On the evening of December 4th, 1996, twenty one days before the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, a neighbor of 37 year old Lorraine Florence Lawrence found her sitting on the ice outdoors wearing just a T-shirt and panties. Blood was streaming from one eye and there was a male standing nearby. It was around 11 p.m. The neighbor urged her to go back inside her apartment, and she did.
The next morning, construction workers were startled to find Lorraine, still dressed only in panties and T-shirt, laying face down in a construction ditch which they had securely covered and cordoned off the night before. The site was not far from the apartment complex were Lorraine lived. Her death was ruled “accidental” by the Boulder coroner’s office. She was, after all, epileptic with a history of alcohol abuse. It was decided that she had died of exposure in the cold Colorado December night air. Autopsy revealed that she had no alcohol in her system but cocaine and an anti-convulsant drug were found
The body had been identified by a neighbor who reported that Lorraine’s face had been beaten so brutally that her features were not recognizable. Her teeth were broken and both her eyes were blackened and bloodied. Her front door had been left wide open all night and a trail of blood led from the apartment to the construction site where she was found.
Neighbors had heard a scream and a thud somewhere around 1 a.m. There was a pool of blood in the parking lot not twenty yards away….but she died of exposure…after she broke through a well secured covering of plywood . And voila, there had been only one homicide in Boulder that year, little JonBenet.
As peculiar and suspect as all of that may be, we aren’t done yet because there is one more detail, something truly odd, even creepy. Lorraine’s mother, Geraldine Vodicka, had worked as a housekeeper for the Ramseys several years prior. Mrs. Vodicka was there when Patsy was sick with her first bout of ovarian cancer. Now, what are the odds that the only two people murdered in Boulder in 1996 died within three weeks of each other and, more importantly, were acquainted with one another?
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