Detective Steve Thomas
Appearances
Crime Junkie
MURDERED: JonBenét Ramsey
Chief Beckner, on June 22nd, I submitted a letter to Chief Kobe requesting a leave of absence from the Boulder Police Department. In response to persistent speculation as to why I chose to leave the Ramsey investigation, this letter explains more fully those reasons. The primary reason I chose to leave is my belief that the district attorney's office continues to mishandle the Ramsey case.
Crime Junkie
MURDERED: JonBenét Ramsey
I had been troubled for many months with many aspects of the investigation. Albeit an uphill battle of a case to begin with, it became a nearly impossible investigation because of the political alliances, philosophical differences, and professional egos that block progress in more ways and on more occasions than I can detail in this memorandum.
Crime Junkie
MURDERED: JonBenét Ramsey
On June 1st and 2nd, 1998, we crunched 30,000 pages of investigation to its essence and put our cards on the table, delivering the case in a formal presentation to the district attorney's office. We stood confident in our work.
Crime Junkie
MURDERED: JonBenét Ramsey
Very shortly thereafter, though, the detectives who know this case better than anyone were advised by the district attorney's office that we would not be participating as grand jury advisory witnesses. How were we expected to solve this case when the district attorney's office was crippling us with their positions? I believe they were, literally, facilitating the escape of justice.
Crime Junkie
MURDERED: JonBenét Ramsey
During this investigation, consider the following. During the investigation, detectives would discover, collect, and bring evidence to the district attorney's office, only to have it summarily dismissed or rationalized as insignificant. The most elementary of investigative efforts, such as obtaining telephone and credit card records, were met without support, search warrants denied.
Crime Junkie
MURDERED: JonBenét Ramsey
The significant opinions of national experts were casually dismissed or ignored by the district attorney's office. Even the experienced FBI were waived aside. In a departure from protocol, police reports, physical evidence, and investigative information we shared with Ramsey defense attorneys, all of this in the district attorney's office spirit of cooperation.
Crime Junkie
MURDERED: JonBenét Ramsey
I served a search warrant, only to find later defense attorneys were simply given copies of the evidence it yielded. An FBI agent, whom I didn't even know, quietly tipped me off about what the DA's office was doing behind our backs, conducting an investigation the police department was wholly unaware of.
Crime Junkie
MURDERED: JonBenét Ramsey
I was advised not to speak to certain witnesses and all but dissuaded from pursuing particular investigative efforts. Innocent people were not cleared, publicly or otherwise, even when it was unmistakably the right thing to do, as reputations and lives were destroyed.
Crime Junkie
MURDERED: JonBenét Ramsey
Some in the district attorney's office, to this day, pursue weak, defenseless, and innocent people in shameless tactics that one couldn't believe more bizarre if it were made up. I was told by one in the district attorney's office about being unable to break a particular police officer from his resolute accounts of events he had witnessed. In my opinion, this was not trial preparation.
Crime Junkie
MURDERED: JonBenét Ramsey
This was an attempt to derail months of hard work. there is evidence that was critical to the investigation that to this day has never been collected because neither search warrants nor other means were supported to do so. Not to mention evidence which still sits today, untested in the laboratory, as differences continue about how to proceed.
Crime Junkie
MURDERED: JonBenét Ramsey
While investigative efforts were rebuffed, my search warrant affidavits and attempts to gather evidence in the murder investigation of a six-year-old child were met with refusals and instead the suggestion that we ask the permission of the Ramseys before proceeding. And just before conducting the Ramsey interviews, I thought it inconceivable I was being lectured on building trust.
Crime Junkie
MURDERED: JonBenét Ramsey
These are but a few of the many examples of why I chose to leave. Having to convince, to plead at times, to a district attorney's office to assist us in the murder of a little girl by way of the most basic of investigative requests was simply absurd. I believe the district attorney's office is thoroughly compromised.
Crime Junkie
MURDERED: JonBenét Ramsey
When we were told by one in the district attorney's office months before we had even completed our investigation that this case is not prosecutable, we shook our heads in disbelief. Will there be a real attempt at justice? I may be among the last to find out. It is my belief the district attorney's office has effectively crippled this case. The time for intervention is now.
Crime Junkie
MURDERED: JonBenét Ramsey
What I witnessed for two years of my life was so fundamentally flawed, it reduced me to tears. Everything the badge ever meant to me was so foundationally shaken. One should never have to sell one's soul as a prerequisite to wear it.
Crime Junkie
MURDERED: JonBenét Ramsey
On June 26, after leaving the investigation for the last time and leaving the city of Boulder, I wept as I drove home, removing my detective's shield and placing it on the seat beside me, later putting it on a desk drawer at home, knowing I could never put it back on. At 36 years old, I thought my life's passion as a police officer was carved in stone.
Crime Junkie
MURDERED: JonBenét Ramsey
I realized that although I may have to trade my badge for a carpenter's hammer, I will do so with a clear conscience. It is with a heavy heart that I offer my resignation from the Boulder Police Department in protest of this continuing travesty. Detective Steve Thomas, number 638, Detective Division, Boulder Police Department.