At 6:00 A.M. the telephone awakened Cliff Gaston. It was Patsy Ramsey. Priscilla took the call, and within minutes the Whites were dressed and on their way to the Ramseys’ house. When they arrived, the police and John Fernie were already there. Patsy was on the floor, hysterical, and her hus- band was trying to comfort her. It was still dark outside. White told the detectives that he had been there only a few minutes when he started to search the house.
Alone, he went down to the basement, found some of the lights on, and started calling out JonBenét’s name. It was so cluttered down there—with boxes stacked everywhere and shelves overflowing with odds and ends—that he could hardly see any open spaces where she might be. He started in Burke’s train and hobby room, where he saw a suitcase sitting under a broken window. On the floor under the window, he found small pieces of glass. He placed some of them on the windowsill.
Then he moved the suitcase a few feet to get a closer look at the window. White said he was sure the win- dow was closed but unlatched. After he left the train room, he turned right, into the boiler room. At the back of the room, he said, he saw a door to what the Ramseys called the wine cellar. He turned the closed wooden latch and opened the door. The room was pitch-black, he said. He didn’t enter, and he saw nothing. When he couldn’t find a light switch, he closed the door and went back upstairs. He did not remember whether or not he relatched the door.
Later, when White saw John Fernie, he told him that a window downstairs had been punched open. The police wondered why White had not seen JonBenét’s body and later Ramsey had, since they both stood at the same spot after opening the door to the wine cellar.
At 6:45 A.M., White said, his wife called home and told her niece that JonBenét had been kidnapped. Her niece, Heather, woke the other adults in the house and told them why Fleet and Priscilla were with the Ramseys. White told the police that the Ramseys decided to wake their son, Burke, at around 7:00 and move him to his house. Fleet White and John Fernie, with Burke in hand, first picked up the Fernies’ children from their home and then took all the kids to the Whites’, where his guests looked after them. Forty-five minutes later, the two men returned to the Ramseys’. White remembered that just after 7:00, the Ramseys’ pastor, Rev. Rol Hoverstock, arrived.
Meanwhile, Ramsey had called Rod Westmoreland, his friend and Merrill Lynch broker, at home in Atlanta and told him what had happened and that he needed cash. Westmoreland started to make arrangements to transfer money from one of Ramsey’s cash management accounts—where he had over a million dollars—to a Boulder bank. Fleet White told the police that when the Lafayette branch of John Fernie’s bank opened, Fernie went there to see about collecting the ransom money from his own account. During this time Ramsey was distressed, White said; the pain he observed in John was unmistakable. He’d never seen Ram- sey this way, at the end of his rope. “He just put his head in his hands and cried and shook.”
White also told the police that he and Ramsey went down to the basement again at about 1:00 P.M. and first went into Burke’s train room, where they both looked at the broken window. Ramsey told White he had broken it to get into the house a few months earlier, when he came home one day without his house key. Then White described what had happened when John Ramsey found JonBenét’s body. He couldn’t forget seeing John standing in the doorway screaming, his back to White, the light being turned on and, when he entered the room himself, seeing Ramsey on his knees beside JonBenét. It all happened so fast, White said. He had no explanation for why he himself hadn’t seen the body on his first trip to the basement.
At about 1:30 P.M., White said, his wife called home and told her niece that JonBenét had been found dead. White also said that around 3:00 P.M., he had called Ramsey’s pilot to cancel a flight to Atlanta that John Ramsey had made arrangements for after finding his daughter’s body. White told the pilot the Ramseys might not be allowed to leave that night because of the police investigation. Around 4:00 P . M . Priscilla left the Fernies’ house, where they’d all gone with the Ramseys, and returned home. White went home later, he said, and they told their children, Daphne and Fleet Jr., that JonBenét had gone to heaven. Later that night, White stopped by the Fernies’ house on his way to Denver International Airport to pick up Jeff Ramsey, John’s brother, and Rod Westmoreland. Ramsey asked to go along. The four men were back at the Fernies’ home by around 11:00 P.M., White said.
