Roughly 30 years after her case, no one can truly find out what happened to 6-year-old JonBenét Ramsey. The morning of December 26, 1996 her parents’, Patsy and John Ramsey, both woke up to find their daughter missing, accompanied by a ransom note found on their stairs. Police were called at around 5:52 AM from the couple claiming their daughter was missing with a ransom note demanding specifically 118,000 dollars for their daughter’s safe return.
Hours later was found dead in the family’s home basement.
When John had looked through the basement, which was previously overlooked by investigators, JonBenet was found with a utility cord around her neck. Her cause of death was ruled as strangulation. Her autopsy showed that she suffered from blunt force trauma to the skull. DNA was found under her fingernails and in her undergarments, which were later never matched.
There are many unanswered questions that lead this case. There weren’t any footprints in the snow leading into the house. The ransom note included a lot of detail about who took JonBenét. Part of the ransom note stated,
“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 serves.”
In a ransom note, it’s highly common to put as little detail as possible and the handwriting was tested to be highly similar to Patsy Ramsey’s.. In the end, the ransom note was considered to be “phony”
The main suspects in this case contain the Ramsey Family -, John, Patsy, and JonBenét’s younger brother Burke– a local man named Bill McReynolds, a neighbor named- Gary Oliva, and John Mark Karr.
The Ramsey family were the first considered suspects due to the fact that JonBenét was found inside their home with the suspicious ransom note- They were later cleared and issued a formal apology in 2008 after a suspect had confessed to the murder.
Bill McReynolds was identified as a suspect due to the fact he and JonBenét were very close. He sometimes would dress up as Santa Claus and surprise her. His wife had written a play about a young child getting molested and murdered in a basement, which was weirdly similar to JonBenéts case. Even weirder, JonBenét had gifted him a capsule of glitter while playing Santa, which he later asked to be mixed into his ashes. Beyond this, no evidence was found against Bill McReynolds
Gary Oliva, our next suspect, had previously had a criminal record. It was discovered that he carried a photo of JonBenét in his backpack. As well as he spoke to “The Denver Post” saying,
“I felt the need to build a monument, a shrine, to remember this little girl.”
A highschool friend of Oliva’s named Michael Vail actually revealed that in an interview with the InTouch magazine that Oliva made contact with Vail via telephone mumbling,
“I hurt a little girl, I hurt a little girl.”
Vail also explained that Oliva had revealed that he hurt this girl in Boulder, Colorado, which is where JonBenét was murdered. After this, Oliva hung up the phone. When police looked at existing records, they had shown that no other girls were harmed in the area on the night of December 26, 1996. Vail had also claimed that the specific method used to strangle JonBenét, Oliva had attempted to strangle his own mother the same way. Nonetheless, Gary Oliva was not matched to the DNA found on JonBenét.
The final suspect is John Mark Karr. Unlike the other suspects, Karr wasn’t identified as a suspect until around ten years later. Michael Tracey, a journalism professor, and John Mark Karr had been emailing back and forth for around four years. In these emails, John Mark Karr had actually confessed to the murder of JonBenét to Tracey. In order to gain trust, Tracey had not said anything regarding Karrs confession for the 4 years they emailed back and forth. Tracey’s statement of the experience was,
¨You are reading and hearing a truly dark side of the human psyche. Having to pretend it’s okay, that I wasn’t going to sit in judgement, because otherwise the communication would have stopped…This is the worst experience of my life by far, it was horrible.”
In the emails between Karr and Tracey, it was found that Karr used similar wording which was found in the ransom note. Karr having used Patsy Ramsey’s nickname “Neddie” when referring to her. Tracey confessed that Karr had said he was in love with JonBenét, and attested to beating her in the head with a flashlight. A email written by Karr says,
“She of course was asleep from the time that she was, so I took her from her bed and took her to 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 is that she stayed there. And that’s where her father found her, and it’s just a horrible thing.”
On August 16, 2008, the Royal Thai Authorities, British Intelligence, and US Department of Homeland Security tracked down Karr in Bangkok, Thailand. After testing, it was also found that Karr’s DNA was not matched with the one on the scene, and he was not charged with murder.
Though he continued to be investigated after he claimed, he did not act alone – relating to the two sets of footprints. Karr’s testimony was deemed inconsistent with the evidence and he was removed from suspicion when it was found that he wasn’t even in Colorado at the time of the murder.
In a more recent CPS program, DNA expert, Dr. Henry Lee studied the DNA found on her undergarments may have held transfer DNA from the manufacture process. It was determined by testing an unopened bag of the same undergarments, which held foreign DNA on them. The crime scene DNA was therefore fallacious. Because of this, the case has been blown open.
To this date, no one still knows what truly happened to JonBenét, and who was responsible for it. The odd and unusual evidence and details to this case will likely conceal and cloud the truth. Which leads us all to wonder, who really killed JonBenét Ramsey?