The details of the murder are still shocking almost three decades later. On December 26, 1996, the 6-year-old daughter of John and Patsy Ramsey, an affluent couple living in Boulder, Colorado, was found dead in the family basement. JonBenét RamseyAn outgoing girl performing in local beauty pageants was beaten to death and strangled.
Polaris
This is a story I started covering for “48 Hours” in 1999 and will return to “The Search for JonBenét's Killer” Airing Saturday, December 21 at 10/9c on CBS and streaming on Paramount+. This program is a look at how we covered the case in 2002. It is a television time capsule, allowing viewers to hear Patsy and john ramsey Talk about their daughter and how her death and the following investigation affected their lives.
Shortly before 6 a.m. the morning after Christmas, Patsy Ramsey called 911. She woke up, she later told police, to find her daughter missing and a two-and-a-half-page note left on the stairs demanding a ransom of $118,000.
AP/Boulder Police Department
Despite written warnings not to inform anyone, the Ramseys called Boulder police, who searched their home and advised the family to wait for a call from the kidnappers. Later that day, a Boulder detective suggested John Ramsey and a family friend check the house to see if anything seemed out of place. When John Ramsey entered a room in the basement, he found his daughter dead on the floor, with a white blanket over her body and duct tape over her mouth.
The tragic discovery of the girl by her own father, after authorities had already searched the house, was the beginning of a years-long investigation filled with errors. The murder of JonBenét Ramsey was the first murder in Boulder that year.
The case immediately became the next international media sensation following the acquittal of football star OJ Simpson. Pictures of a photogenic 6-year-old participating in child beauty pageants appeared in the tabloids, while armchair detectives debating the contents of the ransom note filled the airwaves.
Unidentified male DNA was left on the child and tests conducted just weeks after the murder did not link anyone from the Ramsey family, including JonBenét's 9-year-old brother. RefuseThose results were initially kept from the press and public as investigators continued to focus mostly on John and Patsy Ramsey as suspects in their daughter's murder.
While the couple gave DNA, hair, blood and writing samples in the days following the murder, they hired lawyers and did not speak to investigators until several months later, in April 1997 and again in June 1998. Video of that 1998 interrogation, aired publicly for the first time by “48 Hours,” shows a combative Patsy Ramsey denying any involvement in her daughter's murder. When told that investigators had scientific evidence linking him to it, he responded, “It's completely impossible. Do the tests again.” She then added, “I can't overstate how scientific this is. Go back to the drawing board. I didn't do it. John Ramsey didn't do it. So we all have to start working together.” Here, from today onwards efforts are being made to find out who did this.”
In 2008, after more DNA tests exonerated the Ramsey family again, the Boulder District Attorney at the time, Mary Lacey, publicly exonerated the Ramseys and sent them a letter of apology.
Investigators considered the theory that JonBenét may have been murdered by an intruder, and over the years, looked at other persons of interest, including a neighbor who played Santa Claus and at least Two people who confessed to the murder.
The only arrest in this case was in 2006 of a man named, living in Thailand. John Mark Carr Claims were made that he drugged JonBenét, sexually assaulted her and accidentally killed her. However, no drugs were found on the child and Karr's DNA did not match that left at the scene. Karr was later released.
patsy ramsey I never lived to see the Boulder District Attorney's apology or his name cleared. In 2006, at the age of 49, she died of ovarian cancer. But John Ramsey, who remarried in 2011, has continued to pressure Boulder police to find and arrest his daughter's killer.
If JonBenét Ramsey were alive, she would have turned 34 in August. In an interview with “48 Hours” in November, John Ramsey said that he could imagine his daughter not as an adult woman, but only as a 6-year-old girl. He said he was confident that the DNA profile of the unidentified male in the case would eventually lead to a suspect in her murder. He is asking investigators in Boulder to turn over that DNA to an independent private lab that can use the same technique, genetic genealogy, that was used for identification. golden state killer in 2018, and countless others since.
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Ramsey also said there are seven pieces of evidence from the family home that can still be tested for DNA, including, he said, the garrote used to strangle JonBenét, rope found in the guest bedroom, as well as A blanket is also included. Boulder Police DepartmentHowever, in a release in November, it refuted Ramsey's contention that they were not examining the evidence.
“The claim that there is viable evidence and leads that we are not pursuing – including DNA testing – is completely false,” a statement from Boulder police said. Still, in the nearly six-minute video released, current Boulder Police Chief Stephen Redfern admits, “There were things that people have said over the years that could have been done better and we acknowledge that's true. “
John Ramsey, who turned 81 in early December, has lived under suspicion for nearly three decades, but he said the importance of the constant public scrutiny was nothing compared to the loss of his child.
“It was just noise level stuff,” Ramsey said, “We were so devastated and crushed by the loss of JonBenét… It doesn't matter… It doesn't matter.”
He's speaking out now, he said, because an arrest in the case will finally bring some peace to his son Burke, now 30, and his two older children from his first marriage.
“…Identifying the killer,” he said, “will not change my life at this point, but it will change the lives of my children and my grandchildren. This cloud needs to be removed from the heads of our family and This chapter will be closed to their advantage.”
In addition to fighting to keep her daughter's case in the public eye, Ramsey is working on passage of The Homicide Victims Families Rights Act, which would allow a murder victim's family to request a federal review of their case.
“This would be a big step toward fixing a fundamental problem with our system in this country,” Ramsey said. “Not a complete solution, but it's a big step.”
