THE KILLING OF JONBENET RAMSEY
by Edward Jay Epstein, 2013
In 1996, the reported kidnapping of JonBenet Ramsey, a six-year-old star in the world of child beauty pageants, set off a month long media feeding frenzy reminiscent of the 1932 Lindbergh kidnapping. In both cases, a high-profile child was taken from its bed while the parents were at home, and was then found dead. And in both cases, police could find no signs of forced entry, identifiable fingerprints, or credible witnesses to the putative intruder except for a handwritten ransom note. With Lindbergh, who was a national hero, the police focused on the intruder, but in the Ramsey case, the police focused on the family.
The JonBenet Ramsey investigation began on the morning of December 26, 1996, after her father, John Ramsey, reported her missing from her home in Boulder, Colorado. He told police that the last time the child star was seen by anyone in the family was when he carried her to bed at 10:00 on Christmas night. He showed them a handwritten ransom note that he had found in the house that said that JonBenet had been abducted by a “group” representing a “foreign faction.” It demanded that $118,000, the exact size of John Ramsey’s annual bonus, be delivered to the kidnappers. At 1:05 p.m. that day, before the ransom money could be paid, Ramsey found his daughter’s body covered in a white blanket in the wine cellar.
The medical examination established that her wrists had been tied above her head, and her mouth covered by duct tape, and that she had been garroted by a nylon cord. From the advanced state of rigor mortis, the time of death was between 10:00 p.m. on December 25 and 6:00 a.m. on December 26. The autopsy determined that she was killed by either strangulation or a skull-fracturing blow to the head, and that there were indications that she had been sexually assaulted.
The only solid clue for the investigators was the ransom note. Forensic experts found that the three sheets of paper used in it, as well as the pen with which it was written, came from a table near the kitchen in the Ramsey home. This meant that someone inside the house had taken the time to write a lengthy letter before or after the strangling of JonBenet.
Police found a footprint made by a hiking boot in dust and a palm print on the door of the wine cellar that could have come from an outsider, but they could not date them to the night of the kidnapping. They also found a pubic hair in the blanket in which JonBenet was wrapped that could not be matched to any family member, but it also could have been left in the blanket at an earlier time or resulted from the accidental contamination of the crime scene, which was not initially sealed off.
So, even with modern DNA tests, there was no certain evidence of an intruder.
The investigators were also unable to find an escape route. There was an opened basement window, but there were no footprints in the snow outside the window. So the investigation homed in on the activities of the three family members who were in the house—John Ramsey; JonBenet’s mother, Patsy; and JonBenet’s brother, Burke. Despite an intensive effort, however, the police were unable to match the handwriting samples of any family member to the ransom note, or to find any other evidence implicating them.
Meanwhile, the family hired lawyers to protect their interests and file lawsuits against the media outlets that were reporting police “leaks.” So the investigation ground to a halt.
It took nearly twelve years for the district attorney’s office to officially exonerate the family members on the basis of the DNA. Even though the investigation officially resumed, the Boulder police chief observed, “Some cases never get solved.” There were a number of false confessions, such as that of John Mark Karr in 2006, but none of these confessors matched the DNA profile established by the FBI.
The theories fall into either the domestic-violence category or the unknown-intruder category. The former theories raise the suspicion, which is common when a murder occurs in a household and there are no witnesses, that the ransom note was fabricated to cover the involvement of a Ramsey family member in the death of JonBenet. It was alleged that Patsy Ramsey may have altered her handwriting to avoid it being matched to the note, but this is hardly evidence. The intruder theories posited that some outsider who knew the layout of the Ramsey house, possibly a neighbor, business associate, or relative, murdered JonBenet as an act of revenge or anger against her parents and wrote the ransom note to divert police attention.
Finally, there is the sexual-predator theory. Because JonBenet appeared in beauty pageants, there is the possibility that a sexual predator stalked her, cased the house, broke in somehow, and assaulted her.
My assessment is that the abduction and murder were committed by an outsider. As the district attorney explained: “The match of male DNA on two separate items of clothing worn by the victim at the time of the murder makes it clear to us that an unknown male handled these items.”
This lack of a match convinces me that someone broke into the house. It turns out that there were thirty-eight registered sex offenders within a two-mile radius of the Ramsey home, and, with the attention that JonBenet received as a child star, it is likely that the unknown DNA came from a sexual predator. If he was a known sex offender, he may well have left the note not to collect a ransom but to mislead the police investigation.
DNA is a double-edged sword. It can prove the innocence of an outsider, as it did in the case of the bogus confessor John Mark Karr, but its presence cannot serve as evidence for insiders, such as the Ramsey family members, whose DNA would be expected to be found in the house. While DNA analysis provides a substantial advance over fingerprints in identifying individuals at a crime scene, it still requires a positive match to a person who is not expected to be at the scene of the crime.