Friends say the Ramseys couldn't have killed JonBenet
By Lisa Levitt Ryckman
By Lisa Levitt RyckmanRocky Mountain News Staff Writer © 1997, Rocky Mountain News
"It was devastating. But I knew with what (Patsy and John) had gone through with Beth that Patsy would be the person to talk to about it,'' Kloster said. She was. "Losing a child and burying a child is about the hardest thing anyone will ever do in their life,'' Patsy told Jayne. "She went on to tell me how John suffered after Beth died, had read every book on losing a child and burying a child and how difficult it was,'' Kloster added. "She was just telling me how painful the experience was, how it was something that never goes away but they had gotten through it the best they could. But it was through prayer and God and their strong faith.'' Later that day, a bouquet of flowers arrived from Patsy. That's the sort of people the Ramseys are, their friends say: generous people whose generosity has kept pace with their growing wealth. "You didn't ever say around her, 'Someday, I'd like to have (whatever),' because the next day it would be delivered to your door,'' said Pamela Griffin, a friend of Patsy's whose daughter babysat JonBenet. Down-to-earth, say their friends and family. The kind of people who invite the neighbors in for pancakes in their pajamas. Consummate hosts who, as one friend put it, could take a frog and make it feel like the most wonderful thing at the party. Trusting people, who left the side door unlocked in Boulder so their children's friends could come and go. Patsy liked having the neighborhood kids in so she always knew where to find JonBenet and her older brother Burke. Both natural-born leaders. Both first-born children. Both products of small-town upbringings -- she in West Virginia, he in Michigan. "We had a wonderful, leave-it-to-Beaver family,'' said John's younger brother, Jeff Ramsey, of their middle-class upbringing by their parents, Mary Jane and Jay, a highly decorated transport pilot in World War II who eventually became director of the Michigan Aeronautics Commission. "Our parents were both very calm, loving people,'' Jeff Ramsey said. "You couldn't have asked for a better family life.'' Friends say John has the Ramsey reserve -- not the type to display emotion publicly, either affection or anger -- but shows passion about things that matter to him: his family, his business, his hobbies, including race-sailing and flying. He was the man you wanted at the controls when the plane hit rough weather, said his friend, Gil Kloster, who had flown with John under those circumstances. "John's the kind of person who comes to the dinner table, may not say a thing all evening, and yet no one ever considers John Ramsey as an introverted, shy, withdrawn person,'' Kloster said. "If John has something to say, he'll come across as very wise or extremely funny and appropriate. He's got a very dry humor that can break everybody up.''
They struggled with John's computer business in those early years. Gil Kloster remembers them fretting over a tiny ad they placed in the Atlanta paper, wondering whether it would get any response. Members of Patsy's family worked for John in Atlanta; her father, Don Paugh, a former Union Carbide engineer, helped create the company that merged in 1988 with two others to form Access Graphics, a distributor of high-performance computer equipment based in Boulder. For more than a year, John Ramsey commuted from Atlanta for his job as vice president of sales. In 1991, Lockheed Martin acquired Access, and Ramsey became Access president. Now he needed to be in Boulder full time, and he needed Patsy and the children with him. Patsy agreed to move to Boulder in 1991, even though it meant leaving most of her family and friends.
In five years, John Ramsey shepherded the company from $150 million in sales to more than $1 billion. Success changed them little, their friends say. John was still ambitious, but unassuming. A man whose favorite vehicle while he lived in Atlanta was a 15-year-old Chevy pickup. A man who was mistaken for a mechanic while tending his own airplanes. "John's the kind of guy that if you were to meet him and talk to him for the first time, you would come away never knowing he was the president of a billion-dollar company, or that he had any money at all,'' Jeff Ramsey said. Patsy shared that lack of pretention. Even her closest friends knew her for years before learning she had been Miss West Virginia. Always beautiful, but never the beauty queen type -- that was Patsy from childhood. At Parkersburg High School, she was never the prom queen or the homecoming queen. She was, instead, the queen of overachievers in a school full of them. "She was really about being in the background, just doing all kinds of more important things. She was so bright, she was just the kind of person who was a leader,'' said Charlene Pearman, who was a year ahead of Patsy and served on the student council with her. "If she had an idea, she wasn't afraid to try to get it implemented. It was just amazing. She had a lot of energy. She was more about doing important things. She was just so mature, and maybe saw life from a deeper point of view.'' Patsy cared about doing things that mattered, but it mattered little to her if others were aware of what she had accomplished. Pearman and others were shocked on the high school's award's day to see Patsy sitting in front of two banquet tables loaded with trophies for speech, drama and academics. Talented and resourceful, Patsy was a forensics coach's dream, said Linda Edison McLean, who met Patsy in 1973, when McLean started coaching the school's speech and debate teams. "It would be like a first-year basketball coach finding an all-American on the team,'' McLean said. Patsy's particular strength was oral interpretation, which requires a student to interpret a scene from a story or play without costume or props. Patsy won the state championship in both her junior and senior years and placed second in a national competition for her interpretation of a scene from the play The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the same scene she used to win the Miss West Virginia pageant in 1977.
Patsy didn't make the final 10, but she won a talent award and a $2,000 scholarship. Preparing for the Miss America Pageant plunges most contestants into chaos, with little time to think about or do anything else. But Patsy put together a fashion show to thank everyone who had supported her and the pageant, and opened it to the public. "She's someone who really appreciated everything she was given, not someone who says, 'Where's my dress? How much can I spend?''' said Dianne Lough, another former Miss West Virginia and a friend of Patsy's since childhood. "She was someone who was always intensely aware of other people's feelings. "I just wish everyone knew that.'' Jim and Betty Smith knew. They remember her from the days when they helped the Parkersburg Elks' Club pick the outstanding high school student of 1975 -- Patsy. The couple made pageants a part of their life: he produced them, she chaperoned the state winner, they both acted as judges. Dianne Lough was the first Miss West Virginia chaperoned by Betty Smith; Patsy Paugh was the last. "She was just crazy about my husband and children,'' Betty Smith said. "She was just very down-to-earth, never thought she was better than anyone else. But she was in some ways more caring. She always thought about the other person.'' When Betty Smith suffered a stroke in 1985, Patsy flew up from her home in Atlanta with a nightgown and matching housecoat in blue -- Smith's favorite color. They didn't see each other again for nine years; Smith wasn't in town when Patsy went to Parkersburg to judge the Miss West Virginia pageant in 1993. During that event, Patsy became aware of an uncomfortable swelling in her abdomen. She began consulting doctors, first in West Virginia and finally in Atlanta, where she ended up hospitalized faced with a terrifying and unexpected diagnosis: ovarian cancer. Patsy turned to some of her closest friends: Bill and Carole Simpson, Gil and Jayne Kloster. "Nobody's telling me what's going on,'' she told Gil. "I'm frightened. Will you come and be with me?'' Within a day, Patsy underwent a hysterectomy.
In the beginning, John flew with Patsy to the NIH, where she would undergo four days of a super-potent chemo-cocktail. One weekend, John came through Atlanta, and Carole Simpson posed the question that many of her friends wanted answered but were afraid to ask. "How bad is it?'' she asked John. "It's stage four,'' he said, meaning the cancer had spread to other parts of her body. "It's going to be a tough fight.'' For months, Patsy would fly from Boulder to Maryland for chemotherapy, then return home only to end up in Boulder Community Hospital with a dangerously low white blood cell count for the next week or two. She would return home and live in a kind of seclusion in the guest room, so sick that her family had to wear surgical masks in her presence to protect her from infection. Burke and JonBenet knew that when her door was closed, Mommy wasn't feeling well.
"Facing cancer is so difficult, because you are facing your own mortality,'' Patsy said in a December 1994 article in the newsletter, Colorado Woman News. "It's like someone pointing a gun in your face.'' Her hair fell out. Some days, she could barely talk. Her body wasted away. A deeply spiritual person, Patsy sought strength from her faith, her belief in God. She found solace in a small book with a bright yellow cover called Healed of Cancer, whose author had collected biblical passages that spoke of healing. She visualized a beam of light from God enveloping and healing her. She practiced positive affirmations. In September 1993, Patsy's friend, the Rev. Rol Hoverstock of St. John's Episcopal Church in Boulder, performed a healing ceremony at her home that ended with Hoverstock giving her a crucifix that had been blessed for her.
"In my mind, I was healed the day of the healing ceremony,'' Patsy told Colorado Woman News. When her close friend, Mary Justice, was diagnosed with cancer in March 1990, Patsy and Carole Simpson organized a "food chain'' among her friends to make sure Justice's family was fed for the month after her first surgery. "When I came home from the hospital, there they were, standing in the garage with a nightgown for me," Justice said. "That's the kind of person she is -- always putting somebody else ahead of herself.'' When Patsy was diagnosed with cancer, it became a special bond between the two women. Now they send each other birthday cards every year on the day they were diagnosed, the day, Justice says, they were both reborn. "One time, Patsy came through Atlanta, and several of us went to the airport,'' Justice said. "She had no hair. If you could have seen the expression on her face. She didn't know we'd be out there, and then she saw us at the gate. It was unbelievable. So many tears were cried.'' John's 50th birthday came during this time. Again, Patsy turned to her friends in Atlanta, who arranged it all. Patsy had to go to Maryland for a cancer treatment that weekend, and when she showed up after John's party, her friends were stunned by how thin she was.
"John came forward with the money,'' said his brother, Jeff. "But it's not so much that he did it. It's that nobody knew about it. I even heard it secondhand. I had to ask him if it was true.'' In 1994, Patsy learned that Linda McLean's husband, Jim, had been diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer. She flew to West Virgina and showed up at their home without her wig, even though her hair was only beginning to grow back. "She showed him that she had survived and gave him hope that he, too, could conquer it,'' McLean said. Patsy sent cards and letters and a box of inspirational books. "She was our light to keep going.'' Jim McLean died in March 1995. "But because of Patsy he never gave up hope,'' Linda McLean said. "She loved Jim, and he loved her, and I love her, because she is as good a person as I have ever known.'' If you ask Patsy Ramsey whether she believes in angels, she will say she does. She believed that John's daughter, Beth, became her guardian angel after her death, and helped Patsy survive her cancer. She was convinced the day she underwent a scan to determine if the chemotherapy had successfully eradicated her cancer. ''Beth, if you are there, please help me get through this,'' Patsy silently prayed. She told Colorado Woman News that something amazing happened then: "Suddenly, over my right shoulder, a young woman appeared. She looked exactly like Beth: same hairstyle, same hair color, same lipstick, everything! She said to me, 'My name is Bethany, and I will be running your CAT scan.' I never saw her before at the center, and I never saw her since.'' The CAT scan was negative. It was a second chance. "They lost a lot of time together when she was so ill,'' said Patsy's friend, Dianne Lough. "I know she wanted to make every day count.'' Their friends and children describe the Ramseys as loving parents. John and Cindy's kids, Beth, Melinda and John Andrew, all loved Patsy. John Andrew still remembers how she helped him with his fourth-grade project on the state of Virginia by cutting out Virginias from cardboard for his report. She held a luncheon at their country club in honor of Melinda's debut, and spent hours making the topiary centerpieces for each table. "She loved those kids just as much as she loved Burke,'' said Shirley Brady, who had been Burke's nanny and later baby-sat JonBenet. "She was so good to them. And they adored her.''
John and Cindy divorced when their children were young; John Andrew was still a toddler. But wherever John's business took him, he called them every day. "Every night, 7 o'clock, that was Dad,'' John Andrew said. They would see him every weekend, and calls from his kids always took priority at work. "I was always more important than any meeting,'' his son said. "There couldn't be any better parents,'' said Irene Wills, John's former mother-in-law and stepmother. "I think John realized, especially after Beth's death, how much they mean to him.'' The Ramseys' friend, Jay Elowsky, saw the family frequently at his Pasta Jay's restaurants and was impressed by the couple's patience with Burke and JonBenet.
"If a child was sick in the neighborhood, Patsy would be making cupcakes and delivering them,'' Jayne Kloster said. For years, the Ramseys, the Klosters and several other couples had made an annual outing to North Carolina. Patsy's cancer kept the Ramseys away for a couple of years, but they were back again last October, full of optimism and hope for the future. During that trip, Patsy pulled out photos of JonBenet in her first beauty pageant. "That's the first any of us ever knew about that,'' Gil Kloster said. It was, say all the people who knew, such a small part of JonBenet's life, a part that has taken on a life of its own with her death. The JonBenet they knew was the one trying to keep up with her big brother, Burke. "She was a tomboy with scrapes on her knees, just like any 6-year-old,'' John Andrew Ramsey said.
The foray into pageants, which began in earnest in 1996, was a way for Patsy and JonBenet to be closer. Because of Patsy's cancer, they had to make up for lost time. "It's just mother-daughter time,'' said Tammy Polson, who became friends with Patsy when their daughters competed at pageants together. "It's something you can share together.'' The expensive, custom-made dresses and costumes were part of Patsy's desire to do things exactly right. She even discussed the idea of making extra dresses to bring to pageants and share with other little girls, even if they were competing against JonBenet. And she wanted them to be as elaborate and beautiful as her daughter's. "She never did anything halfway. I think ever since she had cancer, her intensity has increased,'' Dianne Lough said. "Do the best she could with everything she did. Because she didn't know how long she'd be around.'' Pageantry had been good to Patsy, and she believed it would be good for JonBenet, a way to learn poise and self-confidence and to provide an outlet for her daughter's love of performing. "She is just so easy and so gentle, and she had so many good things to teach her child,'' said Pamela Griffin, who designed most of JonBenet's pageant costumes. "If JonBenet did not win a pageant, she was always the first one in line to congratulate the winner, always the gracious loser. If she won -- and when she won, she won big -- she'd be standing there with five or six trophies and a dozen crowns, and she'd immediately go give them to some of the little girls who didn't win.
"Patsy always taught that kind of graciousness.'' It was the same spirit that infused the Ramseys' entertaining, something they both loved. Their parties were elaborate and meticulously planned, down to the tiniest detail. Their Christmas party was an annual event, and 1996 was no different. As always, Santa Claus was there to read stories to the children. The party, two days before Christmas, was just one event on their jam-packed holiday calendar. There was a trip to their Charlevoix, Mich., vacation home right after Christmas, and then on to the Disney Big Red Boat to celebrate Patsy's 40th birthday on Dec. 29. The Little Miss Hawaiian Tropic pageant was on JonBenet's agenda for the first of the year. The family's schedule was so hectic, in fact, that it was Christmas Eve before Patsy was able to mail out the bundles of cards she sent each year, complete with photo, family letter and personal note. Fourth-grader Burke really shines in math and spelling, she wrote. Kindergartener JonBenet has already been promoted to first-grade math. "Her teacher says she is so outgoing that she will never have trouble delivering an oral book report!'' The day after Christmas, the cards arrived. And then the calls came: JonBenet was dead. "I had not finished reading that note Patsy enclosed with that picture an hour earlier,'' Mary Justice said. "It was just real bizarre. Real bizarre.'' John Andrew and Melinda had flown from their mother's Atlanta home to Minneapolis, where the rest of the family planned to meet for the trip to Michigan. A message was waiting for them: call Boulder. "I had this gut feeling -- I've been through this before -- that something was wrong,'' John Andrew said. "I called home, and my Dad said JonBenet had been kidnapped. At that point, they had found the ransom note.'' Immediately, they boarded a plane to Denver. "I yelled and I kicked and I screamed, and they put us on the next flight out,'' John Andrew said. They arrived in Boulder just after their father found JonBenet's body in the basement.
Immediately, the Ramseys' family of friends mobilized. When John and Patsy returned to Atlanta to bury JonBenet, they would stay with them in shifts, around the clock. About 20 friends and relatives met their plane in Atlanta. "I had never seen people with broken hearts,'' Mary Justice said of the Ramseys. "There were no words to describe it.'' They buried JonBenet on the last day of the year in an unmarked grave in St. James Episcopal Cemetery, another child interred in the winter's ground. Surrounded by masses of flowers, like Beth before her. Even at the funeral, John Andrew had to put himself between photographers and Burke. It was only the beginning. Back in Boulder, the Ramseys moved out of their house and in with friends to escape reporters and photographers. They spent the six weeks after the funeral with Jay Elowsky, who had to steel himself each time he returned to them. "It was a very tragic, very heavy environment. I would have done anything in the world to take that suffering away from them.'' Instead, Elowsky found himself swinging at paparazzi with a baseball bat. John and Patsy, out in Atlanta on an errand, saw a photographer pull up next to them and try to take their picture. "Pull into the drive-through at the bank and have the teller call the police,'' Patsy told John. When they pulled into the bank, the photographer jumped out of his car, ran over to the Ramseys and pushed a camera in John's face. "Why did you kill your daughter?'' he screamed, snapping pictures. "Of course it upsets me,'' Melinda Ramsey said of all the negative publicity, of being chased during her vacation by obscenity-spewing photographers from supermarket tabloids. "But I know my Dad better than anybody else. I've known him for 25 years. And I know he could not have done this at all. To me, it is just so shocking that anyone could believe they've done this. It's just beyond belief.'' Her little sister, JonBenet Patricia Ramsey, would have turned 7 this month. So much has changed. John Andrew, alone now in Boulder, always looks over his shoulder when he goes out. The Ramseys have moved back to Atlanta, a place where they feel at home. Still, there will be no unlocked doors. Their new home has state-of-the-art security. They have hired guards to keep them safe from prying cameras and reporters. "I'm tired of waiting for the system to work, because it's not working,'' Jeff Ramsey said. "I'm tired of hearing all these innuendos. Somebody out there murdered a member of this family. It's not John or Patsy. So whoever did it is still out there.'' "The most important thing is to find whoever did this. So this can't happen again,'' Melinda Ramsey said. "It may take years, but this person will be found.'' John and Patsy, their friends say, take it day by day.
"When I came home from the hospital, there they were standing in the garage with a nightgown for me,'' Justice sai "We miss her very much,'' Patsy wrote of JonBenet in a letter thanking people at her childhood church in Parkersburg for keeping them on the prayer list. "I cry myself to sleep every night.'' "They are trying to get their lives back as best they can,'' Jayne Kloster said. "Patsy still has fear because she doesn't know who did it. Someone asked her if she had reached the angry stage yet, and she said, 'I'm still living in fear. I don't know who to be angry at, because I don't know who did this.' She's still looking over her shoulder, not knowing who's out there.''
No, say the Ramseys. No, say their family. No, say their friends. "I have to be perfectly honest, I had to stop and ask myself that question,'' Carole Simpson said. "I honestly can say it didn't make any sense to me that they had done it. You can't feign that kind of innocence. You can't make that up. I know the kind of people they are. I've seen them with their children.'' "Certainly, everyone wants an answer,'' Gil Kloster said. "My concern is, (what if) they never know? They not only have to deal with the loss, they're also suspects. It's a living hell.'' There may never be an answer to what happened to JonBenet. Many people will always suspect the Ramseys. Their friends and family say they never will. "The (public) doesn't know them. And the public is accustomed to being betrayed. Look at Susan Smith,'' Gil Kloster said, referring to the young mother who made up a kidnapping story to conceal the fact she had murdered her two young sons. "This poor, grieving mother, so distraught. Susan Smith was pretty convincing. For a few days, Susan Smith was a sympathetic person. "If John and Patsy had anything to do with this, they would make Susan Smith look like a kindergartener.''
August 17, 1997
