, is that there were marks on the face, two marks on the face. And when I would later talked to Detective Lou Smit, who was brought in by Alex Hunter, the district attorney, and he would later quit the investigation after nine months because he believed the police were, and all the investigators were using the media and going off in the wrong direction. He pointed this out to me, and I saw that the uh, through a PowerPoint presentation, the marks and it appeared to be a stun gun mark on the face with two contact points. One contact point wasn't too good and probably why is because the contact of the stun gun hit the duct tape that was on her mouth. But then two other marks the same distance on the child's lower back. So this could have been what was used to immobilize the child initially by the suspect.

Now if you're talking about stun guns. We had four or five different groups look at this and one said no and the other four said yes, it was a stun gun. If we're going to talk about a stun gun, I'll tell you something else, parents aren't going to use a stun gun to immobilize their child. Now you're also going to sexually assault your child the way she was sexually assaulted. She was sexually assaulted, probably with a paint brush handle. You recall, the garrote was fashioned with a piece of the paintbrush handle that, yes, belonged to Patsy Ramsey. The box of paint stuff was kept right outside the room, the wine cellar. The brush part is there, the middle part was used to fashion the garrote and the other part is missing. And we find a wooden fiber at the end of her vaginal area. The child was sexually assaulted, bruised with that particular item. They were never able to find the piece of paintbrush handle to this date.

So, as far as analyzing the case, is this something any parent would do in a fit of rage. That we accidentally injured our child, now we're going to kill the child. We're going to stage it, make it look like a sex crime, put the child downstairs, and now, we're going to have the presence of mind to write a three page ransom note after all of this. The answer is, no way. There's no way in hell that they're going to do that.

Eric: We'll get into the ransom note when we come back. We gotta take another break. It's the Mindhunter Show on KFI 640, more stimulating talk radio. (I love typing that)

Eric: It's the Mindhunter Show with John Douglas, the criminal profiler. I'm Eric Leonard with KFI News. Let's get right back into the story of the JonBenet Ramsey murder.

We talked about the medical examine, we talked about how the body was found. Let's go over to the ransom note because this is what Patsy Ramsey, the mother, discovered, says she discovered on the back staircase of the house, five-thirty in the morning, was a handwritten note that begins, Mr. Ramsey, Listen carefully! We're a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction. We respect your business but not the country it serves. At this time we have your daughter in our possession. She is safe and unharmed and if you want to see-want her to see 1997 you must follow our instructions to the letter.

It goes on to demand $118,000 ransom payment. The letter ends by saying, You stand a 100% chance of getting your daughter back. You and your family are under constant scrutiny as well as the authorities; don't try and grow a brain, John. You are not the only one, uh, you are not the only, uh, it's hard to read, something around, so don't think that killing will be difficult. Don't underestimate us, John. Use good Southern, that good Southern commonsense of yours. It is up to you now, John. Victory, exclamation point, S.B.T.C

John: Right.

Eric: What do you make of that?

John: Well, that's like we've discussed on other shows, when you're trying to make something, like David Berkowitz had a little logo on the bottom that looked like, uh, looked like breasts, and it was a 'B' for Berkowitz but it looked like breasts and it was analyzed by different shrinks, and I finally asked Berkowitz, what, what, what was this, tell me the deep, hidden message. And he said, what, what? This here, David. What does it mean? It looks good, It looks good. That's it? It looks good?

Here we were trying to get the thing analyzed by people from, you know, hot shots, (unintelligible)analysis, psycholinguistics analysis. We're looking, heck, somebody even said it meant Santa Barbara Tennis Club. Someone else said it was Subic Bay Training Center, that John was in the military. There wasn't a Subic Bay Training Center, but they, they thought, they came up with that.

Another thing, too, is some hotshot came up from Vassar College, Don Foster, who had a reputation as a literary sleuth. He was the one, he found a (unintelligible)seventy-eight line poem on microfilm archives at UCLA library and was able to determine that this was written by William Shakespeare. Well, that's great, but then he came to the Ramseys, early on in the investigation, saying, look, you didn't do it, I've seen the samples of writing, you didn't have anything to do with this. And well, thank you very much but they didn't use him. So then he goes over to the other side and then he tells the police that, in his opinion that the note was written by Patsy Ramsey, he goes on, and on, and on. And then you start looking into the background of Foster, and what was really interesting is that, he stated that uh, early on in his investigation that there was someone on the internet who was using-posting using the name of Jameson, and this Jameson, he believed was John Ramsey's son, John Andrew. And that John Andrew was posting as Jameson, and he is the, uh, you know, the killer and he is doing it this way. Well, lo and behold, just to show you, when you call someone an expert, this particular person was not John Andrew. This was a white female, age 45 years of age, I think she was from West Virginia, her name was Susan Bennett, in fact I've talked with her in the past on this particular case. And she had nothing to do with the case at all other than a fascination with the case and she has a website. So much for the so-called expert, expert witnesses in this.

I was brought in by the police. Finally the Ramsey attorneys said, why don't you help, first of all we'll do the interview of the family and I just want to talk to John because of the DNA, supposedly DNA evidence, and through the interviews, in a nutshell, I could tell, from his responses, he was a broken down man. He was a broken down man. There was word that came out that John Ramsey read my book, Mindhunter , and in Mindhunter, I talk about a victim, Shari Faye Smith. So right away, all these sleuths out there. Shari Faye, JonBenet. You know, and that there was a connection. He learned from my book like it was a book on how to commit crimes. He never even read my book. I was in his bedroom. He never read it. He read my book after I got involved in the case because he wanted to know who I was and what I'd done, what I've done in the past. He knew nothing about me or what I'd done in previous cases.

I was brought over to the Boulder Police Department to be basically interrogated. They wanted to know if I had a listening device, a monitoring device on me, uh Detective Thomas went through my background and everything. And I told them, look if you don't believe me, bring in some of my colleagues from the Bureau. Which they would do. They would bring in some of my colleagues, which turned out, unfortunately in my estimation, was a mistake. It turned out to be a mistake. Because I know from my own people and sources, that when they came back, the Boulder Police, came back to the FBI Academy in Quantico to present the case, a particular agent there, who had been there for quite a long time said, if the Ramseys are not responsible, not responsible for this murder, I'll turn in my credentials. Now that's pretty influential, have an impact on an investigator.

Eric: Sure.

John: A team that only works one homicide a year. I just want to tell you about the homicide detective, Detective Thomas. I went out to lunch this week with a couple of narcotics officers who are friends of mine. And I told them, and they have to agree. I said, you guys as narcotics officers, you think differently. You have a different mindset than a homicide investigator. And what do you mean. Well, what you guys do, you're targeting, say, Eric Leonard, because you think Eric Leonard is involved in drugs. You go about making a case around Eric Leonard 'cause you know he's dealing. It's not a question of 'if,' you know he is. We gotta make a case around him. Now I put you, that mindset of yours, as a narcotics officer, in an investigation, what may happen, and what happened here in Boulder, with Detective Thomas, was that he would only accept information, pieces of information that would fit his theory. Fit the theory that the Ramseys were responsible. Even with DNA evidence, even Barry Scheck, that was used in the OJ Simpson case, Barry Scheck even had to tell the police, hey, look, the DNA, you are using DNA to eliminate people. Well, you can't have it both ways, guys. You can't eliminate people with DNA only where you want to eliminate people. Well, how come you're not eliminating the Ramseys, 'cause the DNA does not fit John Ramsey, does not fit, we know Patsy Ramsey, you're still saying Patsy Ramsey did it. We know that the DNA is DNA of a male. It's not John's, it's not his father's, it's not his son's. There's no DNA with any association with the family.

So you know what the theory is, and I got this theory when I went out, I was brought out by Mary Keenan, the new district attorney. She said, John, what the police are saying is, is that the underwear that JonBenet was wearing is packaged in some Asian country and in this Asian country, they have a tendency, the people there who do the packaging, that they spit on it. So, probably what happened was that spit, spit got in the underwear during the packaging and it just so happened her underwear had to be part of a homicide and that's where this DNA is coming from and that's why it doesn't fit because the killers are really the Ramseys. And this spit, we're not going to accept this DNA.

I mean, this is unbelievable, I mean just unbelievable the mindset of these, you know, the investigators who are handling the case. So you put that mindset here, and he's accepting certain things and ignoring other things. There's evidence of a, there's a boot print, there's a palm print here. Even excluding all of that, going to the letter. They had experts analyze the letter, Secret Service, the FBI, saying that they are not the ones who authored the communiqué. There was some-one-I think it was like five different experts, one of them said, you know, maybe Patsy but we can't, we really can't say one way or the other. Well, the FBI and the other federal agencies said that, uh, no way, that was not authored by them. So what, what you had here was an investigation going off on-on this theory here and totally eliminating any other possibilities.

There were twenty, over twenty keys that were unaccounted for, for that house that were used by a variety of builders and people who were refurbishing that, uh, remodeling the house for the Ramseys over the years. They had a habit of leaving the doors open. When the police arrived, they found six doors, there's six doors on the main floor. Several of them were not even locked. Windows were not locked. You don't have to be, you know, Spiderman to get into this, uh, into this house and that's, if that's what you are inclined to do.

The other thing on the night of the murder, it has to be someone who can commit a crime who can do this and not be unaccounted for, so it has to be someone who, if they're living with someone they can come and go as they please without saying, hey, where you going, you know, where you going. Or maybe the person is even living alone.

From the communiqués that you read, wrote off here, or were reading to us, Eric, there are five, five different movie, movie quotes, that comes out of this communiqué, and uh, movie quotes that came from movies like Speed, came from the movie Ransom. Ransom happened to be playing in town during that week. And it seems by, you and your family are under constant scrutiny as well as the authorities, don't grow another brain, John. Well, that's delivered by Dennis Hopper in the movie Speed. Speaking to anyone about your situation, so probably means FBI, that comes from the movie Ransom. (I lost a bit here when I flipped the tape over)

...videos and films. It's not a forty-five year old guy we're looking for.

Eric: We'll get your analysis on what all this means when we come back. We ran out of time fast on this one. It's the Mindhunter Show on KFI, AM 640, more stimulating talk radio.

Eric: It's the Mindhunter Show with John Douglas, the criminal profiler. I'm Eric Leonard from KFI news.

We've been talking about the JonBenet Ramsey case, and John, you were describing how the investigation uh, was, uh, spoiled pretty much from the beginning. The evidence that could have been found at the scene was disturbed, possibly inadvertently by the family. There were police investigators that were involved, seemed like they, they, you know, we've talked a lot about how important it is for homicide detectives to remain objective and not rule things in or rule things out, just kind of accept things as they are and sort through it later and it really sounds like, the, uh, from your perspective and your participation in this, that the homicide detectives were going in one clear direction from the beginning and perhaps ignored elements and evidence that might have been important.

John: The homicide detectives are not like the LAPD homicide detectives because of the few amount of homicides a year, this was the only homicide that year, there was another one about a year later and that one remains unsolved, is that they rotate their people and so, Detective Thomas, you're working homicide now but now next week or next month or so you'll be on the street, you'll be doing traffic. They keep rotating, rotating these people, and that's fine. A lot of people, it's great when you live in one of these communities where you have a very, very low crime rate, but, but please, the person in charge, the police chief, you have to recognize your strengths and weaknesses of your department. And when you have the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, a top-notch agency, providing you whatever help you want and it's being rejected, if early on in the investigation you're ignoring the FBI lab or resources and you're rejecting that, you're rejecting the Denver Police Department, which has tremendous investigators down there, you're ignoring them as well. Yeah, you're going to have a case like this, you're going to have a case like this that's going to remain unsolved.

But the whole thing of this, there was just, and there were so many other issues I couldn't even get to them all but the main thing from a behavioral perspective is it just, it does not fit and it does not fit at all, method and manner of death and one of the things that's a travesty is I believe because of the stress that Mrs. Ramsey has been under, of being accused, financially went bankrupt, they won some lawsuits to get, to recoup some of the money that they've lost in hiring a variety of lawyers representing them, in fact they were getting all pro bono, themselves, towards the end, and her cancer returned. Mrs. Patsy Ramsey's cancer has returned, they have since moved away from Atlanta, you know, she's gone through treatment.

And I always thought one of the worst things that could happen to anyone is to lose a child. And it's horrible, but what's even worse is not only to lose a child but now you're going to be accused, someone's going to accuse you of killing your child when you have nothing to do with it, had nothing to do with it. This family was open for interviews, it's totally bogus when you say that like, they were evasive, they were elusive. Yeah, they became evasive when they were told by another attorney friend of theirs, that you are being targeted, that they are using, that they are not going to release JonBenet's body to, uh, you know, to you, so you can give her a proper burial. Well, why's that? 'Cause they'll try to use that leverage in an interrogation. And both the police and the FBI got their butts chewed out last year by a Federal judge in
Atlanta when the Ramseys were sued by someone they mentioned as a suspect. They threw out the case of the suspect and the attorney, the judge, I should say, in Atlanta, said that, uh, the police and the FBI used the media. By using the media, what they did is they tried to manipulate the press so that the public at large would be on the side of law enforcement putting pressure on the, on the families. And uh, she said that the, that they totally ignored the intruder theory, and I do know now because I was out to Boulder last year, Detective Smit is involved, he's a tremendous investigator who quit the investigation, that there was something like fifty suspects that were totally ignored, they weren't even, they weren't even looked at by uh, law enforcement. They were put on the side, the back burner because the focus was on the Ramseys.

Eric: We only have a few minutes. What do you think happened?

John: What I think happened was that, I, I think also they have a very, very good suspect who uh, hap-just happened to commit suicide the week after this murder. He's a young, he's a young individual, I believe he's in his twenties, he happens to have a stun gun, he's into pornography as well.

I think this was a case where someone or one or two people tried any way things they saw on television and in the movies and where if the thought was to get some money, they had to know that the one-hundred and eighteen thousand would happen to be John, John Ramsey's bonus money. So they had to be in that house and he had the stuff lying around. Someone had to go in that house, which would have been easy to do, it wasn't, it wasn't, you know, locked up.

But it was a case that went awry on the part of the offenders, but still, I see a lot of personalized aggression. Personalized aggression against, uh, it's going towards Pat-uh, uh, JonBenet but really, to me, it's really going towards the family. There's such a lot of anger and bitterness. And there were suspects within Access Graphics, too, that I don't know how hard law enforcement looked at them either. That, people that formerly worked for Ramseys and uh, one or two were fired right before this case went down.

Eric: Wow. That's an unbelievable story. I wish we had more time to go through it, but uh, but we don't. Let me leave you with a word about next week's show.....

It's KFI AM 640, more stimulating talk radio.