Juror: Ramsaran alibi didn’t hold up

Sept. 25--"My life is an open book," Ganesh "Remy" Ramsaran was saying. "I have nothing to hide."

It was Jan. 29, 2013, and he was on the telephone with The Daily Star, describing how he had been on an "emotional roller coaster" since he last saw his then-missing wife, 36-year-old Jennifer Ramsaran, the mother of his three young children.

But it turned out he had indeed been hiding things, according to testimony at his trial that concluded Tuesday evening in Chenango County Court, where he was convicted by a jury of nine men and three women of second-degree murder.

According to one of those jurors, Pastor Mitch Mullenax of the Common Grounds Baptist Fellowship in Beaver Meadow, who spoke exclusively to The Daily Star on Wednesday, inconsistencies in the accounts Ramsaran provided to police regarding his wife's disappearance on Dec. 11, 2012, emerged as key factors in the jury's rejection of the defendant's testimony.

"There were just so many holes in his story, and the story kept changing," Mullenax said.

JUROR: WEIGHT OF EVIDENCE SPOKE FOR ITSELF

Mullenax said Ramsaran's lawyer, Gil Garcia, made a good point when he argued before the jury that most criminals don't make themselves accessible to police investigators and the media the way Ramsaran did while his wife's disappearance was being pursued by detectives.

Nevertheless, the pastor pointed out, "Guilty men lie, and the lies become obvious."

The jurors, he said, did not judge Ramsaran based on the fact he was having an affair with his wife's best friend and sending that woman lurid messages and raunchy photographs in the weeks before Jennifer Ramsaran went missing.

Instead, he said, the verdict was based on the strong circumstantial evidence assembled by Chenango County District Attorney Joseph McBride and detailed for the panel through witness testimony and scores of exhibits."It was concise and it was clear," Mullenax said.

The pastor said he felt the anguish of the families of Jennifer Ramsaran and Ganesh Ramsaran. The parents of both the victim and the perpetrator sat through much of the testimony, and there was frequent mention of the three children of Jennifer and Ganesh Ramsaran.

"It is so incredibly sad to see both of these families suffer," Mullenax said.

The fact that Ramsaran often rambled on during his testimony, ignoring objections from McBride to limit his answers to the scope of the questions, as well as admonitions from Judge Frank Revoir Jr. and even his own lawyer had no real impact on the jurors, the pastor said.

"I don't blame Mr. Ramsaran for wanting to be heard," he said.

But in the end it was the weight of the prosecution evidence against him that sank him in the eyes of the jury, he added.

Mullenax said he was greatly impressed by the professionalism of the police work that went into the case, as well as the amount of inter-agency cooperation between the Chenango County Sheriff's Department, the State Police investigators and forensic crime lab experts, the New Berlin and Norwich police, and others who assisted the prosecution.

The jurors got to know each other a bit after meeting for coffee in the mornings, making small talk about their families and personal lives, as they were barred from discussing the case in hand, he noted.

No strident debates broke out during deliberations, he said. "We were pretty united," he said. "It was nothing like you see on TV."

Mullenax also gave high marks to McBride and Garcia. "Both attorneys did a stellar job," he said. He said he was heartened to hear McBride explain that his job was to obtain justice, not necessarily convictions. Mullenax said the last thing he would ever want to do is put an innocent person in state prison.

TRIAL REVEALED HOLES IN RAMSARAN'S STORY

During the trial, McBride highlighted the many inconsistencies and discrepancies in the statements Ramsaran had made to police beginning when he first reported her missing.

For instance, according to prosecution testimony, he told a New Berlin police officer the night of Dec. 11, 2012, when he reported his wife missing, that the couple had a perfect marriage.

But the marriage, it quickly became clear to detectives, was anything but perfect, and Ramsaran amended his story one day later to admit he had a girlfriend. Her name was Eileen Sayles, and she happened to be his wife's best friend.

It also came up in trial testimony that before he turned over his iPhone to police he had deleted files from it -- newer ones, such as those created in the weeks immediately before he claimed his wife mysteriously vanished amid a shopping trip to a Syracuse mall.

On Feb. 20, 2013, in another interview with The Daily Star, Ramsaran was less than forthcoming when asked if there was a life insurance policy on his wife. He refused to say if there was, stating, "The police have that information."

His theory as to what happened to his wife also underwent revision as the investigation progressed.

On Dec. 14, 2012, in a comment he posted on his Facebook page, Ramsaran wrote: "All I want is for Jen to come walking through our front door safe and sound and giving us all hugs, but I have lost all faith that will be the case."

But by the Feb. 20, 2013 interview with this newspaper, with the police openly refusing to rule out the possibility that Jennifer Ramsaran had fallen victim to foul play, Ganesh Ramsaran had an entirely different take on things, telling a reporter: "There is no reason for me to believe that my wife has been harmed in any way."

But harmed she was, and it was the night of Feb. 26, 2013, when this reporter contacted at his home and advised him that his wife's body had been found earlier that day by authorities.

He indicated then he didn't wish to discuss the matter. The man who had said he had nothing to hide then hung up on the reporter.

According to authorities, Ramsaran fell asleep on the couch and was officially notified a couple of hours later about the body by representatives of the Sheriff's Department.

The inconsistencies in Ganesh Ramsaran's statements to police were highlighted by the district attorney throughout the trial, and transcripts of those interviews were made available to the jury. There was also evidence that he tried to call Sayles from behind bars nearly 2,500 times in the months since he was first locked up in May 2013, calls that McBride argued buttressed his contention that Ramsaran was "obsessed' with his girlfriend.

The jury had also heard that Ganesh Ramsaran stood to collect $200,000 from an IBM-provided life insurance policy on his wife.

McBride said in an interview Wednesday that one of Ramsaran's former friends, Jason Wicks of Alabama, was an important witness for the prosecution, because he acknowledged that Ramsaran was worried about the impact a divorce from Jennifer would have on his personal finances.

TECH TRAIL COULDN'T BE FULLY ERASED

Though Ramsaran has expertise in computers, digital technology did not do the IBM program manager any favors during the investigation of his wife's disappearance and death.

While Ramsaran was able to wipe out lurid Facebook messages he had sent to his girlfriend, he apparently wasn't banking on the fact that police would end up getting access to those notes via Sayles' Facebook account, authorities said.

Another damning revelation against him came when detectives found out that Jennifer Ramsaran's iPhone had connected with the wireless network in the Ramsaran home after the husband said she had left the house, taking her phone with her.

McBride also said that, while it was not evidence at the trial, authorities also suspect Ramsaran arranged to have messages from his wife's phone deleted before investigators could reconstruct them.

The prosecutor said a series of text messages between Ganesh and Jennifer Ramsaran on Nov. 6, 2012 proved to be a major blow to Ganesh Ramsaran's credibility.

"He was telling everyone how much he loved his wife," McBride said. "But those messages demonstrate he was anything but caring and loving to her."

By March 2013, with preparations for Jennifer Ramsaran's funeral being made, people in the Norwich and New Berlin area were describing her as having been a devoted parent of strong moral character.

Ganesh Ramsaran, however, was making disparaging comments about her, telling her family members that his missing wife had a drug problem and he suspected that she was sending nude photographs of herself to strange men.

"She was a very good mother," Keith Wilcox, a disabled retiree from New Berlin for whom Jennifer Ramsaran had worked as a caretaker, told The Daily Star on March 3, 2013. "She would pick her kids up after swimming lessons, and I would go with her when she took them home. Then her dad would come over and talk to us. Her parents are very nice people."

Wilcox also told the newspaper then that he never believed that Jennifer Ramsaran may have simply wanted to start a new life.

"She would never, ever, leave her kids," Wilcox had said. "Those kids were her life. If somebody tried to abduct her, she would have fought with her last dying breath to get back to her kids and to her parents."

Reached Wednesday night, Wilcox said he wasn't at all surprised that Ganesh Ramsaran now stands convicted of murder.

"The writing was on the wall," said Wilcox, who said he still misses the long walks Jennifer Ramsaran took with him as he recovered from a stroke. "He tried to cover everything up. The good thing is he didn't get away with it."

'JUSTICE FOR JENNIFER' AT LAST

On Tuesday, several members of an ad hoc community group called Justice for Jennifer Ramsaran drove to the spot in Pharsalia where the victim's frozen corpse was found nearly 19 months earlier, and placed a wooden cross in the ground surrounded by a garland of flowers.

Tracy Stearns of Cooperstown, who had never known Jennifer Ramsaran in life, had started the group by way of a Facebook page soon after the search for Jennifer Ramsaran was announced by police.

"It just didn't make any sense to me that Jennifer, this Sunday school teacher, would just leave her three children, right before the birthday of one of her daughters, and right before Christmas," Stearns said Wednesday.

She said the group is now hoping to organize a second funeral for the victim, as Ganesh Ramsaran kept the first one private. Meanwhile, the owner of the land where the body was found has agreed to allow an ongoing memorial for Jennifer Ramsaran at the site, to be marked with solar-powered lights, Stearns said.

As of Wednesday night, the Justice for Jennifer Ramsaran community page on Facebook was being followed by 2,819 people.

At the trial of Ganesh Ramsaran, there was just one witness for the defense: Ganesh Ramsaran.

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