Why the JonBenet Case Still Feels Like a Mystery
This case has likely been solved, but will never see justice. The real mystery is why.
This piece was edited on 12/3 at 10:29am to add additional information on the DNA profile, explain the grand jury decision, the handwriting analysis, a few interviews with detectives and FBI investigators, and findings in JonBenet’s room the night of the incident that hint at Netflix and Berlinger manipulating the truth. I also added clips from the Dr. Phil interview because clips are being removed.
I edited it again to add info on the duct tape, Ramsey PR machine, screenshots from their 1997 website.
This case has likely been solved, but will never see justice. The real mystery is why.
A new Netflix documentary on the JonBenet Ramsey case came out last Monday. Prior to its release, the media hyped this new doc as something that would break open the case. The director, Joe Berlinger, did interviews saying he believed the case could be solved with new DNA evidence and couldn’t believe he previously thought conspiracies the parents did it could be true. People who have watched every doc on the case, read books and pored over the released grand jury papers thought this might be the doc that would finally bring new information to light.
In fact, it doesn’t do that at all. Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey presents no new information and is created by someone who seems more enamored with the fact that he got an interview with John Ramsey than anything that points to him being a serious suspect. Of course, without John, there’d be no family or personal involvement and we probably wouldn’t be watching this on Netflix.
What this creates is a terribly one-sided documentary that does a disservice to everyone involved by leaving out crucial information that points to anyone but an intruder. In fact, the documentary uses the idea that the Ramseys did it as a playful twist designed to trick the audience. The first episode highlights how complicated the house was, how the police noticed odd behavior. It leads you to believe it’s the parents before episode 2 comes in and says, well wait, there was DNA!
The problem is, the first episode doesn’t actually get into the evidence that made the police consider the Ramseys. In fact, they repeat a lot of the lies that are in the Ramsey’s book and have been disproven to make the cops look dumb. For example, the Ramseys say the cops focused on them immediately because they said there weren’t footprints outside in the snow. The Ramseys and Berlinger’s doc point out that there were no prints because there was no snow and show photos of the back of the house. This, to them, is evidence that the cops were trying to make them look bad from the start! The thing is, that’s not what the original police report says.
James Kolar was a detective who worked the case. He started working on it in 1997 when he was asked to stake out one of the Ramsey’s friends at a ski resort. In the week after JonBenet’s funeral, the cops couldn’t find the Ramseys and they wouldn’t share their whereabouts. Kolar worked for the Boulder Police Department for 17 years, but had transferred to Telluride when the murder took place. They asked him to head to the ski resort to see if they were there. He didn’t find them, but this pulled him into the case.
By 2005, he was lead investigator. By 2006, he left the case to go back to Telluride, discouraged by what he witnessed from the DA. In 2012, he released a book with his findings called Foreign Faction: Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet?
Kolar’s book is considered one of the best on the subject, though the Ramseys disagree. We’ll get to why, but he mostly does a great job of compiling all primary sources. You see the child abuse report, the photos of the spiderwebs in the grate, the failure to recreate stun gun marks on a pig. He also points out where the cops made mistakes. So, you remember how the Ramseys said the cops tried to pin it on them from the start by making it sound like there was snow everywhere and no footprints when there wasn’t snow?
Kolar’s book is the first time we find out that’s not true. The cops said exactly what the Ramsey’s said in their initial report: there was some snow on the grass and no snow on the rear patio:
The photo of the clear rear patio the documentary uses as a gotcha to prove police incompetence doesn’t do that at all. It matches exactly what the first officer on the scene wrote in his report. There was no attempt to make it seem like the lack of footprints was suspicious, he just wrote down what he saw. The Ramseys, however, saw a narrative that helped them prove bias and ran with that.
This is what the case of JonBenet has become, sadly. A millionaire family with power and PR behind them, a DA with ties to that family and a police force that did make mistakes, but who also were hindered nearly every step of the way.
Netflix’s Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey tries to hide or simplify details to present a clean cut, TV-ready conclusion: we need the police to do more DNA testing, we need to focus on the DNA! They hope, with advances in technology and additional DNA from scraping the additional evidence, some day, they’ll be able to link this DNA to a relative of the killer.
Meanwhile, experts have said this probably isn’t a DNA case from the start because the scene was so contaminated and the sample was so small. This remains true. The evidence has not gotten less contaminated over time.
The current DNA profile is actually too small to use genealogical testing, even though this is what the documentary presents as the solution. Again, it is an example of a documentary that is eager to present the truth as black-and-white. DNA must be the solution! How can DNA be wrong? Well, we will get to that.
First, I just wanted you to know, whether you’ve watched the Netflix doc already or not, it is far from the entire story.
I watched Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey as soon as it was out. I’d been waiting for it to drop because, well, this case is the case to me. Am I proud to be a true crime person? Maybe? No? I don’t know? I am aware of the ethical issues and all the bad things it does to society to have 800 podcasts that oscillate between horrific murder details and discounts for Squarespace.
Still, I will put on the latest episode of Evil Lives Here to fall asleep at night. Let’s blame my mom, like I do for most things. She’s the one who raised me on CourtTV! She’s the one who showed me you could read police reports and autopsies online! When I got my first laptop in 2003, I was 12 and ready to become Harriet the Goddamn Spy, okay?
JonBenet was 3 months older than me and like most girls born in 1990, I was obsessed with the photos of her that were all over the news and tabloids. How could something like that happen to a girl my age? At 6, I wasn’t into the details of the case, of course, I was just struck by this pretty girl who suddenly made me realize the world may not be such a nice place for little girls.
By 2003, there’d been a grand jury non-indictment, multiple books on the case released and still no trial or justice. I wanted to know everything. I dug into Angelfire websites, forums, Geocities websites, sketchy transcriptions of police tape interviews and radio interviews. I read Steve Thomas’ 2000 book, JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation, from an illegal .pdf someone shared and that changed everything for me.
Steve Thomas is featured heavily in the Netflix documentary as a bumbling idiot. The Ramseys sued him after the release of the book and the doc features discrepancies he was caught in. Some of these discrepancies are fair and do point to a man guessing at motive and some details, but he also shares facts on the Ramseys removing items from the crime scene with the permission of the DA.
He mentions leads he wasn’t allowed to follow that would point to the Ramsey’s, like the fact that beaver hair was found on JBR’s (JonBenet Ramsey) panties and the duct tape. The police noticed Patsy wore black furry boots to an interview and asked to test them for beaver hair, but she never turned in the boots. In fact, Patsy and John don’t turn in their clothes from that night until over a year later according to Thomas. Why was this allowed? Why doesn’t the Netflix documentary mention this? Thomas does:
It’s a fair question for Thomas to have while he worked the case. Netflix doesn’t think this is worth mentioning, despite mentioning the many unidentified fibers on JBR’s body. If the parents wanted to clear themselves and help provide a better profile of the killer’s DNA or clothing, why not turn your stuff in immediately so it can be excluded? Instead, the Ramseys waited a year, when these clothes had been washed and mingled with other things to turn them in. It’s almost like the Ramseys don’t actually want a DNA or fiber sample that isn’t compromised.
Take, for example, their actions after receiving the ransom note. Patsy says she didn’t read the entire note, but saw the beginning, went to check on JBR, she wasn’t there, she called for John and then went to call 911. John says he heard Patsy scream, met her on the backsteps, took the letter, laid it out on the floor and started to read it.
This is a bit odd, since Patsy mentions details from the end of the letter on the 911 call, but it is possible John read it aloud or was relaying this info. What’s odd though is that the letter says they’ve been watching the family, they’re related to John’s businesses and if the Ramseys tell anyone about this, they’ll kill JBR.
It makes sense to call the cops immediately, even though the letter says not to. What doesn’t make sense is Patsy calling her four best friends to come over because there was an emergency and she needed them. Barbara Fernie, John Fernie, Fleet White and Priscilla White head over to the Ramsey house without knowing JonBenet has been kidnapped, Patsy doesn’t say this on the phone according to Foreign Faction, pg. 45. At this point, it’s possible someone close to the Ramseys has done this or is involved and they invite friends who know personal details from the letter over?
If Patsy had told them a kidnapping with a ransom note occurred, these friends probably would’ve acted like they were arriving at a crime scene. Instead, they thought JonBenet might just be missing in the house and proceed to get their DNA everywhere. A year earlier, Fleet’s daughter, Daphne went missing and was eventually found hiding in their home, so this instinct makes sense.
Fleet thought JonBenet was doing the same and went to search the basement, calling out JonBenet’s name, despite there being a ransom letter. John Ramsey would later point to this as suspicious behavior when he added Fleet White to the suspect list. Well, how unfortunate you invited a possible suspect to roam the house and contaminate the scene before the cops even got to your house.
Not that Fleet was a viable suspect. Someone would’ve noticed if he left his own party the night JBR was murdered. In the time since, White has sued to get the grand jury documents released, as he believes this will clear things up for the public. He cooperated with police and got in a fight with John after the funeral because he felt the Ramseys should talk to the police immediately. It’s unlikely he’s involved if he’s doing everything he can to get information and evidence released. The Ramseys still have him on their suspect list, however.
And while the Ramseys take a year to turn their clothes in from that night, their friends, staff and others are happy to do so immediately. People at the White’s party turn in their clothes to clear themselves and find the person who did this. Because the scene was so contaminated, the officers who arrived also had to turn in their clothes from that night. Trace DNA from all of these people could be eliminated from the trace DNA on JBR fairly soon. The Ramsey family’s was not.
When the documentary discusses the Ramsey’s odd behavior when cops arrived, they talk about John seeming distant or going through the mail, but this when the cops start to suspect the Ramseys. They don’t take their clothes that night and they try to interview them but agree to wait. The Netflix doc fails to mention that it’s their shifting stories in the ensuing weeks that raise suspicion. For example, John tells two officers he read to JBR then went to bed. When he finally does his police interview in April, 4 months after the murder, he says they misunderstood him and that he said he put her to bed and he went to read a book.
The two officers felt like he’d been clear and there was no misunderstanding. Patsy also changes her story. The day of the kidnapping, she says she put a red turtleneck sweater over JBR’s white top and white longjohns. It was winter and cold, so she put two layers on top of JBR. That morning, Det. Arendt (the female officer the documentary depicts as crazy) wrote in her report that she noticed a red garment in the laundry area next to JBR’s bedroom.
When JBR is found she’s wearing a white shirt and white longjohns. In April, Patsy changes her story and says she only put JBR in the white longjohns and she always had a white shirt on. In the interrogation, officers push this and she says she can’t recall when or why the red turtleneck was put in the laundry. Maybe, these are two frazzled parents who can’t remember details, but here’s another bit of info the documentary leaves out:
The Ramsey’s lawyers refused to let them be interviewed unless they could have access to police reports and the previous reports of what they said. Their lawyers were essentially given everything they needed to get their story straight. If JBR was wearing a red turtleneck, how did it end up off and in the laundry? Certainly an intruder didn’t do that. Officer Thomas sees this lie as a red flag. JBR’s longjohns were stained with urine, she had a history of wetting herself, maybe she’d wet the bed and stained the red turtleneck, angering her mom and forcing her to put it in the wash. In a 2015 AMA, Lead Det. Mark Beckner confirmed her long johns and the bed had urine stains.
This is why Officer Thomas is seen pushing the “Patsy lost it because JBR wet herself” theory so hard in the documentary. The doc tries to make it seem like a ludicrous idea with no backing that shows how dumb he is, but he’s led to this conclusion because of Patsy’s lies.
People often say this is a case of he said/she said between the Ramseys and the police, but what you’ll find is that, most often, the police take their lead from the Ramseys changing their story and saying conflicting things. Yes, it is bad the police tried to bait the Ramseys into talking by leaking fake information to the media, but remember, these are the parents of their victim and they can’t even find them after the funeral. They’ve failed to answer questions. They’ve failed to turn over crucial evidence. By this point, it’s been two months since JonBenet was murdered, is it so odd they start to take a focus on the parents by February after such behavior?
The doc leads you to believe the focus on the Ramseys was a quick, lazy decision made by bumbling cops that hindered investigations into an intruder. This isn’t true. The Ramseys became suspects after their own lies and behavior couldn’t be written off. Also, officers did investigate intruder theories immediately! Officer Thomas lists all the steps they took: they used cameras from a business in the area to track every car that turned onto the Ramsey’s street that day (a car is the only means of transportation that makes sense if you’re kidnapping a 6 year old).
They interviewed everyone who’d been at the White’s party the Ramseys attended the night before. They took every lead seriously! This is mentioned in both Foreign Faction and JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation, but Netflix make sit seem as though this leads just sat until Lou Smit joined the case.
Shall we get into the Lou Smit of it all? He’s often considered the Best Detective and Smoking Gun in the JonBenet case. He didn’t solve it, but he dedicated his life to it and even passed his work on to his kids, as the Netflix doc tells us. Lou was brought in as the case stalled by the DA. From the beginning, he made it clear he didn’t think the Ramseys were capable of committing such a crime; this is why the DA liked him.
He went to work on beefing up the intruder theory. Smit would eventually leave the case when a grand jury was put together that focused on the parents. He was certain they’d be indicted because of the media treatment they received and the facts other officers shared. Some point to Smit’s work as the key to stopping the indictment since the defense was allowed to present the intruder theory to the grand jury.
Maybe, Smit did help. He presented two main theories that made sense of things the cops could never understand:
How the hell did someone get her from her room to the basement without making any noise or disturbing the scene? JonBenet’s room was pristine, it looked like someone just got out of bed, not like an attack occurred. Nothing from her room to the basement was out of place, meaning she wasn’t kicking or screaming on the way down. How was she subdued?
Smit suggests: a stun gun. You see, there are two sets of bruises equal distance apart on the right side of JonBenet’s neck and lower back. Smit believes they look like the pattern of a stun gun. If you’ve watched the doc on him, JonBenet Ramsey: What Really Happened (2021) you’ve seen the clips of him recreating stun gun marks on dead pigs to see if he can recreate similar bruises to JonBenet. He sort of does, they kind of look like the same distance, but they’re burn marks instead of bruises.
He was also only able to recreate it with one brand of stun gun, an Air Taser, and the maker of that stun gun said they’d never had a case where a stun gun renders someone completely unconscious and created bruises rather than burns. He also couldn’t get the dimensions to match JonBenet’s abrasions exactly. The train tracks police initially thought caused them though? A direct dimension match. This reddit thread has information (and sources!). The below images are from Kolar’s book (pg. 241 and 354, respectively):
The stun gun marks, it’s wider than the marks on the body
Why does the doc spend so much time convincing you the stun gun could be possible when it was debunked years ago? Because it helps the Ramseys and is the only thing that could explain how JBR was removed from her bed by an intruder. If it’s the train tracks, an intruder wouldn’t make sense. Why would he decide to poke her with a child’s toy once in the basement?
The Window Well/Grate Theory
Perhaps, Smit’s biggest help to the Ramseys was finally giving them a potential entry point for the intruder. The morning of the kidnapping, police and the Ramseys found all the doors locked as they had been. When asked about the broken window in the basement, John said he broke it months prior when he was locked out. John said that he and Fleet found the window open and a suitcase under it just before they found JonBenet’s body in the wine cellar at 1:05pm.
John said this before he knew Fleet told police he was in the cellar at 6:40am, the window was closed and he moved the suitcase there to investigate the window. When asked about this discrepancy, John said he was in the cellar before 6:40am and had found the window open, but closed it because he “wasn’t thinking” (his daughter had just been kidnapped, there’s a ransom note and he doesn’t think the open window matters?). He then changes his story to say he reopened the window at 1pm with Fleet to see if there was any new glass.
Why does this matter? The window with the suitcase under it seemed like an obvious exit for the intruder before John was caught in his lie in April, during his interrogation. Once it was established no one could say for sure if the window was open or if the suitcase had been moved by Fleet or the intruder, the likelihood of the window as the entrance/exit became a little less likely.
That is, until Lou Smit joined the case. He said it was totally possible that someone had moved the grate above the basement window, jumped down into the window well, opened the window through the hole and gained entrance. He even makes a video showing that he could do it. This has become a huge piece of evidence people turn to! Look, he got in that way and he got out using the suitcase! See, this is a plausible entrance/exit!
There’s just one problem: the window well and grate were covered in spiderwebs. Like, so many that the officers initially thought, well no one could’ve gone through there without disturbing the spiderweb or getting dirt/dust everywhere. From crime scene video taken that day and published in Kolar’s book, we can see this spiderwebs were not disturbed at all:
Foreign Faction, pg. 231 
Uncleared debris on the windowsill, Foreign Faction, pg. 231 
Smit demonstrating how someone could’ve gone through the window while also highlighting they couldn’t have done it without disturbing those cobwebs This is how Kolar describes viewing this evidence against Lou Smit’s famous window well video. It took until 2005 for a lead investigator on the case to debunk this theory with crime scene video and until 2012 for the public to know this theory was debunked.
And if you’re thinking, well maybe the intruder got out, destroyed the cobwebs and then the spider rebuilt his web by the time the video was taken? Well, Officer Thomas can speak to that in his book. They had a spider expert at University of Colorado Boulder come in and look at the spider/web. He confirmed these spiders go into hibernation in November and the web couldn’t have been rebuilt that morning.
Despite Lou Smit’s two biggest theories being debunked in the years after they were shared publicly, the Netflix documentary still acts as though these are legitimate theories that haven’t been tested. They still present Smit as an expert and an authority on the case, even though his intruder theory falls apart without the stun gun or the window.
Okay, at this point, maybe you think I’m trying to convince you that the Ramseys did this. I’m not! I mean, I definitely think they did and will lay my theory out at the end, but what I love about my theory is that I came up with it from my own research. I really just want you to know that in this modern media landscape, where it’s easy for streamers to sell narratives via documentary, that you have to be discerning. Dig into books, documentaries and interviews! I encourage everyone to do the same.
So, if the Netflix documentary just offers one part of the story, what else should people watch or read? Hit up the below!
I’m Just Curious
This DNA Explainer - Despite everything you will read in this, people still see all of this information and go “Well, the DNA.” There’s a lot of science behind why this DNA sample is most likely useless. If the Ramsey’s were staging the scene, they could easily plant unidentified DNA by rubbing different items from the house on the body (unidentified fibers were found on JBR - navy and tan cloth, beaver or rodent hair - the coroner thought it seemed like someone wiped areas of her body, Kolar and Thomas).
When the FBI and Boulder PD say this is a DNA case, it’s because they think the DNA won’t point to anyone. They think if this DNA eventually does match something, it will be innocent trace DNA that has nothing to do with the murder and, if it matched other fibers or trace DNA on items in the house at the time, would point to a cover-up. This would be the final nail in the coffin for the Ramseys. This is unlikely, as you’ll see below. The Ramseys removed a lot of items from the house the day after the murder.
However, people who believe an intruder did it think the evidence needs to be scraped again for additional DNA to create a better profile of the suspect. Interestingly enough, if the Ramseys had left those items in the house or turned in their clothes from that night sooner, it would’ve allowed the police to exclude fibers and touch DNA to create a better profile from the start!As long as this DNA remains “unidentified” the Ramseys can always point to an intruder. If the cops figure out it came from items in the house or people with alibis, they know it’s unrelated to the crime, thus narrowing in on the Ramseys. So, in a way, this is a DNA case, but probably not in a way where AncestryDNA is going to find a match or something.
That the documentary and John Ramsey act as though a better DNA profile could point to John Mark Karr points to how ridiculous this notion is: Karr was in Georgia at the time of the murder and knew no new details. That they even present Karr as a viable suspect shows how little integrity this project has. Most likely, John knows this DNA will never match anyone and that’s why he pushes for a genealogical match as the key to the case.Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey (Netflix) - What, I’m recommending the doc I just trashed? Well, how else will you know what the discrepancies are!! Also, while this doc is very Pro-Ramsey Family, it inadvertently throws their biggest defense out the window by ending on the fact that the DNA profile used to exclude intruders and the family is contaminated and probably invalid so no one previously excluded can be. That includes the family.
JonBenet Ramsey: What Really Happened (2021) - This is Lou Smit’s take, it is very biased. Still, if you want the parent’s side of things, this is the closest you’ll get.
The Case of: JonBenet Ramsey (2016) - This is the first documentary that presents The Brother Did It theory. It’s based on Kolar’s book which comes to a similar conclusion. The Netflix doc acts as though this doc is ridiculous and invalid because Burke sued CBS and settled, but it actually has legit interviews and science. Also, despite the lawsuit, the documentary is still publicly available.
A lot of the questions this doc brings up have never been addressed by the Ramseys. “Burke Did It” is considered the most “out there” theories by people who only sort of know the case, but it makes sense when you consider that’s the theory presented to the grand jury after the murder (along with the intruder theory) and dig into some of the stuff below.
I Want To Solve This Thing
r/JonBenetRamsey - Do I believe reddit is a legit source for information? No. Do I think incredibly dedicated true crime nerds have created a great subreddit that maintains primary sources, interview transcripts, and photos? Yes. If you have a question about anything in this case, you can probably find a detailed thread that looks into every possible answer. This subreddit explained that the DNA was too degraded to provide a legit suspect DNA profile 4 years before this Netflix doc! So, yknow, dive in, but do your research.
Lead Det. Mark Beckner’s Reddit AMA. It’s verified! He makes it clear Burke was involved, the parents staged a cover-up, this will never go to court or be solved without a confession and BPD and the FBI both believe there was no intruder.
Foreign Faction: Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet? by James Kolar - Kolar’s book is a must-read to me. He lays out the scenario that would be necessary for an intruder to make sense in the first chapter and you can understand how ludicrous it would be for a kidnapper to get so lucky. He then starts diving into the debunked myths he was sold by the DA and lies he catches the Ramseys in.
By the end, he suggests there was an incident involving Burke and JBR, he hit her and the parents covered it up. He points to Burke’s swiss army knife and boot print being found in room where JBR was found. Oh, yeah, that thing in the Netflix doc where they say the Hi-Tec boot print was from the cops? It also could’ve been Burke. Investigators knew when Patsy was interviewed that Burke had a pair of Hi-Tec boots with compasses on them and asked her about it. She claimed she couldn’t remember what shoes she bought him.
Foreign Faction, Pg. 221 JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation by Steve Thomas - Netflix and the Ramseys don’t want you to read this book, so you probably should. He comes to the conclusion Patsy did it because there are signs she, like Burke, lied about being asleep that night. Her fingerprints are on the bowl of pineapple, she most likely put JBR’s red turtleneck in the wash and there were open suitcases upstairs because the family was going on a trip early the next day and she was still packing when the family came home from the White’s.
This is his theory. He thinks Patsy lost it in an act of rage when JBR wet the bed, I think his theory falls apart there. Also, the only evidence we see of Patsy in the basement is that her palm print is on the wine cellar door where JBR was found twice.
The Death of Innocence - This is the book the Ramseys wrote. It is…interesting. It’s mostly about John feeling like he lost this innocence.
The Bonita Papers - In 1998, Boulder PD brought in three lawyers to help assist the case because they felt the DA wouldn’t let them properly investigate. One of the paralegals who worked with these lawyers gathered all of her unedited notes for a book. The notes were leaked to the press by her nephew and uncovered some lies from the Ramseys and confirmed a lot of what Thomas wrote in his book.
The JonBenet Ramsey case is one of the most researched and investigated out there. It isn’t hard to dig in and find a theory that works for you and the evidence you find. This is why it’s easy for one documentary director to manipulate the narrative.
So, at this point…you probably want to know what I think happened. I’ve been tweeting about it in a lot of threads that are hard to follow, so I’ll break it down below based on my take on reading/watching the above. From the jump with this case, I believed the Ramseys did it. When the Lou Smit stuff came out in the early 2010s, it was the first time I really believed an intruder could be possible.
When Kolar’s book came out in 2012 debunking the Smit stuff, I went back to Ramseys Did It. When the 2016 CBS doc and Burke’s Dr. Phil interview came out, I joined Team Burke Did It. With the most recent Netflix documentary, I once again became convinced of the intruder theory, until I revisited Kolar’s book and the other info left out of the doc.
Oh, let me introduce you to some online nerd case terms:
-RDI (Ramseys Did It)
-BDI (Burke Did It)
-JDI (John Did It)
-PDI (Patsy Did It)
-BDIA (Burke Did It All Except the Cover-Up)
-IDI (Intruder Did It)
You will see people in online forums use IDI, PDI, RDI as badges to denote their favorite theory. You’ll see people who go from IDI, RDI to BDI or BDI to IDI to RDI. Whichever your choice, each one comes with a certain set of facts that those theorists believe. Are you IDI? You probably believe in the stun gun. RDI? Your focus might be the fake ransom letter. (Yeah, the BPD and FBI both think the ransom letter is fake, despite the Ramsey civil suit.)
Where am I on this now? Well, I am back to my 2016, Burke Did It All belief. Even more now that the Ramseys are pushing a new documentary that seeks to bolster the intruder argument again while leaving out facts and promoting debunked evidence. After watching the doc, I reread Foreign Faction and re-watched Burke’s Dr. Phil interview. I’d forgotten about the boot match and Burke’s reveal in 2016 that he hadn’t been asleep all night like his parents said. In fact, he was up after everyone went to bed according to him. Let me lay out how I got here.
The Ramseys Lies
They lie about a lot. Whether they put JBR straight to bed or read to her, whether Patsy noticed JBR was missing and then saw the note or saw the note and then went to her room. Whatever, these are things that could be explained by frazzled parents. It’s just odd that their biggest lies all revolve around Burke, his whereabouts, and his belongings:
The Pineapple Lie - The Ramseys say JBR and Patsy went to bed immediately. John played with Burke for a bit, then put him to bed. He read for a bit and then he got in bed with Patsy, took a melatonin and went to sleep. According to them, everyone in the house slept soundly and heard nothing until Patsy woke up to make coffee, found the ransom note and screamed. The scream alerted John, but according to the Ramseys, Burke slept through this, the 911 call and police arriving.
Here’s the thing: JBR ate pineapple at 11pm/midnight, 2 hours before she died. They estimate she died at 1am or 2am. How do we know this? They found undigested pineapple in her stomach. They know it is not from earlier in the day or from the dinner at the Whites because the food from earlier was further along in her digestive tract. Also, officers find a bowl of pineapple on the dining room table. It is a bowl of pineapple in milk next to an empty cup with a tea bag in it.
The Ramsey’s maid said this was Burke’s favorite snack. And, in fact, only Patsy and Burke’s fingerprints are on the bowl of pineapple (see below) and the cup. But, we know JBR ate some from this bowl because they collected it into evidence and tested it against the pineapple in her stomach: it was the same pineapple. Patsy tried to say she had no idea where it came from and someone must’ve left it out in the morning, but how can that be possible if JBR ate some?
Foreign Faction Burke and John say they have no clue either. Well, someone fed that girl pineapple 2 hours before she died and it’s very unlikely an intruder did that. It’s unlikely she could’ve prepared a bowl of pineapple with milk alone at 6 without making noise and waking someone. It’s also unlikely she was eating at midnight with her brother at midnight and an intruder could’ve committed the crime in a 2-hour timeframe without anyone hearing anything.
Below is Burke acting weird about the pineapple in 2016 on Dr. Phil. It’s interesting he says he can’t remember if they ate pineapple and how could anyone remember something that happened so long ago, but when asked about the 911 call, he says he couldn’t forget something like that.With the pineapple evidence, it is clear she was awake at midnight, allowing 1-2 hours for an intruder to do everything. The Ramseys need to say they all went to sleep as soon as they got home because that opens the window of opportunity up from midnight to 10pm-2am and allows time for an intruder. If it’s as simple as “oh yeah, the kids wanted a snack when we got home,” why not say that?
Of course, there’s another reason Patsy and John may not have known about the pineapple: Burke made it himself and JBR went downstairs when she heard him getting a snack and playing with his toys.
The maid said the kids would often go play or get food after bedtime because the house was so large their parents couldn’t hear them. Burke said in his interview he could hear the fridge open from his room. We also know JBR and Burke would share the same room sometimes. If JBR would wet the bed, she’d change herself and go sleep in Burke’s extra bed. Each child had 2 twin beds in their room (see below). Burke would sleep in JBR’s room sometimes because his would get cold, he says this in his first interview.
The Ramseys say the kids never did that. But, Burke even says JBR slept in his room on Christmas Eve because he wakes up before her and she wanted to him to wake her up for gifts. Basically, there’s a lot of evidence pointing to the two siblings being together without their parent’s knowledge, which would explain the pineapple.
Two twin beds in JBR’s room, Foreign Faction The Ramseys say this isn’t possible and Burke was asleep all night. In 2016, Burke goes on Dr. Phil and admits he was up after everyone went to bed for the first time, giving the pineapple theory more credence. Also, you’ll notice the bedroom light is on in the above bedroom picture. The bedroom is the only scene at the crime that we know was actually secured. It’s fair to assume, this is how it was when the incident occurred. If the intruders had a flashlight, why would they enter the room, walk around the bed and turn on JBR’s bedside light?
In addition to that, it would’ve taken someone with inside knowledge to know that was the only working light in her room, according to the Ramsey’s maid. How would a kidnapper know about the light switch and, again, why would they need a light if they have a flashlight? It seems more like JBR woke up in the night, turned her light on, got out of bed and possibly went to go see who was in the kitchen.
The pineapple lie confuses a lot of people and they dismiss it as a red herring, but it is probably the most important piece of information. The medical examiner is able to determine that JBR died shortly after eating the pineapple. Whoever gave her the pineapple knows how she hit her head:
Foreign Faction Here is how Patsy explains the pineapple. It’s all we have since Burke doesn’t remember and won’t answer questions. She thinks the kidnapper fed JBR pineapple right before hitting her. Why would the intruder need to hit JBR then if they’d already subdued her enough to get her downstairs to the table to eat? Why stop to feed her pineapple? You supposedly have a stun gun and duct tape, why not use them and go? Oh, also, if she was stun gunned and dragged from her bed like Lou Smit says, did the intruder wake her up to feed her pineapple in that case?
Foreign Faction One more thing about the pineapple? One of the few witnesses in this case is Scott Gibbons, he’s the neighbor to the immediate north of the Ramseys. According to Kolar he tells detectives, “He had been in his south-facing kitchen around midnight on Christmas night. He observed that the upper lights in the Ramsey kitchen were on, but dimmed low. Gibbons didn’t observe anyone inside the residence at the time, and noted that it was not unusual for lights to be on in the home at night.” (Foreign Faction, pg. 101)
That means the light was on in the kitchen around the time she ate the pineapple. If it was the intruder, why would they turn a light on? They have a flashlight. Why risk being seen? Clearly, there are witnesses close by.
The Enhanced 911 Call Lie - Patsy and John swear that Burke was nowhere in the vicinity the entire morning they realized JBR was missing. They do not wake him up for information, they just check on him, see he’s sleeping and leave him alone. They say he didn’t wake up until Fleet White went to get him and take him to the White’s house. Well, that is a lie.
Kimberly Archuleta was the 911 operator who took Patsy’s call. Almost immediately, she felt like something was off about the caller. At the end of the call, when the caller thought they’d hung up, Archuleta heard a change in tone and someone said “What do we do?” This was suspicious to her. She immediately went to her supervisor and noted this. After JBR’s body was found, she went back to her supervisor and said the 911 call should be enhanced because she swore there was more said at the end.
The FBI and Det. Trujillo thought she was right. They sent the tape to the Secret Service and Aerospace. The Secret Service wasn’t able to pick up on anything, but Aerospace, which had better recording equipment, could. The first two experts wrote down what they thought they heard independently. The third, a detective on the case, also wrote what she heard independently. All three of them wrote the same thing:
The enhanced 911 call is considered such legit evidence, we learn when the grand jury papers are unsealed in 2013, that it was presented to the grand jury. In fact, they asked Burke about the voices on the tape. He said to the grand jury, as confirmed by the 2016 CBS documentary, “It sounds like my voice on the tape,” but he still said he couldn’t remember if he was awake or not. Burke will later lie in his Dr. Phil interview and say he hasn’t heard the 911 call, but he has heard about it. However, we know the enhanced version was played for him at the grand jury and he said it sounded like him.
John and Patsy swore Burke was nowhere in the vicinity and slept the entire morning. The enhanced 911 call proves he was in the vicinity. If he did wake up and was curious about what was going on and awake because of Patsy’s scream, why hide that? On Dr. Phil, Burke and John say again that Burke was in bed asleep during the 911 call, despite the tape.After Dr. Phil and the CBS lawsuit, Burke’s lawyer put out a statement saying that Burke never said he was asleep all morning, his parents did and he may have heard the commotion downstairs and screamed from the stairs “What did you find?” This contradicts what Burke says himself on Dr. Phil. It also doesn’t necessarily make sense of John angrily saying “We’re not speaking to you!” In his actual interview after the event, Burke does say he was awake in bed that morning. See below:
Here is the dispatcher talking about it and Burke answering questions about it on Dr. Phil in a way that seems…not so honest. Again, when during the lawsuit, CBS is able to confirm Burke said it sounds like him to the Grand Jury:
Below is the excerpt from the grand jury from Dateline covering the CBS lawsuit:
A quote from Burke’s grand jury interview used by CBS to prove even he inferred it sounded like he’s on the 911 call in court. The red shirt and bedwetting lies - John said in their CNN interview that they weren’t aware of JBR wetting the bed. Their maid said John was there many times when JBR wet the bed and it’s odd he lied about this. He also must’ve known about Burke’s bedwetting and feces issues. Burke confirms that John and his mom knew that JBR wet the bed and he describes their routine around it in his videotaped interview.
This interview was eventually shared with the public on Dr. Phil in 2016. The Ramseys lying around JBR wetting the bed is, again, what most likely raised Dt. Thomas’ suspicions around that theory. Netflix makes this sound ridiculous, but they ignore that the Ramseys did lie about it. I clipped Burke’s part of the footage from Dr. Phil below. It’s also interesting Burke says he and JBR wet the bed a lot and his parents would clean it up and he remembers this in 2016, but John couldn’t recall if JBR wet the bed in the 1997 CNN interview.
I also believe Patsy did put the red turtleneck Det. Arendt saw in the wash on JBR that night, as mentioned above. She later lied about just putting her to bed in the white shirt. Again, just minor things there’s no real reason to cover up:
Foreign Faction, Pg. 133 This could also be another clue that JBR woke up in the night and took off the red turtleneck herself, another sign she was awake after her parents say she was asleep. Or did someone else take it off of her?
The Flashlight Lie - Police found a black flashlight in the kitchen. The Ramseys said they didn’t recognize it, but may have owned one. The maid and family friend John Fernie said she absolutely recognized it as the flashlight Burke would sleep with. He’d use it in case he had to go to the bathroom at night. And AGAIN, in 2016, Burke says his dad put him to sleep with a flashlight! Dr. Phil asks if he took the flashlight downstairs and he says he can’t remember. That’s a huge change in John and Burke’s stories!
A flashlight sounds like something a kid sneaking downstairs to get a snack and play with his toys would bring with him. Why lie about recognizing the flashlight? Well the flashlight was the only item able to recreate the damage JBR suffered to her head. It was most likely the weapon used to hit her and BPD has held onto it as the murder weapon.
Foreign Faction, Pg. 67 Here is Burke on Dr. Phil in 2016 admitting for the first time that his father put him to sleep with a flashlight and he was up after everyone else went to bed. In this moment, Burke breaks his 20 year alibi and connects both him and his father to the murder weapon the Ramseys previously said they weren’t sure they owned. John doesn’t recognize the flashlight he used that same night with Burke?
The 11am Timeline Lie - When John’s children from his first marriage came to the house after JBR was kidnapped, officers said it was a little before 1pm. This matters because John found JBR at 1:05pm. John’s son-in-law and daughter said that John got in their van as soon as they got there. He climbed in and said “JBR is with Beth now (his daughter who died 5 years before). I found her at 11am this morning.” Well…that means he found JBR before he “officially” did for police. It means he told his other children that JBR was dead before he “found” her at 1:05pm.
John will eventually say got the timezones mixed up, but his son-in-law points out that he was referring to his own timezone, so why talk about a different time zone? Later, the Ramseys will say the kids arrived at 2pm or 7pm, despite John saying in his police interrogation that the entire family left the house at 1:30pm and never returned again.
It’s a little hard to believe his kids arrived at 2pm or 7pm if the Ramseys weren’t there. Also hard to believe they arrived in the 1:05-1:30 window when John would’ve been finding JBR. It is most likely that the cops are telling the truth and the other kids arrived before 1pm, the body was then found and the family left the house for good at 1:30pm as John said in the interrogation. Officer Thomas documents this moment:
JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Ramsey murder Investigation, Pg. 146 Some believe John did this because he knew the staging was shoddy and didn’t believe that he and Patsy would get away with it. With this move, John gave himself an alibi and potential witnesses who could say he wasn’t involved with the crime until 11am if this did blow up in their faces.
The American Girl Doll Theory - Ok, this isn’t REALLY the American Girl Doll theory, I just call it that because it’s fun. BUT, people who think an intruder did it point to the fact that there was no matching source for the duct tape in the house and the Ramseys hadn’t left all morning, so how could they dispose of the tape? It must’ve come from outside the house. WELL, in his book, Det. Steve Thomas outlines a very easy way the Ramseys could’ve snuck evidence out of the house: they were allowed to.
The day after JBR was found, the Ramseys asked if they could retrieve clothes for the funeral/JBR’s burial. The lead detective said sure, but you have to send someone else, we’ll take them to each room, they’ll point at what they need, we’ll document it and allow it to leave the property.
At least, that’s how it was supposed to go. According to Det. Thomas, when Pam, Patsy’s sister, shows up to gather items, she has an entire list from the Ramseys. It includes credit cards, jewelry, passports, JBR’s American Girl Dolls and stuffed animals, clothes, and other items. Det. Thomas says she filled a car with suitcases, the officers on scene didn’t properly itemize everything taken and if the Ramseys did want to sneak stuff out, this is how they’d do it. How Thomas describes it:
NOW, really crazy conspiracy ppl believe the source of the tape was the American Girl Doll. You see, in 1996, American Girl Doll stores trained employees to put tape on the back of the doll to cover a cord that came from the back of the doll’s neck. They also encouraged people who bought the dolls to do this. Det. Thomas looks into this theory and says it’s farfetched. It’s more likely they just hid the tape in a suitcase and had Pam take it out of the home.
But it is weird that Pam takes a Molly doll that JBR only owned for about a month. Sure, maybe Patsy did want things that reminded her of JBR, but why a doll that’s only a month old and was a gift from her grandma? Well, tan and navy fibers were also found on JBR’s longjohns and the tape. These people think the tan and navy fibers would match the tan body of the Molly doll and her navy clothes. Did the police want to check the Molly doll for a fiber match? Yes. Could they? No. The Ramseys wouldn’t give it to them.In addition to that, the Molly doll drives suspicion because a few months after the murder, an employee at the American Girl Doll company reached out to Boulder PD to say someone ordered a Molly doll in JonBenet’s name after she was killed. The doll was bought with a money order and was sent to John’s office. John denies knowing anything about the doll, but it’s odd he didn’t go to police and say a stranger mailed him a doll in his dead daughter’s name that she owned before she died.
Couldn’t that be a potential clue? Is it unrelated? Most people think they ordered a new Molly doll and destroyed the one that would match the fibers. People who don’t want to believe in the power of an American Girl Doll to solve this case, however, just think Pam snuck the tape and other evidence out when she grabbed their things.
The Ransom Note - Pretty much everyone thinks Patsy wrote the letter, but I mostly care about the opinion of James Fitzgerald. He was a linguistics expert who caught the Unabomber based on language in letters! He is very good at his job! He says it was Patsy. But, that is just his opinion.
He wasn’t asked to officially review the case, even though he offered to do it for free with a panel of other experts in 2009. Chief Beckner said in his 2015 AMA that he declined the offer because Fitzgerald had trained a previous forensics expert on the case and he felt that was a conflict of interest the defense could benefit from, so there was no point in using Fitzgerald’s panel.
Foreign Faction, pg. 338 I know Netflix showed you something that said “6 experts said it wasn’t Patsy,” but you see those were 6 experts hired by the Ramseys to help them in the civil suit they filed against Dt. Steve Thomas. These were not the findings of the handwriting experts the grand jury heard. The standards of a civil suit are very different from a criminal suit so their findings can hardly be accepted as the final word.
Oh, also the FBI said in the history of kidnappings, there has never been a 2.5 page ransom letter and they felt it was written as a cover-up. Even if you think Boulder PD were bumbling idiots who dropped the ball, the FBI was a different team of people and the below statement is what they thought about the note.
Also, let’s think about this. If you’re a kidnapper who wants an amount with specific instructions, do you hope there’s paper and a pen in the house so you can write that demand out when you get there? What do you do if you can’t find a pad of paper? If that’s your motive, you’re just crossing your fingers that you get there and find a way to communicate your demands?
Also, if you’re in the middle of kidnapping her and she dies, why leave the ransom letter that’s the only evidence pointing to you anyway? Without the ransom letter, the kidnapper could take all evidence pointing to him and easily pin this on the parents.
The FBI thought it was odd a kidnapper would leave something so incriminating with the body in the house, which would immediately negate any chance of getting the ransom money and provide a clues on a suspect. If you accept the ransom note is fake, that’s incredibly damning for the Ramseys.
Inside the Ramseys Murder Investigation, Pg. 131 The Morning Timeline Lie/Was Burke Awake? - For 20 years, John and Patsy told the same story about that morning: Patsy woke up to make coffee, she went down the stairs and found the ransom note. She didn’t read all of it, she just immediately ran to JBR’s room. When she saw she wasn’t there, she yelled for John. John ran out of the bathroom to the back stairs and found Patsy. He took the letter and told her to call 911. He says at this point he or Patsy went in to check in on Burke, but they left him sleeping. Both Patsy and John say they never looked for JBR because of the ransom note
For 20 years, the police thought that was weird as hell. Whose daughter goes missing and they don’t call her name out or search for her? Why wouldn’t they wake Burke up and ask if he knew anything? Kolar documents this:
Here, is John saying he was the one who checked Burke’s room and Burke was still asleep.
Foreign Faction, Pg. 44 In 2016, thanks again to Burke’s Dr. Phil interview, we find out that Kolar was right to feel suspect about this because the Ramseys did lie. According to Burke, his mom came bursting into his room, searching for JBR, not his dad. She was screaming, “Where is my baby?!” and woke him up. About an hour later, a police officer enters his room and he says that he stays in bed. This means the Ramseys did search for her, they knew Burke was awake and there was at least an hour between Burke waking up because of his mom and the 911 call and police showing up.
You know I have the clip!The thing is, Kolar and the police knew to be suspect about this during the case because Burke told the police in 1996 that his mom came rushing into his room looking for JBR. They knew she and John were lying about Burke’s whereabouts and when they woke him up from day one. That’s why the police suspected the Ramseys. Burke’s police interview is below. Dr. Phil also points out it’s weird that Burke would hear his parents searching for his sister and wouldn’t get up to see what was happening:
If the Ramseys did search Burke’s room, they probably searched the rest of the house looking for JBR too. We now know about an hour went by from Patsy waking Burke up to the cops showing up, rather than her original “I found the letter, John checked Burke and I called the cops shortly after, Burke never woke up” timeline.
Did they tell police Burke was asleep and they didn’t search the house because he could mess up their timeline and prove they’d been searching for her for at least an hour before cops arrived?
Burke and JBR’s Behavioral Histories
Most people hate the Burke Did It theory because they can’t imagine a 9yo boy being violent or doing these things. However, Burke had a history of violence with JBR. By the end of this, you’ll see that he was a 9 year old boy who previously sent JBR to the hospital, had issues with bedwetting and feces, and may have been a victim himself.
When Burke was 6, he hit her in the face with a golf club and sent her to the ER. This is in her medical records. At the time, Patsy told friends he lost his temper. In their book, the Ramseys say he was practicing his golf swing and lost control. JBR was taken to the doctor 33 times in the last 3 years of her life. There were frequent doctor calls including three 8 days before the murder. It’s more than likely that Burke hit JBR more than once. As far as we know, he’s the only person in the family to ever send JBR to the ER:
People point to JBR wetting the bed and getting clingier with her mom in the days leading up to her death as evidence she was being sexually abused or suffering trauma. What they tend to ignore is that Burke was also wetting the bed at an older age and people around the Ramseys heard odd comments from the family about his body.
Jane Stobie, a former manager who began working at John’s company Access Graphics in 1990, said Nedra, Pam and Polly (Patsy’s mom and sisters) would comment often on Burke’s penis in her 1997 interview with Vanity Fair. The three were also on payroll at Access Graphics and Stobie managed Nedra.
Of course, this could be how the family jokes around. In addition to that, however, his previous nanny said he was wetting the bed until he was at least 7. Cops asked him about it and he got defensive. If JBR regressing and her bed wetting getting worse is a sign of abuse, the same could be said for Burke. Was he wetting the bed because someone in the family was also sexually abusing him? If that’s the case, could he have picked up learned behaviors that he took out on JBR?
Wilcox says that JBR’s bedwetting was getting worse, but what we also know is that Burke’s issues with feces were also escalating. When Patsy was first diagnosed with cancer, housekeeper Geraldine Vodicka found him smearing poop on the walls. This would’ve been around the time of the golf club incident.
Nedra, JBR and Burke’s grandmother cleaned up the incident Vodicka mentioned so she also witnessed this. Another maid, Linda Hoffman-Pugh, previously found feces in JBR’s bed sheets and thought it may have been Burke’s. This matters because feces were found in JBR’s room when the crime scene was processed:
The Ramseys say that Burke lived in the house and they can’t say when he may have left the pajamas there and question if he even did. Boulder PD didn’t have a chance to question him about it. However, the fact that it was still present at the crime scene points to it being recent: The Ramseys had maids, does it really seem likely they left poop-stained pajamas and candy in JBR’s room for days? A maid was there on the 23rd according to witnesses (this is the day Fleet White makes an “accidental” 911 call at the Ramsey’s home, they had guests over).
We know JBR slept in Burke’s room on the 24th because he says this in his interview. Did Burke do this on the 25th? If so, why? Did the maid leave poop-covered pajamas and a candy box in JBR’s room for days? Did this cause a fight between Burke and JBR that night? It’s unlikely the feces is connected to the intruder, but if Burke did do this on the 25th, again, it points to him being awake that night.
Maybe it was an innocent prank, but did he hear anything while intruders came to kidnap his sister while he happened to be leaving feces in her room? These are questions he could answer, but he doesn’t seem interested.
Back when Burke did his Dr. Phil interview in 2016 and admitted he was up after everyone went to sleep, Boulder PD asked to interview him again. They even sent two people out to his house. They wanted to ask if he heard anything since this was a new revelation after 20 years. That makes sense! They have a possible new witness! Even John Ramsey was shocked at this revelation.
John says he had no idea Burke got back up, “if he even did.” He thinks Burke might’ve misunderstood Dr. Phil’s question, but it’s clear that Dr. Phil asks twice. Dr. Phil says, “Your father says he put you to sleep with the flashlight and you went downstairs.”
Burke says “Yeah, I had some toy that I wanted to put together. I remember being downstairs after everyone was in bed…wanting to get this thing out.” Dr. Phil replies “Did you use the flashlight so you wouldn’t be seen?” Burke says, “I don’t remember. I just remember being downstairs with this toy.” I’ll share this YouTube clip of an interview John did this year for Crime Junkies where he expresses shock that Burke left his room after everyone was asleep. Apparently, John and Burke never talked about this:
John says Burke wouldn’t keep any information to himself, but Burke refused to answer any questions after this revelation and sent a message via his lawyer to never contact him again. If he is interested in finding his sister’s killer, that isn’t something anyone has ever seen, at least outside of the family. Even after the murder, he seemed uninterested in where JBR was or who may have taken her. Fleet White noticed he didn’t ask any questions when he drove Burke from the Ramsey’s home to his the morning JBR was kidnapped. Kolar notes this:
Apparently, no new questions have come up for Burke since 1996. Even though he’s connected to the pineapple, the feces-smeared pajama bottoms and admitted he was up, he has nothing to say. He was willing to talk to Dr. Phil, but not the police. That’s odd.
The Evidence of JBR’s Previous Sexual Assault
Ok, this is a very complicated topic and I will beg you here to read this 2 part reddit thread that quotes from the child abuse panel’s findings on JBR directly. But, look, I know, the Netflix documentary showed you a clip of JBR’s pediatrician from ages 3-6 and he said he saw no signs of sexual abuse during his exams of her. The documentary presents this as final evidence: there was no previous sexual assault before her murder, see her pediatrician said so.
As I’ve said so many times: this isn’t the case! In order to see signs of child sexual abuse, thorough exams are needed that look at the hymen and internal vaginal walls for damage. JBR’s pediatrician never performed a test like that and said so to the grand jury. That wouldn’t have been typical for him to do when JBR wasn’t brought in for those reasons and he had no reason to suspect that. Of course he saw no evidence for sexual abuse, he wasn’t looking for it.
The coroner who did the autopsy did see signs of previous sexual abuse, but couldn’t say when it occurred. The Boulder PD decided to put together a panel of child sexual abuse experts to examine the body and look into the case. This panel included John McCann, who created the standard now used to define child sexual assault in hospitals and police cases. Basically, these are authorities on the topic. The strongest evidence of the previous sexual abuse is that it was allowed into the grand jury evidence:
The other four people on the panel were Richard Krugman, James Monteleone, Valerie Rao and Andrew Sirotnak. Every sexual abuse expert who examined the genital findings from JBR’s autopsy recognized physical signs of sexual abuse that predated her murder. The only thing they couldn’t agree on was when and how often it occurred. McCann said the abrasions were 7-10 days healed, Rao said it could be 2 months, some didn’t feel comfortable trying to date it but could say it was damage that predated her death.
You may have heard that this damage and JBR’s bedwetting were caused by UTIs and irritation that’s common in kids. This is what the Ramseys put out through their lawyers. However, the abrasions seen on the hymenal transection by the panel could only be done through sexual assault or a massive injury. There was no massive injury in JBR’s medical history that pointed to something like this. It couldn’t have been caused by horseback riding or a bike, as these were abrasions that had healed, opened and re-healed, pointing to chronic sexual abuse.
If there was some intruder or pedophile stalker who managed to get access to JBR and assault her 7-10 days before her death, that would be a huge lead. This is evidence that, like the pineapple in her stomach, cannot be denied. But the Ramseys dismiss the evidence from this panel outright. Additionally, if there’s evidence that JBR was being chronically abused, who is to say Burke wasn’t also being abused, causing him to wet the bed again or take out the same abuse on his sister? And even if you don’t believe it’s Burke, couldn’t this be possible evidence that John was abusing his daughter and it’s still someone in the family?
Many believe Burke perpetrated the previous abuse on JBR and not John because a maid previously saw them “playing doctor.” When she asked what was going on, Burke got mad at her. Also, John was gone a lot. Additionally, the previous summer at the family’s Michigan house, Patsy told staff that Burke and JBR couldn’t be alone together. A family friend said Patsy said it was because they were “exploring” with each other too much.
Of course, these are secondary accounts, but coupled with the fact that Burke and JBR would share bedrooms occasionally and they both showed signs of regressing due to sexual abuse, there is a chance that their doctor “play” wasn’t so innocent. Was Patsy having issues with Burke? We can’t say for sure, but police do know that her mother, who cleaned up after Burke spread feces on the wall, gifted her 3 books on raising problem children in the year before JBR died.
One was Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong (see above screenshot on feces). Of course, she might just like parenting books and they were just gifts.
The above facts usually get people around to Ramseys Did It. It was this thread that got me fully convinced of Burke Did It. Basically: everything done by JBR could’ve been done by a child and an adult would’ve caused more damage. The Netflix doc ignores all of this. The hit to the head wasn’t enough to kill JBR, it caused internal bleeding and knocked her out, but she wasn’t dead. The choking started 45 minutes to 2 hours after she was hit in the head and also wasn’t enough to kill her by itself. While the skin on the outside of her neck was red, there was no internal damage to the windpipe.
If an adult hit her head, it would’ve killed her. If an adult strangled her, there would’ve been internal damage to the windpipe. She was either choked by an adult who didn’t want to hurt her or a child who wasn’t strong enough to. Also, why would an intruder hit her in the head and wait 45 minutes to 2 hours to choke her? If you’re there to kidnap her, why not just leave now that she’s unconscious and you have her? Also, If you think she’s dead from the hit, why leave the ransom note that would point to you?
And while the garrote used was described as “complex” by the Ramseys, a knot expert and the FBI said it was a simple loop knot a boy scout could make and the tool was rudimentary. Burke was a cub scout. In Officer Thomas’ book, he says these are the facts that even made the FBI ask if a child could be involved.
Let’s get into the reason so many people believe the garrote was complex, despite the opinion of experts. That would be thanks to the Ramseys. You see, soon after their daughter was killed, the Ramseys decided to start a foundation in her name. By March, the foundation was created with tax documents filed.
The Ramseys still wouldn’t talk to police until April, but they took time to do this. Part of the foundation was a website, ramseyfamily.com (since taken down). On this site, the Ramseys shared a tip phone number that led to their lawyers and not the police.
They also shared intimate details about the case before police said it was okay. You see, the Ramseys point to the media circus causing them to become suspects. The truth is that it was the Ramsey’s circus. When the police started leaking information to the media, it was only after the Ramseys started a website with information from the case and started buying ads in the newspaper that also leaked information about the case!
The police couldn’t understand why the Ramseys wouldn’t talk to them to answer questions or get updates, but they wanted to put things online. The World Wide Web! In 1997! The Ramseys published crime scene photos, direct messages from family members, photos of JBR, drawings she did, and updates.
They even published a photo of the garrote, where they ask people to notice the “complexity”:
That’s odd considering police experts felt it was a simple knot with a bunch of loops that any adult or Cub Scout could’ve done. The police wondered why the Ramseys were purposefully putting out misleading information. That wouldn’t help find the killer. If it was a close friend or someone in the pedophile circuit, what if they had used simple knots and weren’t an expert? Sharing this information with the public would also mean any wanna-be fake confessor could share details of the case and confuse the suspect list.
The Ramseys are also the ones who leak the ransom note to the press. They buy an ad and publish it in the paper, despite the police begging them not to. The Ramseys even admit on their website that the police have told them not to share details from it, but they share samples of the writing with the public. Now, if an intruder tried to mimic Patsy’s handwriting or just tried to conceal their handwriting, how would releasing this to the public be helpful? This was the most intimate, direct piece of evidence from a supposed intruder and they published it in the paper and on their website:
Well, the police didn’t like this. Neither did their friends. Even Barbara Fernie, one of the people Patsy called over immediately, noticed the Ramseys were misleading the public by presenting false information. She let investigators know that one of the ads the family published was intentionally misrepresenting things. Fleet White also begged the family to stop posting and going on TV and to talk to the police.
This was the power of the Ramsey PR machine! To this day, people think the knots were complicated. They think there was evidence of a break-in on the backdoor! They think an intruder could’ve found duct tape, a paintbrush and cord in the basement of a house this crowded, big and dark (someone leaks the crime scene video at some point)! Oh, are you shocked you just saw a full video of the inside of their house? Yeah. That's pretty weird for 1996.
Maybe the cops leaked it to show the public how hard it would be for anyone to find anything in such a dark, big, crowded basement. Maybe the Ramseys leaked it so there’d be more doubt about who exactly knew the layout of their basement. Who knows?
This is also why John Mark Karr persists as a suspect. Because he knew “private” information. Well, the Ramseys maintained a website for years where relatives left personal messages. Did she ever sign one with that nickname? Hard to say, most of the site has been scrubbed from the internet. If Karr was obsessed with the case, he easily could’ve seen that there. The family put personal photos and crime scene photos on the site, anyone interested could’ve checked obsessively.
Despite the family making all this information public, Boulder PD investigators who previously worked on the case like Kolar knew that Karr was a fraud as soon as his emails came out because he still couldn’t get the details right. Boulder PD did manage to keep a few details from the public and Karr didn’t know them says Kolar in his 2014 AMA. The police know Karr is a fraud from these details, but Netflix dedicates nearly an entire episode to him. Why? It helps the Ramseys and supports their intruder theory.
Boulder Police dropped the ball on this case on day one by failing to secure the crime scene. However, the Ramseys are the people who failed to secure crucial information about the investigation and case after day one. The Ramseys benefit from muddying the evidence, the suspect list and anything else. If the police were able to rule people out, something might point to the Ramseys.
If the Ramseys could make details widely known, there’s just more people to point away from them. Their PR team goes to work at this and, now, the myth that the garrote was “complex” persists. Today, the Ramseys can use Netflix instead of a geocities site. I would be willing to believe they created their site in good faith, to collect evidence or tips, but it’s odd that they dismantled the site a few years after her murder. No one was arrested. They stopped communicating with Boulder PD after they moved back to Georgia. Was the site just a temporary PR effort?
The Ramseys continue to use the media to push the narratives they want. Let’s take, for example, something as simple as the order of JBR’s injuries. The Netflix documentary says it’s “unclear if the head injury or choking” happened first. It makes it nebulous, like no one could tell! Well, the medical examiner could. he listed this as the order of death:
Det. Kolar also points to evidence that this is likely the order. As he says below, if the garrote caused her death or brought her close to death and then she was hit in the head, her head wouldn’t have bled for 45-90 minutes:
There’s a lot of evidence that makes the timeline clear, so why don’t the Ramseys want you to know the above timeline? Because it makes them look guilty as hell. In fact, the grand jury thought this pointed to the Ramseys. Why would an intruder sit around for 45 minutes to an hour waiting to choke her and not just leave with her?
A few members of the grand jury have spoken out. They said this timeline was one of the most convincing pieces of evidence that the parents did it. They felt the DNA didn’t matter. Naturally, the Ramseys use Netflix to confuse the timeline and make the DNA sound incredibly important.
I found the Ramsey site when I was 12. I remember thinking it was so weird I could see crime scene photos and evidence. Isn’t it strange how much publicly available information there is in this case, but the Ramseys still create their own narrative?
Once you accept that these injuries could be caused by a child, the Ramsey’s PR works harder than Kris Jenner, Burke may have been a victim of sexual abuse himself and Burke may have been doing this to his sister, the case makes a lot more sense than a magic intruder floating in through a window without touching spiderwebs or the world’s quietest stun gun.
It also explains why the Ramseys would cover for Burke. If they said he did it, he might tell the police their dad had been inappropriate with both of them. If John or Patsy did it, they have little reason to cover for each other. If either parent did it, why would the other keep Burke around them? Either parent could’ve turned on the other and the innocent parent would look like a hero.
However, if it was Burke that did it, that would damage Patsy and John’s reputation as parents. Could John work for the government if he was famous for raising a son who killed his beauty pageant daughter? Would Patsy still be loved in the community? Patsy also said she’d die if anything happened to Burke. When asked if she’d protect John if he did it, she said no, she’d kill him herself.
John also said he wouldn’t protect Patsy if she did it. When asked if she’d protect Burke if he did it, Patsy screamed “You can’t ask that!” However, Burke being involved is the only reason to do a cover-up or lie about his whereabouts or keep him from answering questions about direct evidence connected to him. John and Patsy wouldn’t have covered for each other.
What do I think happened that night?
The family came home at 9:30/10pm. John did put JBR to sleep and her mom did go in and change her into a red sweater over her white shirt and longjohns. Burke, however, didn’t want to go to bed yet. John said in his interview that Burke wanted to build a car garage toy he got, but he made him go to bed. John goes to bed where Patsy is already asleep after changing JBR.
Thinking everyone is asleep around midnight, Burke gets his flashlight and decides to sneak back downstairs to get his favorite snack, pineapple and milk, and to play with his new toys. I tend to think Burke made the pineapple alone because Patsy would’ve known to clean it up with everything else if she’d known about it.
He gets to the kitchen, makes the bowl and a cup of tea. He finishes the tea, but only eats some of the pineapple. He grabs his flashlight and goes down to the basement. The basement is known as Burke’s toy room. He has an entire train room down there, he often whittles in the wine cellar and is basically left to roam down there a lot according to their maid:
At some point, JBR wakes up in the night. Maybe she heard Burke in the kitchen (her room is above it and even Burke said he could hear the fridge open from his bed). Maybe she hears him playing with toys. Maybe she wet herself and is doing her usual routine of changing and going to his room, but notices he isn’t there. Either way, she’s a six year old and she wants to play too so she goes to find him. Downstairs, she sees the leftover bowl of pineapple and grabs a piece. She heads down to the basement to play with her brother.
Burke has been in the wine cellar, we know this because he later says he opened the gifts that were being kept there (see below), even though Patsy lies and says she did this. She most likely wants to distance Burke from the scene. When JBR comes down, perhaps he sees a chance to “play doctor,” since he believes his parents are asleep. I think this is actually when the paintbrush comes into play. Or, maybe, they just get into a fight over the gifts.
The previous abrasions caused to JBR were thought to be caused by digital penetration. Perhaps, Burke saw his mom’s paintbrush in the basement and escalated things. According to the autopsy, the paintbrush was inserted once and removed. The FBI thought this was odd if it was a pedophile: they’d probably do something similar to sexual stimulation, not jam it in and remove it once. Their conclusion was that it was staged to hide previous sexual abuse. As you see from Dr. Meyer’s report below, this is another grey area the Ramseys took advantage of. It sounds horrific, too horrific for a 9yo to do it, but the actual physical evidence was not consistent with torture:
But, imagine a young boy who has been abusing his little sister. Or you just hit her and she’s knocked out and you want to try something extreme to wake her up. He happens to see a paintbrush around, escalates the situation, she screams in pain, jumps up and says she’s going to tell mom. Burke grabs her by the collar to stop her (see below, does this sound like the action of an intruder?).
We know someone grabbed the front of her shirt because it had a wrinkle pattern that looked like someone grabbed it. She scratches at her neck and his hands to get him to let go, which is how DNA ends up under her fingernail. When he lets go, she turns around to run. He grabs his flashlight and hits her on the head. She falls unconscious.
Burke is now a scared little boy who is trying to wake his sister up. He grabs the train tracks that are later found next to her body and starts poking her in the back and in the neck to get her to wake up. She doesn’t. He realizes he might be in big trouble now. He can’t let his parents see what he did. He breaks the paintbrush. He wraps a cord around the broken brush with a knot and decides to strangle her with it. Maybe he thinks that won’t look as bad as what he actually did with it. Or, maybe he simply left the paintbrush there and when Patsy and John find her, they create the garrote to hide what Burke did with the paint brush.
Whoever strangles her isn’t strong enough to break her windpipe or they were careful not to use too much pressure. However, it is enough to kill her with the head wound. After the murder, Burke will casually talk to a friend about possible ways JBR was strangled and how JBR may have been hit in the head. Officers will note he seems comfortable talking about violence. Others believe the garrote is part of the parent’s staging.
Now, Burke or his parents have to hide his crime. Maybe he’s angry and also breaks the Train Room window (some believe it was broken that morning and John’s story about breaking it months prior was a lie.) Maybe he’s so angry about what he’s done, he regresses to smearing poop in JBR’s room. He tries to hide what he’s done and grabs a blanket off of JBR’s bed. He doesn’t realize her Barbie pajamas are wrapped up in it. He goes back to the basement, throws the blanket over it and goes to bed. Some think the parents carefully wrapped her in the blanket with her favorite pajamas, however.
At some point, Patsy wakes up, well before 5:30am. They had to be at the airport at 7am and she hadn’t finished packing yet. We know this because there were open suitcases with clothes in them in the room next to JonBenet’s. Or, maybe she never went to sleep.
When Patsy greets officers after the 911 call, she’s wearing the same clothes she wore to the party at the White’s the night before and she has a full face of make-up. She says she threw on the same clothes from the night before. The Crime Junkies episode and Netflix treat this as normal for her. However, it wasn’t according to her maid. Her friends say she’d never be caught dead wearing the same clothes two days in a row. The family was also headed to the airport for a trip that morning, why travel in party clothes and not something more comfortable if you don’t care? Investigators see it as a sign that she didn’t actually go to bed.
Did Patsy stay up because she heard a fight start between JBR and Burke that escalated into him hitting her? Did Burke sneak into JBR’s room with his flashlight to leave the feces, wake her up and start a fight that ended with him hitting her in the head and Patsy rushing into the room to turn on the only light that worked?
Personally, I do believe her when she said she went to JBR’s room first that morning and noticed she wasn’t there. If John or Patsy had known about the pineapple or feces, they probably would’ve cleaned those parts up, so these activities probably happened without their knowledge.
If she saw JBR wasn’t in bed, she most likely went to search for her. She goes downstairs, she checks the dining room, eventually she goes to check Burke’s playroom downstairs. Maybe she notices he left his new toys out, but she doesn’t see JonBenet. Maybe she notices the door to the wine cellar is partially open. We do know her palm prints are found on the wine cellar door in two locations. She finds JonBenet and screams, waking John up.
John and Patsy go into panic mode. They know Burke has been violent with JBR before, they probably suspect he did it immediately. They can’t lose two children or have Burke admit to any abuse in the home, so they decide to cover it up and make it look like a kidnapping. Patsy or John decide to write a ransom note. He dictates it to Patsy, she writes it. He’s very specific about two things in the letter: they cannot call the police or tell anyone and John must bring a large enough bag to carry the $118k broken down in small bills. He pulls out a large, blue Samsonite suitcase. Later, JBR’s DNA will be found inside this suitcase according to Det. Lou Smit.
This, perhaps, is a clever attempt by John to find a way to remove JBR’s body, I believe. He intended to put JBR in the suitcase and leave the house to dispose of it. The letter would give him cover for leaving the house before calling 911 (“I went to get the cash, they told us not to call,” he could say). However, this didn’t work. Rigor mortis had already set in, they couldn’t get JBR into the suitcase.
Det. Lou Smit offered that theory on Larry King when he leaked info that JBR’s DNA was found on a duvet in the suitcase and he thinks the intruder tried to leave with the body in the suitcase, but couldn’t get it through the window. I don’t think this is realistic. Most likely, she had previously used the duvet and Fleet put the suitcase there. However, if Smit knows there’s DNA beyond the duvet, that really only points back to the parents.
Why would an intruder just hope a perfectly-sized suitcase is there to help smuggle her out that window? Smit believes they changed course and killed her because the suitcase wouldn’t fit (there were scuff marks on the wall). If you’re a kidnapper with only one small, awkward window well to leave through, wouldn’t you prepare?
It doesn’t matter, the parents have to pivot now anyway and leave her in the basement while still making this look like a kidnapping. Patsy gets duct tape and puts it over her mouth. The FBI, Boulder PD and coroner believe the tape was placed on JonBenet after she was dead. Why put tape over a dead or unconscious girl’s mouth?
The tape also had Patsy’s from the jacket she wore that night at the White’s (see below) . That means the tape definitely came from the house. John said he carried JBR into the house. Patsy went in to change her, but most likely removed the tape from JBR’s mouth in the basement. It wouldn’t make sense for Patsy’s jacket fibers from that night to be on it if this were brought in by an intruder.
Remember back when I said the Ramsey’s might’ve snuck tape out through Pam? Did the intruder just hope they’d also be able to find duct tape in the house? They didn’t bring it with them for a kidnapping? And why would you need duct tape if you she’s knocked out, bleeding from her mouth and mucous is running down her face? Does it make sense for an intruder to take time at this crucial moment to go search the house for duct tape when the girl is incapable of talking or moving from the head injury?
This is the family staging the scene. John ties loose restraints around her wrists. They tuck the blanket in around her. Some believe this is when John may have used the paintbrush to hide his previous sexual assault or he made the garrote to hide Burke’s assault if you can’t believe that Burke made this tool.
It’s time for the Ramseys to call 911 and put on a show, Patsy is yelling into the phone. At some point, this wakes Burke up or he was already up. He asks them “Please what should I do” (this is according to the CBS enhancement of the 911 call, the Aerospace enhancement doesn’t have this). Thinking she hung up the 911 call, his father yells “We’re not talking to you!” His mother says “Help me, Jesus. Help me, Jesus.” Burke asks, “Well what did you find?” and the call clicks off.
Within minutes, the police will be here, but the Ramseys aren’t dumb. They already wiped JBR’s body with a navy blue cloth to mix up DNA. Unsourced fibers are eventually found on her vaginal area. The coroner says it looks like someone tried to “wipe clean” the body with a cloth, but a matching cloth is never found in the Ramsey home. Perhaps Pam removes it when she’s given access to the scene. Maybe an intruder used something with them, but if you’re concerned about leaving evidence on her…why not just take her body like you intended?
Some have mentioned that it was the 90s and people weren’t thinking about DNA. Well, I’m sorry, but I’m old and that’s not true! On top of that, guess what case happened the year prior? OJ Simpsons! That was a huge case where the main attraction was DNA. OJ was found innocent because of DNA. There’s no way the Ramseys weren’t aware of the case.
In fact, in their first interview a week after their daughter dies on CNN, Patsy mentions OJ. They were aware of him when their daughter died:
So, yeah, the Ramseys know it matters that only the Ramseys have been in the home and they really want to make sure there’s other DNA around the body. They call their closest friends and tell them to rush over immediately, there’s an emergency and they need them. Hopefully, this will muddy the crime scene. Fleet White comes and immediately heads to the basement, but doesn’t see JBR in the wine cellar because it’s dark and he can’t find the light. He notices the train room window is closed, but it is broken. He moves the suitcase that happens to be there over to look into the windowsill for glass. At some point after this, John goes back down and opens the window.
As the police start to arrive and his friends begin searching the house, John grows frustrated that 2 police officers have failed to find JBR in the wine cellar. When Det. Arendt suggests that he and Fleet go search the house top to bottom to find anything off, he realizes now is his chance. Fleet and John first go to the train room. Fleet asks about the broken window and John says he did it months prior. According to John, they look around for any new broken glass.
Then, as Fleet is still in the train room, John heads to the wine cellar door. With Fleet standing 20ft away, John opens the door and says, “Oh my God, Oh my God.” Fleet follows behind him and sees John turn the light on. For a moment, Fleet considers that he had just walked in that room and couldn’t see anything without a light but John screamed before the light was even on, but he doesn’t make much of that for now. John will eventually say he could see the white blanket. Yet Fleet and a police officer who peered in the room could not.
Rather than risk someone finding the body where the crime occurred, John sees another chance to muddy DNA evidence. He picks up JBR, despite it being clear she is dead, rigor mortis has set in, and rushes her upstairs to “get her help.” Det. Arndt tells John to put lay her at the top of the stairs. He asks if she’s dead and moans when the officer confirms she is. Det. Arndt moves JBR’s body to the living room, but before she can tell anyone not to touch her, John places a blanket over her and a sweatshirt.
He lays on her and cries, he lays next to her and puts his arm around her. Det. Arndt tells him not to touch her hands. Next, Patsy comes in and does the same, laying all over JBR. Their friends stand around JBR and pray. If there was any hope of getting DNA from a single suspect who interacted with the body, that hope is gone now. The Ramseys have successfully created an “unidentified” third profile. I think if this DNA ever does match to anything, it will prove to be touch DNA unrelated to the killer.
Anyway, there’s too much information out there for this to still feel like a mystery. The only mystery is why the Ramsey Family has worked so hard to create a different narrative through their PR, but even that isn’t a mystery.
Is there a way to prove what you said and solve this?
Well yes, and I imagine the police have already done this. You’ll remember when you started reading this an hour ago, that I told you feces were found on a candy box in JBR’s room and in a pair of pajama bottoms that were too big for her? Well, there’s your answer. Examinations can tell you how old or fresh stool is. The contents of the stool could match the meal served at the Whites and police would know someone in the family was in her room after everyone went to sleep, smearing poop on her candy.
Odds are, the poop was fresh. It’s one piece of evidence the Ramseys have never addressed or tried to spin. It’s also a detail the cops rarely mention. With all that publicly available info, isn’t it odd that this detail is the one that hasn’t been mentioned a million times? If Burke did this in her room that night, did it start a fight? Did he see an intruder while playing this prank in her room? If the poop is old, it’s irrelevant. It’s just…that that’s highly unlikely.
The Ramsey’s maid confirmed she was at the house on the 23rd and there was a huge party. She probably would’ve noticed large, stained grey pajama pants in JBR’s room. She was supposed to go back on the 24th, but didn’t. However, Christmas Eve, JBR sleeps in Burke’s room according to his testimony to police. She wanted Burke to wake her up early for Christmas presents. Seems unlikely he could’ve done this that night without the parents or JBR noticing it Christmas Day. I tend to think John and Patsy didn’t know about the feces incident or they would’ve cleaned it up.
Another way we know the pajama bottoms were probably left Christmas night? Patsy says in her interview with police that she checked JBR’s bed Christmas morning. If the accident happened then, Patsy surely would’ve noticed soiled pajama bottoms. Plus, she even says that JBR had on pink pajamas, not grey, large pajama bottoms.
The pajama bottoms were very visible in JBR’s bathroom (each bedroom had its own bathroom), so a maid, JBR or a parent would’ve seen them. Patsy definitely would’ve seen them that Christmas morning. They weren’t hidden or tucked behind anything. If Patsy and John came right home from the White’s and took JBR to bed, did they not notice them right next to the toilet?
Investigators aren’t able to ask Patsy about these pants until 1998, a year and a half after the murder. She said they were JBR’s, not Burke’s despite appearing to be his size and “boys flannel pajama bottoms.” She said it was from JBR not wiping properly. She couldn’t recall when JBR wore them last. Kolar says it’s hard to know if she’s lying about who they belonged to or not in his verified AMA 4 years ago.
So, let’s say Patsy was lying about who the pajama pants belong to. Doesn’t that mean it’s possible Burke left the feces the night of the murder? He said he got up after everyone went to bed, did he do it then and that’s why his parents didn’t know? If the police have confirmed when this happened, it throws everything the family has ever said out the window. There’s a completely different timeline. That puts Burke in JBR’s bathroom and bedroom. And, if you have a hard time with my theory that Burke was involved with the paintbrush at all, some people think it went this way:
The family came home. Patsy and John tell the kids to go straight to bed, but Burke wants to stay up. After his dad reads him to sleep with the flashlight like he says in Dr. Phil, he goes downstairs. Maybe he makes some pineapple and this wakes up JBR. She eats some of his snack. Either this made him mad or something involving the gifts did and he hits her in the head. He tries to poke her awake with the train tracks, but she doesn’t move. Some time passes, maybe 30 minutes, an hour. He gets nervous, maybe he starts yelling for her to wake up, eventually getting Patsy to come downstairs.
Patsy immediately tells him to go to his room, noticing that JBR isn’t moving. JBR isn’t bleeding, so maybe Burke doesn’t realize how hard he hit her or that she’s really hurt. Maybe he throws a tantrum, angry that he can’t finish his snack (you’ll notice there’s a lot in the bowl) or play with his new Christmas toys because his sister got him caught.
Burke storms upstairs and, out of anger, smears feces on JBR’s candy box and goes to his room. He falls asleep, unaware his parents are creating the scene. He has no idea what they’re do. They have no idea he left feces in JBR’s room or left pineapple out. Now the Ramseys have to stage a crime so horrific that no one would ever consider a 9-year old who previously hit his sister did it again with an object he was often seen with, his bedtime flashlight.
Theoretically, John may have a problem now too. If he’s been abusing his children, he needs to conceal it. If Burke has been “playing doctor” and Patsy and John know that, then they both know they’ll need to hide evidence of that. There will be an autopsy and there needs to be doubt as to where the previous injuries come from. This also explains why they can’t just call 911 after JBR is hit. This is a serious head injury, if they take her to the hospital, they might do an exam and see the prior sexual abuse. They conceal evidence of this abuse and stage the scene.
They miss the feces and pineapple, though.
It also would explain Burke’s comment on the enhanced 911 call. “What did you find?” He might’ve thought they found the pajama bottoms and the candy box. He stays in his room all morning because he thinks he’s in trouble for that. Eventually they tell him JBR was fine after their fight. She went to bed and he didn’t do anything bad. Everyone went to sleep, an intruder came in and now she’s missing.
At 9, Burke might’ve truly believed this was the case. He just has to keep his temper tantrum a secret. He wouldn’t want anyone to know what he did in her room anyway.
When a few people involved in the case did a panel in 2016, they said: The JonBenét Ramsey case is not a mystery. It just remains unsolved. Because the Ramseys want it that way. The grand jury, however, unraveled that mystery and wanted to indict the parents for child abuse.
Some people believe the feces information and who it belonged to was in the grand jury trial because it was relevant. Some people think it wasn’t included because it was found to be irrelevant or was JBR’s. Well, it’s sealed, so we don’t know! Either way, it potentially points to a 9-year old being involved in the incident and that’s where the real problem with the idea of “justice” in this case comes in.
If the feces were relevant and Burke hit her, the DA knew they couldn’t prosecute a 9-year old in Colorado and Boulder PD knew they couldn’t leak the source of the feces that confirmed an intruder couldn’t have been in her room if it was related to a child. Without Burke’s exact involvement, you can’t say which parent did what and they can point to the kid or each other (or just John to Patsy, now). It’s a no-win case. There will never be charges.
The only hope this case will be solved? If all the grand jury documents are released. Colorado has strict laws around this, but Fleet White and officers in the case have sued to get them released in the past and ~4 pages have been released. The total indictment is 18 pages. White and the Boulder PD seem to think making the grand jury documents public will solve this for everyone.
When those 4 pages were released, the judge initially decided to release all of them, then changed his mind. Kolar believes it’s because it contained information about a juvenile:
The grand jury who recommended the parents be charged with child abuse for knowing their child was in danger, but not providing help seemed to solve the case. Of course, most people are only just finding out the grand jury made this recommendation because it came out in 2013. The DA and the Ramseys kept that information sealed for 14 years and the Ramseys presented this as them being “cleared.” That was, once again, far from the truth. The grand jury did recommend charges, but the DA declined to move forward.
Netflix tells you the answer to this case is DNA, but the answer sits with the grand jury. While the documentary does mention that the jury did want to convict Patsy and John of 2 charges each, it doesn’t get into the details. The specifics make clear the grand jury believed that Burke was involved. Why does Netflix make this theory sound so ridiculous?
The charges were child abuse and “unlawfully, knowingly and feloniously render assistance to a person.”:
COUNT IV (a)
On or between December 25, and December 26, 1996, in Boulder County, Colorado, John Bennett Ramsey/Patricia Paugh Ramsey did unlawfully, knowingly, recklessly and feloniously permit a child to be unreasonably placed in a situation which posed a threat of injury to the child's life or health, which resulted in the death of JonBenet Ramsey, a child under the age of sixteen.
As to Count IV (a), Child Abuse Resulting in Death: A TRUE BILL
and
COUNT VII
On or about December 25, and December 26, 1996 in Boulder County, Colorado, John Bennett Ramsey/Patricia Paugh Ramsey did unlawfully, knowingly and feloniously render assistance to a person, with intent to hinder, delay and prevent the discovery, detention, apprehension, prosecution, conviction and punishment of such person for the commission of a crime, knowing the person being assisted had committed and was suspected of the crime of Murder in the First Degree and Child Abuse Resulting in Death.
As to Count VII, Accessory to a Crime: A TRUE BILL
If the jury thought the only two people involved were Patsy and John and charged them with assisting each other, one would be charged with the underlying crime. The fact that no one is charged with the underlying crime points to someone who couldn’t be charged, like a child. Colorado Attorney Lisa Polansky agrees with this take in the CBS documentary:
Outside of those documents that made the grand jury feel a third person was involved, is there any hope of solving this? Well, someone could confess.
EDITED TO ADD:
Yeah, I’m back I’m so sorry, I forgot to mention one more thing.
John Mark Karr - The Netflix doc spends a lot of time with this suspect and his voice messages to a detective on the case. They almost make it seem like he could be a legit suspect if only the DNA was a match. However, Karr has an alibi: he was in Georgia with his family according to them.
Oh, also Boulder PD found pictures of him in Georgia with his family within 18 hours of hearing he was a suspect. They felt the DA never should’ve brought him in. He also didn’t know any private details of the case. He only knew publicly available information. As I told you above, the Ramseys had that damn website with all their info!
Outside of that, the nickname for JBR’s grandma was known in the pageant circle. Her grandma planned most of it. If he attended shows, he may have heard it. However, the doc makes it seem like this wasn’t known at all. Anyway, Karr was cleared in 2006 for those reasons.
Most people do not consider him a serious suspect and view him as a mentally ill pedophile seeking fame. It’s insulting his pedophile audio fan fiction is given serious time in this documentary and he’s getting the fame he wanted. However, it helps the Ramseys, so that may have guided the director’s desire to spend so much time on him. I think that is another bad decision and wanted to make that clear too.
Interview with JBR’s nanny, Linda Hoffman-Pugh in Perfect Murder, Perfect Town saying Nedra did most of the pageant planning/was involved
Some people asked if I had any layouts/t
*Note, I edited this on 11/29 at 9:57pm PST to add more links if you read it before that!
This was an excellent write up and mirrors a lot of my own thoughts on the case. Specifically the part where you say that all the things that happened to her could’ve been done by a child. I think anyone who hears about the case from the first time, can note the absurdity in all the things that happened that night and how juvenile and unserious it all seemed to be. Right down to pineapples and milk being had for a snack (I’ve never heard of ANYONE making this for themselves, and it sounds childish by its very nature).
The one question I continue to have is why do they keep speaking? It is frustrating to hear this family lie time and time again. The disservice they do to their daughter’s memory is beyond comprehension. And why lie about certain aspects of the case? Like Burke being asleep, or whether her shirt was red or white.
They were affluent people in an affluent community, and therefore were afforded a high level of trust when it came to the crime scene. Police never thought this affluent family who was involved in the community would have anything to hide, and thus they got away with a lot concerning the crime scene.
I think at this point, certain parties want to maintain the idea of innocence for the family, because it makes the police work look horrible by association as well. It makes them look bumbling and unprofessional.
At this point, I wish we’d move past trying to ask the Ramsey’s questions. They will never tell us the truth. Why they keep agreeing to interviews is another question entirely.