JonBenét Patricia Ramsey was born on August 6, 1990, in Atlanta, Georgia (USA). Her parents were Patricia "Patsy" Ramsey (1956-2006) and John Bennett Ramsey (born 1943). Her older brother, Burke, was born in 1987. The name JonBenét was a combination of two fathers' names. The second name was given to the girl after her mother. JonBenét attended High Peaks Elementary School in Boulder, Colorado.
John Ramsey was a businessman and president of Access Graphics, a computer software company. It later became a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin. The man's first marriage ended in divorce in 1978. John had two adult children - a son and a daughter. In 1991, Ramsey moved with his second wife and their two children to Boulder. The seat of his company was located in this city.
Patsy Ramsey from an early age enrolled her daughter as a participant in various children's beauty contests. JonBenét, moreover, won several of them. It is worth adding that the woman herself participated in such competitions in the past. However, she appeared in them as an adult. This thread aroused great controversy among the media and public opinion after the girl's death. In the summer of 1997, about six months after the tragic event, the Ramsey family moved to a new home in Atlanta. In 2006, Patsy died of ovarian cancer at the age of 49. She was buried next to her daughter.
Little did Ramsey know that Christmas would turn their lives upside down. On December 25, 1996, the family was invited to a Christmas party by Fleet White, who was a friend of the family. They returned home quite late. JonBenét, who was given a bicycle for Christmas that day, went to bed around 10pm.
However, it is said that at night she sneaked into the kitchen, where she was supposed to argue with her brother about who would get Christmas delicacies. This information is quite important from the point of view of further events. I will also write about it later in the article.
On December 26, Patsy got up around 5:30 and went to the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee. On the stairs, a woman found a two-and-a-half-page handwritten ransom note. The kidnappers demanded $ 118,000 for their daughter. One hundred thousand were to be in hundred-dollar bills and the remaining eighteen thousand in twenty-dollar bills.
John drew the attention of the police to a strange coincidence. This amount was the same as his Christmas bonus. This suggested that someone with access to this information was most likely involved in the case. Investigators then checked several Access Graphics employees who might have known the details of the bonus. However, no connections could be found. Investigators also considered the possibility that the ransom amount was a reference to Psalm 118. In this regard, they consulted Bible specialists.
Another unusual aspect was the length of the ransom note. It was also very strange that the only fingerprints found on this unusual document belonged to Patsy and the officers investigating the case. The use of exclamation marks and initials was also peculiar. After a few days, it was established that the note was written using a pen and notebook that had come from the Ramsey house. The FBI informed the police that it would be very unusual for such a memo to be written at the crime scene. According to a report by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI), there were indications that Patricia Ramsey herself was the author of the ransom note. However, the evidence did not conclusively confirm this.
The case was consulted with forensic pathologist Michael Baden. The man admitted that he had never seen such a ransom demand in his 60-year career. He also did not think that a stranger had written the letter. However, a federal court ruled that it was highly unlikely that Patsy would write a handwritten note. The opinions of six certified handwriting experts were cited. The judge lamented the revelations of self-proclaimed specialists who did not have graphological knowledge and accused their mother.
The only people who were at home the night JonBenét died were her immediate family members, including her parents and brother. The ransom note contained detailed instructions and prohibited any contact with the police and friends. However, Patsy ignored this prohibition and contacted the police at 5:52 AM. She also called friends Fleet and Priscilla White and John and Barbara Fernie.
The police arrived at the Ramsey house within minutes. A cursory search of the house was carried out, but no signs of a break-in were found. Officer Rick French descended into the basement and headed towards the door, which was secured with a latch. He paused a moment in front of them, but walked away without opening them. The policeman later explained that he was looking for an escape route for the alleged kidnapper. When he saw the padlocked door, he ruled out that possibility and continued searching the house. Anticipating the facts a bit - JonBenét's body was later found just outside this door.
Since no trace of the girl was found, John began to prepare to pay the ransom. A team of forensic technicians (these were Veitch, Weiss, Barcklow, and their supervisor Reichenbach) was sent home. Initially, it was recognized that JonBenét had been kidnapped. Her bedroom was therefore the only room that had been fenced off to prevent the destruction of evidence. However, no precautions were taken to secure the rest of the house in this way. Meanwhile, Ramsey's friends and family, and even their clergyman, came to show their support. Although no one thought about it at the time, the guests probably destroyed a lot of evidence. Detective Linda Arndt arrived at the scene around 8:10. The woman hoped that further instructions from the kidnapper (hijackers) would soon arrive. The letter said that they would be in contact between 8:00 am and 10:00 am. However, no one called to collect the ransom.
Around 1:00 PM, Detective Arndt asked John Ramsey and Fleet White to double-check the house. The men began searching in the basement. John opened the slammed door that Officer French had stopped before. He searched this part of the house (where Christmas presents were said to have been stored) and found his daughter's body there. JonBenét's mouth was taped shut, a nylon rope was found around her wrists and neck, and her torso was covered with a carelessly thrown white blanket.
It was unusual that the girl was tied by clothes, thanks to which she could theoretically easily free herself. This fact spoke for the fact that the restraint could occur after the death of the 6-year-old in order to confuse law enforcement. John screamed, picked up the baby's body, and carried it upstairs. The crime scene was thus "contaminated" and the key forensic evidence was probably lost forever.
The parents and brother provided police with handwriting, blood, and hair samples for forensic examinations. John and Patsy answered police questions for over two hours. Burke was also questioned in the first few weeks after his sister's death.
JonBenét's funeral took place on December 31, 1996, at St. James in Marietta, Georgia. The girl was buried next to her half-sister Elizabeth Pasch Ramsey, who had died in a car accident almost five years earlier at the age of 22.
An autopsy showed that the cause of JonBenét's death was suffocation and a fracture of the skull. There was no conclusive evidence that the 6-year-old had been raped, although the sexual assault was under consideration. No semen was found, but vaginal damage was found. During the autopsy, the pathologist noted that the area of the murderer's vagina was probably wiped with a cloth or a piece of cloth. Death was finally classified as a homicide.
The girl was strangled with the use of the so-called garrotte, which was made of a nylon string tied to two pieces of a broken brush handle. Thus, the girl's neck was wrapped. Some of the bristles of the brush were found where Patsy kept her painting supplies. The lower part of the brush was never found, however, despite extensive police searches of the house in the following days.
The autopsy of the girl also showed that traces of fully undigested fruit or vegetables were found in her stomach. It has been found that it may have been a pineapple that JonBenét allegedly ate several hours before her death. Photos of the house taken on the day the 6-year-old's body was found showed a bowl with pineapple pieces on the kitchen table.
However, neither John nor Patsy remembered putting a bowl on the table or feeding their daughter pineapple. The police, however, found nine-year-old Burke Ramsey's fingerprints on the vessel. Parents stubbornly repeated that their son slept all night until he woke up a few hours after the police arrived.
In December 2003, forensic technicians collected enough material from a mixed blood sample found on JonBenét's underwear to determine the DNA profile of the alleged perpetrator. It turned out that the genetic material belonged to an unknown male person and excluded each Ramsey's DNA. The material was then sent to the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), the FBI's database of over 1.6 million DNA profiles. However, the sample did not match any profile that was in the database. An analysis was carried out using the latest forensic techniques. An October 2016 report revealed that the original DNA contained genetic material from two people other than JonBenét.
A. James Kolar, who was the lead investigator in the district attorney's office and published a book on the JonBenét case in 2012. The man revealed that additional traces of male DNA were found on the string and brush. There were a total of six samples with genetic material. Unfortunately, it was not possible to establish whose DNA it was. Former FBI profiler Candice Delong concluded that identical DNA that appeared in several different places on many surfaces belonged to the killer. The forensic pathologist Michael Baden mentioned earlier, said: “Traces of DNA can get into places and clothes for various, not necessarily suspicious reasons. There is no forensic evidence to show that this is a murder committed by a stranger. "
Local police initially focused almost exclusively on John and Patsy. By October 1997, there were already over 1,600 people on the list of potential perpetrators. The aforementioned errors made in the preliminary investigation unfortunately significantly complicated the possibility of a solution to the case.
Detective Lou Smit came back from retirement in early 1997 to assist the Boulder County District Attorney's Office with the case. In May 1998, the man presented his findings to the local police. According to them, the Ramseys were not involved in their daughter's murder. However, the district prosecutor's office was unable to convince the officers that the parents were innocent. Due to a disagreement between the police and the prosecution and pressure to find and convict the perpetrator, Colorado Governor Roy Romer appointed Michael Kane as the special prosecutor who initiated the grand jury.
The two main investigators in the case had different views. Both Lou Smit (prosecution) and Steve Thomas (police) eventually dropped out of the investigation. Smit because he believed that the theory that an intruder was involved had been wrongly rejected. Thomas because the prosecutor's office interfered too much but did not properly support the police investigation of the case.
A jury was called on September 15, 1998, to consider prosecuting Ramsey for related charges. In 1999, the parents were accused of putting their child's life in danger, which ultimately led to her death. The second charge was obstruction of the investigation. However, district attorney Alex Hunter did not prosecute. The man did not believe that he could prove his parents' guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. This is required for a criminal conviction in the US. The American public also felt that the outcome of the trial before the grand jury was inconclusive.
Mary Lacy, who would become the next district attorney, took over the investigation from the police on December 26, 2002. It happened exactly on the sixth anniversary of the girl's tragic death. In April 2003, Lacy agreed with a federal judge ruling in a defamation case in 2002. The woman confirmed that the evidence was more in line with the theory that the burglar murdered JonBenét than with the hypothesis that Patricia Ramsey did. On July 9, 2008, the Boulder Attorney's Office officially announced that as a result of newly developed techniques for DNA extraction and verification (DNA tactile analysis), members of the Ramsey family were excluded as suspects in the case.
On February 2, 2009, Boulder Police Chief Mark Beckner announced that Stan Garnett, the new Boulder District Attorney, had handed the case over to his team. Garnett also stated that there had been a statute of limitations for the acts accused of the parents of in the 1999 jury trial.
In October 2010, the Boulder police reopened the case. New hearings were held after the investigation began by a committee of state and federal investigators. It was expected that the investigation would use the latest DNA-related techniques. However, no breakthrough was achieved in the case.
In 2015, Beckner disagreed with Ramsey's acquittal, arguing that "acquitting anyone on the basis of little evidence that has yet to be proven when it is not even known whether it is related to a crime is absurd." He also added that the focus of the investigation should be on the transient DNA from JonBenet's clothing. In 2016, Gordon Coombes, a former investigator in the district attorney's office, also questioned Ramsey's complete absolution. The man said that "purifying someone on the basis of tactile DNA alone, especially when the crime scene has not been secured from the beginning, is really a stretch." Steven E. Pitt, a forensic psychiatrist employed by the Boulder government, was not at all surprised by this reaction. In his opinion, "Lacy's public acquittal of the Ramseyes was a big slap in the face of Beckner and the group of detectives who had been working on this case for years."
There are two types of theories regarding JonBenét's death. According to one of them, at least one family member (and possibly all of them) was involved in the girl's death. Initially, the police focused almost exclusively on this hypothesis. According to Gregg McCrary, a retired FBI agent, and profiling specialist, the statistical chance that a family member or guardian is involved in the murder of a child is 12 to 1.
In addition, investigators found no evidence of a break-in. The ransom-demand letter was supposed to be a confirmation that the scene had been staged. The detectives also saw no willingness to cooperate on the part of the parents to help solve the case of their daughter's death. The Ramsey's said their reluctance stemmed from fear that the police would not take seriously the possibility of an intruder-burglar having committed a crime. The relatives also suspected that they would be selected as key suspects in the case (which in fact happened).
One hypothesis is that Patsy hit her daughter in a fit of anger after she wet her bed during the night. She then had to strangle her to hide what had happened. The woman mistakenly believed that the girl was dead after receiving a blow to the head. However, no other situation could be found for Patricia to fall into such an uncontrolled frenzy. Brother JonBenét later said that he and his sister had never been spanked or experienced any form of physical abuse. Thus, he suggested that it was difficult to accuse his parents of a much more serious act of killing his own child.
Burke, who was nine years old at the time of JonBenét's death, was questioned by investigators at least three times. The first two conversations did not raise any concerns. In an interview with a child psychologist, it was stated that the Ramsey's appeared to have had "a healthy, caring family relationship." In 1998, Boulder Police Chief Mark Beckner said in an interview with a reporter that Burke Ramsey was not involved in his sister's murder. In May 1999, the district attorney's office reiterated that the 9-year-old was not a suspect.
The Ramseys offered a prize of $ 100,000 in a press announcement on April 27, 1997. Three days later, more than four months after their daughter's body was found, they were formally questioned for the first time by investigators.
In the TV documentary miniseries The Case: JonBenét Ramsey, which aired on CBS on September 18 and 19, 2016, a group of experts was introduced who assessed the evidence. According to one theory, Burke hit his sister on the head with a heavy object (possibly a flashlight) after she stole a piece of pineapple from his bowl. The boy, of course, was not going to kill the 6-year-old. The invited guests suggested that the ransom note was an attempt to cover up the actual circumstances of JonBenét's death. On behalf of Burke Ramsey, a family attorney filed defamation suits against CBS, the show's producers, and several of its participants.
Police and prosecutors leaned towards the intruder theory, in part due to an unidentified shoe mark left in the basement where JonBenét's body was found. Among the first suspects was neighbor Bill McReynolds, who was dressed as Santa Claus; former housewife Linda Hoffmann-Pugh or Michael Helgoth, who committed suicide shortly after the girl's death. Hundreds of DNA tests have been carried out to find a match to the genetic profile obtained during the autopsy - unfortunately to no avail.
Stephen Singular, the author of a book on mysterious homicide, which was published in 2016, mentions consulting cybercrime specialists. They believed that JonBenét, due to her multiple participation in beauty contests, could attract the attention of pedophiles.
It has been established that more than a hundred burglaries had taken place in the neighborhood where her family lived in the months before the murder of a 6-year-old. And there were 38 sex offenders within three kilometers of the Ramsey home. In 2001, former Attorney Trip DeMuth and Detective Steve Ainsworth of the Sheriff's Office said a more thorough investigation into the burglar theory should be carried out.
Lou Smit, the detective who conducted the case, after verifying the evidence, stated that it was an outsider who committed the crime. On the night of JonBenét's death, two windows were slightly opened to allow electric wires for the Christmas lights to pass outside. In addition, the basement window was broken and one door was left unlocked.
Smit's theory was that someone had entered the Ramsey house through a broken basement window. Many criticized this hypothesis because there was a large intact cobweb in the basement window. The steel grille covering them also had intact cobwebs, and the foliage around the grille was intact. There were also cobwebs in the tracks of the various windows, and dust and debris on some of the window sills. The detective believed that the intruder had overpowered JonBenét with a stun gun and taken her to the basement. Then the girl was to be killed and the perpetrator left a ransom note. Smit's theory was supported by former FBI agent John E. Douglas, who was hired by the Ramsey family. Smit believed his parents were innocent. For this reason, he resigned from the investigation on September 20, 1998, five days after the grand jury had been called.
However, the investigator continued to work on the case until his death in 2010. One of the people Smit suspected of having committed the crime was Gary Howard Oliva. The man was also indicated as a possible perpetrator at the very beginning of the investigation. Oliva called Michael Vail the day Ramsey died. The men knew each other from their school days. Gary confided to his colleague that he had hurt a little girl, but did not reveal any more details. At first, Vail had no idea what his friend was up to. However, he did recollect the facts when he heard in the media about the murder of JonBenét. He then went to the police and told about Oliva's strange confession. He suspected that he might have been the perpetrator of this crime. Unfortunately, the detectives did not pay due attention to this report, despite several calls from Vail regarding the case.
In 2000, Gary Oliva was arrested for illegally possessing weapons and drugs (specifical marijuana). The strangest thing, however, was that the detainee found a lot of photos of the killed 6-year-old. Investigators took DNA material from the man and compared it with the ones found at the crime scene. However, no agreement was reached, so no charges were brought against Olivie in relation to the little miss case.
In 2016, Oliva was arrested again. This time he was sentenced to ten years in prison for possessing child pornography. The man was also suspected of strangling his mother. 335 pictures of JonBenét were found on Gary's phone. 19 of them came from the girl's autopsy. They were probably photos that had leaked to the media. Even stranger were the pictures of the altars dedicated to the girl.
Oliva wrote a letter to Michael Vail while in prison. It showed that he was responsible for JonBenét's death. It was not a deliberate act, however, but an accident. The girl was about to slip out of his hands. Then her head hit the ground, as a result of which she allegedly died before his eyes. Oliva also complained that he didn't love anyone as much as Ramsey. However, no evidence was found to confirm the man's words. He was also truly obsessed with JonBenét. Perhaps it was also associated with mental disorders. In any event, this confession did not lead to a final solution to the matter.
On August 15, 2006, John Mark Karr was arrested in Bangkok, Thailand. The husband, 41, worked as a teacher in an elementary school at the time. The reason for the arrest was Karr's confession to murdering JonBenét. The man testified that the 6-year-old was drugged, sexually assaulted, and then accidentally killed by him. According to CNN, however, no evidence linking the man to the crime scene was found.
In his testimony, Karr provided only the basic facts that were generally known. He also did not provide any additional credible details. His claim that he had drugged JonBenét was also questionable. The autopsy showed that no substances of this type were found in Ramsey's body. The samples were taken from the alleged perpetrator also did not match the DNA found on the body of the more tragically murdered. He was eventually released from prison, but arrested shortly afterward for possession of child pornography. Unfortunately, the man's computer that was the main evidence disappeared under suspicious circumstances. So Karr was at liberty again.
In 2010, the man formally changed his name to Alexis Valoran Reich after revealing himself as a transgender person. The Washington State driver's license showed Delia Alexis Reich. According to Samantha Spiegel, the man intended to undergo sex reassignment surgery just to get closer to younger girls. Karr was also to be a member of the organization "Niepokalanie" dealing with the trafficking and sexual exploitation of children.
Unfortunately, despite all these theories, evidence, circumstantial evidence, and the disclosure of the alleged perpetrators, it has not been possible to state unequivocally who actually killed the 6-year-old girl. The media and numerous internet detectives are still trying to find out what exactly happened that Christmas night.
No comments:
Post a Comment