Who killed JonBenét Ramsay? — A 28-year-old mystery yet to be solved

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CrimeSpot

19 min readJan 3, 2024

JonBenét Ramsey was just six years old when she was beaten and strangled in her family’s Colorado home.

On December 26, seven hours after her disappearance was reported, the beauty pageant participant was found assaulted and strangled in the basement of her family’s Boulder home. The young girl was discovered wrapped in a white blanket, with duct tape covering her lips, hands bound over her head, and a nylon cord around her neck. Police did not completely rule out sexual assault even though there was no concrete evidence of rape. Additionally, a strange ransom note requesting $118,000 from the family was discovered.

Who was JonBenét Ramsey?

On August 6, 1990, Patricia Paugh Ramsey and John Bennett Ramsey welcomed JonBenet Patricia Ramsey into the world at Northside Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. John Bennett Ramsey was a businessman, and Patricia “Patsy” Ramsey, was a socialite and the Miss West Virginia of 1977. When JonBenet was about a year old, her family moved to Colorado. John Bennett, her father’s first and middle names, are combined to form her first name. Patricia, her mother, is the origin of her middle name. America’s Royal Miss, Colorado State All-Star Kids Cover Girl, Little Miss Charlevoix Michigan, Little Miss Colorado, Little Miss Merry Christmas, Little Miss Sunburst, and National Tiny Miss Beauty are just a few of the kid beauty contest titles that JonBenet has won. December 17, 1996, was JonBenet’s last pageant. She modelled a few clothes and gave a rendition of “Rockin Around the Christmas Tree”. The tournament was held in Denver, Colorado, at Southwest Plaza. She received a talent prize and was dubbed Little Miss Christmas.

From her father’s first marriage, she had two half-sisters, Melinda and Elizabeth Ramsey, the latter of whom passed away in a car accident when JonBenét was just two years old. She also had an elder brother, Burke Ramsey. The family relocated to Boulder, Colorado, in 1991, and Mr. Ramsey accepted a position as chief executive officer of a computer company that had just amalgamated with his own. JonBenét was a Boulder’s St. John’s Episcopal Church member and a High Peaks Elementary School student.

The Murder

Patsy, John Ramsey, and their son Burke were the only members of JonBenét’s immediate family who are known to have been present in the house on the night of her death. Patricia Ramsey found that JonBenét was missing when she woke up early on December 26, 1996, at around 5:45 a.m. She also discovered a handwritten ransom note, spanning two and a half pages, addressed to Mr. Ramsey, stating that their daughter had been abducted by “a group of individuals representing a small foreign faction”. It requested a ransom of $118.000, which is nearly the same amount that Mr. Ramsey’s employer gave him as a Christmas bonus. It also included very explicit instructions regarding the denomination of the bills and how they were to be delivered. It read “Victory!” at the end and was signed “S.B.T.C.”

The ransom note seems to mimic movie dialogue. Accepted sources include the motion pictures Ruthless People, Ransom, Escape from New York, Speed, and Dirty Harry. The ransom note was longer than normal. The police were informed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that the note’s writing at the crime site was highly odd. Because the note contained an unusual amount of exclamation marks and initials, and no fingerprints other than Patsy’s and the authorities who had touched it, the police assumed that the note had been staged. Using a pen and paper from the Ramsey residence, the note and a draft version were created.

Mrs Ramsey summoned the police, who conducted a search of the home and discovered no overt evidence of forced entry, save for a broken window in the basement that John Ramsey said he had broken months prior after being locked out of his house without his keys. Meanwhile, a local minister and a few family friends showed up, and the Ramseys started getting ready to pay the ransom. A forensics team was dispatched to the house. The team initially believed that the child had been kidnapped, and JonBenét’s bedroom was the only room in the house that was cordoned off to prevent contamination of evidence. No precautions were taken to prevent contamination of evidence in the rest of the house.

On the afternoon of the same day, Mr. Ramsey and Fleet White, a family friend, discovered JonBenét’s body in the wine cellar of the house while looking for clues. They were doing this on the recommendation of one of the detectives, Linda Arndt.

The small girl had black duct tape covering her mouth, her right hand bound with a piece of rope that also formed a handmade garrote around her neck, and her white blanket wrapped over her torso. She was long dead when Mr. Ramsey swiftly grabbed her up, broke her chains, and carried her into the living room. The crime scene was further contaminated and important forensic evidence was disrupted for the returning forensics team when JonBenét was transferred. The Ramseys gave the police samples of their hair, blood, and handwriting.

Upon conducting a postmortem investigation and autopsy, it was discovered that Ramsey had been strangled twice using a nylon wire that had been disguised as a crude garrote and connected to a paintbrush fragment from the basement, most likely for leverage.

Recreation of the crime scene from autopsy reports. Source

In addition, there were obvious indications of blunt force damage to the head, indications of a potential sexual assault, and (according to investigator Lou Smit’s view) electrical burns on the cheek that suggested she might have also been tasered. The official diagnosis of suffocation by strangulation related to craniocerebral injuries was made.

A “vegetable or fruit material which may represent pineapple,” which JonBenét had consumed a few hours before her death, was discovered during the autopsy. There was a bowl of pineapple on the kitchen table with a spoon inside, according to pictures of the house taken the day JonBenét’s body was discovered. But neither Patsy nor John claimed to have remembered giving JonBenét pineapple or setting the bowl on the table. The fingerprints of Burke Ramsey, JonBenét’s nine-year-old brother, were discovered on the bowl, according to the police. Burke slept through the whole night, according to the Ramseys, only to wake up a few hours after the cops showed around.

On 29 December 1996, the family flew to their former hometown of Atlanta. JonBenét was laid to rest in Marietta, Georgia, on New Year’s Eve. Her grave is right beside that of her older half-sister Elizabeth, who died in a car accident in 1992.

Investigation

More than two hours were spent in a preliminary interview with John and Patsy, and in the initial weeks after JonBenét’s passing, Burke was also interviewed. Potential suspects in the case have been identified by experts, media experts, and the Ramseys. After concentrating nearly solely on John and Patsy at first, Boulder police had over 1,600 individuals on their list of persons of interest by October 1997.

Detective Lou Smit came out of retirement at the beginning of 1997 to help the Boulder County District Attorney’s office with this case. Together with other DA’s Office employees, he presented his findings to the Boulder police in May 1998 and concluded that the evidence did not support the Ramseys. They failed to disprove the police department’s conclusion that the Ramseys were responsible. The goal of the DA’s office was to assume command of the inquiry. The pressure to secure a conviction and the enmity between the DA’s office and the police led Colorado Governor Roy Romer to step in and appoint Michael Kane as special prosecutor to convene a grand jury.

There were divergent opinions among the case’s two principal investigators. Lou Smit and Steve Thomas both resigned in the end; Smit did so because he felt the investigation had incompetently ignored the intruder idea, and Thomas did so because he felt the DA’s office had meddled in the case and refused to back the police investigation. Beginning on September 15, 1998, a grand jury was called in to consider charging the Ramseys with relevant charges.

Based on the probable cause standard applied in such grand jury proceedings, the grand jury returned a true bill in 1999 charging the Ramseys with putting the child at risk in a way that resulted in her death and with obstructing an investigation of the murder because John Ramsey tampered with the crime scene. However, Boulder County District Attorney Alex Hunter decided not to press charges against them because he did not think he could establish their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, which is a more stringent requirement for a criminal conviction. On December 26, 2002, the police handed over the case to Mary Lacy, the next Boulder County District Attorney.

She concurred with a federal court sitting on a libel case in 2002 in April 2003, stating that the evidence presented in the suit is “more consistent with a theory that an intruder murdered JonBenét than it was with a theory that Mrs Ramsey did”. The Boulder District Attorney’s office declared on July 9, 2008, that the Ramsey family members were no longer considered suspects in the case due to the use of newly developed DNA testing and collection techniques (contact DNA analysis). The Ramseys were publicly cleared by Lacy.

Theories and Suspects

Several theories started to surface after JonBenét Ramsey’s murder, which soon became a media sensation. One involved Mr Ramsey killing his daughter after sexually abusing her and trying to hide it. Another claimed that she had been a frequent bed wetter who even needed diapers despite her advanced age; Mrs Ramsey had killed her in a fit of wrath after discovering this and had covered it up as a house invasion. Early on, the authorities made it apparent that the parents were the center of their attention, not “some crazy kidnapper”. One account that was reported stated that there were no footprints in the snow close to the open basement window; however, an investigator refuted this claim by pointing out that there were other entrances (such as the basement’s broken window) where no footprints could have been left behind.

The Parents

First, speculation exists that Patsy Ramsey turned on a switch and forcefully hit the young girl’s head against the side of a hard, blunt object, such as a bathtub while tending to yet another of JonBenét’s bed-wetting mishaps, which is rumoured to happen rather frequently. Second, JonBenét was discovered with a rope around her neck, secured by a makeshift garrote that was manufactured from a paintbrush that had been stolen from Patsy’s paint kit, which was lying close by. The third ransom note is the most unusual in ransom note history. According to Patsy, she found a two-and-a-half page ransom letter on a rung that descended the spiral staircase that went to the basement where JonBenét’s body was recovered.

The note, which was written in bizarre language that looked to have been stolen from vintage crime movies, asked that $118,000 be paid to the “foreign faction” by 10 a.m. the next day. It was later discovered that this amount was equal to John Ramsey’s Christmas bonus from Access Graphics. According to certain sources, Patsy composed the note herself in a panic after learning what she had done to JonBenét. One such source is Steve Thomas, the former co-leading investigator for the Boulder Police Department. However, despite their compelling nature, the handwriting studies proved to be inconclusive in the end. However, it was determined that Patsy had used her pen to write the note on a piece of stationary that she had taken from inside the house.

A report from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) states that Patricia Ramsey appears to be the author of the ransom note. However, the evidence was insufficient to draw a firm conclusion. In his 60 years of experience, board-certified forensic pathologist Michael Baden, who provided consultation to both sides of the case, claimed he had never seen a note quite like it and did not believe it to have been written by an outsider. A federal court, citing six certified handwriting experts, determined that Patsy was not the likely writer of the memo.

Patsy became extremely guarded in the years after the murder; she even got into an argument with a critic on Larry King Live. Some bystanders took offence at Ramsey’s sexualization of a helpless kid through a series of beauty pageants, despite family friends insisting that Patsy loved JonBenét and would never have put the young girl in danger.

The first police officer on the scene that morning, Linda Ardndt, searched the house but was unable to find anything. After a while, she dispatched John Ramsey and Fleet White, a neighbour, to look about the house for anything strange. Ramsey headed straight toward the bottom cellar, where he discovered his dead child right away. Despite being instructed to abandon everything in its original location, he lifted her, carried her corpse upstairs, took a piece of tape out of the child’s mouth, and set her down. He even covered her with a throw blanket, therefore obliterating even more important physical proof.

That’s when Arndt began to think Ramsey might know far too much. While Ramsey’s covert finding of the body was believed to have been the result of a botched police inquiry, Arndt has never hidden her concerns about the family. Some people find it odd that someone would use intuition alone to find an admittedly unutilized portion of the house. In 1999, Arndt informed ABC News that she had discovered other suspicious behaviour on their part, such as how Patsy and John ignored the $180,000 ransom note’s 10 a.m. deadline.

Not just Arndt thought Ramsey’s actions that morning were oddly suspicious. Only hours after the murder, according to a cop on the scene, John Ramsey was making plans to fly the family to Atlanta. (John subsequently acknowledged this, stating that they had been asked to leave the residence and that their only desire was to return to Atlanta, their home of more than 25 years.) Rumours of sexual assault started to spread, but no concrete proof of these claims was ever discovered. “History does not exist,” stated Ramsey in a statement. “A person doesn’t go throughout their lives as a normal human being, one night turn into a monster, slaughter their daughter, go to bed and get up and act normal from there on. That doesn’t happen.”

The Brother

For years following the murder, JonBenét’s older brother Burke was kept out of the media by John and Patsy Ramsey, and based on his recent, bizarre interview with Dr Phil, it was probably a wise decision. After being officially cleared in 2008, Ramsey and his parents decided to “clear the air” in September. The 29-year-old software developer gave a sinister smile as he answered questions from Dr Phil about the circumstances leading up to the alleged night in question.

The Case of JonBenét Ramsey, a two-part documentary that immediately followed on CBS, reexamined the crime scene’s evidence with the help of a small team of FBI and forensic specialists, including former Scotland Yard behavioural analyst Laura Richards and retired profiler Jim Clemente. The documentary approached Burke Ramsey with as much scepticism as it could manage without officially accusing him. The CBS crew developed a convincing hypothesis. In his analysis of JonBenét’s autopsy, renowned forensic investigator Werner Spitz noted a “perfectly rectangular defect” that he suspected resulted from a blow to the young girl’s head caused by a blunt, heavy flashlight that was visible in one of the crime scene images on the kitchen counter.

He stated that the flashlight “perfectly fit” the eight-and-a-half-inch incision in her skull. Nevertheless, there was not any trace of Burke or JonBenét on the flashlight. When the flashlight was connected to the pineapple scenario, which postulated that JonBenét had stolen a piece of fruit from Burke’s late-night snack, which was discovered on the dining room table (an undigested pineapple piece was discovered in the child’s stomach during the autopsy), he became even more suspicious. He then struck her with the nearby flashlight out of rage.

Finally, Spitz hypothesized that Burke may have used the ends of one of his toy train tracks to poke his unconscious sister’s body for a reaction, given the wounds on JonBenét’s back, which had previously been thought to have resulted from a stun gun encounter. But Burke retaliated right after following the special’s broadcast, which is not typically the behaviour of a guilty party. According to his lawyer L. Lin Wood, “CBS perpetrated a fraud on its viewers.”

The Town Drifter

Given that there was a droplet of blood on JonBenét’s underwear and that she appeared to have been the victim of a possible sexual assault, Gary Oliva, a 32-year-old known sex offender in Boulder, Colorado, was the person who was discovered to have strangled her to death. After being arrested in 2000 on drug-related crimes, the convicted paedophile had been residing in the neighbourhood intermittently until police allegedly discovered a magazine cutout of JonBenét Ramsey in his backpack. Though he was quickly set free, doubts persisted. Longtime private investigator for the Ramsey family, Ollie Gray, once called Oliva’s connection to JonBenét a “bombshell arrest” in the case and chastised the Boulder Police Department for not viewing him as a more plausible suspect.

Michael Vail, an old acquaintance from high school, soon came forward with a claim that validated Gray’s misgivings. Vail said that shortly after the murder, an upset Oliva had called him and admitted to his old friend he had “hurt a little girl.” I hurt a young girl.” Earlier this year, Vail told InTouch magazine that he was especially uneasy about the knots used to create the garrote that strangled JonBenét because they reminded him of an event in which Oliva tried to choke his mother with a telephone wire. “My blood ran cold when I read that,” recalled Vail of his troubled childhood friend. There were also rumours that Oliva might be associated with a theory that connected the marks on JonBenét’s body to a stun gun incident. Oliva had one on him at the time of his initial arrest.

The Electrician

Ollie Gray said that Michael Helgoth, an electrician who worked in a nearby vehicle salvage yard, was another possible suspect. Gray called Helgoth a “hellraiser” because of a supposed property dispute between the Ramseys. Could that have been the driving force behind the attempt to abduct JonBenét and exact revenge on the family? The 26-year-old Helgoth is thought to have killed himself before help could reach him after learning that he might be a suspect in the case (officials discovered what is purported to be his boot print close to the Ramseys’ house). His passing happened two days following a press conference in 1997 where it was announced that the Boulder District Attorney was focusing on a new suspect. Still, Helgoth is exonerated by death and DNA.

The School Teacher

Former schoolteacher John Mark Karr made an unexpected, graphic, and sexually explicit confession to the 1996 strangulation of JonBenét in 2006. Karr was detained in Thailand, where he had been residing, following accusations of child pornography in the United States. The now 51-year-old got involved in the situation at first by emailing Michael Tracey, a lecturer at the University of Colorado Boulder, about a documentary Tracey was producing about the case. Following a disturbing development in the emails that exposed the adult man’s sexual interest in JonBenét, Tracey reported Karr to the police, who detained him in Bangkok as a potential suspect.

Karr’s demented confession involved a series of diary entries allegedly written from the scene of the crime. In one dramatic account, Karr recalls strangling JonBenét in a “love game” gone wrong. “Close your pretty eyes, sweetheart,” reads the excerpt, in which Karr repeatedly refers to himself as “Daxis.” “Daxis loves you so much. Oh God, I love you, JonBenét. And my lover’s eyes are slowly closing …”

Karr’s alleged involvement made headlines throughout the world, and his sincere insistence that he had killed her was enough to start a media circus. But in the end, he was written off as a paedophile seeking recognition and fame and his suspicions were completely discarded. It was also not confirmed by officials that he had ever been in Boulder. The former suspect is reportedly living under a new identity and gender in the Pacific Northwest, according to a 2010 Daily Beast article.

The Housekeeper

It was not surprising that Linda Hoffman-Pugh was known to have a key to the house because she had been the family’s housekeeper and her husband Mervin was their handyman. Furthermore, Hoffman-Pugh didn’t even remotely match the type the police were looking for — a white male, 25–30-year-old ex-convict — during the murder inquiry into JonBenét’s death. She did not, however, hold back from expressing her concerns that JonBenét had been unintentionally killed by Patsy Ramsey.

Nevertheless, Patsy told investigators that Hoffman-Pugh was having financial difficulties and had approached Ramsey for a loan of several thousand dollars, but Ramsey had turned it down. The night following the murder, Pugh’s home was visited by police, who reportedly seized her fingerprints and several hair strands from the 57-year-old housekeeper in addition to asking her to write the figure $180,000 on a piece of paper. After that, she gave an eight-hour testimony before a grand jury, during which she made a statement disparaging Patsy, saying, “I believe she had multiple personalities.” She would alternate between being happy and grumpy. She got into arguments with JonBenét about wearing a dress or about a friend coming over. I had never seen Patsy so upset.”).

According to the Hoffman-Pugh theory, the housekeeper lured a gullible JonBenét into the basement that evening to deceive her employers into paying a ransom (it’s plausible that she saw John Ramsey’s pay stub for $180,000 as a holiday bonus and decided to demand that amount). Hoffman-Pugh is a convenient suspect since she is familiar with the house and the family’s routine. She also doesn’t have an alibi because she was sleeping in bed when her husband was supposedly sleeping on the couch, but it is still possible that she was involved. She has never been legally charged with this crime, and the evidence that points to her involvement in the case thus far is merely circumstantial at best.

Aftermath

The case eventually became cold. The Ramseys devoted the ensuing years to self-defence, suing publications for inaccurate portrayals of them, and penning a book, The Death of Innocence, about the murder of their daughter and their subsequent existence. In June of 2006, Patricia Ramsey passed away from ovarian cancer.

The Boulder police resurrected the cold case in October 2010. A commission of federal and state investigators conducted new interviews after conducting an updated investigation. In their inquiry, police were anticipated to employ cutting-edge DNA testing. On January 27, 2013, it was announced that a grand jury had found sufficient evidence to indict JonBenét’s parents in 1999 on charges of child abuse resulting in death, but the District Attorney had refused to sign the indictment, leaving off the impression that the investigation conducted by the grand jury was judged as inconclusive. Nothing new could be learned from the interviews. According to Boulder Police Chief Greg Testa, the investigation into JonBenét’s death is still an ongoing homicide case, as was reported in September 2016. Court records sealed in 1999 were made public on October 25. They showed that the Ramsey parents had been charged by a grand jury in 1999 with child abuse that resulted in death and accessory to a crime, including murder. Additionally, according to the documents, both parents planned to obstruct or postpone the accused killer’s arrest. The identity of JonBenét’s killer was not disclosed in the indictments, though. The case has resumed national media coverage as a result of the fresh information release.

The district attorney and Boulder police released a statement in November 2022 regarding the “ongoing homicide investigation,” stating that they will be conferring with the Colorado Cold Case Review Team in 2023. “There is a very little and complex amount of DNA evidence that is now available for analysis. The announcement went on, “DNA testing may use the material in whole or in part.

“In collaboration with the CBI and the FBI, there have been several discussions with private DNA labs about the viability of continued testing of DNA recovered from the crime scene and genetic genealogy analysis … Whenever there is a proven technology that can reliably test forensic samples consistent with the samples available in this case, additional analysis will be conducted.”

New DNA testing has been completed which may help solve the decades-old murder of child beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey. New evidence, as well as some which were previously reviewed, have been analyzed by a criminal lab and returned to the police. The results have yet to be released, but a detailed DNA report has been issued to the authorities. A police source told The Messenger: ‘Time will tell if this is the evidence needed to solve this case. ‘I hope we get answers, and more importantly, I hope her family finally gets answers.’

John Ramsay talked about celebrating Christmas. We didn’t celebrate Christmas for several years, and we thought, ‘Well, this isn’t fair to Burke.’… We tried to give him a normal childhood,” John Ramsey, 80, told Fox News Digital of celebrating Christmas after his daughter was killed 27 years ago. “Now, we have grandchildren, and we have to enjoy those in our life. We will be with my daughter and her children and [my son’s] children this Christmas. It’ll be a joyful Christmas. You’ve got to remember what Christmas is all about, and that helps solidify our view of life and what life’s all about.” He continued: “It impacts us, not just on Dec. 26. It’s with us — I’ve told people, the death of a child… you don’t get over. You don’t move on. You’re a changed person. And I’m sure that’s the same for my other children. It’s a horrible thing for them to have to live with, but you move on, and you’ve got to move on and create new memories.”

“But if I see a little girl holding hands with her dad walking through the mall, it kind of tugs at me.”

Ramsey takes comfort in the fact that “JonBenet is in heaven.”

Authorities are asking anyone with information related to the JonBenet investigation to contact 303–441–1974, BouldersMostWanted@bouldercolorado.gov or Northern Colorado Crime Stoppers at 1–800–222-TIPS (8477).

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