Upon hearing of JonBenét’s murder, Archuleta (911 operator) nearly became ill. A supervisor directed her to her office where she sat and tried to calm her emotions. She could not get past the notion that something had been wrong about the 911 call and it had been there, troubling her subconscious during her days off. Archuleta asked her supervisor if police had listened to the 911 tape and was told that they had already obtained a copy of the recording: “What about the end of the call? Have they listened to the tail end of the call after Patsy Ramsey had stopped talking?” The supervisor looked back at Archuleta with a puzzled look on her face. “What are you talking about?” she asked. The 911 call didn’t end when Patsy stopped talking to her, Archuleta explained. The telephone line had not disconnected immediately, and she had heard a definite change in the tone of Patsy Ramsey’s voice before the call was fully terminated. Archuleta explained that the hysterical nature of Patsy Ramsey’s voice appeared to have dissipated, and she thought that she had been talking to someone nearby at her end of the telephone line. Investigators needed to listen to that extended part of the 911 call, Archuleta told her supervisor.
The 911 tape was subsequently sent to the Aerospace Corporation located in Los Angeles, California, and technicians determined that there was an additional several seconds of recording at the tail end of the call before the recording had been fully terminated. It was theorized that Patsy Ramsey had placed the handset of the telephone into its wall mounted cradle after discontinuing her conversation with the dispatch center, but that it had not fully settled into place to disconnect the call. Aerospace technicians were tasked with attempting to enhance the tail end of the 911 call to determine if the voices heard there could be better understood. Through a series of electronic washings, technicians were able to reduce the background noise associated with the transmission of the telephone call and identified three distinct voices conversing at the tail end of the 911 call. Several technicians listened to the enhanced version of the tape and compared notes on what they thought they had heard. Each technician reportedly had heard the same conversation. It was time to call Boulder authorities.
Boulder Police detective Melissa Hickman flew to California in late April 1997, and met with the technicians. She, too, was provided the opportunity to listen independently to the enhanced version of the 911 tape. After Hickman has listened to the tape several times, she shared her observations of what she thought had been overheard with the technicians.
Producing a previous set of handwritten notes, the technicians revealed their interpretation of the words spoken by the voices heard on the tail end of the tape. They all stared in amazement. Everyone who had listened to the enhanced version of the 911 tape had independently identified the same words and gender of the people speaking them. There were three distinct voices heard on the tape and the conversation was identified as follows: Male (angry): “We’re not speaking to you!” Female: “Help me Jesus. Help me Jesus” Young male: “Well, what did you find?” The discovery of this conversation, taking place in the family home after Patsy Ramsey thought she had terminated her 911 call, was of significant importance. It was a piece of evidence that pointed to deception on the part of the Ramsey family. They had continued to maintain throughout their statements that Burke had remained asleep in his bedroom during the events of the morning and that they had never awakened him or asked him questions about JonBenét’s kidnapping. Proof of the Ramsey’s deception was beginning to erode the foundation of the kidnapper / intruder theory in the eyes of Boulder Police investigators, and they contemplated the questions:
*Why would the Ramseys feel the need to mislead authorities about their son being asleep at the time of the 911 call?
*Were they attempting to conceal information that he may have had about the circumstances of his sister’s death?
Intruder theorists seemed to discount this evidence of deception as inconsequential. For others, those voices at the end of the 911 tape pointed to family involvement and some type of cover-up.
