Free JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation by Steve Thomas Page A

Paugh, one of Patsy Ramsey’s sisters who had flown in from Atlanta, was staging a one-woman raid on the crime scene that I could only compare to burning the damned place down. And she did it with the help of the cops!
    Patrol Officer Angie Chromiak told me later that when she showed up to pull a security shift at Tin Cup Circle, she was ordered by police headquarters to ferry Pam Paugh over to Fifteenth Street to collect some clothing that John, Patsy, and Burke Ramsey could wear to the funeral. Even that decision, as kind as it might have been to grieving parents, was questionable, for nothing should be removed from an active crime scene.
    To disguise her identity from the media, Pam donned a Boulder Police jacket, complete with badge and patches. When they parked behind the house to dodge the media out front, Pam psyched herself up for the job ahead: “I can do this, I can do this, I can do this,” she panted as she pulled on the latex gloves. Then she headed into the house, accompanied by Detective Mike Everett. She spent an hour on her first trip through the crime scene and emerged with a big cardboard box filled to the brim, which she plopped into the trunk of the police car. For the next several hours, Pam made about half a dozen trips through the house, often spending an hour or more inside, and hauled out suitcases, boxes, bags, and loose items until the backseat of the police car was stuffed like a steamer trunk.
    Like me, the patrol officer understood how far out of the ordinary the visit was. “Are you checking all this? It’s way more than just funeral clothes,” Chromiak asked Detective Everett. “You don’t worry about it,” Everett replied. I listened with total disbelief when I interviewed Chromiak about the incident. It was too crazy to be true—what had begun as a courteous gesture to allow some funeral clothes to be fetched had turned, probably without intention, into a scorched earth assault. The officer said she was told by a police intern on duty not to be concerned because “The detectives already know who did it.”
    Pam’s last trip was into the bedroom of JonBenét, and she pumped herself up again: “I can do this, I can do this, I can do this.” She came back carrying an armload of stuffed animals and other items from the first room in the house to have been sealed off by police.
    Everett kept only a general inventory of what was removed, and even that abbreviated listing was astonishing. Stuffed animals, tiaras, three dresses for JonBenét, pageant photo portfolios, toys and clothes for Burke, John Ramsey’s Daytimer, the desk Bible, and clothing. For Patsy, there were black pants, dress suits, boots, and the contents of a curio cabinet. Bills, credit cards, a black cashmere trench coat, jewelry that included her grandmother’s ring and an emerald necklace, bathrobes, a cell phone, personal papers, bank records, Christmas stockings, her Nordstrom’s credit card, and even their passports! The patrol car was loaded with zipped bags, boxes, sacks, and luggage, the true contents unknown. This, to my mind, was madness. Once those items were gone, they weren’t coming back, and the police were only in their second day of the official search of the house. Pam Paugh should never have been allowed in there at all. The removal of so much potential evidence, with police assistance, was more like an earthquake than a mere procedural error.
    Pam finally got into the front seat, clutching some stuffed animals, and Chromiak drove off, only to have Pam thrust out her arms and scream as if spiders were crawling on her. “Get these gloves off of me! Get them off! Get them off! Get them OFF!” The puzzled cop removed the latex gloves, and Pam immediately felt better. “I need a large Diet Coke with a lot of ice,” she demanded. “Right now!”
    On the way to a fast-food restaurant, Chromiak told me, her passenger described making her first million dollars before the age of thirty-two and not