Criminal Minds (25 page)

During the initial investigation, Riley’s parents were suspected, and they stopped cooperating with the police—just like, it’s explained in the episode, the parents of JonBenét Ramsey.

JonBenét’s murder is one of the most infamous unsolved crimes of the twentieth century, and it’s also brought up in the episode “Children of the Dark” (304). JonBenét’s mother, Patsy, was a former beauty queen, and her father, John, ran his own computer company. The family was affluent and had moved from Atlanta, Georgia, to Boulder, Colorado, when JonBenét was nine months old. They lived in a large, expensive home at which they entertained frequently. Only six years old, JonBenét had already participated in and won many beauty pageants. The winter of 1996, Patsy had just overcome ovarian cancer, and John was selected as Boulder’s “businessman of the year.” It should have been a charmed time for the Ramsey family.

But the morning after Christmas 1996, Patsy was on her way downstairs when she found a note on the staircase demanding a $118,000 ransom for JonBenét’s safe return (John Ramsey had received a holiday bonus of just that amount). If the ransom wasn’t paid, the note warned, JonBenét would die. Patsy dashed to JonBenét’s room, but the girl was gone. She called the police, and the couple almost immediately started working on raising the ransom payment.

The Boulder police didn’t do themselves or the case any favors. They didn’t immediately search or seal the house or perform a full investigation of the crime scene. Neighbors and friends came and went at will. Hours after the police had arrived, a detective suggested to a family friend, Fleet White, that he and John search the house for anything unusual. In the basement, eight hours after the police had been called, John and Fleet found JonBenét covered with a white blanket, dead. There was duct tape over her mouth. Her wrists were bound with white cord, and more of the same cord was wrapped around her throat, where it had been used, along with a paintbrush handle, to garrote her. She had been strangled, and her skull was fractured. There was inconclusive but likely evidence of sexual assault, and although DNA evidence was recovered from her underwear, it has never been matched to anyone.

Because the little girl had never left the house, and John Ramsey had found her, the parents, and to a lesser extent JonBenét’s brother, Burke, were immediately suspected. The media coverage played up this angle, stretching the facts on occasion to make it appear more likely that the Ramseys were involved.

JonBenét was buried in Atlanta on New Year’s Eve 1996. After the Ramseys returned to Boulder, the stories about them grew ever more heated. Videos of JonBenét participating in pageants hit the airwaves, and the Ramseys were accused of sexualizing and exploiting their six-year-old and perhaps even sexually abusing her during her lifetime. Seeing the suspicion with which the police viewed them, the Ramseys did indeed cease cooperating.

Various bits of evidence—a boot print, a palm print, a pubic hair, and more—were found that indicated that an intruder had come into the house and murdered JonBenét. However, there was no sign of forced entry. Experts suggest that the killer probably knew the family, knew about John’s bonus, and felt comfortable enough in the house to assault and kill JonBenét there instead of taking her away. The murderer brought in the duct tape and the white cord, so he always intended to abduct, if not kill, the child.

The years have passed, with accusations, suspicions, and lawsuits, but with no solid suspects and very little movement in the case. A convicted sex offender named John Mark Carr confessed to JonBenét’s murder in 2006, but it didn’t take long to determine that he didn’t know the facts of the case and wasn’t even in Boulder that fateful Christmas.

Patsy Ramsey died on June 24, 2006, after her ovarian cancer recurred. She went to her grave never knowing who killed her daughter—unless, as many continue to insist, she was involved. Some evidence suggests otherwise, however, and she was never charged. Although the Boulder police have kept the case open and return to it from time to time, there’s every likelihood that this case will never be solved and that JonBenét’s murderer will never be brought to justice.

 

 

BILLIE COPELAND
, the eleven-year-old victim in “What Fresh Hell?” (112), is abducted by a stranger using the “lost dog” trick: asking a child to help search for a lost dog in order to lure the child away from adult supervision. A similar ruse was used on July 15, 2002, to abduct five-year-old Samantha Bree Runnion, who is mentioned in that episode, from outside her home in Stanton, California. A stranger approached Samantha and a friend, who were playing outside, and asked if they had seen his lost Chihuahua. When Samantha moved closer to the man, he grabbed her and wrestled her into his car. She kicked and screamed and called out to her friend to tell her grandmother, and then she was gone.

Samantha’s friend remembered enough details about the kidnapper and his car to allow police sketch artists to come up with a reasonable likeness. The drawing was promptly displayed on posters and in the media, but it was too late for Samantha. The next day, her battered, sexually molested nude body was found beside a rural road in nearby Riverside County. Her killer had spent several hours with her before crushing her abdomen and strangling her.

Alejandro Avila was arrested three days later, after having been singled out by a telephone tip. He had been to Samantha’s apartment building before, because his ex-girlfriend and her daughter lived there. Avila had been accused of molesting the daughter and another friend when they were young girls, but he had been acquitted. With the Danielle Van Dam trial making headlines not far away in San Diego, there was furor over Avila’s arrest, with local and national officials, including President George W. Bush, declaring Avila “Samantha’s killer” before he had even gone to trial.

The physical evidence was overwhelming. His tire tracks were found near Samantha’s body, her DNA was inside his car, and his DNA was under Samantha’s fingernails. This and other evidence from the abduction scene and the murder scene was presented to the jury, which convicted him of kidnapping, murder, and lewd acts upon a child.

Avila was sentenced to death on July 22, 2005. In Samantha’s memory, her mother, Erin Runnion, and Erin’s partner, Ken Donnelly, established the Joyful Child Foundation to advocate for the protection of children from abduction and sexual abuse.

 

 

WHEN A CHILD DISAPPEARS
, one of the first responses of law enforcement today is to issue an AMBER Alert. (AMBER stands for America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Reponse, but in some states the alerts go by other names, commemorating local abduction victims.) AMBER Alerts have shown up on
Criminal Minds
in the episodes “The Instincts” (406) and “A Shade of Gray” (421).

When an AMBER Alert is issued, it is broadcast on commercial radio, network TV, and cable TV stations; on the national Emergency Alert system; on electronic highway signs; and over the Internet and cell phones to people who have signed up to receive alerts. The system is voluntary but elicits a great deal of cooperation among law enforcement and other branches of local and state government, private industry, and individuals.

The original source of the acronym and the name was the case of Amber Hagerman, a nine-year-old girl who was snatched while riding her bicycle in Arlington, Texas, on January 13, 1996. A witness saw a man grab her from the bike and throw her into the front seat of a pickup truck.

Four days later, a man walking his dog found Amber’s corpse in a creek bed. Her throat had been slit, but she had been kept alive for two days before being killed. Her murderer has never been discovered, but the knowledge that her legacy continues to help other families helps Amber’s loved ones cope with their loss.

 

 

NOT EVERY
violent crime against children is committed by an adult. Some attacks on children are committed by other children—a tragedy that can ruin or end two young lives instead of just one.
Criminal Minds
acknowledges this sad pattern. The serial killer of young children in “The Boogeyman” (206) is a child himself. And in “A Shade of Gray” (421), the killer of seven-year-old Kyle Murphy is Kyle’s older brother.

“A Shade of Gray” first aired in April 2009, so it couldn’t have been inspired by the case of Andrew Conley, who was arrested in December 2009 for killing his little brother. But Conley admitted to being inspired by TV—specifically the cable series
Dexter
, about a serial killer. After Conley, seventeen, allegedly strangled his ten-year-old brother, Conner, to death, he said the act made him feel just like Dexter.

Conley says that he was wrestling with his brother and then began choking him. This went on for about twenty minutes, until he saw blood leaking from the younger boy’s nose and mouth. Pulling a plastic bag over Conner’s head, Conley affixed it with electrical tape, then dragged the body into the basement and finally to his car, striking Conner’s head on the ground several times en route. He put the body in the trunk of his car, then drove to his girlfriend’s house to give her a ring.

The girlfriend later told the investigators that Conley seemed happier than he had been in a while. Conley dumped Conner’s body in a park. He confessed to the police and told them where to find Conner, admitting that he had fantasized for years about killing someone.

A few weeks earlier, on October 21, 2009, according to her confession, fifteen-year-old Alyssa Bustamante allegedly stabbed to death a nine-year-old neighbor, Elizabeth Olten, in Missouri. Bustamante, whose online profile listed “killing people” and “cutting” as hobbies, had been institutionalized for a suicide attempt in 2007. Days before the murder, Bustamante dug two holes in the ground in a wooded area; then she killed Olten with no provocation, she said, because she wanted to know what it felt like.

 

 

Conley and Bustamante will both be tried as adults, a process that owes much to a young man named Willie Bosket.