The JonBenét Ramsey Case at 25: The Middle Years

This is part two of our three-part look at the JonBenét Ramsey murder case at 25. Click to read part one and part three.

When a murder goes unsolved for several years, interest in the case tends to fade. But not so the killing of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey, who was found in the basement of her lovely Boulder home early on December 26, 1996. The fascination with the violent death of the child beauty queen never flagged, and the public pressure that resulted led to several strange twists — such as when District Attorney Mary Lacy publicly exonerated the child's parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, based on questionable DNA evidence around a decade after her predecessor, Alex Hunter, declined to issue indictments against them despite a grand jury's desire to do so.

Part two of our look back at the case 25 years later draws on the work of reporter Alan Prendergast, whose dogged pursuit of the truth is must-reading for anyone obsessed with the crime. Below, find excerpts from articles published from 2006 to 2016, accompanied by links to the complete stories that dig into bogus confessions, dubious "experts" and much, much more.

"Ten Years After"
By Alan Prendergast
December 21, 2006

She would have been sixteen now. A boy-crazy cheerleader, maybe, or the dorky president of the debate team. A wobbly-voiced contestant on America's Got Talent. Or just another girl in narrow-legged jeans at the mall — diamond stud in nostril, cell phone clamped to ear. Who can say?

Instead, she's gone. In place of the teen she might have become is a media obsession with the "pageant princess" she never was. And a pile of well-worn theories, idle conjectures and wild assertions about who killed her.

Next Tuesday, December 26, marks the tenth anniversary of the day the crumpled body of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey was found in the basement of her Boulder home. She'd been sexually assaulted, strangled and bludgeoned — although in what order remains a topic of online debate, like just about every other aspect of the crime.

Her murder was a shocking aberration for Boulder that soon evolved, through the magic of television and the tabloids, into an international wallow in morbidity. There was an abundance of leads and clues: the absurd ransom note, the oversized underwear, the odd attempt at a garrote. The unlocked but spiderwebbed grate over the busted basement window, the partial bootprint, the broken paintbrush. The pineapple in her digestive tract, the foreign DNA in her panties. The tacky pageant videos.

So many clues, but no viable suspects.

The case provided endless fodder for books and docudramas, talk-show Sherlocks and web-chattering Columbos. For the authorities in Boulder, it was a career-busting frustration, to be discussed in terse phrases at hurried press conferences, then in the high secrecy of the grand jury room — and finally, not at all. The failure to charge a killer put the city's inept criminal-justice system in an embarrassing national spotlight, and rightly so.

Pundits have blamed the cops, the prosecutors, the lawyered-up parents, the rabid media or any combination of the above for this long-running charade of a murder investigation. And why not? The past decade of false hopes and blown opportunities, dead ends and sideshow lawsuits has been a chronicle of catastrophe, with plenty of blame to go around. Yet there are also a few grim lessons to be gathered from revisiting the Ramsey case, in all its lurid folly.

It's probably too late to get justice for JonBenét. Maybe it always was. But knowing where things went wrong is the first step to not going there again....

"A New Look for Ramsey Case in New Year?"
By Alan Prendergast
December 31, 2008

The arrival of a new district attorney in Boulder has some people expecting that the twelve-year-old murder of JonBenét Ramsey will get a "fresh look." But what exactly does that mean?

A mind-bending report in the Boulder Daily Camera suggests a new look means another look at John Mark Karr, the prolific false confessor who was arrested for the crime in 2006, at great expense, then immediately discredited. Private investigator Ollie Gray seems to think Boulder District Attorney Mary Lacy ignored important evidence in releasing Karr.

New DA Stan Garnett has his work cut out for him, thanks to Lacy's recent exoneration of John and Patsy Ramsey in their child's death, based on dubious "touch DNA" evidence. But revisiting the Karr fiasco isn't a smart move. For more on the overwhelming case that Karr isn't the guy, as well as Ollie Gray's connections to ethically challenged University of Colorado journalism prof Michael Tracey and the cabal of Ramsey defenders who have strained credulity time and again in serving up alternate suspects, see "Made for Each Other."

Lacy received a scathing farewell from one of her most vocal critics on a blogger's online talk show a few days ago. Tricia Griffith, who runs Forums for Justice, an online gathering of amateur sleuths, has been a key figure in exposing the ways Tracey and others promoted Karr's confession. She socked it to the DA on a recent podcast of the Levi Page Show.... Griffith told Page her group may be going to court soon to get some of the still-buried Ramsey materials open to the public. There may not be much new light to be shed on the case after all these years, but that sounds like a more promising direction than another round of theatrics and misdirection with Karr.

"John Ramsey's Hunt for Suspicious Characters"
By Alan Prendergast
December 28, 2009

It wouldn't be the holiday season without the annual appeal from John Ramsey for help solving the 1996 murder of his six-year-old daughter, JonBenét....

Ramsey is asking "everyone to examine their consciences" and to "share any doubts or information they have about someone they know who may have behaved strangely or acted out of character around the time of my daughter's murder." A simple request, really, but it covers a lot of ground.

I mean, think about all the strange behavior that occurred on and around December 26, 1996, in just one Boulder home. The Ramsey home.

To begin, there was one of the strangest ransom notes in the annals of crime, written on a pad from the Ramsey household, in handwriting that some experts believe most closely resembles that of John's wife, Patsy. And John's search of the basement hours after police arrived, leading to the discovery of JonBenét's body — and the demolition of the crime scene, as John scooped up his daughter and hauled her upstairs. And the same John Ramsey, less than an hour later, on the phone with his private pilot and telling cops he had something "important" to do in Atlanta and planned to leave town that evening — a plan the police had to nix, for obvious reasons.

And Patsy throwing herself on her daughter's corpse, further contaminating evidence, and covering her face with her hands and playing peek-a-boo with the cops. And John and Patsy hiring attorneys and a publicist and going on CNN to warn the world of a killer on the loose, while fencing with the cops over formal interviews and insisting on written questions and written responses.

To be fair, the strange behavior in Boulder that holiday season extended well beyond the Ramseys. The police failed miserably to control the crime scene and preserve evidence, and the department's bickering with the DA's office may have doomed the investigation from the start....

"JonBenét's Parents: How an Indictment Became an 'Exoneration'"
By Alan Prendergast
October 30, 2013

If you happened to tune into cable news or talk radio or any other variety of media late last week for the first time in fourteen or fifteen years, you might think things were stuck in an endless loop. There was that harpy Nancy Grace, grilling forensic whiz Henry Lee about the mysterious male DNA in a six-year-old girl's underwear. There was Peter Boyles, scourge of the local airwaves, yakking it up with Dan Caplis and Craig Silverman about small foreign factions and other weird details mentioned in the world's most peculiar ersatz ransom note.

Is somebody humming "La Macarena"? Is that Slick Willie in the White House, feeling our pain and ogling thong-snapping interns? What year is it, and how do we get out of this wormhole?

Some sense of dislocation is understandable. The release of four musty pages drafted by a Boulder grand jury in 1999, accusing John and Patsy Ramsey of criminal conduct in the 1996 death of their daughter  JonBenét, triggered a surge of fresh news stories and chatter about Colorado's most infamous unsolved murder. But the case has been out of the spotlight for so long, mired in a slough of compromised investigations, civil suits and nutty theories, that the pundits couldn't agree on the significance of this revelation....

"JonBenét Case: Fleet White Sues for Release of Grand Jury Documents Accusing Girl's Parents"
By Alan Prendergast
July 11, 2014

A prominent Boulder couple, former close friends of John and Patsy Ramsey, have filed a lawsuit seeking the full release of long-suppressed documents drafted by a grand jury investigating the 1996 murder of the Ramseys' six-year-old daughter, JonBenét. Last fall a judge released four redacted pages from eighteen pages of "official action" documents prepared by the grand jury, indicating that the panel had sought to indict JonBenét's parents for felony child abuse resulting in death and on an accessory charge — but Fleet and Priscilla White contend that the remaining documents may also contain information the public is entitled to know.

"If Colorado law requires the disclosure of any information related to the grand jury's work, we want it out there," White says. "This isn't some minor matter. It's the JonBenét Ramsey homicide."

"JonBenét Ramsey: How the Investigation Got Derailed — and Why It Still Matters"
By Alan Prendergast
December 17, 2014

Bad news often comes in the night. It arrives in a whirl of dread and confusion, like a drunk trying to get into the wrong house, shattering the pre-dawn silence and bursting our dreams.

When Priscilla White answered the phone at her Boulder home at six in the morning on December 26, 1996, she knew that something terrible had happened. Why else would anyone be calling so early, the day after Christmas? But the news was worse than anything she could imagine.

The voice on the line belonged to a frantic Patsy Ramsey. "JonBenét's been kidnapped," she said. "Come over right now. Call the FBI."

She hung up before the stunned Priscilla could say much of anything.

Priscilla and her husband, Fleet White Jr., had been with John and Patsy Ramsey just ten hours earlier. The Ramseys and their two children had come to the Whites' house for Christmas dinner. Nine-year-old Burke Ramsey had played Nintendo games with seven-year-old Fleet III, while best friends JonBenét and Daphne White, both six, had played in Daphne's room. There had been nothing remarkable about the evening, but now the Ramseys were making desperate calls for help.

Fleet and Priscilla hurried to their friends' house. The police were already there, and more friends, summoned by Patsy, were on their way. But Patsy was inconsolable. She sat on the floor, clutching a crucifix and praying to Jesus. "They have my baby," she moaned.

She'd woken up that morning, she told detectives, to find a three-page handwritten note on the spiral staircase leading from the children's bedrooms to the first floor. The garrulous note, claiming to be from a "small foreign faction" and signed "S.B.T.C.," demanded $118,000 for the return of JonBenét, who was missing from her room. Patsy had screamed for her husband, then dialed 911.

Fleet and Priscilla had never seen Patsy so hysterical, flailing and collapsing in sobs. John Ramsey wasn't known for displaying emotion — Fleet, who'd done a lot of sailing with him in rough weather, had admired his calm in even the worst storms — but he looked distraught, too.

While arrangements were under way to assemble the cash demanded, the Whites did what they could to be useful. Recalling how his own daughter had once gone missing only to be found hiding under her bed, Fleet took a quick tour of the basement, looking for hiding places. He and John collected Burke Ramsey from his room, and Fleet drove him to the Whites' house, to keep him away from the awful situation.

As the day dragged on with no word from the kidnappers, several of the visitors got a glimpse of a police photocopy of the ransom note. It was a melodramatic epic, full of odd lines from movies ("Don't try to grow a brain") and squiggly, palsied lettering, as if the writer was trying to disguise his handwriting.

Priscilla was struck by the taunting tone of the note, which was addressed to "Mr. Ramsey." She wondered who could hate John Ramsey that much, to put him through this. She believed it had to be someone familiar with the layout of the Ramsey house, a three-story, much-modified Tudor with a labyrinthine basement; Priscilla herself had lost her way more than once the first few times she'd visited.

Around one in the afternoon, Boulder police detective Linda Arndt suggested that Fleet take John Ramsey around the house to see if they'd missed anything — probably just to give the anxious father something to do. After inspecting several rooms in the basement, Ramsey headed toward a storage room known as the wine cellar. It was a door Fleet had opened on his earlier tour, but he hadn't found a light switch and hadn't gone inside. Moving a few feet and seconds ahead of Fleet, Ramsey opened the door and snapped on the light.

"Oh, my God," he said. "Oh, my God."

"JonBenét Ramsey Investigation: Distorted DNA Part of Ongoing Coverup?"
By Alan Prendergast
October 28, 2016

A new report by two of Colorado's premier investigative reporters indicates that former Boulder district attorney Mary Lacy misrepresented DNA evidence in the JonBenét Ramsey investigation in order to clear her parents and her brother of any suspicion in the six-year-old's 1996 murder. That revelation is unsettling enough, but it also fits into a pattern of officials misleading the public over the entire troubled history of the still-unsolved case.

According to the report, a joint effort by Charlie Brennan of the Boulder Daily Camera and Kevin Vaughan of 9NEWS, minute traces of DNA found on JonBenét's panties and her long johns that Lacy described as belonging to her killer actually contain genetic markers from two people and may have no connection to her death at all.

In 2008, Lacy cited new developments in "touch DNA" as her justification for issuing a highly unusual (and much-criticized) apology to John Ramsey. She maintained that there was no "innocent explanation" for the presence of the unknown male DNA in three locations on the panties and long johns, and therefore the killer was someone outside the family who had not yet been identified. For years after the announcement, most of the media stories about the Ramsey case routinely included a line about how the parents and JonBenét's brother, Burke, had been "cleared by DNA."

But as we've pointed out on several occasions, many experts in DNA typing believe that Lacy was overreaching in basing her exoneration on such minute traces of genetic material. They suggested numerous plausible, "innocent" explanations, including the possibility of contamination; they also noted that additional samples of trace DNA found under the victim's fingernails and on the cord and garrotte used in the crime didn't match the long johns DNA or each other. The presence of so many different DNA samples, many of them too tiny or degraded to put into a database or even determine if they came from blood or skin tissues, suggests that JonBenét was killed by a sizable "foreign faction" of sadists — or that police were looking for a suspect who didn't exist....