JonBenet Ramsey: Colorado’s Most Famous Unsolved Murder

On the morning of December 26, 1996 in Boulder, Colorado, Patsy Ramsey claimed to discover a ransom note for her six-year-old daughter, JonBenét Ramsey on the back staircase inside the house. This prompted Patsy Ramsey to call the police at 5:52 a.m. to report JonBenét as missing. The people inside the house at the time were John Ramsey, her father, Patsy Ramsey, her mother, and Burke Ramsey, her nine year old brother. Bizarrely, the body of JonBenét Ramsey was found less than eight hours later. And even stranger, the body was found inside the Ramsey residence, in the utility room in the basement.

JonBenet Ramsey body discovered by her father in their house

The body was found by JonBenét’s father, she was found with duct tape over her mouth and a smooth cord around her neck. It is widely reported that the crime scene was heavily compromised by people arriving at the scene. The police later claimed that they had not searched the house after Patsy’s call because there was no reason to believe from the ransom note that JonBenet Ramsey was in the house. At the time of her death, JonBenét Ramsey was a well-decorated beauty pageant competitor, having won at least five high-profile competitions. Her death was ruled a homicide.

The autopsy found that JonBenét was bludgeoned to death. While the County coroner ruled that JonBenét Ramsey had died of asphyxiation caused by being strangled, a paintbrush from Patsy’s hobby kit was used to tighten the rope that strangled JonBenét. There was DNA found on JonBenét’s long johns and underwear, both belonging to a single unidentified man, who when compared to the FBI’s database of convicted violent offenders in 2004, was not found among 1.5 million samples.

There were two sets of unidentified footprints found at the scene. There was a rope found close by JonBenét’s bedroom that did not belong to the Ramseys. However, as of 2006, the rope had never been tested. If somebody broke into the house, they did so cleanly, as there was no footsteps in the snow outside the house, as well as no sign of force entry.

Ransom note demanded $118,000

The note requested $118,000 in exchange for JonBenét Ramsay. With the exchange to take place the next day between 8:00 and 10:00 a.m., the highly scrutinized note starts with: “Mr. Ramsey listen carefully we are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction. We respect your business, but not the country that it served.” A strange declaration that would ultimately lead nowhere. Here’s another excerpt: “the two gentlemen watching over your daughter do not particularly like you, so I advise you not to provoke them. Speaking to anyone about your situations such as police or FBI will result in your daughter being beheaded. You can try to deceive us, but be warned that we are familiar with law enforcement countermeasures and tactics. You stand in 99% chance of killing your daughter if you try to outsmart us. Follow our instructions and you stand a 100% chance of getting her back.”

The letter was signed SBTC, initials that still remain a mystery. One curious fact is that the sum of $118,000 was close to the amount that John Ramsey received were a bonus that year. However, the most chilling fact about the ransom note was that it was determined that the note was written using pen and paper from inside the house. While this detail is absolutely horrifying, it also brought a lot of suspicion into the integrity of the note. This suggests that the killer somehow entered the house, wrote the note inside, and for some reason, then killed JonBenét Ramsey after writing a ransom note. All of this occurring while the other three Ramsay family members were inside the house.

Analysis of the notepad used suggested that a practice letter was written and part of a practice note was found. There were spelling errors in the letter on words thought to be easy like “possession”, yet some wonder how words such as attaché, with an accent on the E were spelled correctly. Some believe this adds up to the letter being a hoax, and when combined with the lack of evidence of an intruder, this case becomes even more puzzling.

JonBenet Ramsey Suspects

• The first three suspects are the Ramseys themselves. In the early goings of the case, the Ramsey family was under heavy scrutiny given the suspicions of the ransom notes, authenticity, and the little evidence to suggest an intruder. The actual person responsible for the murder varies depending on who is theorizing.

• A recent television program claims that police theorized that Patsy accidentally killing JonBenét. That same program also posited that Burke Ramsey, JonBenét’s nine-year-old little brother, accidentally killed JonBenet Ramsey as well. However, for Patsy or Burke to be the culprit, not only would the note have to be staged, but so with the strangulation, and that doesn’t add up when you consider the evidence suggests that JonBenét was still alive as she was being strangled. Furthermore, handwriting analysis also ruled out John Ramsey and ruled Patsy Ramsey as inconclusive. Experts believe the science are more consistent with child abduction and murder done by an intruder.
• Fascinatingly in 2013, it came to light that in 1999, a grand jury had voted to indict JonBenét parents on charges of child abuse resulting in death. However the Boulder District Attorney at the time, Alex Hunter, did not sign the indictment believing, that there was not enough evidence to support the charges. Casting further doubt on this theory is the fact that the DNA evidence appeared from the crime scene officially exonerated the entire Ramsey family.

• The fourth and first non-Ramsey suspect is a local man named Bill McReynolds, who had visited the Ramsey house two days before JonBenet Ramsey murder.
• He sometimes dressed up as Santa Claus. His own daughter had been kidnapped twenty-two years before the JonBenét murder his wife had written a play about a child getting molested and then murdered in a basement. According to the Denver Post, this man felt close to JonBenét, “her murder was harder on me than my operation she made a profound change in me.” McReynolds even brought up vial glitter gifted to him by JonBenét into heart surgery. The gift had been meaningful to him since no child had ever given him a gift while playing Santa. He even asked his wife to mix the glitter with his ashes if he were to die.
• However, beyond these sensationalized details which can also be interpreted as the acts of a friendly old man, there is nothing to suggest McReynolds as the murder.

• The fifth suspect is Gary Oliva, a man who lived a few blocks away from the Ramsey home at the time of the murder.
• In 2016, Oliva was arrested on charges of child pornography. In December of 2011 Oliva was arrested on unrelated drug charges and was found to be carrying a photo of JonBenét Ramsey in his backpack. He explained why he had the photo to the Denver Post: “JonBenét’s murder touched me very deeply. I felt he was an exceptional girl whose death was an exceptional loss. I felt the need to build a monument, a shrine to remember this little girl.”
• A high school friend of a Oliva named Michael Vale revealed in an interview with In Touch magazine that Oliva called him a day after the murder occurred and said “I hurt a little girl. I hurt a little girl.” According to Vale, Oliva also revealed the location of where he had hurt this girl: Boulder, Colorado, after which Oliva hung up the phone. This is interesting if true because records show that no other girl other than JonBenét was harmed in that area that night. Vale also revealed that the strangulation method used on JonBenét was also allegedly used by Oliva when Oliva attempted to strangle his own mother with a telephone cord.
• Nonetheless, Gary Oliva was also not a match to the DNA evidence.

• The final suspect is John Mark Karr, a divorced father and elementary school teacher. Karr had not become a suspect until nearly 10 years after the murder, when he confessed to the murder via email to a journalism professor named Michael Tracy.
• Tracy had emailed back and forth with Karr for four years in order to gain his trust. Tracy said this of the experience: “you are reading and hearing a truly dark side of the human psyche. And having to pretend it’s okay that I wasn’t going to sit in judgment, because otherwise the communication would have stopped… this is the worst experience of my life by far. It was horrible.”
• In his emails, Karr used similar wording as the ransom note at. One point, he used Patsy’s mother’s nickname in an email, “Neddie”, and it was bizarre that he would even know that. Karr would eventually write that he was in love with JonBenét and what later confessed a hitting JonBenet in the head with a flashlight. Here’s some of the email: “she of course was asleep from the time that she was that I took her from her bed and took her into the basement. Her first reaction “was where am I?” And I said “you’re in your basement.”… She wasn’t in that little room to be disgraced. And I would never disgrace her or dishonor her. She was there temporarily and what really hurts me is that she stayed there. And that’s where her father found her and it’s just a horrible thing.”
• On August 16, 2008, with the help of British intelligence, the Royal Thai authorities and the US Department of Homeland Security, they were able to track down Karr in Bangkok, Thailand, where he had traveled to from the u.s. to escape child pornography charges in California. A few months after this confession, Boulder County District Attorney Mary Lacy issued a formal apology to John Ramsay for the suspicion his family had lived with and said that no one in the Ramsey family is considered a suspect.
• Karr’s DNA did not match the DNA found on the scene and he was not charged with the murder. However, the US Department of Homeland Security continued to investigate John Mark Karr. He had always maintained that he had not acted alone, if you recall there are two sets of unidentified foot prints found at the scene. It’s worth mentioning that former Boulder Police Chief Mark Beckner and the lead investigator on the JonBenét Ramsey case for a time, said in a reddit AMA in regards to John Mark Karr that “his confession, once they shared it with us, did not match the evidence at the scene. We knew in about 18 hours he was not the guy. We were able to confirm he was not even in Colorado at the time by just doing some routine checking and then obtained photos of him in Georgia at the time.”
• In a recent CBS program, DNA expert Dr. Henry Lee, best known from the OJ Simpson case studied the DNA from the JonBenét scene. Dr. Lee found that Japanese underwear may have held transfered DNA from the manufacture process, and proved this by testing an unopened bag of underwear, which also had foreign DNA on them. The CBS program concluded that the DNA from the crime scene was therefore fallacious, meaning that conceivably, any of the listed suspects could possibly be the killer.

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