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- [00:01]
Carter Roy
Hi listeners, it's Carter. Before today's episode of Murder True Crime Stories, I want to tell you about another podcast I am hosting I know you'll love. Crime House and AE are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series the First 48. Each week I'll take you inside a landmark homicide case. The interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 4048 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This is crime house. Christmas is supposed to be all about magic. The presents are wrapped, the doors are locked, the kids are finally asleep. And for a few hours, everything goes quiet and still. Of all the nights of the year, it's the one that's supposed to feel like nothing bad can reach you. But safe is mostly a story we tell ourselves. And on Christmas night in 1996, in a big house in Boulder, Colorado, that story. That evening, a six year old girl fell asleep in her own bed with her new presents nearby and a family trip just a morning away. But she never got to play with those gifts. And she never got to go on that vacation because the next day she was found dead. At first, her parents thought she'd been kidnapped. Hours earlier, someone had left a ransom note on the back stairs, pages long, demanding money and prom a phone call. Her parents waited and waited, but there was no kidnapper and there would be no call. Their little girl had been inside the house the whole time. And the closer detectives looked, the stranger the case got. The evidence pointed in every direction at once. At her mother, her father, her brother. A stranger who slipped in through a basement window nearly 30 years later. Almost everyone has a theory, and almost no one has an answer. This is the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy and this is True Crime Stories, a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, with Friday's episode covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the Crime House community. Please rate, review and follow the show and for early ad free action access to every episode. Subscribe to Crime House plus you'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive bonus content. To join go to crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Stories show page on Apple Podcasts. Welcome back to another episode of Murder Mystery Fridays, where I'm covering unsolved cases with questions that I can't get out of my head. The ones where the evidence points in multiple directions and every theory feels like a possibility. Today, I'm revisiting a case I've covered before but truly can't let go of. I bet you know of it. The murder of JonBenet Ramsey. On December 26, 1996, the six year old was found murdered in the basement of her family's home in Boulder, Colorado, hours after her parents reported her kidnapped. The investigation was botched from the beginning. The crime scene was never secured, friends came and went. JonBenet's body was moved as soon as it was found, and evidence that might have cracked the case was lost in the first few hours and within days suspicion had settled on the people closest to her her own family. Nearly three decades later, no one has ever been charged. But the case isn't closed. Right now, investigators are retesting old evidence with DNA tools that didn't exist in 1996. JonBenet's father is pushing to name her killer through genetic genealogy, and a new documentary has drawn a fresh wave of attention and a flood of new tips. After all these years of dead ends, the investigation is more active than it's been in a very long time, and it feels like maybe JonBenet will finally get justice. All that and more coming up. If you've ever tried to find a psychiatrist, you know how frustrating it is to hear that there's a six month waiting list or that they don't take your insurance. It can make managing your mental health feel completely overwhelming, but Talk Iatry is changing that. Talk Iatry is a full service virtual psychiatry practice that helps you skip the long wait times and get real medical care in just a few days. Unlike regular talk therapy, talkiatry focuses on specialized psychiatric care. Their licensed clinicians take the time to truly understand your needs, offering professional diagnoses and ongoing medication management for conditions like adhd, anxiety, depression, and more. You get a personalized treatment plan and see the same provider every time so you can actually measure your progress. 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- [06:54]
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- [08:16]
Carter Roy
Before she was a tabloid cover, before she was a theory people argued about online, JonBenet Ramsey was a six year old who loved to perform. She had blonde hair, blue eyes and a winning smile. She liked singing, dancing and being the center of attention. And on the morning of December 25, 1996, what she wanted most in the world was the bike Santa left under the tree. She spent that Christmas afternoon doing exactly what most 6 year olds do on Christmas playing, showing off her presents, being a kid. She was in kindergarten that year at a Boulder elementary school. And by every account, she was outgoing and full of energy. The kind of kid who lit up when people were watching. She had a big brother, Burke, who was 9. She had a mom who adored her and a dad who, when he wasn't at the office, doted on her. On paper, she had the safest, luckiest childhood a kid could ask for. That's where I want to start. Because so much of this story is about everyone except JonBenet. The detectives, the lawyers, the documentary crews, the strangers with theories. So before any of them get their turn, let's sit with the little girl and the family she was born into. Because that family is where the questions begin. JonBenet's parents met in Atlanta, Georgia in 1979. John Ramsey was in his mid-30s. He was quiet, controlled and serious about his work. He'd been married once before and was raising three kids from that marriage. He was also building a career in the early days of the computer business. The kind that would soon make him a very rich man. Patsy Paw couldn't have been more different. She was a decade younger, warm, funny and impossible to miss in a room. She'd grown up in Parkersburg, West Virginia and studied journalism at West Virginia University. But back home, the thing she was best known for was a sash. In 1977, during her sophomore year, she was crowned Miss West Virginia and went on to compete for Miss America in Atlantic City. She didn't take the national crown, but the pageant world had shaped her and she carried it with her for the rest of her life. John and Patsy fell for each other fast and got married in 1980 when Patsy was 23. He was the steady, ambitious provider and she was the spark. But it was also a big adjustment for her. Overnight she went from a recent college graduate to a wife and a stepmother, walking into a ready made family and helping raise John's three children. She also pitched in at his company as it grew. Together they made a good team. It looked like the start of a great life and for a long time it was. Genuinely was. John's business kept climbing and in 1991 the family left Atlanta for Boulder, Colorado, where the company he now ran, Access Graphics, was based. Access Graphics sold computer systems and it was about to get enormous. By 1996, it was owned by the defense contractor Lockheed Martin and was posting more than a billion billion in sales a year with John as its president. He wasn't just comfortable, he was wealthy in a way most people only see on television. John was a builder at heart of companies, of families. The kind of man who solved problems by putting his head down and grinding through them. That instinct served him well in business. By then he and Patsy had two children of their own. A son, Burke, born in 1987, and daughter, JonBenet, born on August 6, 1990. If you're wondering about that unusual name, it's a blend of her father's first and middle names. John Bennett. The family settled into a big house on 15th Street, a sprawling, multi story place that Patsy threw herself into decorating and remodeling room by room. It was the kind of home where you could host the whole neighborhood. And the Ramses did. They were known for their parties, their generosity and their place near the center of Boulder's social scene. Among their closest friends were Fleet and Priscilla White. By all accounts, Patsy loved her new community in Colorado and she was devoted to her son and her husband. But the bond she shared with JonBenet was special. And it only grew when JonBenet followed in Patsy's footsteps and started doing pageants. To Patsy it was something a mother and daughter could share. The dresses, the rehearsals, the lights, the trophies. So when JonBenet was still very young, Patsy started entering her in children's pageants. And JonBenet turned out to be a natural. She racked up titles. America's Royal Miss Little Miss Charlevoix, Little Miss Colorado National, Tiny Miss Beauty. There were singing lessons and dance classes and custom made costumes. Patsy was hands on coaching her daughter on how to walk a stage, how to wave, how to win over a panel of judges. By all accounts, those years were some of the happiest of Patsy's life. The pageants were pure joy for her and her daughter both and she poured herself into them. But those happy years had been hard won. By this point the Ramses had already lived through real loss. In January 1992, John's oldest daughter from his first marriage to 22 year old Elizabeth was killed in a car crash. Burying a grown daughter was a wound that would never fully close. And the family was still recovering from the loss when they got more bad news. In 1993 at the age of 36, Patsy was diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. It was advanced and the prognosis was terrifying. She went through punishing rounds of chemotherapy and surgery and she fought it with everything she had. Against all odds, it worked. The cancer went into remission and it stayed there for years. So By Christmas of 1996 the Ramses had every reason to feel grateful. John's company was booming. Their two kids were thriving. From the outside they looked like a family that had taken its hits and come out the other side stronger. On Christmas night they had dinner at the Whites home, just a few minutes away. The families were close. The kids played together. It was an ordinary happy holiday evening. By around nine or ten o' clock the Ramses drove home. JonBenet had reportedly fallen asleep on the way and was carried inside and put to bed. The next morning the whole family was due to fly out for a trip. First to Michigan to see John's older children, then onto a holiday cruise. The whole family went to bed that night believing the hardest thing waiting for them in the morning was an early alarm and a flight to catch. Patsy was up First, a little before six on the morning of December 26th. She came down the back staircase, still half asleep, heading for the kitchen and a pot of coffee. But on one of the lower steps, she found something that didn't belong there. A stack of handwritten notes. They ran two and a half pages and said JonBenet had been kidnapped. It demanded $118,000 for her safe return and it warned the Ramses in detail not to call the police. Patsy ran upstairs to JonBenet's room. The bed was empty. Then she got John and they did what the note told them not to. At 5:52am, Patsy called 911 and reported her daughter kidnapped. The first officer arrived within minutes and John handed over the note. It was bizarre, long, rambling, almost theatrical, like something out of a movie. It claimed the kidnappers were a, quote, small foreign faction and it insisted JonBenet was safe for now. It spelled out detailed instructions for gathering the money and threatened her life if the family called the police. And it promised a phone call between 8 and 10am to arrange the handoff. Think about how strange that is for a ransom note. Real kidnappers tend to be brief. This one went on for pages. Whoever wrote it took their time. So that's what everyone else did too. They waited. And here is where this case starts to go wrong. Not in one dramatic, obvious moment, but in a slow, quiet, compounding way that would haunt the investigation for decades. As the morning wore on, the house filled up. The Ramses called friends, including Fleet and Priscilla White and their minister, Victim Advocates, arrived. Officers came and went. Police treated JonBenet's bedroom as off limits. But the rest of the house, not really. People moved through it for hours. They sat on furniture, made coffee, comforted each other, tidied up. Every one of those ordinary human gestures was quietly erasing whatever evidence the house might have held. Around 8:00am, a Boulder detective named Linda Arndt arrived to manage what everyone still believed was a kidnapping in progress. She was experienced with people in crisis and she did what made sense for a kidnapping. She stayed close to the parents and waited for the ransom call. But looking back, the response that morning broke nearly every rule in the book. John and Patsy were never separated, so no one could quietly compare their accounts of the night. The house was never sealed off as a crime scene, so footprints, fingerprints and fibers were all at the mercy of a house full of people moving freely from room to room. And no one did a careful top to bottom search of the house. Instead, everyone's attention stayed locked on the phone, waiting for a kidnapper to call. By early afternoon, the Ramses were still stuck in that limbo. No contact, no demand, nothing. Finally, Detective Arndt decided she couldn't just keep sitting there. Around 1pm she asked John, along with his friend Fleet White, to walk through the house and see if anything looked out of place or missing. Which is wild. Roughly seven hours into the investigation, the home still hadn't been properly searched, and a detective sent the father to look through his own house. Still, the two men started in the basement. They found a small window that was broken with a suitcase sitting underneath it. And then John pulled open the door to a little storage room. 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- [21:14]
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- [21:14]
Carter Roy
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- [21:19]
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The government gets a bad reputation, but did you know that? The roads under your feet, the forecast on your phone, the letter in your mailbox, that's all government, too. I'm Professor Lindsey Cormack, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Government that Doesn't Suck alongside Professor Professor Greg Jackson, who you may know from the hit podcast History that Doesn't Suck. Each episode we dig into the surprising story of an American institution, from the origins of the Internet to the National Park Service to the GI Bill, and so much more. You'll hear the stories behind them, plus a conversation with an expert who knows it inside and out. This is the real history of how we built the country under your feet. And you'll never look at any of the of it the same way again. Listen to and follow Government that Doesn't Suck. Available now, wherever you get your podcasts.
- [22:10]
Carter Roy
Evening. Buyer's remorse. Buy a new car. I'll be moving in. Let's get started.
- [22:17]
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- [22:20]
Carter Roy
You what?
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- [22:21]
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- [22:24]
Carter Roy
So there's no.
- [22:25]
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- [22:29]
Carter Roy
I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it.
- [22:34]
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- [22:43]
Carter Roy
was the afternoon of December 26, 1996. For most of the day, the Ramsey home in Boulder, Colorado, had been treated like the scene of a kidnapping. A house full of police and friends organized around a little girl everyone still believed was alive somewhere, waiting to be brought home. Then, just after one o', clock, John Ramsey went down to his basement and opened the door to a small storage room. What he found there ended one search and began another. That is still going on today. JonBenet was on the floor. She was partly wrapped in a blanket. Her wrists were bound. There was tape over her mouth, and a cord had been pulled tight around her neck, fastened to a broken paintbrush handle to twist it together. It's a device called a garrote. John didn't leave his daughter lying there. Whether it was shock or pure instinct, he tore the tape from her mouth, lifted her off the floor and carried her up the stairs, where he laid her down in the living room beside the Christmas tree. For a moment, the house full of people simply stopped and Patsy threw herself over the body. The minister gathered everyone around and led them in the Lord's Prayer. The waiting was over. The worst possible answer had been inside the house the entire time. As a human moment, it was almost unbearable. As a crime scene, it was a disaster. The single most important room in the house had been overlooked for hours. And then JonBenet was moved before a forensic team ever saw where she'd been left. And there's one more detail about that moment that I can't shake. Detective Arndt would later describe watching John carry his daughter up those stairs and feeling something turn over in her gut. She couldn't fully explain it, and she chose her words carefully for years afterward, but she came away believing she had just looked into the face of the person who did this. She had no proof, just a feeling in a hallway on the worst morning of a family's life. But that hunch that the answer was somewhere inside this house, inside this family, would shape everything that came next. It started the day after she died, on December 27th. The autopsy found that JonBenet had been struck, strangled and suffered a violent blow to the head, leaving a skull fracture more than 8 inches long. The official cause of death was asphyxiation by strangulation associated with the trauma to her head. There was also evidence consistent with sexual assault. Experts would argue about the specifics for years, and they never fully agreed. I'm going to leave it there because the disagreement matters more than the details and the details belong to her. The bottom line is that autopsy hadn't settled anything. So investigators kept circling back to the evidence that felt more solid. The things inside the house itself. And there were three pieces in particular they couldn't get past. The first was that ransom note. It turned out to have been written on a pad of paper from inside the Ramsey home. Investigators kept asking the same question. Why would an intruder who had already committed this crime sit down and compose pages of demands on the family's own notepad in their house, with the family asleep upstairs? The second was the number the note demanded. $118,000. An oddly specific figure. And it happened to be almost exactly the amount of a recent work bonus John had received. Investigators reportedly even found a check stub for that amount on his desk. So who exactly would know to ask for that number? And the third was the garrote. The paintbrush handle appeared to have come from inside the home. The killer, whoever they were, hadn't brought a weapon. They'd built one on the spot out of what was lying around for the Boulder detectives. All three pieces pointed the same direction, inward at the family. And then there was the biggest question the note raised. Who actually wrote it? At one point, investigators even turned up what looked like a discarded first attempt, A kind of practice note on a pad inside the house. Which only sharpened the question of who had sat down to write the real one. When experts compare the finished notes note against handwriting samples from John and Patsy, they were able to rule John out as its author. Patsy was a different story. The experts split. And while no one could ever prove she wrote it, no one was able to conclusively eliminate her either. It was the single most scrutinized document in the entire case. And after years of analysis, it's still unresolved. But the Ramseys saw exactly where this was heading. So within days, they hired attorneys. They gave fingerprints and DNA samples, but they largely stopped sitting down for police interviews. Now, hiring a lawyer is not a confession. Plenty of innocent people lawyer up. And the Ramses always said that's precisely why they did it. They could feel themselves being railroaded as suspects, while, in their view, no one was seriously hunting for an intruder. But to the police and to a public that was now watching very closely, it looked like a wealthy family circling the wagons. And the public was watching. JonBenet's murder happened during a quiet stretch of the holiday news cycle. The family was rich and photogenic. And JonBenet wasn't simply a murdered child. She was a child who had been photographed and filmed over and over on a pageant stage. So those images went every everywhere. Footage of a six year old in stage makeup and elaborate costumes ran on a loop on national television, in newspapers, and on the covers of supermarket tabloids. In a lot of ways, this case helped build the modern true crime media machine. The round the clock speculation, the talking head experts, the armchair detectives convinced they'd cracked it from the couch. And a lot of people watching that pageant footage were unsettled by it. They felt she'd been made to look far older than she was. I want to be honest about what happened next, because it got ugly. A lot of that public discomfort curdled into anger. And the anger got aimed squarely at JonBenet's mother and disturbingly, at JonBenet herself. The question people kept asking was some version of what kind of family puts a little girl on a stage like that? And for many people, that question became a shortcut to a verdict long before anyone had any facts. So let me just say this plainly. A 6 year old is never responsible for how the adults around her dressed her or for how strangers chose to look at her. But in early 1997, the Court of public opinion was not in the mood for that distinction. The Ramses tried to push back. On January 1, 1997, less than a week after the murder, John and Patsy sat for an interview on cnn, and they pleaded for help finding the killer. Patsy looked into the camera and warned other parents in Boulder that, quote, there is a killer on the loose. To some viewers, that was a shattered, grieving mother doing everything she could to find her daughter's killer. Two others, it was a performance. A polished former pageant queen playing to the cameras. And they thought it was even more suspicious that the family was willing to go on national television, but wouldn't sit down for a formal police interview. Well, that's this case in a nutshell. Almost every fact in it can be read two completely different ways, depending on what you already believe. The same maddening question over and over. Are they heartbroken or hiding something? Before that question could be answered, the investigation began to turn on itself. Detective Linda Arndt, who had been there that first morning, took a savage beating in the press over how the scene was handled. By May 1997, Boulder police pulled her off the case entirely. She resigned in 1999 and later went on Good Morning America and said, in essence, that she knew who was responsible. She wouldn't name the person, but she left little doubt that she still believed the answer was inside that family. The detective who took over the case shared that instinct. But he aimed with far more precision. His name was Steve Thomas. Thomas had come up through narcotics. JonBenet's murder was pretty much his first homicide investigation. And his critics never let anyone forget it. He built a theory that centered on Patsy. His thinking went like this. Late on Christmas night, under enormous stress, something went terribly wrong between mother and daughter, and JonBenet was fatally hurt. The trigger in Thomas telling was something as small as a bedwetting accident. Then he believed the family staged an elaborate kidnapping to cover it up. Writing the note and building the garrote to sell the story of an intruder. Not everyone bought it. And the loudest skeptic was a detective the district attorney's office had specifically brought in to help a veteran named Lou Smit. Smit had decades of homicide experience behind him, and he reached the exact opposite conclusion. He believed an intruder did this. Someone who got into the house, possibly through that broken basement window, and attacked JonBenet. He pointed to the unidentified male DNA found on her body. He pointed to the window and the suitcase. He pointed to marks on her skin that he believed had come from a stun gun. So now you had two seasoned investigators who working the same murder, each absolutely certain the other was wrong. Thomas thought Smit was chasing a phantom intruder who never existed. Smit thought the department had locked onto the family with tunnel vision and was letting a dangerous killer walk free. The two camps could barely stand to be in the same room. When it came to the Ramses, Lou Smit was one of the only investigators who took treated them as victims rather than suspects. They held onto that even as the detectives feuded. The case was moving toward a decision of a different kind. In 1998, the district attorney convened a grand jury to weigh possible charges. A grand jury is a strange, secret thing. Ordinary citizens sworn to silence, hearing evidence the public never sees, deciding only whether there's enough to charge someone, not whether they're guilty. For more than a year, this one would weigh the case against the Ramses. Behind closed doors around the same time, investigators finally turned to someone they had mostly left alone. Burke, JonBenet's big brother, had been nine years old. On the night of the murder, police had largely kept their distance from him, partly to protect a child, partly because the stage scene seemed too elaborate to be the work of a kid. But in 1998, they sat him down with a psychologist. Burke described his memory of that morning and parts of it didn't quite square with what his parents had told police. In particular, the question of Whether he'd actually been asleep through all of was a loose thread. It didn't lead anywhere conclusive at the time. But the investigation was about to lose both of its Central figures. In August 1998, Steve Thomas resigned. He left with a scorching letter accusing the district attorney's office of obstructing the case and refusing to support its own detectives. That same fall, Lou Smit resigned too, with the mirror image complaint. He warned that a very dangerous killer was still out there and that the authorities were wasting their energy on the Ramses. Two lead detectives, opposite theories, both gone, both convinced the system had failed. JonBenet then In October 1999, after more than a year of testimony, the grand jury reached a decision. They voted to indict John and Patsy Ramsey not for murder, but on charges of child abuse resulting in death and accessory to a crime. And then the district attorney, Alex Hunter, refused to sign it. He announced publicly that he didn't believe he could prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt, so he would not be filing any charges. What he did not announce, what almost no one outside that room knew, was that the grand jury had actually voted to charge the parents. That vote was was sealed for years. The public was left to assume the grand jury had simply come up empty and that the Ramseys had effectively been cleared. The family let that impression stand. They left Boulder, moved back to Atlanta, and tried to build some kind of life out of the wreckage. The case went cold. And then out of nowhere, nowhere, a man on the other side of the planet started sending emails claiming that he was the one who killed JonBenet Ramsey.
- [39:32]
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- [40:29]
Carter Roy
By the early 2000s, the murder of JonBenet Ramsey looked frozen solid. A grand jury vote no one knew about. Locked away, two lead detectives gone. A family in Atlanta trying to disappear from the headlines. And then came the emails. Starting in 2002, a man using the name Daxis began writing to Michael Tracy, a University of Colorado professor who had produced documentaries about about the case. Over the next four years, the messages grew darker and more specific until the writer flatly claimed he had been there when JonBenet died and that her death had been an accident. Tracy was skeptical at first. People confessed to famous crimes for all sorts of reasons. But the writers seemed to know things.
- [41:25]
Lindsey Cormack
Things.
- [41:25]
Carter Roy
And over time, the correspondence rattled Tracy enough that he took it to the authorities. Those emails would take years to play out. And in the meantime, the Ramsey's were dealing with yet another heartbreak. Patsy Ramsey was dying. Her cancer had come back in 2002 after nearly nine years of remission. She fought it a second time, way she'd fought it before. But on June 24, 2006, she died at her father's home in Georgia. She was 49 years old. She was buried beside JonBenet. That last decade had been a cruel one for her. She had spent it as both a grieving mother and a suspect in her own daughter's murder. She had been accused, investigated and never charged. And she died without ever seeing the case resolved. Just weeks after Patsy's death, the Daxus investigation broke wide open. Investigators traced the emails to a 41 year old American named John Mark Carr, who was working as a schoolteacher in Bangkok, Thailand. In August 2006, the they arrested him. And almost immediately, in front of a crush of reporters, he confessed, saying he had been with JonBenet when she died and that it was an accident. For about two weeks, it looked like the case of the decade had finally cracked open. Carr was flown to Colorado under a swarm of cameras. Newspapers around the world ran his face on the front page. After 10 years of dead ends, the people desperately wanted this to be the answer. It wasn't. Carr's DNA didn't match the evidence from the scene. His own family said he had been with them out of state that Christmas and the specifics of his confession didn't hold up against the known facts. On August 28, 2006, the bold older district attorney dropped the case against him. But Carr wasn't simply set free. He was still wanted in California on unrelated child pornography charges from 2001 and was sent there to face them. That case Collapsed too In October 2006, a judge dismissed the charges after prosecutors admitted they had lost the computer evidence and the case relied on John Mark Carr turned out to be a false confessor, a man so fixated on this murder that he talked his way into the center of it. And for a couple of weeks, the whole world played along. When he collapsed as a suspect, investigators were right back where they'd started. Except now with one more painful reminder, that of how badly people wanted an answer. Any answer. But the district attorney at the time, Mary Lacy, wasn't finished, because there was still that one piece of evidence. The entire case kept tripping over the DNA. For years, there had been an unidentified male DNA profile connected to JonBenet's clothing that didn't match anyone in her family. Touch DNA is exactly what it sounds like. The microscopic traces of cells a person leaves just by handling something, even when there's no visible stain. In 2008, Laci had the clothing tested again using that method, and the lab reported finding male DNA in two more spots. To Laci, that was the answer. In July 2008, she wrote the Ramses a remarkable letter formally clearing the family and stating that the evidence pointed to an unknown male killer. She even apologized to them directly, writing, quote, I am deeply sorry. It made headlines all over the world. After 12 years of suspicion, the Ramses had been officially exonerated. But it wasn't so simple. Later, reporting by Colorado journalists working straight from the lab's own notes, found that the so called unknown male DNA wasn't a clean single profile at all. It was a tiny mixed sample genetic material from more than one person, the kind of trace that could have come from innocent contact long before the murder. One outside expert noted that DNA like that could have landed on the clothing weeks, months, even years earlier. And a later Boulder District Attorney Stan Garnett went further still. He said Lacy's clearance wasn't legally binding and that the letter never should have been written in the first place. So even the exoneration became one more thing for people to fight about. And then in 2013, a secret that had been buried for over a decade finally came out out. A Boulder journalist went to court and got the sealed 1999 grand jury documents unsealed. And for the first time, the public learned the truth. The grand jury had not cleared the Ramses at all. It had voted to indict them, the parents, on a charge of child abuse resulting in death. The district attorney had simply refused to bring the case to trial because he didn't believe he could Win. It is hard to overstate how strange that is. For 14 years, the public believed one thing that a grand jury had looked at the evidence and found nothing. The reality was almost the opposite. And suddenly a story a lot of people thought, thought they understood looked very different all over again. Three years after that, in 2016, the 20th anniversary of the murder brought a wave of new documentaries. The biggest was a CBS special called the case of JonBenet Ramsey. And it put forward a theory the original investigation had mostly set aside. The CBS team revived the idea that JonBenet's brother Burke had struck her and that the parents had then staged the scene to protect their surviving child. They pointed to marks on her body they argued could have come from a toy in the same spots where Lou Smit had once seen stun gun marks. And they pointed, pointed to the 911 call, claiming an enhanced version captured a third voice in the background. Burke's. Even though the parents had said he was asleep. I want to be careful and fair and clear here because Burke Ramsey is a living person who has never been charged with anything. When the FBI and the Secret Service examined that same 911 tape in the 1990s, they reported hearing nothing usable on it. And Burke, who was 29 when the CBS special aired, sued. The defamation cases tied to that program were eventually settled out of court. So the Burke theory is exactly that. A theory never tested in a courtroom and never matched to a single piece of physical evidence. Which brings us back around to the intruder side of the ledger, because plenty of people took a hard look there, too. Over the years, investigators and armchair detectives floated suspect after suspect. There was a family acquaintance who had played Santa Claus at the Ramses Christmas parties. There was a pageant photographer named Randy Simons who had taken many of JonBenet's photos and was later arrested in a completely unrelated case. And maybe most chilling of all was a drifter and convicted sex offender named Gary o' Neill Oliva, who was living not far from the ramsay home in 1996. According to a former classmate, Oliva once said he had hurt a little girl. He reportedly kept a kind of shrine to JonBenet with her photos. And grew more fixated the more time passed. To this day, there are people who close to the case, including John Ramsey himself, who believe Oliva belongs near the top of the suspect list. But Oliva was just one name among hundreds. Before he died, Lou Smit compiled a list of possible intruders that John Ramsey says ran to roughly 700 names. And here's the thing. Every single one of those people, as well as every single other suspect, has something in common. Yeah, the Santa, the photographer, Gary Oliva, John, Patsy, and Burke. None of their DNA matches that unidentified male profile from the crime scene. It's maddening. Decades of suspects and theories and confessions, and the one piece of physical evidence that could actually name a killer points to a man who has never been identified, never been matched, and never been found. But JonBenet's case is far from cold. In 2024, a Netflix series called Cold Case who Killed JonBenet Ramsey? Reignited public interest all over again. And it put real pressure back on Boulder authorities. But the bigger development is quieter, and it's happening inside the police department. Boulder has new leadership now, and they've put fresh eyes on the case. They've convened a cold case review panel and begun retesting old evidence with tools that simply didn't exist in 1996. John Ramsey, now in his 80s, has become the public face of that push. He's been lobbying investigators to use forensic genetic genealogy, the same family tree DNA technique that has cracked other notorious cold cases. The idea is to trace a suspect through distant relatives in public DNA databases until investigators can close in on a name. John has also pushed to test items that were never fully analyzed, including the garrote itself. As he put it recently, with all the leads in this case, using DNA makes this case solvable. And as of this year, Boulder police say new interviews and newly tested evidence have actually moved the investigation forward. After more than 21,000 tips and trips to 19 states, they're saying for the first time in a very long time that they feel close. If we're lucky, maybe we'll have an answer by the 30th anniversary of JonBenet's murder, which is coming up in December 2026. All unsolved cases leave a gap one we can't help but fill with theories. And JonBenet's case might be the clearest example of that. For nearly 30 years, people have been so certain, so certain about the mother or the father or the brother or some stranger who slipped in through a window. We're all so certain that it's easy to forget how little anyone actually knows for sure. What we do know is small and it's difficult to sit with. There's an unidentified man's DNA that has never matched a soul. There's a strange rambling note that no one can definitively trace. There's a contaminated crime scene, and there's a 6 year old who should have turned 30 and then 35, but never got the chance to be anything except a little girl. So when all the theories run out, here's what I'm left with before she was a mystery, before she was a headline, before she was an argument strangers have online. JonBenet Ramsey was a kid who got a bike for Christmas and spent her last good afternoon riding it. She deserves an ending to her story. She deserves to finally rest in peace. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy and this is True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of another murder and all the people it affected. True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media, Rimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Murder True Crime Stories listening experience, subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get both parts of every story dropped on Tuesday completely ad free. No waiting for part two plus ad free and early access to every show across Crime House and bonus episodes every month. To join go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcast podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories page. We'll be back on Tuesday. True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benidon, Natalie Pertovsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Roman d' Angelo and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening.
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She’s Birdie Advertiser
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Carter Roy
Before today's episode of Murder True Crime Stories, I want to tell you about another podcast I am hosting I know you'll love. Crime House and A and E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series the First 48. Each week, I'll take you inside a landmark homicide case the interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts.