Linda Arndt

This leads us to the part of preparing for the ransom call.

Detective Linda Arndt arrived at the Ramsey home about 8.10 a.m. She was briefed that JonBenet had apparently been taken from her bedroom between about 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. It's a pretty wide stretch.

Arndt was also told that the ransom note demanded $118,000 and promised instructions by telephone between 8 and 10 a.m. She started gathering information that could help her identify a kidnapper or prepare for a ransom exchange.

Arndt asked John about his business, his employees, his recent terminations, financial problems, and people who might know the amount of his bonus because this was exactly identical to his Christmas bonus from the year before.

The mistakes did not merely favor one theory.

They made every theory harder to prove.

The timing and police response details are anchored primarily to Detective Linda Arndt's January 8, 1997 supplemental report.

This includes her arrival at 8.10 a.m., the anticipated ransom call, It tells us about the reduced police presence, the second search, and the approximately 1.05 p.m. discovery of JonBenet's body.

Officer Rick French arrived shortly before 6am.

Other officers and Detective Linda Arndt followed.

Patsy had also called friends.

Fleet and Priscilla White came to the house.

The suggestion that John found her then and concealed the discovery is an investigative theory, not an established fact.

No evidence in the public record proves it.

By late morning, Detective Linda Arndt was still at the house, attempting to manage multiple family members and visitors in a location that had never been adequately controlled.

At about one o'clock, she directed John Ramsey and Fleet White to search the house again for anything unusual.

And let's remember already was a crime scene if she'd been kidnapped from the home.

Then just after 1pm, John Ramsey was asked to do a thorough search of the home by Detective Linda Arndt.

He opened the door to the basement, and there he sadly found John Bonnet's body.

She had been bludgeoned and strangled, with duct tape placed over her mouth and neck.

People sat on the furniture, made coffee, and comforted each other for hours, and every one of those ordinary human gestures was quietly erasing any evidence the house might have held.

Around 8:00 AM, a Boulder detective named Linda Arndt arrived.

She was good with people in crisis, but she'd never led a kidnapping before, and honestly, that wasn't unusual for Boulder.

It was a quiet college town that saw only a handful of murders in a typical year, so very few people on the force had homicide experience to draw on.

That fundamental disagreement this early is a big part of why the case stalled for years to come.

And as the two sides dug in, the investigation started to turn on itself.

Detective Linda Arndt took a beating in the press over how the scene was handled that first morning, and by May 1997, Boulder Police pulled her off the case.

The detective who took over was named Steve Thomas, and he shared her gut feeling that the answer was inside the family.

It seemed she'd never left the property.

Detective Linda Arndt, who was leading the investigation at that point, quickly came to believe the Ramseys were involved in JonBenet's death.

In her opinion, John and Patsy had orchestrated the fake kidnapping and ransom note as a cover for their daughter's murder.

But Arndt's hunch wasn't enough.

But John and Patsy Ramsey weren't your typical suspects.

Whether it was their standing in the community or their lawyers negotiating abilities, John and Patsy were able to review the file.

After that, they agreed to sit down with Detective Steve Thomas and Tom Trujillo, two seasoned homicide investigators with far more experience on murder than Linda Arndt.

John's interview lasted 90 minutes.