Replies

"Already your theory has holes in it which proves you really don't know for a "fact" like you do that Patsey murdered her daughter."

The New Evidence (excerpts from Crime Magazine, 2003):

"This scenario for unraveling the mystery of the Dec. 25-26, 1996 slaying of beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey is based in large part on documents not in the public record, including complete transcripts of the interviews of John and Patsy Ramsey conducted by law enforcement officials in 1997, 1998, and 2000.

Videotapes of the interviews were given late last year to NBC, CNN, and CBS by, of all people, the Ramsey's attorney, L. Lin Wood of Atlanta. The networks didn't seem to know what to do with them. NBC hasn't used them at all as far as I have been able to tell. CBS cited them briefly during a "48 Hours" segment. And all CNN did was give them to Larry King, who gave Ramsey attorney Wood yet another platform to defend his clients. If Wood's motive in releasing the videotapes was to use them to his clients' PR advantage and pre-empt a damaging leak from police, it worked like a charm.

As it happens, these interviews are a treasure chest of information. They contain the most complete account of statements by John and Patsy Ramsey. They also reveal the most thorough detailing of the evidence against them, including the first glimpse into evidence heard by the grand jury impaneled in 1998 to investigate the slaying. And they provide a key to understanding the case.

So breathe deep, let go of preconceived notions, and start by considering the possibility that the one premise in the case repeated by the media more often than any other — that JonBenet was murdered — is wrong.

Was It Murder?

There are two important components of a death that form the basis for a conclusion of murder. The first is what the deceased's body reveals about the circumstances of death.

The best evidence that JonBenet was murdered has always been the force of the blow to her head and the apparent viciousness of her strangulation. Each is a flimsy foundation for a conclusion of murder. As a legal term, "murder" occurs when someone acts with the intent to kill. To say the power of a blow to the head speaks to the intent of the one delivering it is a crude tool for legal analysis. The blow, no matter how hard, could have been accidental, or unintentionally life-threatening. And the strangulation, if done on a limp, seemingly lifeless body, could have been motivated by someone's desire to stage the scene to distract. Tie a cord around her neck and stick a finger in her vagina and you'll have people thinking sex crime. Some did.

That sequence is consistent with what forensic pathologists told Boulder police had likely happened, according to Det. Steve Thomas in his book on the case (JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation) and author Lawrence Schiller (Perfect Murder, Perfect Town). Schiller, citing unnamed "specialists," and Thomas, citing Michigan pathologist Dr. Werner Spitz, say pathologists told police that someone struck JonBenet in the head with a bat or a metal object such as a flashlight (each was found in the home, clean of fingerprints). Her skull was fractured. Massive brain damage was instantaneous. She could never have regained consciousness.

She was then strangled by someone who placed a cord around her neck and twisted it tight with a garrote fashioned from a paintbrush in the basement of the Ramsey home. JonBenet offered no resistance. The strangulation stopped all of JonBenet's bodily functioning, but in time the blow to the head would have been fatal by itself. The strangler could easily have believed JonBenet was dead, in which case the strangler couldn't be a murderer because you can't murder someone you think is dead, even if you were, as it turned out, wrong.

The forensic evidence from the body, then, is inconclusive. It could have been murder. But the blow to her head could just as easily have been unintentional.

The belief that JonBenet was murdered is so ingrained in public perception of the case in part because Boulder law-enforcement officials have consistently said she was murdered, and the media have dutifully repeated that conclusion. How else to explain what happened to her? In fact, from the beginning of the case there never has been anything about what JonBenet's body shows that couldn't be just as easily explained by an accident and then a cover-up designed to distract. That's one reason famed criminologist Henry Lee (famous, largely, because of his work on the O.J. case) repeatedly urged Boulder officials to consider the possibility they were dealing with the result of an accident. "Whether ... it was murder or an accidental death with staging of the crime scene remains an open question in my mind," Lee wrote in his 2001 book Famous Crimes Revisited.

The next step in determining whether someone was murdered is identifying a perpetrator with motive. The weakness of the forensic evidence as proof of murder is all the more glaring when combined with the complete lack of evidence either parent had any reason to harm, let alone murder, JonBenet. All indications are that each loved her as fervently as the most loving of parents.

JonBenet's brother, Burke, who was 9 at the time of his sister's death, arguably had motive to kill her, if one is willing to allow that sibling rivalry can sometimes escalate into violent rage. And a 9-year-old is certainly less able to judge the result of a blow to the head than an adult, or be able to deliver a measured blow designed to punish instead of kill. Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter is among those who privately considered the possibility that Burke played a role in the death of his sister. "I wonder if Burke is involved in this," Hunter mused out loud one day, former Boulder police detective Steve Thomas wrote in his book.

Hunter declared publicly in 1999 that Burke wasn't a suspect in his sister's death. But later events suggested that statement wasn't as definitive as it seemed. In 2000 Hunter refused a request by Ramsey attorney Wood to sign a statement declaring under oath that "all questions related to" Burke's "possible involvement" in the death of his sister "were resolved to the satisfaction of investigators." He also refused to declare that Burke "has never been viewed by investigators as a suspect." Nor would he say that Burke "has not been and is not a suspect."

Hunter did, however, agree to language in which he declared that "no evidence has ever been developed ... to justify elevating Burke Ramsey's status from witness to suspect," and there is nothing in the transcripts of the interviews of the Ramseys to suggest any such evidence was developed.

So whatever Hunter's suspicions about Burke, he wasn't able to substantiate them.

If Burke killed his sister, child psychologists can debate endlessly the issue of whether a 9-year-old has the psychological capacity for intent for murder without reaching consensus. In Colorado, the issue is settled by law: No one under the age of 10 can be charged with any crime. They know not what they do, Coloradans have decided. If Burke is the killer, he's not — legally, anyway — a murderer, and JonBenet wasn't — legally, anyway — murdered. When Hunter said in 1999 that Burke wasn't a suspect in his sister's murder, he could also have said that from a legal standpoint Burke couldn't be. He was too young.

The best case for murder has always rested on the possibility of an intruder. Among other mysteries, unidentified DNA under JonBenet's fingernails and in her panties, an unidentified pubic hair in the white blanket found with her body, an unidentified palm print on the door to the room in which JonBenet's body was found, an unidentified Hi-Tec boot imprint in the basement room in which JonBenet's body was found, and bruises on JonBenet's body that suggest to some the use of a stun-gun mark all combine to make it clear there is no way of excluding the possibility of an intruder. Lou Smit, the retired Colorado Springs cop hired by Boulder D. A. Alex Hunter to sift the evidence, is right: Possible intruders have to be identified and investigated.

It doesn't help the intruder theorists, however, that many of the list of clues Smit says point to an intruder fell by the wayside as the investigation proceeded:

Forensic examiners said the pubic hair might not be a pubic hair, and in any event many Ramsey houseguests slept in JonBenet's bed when she wasn't home.

The DNA under JonBenet's fingernails was old and degraded, according to the Rocky Mountain News, and didn't indicate she had struggled with anyone.

The DNA in her panties wasn't from seminal fluid and was so flimsy, the News quoted a prosecutor as saying, that the manufacturer could have put it there.

Dr. Spitz says that what appears to be stun gun marks aren't such marks.

The palm print on the basement door turned out on further review to belong to Melinda Ramsey, one of John Ramsey's children from his first marriage, the News reported last year citing "a source close to the case."

And the mystery of the Hi-Tec boot imprint was solved in grand jury testimony. Prosecutors disclosed in the 2000 interviews of the Ramseys that Burke and one of his friends had told jurors that Burke owned a pair of Hi-Tec boots — something his parents said they somehow overlooked or forgot when they told authorities no one in the family owned such a boot, even though there is a distinctive compass on the boot.

More importantly, as an explanation of what happened that night, the intruder theory is problematic. It's difficult to get around the ransom note Patsy Ramsey reported finding early the morning of the Dec. 26th. The author clearly had no fear of detection because he or she wrote the mother of all ransom notes while in the Ramsey home, using paper and pen from the home. Under the intruder scenario, he/she entered the home and killed JonBenet without detection while the child's parents and brother slept, and was therefore free to leave without being detected. For the intruder to pen a three-page ransom note and leave behind the strongest evidence that would link him or her to the killing suggests he/she was either stupid or trying to get caught.

A federal judge who last month tossed out a defamation suit against the Ramseys declared there is "abundant evidence" for the intruder theory. But as a vehicle for truth finding the ruling is of little value. The judge didn't have access to the police files. She didn't know about the grand-jury testimony of Burke and a friend that Burke owned a Hi-Tec boot. In writing her decision, she was unable to fashion a coherent explanation for the actions of the intruder in writing a long ransom note while in the Ramsey home. Such an intruder would have been at risk of discovery. Further she offers no explanation for why an intruder, who had killed rather than kidnapped JonBenet and left her body in the cellar, would leave a ransom note, knowing that as soon as a thorough search of the house was conducted no ransom could be obtained. (For a detailed dissection of the judge's ruling, click here.)

Following a briefing about a year after JonBenet's death, members of the FBI's Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit (the Silence of the Lambs unit) said they believed there had never been any kidnapping. "These guys, who do it everyday," Boulder police detective Steve Thomas told John Ramsey when he interviewed him in 1997, "say ... there were clearly steps taken in this case to make this look like something it wasn't. (They said) 'This is how it happens in the movies. It is not how it happens in real life.' And they said all that was done... was made to make this look like something that wasn't there."

"They had the gut feeling," Thomas writes in his book on the case, "that 'no one intended to kill this child.'"

Accident/Cover-up?

In contrast to the intruder theory, the accident/cover-up theory provides a framework that appears to fit the publicly available evidence, and the most significant secret evidence revealed in the transcripts of the interviews with the Ramseys conducted in their attorney's office in Atlanta in August of 2000.

In the course of the interview with Patsy Ramsey, prosecutors asserted that investigators had found:

Fibers on the sticky side of the duct tape John Ramsey removed from his daughter's mouth when he says he discovered her body in the basement wine cellar that are "identical" to fibers in the red sweater-jacket Patsy was photographed wearing at a Christmas dinner at a friends' house the previous day.
Fibers from the same type of jacket in the paint tray from which a brush was taken that was used to help fashion the ligature found around JonBenet's neck.
Fibers from the same type of jacket "tied into" the ligature.
Fibers from the same type of black wool shirt made in Israel that John Ramsey wore to the Christmas dinner "in" the panties JonBenet was wearing when she found and in her "crotch area."
The most notable mention of any of this evidence in the public record is in the book by former Boulder police Det. Thomas, one of the principal investigators in the case before he resigned in 1998. He writes that fibers from the jacket Patsy had been wearing were found to be "chemically and microscopically consistent" with four fibers found on the inside of the piece of duct tape John Ramsey found on his daughter's mouth when he discovered JonBenet's body.

For all his zeal in pointing an accusing finger at Patsy Ramsey (he concludes in his book that she killed her daughter), Thomas downplays the significance of the fiber evidence from the duct tape. He notes that when John removed the tape from the mouth of his daughter's body, he "dropped it," as John told investigator Smit in 1998, and it may therefore have fallen on the blanket JonBenet's body was wrapped in, which, according to Patsy, came from JonBenet's bed, where it might have picked up the fibers from Patsy's red sweater-jacket when Patsy tucked JonBenet in the previous night or on some prior occasion.

Moreover, prosecutors may have misrepresented the fiber evidence in their interviews with the Ramseys, or overstated the strength of the conclusions. Although they at one point said the fibers found on the duct tape were "identical" to fibers in Patsy's red sweater-jacket, it's likely that the match is only to that type of jacket, not the exact jacket that Patsy wore.

Nonetheless, the likelihood of there having been a jacket of that type in the house when JonBenet died owned by someone other than Patsy is remote. Assuming prosecutors accurately summarized the results of the fiber comparisons, the implication is that four fibers found on the inside of the tape put over JonBenet's mouth by someone who was trying to control, or kill her, or cover-up the circumstances of her death matched the VERY type of article of clothing Patsy had been wearing the last time she says she saw her daughter alive.

Det. Thomas doesn't write in his book about the fibers from Patsy's sweater-jacket found in the paint tray or on the ligature found tied to JonBenet's neck, or the fibers from John's shirt found in JonBenet's panties and crotch. Those results apparently weren't in when Thomas quit the force in 1998. They are examined publicly for the first time here.

THE PAINT TRAY - Photographs show the paint tray was located outside the door to the wine cellar in which JonBenet's body was found, and thus well removed from the blanket that creates the possible contamination problem with the fibers on the duct tape. The fibers were put in the paint tray sometime before or during the time a brush in the tray was used to tighten the cord around JonBenet's neck, because Patsy didn't have access to the tray thereafter. Patsy told prosecutors she had never worn the red sweater-jacket while painting. So there is no readily apparent explanation for how the fibers could have gotten there in a manner that doesn't implicate Patsy in the use of the brush in the paint tray around the time of her daughter's death.

THE LIGATURE - This was an instrument fashioned for the apparent purpose of controlling JonBenet (it was like a collar and leash used on a dog), strangling her, or "staging" the crime scene to make it look like there had been an intruder. In any case, the only way fibers from ANY type of Patsy's clothing could make their way innocently onto this instrument would be if the fibers attached themselves to the paint brush used to make the ligature at some prior time, when it was simply a paint brush. Thus an innocent explanation runs into the same problems as does the explanation of how the fibers from Patsy's sweater/jacket came to be in the paint tray (why THAT piece of clothing when Patsy never wore it while painting?), and it runs into the additional problems created by the switch from the innocent use of a paint brush to the felonious use of the ligature. Patsy told investigators there were no broken brushes in her paint tray prior to the night JonBenet was killed. So the brush in question was broken the night JonBenet died by someone trying to control or kill her, or stage the crime scene.

THE PANTIES - John Ramsey told investigator Smit in his 1998 interview that while he had carried a sleeping JonBenet to bed after the family returned from their Christmas Day outing, he did not undress her. Patsy did. Patsy confirmed that. There is, therefore, no obvious way to explain why fibers from the type of shirt John was wearing when he says he put her to bed were found in her underpants and "crotch area."