By: Gabriela Sundquist
Content Warning
Harm to a child and mentions of SA. Reader discretion is advised.
Imagine spending a wonderful Christmas day with your family. You have two beautiful children: a 9-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl. You have spent eating, playing, and spending time with each other.
Now imagine that you wake up in the middle of the night after sleeping just a few short hours to find that your beautiful 6-year-old angel is missing, and in her place a ransom note.
For the Ramsey family, that was their reality December 26, 1996. They woke and JonBenét Ramsey was missing, nowhere to be found. What happened to her? More importantly, who did this to her? Twenty-six years later, that is still one of the biggest mysteries to date.
The Facts
For those of you who know of JonBenét and her heartbreaking story, you know you can’t help but hear the many theories, conspiracies, and confusions around this case. There are so many theories that it’s hard to keep track of. So, for now, let’s look at the facts.
Family-Life
JonBenét Patricia Ramsey was born to John Bennet and Patsy Ramsey on August 6, 1990. Her big brother, Burke Ramsey, was 3 at the time of her birth. John Bennet was a successful business owner. He started his own computer-equipment manufacturing company in the 1970s and it became a raging success. Patsy Ramsey was a stay-at-home mom and a former pageant queen. She volunteered at both of her children’s schools and in the community. Needless to say, the Ramsey family was quite well-off.
She grew up in Boulder, Colorado, but she traveled quite a lot with her beauty pageants.
Pageants
By 1994, Patsy had started enrolling her daughter in child beauty pageants. JonBenét quickly became a star, winning many of the pageants she took part in. The first one she starred in was the Colorado State All-Star Kids Pageant. Four months later, she stunned at the Little Miss Charlevoix pageant. In her two short years as a beauty pageant star, she won the following titles:
- America’s Royale Miss
- Little Miss Charlevoix
- Little Miss Colorado
- Colorado State All-Star Kids Cover Girl
- National Tiny Miss Beauty
May I remind you that in these pictures she is between the ages of 4 and 6 years old?
December 26, 1996 – Where’s JonBenét?
It’s hard to know exactly what happened on this tragic night, as the witness accounts and evidence found never quite finish the complete picture. But this is what we know for sure.
At 5:52 am, Patsy Ramsey called 911 crying and pleading for officers to get to her house because her daughter was missing. Three short minutes later, two police officers arrived. Patsy continued to call many of her friends, and several of them ended up coming over to comfort Patsy and the family.
When they arrived, the police did a basic search around the house to look for any signs of forced entry. They found none. They cordoned off her bedroom to avoid contamination of evidence but failed to do so with the rest of the house. The Ramsey’s friends, minister, and victims’ advocates started arriving. They proceeded to pick up and clean the house. This effectively destroyed any possible evidence outside of JonBenét’s bedroom.
Ransom Note
When the police arrived they immediately started searching the house. In this search, they found a ransom note on the kitchen staircase. It was 2 1/2 pages long and handwritten. It said the following:
Mr. Ramsey,
Listen carefully! We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction. We
dorespect your bussiness [sic] but not the country that it serves. At this time we have your daughter in our posession [sic]. She is safe and unharmed and if you want her to see 1997, you must follow our instructions to the letter.You will withdraw $118,000.00 from your account. $100,000 will be in $100 bills and the remaining $18,000 in $20 bills. Make sure that you bring an adequate size attache to the bank. When you get home you will put the money in a brown paper bag. I will call you between 8 and 10 am tomorrow to instruct you on delivery. The delivery will be exhausting so I advise you to be rested. If we monitor you getting the money early, we might call you early to arrange an earlier delivery of the money and hence a [sic] earlier
deliverypick-up of your daughter.Any deviation of my instructions will result in the immediate execution of your daughter. You will also be denied her remains for proper burial. 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 situation, such as Police, F.B.I., etc., will result in your daughter being beheaded. If we catch you talking to a stray dog, she dies. If you alert bank authorities, she dies. If the money is in any way marked or tampered with, she dies. You will be scanned for electronic devices and if any are found, she dies. You can try to deceive us but be warned that we are familiar with law enforcement countermeasures and tactics. You stand a 99% chance of killing your daughter if you try to out smart [sic] us. Follow our instructions and you stand a 100% chance of getting her back.
You and your family are under constant scrutiny as well as the authorities. Don’t try to grow a brain John. You are not the only fat cat around so don’t think that killing will be difficult. Don’t underestimate us John. Use that good southern common sense of yours. It is up to you now John!
Victory!
S.B.T.C
The Ransom Note
The note turned many eyes at the FBI because this was different than any they had seen before. It read more like a letter from a movie buff. It is riddled with movie quotes from many films including Ransom, Escape from New York, Speed, and Dirty Harry.
It also is very long for a ransom note. Most notes keep it simple and direct. “I have your kid. They’re safe. $500,000 and they’ll be returned to you.” But this was more of a letter.
They also found it was written inside the house. They found the pen and notepad that the writer used were already in the house before the disappearance. The note was also full of interesting exclamation marks and certain indicators that the person who wrote this note knew the Ramseys on a personal level.
The author of the note only asked for $118,000, which happened to be the exact amount of John’s Christmas bonus from the previous year. It was also not a lot of money for a man as rich as John. He had much more to give than that, yet they only asked for $118,000. This led authorities to believe that it was someone who either worked with John or worked closely with the Ramsey’s finances.
Michael Badan, a forensic pathologist who studied the note, said he had never seen a note like it in his 60-year experience. He didn’t believe a stranger wrote it.
Finding JonBenét
Pretty quickly, John started making arrangements to get the money ready in order to get his baby back. At 8:00 am, Detective Linda Arndt arrived, prepared to help if they received any further instructions from JonBenét’s kidnappers, but the kidnappers never reached out and no one collected the money.
1:00 pm Detective Arndt sent John Ramsey and Fleet White (family friend) to see if “anything seemed amiss”
John and Fleet started their search in the basement, where John went to a door secured by a big wooden latch. He then opened the door and found his daughter’s body in that space. In the police’s initial search of the house, they had bypassed that door and left in unsearched.
When John found JonBenét, she had duct tape on her mouth and a nylon cord around her neck and wrists. Her small torso was covered with a blanket. John then proceeded to pick up JonBenét and took her body upstairs.
JonBenét’s Cause of Death
They found her official cause of death to be “asphyxia by strangulation associated with craniocerebral trauma” which basically means she was strangled to death.
The autopsy also reported there wasn’t any explicit evidence of conventional rape, but they couldn’t rule out sexual assault. No semen was found but she did have a vaginal injury.
Investigation
In their search for the killer, the police collected handwriting samples, blood samples, and hair samples from John, Patsy, and Burke. These three were also each thoroughly interviewed by the police.
These tests and interviews later found that “there [were] indicators that the author of the ransom note [was] Patricia Ramsey… however, the evidence fell short of a definitive conclusion. (Colorado Bureau of Investigation)
A couple of these indicators were that the only fingerprints found on the note were Patsy’s and the FBI agent who handled the note. Patsy’s handwriting sample also perfectly matched the handwriting of the ransom note author.
October 1997 – Less than a year later, police had over 1,600 people on their list of people of interest in this case alone, but John and Patsy were their top suspects.
2002 – The District Attorney’s predecessor took the case and pursued the theory that there an intruder committed the crime.
December 2003 – Found trace amounts of DNA on JonBenét’s underwear. This DNA did not match any of the Ramseys’ DNA but belonged to an adult male. Authorities say this isn’t direct evidence that a stranger committed this murder.
2006 – Patsy Ramsey died from Ovarian Cancer at age 49.
2008 – DA sends apology letter to the Ramseys as they had been “cleared by DNA results” stating they were officially exonerated from being suspects. Others (including the Boulder police) thought it was wrong to exonerate strong suspects because of DNA that they described as “a small piece of evidence that was not proven to have any connection to the crime.”
February 2009 – Boulder police took the case back from the DA’s office and reopened the case with the Ramseys still as prime suspects.
October 2013 – A jury rules the Ramseys should be charged for permitting the child to be in a threatening situation. The DA denied these charges saying there wasn’t enough evidence to move forward.
Theories and Suspects
While this case is cold, it remains an open investigation. Many doubt that we’ll ever find any real answers about what happened to sweet JonBenét. And that is when theories and conspiracies blossom. Humans don’t like not knowing, so we put pieces together in our minds to create the complete picture. It feels safer than swimming in a sea of the unknown.
Experts have identified many potential suspects over the years, but the Boulder Police focused mainly on John and Patsy as their prime suspects. The District Attorney’s office insisted that it was an intruder. Many other media sources and armchair detectives have looked in other directions for the potential murderer of JonBenét.
In this series, we will focus on the two dominant theories that have the most underlying evidence: that an intruder committed this crime or that the murder came from inside the house.
Catch JonBenét: Part 2 next week for The Intruder theory. For now, Happy Holidays, and “keep your babies close to you”.
Meditation, Mindfulness and Murder 