JonBenét Ramsey | The Facts 96-22 |Part 1

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0:08 What's up guys, thanks for tuning in to Crime Time Snacks, the true crime podcast. The case we're diving into today is the case of Jean-Benet Ramsey. Now this case is a very famous case because it hasn't been solved for 26 years. There really hasn't been any main suspects, more theories than anything. And Jean-Benet was a child pageant star. So there's lots of photos and videos of her out there, even though she was only 6 years old. And a lot of people theorize that might have possibly been what led to her death.

0:38 But we'll get into the theories in the second part. This is split into two parts. The first part of this segment is going to be a storyline and talking about the facts of the case. Well the second part is going to go over theories in my theory on who I think kills Jean-Benet Ramsey. So tune in for both parts. The story of Jean-Benet Ramsey starts in Boulder, Colorado on Christmas night 1996. Jean Ramsey and Patsy Ramsey come home after a late night out with the kids. And they put Burke Ramsey, their 9 year old son, and Jean-Benet Ramsey, their 6 year old daughter to bet.

1:28 The next morning around 5.52 a.m. Patsy Ramsey gets up and starts getting ready. She walks outside of her bedroom door on the second floor to the spiral staircase and starts walking down. As she's walking down she notices three neatly placed pieces of paper around the bottom of the staircase. She picks them up and she starts reading them. At some point while she's reading them she notices the words, we have your daughter. At that point she screams for her husband, John, in calls 911.

2:02 During the 911 call she expresses her daughter has been kidnapped within about 5 minutes the first detective arrives on the scene. John directs that detective to the ransom letter which is spread out on the floor. They start reading it. The ransom note was about 2.5 pages and I am going to read it for you guys just so you can hear how cinematic and almost unreal it sounds. Mr. Ramsey, listen carefully. We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction. We respect your business but not the country it serves.

2:57 At this time we have your daughter in our possession. She is safe and unharmed and if you want to see her in 1997 you must follow our instructions to the letter. You will withdraw $118,000 from your account. $100,000 will be in $100 bills and the remaining $18,000 will be in $20 bills. 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 arrested.

3:33 If we monitor you getting the money early we might call you early to arrange an earlier delivery of the money and hence an earlier pickup 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 or FBI will result

4:02 in your daughter being beheaded. If we catch you talking to a stray dog she dies. If the money is in any way marked or tampered with she dies. You can try to deceive us but be warned we are familiar with law enforcement and counter measurement and tactics. You stand a 99% chance of killing your daughter if you try to outsmart us. Follow our instructions and you stand a 100% chance of getting your back. You and your family are under constant scruiny as well as the authorities. Don't go try and grow brain John. You are not the only fat cat around so don't think that

4:40 killing will be difficult. Don't underestimate us John. Use that good southern common sense of yours. It's up to you now John. Victory. SBTC. For the next few hours John and Patsy Ramsey call over friends and neighbors and that within itself has gotten a lot of scrutiny obviously 26 years later how you preserve a crime scene is a little different but even at that time most people say that how the Boulder Colorado preserves that crime scene or more or less how they didn't preserve that crime scene speaks volumes on why this crime has not been solved for 26

5:22 years. John and Patsy Ramsey are calling their friends and neighbors to come help because at this time it's a kidnapping and they want as much help as they can. At that time everyone's just sitting in the house talking about the kidnapping and there were some points where John was even seen laughing before walking around hysterical. Patsy Ramsey was consoling with friends and this is telling within itself because the detective said that in 99% of the cases he's seen anytime there's a child death the parents are consoling each other so just keep that

5:57 thought in mind. It was about 1 p.m. when Detective Finch told John Ramsey and his friend to search the house from top to bottom and see if anything else is amiss. For some reason which no one knows to this day John told his friend Fleet that they should check the basement so they went down to the basement and John opens the wine cellar he sees a white blanket it was at that time he finds the body of his daughter Jean Benet. As the whole upstairs is like a home alone scene filled with family advocates family friends and neighbors John picks the body up brings it upstairs

6:35 and takes the duct tape off Jean Benet's mouth and unties her wrists. I don't know exactly what I would do but this is another contamination of the crime scene. He puts the body in the living room in the detective then picks up the body and puts it in the foyer underneath the Christmas tree. So within six hours a kidnapping had just turned into a homicide and the crime scene was probably one of the most contaminated crime scenes that the Boulder Police Department had worked with in a long time. At that time it wasn't exactly known what had caused the death of Jean Benet.

7:08 What was known was that there was a grub or a homemade strangulation device tied tightly around her neck. Looking at the body one could assume that she was strangled. During the autopsy it was found that she also suffered a skull fracture. With this information the police and investigators first went off the theory that an intruder had broken into the house and tried to kidnap Jean Benet and failed. They ended up killing her and left her body in the basement because no family member would kill Jean Benet or kill their own in such a violent

7:46 manner. Unfortunately for the Ramses that theory didn't last very long. During the first few days of their investigation they found there was no signs of forced entry. So you have four people in the house and one person ends up dead. The Boulder Police wanted to talk to John and Pat Ramsey. More than likely somebody in the house did it. Within a week of the murder the Boulder Police department had their main suspects John Ramsey and Pat Ramsey. They wanted to sit down and have the

8:17 formal interrogation or formal interview with them that they would with any other suspect. But the Ramses were busy. They had their funeral. They had the memorial. And they also had a lot of people in the community who respected John asking the police department to back off and give them time. Within three days of Jean Benet's memorial John and Pat Ramsey were on CNN. However they had not yet sat down and had that formal interview with the Boulder Police Department. Bill Owens the governor of Colorado at that time had a lot to say about that. After the CNN

8:51 interview aired Bill Owens goes on national TV and says the Ramses refuse to talk to the Boulder Police Department but they'll take the easy way out and go talk to the journalists. Because they went on CNN before they talked to the Boulder Police Department they did get a lot of public scrutiny. You have to remember that John Ramsey is a very wealthy man a multi-millionaire so a man like that is going to have attorneys in a PR firm and as soon as he is even a suspect in a crime his attorneys are going to chirp in and say you should probably not talk to the police.

9:24 Now some people would also say that the Boulder Police Department had tunnel vision. They already had their suspects picked out so John Ramsey or Pat Ramsey or Burke Ramsey for all that matter walking into a police department without an attorney present wouldn't be smart for any of them. The evidence the Boulder Colorado police had were pictures of the crime scene. They knew that the ransom note was torn out of a legal pad owned by Pat Ramsey. They knew that in the ransom note the $118,000 requested was just $236 shy of the bonus John Ramsey

10:00 had received from his business that year. They also had a broken paintbrush tied to a shoestring that was used to strangle John Benet and that broken paintbrush came from a set of paint brushes that belonged to Pat C Ramsey in the house. Sadly all that evidence doesn't really point to a direct person it just proves that all the evidence used in the murder of John Benet came from the house. About four months later they did get their formal interviews with Pat Ramsey and John Ramsey with their attorneys present. When nothing came of that they brought in a

10:34 renowned detective named Lou Smith. Lou Smith found pieces of evidence that were just looked over during the first part of this investigation. In fact Lou Smith came up with his own theory that backed the parents theory that there was an intruder that came into the house and after 18 months he recused himself from the investigation because the Boulder Police Department didn't want to hear what he had to say. Throughout the years following the murder there were some suspects but none really came to light. One famous suspect was John Carr. He was

11:08 arrested in 2006 and he actually confessed to killing John Benet but the way he said he killed her didn't really match and he said he drugged her there were no drugs found in John Benet's system and police couldn't even confirm if he was in Boulder at the time and his DNA didn't match the profile. In 2006 Pat Ramsey loses her fight to ovarian cancer and dies at the age of 49 and Boulder Colorado has a new district attorney taking over the Ramsey case. Her team develops a DNA profile from Touch DNA but this DNA was found on Jean Benet's Long Johns so in the mind of

11:46 the DA that means there had been another person in the house or another person who committed this crime whose DNA they haven't found yet. She publicly in her last days of office said the Ramseys are no longer on the suspect list which a lot of people were a little disappointed in because again just because there's Touch DNA doesn't mean that the Ramseys didn't still commit this crime that just means there was other somebody else's DNA on Jean Benet's Long Johns which could have gotten there in a lot of different ways the same way it could have gotten on her

12:19 shirt. Now they already had an unknown DNA profile but it didn't necessarily exclude John or Patsy or Burke for that matter because Touch DNA found on a shirt is gonna be found on everybody's shirt. The evidence in this case really hasn't changed much the only new evidence that's came to light is the evidence of a new DNA profile. Now this DNA profile was found and put into the CODIS database which is a database that the FBI has with DNA of felons and rapists and people who have had their DNA taken by the government and usually committed a felony get their DNA

12:59 sent into this big database called CODIS. Now CODIS has not had a match of this DNA which essentially means whoever did this crime has either not committed another crime of this nature to put themselves in CODIS or they're not around anymore or this is still Touch DNA that doesn't have anything to do with the crime so therefore it's from somebody who isn't in CODIS. John Ramsey has been trying to access this unknown profile DNA for 10 years now and the Boulder Colorado Police Department won't release it to him because I mean this is still an open

13:34 investigation and if he's a suspect it makes sense on why they won't release it to him. He wants this DNA to go to a genealogy lab and what a genealogy is to kind of summarize it it's what was used to solve the Golden State Killer case. Basically if I upload my DNA onto ancestryinme.com to try to find out who my great great great grandpa was in that situation it shines light on all my family members around me even if they haven't uploaded their DNA and in the case of the Golden State Killer it was a tree of about a thousand people but these detectives used that and

14:12 narrowed it down to about four people and that's how they found the Golden State Killer. John Ramsey wants this DNA profile so he can potentially use that same type of ideology to find out at the least who the unknown profile belongs to. Now it probably wouldn't be as easy as just loading it into CODIS because one the private labs that ancestryinme and 123inme.com use that information isn't necessarily like a public database you can't just search it for a DNA match. They can still use

14:49 it to potentially solve crimes in extreme cases and that's what John Ramsey is hoping to do with this unknown profile because at that point it doesn't matter if the actual person is in the database all it takes is someone with a close DNA profile and this little investigative work but again that's how they solve the case of the Golden State Killer. That's all the facts of the case honestly there's not that many facts. The next episode we're going to talk about the theories in this

15:21 case including the famous Lou Smith and how he came up with the intruder theory and I'm going to give you my theory on who I think killed Jean Benet and why so tune in for part two of Jean Benet Ramsey America's Child Beauty Queen.