The details of the murder are still shocking today, almost thirty years later. On December 26, 1996, the six-year-old daughter of John and Patsy Ramsey, a wealthy couple living in Boulder, Colorado, was found dead in the family’s basement. JonBenet Ramseyan outgoing child who performed in local beauty pageants had been knocked down and strangled.
It’s a story I started covering in 1999 for “48 Hours” and will return to in “The Search for JonBenét’s Killer,” now streaming on Paramount+. The program is a look back at how we handled the case in 2002. It’s a television time capsule, allowing viewers to hear Patsy and John Ramsey talking about their daughter and how her death and subsequent investigation turned their lives upside down.
Shortly before 6 a.m. after Christmas, Patsy Ramsey called 911. She had woken up, 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.
In the early morning hours of December 26, 1996, Patsy Ramsey called 911 to report her 6-year-old daughter JonBenét missing, and found a dashing ransom note left in their home in Boulder, Colorado. /Credit: AP/Boulder Police Department
Despite a written warning not to notify 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 that John Ramsey and a family friend look through the house to see if anything seemed out of place. When John Ramsey entered a basement room, he found his daughter dead on the floor, with a white blanket over her body and duct tape over her mouth.
The child’s tragic discovery by her own father, after officers had already searched the house, marked the beginning of a years-long, error-plagued investigation. The murder of JonBenét Ramsey was the first homicide in Boulder that year.
The case immediately became the next international media sensation after the acquittal of football star OJ Simpson. Photos of the photogenic six-year-old competing in children’s beauty pageants appeared in the tabloids as armchair detectives filled the airwaves debating the contents of the ransom note.
Unidentified male DNA was left to the child and tests, conducted just weeks after the murder, ruled out everyone 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 primarily on John and Patsy Ramsey as suspects in their daughter’s murder.
While the couple provided DNA, hair, blood and writing samples in the days after 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 her, she responded, “That’s totally impossible. Go test again.” Then she added, “I don’t give a damn 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 had to start working together from here on this day to try to figure out who the hell did it.
In 2008, after more DNA testing again ruled out the Ramsey family, then-Boulder District Attorney Mary Lacy publicly exonerated the Ramseys and sent them an apology letter.
Investigators entertained the theory that JonBenét may have been killed by an intruder, looking at other people of interest over the years, including a neighbor who played Santa Claus and at least two people who confessed to the murder.
The only arrest in the case took place in 2006 after a man living in Thailand by the name Johannes Mark Karr claimed to have drugged, sexually assaulted and accidentally killed JonBenét. However, no drugs were found on the child and Karr’s DNA did not match what was left at the scene. Karr was later released.
Patsy Ramsey never experienced the apology from the Boulder district attorney or her name being cleared. In 2006, she died of ovarian cancer at the age of 49. But John Ramsey, who remarried in 2011, continued to pressure Boulder police to find and arrest his daughter’s killer.
Had JonBenét Ramsey been alive, she would have turned 34 in August. In an interview with “48 Hours” in November, John Ramsey said he cannot imagine his daughter as an adult, but only as a six-year-old. He says he is confident that the unknown male DNA profile in the case will ultimately lead to a suspect in her murder. He’s asking researchers in Boulder to turn that DNA over to an independent private lab that can use the same technology, genetic genealogy, that was used to Golden State killer in 2018, and countless others since.
JonBenét Ramsey had been hit on the head and strangled with this intricately made device known as a garrote. / Credit: CBS News
Ramsey also said that is true seven pieces 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 room, as well as a blanket. However, Boulder police disputed Ramsey’s claim that they do not test evidence in a November news release.
“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, current Boulder Police Chief Stephen Redfearn admits in a nearly six-minute video that “there have been things over the years that people have pointed out that could have been better and we recognize that to be true.”
John Ramsey, who turned 81 in early December, has lived under a cloud of suspicion for nearly three decades, but he said the burden 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, “will not change my life at this point, but it will change the lives of my children and grandchildren. This cloud must be removed from our family’s minds and this chapter can be closed forever. their advantage.”
In addition to his fight to keep his daughter’s case in the public’s attention, Ramsey is also working toward passage of the Homicide Victims’ Families’ Rights Act, which would allow the family of a murder victim to seek a federal review of their case.
“That would be a huge step forward to solve a fundamental problem in our system in this country,” Ramsey said, “not a complete solution, but it is a step forward.”
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