Hard-working Smit brought honesty, integrity to muddled Ramsey probe
By Bruce Plasket
Special to Speaking of JonBenet
Lou Smit, the previously obscure retired homicide detective upon whom overnight fame was thrust 13 years ago when he was hired to fix the badly-broken investigation into the murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey, died last week.
Special to Speaking of JonBenet
Lou Smit, the previously obscure retired homicide detective upon whom overnight fame was thrust 13 years ago when he was hired to fix the badly-broken investigation into the murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey, died last week.
So, too, did any realistic chance of solving Boulder’s most infamous unsolved murder case.
Smit, who lost his wife to cancer six years ago, succumbed to cancer at a Colorado Springs hospice five days after what would have been JonBenet’s 20th birthday. The ill-fated investigation that made him a household name in 1997, however, had long ago succumbed to the incompetence, inexperience, arrogance and collective ego of a Boulder Police Department that had privately scoffed at the short, bald man who had been brought in to clean up its mess.
And it was quite the mess.
Books could be written about the inept investigation that began in the wee hours of December 26, 1996 inside the Ramseys’ upscale brick Tudor home on 15th Street. But, for the sake of time and space, one need only look at the initial hours of the investigation that began when Patsy Ramsey woke to discover her daughter missing from her bed and a ransom note sitting on the stairs. That sequence tells the story of an investigation that would embarrass any professional police officer and most CSI Miami viewers.
Arndt, like every other detective on the Boulder force, had never investigated a murder. When called to 755 15th Street to investigate a reported kidnapping, she was out of her element and out of her league.
Years after the crime, after quitting the force and filing a federal lawsuit claiming the department had stifled her free-speech rights by blaming her for mistakes in the case and prohibiting her from defending herself, she took the stand in a Denver federal court room.
During two days of direct and cross-examination, she literally confessed her ineptitude in the case – causing U.S. District Judge William Downes to dismiss the case before Boulder put on its defense. As a reporter covering that case, I remember it felt like a high-school football game that had been called at halftime because of a mercy rule. Arndt was lucky she was saved further dismemberment in open court.
In her own testimony, Arndt admitted to not securing the crime scene and instructing the Ramseys and a gaggle of friends to search the house unaccompanied by police. Shockingly, she also admitted to placing a blanket that had been laying on a couch over the body of JonBenet after her father found the body in a basement wine cellar and brought it upstairs to the living room. Any relevant evidence on the child’s clothing was immediately and permanently tainted by the placing of the blanket on her body.
The department’s ineptitude continued past those first few hours as detectives, including “lead” detective Steve Thomas, zeroed in on John and Patsy Ramsey as the lone suspects while disdaining help from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and the FBI. Three months later, frustrated District Attorney Alex Hunter – reportedly on the advice of deputy DA Trip De Muth - hired Smit to provide what he politely called a fresh set of eyes. It would actually be the first set of professional eyes to examine the case.
Smit immediately drew the wrath of his new colleagues in the Boulder PD by wiping clean the preconceived notions and prejudices that had hamstrung detectives since the onset of the investigation. He started from the beginning, using tried-and-true investigative techniques that had made him one of the most respected homicide detectives in the state. Smit, along with some of Hunter’s deputy prosecutors, soon developed a theory that an intruder had murdered JonBenet. The Boulder detectives were beside themselves. They had investigated the case like it was an episode of “Law and Order,” where Det. Lenny Briscoe assumed the parents were guilty and the case was solved in an hour. In the real world, however, thing s didn’t work that way.
Unfortunately, their theory that one or both of the parents were guilty was not accompanied by any evidence. During the next 18 months, Smit collected evidence pointing away from the parents and pointing toward an intruder he believed was a pedophile and a sexual sadist. The split between the PD and Smit-Demuth, et al. was widening and Smit finally resigned. In a letter to Hunter, he decried the department’s focus on the Ramseys in spite of evidence pointing in another direction. He later had to fight to become a witness before a grand jury investigating the murder and went to court to force Hunter to allow him to keep the case files he had developed.
Smit kept fighting for the case while those around him operated on various other agendas, even after he left the case. Prior to Patsy’s Ramsey death to cancer and his own losing battle with the disease, Smit continued to work on the case. While the media, the Boulder community -- and to a large extent the law enforcement community-- tried to put the notoriety and embarrassment of the Ramsey case behind them, Smit went to his grave trying to make sure that didn’t happen.
Hunter, meanwhile, had failed in his leadership as Boulder’s highest-ranking law enforcement official.
He never got his arms around the fights between the PD and his own office and Smit. In essence, his failure to rein in the department’s thinly-veiled contempt for Smit’s work and his failure to stop the childish bickering contributed to a stalemate that has doomed the case to this day.
While the Boulder PD had no experience in murder investigations, Smit had plenty. He had investigated more than 300 murders. Every murder arrest he had ever made resulted in a conviction. In 1995 he solved the four-year-old murder of 13-year-old Heather Dawn Church when he matched a single fingerprint from the crime scene to Robert Charles, a neighbor who lived a half-mile away from Church in the Colorado Springs suburb of Black Forest. Browne eventually pleaded guilty to avoid a possible death sentence and later entered a similar plea to the 1987 murder of 15-year-old Colorado Springs resident Rocio Sperry. He has subsequently hinted that he killed as many as 48 people. Smit, though his work in the Church case, had taken a twisted serial killer off the streets.
The Boulder PD’s record was and is a joke when stacked up against that of Lou Smit.
In spite of his credentials and track record, Smit was also a bad cultural fit among the Boulder detectives and the Boulder community. Although he didn’t beat anyone over the head with his faith, he was an unabashed Christian. He prayed on his way to work each day and drew the scorn of the media when it was revealed that he prayed with the Ramseys when he questioned them. Speculation said he had been taken in by the Ramseys because of his faith. In lieu of actually covering the case—and ignoring the ineptitude of nearly everyone involved in it -- reporters focused on Smit’s faith and the Ramseys’ wealth. Smit’s role would be further scrutinized and clouded by the case’s distinction as the first big “Internet Case.” The public’s hunger for information was being fed daily by thousands of web posters – some serious and responsible and most hell-bent on railroading the Ramseys to satiate the public thirst hunger for quick justice.
Smit would later say that his faith had never clouded his investigative work, claiming he had put “plenty of Christians” in jail. Detectives use lots of techniques to get close to suspects and he was no different. Detectives can give suspect a cigarette or a soft drink without raising eyebrows, but Smit was vilified for praying with a “suspect.”
Smit’s insistence on the Ramseys’ innocence would be vindicated years later. In a 2003 ruling that dismissed a defamation case filed against the Ramseys by part-time Boulder journalist Robert Wolfe, who had been interviewed by police as a possible suspect, federal judge Julie Carnes wrote there was virtually no evidence against the Ramseys and lots of evidence leading to an outsider. Almost immediately, Boulder DA, Mary Keenan, who succeeded Alex Hunter, issued a statement – and later wrote a letter to the Ramseys – in which she exonerated them, saying there was no evidence of their involvement.
In spite of the dark cloud that features the work of Lou Smit as its only silver lining, there is, of course, always a chance the case will be solved.
The death of Lou Smit, sadly, has greatly diminished those chances.
Maybe someone will make a TV-episode-esque, deathbed confession.
Or perhaps an increasingly-sophisticated national DNA database will connect the material found under JonBenet’s fingernails with some as-yet-unknown person.
In any case, if the case is ever solved, it will be because of, and a tribute to, the integrity and rubber-meets-the-road work ethic of Lou Smit.
And perhaps the spirit of a humble, hard-working, short bald man will smile down on a job finally done.
Smit, who lost his wife to cancer six years ago, succumbed to cancer at a Colorado Springs hospice five days after what would have been JonBenet’s 20th birthday. The ill-fated investigation that made him a household name in 1997, however, had long ago succumbed to the incompetence, inexperience, arrogance and collective ego of a Boulder Police Department that had privately scoffed at the short, bald man who had been brought in to clean up its mess.
And it was quite the mess.
Books could be written about the inept investigation that began in the wee hours of December 26, 1996 inside the Ramseys’ upscale brick Tudor home on 15th Street. But, for the sake of time and space, one need only look at the initial hours of the investigation that began when Patsy Ramsey woke to discover her daughter missing from her bed and a ransom note sitting on the stairs. That sequence tells the story of an investigation that would embarrass any professional police officer and most CSI Miami viewers.
Arndt, like every other detective on the Boulder force, had never investigated a murder. When called to 755 15th Street to investigate a reported kidnapping, she was out of her element and out of her league.
Years after the crime, after quitting the force and filing a federal lawsuit claiming the department had stifled her free-speech rights by blaming her for mistakes in the case and prohibiting her from defending herself, she took the stand in a Denver federal court room.
During two days of direct and cross-examination, she literally confessed her ineptitude in the case – causing U.S. District Judge William Downes to dismiss the case before Boulder put on its defense. As a reporter covering that case, I remember it felt like a high-school football game that had been called at halftime because of a mercy rule. Arndt was lucky she was saved further dismemberment in open court.
In her own testimony, Arndt admitted to not securing the crime scene and instructing the Ramseys and a gaggle of friends to search the house unaccompanied by police. Shockingly, she also admitted to placing a blanket that had been laying on a couch over the body of JonBenet after her father found the body in a basement wine cellar and brought it upstairs to the living room. Any relevant evidence on the child’s clothing was immediately and permanently tainted by the placing of the blanket on her body.
The department’s ineptitude continued past those first few hours as detectives, including “lead” detective Steve Thomas, zeroed in on John and Patsy Ramsey as the lone suspects while disdaining help from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and the FBI. Three months later, frustrated District Attorney Alex Hunter – reportedly on the advice of deputy DA Trip De Muth - hired Smit to provide what he politely called a fresh set of eyes. It would actually be the first set of professional eyes to examine the case.
Smit immediately drew the wrath of his new colleagues in the Boulder PD by wiping clean the preconceived notions and prejudices that had hamstrung detectives since the onset of the investigation. He started from the beginning, using tried-and-true investigative techniques that had made him one of the most respected homicide detectives in the state. Smit, along with some of Hunter’s deputy prosecutors, soon developed a theory that an intruder had murdered JonBenet. The Boulder detectives were beside themselves. They had investigated the case like it was an episode of “Law and Order,” where Det. Lenny Briscoe assumed the parents were guilty and the case was solved in an hour. In the real world, however, thing s didn’t work that way.
Unfortunately, their theory that one or both of the parents were guilty was not accompanied by any evidence. During the next 18 months, Smit collected evidence pointing away from the parents and pointing toward an intruder he believed was a pedophile and a sexual sadist. The split between the PD and Smit-Demuth, et al. was widening and Smit finally resigned. In a letter to Hunter, he decried the department’s focus on the Ramseys in spite of evidence pointing in another direction. He later had to fight to become a witness before a grand jury investigating the murder and went to court to force Hunter to allow him to keep the case files he had developed.
Smit kept fighting for the case while those around him operated on various other agendas, even after he left the case. Prior to Patsy’s Ramsey death to cancer and his own losing battle with the disease, Smit continued to work on the case. While the media, the Boulder community -- and to a large extent the law enforcement community-- tried to put the notoriety and embarrassment of the Ramsey case behind them, Smit went to his grave trying to make sure that didn’t happen.
Hunter, meanwhile, had failed in his leadership as Boulder’s highest-ranking law enforcement official.
He never got his arms around the fights between the PD and his own office and Smit. In essence, his failure to rein in the department’s thinly-veiled contempt for Smit’s work and his failure to stop the childish bickering contributed to a stalemate that has doomed the case to this day.
While the Boulder PD had no experience in murder investigations, Smit had plenty. He had investigated more than 300 murders. Every murder arrest he had ever made resulted in a conviction. In 1995 he solved the four-year-old murder of 13-year-old Heather Dawn Church when he matched a single fingerprint from the crime scene to Robert Charles, a neighbor who lived a half-mile away from Church in the Colorado Springs suburb of Black Forest. Browne eventually pleaded guilty to avoid a possible death sentence and later entered a similar plea to the 1987 murder of 15-year-old Colorado Springs resident Rocio Sperry. He has subsequently hinted that he killed as many as 48 people. Smit, though his work in the Church case, had taken a twisted serial killer off the streets.
The Boulder PD’s record was and is a joke when stacked up against that of Lou Smit.
In spite of his credentials and track record, Smit was also a bad cultural fit among the Boulder detectives and the Boulder community. Although he didn’t beat anyone over the head with his faith, he was an unabashed Christian. He prayed on his way to work each day and drew the scorn of the media when it was revealed that he prayed with the Ramseys when he questioned them. Speculation said he had been taken in by the Ramseys because of his faith. In lieu of actually covering the case—and ignoring the ineptitude of nearly everyone involved in it -- reporters focused on Smit’s faith and the Ramseys’ wealth. Smit’s role would be further scrutinized and clouded by the case’s distinction as the first big “Internet Case.” The public’s hunger for information was being fed daily by thousands of web posters – some serious and responsible and most hell-bent on railroading the Ramseys to satiate the public thirst hunger for quick justice.
Smit would later say that his faith had never clouded his investigative work, claiming he had put “plenty of Christians” in jail. Detectives use lots of techniques to get close to suspects and he was no different. Detectives can give suspect a cigarette or a soft drink without raising eyebrows, but Smit was vilified for praying with a “suspect.”
Smit’s insistence on the Ramseys’ innocence would be vindicated years later. In a 2003 ruling that dismissed a defamation case filed against the Ramseys by part-time Boulder journalist Robert Wolfe, who had been interviewed by police as a possible suspect, federal judge Julie Carnes wrote there was virtually no evidence against the Ramseys and lots of evidence leading to an outsider. Almost immediately, Boulder DA, Mary Keenan, who succeeded Alex Hunter, issued a statement – and later wrote a letter to the Ramseys – in which she exonerated them, saying there was no evidence of their involvement.
In spite of the dark cloud that features the work of Lou Smit as its only silver lining, there is, of course, always a chance the case will be solved.
The death of Lou Smit, sadly, has greatly diminished those chances.
Maybe someone will make a TV-episode-esque, deathbed confession.
Or perhaps an increasingly-sophisticated national DNA database will connect the material found under JonBenet’s fingernails with some as-yet-unknown person.
In any case, if the case is ever solved, it will be because of, and a tribute to, the integrity and rubber-meets-the-road work ethic of Lou Smit.
And perhaps the spirit of a humble, hard-working, short bald man will smile down on a job finally done.
Bruce Plasket is a former award-winning Colorado journalist who, in addition to the Ramsey case, covered such stories as the Columbine shootings and the Oklahoma City bombing case during his 20-plus years as a reporter. He is currently working on a screenplay and performing stand-up comedy, he recently made appearances in three feature films.
Labels: Boulder Police Department, Detective in JonBenet Ramsey Case, Lou Smit
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