JonBenét Ramsey | The Facts 96-22 |Part 1

Transcribed from the recording by faster-whisper (medium.en), primed with the names in the case and checked for their spelling. Wording may contain minor errors.

0:08 What's up, guys? Thanks for tuning in to CrimeTimeSnacks, the true crime podcast. The case we're diving into today is the case of JonBenét Ramsey. Now, this case is a very famous case because it hasn't been solved for 26 years. There really hasn't been any main suspects, more theories than anything. And JonBenét was a child pageant star, so there's lots of photos and videos of her out there, even though she was only six years old. And a lot of people theorize that might have possibly been what led

0:38 to her death, but we'll get into the theories in the second part. This is split into two parts. The first part of this segment is going to be a storyline and talking about the facts of the case, while the second part is going to go over theories in my theory on who I think killed JonBenét Ramsey. So tune in for both parts. We come home after a late night out with the kids, and they put Burke Ramsey, their nine-year-old son, and JonBenét Ramsey, their six-year-old daughter, to bed. The next morning, around 552 a.m., Patsy Ramsey gets up and starts getting ready. She walks outside of her bedroom door on the second floor to the spiral staircase and starts walking down. As she's walking down, she notices three neatly-placed pieces of paper around the bottom of the staircase. The next morning, around 552 a.m., Patsy Ramsey gets up and starts getting ready. She walks outside of her bedroom door on the second floor to the

1:48 staircase. She picks them up, and she starts reading them. At some point while she's reading them, she notices the words, we have your daughter. At that point, she screams for her husband, John, and calls 911. During the 911 call, she expresses her daughter has been kidnapped within about five minutes the first detective arrives on the scene. John directs that detective to the ransom letter, which is spread out. On the floor, they start reading it. The ransom note was about two and a half pages, and I am going to read it for you guys just so you can hear how cinematic and almost unreal it sounds.

3:05 You will withdraw $118,000 from your account. $100,000 will be in $100 bills, and the remaining $18,000 will be in $20 bills. When you get home, you will put the money in a brown paper bag. I will call you between 8 and 10 a.m. tomorrow to instruct you on delivery. The delivery will be exhausting, so I advise you to be arrested. If we monitor you getting the money early, we might call you early to arrange an earlier delivery of the money and hence an earlier pickup of your daughter. Any deviation of my instructions will result in the immediate execution of your daughter. You will also be denied her remains for proper burial.

4:06 According to a stray dog, she dies. If you alert bank authorities, she dies. If the money is in any way marked or tampered with, she dies. You can try to deceive us, but be warned, we are familiar with law enforcement and counter-measurement and tactics. You stand a 99% chance of killing your daughter if you try to outsmart us. Follow our instructions and you stand a 100% chance of getting her back. You and your family are under constant scrutiny as well as the authorities. Don't go try and grow a brain, John.

4:36 You are not the only fat cat around, so don't think that killing will be difficult. Don't underestimate us, John. Use that good southern common sense of yours. It's up to you now, John. Victory. SBTC. But even at that time, most people say that how the Boulder, Colorado preserves that crime scene, or more or less how they didn't preserve that crime scene, speaks volumes on why this crime has not been solved for 26 years. John and Patsy Ramsey are calling their friends and neighbors to come help because at this time it's a kidnapping and they want as much help as they can. At that time, everyone's just sitting in the house talking about the kidnapping.

5:38 It points to where John was even seen laughing before walking around hysterical. Patsy Ramsey was consoling with friends. And this is telling within itself because the detective said that in 99% of the cases he's seen, any time there's a child death, the parents are consoling each other. So just keep that thought in mind. It was about 1 p.m. when Detective Finch told John Ramsey and his friend to search the house from top to bottom and see if anything else is a myth. For some reason, which no one knows to this day, John told his friend Fleet that they should check the basement. So they went down to the basement and John opens the wine cellar. He sees a white blanket. It was at that time he finds the body of his daughter, JonBenét.

6:38 I don't know exactly what I would do, but this is another contamination of the crime scene. He puts the body in the living room in the detective, then picks up the body and puts it in the foyer underneath the Christmas tree. So within six hours, a kidnapping had just turned into a homicide and the crime scene was probably one of the most contaminated crime scenes that the Boulder Police Department had worked with in a long time. At that time, it wasn't exactly known what had caused the death of JonBenét.

7:08 It was that there was a grout or a homemade strangulation device tied tightly around her neck. Looking at the body, one could assume that she was strangled. During the autopsy, it was found that she also suffered a skull fracture. With this information, the police and investigators first went off the theory that an intruder had broken into the house and tried to kidnap JonBenét and failed. Unfortunately for the Ramseys, that theory didn't last very long. During the first few days of their investigation, they found there was no signs of forced entry. So you have four people in the house and one person ends up dead. The Boulder Police wanted to talk to John and Patsy Ramsey. More than likely, somebody in the house did it.

8:08 Within a week of the murder, the Boulder Police Department had their main suspects, John Ramsey and Patsy Ramsey. They wanted to sit down and have the formal interrogation or formal interview with them that they would with any other suspect. But the Ramseys were busy. They had their funeral. They had the memorial. And they also had a lot of people in the community who respected John asking the police department to back off and give them time. They were on CNN. However, they had not yet sat down and had that formal interview with the Boulder Police Department. Bill Owens, the governor of Colorado at that time, had a lot to say about that. After the CNN interview aired, Bill Owens goes on national TV and says the Ramseys refused to talk to the Boulder Police Department, but they'll take the easy way out and go talk to the journalists. Because they went on CNN before they talked to the Boulder Police Department, they did get a lot of public scrutiny.

9:08 You also have to remember that John Ramsey is a very wealthy man, a multi-millionaire. So a man like that is going to have attorneys in a PR firm. And as soon as he is even a suspect in a crime, his attorneys are going to chirp in and say you should probably not talk to the police. Now some people would also say that the Boulder Police Department had tunnel vision. They already had their suspects picked out. So John Ramsey or Patsy Ramsey or Burke Ramsey, for all that matter, walking into a police department without an attorney present.

9:38 Wouldn't be smart for any of them. The evidence the Boulder, Colorado police had were pictures of the crime scene. They knew that the ransom note was torn out of a legal pad owned by Patsy Ramsey. They knew that in the ransom note, the $118,000 requested was just $236 shy of the bonus John Ramsey had received from his business that year. They also had a broken paintbrush tied to a shoestring that was used to strangle JonBenét. And that broken paintbrush came from a set of paintbrushes that belonged to Patsy Ramsey in the house. Sadly, all that evidence doesn't really point to a direct person. It just proves that all the evidence used in the murder of JonBenét came from the house. About four months later, they did get their formal interviews with Patsy Ramsey and John Ramsey with their attorneys present. When nothing came of that, they brought in a renowned detective named Lou Smit.

10:38 Pieces of evidence that were just looked over during the first part of this investigation. In fact, Lou Smit came up with his own theory that backed the parent's theory that there was an intruder that came into the house. And after 18 months, he recused himself from the investigation because the Boulder Police Department didn't want to hear what he had to say. In 2006, and he actually confessed to killing JonBenét. But the way he said he killed her didn't really match. And he said he drugged her. There were no drugs found in JonBenét's system. And police couldn't even confirm if he was in Boulder at the time. And his DNA didn't match the profile.

11:26 In 2006, Patsy Ramsey loses her fight to ovarian cancer and dies at the age of 49. And Boulder, Colorado has a new district attorney taking over the Ramsey case. Her team develops a DNA profile from Touch DNA. But this DNA was found on JonBenét's long johns. So in the mind of the DA, that means there had to have been another person in the house or another person who committed this crime whose DNA they haven't found yet. She publicly in her last days of office said the Ramseys are no longer on the suspect list, which a lot of people were a little disappointed in. Because again, just because there's Touch DNA doesn't mean that the Ramseys didn't still commit this crime. That just means there was other somebody else's DNA on JonBenét's long johns, which could have gotten there in a lot of different ways the same way it could have gotten on her shirt.

12:19 Now they already had an unknown DNA profile, but it didn't necessarily exclude John or Patsy or Burke for that matter, because Touch DNA found on a shirt is going to be found on everybody's shirt. The evidence in this case really hasn't changed much. The only new evidence that's came to light is the evidence of a new DNA profile. Now this DNA profile was found and put into the CODIS database, which is a database that the FBI has with DNA of felons and rapists and people who have had their DNA taken by the government and usually committed a felony get their DNA sent into this big database called CODIS.

13:03 Now CODIS has not had a match of this DNA, which essentially means whoever did this crime has either not committed another crime of this nature to put themselves in CODIS or they're not around anymore. Or this is still Touch DNA that doesn't have anything to do with the crime. So therefore it's from somebody who isn't in CODIS. John Ramsey has been trying to access this unknown profile DNA for 10 years now, and the Boulder, Colorado Police Department won't release it to him because, I mean, this is still an open investigation.

13:34 And if he's a suspect, it makes sense on why they won't release it to him. He wants this DNA to go to a genealogy lab, and what a genealogy is to kind of summarize it, it's what was used to solve the Golden State Killer case. Basically, if I upload my DNA onto Ancestry.com to try to find out who my great great great grandpa was, in that situation, it shines light on all my family members around me, even if they haven't uploaded their DNA. And in the case of the Golden State Killer, it was a tree of about a thousand people, but these detectives used that and narrowed it down to about four people.

14:14 And that's how they found the Golden State Killer. John Ramsey wants this DNA profile so he can potentially use that same type of ideology to find out at the least who the unknown profile belongs to. Now, it probably wouldn't be as easy as just loading it into CODIS because, one, the private labs that Ancestry and 23andMe.com use, that information isn't necessarily like a public database. You can't just search it for a DNA match. They can still use it to potentially solve crimes in extreme cases.

14:52 And that's what John Ramsey is hoping to do with this unknown profile. Because, at that point, it doesn't matter if the actual person is in the database. All it takes is someone with a close DNA profile and this little investigative work. But again, that's how they solved the case of the Golden State Killer. That's all the facts of the case. Honestly, there's not that many facts. The next episode, we're going to talk about the theories in this case, including the famous Lou Smit and how he came up with the intruder theory.

15:26 And I'm going to give you my theory on who I think killed JonBenét and why. So tune in for part two of JonBenét Ramsey, America's child beauty queen.