Who killed JonBenét Ramsey?
- Paige Phillips
- Jan 18, 2019
- 9 min read
JonBenét Ramsey was born in 1990 in Atlanta Georgia to mother Patsy and father John. Her name was actually a feminized portmanteau of her father’s first and middle names. She also had a brother Burke, who was 3 years older than herself.
John Ramsey was president of a computer system company. He was married before he met Patsy and had two children with his former wife. His daughter, Elizabeth, from his previous marriage, died in 1992 in a car crash.
Patricia ‘Patsy’ Ramsey entered JonBenét in various child beauty pageants that were held in her hometown of Boulder, Colorado. JonBenét had received a variety of different titles such as America’s Royale Miss and Little Miss Colorado due to her participation in such events. Many people described Patsy as a typical “pageant mother”.
JonBenét was found dead in the basement of her house on December 25th1996, when she was aged just 6 years old. Her cause of death was confirmed as asphyxia due to strangulation with craniocerebral trauma. Although some arrests have been made, nobody has been convicted for her murder.
JonBenét Missing:
Patsy realised her daughter was missing on December 26th1996 after waking up and finding a ransom note on the kitchen staircase. The note was almost 3 pages long and demanded an $118,000 ransom for JonBenét’s safe return. The value of this ransom was almost the exact value of a bonus John had received earlier that year, arising suspicion that her abductor was likely to have studied the family, or have been a friend to John.
The ransom note itself had various scribbles and an unusual use of exclamation marks and acronyms. The note was also written using a pen and pad from the Ramsey home. The FBI believed the note was staged as such a lengthy note is unusual to be written at the scene of the crime. The note also did not have any fingerprints on it and contained specific instructions that the police and friends should not be contacted. The note was signed “S.B.T.C” and contained superfluous information about who the kidnappers were and what they were going to do with JonBenét. As the note was written in the Ramsey’s home, it seems odd that the kidnapper(s) decided to spend a lengthy amount of time writing a note containing such irrelevant information, when they would most likely want to get out of the house as quickly as possible undetected.
Initial search:
At 5:52am, Patsy called the police department to report JonBenét’s disappearance. She also phoned various family members and some of her friends. When Patsy called 911 to report her daughter missing, she initially said “we have a kidnapping” as an explanation for her reason for calling. This type of passive language has been linked to lying. She also failed to mention JonBenét in the first few sentences, instead focussing on a kidnapping and a note, but didn’t mention that her daughter was gone. Patsy also ended the 911 call, which is not typical behaviour. Usually people stay on the line with 911 until the police arrive or know they will get there soon. Patsy didn’t wait on the line to give additional details or hear if the police were on their way.
A recording of the 911 call can be found here:
Two police officers responded to the 911 call and were at the Ramsey residence within 3 minutes. After an initial search of the house, they didn’t find any signs of forced entry. One of the initial officers, Rick French, went to search the basement but realised it was secured by a wooden latch, and instead decided to not investigate further.
JonBenét’s bedroom was cordoned off by a forensics team, but the rest of the house was not, causing contamination of potential evidence that could have been present. Friends and family of the Ramsey’s were also moving in and out of the house to support Patsy and John, causing further destruction of evidence that could have been key to solving the case. Several kitchen surfaces were cleaned in the process. John Ramsey had planned to pay the ransom, and at 8am, Linda Arndt, a detective for Boulder, arrived at the Ramsey house with the goal of awaiting the kidnapper’s instructions, but there was never any attempt to claim the money.
Officers noted that the Ramsey’s were actually strangely whilst waiting for the phone call from the kidnappers, saying that they could barely stay in the same room as each other. One officer even overheard John on the phone planning a flight to Atlanta, hours after the discovery of his daughter’s body, which he later claimed was true, but said he was told to get his family away from the house as soon as possible so the police could investigate. The note also indicated that someone would call between 8am-10am to collect the ransom money, but nobody called.
Discovering the body:
At 1pm, Detective Arndt asked John and Fleet white, a family friend, to search the house to see if anything was missing or out of place. John searched the basement that Officer French had failed to investigate, and found his daughter’s body in one of the rooms. JonBenét’s mouth was covered with duct tape and a nylon cord was found around her wrists and neck. Her torso had been covered with a white blanket. John immediately picked up his daughter’s body and took it upstairs. He then removed a piece of tape from her mouth and covered her with a throw blanket. Potential evidence was disturbed and contaminated, meaning the forensics team could not collect any reliable evidence. Each of the Ramsey’s provided handwriting, blood and hair samples to the police.
In the basement where JonBenét was found, there was a broken window and a footprint on a suitcase under the window. However, there were no footprints in the fresh snow outside of the house, and a spiderweb across the broken window was undisturbed. Is someone had used the window as a point of entry to break it, the spiderweb would most likely have been disturbed, and there was almost certainly going to be footprints in the snow outside, or else the killer would have had to have already been in the house. This conclusion leads some to believe the window and footprint were staged to look like a break-in.
The Ramsey family also alleged that the suitcase did not belong to them and didn’t have any idea how it had gotten into the basement. Inside the suitcase as a semen-encrusted blanket and a Dr. Seuss book. Although the suitcase didn’t belong to the John or Patsy, it actually belonged to John’s son from his previous marriage. However, the police were able to prove that he wasn’t in Boulder at the time of JonBenét’s murder.
Autopsy:
The autopsy revealed that JonBenét had been killed by strangulation and a skull fracture. The official cause of death was “asphyxia by strangulation associated with craniocerebral trauma”. There was no evidence of rape, although sexual assault could not be ruled out. Although no semen was found, there was evidence that there had been vaginal injury and at the time of the autopsy it appeared her vaginal area had been wiped with a cloth. There were also marks on her body that indicated she may have been hit with a stun gun.
A garrotte that was made from a length of nylon cord and the broken handle of a paintbrush were tied around JonBenét’s neck and had been used as the tool to strangle her. Part of the bristle end of the paintbrush was found in a tub containing Patsy’s art supplies, but the bottom part of it was never found.
The autopsy also revealed a “vegetable or fruit material which may represent pineapple” was found in JonBenét’s stomach, indicating she had likely eaten this in the hours before her death. Photographs of the home taken on the day when JonBenét’s body was found show a bowl of pineapple on the kitchen table with a spoon in it. However, both John and Patsy said they didn’t remember putting the bowl on the table or giving pineapple to their daughter. Police reported that they found JonBenét’s brother, Burke’s fingerprints on the bowl. The Ramsey’s have always maintained that Burke slept through the entire episode until he was awakened several hours later when the police arrived.
Blood sample:
In December 2003, forensic investigators extracted enough material from a mixed blood sample found on JonBenét’s underwear to establish a DNA profile. The DNA belonged to an unknown male person, and did not match any of the FBI’s database. In October 2016, further testing revealed that the original DNA actually contained genetic markers from two individuals other than JonBenét.
Theories and suspects:
1. Burke did it
Some theorists claim JonBenét’s older brother Burke killed her, perhaps by accident, by hitting her on the head with something heavy in anger, and then her parents wrote the note and staged the kidnapping to cover it up. Rumours have claimed that Burke had displayed questionable behaviour in the past, as he had smeared faces on the walls of his sisters’ room and in her bed. Some believe that the pineapple JonBenét was eating actually belonged to Burke, and in a rage of anger, he hit his sister on the head with a blunt object and caused her to collapse. John and Patsy, thinking their son had killed JonBenét and worried they would lose another child, staged the kidnapping in order to protect him and wrote the ransom note from inside the home. Yet, the autopsy showed that she was still alive when she was strangled. This counters against this argument, because if she wasn’t dead due to the trauma, why would her parents strangle and actually kill her?
Dr. Phil interviewed Burke in 2016 for his TV show, in which he showed some pretty weird behaviour throughout.
2. Patsy
It has been speculated that whilst cleaning up yet another one of JonBenét’s bed-wetting accidents, Patsy flipped a switch and slammed her daughter’s head against the side of a hard, blunt surface like a bathtub. The garrotte used to strangle JonBenét was also taken from a paint kit that belonged to Patsy. People have speculated that the ransom note was actually written by patsy herself, in a moment of panic after realising what she had done to her daughter. Handwriting analysis of the note came back inconclusive. Onlookers criticised Patsy for the sexual exploitation her daughter endured through her being forced to participate in beauty pageants by her mother.
3. John Mark Karr
John Mark Karr was a 41-year-old elementary school teacher who was arrested on August 15th2006 when he falsely confessed to killing JonBenét. He claimed that he had drugged, sexually assaulted and accidentally killed her. He failed to provide any convincing details and only gave information that was already known to the public. DNA samples taken from Karr did not match the DNA found on JonBenét’s body, and he was later released.
4. Gary Oliva
Gary Oliva was a known sex offender that lived near JonBenét. On the night of JonBenét’s murder, he called a friend upset and claimed that he had hurt a little girl. He was also found with the same stun gun marks on his body that JonBenét had.
In 2000, he was arrested on unrelated charges and police found a photo of JonBenét, a poem he’d written about her, titled: “Ode to JonBenét” and a stun gun amongst his possessions. Investigators theorised the stun gun may have been used to subdue JonBenét on the night of her murder. In 2016, when Oliva was arrested again, police discovered he had 335 photos of JonBenét including photos from her autopsy. The knots used to fashion the garrotte that strangled JonBenét were also similar used to those in an incident where Oliva attempted to strangle his mother with a telephone cord.
As recently as January 2019, letters have emerged that Oliva had sent to his high school friend Michael Vail, also the man he called on the night of JonBenét’s murder, claiming he killed JonBenét in an accident. One of the letters claims to read “I never loved anyone like I did JonBenét and yet I let her slip and her head bashed in half and I watched her die. It was an accident. Please believe me. She was not like the other kids”. In another letter he wrote, “JonBenét completely changed me and removed all evil from me. Just one look at her beautiful face, her glowing beautiful skin, and her divine God-body, I realised I was wrong to kill other kids. Yet by accident she died and it was my fault”.
The Boulder police are currently investigating the letters.
My thoughts:
· The police did a terrible investigation with this case, failing to prevent contamination of DNA, not clearly cordoning off a crime scene and even one of the officers failing to investigate the basement where JonBenét’s body was actually located
· John Ramsey seemed to conveniently pick up his daughter when he found her, potentially destroying or contaminating any evidence that may have been present that could have identified her killer, which could raise suspicion that he did this knowingly to prevent incriminating himself
· Why wasn’t the blood found in JonBenét’s underwear tested for a match against her dad? Since he gave his blood sample, I don’t understand why it wasn’t tested to see if it matched the blood found from a male individual in JonBenét’s underwear. That would’ve definitely ruled John out and stopped suspicion.
· There seems to be no further information on the suitcase found in the basement, like how it got there and why? I can’t seem to find any further information on this but the suitcase in general is extremely disturbing.
· Gary Oliva seems very likely to have done this, but people have claimed to have killed JonBenét and been proved that it is impossible for them to have done so (which is disgusting), so there is a potential for this to have happened here. However, there are quite a lot of things that implicate him, so I would like to see how the investigation pans out, and why he hasn’t been charged sooner!
Here are some other videos on this case which I think cover it really well:
Comments