8 Things You Need To Know About JonBenet Ramsey’s Murder

The bizarre and mysterious case of six-year old beauty pageant queen JonBenet Ramsey’s murder is once again under the public spotlight with the release of the CBS docu-series The Case Of: JonBenet Ramsey, in which a team of investigators and experts present the available evidence of the case and concluded who they think her killer is.

Here are nine things you need to know about Ramsey’s murder.

1. Ramsey was found dead on December 26, 1996. Ramsey’s mother, Patsy, noticed that her daughter was missing, and found a 370-word ransom note in their Boulder, CO home demanding $118,000 in exchange for Ramsey. After the police were called, Ramsey’s father, John Bennett, found Ramsey’s lifeless body wrapped in white cloth, tied up with duct tape over her mouth in their basement. The autopsy revealed that Ramsey’s skull was fractured and she had been strangled with a garrote and sexually assaulted.

2. The case was mishandled right from the start. A New York Times article from 1997 chronicled the series of missteps by investigators:

• A police escort did not assist John Ramsey as he looked for his daughter in the house.
• The crime scene became contaminated when John Ramsey picked up his daughter’s body.
• The contamination became more severe when Detective Linda Ardt put “a blanket over the body” as well as allowed “10 people to mill throughout the house, including the Ramseys’ pastor and four family friends.”
• Boulder Police Chief Tom Koby was offered help from the Denver police – which had far more experience with homicides than the Boulder police – and Koby turned them down.

More recently, ex-Boulder police chief Mark Beckner, who succeeded Koby, gave his thoughts on the botched handling of the case in a February 2015 “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit:

“Yes, the crime scene was not handled properly and this later affected the investigation. [The Ramseys’] position in the community may have had something to do with decisions made that day, but I think the primary reason was a perfect storm-type scenario. It was the Christmas holiday and we were short staffed, we faced a situation as I said earlier that no one in the country had ever seen before or since, and there was confusion at the scene… As a result, some evidence was compromised.

“Yes, after that initial day, we felt pressure from the DA’s office not to push too hard on the Ramseys. This was a constant source of frustration and much could be written about this and the reasons for it.”

These missteps have made the case that much more difficult to resolve.

3. The CBS docu-series points the finger at Ramsey’s brother, Burke. The experts and investigators conjectured that Burke, who was nine-years old at the time of the murder, smacked his sister on the head with a flashlight in a fit of rage when she stole some pineapple from Burke’s bowl. The autopsy determined that pineapple was found in her “digestive tract.” The bowl itself had Burke’s fingerprints on it, as well as Patsy’s, although the mother claimed that she had no idea how the bowl got there.

Burke did strike his sister with a golf club the year prior, prompting the CBS crew to determine that Burke did have a history of violence stemming from anger. There were also marks on Ramsey’s back, which the team theorizes came from a toy train track.

Adding to the suspicion of Burke as the killer was that he was notably jovial in an interview with a child administrative specialist two weeks after his sister’s death, declaring that he was “just going on with my life.”

Some viewers who watched the series believe that Burke all but admitted to his guilt. When he is shown a picture of the pineapple on the table in his childhood home, Burke initially responded to the photograph by saying, “I don’t know what that is.” He then suddenly said, “Oh,” as he realized what it was and became suspiciously silent.

Based on the conclusions of the docu-series, it’s possible that Burke did not intend to kill his sister but his actions caused her to die on accident. However…

4. The docu-series accuses the parents of covering up the incident to protect Burke. The CBS team theorized that the parents were already devastated by the loss of their daughter, and wanted to do everything they could to protect their last child. They staged the incident as a botched kidnapping, with Patsy writing the abnormally long ransom note, the investigators allege.

They also enhanced the audio of the 911 call made by Patsy. Three voices can be heard after Patsy wrongly believed she had hung up. The New York Sun reports:

One voice believed to be Mr Ramsey’s says: “We’re not speaking to you.”

Another, this time Mrs Ramsey, replies: “What did you do? Help me, Jesus.”

JonBenet’s brother then says: “What did you find?” the experts claim.

The parents have insisted that Burke was asleep when this occurred.

The experts also claimed that former District Attorney Alex Hunter had no intention of ever prosecuting the Ramseys because of the family’s wealth and influence.

It’s worth noting that the note itself contained some rather personal information about the Ramsey family, such as “the size of Mr. Ramsey’s most recent annual bonus and a reference to the United States Navy base where he served three decades ago,” details that only “an intimate few” could have known, according to the Times. In fact, John Ramsey’s bonus was $118,000 – the exact amount demanded in the ransom note.

Additionally, while John has been ruled out as the author of the note, Patsy was ruled as “inconclusive.” One user pointed out in Beckner’s AMA that when Patsy wrote a “sample ransom note” for handwriting testing, she actually wrote out the $118,000 demand in letter-form rather than number form, which caused the user to ask Beckner if it appeared “contrived.”

“The handwriting experts noted several strange observations,” Beckner cryptically responded.

The Ramsey parents also refused to give police interviews unless certain conditions were met.

5. At one point, Patsy was thought to be Ramsey’s killer. A New York Times article from 2000 explained how former Boulder detective Steve Thomas came to this conclusion:

By Mr. Thomas’s analysis, Mrs. Ramsey had grown frazzled by Christmas night 1996 because of ”an approaching 40th birthday, the busy holiday season, an exhausting Christmas Day and an argument with JonBenet” over a bed-wetting incident that led to ”some sort of explosive encounter in the child’s bathroom” that resulted in a mortal head wound.

Mr. Thomas says he concluded that while JonBenet’s head was probably injured by accident, Mrs. Ramsey, rather than summon help, panicked after her daughter fell unconscious. That, he says, led her to write a note suggesting that JonBenet had been kidnapped, after which she ”faced the major problem of what to do with the body.”

It was at that point, Mr. Thomas concludes, that the accident turned to murder. He says that on the way to placing her in a remote room of the basement, Mrs. Ramsey realized JonBenet was still alive. ”Only feet away was her paint tote,” he writes. ”She grabbed a paintbrush and broke it to fashion the garrote with some cord. Then she looped the cord around the girl’s neck.” To make it look like a kidnapping, he says, Mrs. Ramsey tied the girl’s wrists and taped over her mouth.

The Ramsey parents were later ruled out as their daughter’s killers when in 2008 DNA was found on Ramsey’s underwear and in under her fingernails from an unknown male. However, the CBS team has suggested that the DNA on the clothing was “transferred in the manufacturing process.”

In 2013, it was revealed that a grand jury had voted to recommend an indictment against the Ramsey parents in 1999 but Hunter refused to prosecute them.

Patsy Ramsey died from ovarian cancer in 2006.

6. Not everyone is convinced by the docu-series. Rolling Stone’s Amelia McDonnell-Parry accused CBS of providing “misleading” information, pointing to viewers claiming they couldn’t fully understand the 911 audio, and that the team’s deciphering of the audio is verbatim to the Aerospace Corporation’s conclusion in 1997. The series only “made a vague reference” to it, according to McDonell-Parry.

McDonell-Parry also didn’t think much of the Burke theory:

Yet when laying out their theory for Burke Ramsey as the killer, these experts literally made up a story about Burke killing JonBenét (on accident or in anger, but probably unintentionally) by hitting her in the head with a flashlight because she took a piece of his pineapple. The proof? JonBenét had undigested pineapple in her stomach. Even if this theory had been proven back in 1996, at age nine, Burke would have been too young to be legally prosecuted in Colorado, and he certainly couldn’t be held responsible for any horrendous cover-up instigated by his parents. To unleash a witch hunt on him now without rock solid proof of guilt is a cruel ratings ploy.

7. Burke has claimed that he is innocent in a recent interview with Dr. Phil McGraw. “It blows my mind. What more evidence do you need that we didn’t do it?” said Burke, who is now 29 years old.

Burke’s theory is that “some pedophile in the pageant audience” was his sister’s killer.

Some were perturbed at Burke’s “smiling” as he discussed his sister’s death, but Dr. Phil said it was likely due to his social awkwardness.

“There is unusual affect when he’s talking about otherwise very deep and dark content, but he is socially uncomfortable,” Dr. Phil told Fox News. “He works remotely as a computer analyst. He doesn’t go into the office. He’s not around people a lot. He’s very intelligent.”

8. There have been other suspects outside of the Ramsey family. Here is a list of them:

• John Mark Karr: Karr actually confessed to the murder in 2006 when he was facing charges of child pornography. It was later determined that he gave a false confession and the child porn charges were dropped.
• Bill McReynolds: McReynolds and his wife Janet faced questions because they were among the last people to see Ramsey alive. McReynolds was dressed as Santa Claus at the Christmas Party at the family’s Christmas parties in 1995 and 1996, and had given Ramsey a card saying “You will receive a special gift after Christmas.” Janet had written a play that had similarities to the details of Ramsey’s murder. However, there was no evidence connecting them to the case, and they weren’t “serious” suspects. McReynolds died in 2002.
• Gary Oliva: Oliva was first questioned by police about Ramsey’s murder in 2000 when he was arrested on drug charges and a photo of Ramsey was found in his backpack. He claimed that he was “touched” by her death and even wanted to establish “a shrine” for her. There was also a stun gun in his backpack – which some believe was the source of the marks on Ramsey’s back – and Oliva claimed it was from a friend for “safety” purposes. Oliva lived “blocks from the Ramseys” when the murder occurred and has a lengthy “history of sexually abusing minors.” Oliva faced charges earlier in 2016 for “sexual exploitation of a child.”
• Michael Helgoth: Private investigator Ollie Gray, who had been initially hired by the Ramsey parents to investigate their daughter’s death, has been stating for years that Helgoth is the man that investigators should be focused on. John Kenaday, who used to work for Helgoth, claimed that Helgoth bragged about soon “making $50,000 to $60,000 on a ‘killer deal'” and “wanted to crack a human skull.” Gray also alleges that “Helgoth recorded a confession before his death” two days after Ramsey’s. Helgoth’s death appeared to be a suicide but Kenady believes that it was a murder framed as a suicide. However, there was no DNA evidence that proved that Helgoth was involved in Ramsey’s murder.

It may never be known who Ramsey’s killer was, and there will be plenty of theories speculating who it was. In his AMA, Beckner argued that ultimately he does not believe the murder was sexually motivated.

“It just didn’t seem to fit the totality of the circumstances,” he said. “Remember, she was hit on the head first, hard enough to render her unconscious. Then there was the staging of a kidnapping. Why do that if the motive is purely sexual?”