The district attorney and his top prosecutor, two police chiefs, and a large number of cops, although so at odds on some points that they almost came to blows, all agreed on one thing - that probable cause existed to arrest Patsy Ramsey in connection with the death of her daughter. But due to a totally inept justice system in Boulder, no one was ever put in handcuffs, and the Ramseys were never really in serious jeopardy.

What follows is the story of how someone got away with murder.
The hardback book at 13-14 (emphasis added, italics in original).
65.
The books contain the following libelous statements, among others, falsely conveying that Plaintiff Patsy Ramsey killed her daughter, JonBenét Ramsey, and that Plaintiff John Ramsey engaged in a criminal cover-up of his wife's crime because they were allegedly uncooperative and evasive concerning the investigation into JonBenét's murder:

John and Patsy Ramsey broke their silence on New Year's Day with an interview on the Cable News Network instead of talking to us. Arranging an interview with a news organization was a tactic they would use repeatedly in coming years, and in my opinion it was always sheer propaganda, allowing them to spin a public relations story while avoiding the police. Most of the time the reporters involved agreed in advance not to ask them anything about the murder of their daughter. And the reporters, however well informed, knew only a fraction of the real case. Cops wanted to ask tougher, deeper questions - and on the first day of 1997 our topics would have included a long ransom note written in a familiar hand, JonBenét's bed-wetting, a broken paintbrush used to make a garrote, pineapple found in a bowl and in the victim's stomach, and what looked like traces of semen on the victim. The only danger to Patsy and John Ramsey when they put on their dog and pony shows did not come from the interviewers but from themselves. Even a carefully controlled statement still might give us something we could use.

The hardback book at 87, the paperback book at 97 (emphasis added).
66.
The books contain the following libelous statements, among others, falsely conveying that Plaintiff Patsy Ramsey killed her daughter, JonBenét Ramsey, and that Plaintiff John Ramsey engaged in a criminal cover-up of his wife's crime:
Evidence was accumulating to indicate the involvement of a parent, but we could not ignore other leads, and there were dozens of them…

It was extremely frustrating to chase the nonsense leads, and we seemed to be constantly heading down roads that led nowhere. Information evaporated before our eyes, suspects were cleared, tips were not what they seemed. The effort spent on such things was chewing up detective hours and not getting us close to the people on whom we should be concentrating.

Evidence at hand pointed to the Ramseys. But instead of the focus narrowing, as in normal investigations, this one widened like an inverted funnel. At some point we hoped common sense would take over; we wanted to stop chasing phantoms. There was no shortage of suspects, just a shortage of detectives.

One day I asked Trip DeMuth, our primary contact with Alex Hunter's office, why they didn't see what we saw. Everyone we had interviewed had resulted in a dead end, the evidence was piling up, and of all of the handwriting examples, only one person - Patsy Ramsey - came back as the likely author. We saw nothing that pointed to anyone outside the home being involved. Locked house. Dead child. Two parents. Hello?

The hardback book at 140, 142, the paperback book at 159, 161-62 (emphasis added).
67.
The books contain the following libelous statements, among others, falsely conveying that Plaintiff Patsy Ramsey killed her daughter, JonBenét Ramsey:

There was no doubt in my mind that Patsy wrote the note. "I believe she committed the murder," I told Smit and proceeded to lay out what I thought had happened that night.

In my hypothesis, an approaching fortieth birthday, the busy holiday season, an exhausting Christmas Day, and an argument with JonBenét had left Patsy frazzled. Her beautiful daughter, whom she frequently dressed almost as a twin, had rebelled against wearing the same outfit as her mother.

When they came home, John Ramsey helped Burke put together a Christmas toy. JonBenét, who had not eaten much at the Whites' party, was hungry. Her mother let her have some pineapple, and then the kids were put to bed. John Ramsey read to his little girl. Then he went to bed. Patsy stayed up to prepare for the trip to Michigan the next morning, a trip that she admittedly did not particularly want to make.

Later JonBenét awakened after wetting the bed, as indicated by the plastic sheets, the urine stains, the pull-up diaper package hanging half-way out of a cabinet, and the balled-up turtleneck found in the bathroom. I concluded that the little girl had worn the red turtleneck to bed, as her mother originally said, and that it was stripped off when it got wet.

As I told Smith, I never believed the child was sexually abused for the gratification of the offender but that the vaginal trauma was some sort of corporal punishment. The dark fibers found in her pubic region could have come from the violent wiping of a wet child. Patsy probably yanked out the diaper package in cleaning up JonBenét.

Patsy would not be the first mother to lose control in such a situation. One of the doctors we consulted cited toileting issues as a textbook example of causing parental rage. So, in my hypothesis, there was some sort of explosive encounter in the child's bathroom sometime before one o'clock in the morning, the time suggested by the digestion rate of the pineapple found in the child's stomach. I believed JonBenét was slammed against a hard surface, such as the edge of the tub, inflicting a mortal head wound. She was unconscious, but her heart was still beating. Patsy would not have known that JonBenét was still alive, because the child already appeared to be dead. The massive head trauma would have eventually killed her.

It was the critical moment in which she had to either call for help or find an alternative explanation for her daughter's death. It was accidental in the sense that the situation had developed without motive or premeditation. She could have called for help but chose not to. An emergency room doctor probably would have questioned the "accident" and called the police. Still, little would have happened to Patsy in Boulder. But I believe panic overtook her.

John and Burke continued to sleep while Patsy moved the body of JonBenét down to the basement and hid her in the little room.

As I pictured the scene, her dilemma was that police would assume the obvious if a six-year-old child was found dead in a private home without any satisfactory explanation. Patsy needed a diversion and planned the way she thought a kidnapping should look.

She returned upstairs to the kitchen and grabbed her tablet and a felt-tipped pen, flipped to the middle of the tablet, and started a ransom note, drafting one that ended on page 25. For some reason she discarded that one and ripped pages 17-25 from the tablet. Police never found those pages.

On page 26, she began the "Mr. & Mrs. I," then also abandoned that false start. At some point she drafted the long ransom note. By doing so, she created the government's best piece of evidence.

She then faced the major problem of what to do with the body. Leaving the house carried the risk of John or Burke awakening at the sounds and possibly being seen by a passerby or a neighbor. Leaving the body in the distant, almost inaccessible, basement room was the best option.

As I envisioned it, Patsy returned to the basement, a woman caught up in panic, where she could have seen - perhaps by detecting a faint heartbeat or a sound or a slight movement - that although completely unconscious, JonBenét was not dead. Others might argue that Patsy did not know the child was still alive. In my hypothesis, she took the next step, looking for the closest available items in her desperation. Only feet away was her paint tote. She grabbed a paintbrush and broke it to fashion the garrote with some cord. Then she looped the cord around the girl's neck.

In my scenario, she choked JonBenét from behind, with a grip on the broken paintbrush handle, pulling the ligature. JonBenét, still unconscious, would never have felt it. There are only four ways to die: suicide, natural, accidental, or homicide. This accident, in my opinion, had just become a murder.

Then the staging continued to make it look more like a kidnapping. Patsy tied the girl's wrists in front, not in back, for otherwise the arms would not have been in that overhead position. But with a fifteen-inch length of cord between the wrists and the knot tied loosely over the clothing, there was no way such a binding would have restrained a live child. It was a symbolic act to make it appear the child had been bound.

Patsy took considerable time with her daughter, wrapping her carefully in the blanket and leaving her with a favorite pink nightgown. The FBI had told us that a stranger would not have taken such care.

As I told Lou, I thought that throughout the coming hours, Patsy worked on her staging, such as placing the ransom note where she would be sure to 'find' it the next morning. She placed the tablet on the countertop right beside the stairs and the pen in the cup.

While going through the drawers under the countertop where the tablet had been, she found rolls of tape. She placed a strip from a roll of duct tape across JonBenét's mouth. There was bloody mucus under the tape, and a perfect set of the child's lip prints, which did not indicate a tongue impression or resistance.

I theorized that Patsy, trying to cover her tracks, took the remaining cord, tape, and the first ransom note out of the house that night, perhaps dropping them into a nearby storm sewer or among the Christmas debris and wrappings in a neighbor's trash can.

She was running out of time. The household was scheduled to wake up early to fly to Michigan, and in her haste, Patsy Ramsey did not change clothes, a vital mistake. With the clock ticking, and hearing her husband moving around upstairs, she stepped over the edge.

The way I envisioned it, Patsy screamed, and John Ramsey, coming out of the shower, responded, totally unaware of what had occurred. Burke, awakened by the noise, shortly before six o'clock in the morning, came down to find out what had happened and was sent back to bed as his mother talked to the 911 emergency dispatcher.

Patsy Ramsey opened the door to Officer Rick French at about 5:55 A.M. on the morning of December 26, 1996, wearing a red turtleneck sweater and black pants, the same things she had worn to a party the night before. Her hair was done, and her makeup was on. In my opinion, she had never been to bed.

The diversion worked for seven hours as the Boulder police thought they were dealing with a kidnapping.

John Ramsey, in my hypothetical scenario, probably first grew suspicious while reading the ransom note that morning, which was why he was unusually quiet. He must have seen his wife's writing mannerisms all over it, everything but her signature. But, where was his daughter?

He said in his police interview that he went down to the basement when Detective Arndt noticed him missing. I suggested that Ramsey found JonBenét at that time and was faced with the dilemma of his life. During the next few hours, his behavior changed markedly as he desperately considered his few options - submit to the authorities or try to control the situation. He had already lost one child, Beth, and now JonBenét was gone too. Now Patsy was possibly in jeopardy.

The stress increased steadily during the morning, for Patsy, in my theory, knew that no kidnapper was going to call by ten o'clock, and after John found the body, he knew that too. So when Detective Linda Arndt told him to search the house, he used the opportunity and made a beeline for the basement.

Then, tormented as he might be, he chose to protect his wife. Within a few hours, the first of his many lawyers was in motion, the private investigators a day later.