Now here's something interesting.
"48 Hours has learned that JonBenet may have been targeted for murder long before she took the stage, possibly at a local dance studio called Dance West, where she took lessons.
"To someone with that, you know, kind of a twisted mind, she may have looked like a really good target," says former Denver private investigator Pete Peterson. Less than a year after the murder of JonBenet, he was hired to work on another case in Boulder that had strange parallels to the Ramsey case.
"There's a Dance West school where the victim of the assault in our case, the one that we investigated, and the Ramsey girl, both attended," says Peterson, who now believes Jon Benet was first targeted at that dance studio because of what happened to his client, just nine months after JonBenet was murdered. He also collected cigarette butts found outside Amy's house, and discovered that the "same brands were found in the Ramseys' alley."
"I expected it to be a serene, quiet, safe area," says Peterson of the Boulder neighborhoods. "It's fairly serene and quiet, but you find that there's a real undercurrent of activity at night that would give me pause for concern if I lived here."
Peterson, however, is a private detective with no police authority. He's been censured by a judge in the past for how he's gathered evidence. And in this case, he's planning to hand over all of his materials to the Boulder DA. He hopes they will take his theory seriously.
In his heart, does he think these two cases are connected? "I think that there's a really good likelihood, that's what we're pursuing," says Peterson. "We're pursuing that angle still."
Meanwhile, Boulder DA investigators are continuing to pursue their own leads.
Like JonBenet, she took lessons at Dance West. And like JonBenet, another girl, who is identified as "Amy," was attacked and sexually assaulted at night in her own bedroom on Sept. 14, 1997.
That night, Amy's father was out of town. After catching a movie, Amy and her mother returned home late. What they didn't know when they entered the house was that there was already an intruder inside.
Amy's father, who asked that his identity be obscured, agreed to talk about what happened that night: "My feeling is he got into the house while they were out and hid inside the house, so he would have been in there for perhaps four to six hours, hiding."
Before going to bed, Amy's mother turned on the burglar alarm. Around midnight, Amy woke up to find a man standing over her bed, his hand over her mouth. "She remembered the intruder addressing her by her name," says Peterson. "He said, 'I know who you are.' He repeated those things a few times, apparently. 'I'll knock you out. Shut up.'"
Peterson says Amy's mother heard whispering, and proceeded through the doorway, and saw a person, who just brushed her aside and quickly made his escape by jumping out a second-floor window.
"He was like a ghost," recalls Amy's father. "We couldn't figure out where he came from, or where he went."
By the time the Boulder police arrived, the man was long gone. Because the intruder had gotten in and out of the house so easily, Amy's father began to think this wasn't the first time he had done something like this.
"The first thing that occurred to us was that it was the parallel to the Ramsey case because it was exactly the same situation," says Amy's father, who even told the Boulder police about the Dance West studio connection to the Ramsey case. "I think someone, somewhere, drew a bead on her. Obviously had us under surveillance that we were not aware of."
The studio has since gone out of business and been torn down, but photos show that there was a balcony overlooking the dance floor where parents and anyone else could come in and watch the children.
But Amy's dad says that when he told the police detectives about the information he had, "they were completely uninterested in it."
"They were very frustrated," says Peterson. "It was difficult to get them to do anything much less, you know, beyond taking a report."
But not only did the Boulder police dismiss any link to the Ramsey case, they didn't even bother to use the mother's eyewitness description to make a composite sketch. That's when Amy's family hired Peterson. What he has uncovered in his investigation may not only solve Amy's case, but also help lead to the capture of JonBenet's killer.
"This person is someone with a huge ego, someone who views himself as bold," says Peterson, who believes there are too many parallels between Amy's case and JonBenet's murder.
Both JonBenet and Amy were sexually assaulted by an intruder at night in their homes -- within nine months of each other. Fiber evidence shows that JonBenet's attacker may have been wearing black, as was the man who attacked Amy. And there's the fact that both girls took lessons at the Dance West studio.
But Boulder police never found any connections to the murder of JonBenet.Yet, Peterson found something very disturbing. As he collected evidence in and around the house, and did background checks on people who worked in the neighborhood, he found a group of individuals with criminal histories, who roamed the neighborhood at night.
He made surveillance videotapes, and showed 48 Hours vehicles that he believes were used by a roving band of criminals. "We did tail them at one point, within two blocks from the Ramsey house," says Peterson, who watched the neighborhood for weeks.
In his possession, he had a map that was discarded by the group under surveillance. "I think it's a blueprint for burglary, at least," says Peterson.
48 Hours has discovered that, of Colorado's most dangerous sex offenders, one in eight also has prior convictions for burglary or robbery. "They burglarize and sexually assault if the opportunity presents itself," says Peterson.
And in Amy's neighborhood, that opportunity seemed to present itself quite often. Peterson says there were 19 burglaries, breaking and entering, or trespassing reports in a two-month period. He did background checks on his suspects in Amy's case, and discovered that some of them had at one time worked at the Ramsey home.
"Two or three people we were looking at had associations with both neighborhoods," says Peterson, who went so far as to collect the sample of one man's handwriting. "We talked with him several times. ...We had him write something."
Peterson then had an expert compare that handwriting to the Ramsey ransom note. He claims he found distinct similarities were found, but "handwriting analysis is kind of an art. It's pretty subjective."
