1998-07-21: Peter Boyles Radio Show 630KHOW

Peter Boyles Radio Show - July 21, 1998
Linda Wilcox Interview

PETER BOYLES: You've talked to us on who you are in terms of legitimacy about what you're saying. And, again, we have to be cautious, we aren't going to use your name. When did you first meet John and Patsy Ramsey?

LINDA WILCOX: I actually met Patsy before I met John. I don't have it in my records exactly, it was somewhere around March of 93. I was hired by the housekeeper, her name was Suzanne, she was a friend of mine who (illegible) she couldn't keep up. The person they had, had left for some reason or another. One, she wouldn't pick up toys which was a big part of that job. So she asked me, as a friend, if I'd come in and help her out because I was doing housekeeping part time and I had a part time job at K-Mart. I also had a small business on the side. She asked me to come in and help her out. Patsy was out of town at the time and I didn't actually meet her until almost a month later. I met Nedra before I met Patsy. And then I met John, I don't remember the exact moment I met John, he came foraying through the kitchen at one point and we introduced ourselves to each other.

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(SNIP)

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PETER BOYLES: You told me in another conversation, I dont' want to put words in your mouth, that JonBenet took a bottle really late in life.

LINDA WILCOX: She was in Nursery School. She was about 3 1/2 or 4. Suzanne, the nanny, was trying to break her from the bottle. It was, she turned 4 that August and that summer she pretty much broken from it. But, she was 3 years old, she was going to nursery school and she... Suzanne used to threaten that she was going to tell her nursery school friends that she was still using a bottle to get her to stop because she was way too old to be using one. Um, she wasn't a good sleeper. She didn't sleep well and John, in particular, would get frustrated with her trying to get her to bed and he would put her to bed with a bottle and a video.

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(SNIP)

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PETER BOYLES: So much talk about the so-called "secret room," the little room, the room that hardly anyone knew. Linda Hoffman-Pugh, who replaced you, once said that she didn't know the room was there. What about the room where the little girl's body was found?

LINDA WILCOX: It's a wine cellar, that's what it was built as. It has no windows, I mean, it was a wine cellar. The last time I was in that room, there was nothing in it, it was bare. It wasn't used for storage, it wasn't used for anything. It was very damp, anything you put in there got kinda moldy, nothing was in that room. It wasn't necessarily hidden but it wasn't in plain view. And the room leading to it was the boiler room. It was kind of open but it was very dark. No one was ever down there much except maybe Burke. Burke was there occasionally. He had his train set down there. He was the only one who played down there. Patsy hardly ever went down there. She'd go down to get whatever she needed, she didn't like to go down there. It freaked JonBenet out. It was cold, it was damp, it was cluttered, it was dark. Pretty much the household help were the only ones who went down there. In fact, I'm the one who discovered the safe. Patsy didn't know it was there. One day, it was Suzanne, myself, Nedra and Patsy

PETER BOYLES: Suzanne was the nanny?

LINDA WILCOX: Yes, and the kids were in one of the other rooms playing. There had been a refrigerator down there. We were cleaning it out and doing things and I was, the floor leading to that room is linoleum and I was cleaning it by hand and I was backing myself out of the room so I wouldn't track over what I had cleaned. And I was backing myself into the wine cellar, the vacuum was behind me as I backed into the wine cellar. When I saw the safe on the floor and I go, hey did you know that there was a safe in here? It was covered with chips and paint and it hadn't been touched in a long time and I actually cleaned it off. And Patsy goes, 'Nah, I didn't know, John probably knows. Maybe he should, you know, drill it out sometime." As far as I know it was never used, there was never anything in it. There was no sign that it had been touched in years when I found it.

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(SNIP)

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PETER BOYLES: Did you get the sense that pageants were no part of this, a little part of this, the significance?

LINDA WILCOX: Okay, pageants were very significant. It was a status thing. I heard about it right after they got back that summer, the summer of '95. Suzanne, who had already left their employ because JonBenet, they didn't need her when she started nursery school, or Pre-K in that case. But she was a friend of mine and she had called and asked if she could see the kids because she was still in touch with them. And she had gone to see them, and I was talking to Suzanne that next week and she said, Yeah, I went to see the kids and she was going to take JonBenet to McDonalds because JonBenet loved McDonalds. It was like her favorite thing in the whole world. And Suzanne told me, I just heard the saddest thing. She'd gone and gotten the kids and she said, hey, I'm going to take you guys to McDonalds. JonBenet looked at her stone cold and said, "Eating McDonalds makes you fat."

PETER BOYLES: Didn't you tell me once about what they called her bedroom, the pageant room?

LINDA WILCOX: Well, actually it was Melinda's bedroom. See, her bedroom, when I first got there, this was before the redecorating and JonBenet's room was next to Burkes. And they shared a bathroom. However, because she was um, and then the bedroom that became her bedroom, had belonged to Melinda, it was set up for Melinda and Beth. It had twin beds and it was called the "pink" room because it was mostly done in pink. JonBenet wouldn't sleep in her room because the pink room had a VCR - well a TV/VCR. Well, her dad especially, but sometimes Patsy, she didn't sleep well, would put her to bed with a bottle and a video so she was always sleeping in the other room. So, they named that her room. The small room next to Burke's became Melinda's room. But, of course, Melinda only visited, primarily, I mean, she was in nursing school so she wasn't there much. And from what I got from Suzanne later, became the pageant room. So that was originally her room but she wouldn't sleep in her room because it didn't have a t.v. in it.

PETER BOYLES: Why did they call it the pageant room?

LINDA WILCOX: I assume because that's where they kept all her costumes and her clothes, her crowns and her trophies. But I personally did not see it as such because I had already been gone. Suzanne told me (garbled) I mean this kid was 3 1/2, she was in Nursery school in the morning. She had music lessons, she had dance. The poor kid was so busy every afternoon she was only 3 years old.

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(SNIP)

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PETER BOYLES: Full circle. Two months after the little girls' death, the Boulder Police come to you. How did they get to you? What was that all about? What did you go through? Give the folks in the audience your impressions of the Boulder PD and sort of, how this all came to you.

LINDA WILCOX: Well, how it came to me. Initially, my friend Suzanne, who was the nanny, because she had hired me, the Ramseys at this point had no clue who I was or where to find me. I'd already been gone for a year and a half. Suzanne called me at home and said, the police are looking for you. I said, well I'm not hiding. And she said, well, is it okay if I give them your number? And I said fine and she said yeah, I talked to them and I said oh, did they take you there? She goes yeah, um, it turns out she was getting ready to go to work, cause she's working someplace else now, someplace professional, and she said she walked in and the officer said, "Is that Red" (the perfume she was wearing) and she was like at that point she was kind of turned off. She said, I can't believe they would think I could ever hurt that little girl. And, at one point they asked well how do you feel right now and she said, well I feel insulted and violated.