Are JonBenet’s family still prime suspects in beauty queen murder?

TWENTY years after the six-year-old beauty queen’s murder, the case is coming full circle back to the most obvious suspects and their outlandish story.

Editor’s Note: In a recent interview, Burke Ramsey denied that he harmed his sister, and said he suspected a paedophile who stalked child beauty pageants was the killer. He also denounced the CBS documentary theorising he killed his sister as a “false and unprofessional television attack” that is riddled with “lies, misrepresentations, distortions and omissions”.

TWENTY years after JonBenet Ramsey’s horrifying murder, the identity of the six-year-old beauty queen’s killer is set to be uncovered.

All indications point to the case coming full circle back to the original suspects — her family — as the second part of an explosive documentary airs in Australia tonight.

Their eyebrow-raising story certainly has all the trappings of a Hollywood thriller.

The Ramseys had a seemingly idyllic, all-American life.

High-flying navy officer John Bennett Ramsey, 36, married 23-year-old beauty queen Patricia “Patsy” Paugh in 1980, after divorcing his first wife Lucinda, with whom he had three children, three years earlier.

The couple lived just north of Atlanta, where Mr Ramsey started a successful computer company and journalism graduate Mrs Ramsey became known for her “near-compulsive housekeeping”, according to the Washington Post, having their living room repainted five times in one week. They had two children, Burke and JonBenet.

In 1988, Mr Ramsey merged the firm with two others to form Access Graphics, based in Boulder, Colorado, and moved the family to a 15-room Tudor home in the town in 1992.

But tragedy entered his life for the first time that same year, when his daughter Elizabeth, a 22-year-old flight attendant, died in a car accident.

“It nearly destroyed me,” he said.

Mrs Ramsey, former Miss West Virginia and a Miss America competitor, delighted in entering her youngest child in pageants, with doll-like JonBenet winning a slew of titles, including Little Miss Colorado, America’s Royale Miss, National Tiny Miss Beauty and Colorado State All-Star Kids Cover Girl.

But fate wasn’t done with the Ramseys. Just a year after Mr Ramsey lost his daughter Elizabeth, his wife was found to have Stage 4 ovarian cancer. She had treatment and it appeared to go into remission, with the ex-sorority girl and keen volunteer becoming a public speaker for the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition.

The six-year-old beauty queen’s horrifying murder has consumed experts for almost 20 years. Picture: DHP/Zuma Press/australscope

‘WHAT DID YOU DO?’

Early on Boxing Day 1996, Mrs Ramsey called 911 in hysterics. JonBenet was missing, she said, and she had found a ransom note demanding $US118,000 ($157,000) for her return — the exact sum of her husband’s annual bonus.

This is when the bizarre story came to the world’s attention. Yesterday, former FBI special agent Jim Clemente, the man behind the shocking documentary that concludes tonight, told news.com.au there was a catalogue of errors in the case.

Former Boulder police chief Mark Beckner later admitted officials failed by not immediately separating the missing child’s parents to get their statements.

Police did not search the Ramseys’ luxurious home for eight hours after she was reported missing, by which time family and friends had trampled through the house, destroying vital forensic evidence.

The police detective asked a friend of Mr Ramsey to help him search the home, and they found JonBenet’s body under a blanket in the basement, with a nylon cord around her neck and a blow to the head.

“I was just hoping she would wake up and began to realise that she wasn’t going to, and I started to scream,” Mr Ramsay said.

Her father was allowed to carry her to an upstairs room, further contaminating the evidence.

“Her face has a sweet look of peace,” he wrote in his 2012 book The Other Side of Suffering, a description People magazine said contrasted strikingly with the gruesome autopsy photos. “The worst moment was when I realised she was missing, not when I found her ... I found her and she was back in my arms.”

An explosive documentary throw the spotlight back on the wealthy family. Picture: Rocky Mountain News, Ellen Jaskol

It was the start of a rapid fall from grace for the Access president, then worth $6.4 million after the company had celebrated its first billion-dollar year days earlier.

The family came under immediate suspicion.

There were no footprints in the snow or evidence of an intruder breaking in. There were claims Mrs Ramsey had been inconsistent in her description of whether she discovered JonBenet’s absence or the ransom note first.

Serious doubt was cast upon the strange letter, which was three pages long and said at the time to show “indications” it was written by Mrs Ramsey. She provided three handwriting samples and was cleared of guilt.

But in The Case of JonBenet Ramsey, forensic linguistics expert James Fitzgerald claims the note used “maternal” language, and that misspellings appeared deliberately included to make it seem as if the writer wasn’t a native English speaker.

The program’s pathology expert Werner Spitz told CBS JonBenet appeared to have been killed by the blow to the head, with the garotte tied around her neck after she died.

He believes nine-year-old Burke (who had allegedly smeared faeces over the bathroom and his sister’s bedroom wall) “had a mental problem” and killed his sister, before his parents helped cover it up.

The most damning claim from last night’s first instalment of the documentary relates to Mrs Ramsey’s phone call to police. Six extra seconds of the recorded call were slowed down enough to hear what sounded like Mr Ramsey saying “We’re not speaking to you,” Mrs Ramsey saying, “What did you do?” and “Help me, Jesus,” and a child thought to be Burke saying, “What did you find?”

The Ramseys found themselves at the centre of a media storm. Picture: Gregory Smith

MEDIA CIRCUS

The Ramseys offered a $100,000 reward for their daughter’s murderer, appeared on numerous TV shows and wrote a 2000 memoir, The Death of Innocence.

Asked about JonBenet’s pageants on ABC’s 20/20 with Barbara Walters, Mrs Ramsey said: “There is something wrong here if someone thinks that looks perverted. JonBenet was an entertainer. Little girls play dress-up.”

The parents were furious when detectives began investigating them. “I was almost more angry at the police than at the killer,” Mr Ramsey said. “We called the police to help us, and they turned on us.”

They hired multiple lawyers, including Hal Haddon, one of the most highly respected criminal defence lawyers in Colorado, who engaged a public relations consultant many believed did more harm than good. The Ramseys were accused of not co-operating, declining to submit to detailed police interviews until April 30, 1997.

Mr Ramsey said he even thought about suicide. “I wanted an escape from the pain,” he later revealed. “Patsy said, ‘Don’t you dare leave me alone with this mess’.”

Now notorious, Mr Ramsey struggled to find a job, briefly working for software firm Jaleo North America before leaving in 1999.

That year, the couple prepared to be arrested, signing over custody of Burke to his paternal uncle. A grand jury voted to indict them for child abuse resulting in death, but the prosecutor never signed the indictment, saying there was not enough evidence.

As former Miss West Virginia, Mrs Ramsey loved entering her daughter in pageants.

Boulder police detective Steve Thomas later wrote a resignation letter calling the prosecutor too timid and the DA’s office “thoroughly compromised”. The prosecutor left office in 2001.

The family took sleeping pills, had therapy and moved to their summer home in Charlevoix, Michigan. In 2003, the couple were partially exonerated.

While dismissing a slander suit against the Ramseys by a freelance journalist, a US district judge in Atlanta reviewed the case and determined that an intruder killed JonBenet. The district attorney in Boulder concurred with that ruling.

In 2004, Mr Ramsey lost a primary bid to be the Republican candidate for a seat in the Michigan House of Representatives.

Mrs Ramsey’s ovarian cancer returned and she died in 2006, two years before Boulder DA Mary Lacy fully exonerated the couple on the basis of DNA evidence found in JonBenet’s underwear, which apparently pointed to an unnamed male culprit.

But The Case of JonBenet Ramsey throws doubt on this ruling, with the FBI’s Mr Clemente saying the DA “did not know what she was talking about when she exonerated the family”.

Mrs Ramsey died in 2006 and her husband has now remarried. He says he regrets putting his daughter on display.

MOVING ON

Mr Ramsey briefly dated Beth Twitty, the mother of Natalee Hollway, the Alabama teenager who vanished in Aruba in 2005, but they broke up in 2007. He said at the time that he was ahead of her in the grieving process.

The 67-year-old married Las Vegas fashion designer Jan Rousseaux, 53, in July 2011.

“John’s got the most confidence of any human being I’ve ever met, and the least ego,” Ms Rousseaux said.

As of 2012, the couple had a promotional marketing company in Nevada.

When suspect John Karr was arrested in 2006, Mr Ramsey said he was surprised at how he felt: “He wasn’t an evil, dark-looking person.

“I realised there could be a trial and with it the horror of knowing what happened. I wasn’t excited about opening that wound again.”

He said he was trying to forgive the killer in his heart: “Forgiveness is not saying to the killer, ‘Oh, it’s OK’. Forgiveness is a gift to give yourself.”

In his 2012 book, he said faith helped him through the nightmare.

“Everybody has got a burden, and I wanted to tell people that it doesn’t last forever. There is a light at the end of the tunnel.”

Mr Ramsey does not appear in The Case of JonBenet Ramsey, but did agree to be interviewed for A&E’s The Killing of JonBenet: The Truth Uncovered, which aired earlier this month.

“We keep our curtains closed. Our doors and windows are locked,” he said of his life today. “Going anywhere is a major organised and planned operation. We get people coming to the door claiming to have information that can be helpful in the case.”

“These accusations are wrong, and they are abhorrent.”

He told ABC News he now “regrets” putting his child in pageants, sharing one bad memory in particular with ABC News:

Patsy had her sitting atop a friend’s convertible in the Christmas parade, waving at the people lining the streets. Patsy’s mother later told me that a strange man approached the car during the parade and it make her uncomfortable.

“I think about these things now and it makes me cringe. We were so naive,” he said.

“I now believe with all my heart that it’s not a good idea to put your child on display.

“No, I wouldn’t [allow her to participate in pageants]. And I don’t think that had anything to do with her murder but I didn’t care for the atmosphere particularly.”

The final episode of The Case of JonBenet Ramsey airs tonight, 8.40pm on Channel 9.