Bugging a Gravestone

By RICHARD WOODBURY/BOULDER

Seven months after JonBenet Ramsey's murder, with the investigation going nowhere, police detectives in her hometown of Boulder, Colo., took an extraordinary gamble. They flew to Atlanta, Ga., where her parents had moved after the killing, and drove to the suburb where the children's beauty-pageant queen was buried. On the eve of what would have been her seventh birthday, Aug. 6, 1997, the investigators broke into St. James Episcopal Cemetery with the help of a Georgia state cop who picked the lock on the gate. The Boulder detectives then planted a hidden microphone and camera a few feet from JonBenet's resting place. For three days, they mounted round-the-clock surveillance from the window of a nearby high school, hoping to overhear a graveside confession from one of the many mourners who trooped by. But the effort netted little more than curious gawkers--and a salesman who signed up an elderly couple for a nearby burial plot.

Four months later, on Christmas Eve, the detectives repeated their stakeout, this time hiding a bug in a fake tombstone fashioned by a movie special-effects company. But the ruse failed when reporters and cameramen overran the site, and a youngster discovered the bogus marker, rocking it back and forth and loudly announcing, "This is made of wood!"

Recalling those tragicomic efforts last week, former Boulder detective Steve Thomas said, "We were grasping at straws." JonBenet's parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, didn't visit the grave. They have denied any culpability in their daughter's death and have not been charged with any crime. Yet they were the primary targets of the graveyard stakeout. And several investigators still consider them the likeliest suspects in the unsolved killing, as Detective Thomas makes clear in his new book, JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation, St. Martin's Press, written with Don Davis, a former wire-service reporter. Thomas and Davis recount the tortuous wanderings of police in their search for the child's killer--an exercise that in this book appears to be less an open-ended investigation than an effort to confirm early suspicions that the Ramseys were involved.

Working from circumstantial evidence and surmise, Thomas elaborates his theory of the crime: Patsy Ramsey accidentally killed her daughter in a late-night rage over the child's chronic bed-wetting, mortally wounding her with a blow to the head, and then in a state of panic, tried to make the assault appear to be the result of a botched kidnapping. Patsy penned a ransom note, Thomas alleges, and carried JonBenet to a basement storeroom, where she garroted her. Thomas believes John Ramsey was asleep and unaware of the events until morning, when he discovered the body and moved to protect his wife and further cover up the crime.

Thomas quit the Boulder force in August 1998, blasting prosecutors for crippling the case by failing to collect or test key evidence like phone records and hairs found at the murder scene and for denying detectives' requests for warrants for financial and movie-rental records. Thomas seizes on what he believes to be contradictions and inconsistencies in the Ramseys' statements. Did John check the doors the night of the killing and find them secure, as he said right after the murder, or did he not, as he said four months later? Did John read to his daughter in bed or carry her to bed asleep? If she was wearing a red turtleneck, as Patsy told detectives, why was her body found clad in a white top? Thomas writes that frustrated Boulder detectives in 1998 lined up a technical specialist with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and planned to have him break into the Ramsey's Atlanta home and install hidden listening devices. But the idea was nixed by Boulder police supervisors.

District Attorney Alex Hunter, criticized in the new book for unduly restraining detectives, calls Thomas "a tormented soul. The case...was all black and white to him from the beginning." L. Lin Wood, an attorney for the Ramseys, says the new book supports his view that Thomas "developed a theory early on and then tried to shape the evidence and nonevidence to fit." Indeed, Thomas writes that the screen saver on one detective's computer scrolled continuously in bright letters: THE RAMSEYS ARE THE KILLAS.