09-10-2017, 11:53 PM
Quote:2000-04-11: “JonBenet, Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation”
by Steve Thomas and Don Davis, April 11, 2000
ST Page 121
"They also had recited a list of suspects for us-Jeff Merrick, Mike Glynn, and Jim Marino, all former Access employees who had been seen at a mysterious dinner with Tom Carson, currently the company's chief financial officer. Then he shocked us by also offering the name of Fleet White. The Ramsey camp had turned on one of its best friends.
Gosage and I returned to Access Graphics for an appointment with CFO Tom Carson, who had been so negatively portrayed by Patsy's mother and who was now linked by John Douglas to a suspicious dinner with Merrick, Marino, and another friend, Mike Glynn. Unlike most of the others at Access, Carson was open and helpful and had a rock-solid alibi. At the time JonBenet was killed, he was in France with his girlfriend, Natalie, and her parents.
He dismissed the controversial dinner as just a get-together with old friends, not a conspiracy to commit murder across a table in a public restaurant in which John Ramsey was a part-owner. I would devote many hours to running down the stories of the others named, and the result was always the same. It was an innocent gathering that meant nothing to our case.
Carson had no idea the Ramseys had given us a copy of the gently
ST Page 122
"worded handwritten sympathy note he sent them after the murder. Team Ramsey asked us to see if there was any link to the ransom note.
Another of those at the dinner, Jim Marino, had known John Ramsey since the 1970s in Adanta and said he was a good guy with no enemies. When Marino had an accident in 1978 and was temporarily confined to a wheelchair, Ramsey offered him a sales job, which turned into long-term employment. Marino was making $51,600 a year when he left Access Graphics and considered himself a loyal friend of John Ramsey.
Detective Gosage started to take hair samples before Marino could warn him that some were hair plugs that cost ten dollars apiece. He would be cleared as a suspect but remained an ongoing character in the case. Even while he defended his pal John Ramsey on national television, Marino would repeatedly be pointed out by Ramsey and his lawyer as a murder suspect."
(SNIP)
ST Page 257
"Beckner put a personal letter from John Ramsey to DA investigator Lou Smit, dated December 18, on my desk. It had been mailed to Smit's house, and long weeks had elapsed before it reached us. "Patsy and I are so very thankful you came into our lives at this time," Ramsey wrote to Smit. It looked to me as if the investigator were being seduced. Ramsey spent almost an entire single-spaced page fingering Santa Bill McReynolds as the killer. Was SBTC really supposed to be SBJC- Santa Bill and Janet Claus? Santa Bill wasn't as frail as he might seem, Ramsey suggested, and the ransom note indicated the cleverness of a real writer, such as Janet McReynolds.
I later telephoned Bill McReynolds, and again he answered all my questions. "I'll help with anything you need," he said. "I didn't do anything wrong." Although we had cleared the McReynolds family months ago, the DA's office and Team Ramsey would remain fixated on him.
John Ramsey suggested in his letter to Smit that other suspects might emerge. It could be anyone who read a newspaper article about his company passing the billion-dollar mark in sales, or someone who saw JonBenet riding in the Christmas parade, or maybe it was one of the customers of Access Graphics. That expanded the suspect list by another thirty thousand or so. For good measure, he threw in his loyal supporter Jim Marino as a possibility. Later in January, Marino received a voice mail message from his old pal, complimenting him for "doing such a good job [defending Ramsey] on TV." Ramsey ended the call with, "Love ya, brother!"