Why JonBenet case wasn’t solved 20 years ago
BURKE Ramsey’s alleged strange fixation with excrement could be a vital clue in his sister’s sensational murder case.
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”.
WHAT would drive a nine-year-old boy to murder his younger sister?
That’s the question that’s become paramount after a landmark documentary last night concluded that Burke Ramsey killed JonBenet.
And the key to his role in the sensational, 20-year-old case could hinge on disturbing claims about the boy smearing faeces on his sister’s Christmas gift and her bedroom walls.
Burke, now 29, had a “history of scatological problems”, FBI special agent Jim Clemente notes in The Case of JonBenet.
The Ramseys’ former housekeeper Linda Hoffman-Pugh recalled once “finding faecal material the size of a grapefruit on the sheets” in his six-year-old sister’s bed.
“After they sealed off JonBenet’s room, the crime scene technicians went through it, they apparently found faeces smeared on a box of candy she had got for Christmas,” said Mr Clemente.
Leading forensic pathologist Werner Spitz alleged in the documentary that Burke appeared to have a “mental problem”, having also smeared faeces on a bathroom wall.
“The brother is not exactly thinking straight, the behaviour is … of somebody who’s got a problem,” he said. “When I think of putting faeces in the sister’s bed … He was doing that.”
Family friend Judith Phillips told the program Burke had been the “apple of his parents’ eye” before JonBenet came along and began making waves on the pageant circuit.
Just over a year before the murder, Ms Phillips said, the boy had hit his sister with a golf club, leaving a scar just below her eye. Their father John dismissed had it as a “pure accident”, she added.
“I think Burke had a bad temper, it’s like he had a chip on his shoulder,” said Ms Phillips.
NOT AS PERFECT AS THEY SEEMED
John and Patsy Ramsey were wealthy and respected pillars of the community — she a keen volunteer and dedicated housekeeper, he a successful businessman. But behind closed doors, things were apparently not as perfect as they seemed.
Early on Boxing Day morning in 1996, Mrs Ramsey called 911 to report her daughter missing and the discovery of a ransom note demanding $US118,000. But eight hours later, Mr Ramsey found JonBenet’s body in the basement of the family’s 15-room Tudor home in Boulder, Colorado.
The crack team of world-leading experts who spent months working through every theory on the murder for last night’s dramatic documentary called for the case to be reopened after they all came to the same conclusion — that she was killed by her nine-year-old sibling and their parents covered it up.
The forensic experts, former FBI agents and psychologists concluded that after coming home from a Christmas dinner, John carried JonBenet upstairs to bed while Burke sat down to eat a bowl of pineapple and milk in the kitchen downstairs.
They theorised that Burke could have been angry at JonBenet over Christmas presents. When she came downstairs and tried to steal some of her brother’s snack, he allegedly hit her over the head with a nearby torch — before prodding her with a piece of train track to see if she was alive, leaving two marks in her back that some have claimed came from a stun gun.
Their parents then placed her corpse in the basement with a nylon cord around her neck, covering her with a blanket and making it look as though an intruder broke in, with Patsy writing the ransom note.
The family claimed Burke remained in bed throughout the commotion. Former New Scotlyard Year detective Laura Richards questioned why a curious child wouldn’t get up after hearing his mother’s screams. The experts commented that he appeared to “oversell” his general sleepiness in police interview, behave evasively over the pineapple he appeared to have eaten that night and appeared unusually calm about his sister’s death.
Most explosively, the documentary played a few previously unheard seconds of Mrs Ramsey’s 911 call that suggest Burke was there, with a child’s voice audible and her saying something sounding like: “What have you done?”
She also told police at one stage she would have “nothing left to live for” if she lost Burke as well as JonBenet.
THE INTRUDER THEORY
Burke explained his own theory in an interview with Dr Phil this week, ahead of the 20th anniversary of his sister’s murder. “I kinda always thought it was a paedophile who saw her in one of the pageants and snuck in [to our house], who knows,” he said.
He also caused consternation by smiling in the first part of the interview about his sibling’s tragic death.
In the documentary made by former FBI special agent Jim Clemente, the investigators rebuilt a scale model of the home to show that an intruder could not have come through the basement window without disturbing cobwebs in the corners and transferring plant debris into the basement.
If they weren’t going to hide the suitcase they supposedly used to climb out, why would they clean up other signs of entry?
Furthermore, why would they leave a two-and-a-half page ransom note if they had killed JonBenet at the scene?
“We know that was [Mrs Ramsey’s] pad, her fingerprints were on that pad,” former Boulder detective Steve Thomas, who quit over the case in 1998, told the documentary-makers. “The Sharpie pen we located, that ink matched the ransom note, which bore handwriting characteristics some experts said were remarkably similar to Patsy’s.
“If we found that body of evidence in the possession of any third party, that’s pretty damning evidence but in this case, for some reason, the DA wanted to create some parallel universe where it wasn’t her. I find it preposterous.”
The experts showed it was unlikely JonBenet would have been “subdued” with a stun gun, since this was likely to have made her scream and run.
A manufacturer of such devices said the marks on her lower back were not consistent with a stun gun. But they did fit the shape of a toy train track.
‘SOME PARALLEL UNIVERSE’
The most damning revelations in The Case of JonBenet Ramsey came from police who investigated the case 20 years ago and say it could have been solved back then if they were not “hamstrung by politics.”
Since the crime was initially investigated as a kidnapping, police did not search the home for eight hours, by which time the home had been filled with family and friends, and Mr Ramsey had carried his daughter’s body upstairs, contaminating the evidence.
The Ramseys were accused of not co-operating, declining to submit to detailed police interviews until April 30, 1997.
Worse, they were provided copies of police reports to prepare for their interviews, Thomas said. He and the FBI were “furious.” Police were not given search warrants, phone records or credit card receipts to aid their investigation.
Gretchen Smith, a former officer who worked on the murder case in Boulder, Colorado, told the documentary-makers: “The district attorney’s office and some of the administration did not want to hear that an affluent member of the community was guilty of a crime like this.
“Idon’t think they wanted to solve this crime and if they had to go down a different path that might not be the truth, I think they were willing to do that.”
‘A LITTLE GIRL IS MOULDERING IN THE GROUND’
“The Ramsey family did not want law enforcement to resolve this case and that’s why it remains unsolved,” said Mr Clemente. But it wasn’t just the Ramseys who wanted to buy into their alternative perception of reality.
The last straw for Thomas came in June 1998, when Boulder detectives, FBI agents and personnel from the DA’s office congregated to discuss the possibility of indicting the Ramseys before a Grand Jury.
Thomas says he recalls leaning against a cinderblock wall as the FBI’s Bill Hagmaier asked prosecutor Alex Hunter: “Mr District Attorney, no disrespect intended but a little girl is mouldering in the ground and something needs to be done. Are you going to call a Grand Jury?”
He said he would never forget the DA’s response. “I need to get with my people. This is a political decision.”
The next day, the FBI agents decided they could no longer be part of the investigation. Thomas felt the same. “I thought, I can’t do this any more, I won’t do this any more,” he said.
In October 1999, Mr Hunter reported that the “Grand Jury has finished its work ... no charges have been filed”, adding that there was not sufficient evidence to indict.
It was only years later that a Grand Jury member revealed they had voted to indict the Ramseys for child abuse resulting in death, only the prosecutor had never signed the indictment.
In 2001, Mr Hunter left office after 28 years.
‘EVERYONE FORGOT ABOUT JONBENET’
His successor, DA Mary Lacy, fully exonerated the Ramseys in 2008 on basis of DNA evidence found in JonBenet’s underwear that did not match any family member.
But the documentary cast doubt on this. The sample was tiny, and DNA expert Dr Henry Lee showed how even brand new underwear can have fragments from a manufacturer on them.
He said retesting the garotte, the torch and the ransom note would be far more significant.
The documentary asserts that the Ramseys do not appear to have deliberately killed their child.
JonBenet’s parents had no history of domestic violence or child abuse and seemed to dote on their daughter.
But the fact remains that a child is dead and has never found justice.
As former New Scotland Yard detective Laura Richards concludes: “Everyone forgot about JonBenet, it became about politics and agendas and creating a smokescreen. Why?
“This is a young girl who’s become a footnote in her own murder.”
The Case Of: JonBenét Ramsey, a two-part series re-examining the sensational unsolved murder of a child beauty queen. Catch up now on 9Now.
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