Can the murder of JonBenét Ramsey be solved by 7 items of evidence?
The details of the murder are still shocking today, nearly three decades later. On Dec. 26, 1996, the 6-year-old daughter of John and Patsy Ramsey, a well-to-do couple living in Boulder, Colorado, was found dead in the family's basement. JonBenét Ramsey, an outgoing child who performed in local beauty pageants, had been bludgeoned and strangled.
It is a story I began covering for "48 Hours" in 1999 and will return to in "The Search for JonBenét's Killer" airing Saturday, Dec. 21 at 10/9c on CBS and streaming on Paramount+. The program is a look back at how we covered the case in 2002. It's a television time capsule, allowing viewers to hear Patsy and John Ramsey talk about their daughter and how her death and the following investigation upended their lives.
Shortly before 6 a.m. on the morning after Christmas, Patsy Ramsey called 911. She had awakened, she later told police, to find her daughter missing and a two-and-a-half-page note left on the stairs demanding a $118,000 ransom.
Despite a written warning not to notify anyone, the Ramseys called Boulder police, who searched their home and recommended the family wait for a call from the kidnappers. Later that day, a Boulder detective suggested John Ramsey and a family friend look through the home to see if anything looked 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 across her mouth.
The tragic discovery of the child by her own father, after officers had already searched the home, was the beginning of a yearslong, error-plagued investigation. JonBenét Ramsey's murder was the first homicide that year in Boulder.
The case, after the acquittal of football star O.J. Simpson, immediately became the next international media sensation. Pictures of the photogenic 6-year-old competing in child beauty pageants appeared in the tabloids, while armchair detectives filled the airwaves, debating the contents of the ransom note.
Unidentified male DNA was left on the child and tests, performed just weeks after the murder, excluded anyone from the Ramsey family, including JonBenet's 9-year-old brother Burke. Those 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 attorneys and didn't speak to investigators until several months later, in April 1997, and again in June 1998. Video from 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 trace evidence linking her, she responded, "That is totally impossible. Go retest." She then added, "I don't give a flying flip how scientific it is. Go back to the damn drawing board. I didn't do it. John Ramsey didn't do it. So we all got to start working together from here, this day forward to try to find out who the hell did it."
In 2008, after more DNA tests again excluded the Ramsey family, the Boulder District Attorney at that time, Mary Lacy, publicly exonerated the Ramseys and sent them a letter of apology.
Investigators considered the theory that JonBenét may have been killed 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 the case was made in 2006 after a man living in Thailand by the name of John Mark Karr claimed to have drugged, sexually assaulted and accidentally killed JonBenét. No drugs, however, had been found in the child and Karr's DNA did not match what was left at the scene. Karr was later released.
Patsy Ramsey never lived to see the Boulder district attorney's apology or have her name cleared. In 2006, she died, at age 49, of ovarian cancer. But John Ramsey, who remarried in 2011, has continued to push the Boulder police to find and arrest his daughter's killer.
If JonBenét Ramsey had lived, she would have turned 34 years old in August. In an interview with "48 Hours" in November, John Ramsey said he can't imagine his daughter as a grown woman, but only as a 6-year-old. He said he is confident that the unknown male DNA profile in the case will ultimately 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 employ the same technology, genetic genealogy, that was used to identify the Golden State Killer in 2018, and countless others since.
Ramsey also said there are seven items of evidence from the family's home that could still be tested for DNA including, he said, the garrote used to strangle JonBenét, a rope found in a guest bedroom, as well as a blanket. The Boulder Police Department, however, in a release in November, disputed Ramsey's contention that they are not testing evidence.
"The assertion that there is viable evidence and leads we are not pursuing—to include DNA testing — is completely false," read a Boulder Police statement. Still, in a nearly six-minute video that was also released, the current Boulder Police Chief Stephen Redfearn admits, "there were things that people have pointed to throughout the years that could have been done better and we acknowledge that is true."
John Ramsey, who turned 81 in early December, has lived under a cloud of suspicion for nearly three decades, but he said the weight of 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 didn't matter … it didn't matter."
He is speaking out now, he said, because an arrest in the case would finally give some peace to his son Burke, now in his 30s, and his two older children from his first marriage.
"… identifying the killer," he said, "isn't gonna 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 our family's head and this chapter closed for their benefit."
In addition to fighting to keep his daughter's case in the public eye, Ramsey is working to see the passage of The Homicide Victims' Families' Rights Act, which would allow a murder victim's family to request a federal review of their case.
"That would be a huge step forward to fix a fundamental problem in our system in this country," Ramsey said, "not a complete solution, but it's a step forward."