JonBenét Ramsey: The FULL MK Confidential Series

Summary

The Megyn Kelly Show: JonBenét Ramsey – The FULL MK Confidential Series

Date: August 9, 2026
Podcast: The Megyn Kelly Show, SiriusXM
Episode: The FULL MK Confidential Series – A Deep Dive into JonBenét Ramsey

---

Episode Overview

A comprehensive, multi-episode exploration into one of America’s most infamous unsolved murders, the JonBenét Ramsey case. Megyn Kelly leads listeners through the facts, myths, media circus, law enforcement missteps, family perspectives, and two irreconcilable investigative theories, while drawing on extensive interviews, primary sources, and never-before explored details.

The five-part series reexamines the evidence and untangles the decades of rumor, speculation, and media distortion, focusing on both the family-as-suspects theory and the countervailing intruder theory, all in the pursuit of understanding what really happened on Christmas 1996 in Boulder, Colorado.

---

Table of Contents

1. Setting the Stage: The Night of the Crime
2. The Ramsey Family and the First 24 Hours
3. Crime Scene, Ransom Note, and Early Police Work
4. Inside the Investigation: Competing Theories
5. Media Frenzy and Public Perception
6. Forensic Evidence and the Role of DNA
7. Grand Jury, Indictment, and Legal Limbo
8. Alternative Suspects and False Confessions
9. The Power and Limits of New DNA Technology
10. The Unresolved Legacy
11. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments
12. Key Timestamps

---

1. Setting the Stage: The Night of the Crime

• Date of Murder: December 26, 1996 in Boulder, Colorado.
• Victim: JonBenét Ramsey, age 6 – child beauty queen, daughter, beloved by her family.
• Initial Scenario:
  • The Ramseys were preparing for a post-Christmas trip, packing presents and readying their private plane.
  • Patsy discovers a three-page ransom note early in the morning: “We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction… We have your daughter in our possession.” (10:03)
  • Note demands $118,000, eerily close to John’s annual bonus.
  • Patsy immediately calls 911 and several friends (13:30).
  • Police arrive; initial house search critical but incomplete.

---

2. The Ramsey Family and the First 24 Hours

• Background:

  • John Ramsey: Successful tech CEO, wealthy, suffered previous personal tragedies (loss of eldest daughter in car accident).
  • Patsy Ramsey: Former Miss West Virginia, cancer survivor, intensely involved in pageant life.
  • JonBenét: Seen by nation as a pageant princess, but also “a kindergartner, a daughter, a little sister… who played and loved to perform.” (03:00)
  • Burke, the 9-year-old brother, is largely in the background.

• The Morning Unfolds:

  • Police and family friends fill the chaotic house.
  • Officer Rick French fails to open the crucial basement door where JonBenét’s body lies.
  • The house, improperly managed as a crime scene, is contaminated almost immediately with well-meaning visitors cleaning, eating, and congregating.

---

3. Crime Scene, Ransom Note, and Early Police Work

• Discovery of the Body:

  • After hours of tense waiting for a ransom call that never comes, John, at police suggestion, searches the house and finds JonBenét’s body in the “wine cellar,” covered with a white blanket. (23:15)
  • The crime scene further compromised by the body being moved.
  • Autopsy reveals both strangulation and severe head trauma, as well as sexual assault.

• Ransom Note Analysis:

  • “One of the longest in the history of kidnapping.” (10:03)
  • Investigator debate over unusual details: movie references, specific sum, written on family notepad with attempts at practice drafts.
  • Cited as either a sign of staged crime (per Boulder PD) or evidence of an external perpetrator (per private/federal profilers).

---

4. Inside the Investigation: Competing Theories

A. The Family-Suspect Theory (Boulder PD)

• Detective Linda Arndt and Steve Thomas lead the local investigation, quickly focusing on John and Patsy.
• Key Evidence Ascribed by Thomas:
  • Ransom note written on Patsy’s pad, practice drafts.
  • Circumstantial suspicions: parents’ demeanor, Ramsey legal strategy, bowl of pineapple (matching JonBenét’s last meal with house fingerprints), and evidence-free timeline cracks.
  • Asserts an accidental death (possibly from bedwetting/parental frustration), covered up elaborately as a kidnapping gone wrong.
    • “My theory is that Patsy, in a violent confrontation with her daughter, accidentally killed her...” (51:39)
    • “Our child wet her bed and we slaughtered her. That is so preposterous.” – John Ramsey (52:24)

B. The Intruder Theory (Lou Smit, DA’s Office)

• Veteran detective Lou Smit, hired by the DA, approaches case expecting family guilt – but evidence leads him elsewhere.
• Key Intruder Evidence:
  • Broken window in basement with suitcase positioned as a step, disturbed foliage (85:15, 90:17).
  • Unidentified boot print and palm print, no matching family DNA.
  • DNA under JonBenét’s fingernails and inside underwear—unknown male.
  • Marks consistent with stun gun use (disputed by later tests).
  • Potential parallel attack in nearby neighborhood nine months later, never solved.
• Critiques of intruder theory: lack of forced entry, staged feel to ransom note, murder weapon created from family’s belongings, and doubts raised about spider-web evidence and stun gun findings.

---

5. Media Frenzy and Public Perception

• The Role of Television and Tabloids:

  • Case explodes nationally due to tragic timing, the pageant footage, and “cable’s hungry 24-hour news cycle.” (57:59)
  • Mock trials (Geraldo Rivera’s televised “verdict”) convict the parents in the court of public opinion (56:31).
  • Speculation about sexual abuse, handwriting “matches,” and bogus stories about John piloting his own plane to the funeral.
  • Notable quote: “The accusation runs at the top of the hour. The correction, when it comes at all, is a line buried at the bottom of a story no one reads to the end.” (72:49)

• Impact on the Ramseys:

  • Relentless pursuit by media and police, social circle fractures, legal bills mount (117:07).
  • Patsy, John, and later Burke each become the target of speculative guilt.

---

6. Forensic Evidence and the Role of DNA

• Unknown Male DNA:

  • Found under JonBenét’s fingernails and her underwear, not matching any family member or known suspect.
  • The existence of this DNA is under-publicized at the time and not widely acted upon until years later.

• Handwriting Analysis:

  • Repeated media claims of a “match” with Patsy’s hand are not borne out by careful analysis. “Unable to identify Patsy Ramsey as the author of that ransom note.” (69:32)

• Physical Evidence Still in Limbo:

  • Items such as the garrote and other evidence have never been fully tested with latest genetic genealogy technology (146:04).

---

7. Grand Jury, Indictment, and Legal Limbo

• Grand Jury (1998–99):
  • After lengthy investigation, grand jury votes to indict John and Patsy Ramsey for child abuse resulting in death and as accessories to murder (114:13).
  • DA Alex Hunter refuses to sign the indictments, citing lack of proof beyond a reasonable doubt; this decision, and the indictments themselves, are kept secret for years.
  • Quote: “No charges, no indictment, no arrest… what no one in that room knows is that those grand jurors voted to indict John and Patsy Ramsey.” (114:48)

---

8. Alternative Suspects and False Confessions

• List of Suspects:

  • Police follow up on 21,000 tips, but all prominent alternative suspects (including convicts and known predators) are ruled out by alibi or unmatched DNA.

• John Mark Carr:

  • Eccentric confession from Carr (“Daxus”), tracked to Thailand, but DNA and timeline eliminate him (134:39, 137:01).

---

9. The Power and Limits of New DNA Technology

• Genetic Genealogy:

  • Approach that solved the Golden State Killer case; John Ramsey is now pushing for its full use (146:04).
  • Boulder PD claims renewed testing as of December 2025, but results remain unreleased.

• Official Stances:

  • D.A. Mary Lacey, in 2008, clears the Ramseys based on updated DNA findings; others remain skeptical about contamination and technical meaning (139:46).
  • The core of the case remains the unknown male DNA profile, unlinked after nearly three decades.

---

10. The Unresolved Legacy

• The World Watches but Waits:
  • The case remains a “strange life sentence” for the Ramseys, particularly after Patsy’s death (June 2006, 132:38).
  • The case’s cultural shadow grows: a major Netflix drama is announced (148:33).
  • The hope rests in the cold evidence still in Boulder’s property room: “the answer is most likely already there… the question is whether anyone will let it speak.” (148:33)

---

11. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On JonBenét as a Symbol:
“Within days of her killing, JonBenét was no longer simply a murdered child. She’d become a symbol. The child beauty queen. The little girl in makeup. The face on every supermarket tabloid.” (03:51)

On Police Tunnel Vision:
“When a child is killed inside her own home, investigators start with the people who are in the home and work outward… The trouble with that playbook is that a statistic is a starting point, not a finish line.” (34:03)

On the Stigma of Grief:
“There’s no version of grief over a murdered child that a parent performs correctly. Weeping reads as staged. Composure reads as guilt. The camera convicts either way.” (44:32)

On Media Power:
“The public verdict is built almost entirely on… leaked and distorted information, not on anything a court of law would ever admit.” (75:07)

On the DNA’s Promise:
“The answer is most likely already there. On a length of cord, on the waistband of a child’s long johns, in the profile of an unknown male that has waited, patient and silent, to be discovered since the day after Christmas 1996. The science… has finally arrived. The question remaining is whether anyone will let it speak.” (148:33)

---

12. Key Timestamps (MM:SS)

• JonBenét’s public persona and real life: 02:00–03:31
• Discovery of ransom note: 08:58–10:03
• 911 Call & immediate response: 13:30–15:03
• Body discovered: 23:15–25:27
• Crime scene & autopsy details: 27:38–31:35
• Detective Linda Arndt’s “I knew it” moment: 31:35–32:17
• Detective Steve Thomas' theory: 37:03–53:13
• Burke as a suspect in media: 53:13–56:34, 142:42–143:08
• Media’s impact & mock trial: 56:31–74:09
• DNA’s pivotal role: 76:52–77:09; 132:38–139:46
• Lou Smit’s intruder theory: 85:15–101:11
• Notorious false confession (John Mark Carr): 123:27–137:14
• Clearing of the Ramseys & call for new testing: 139:46–147:03
• John Ramsey on need for advanced DNA technology: 146:04–147:03
• Boulder PD on retesting in 2025: 148:15–148:33
• Closing reflection on the case’s legacy: 148:33–end

---

Conclusion

This docuseries-style podcast distills three decades of mystery, missteps, and media into a compelling oral history of the JonBenét Ramsey case. While it cannot resolve the crime, it meticulously lays out the two rival theories, reveals the complexity of family and police dynamics, and underscores both the promise and shortcomings of forensic technology. Ultimately, Kelly delivers a timely reminder about the costs of rushing to judge, the fallibility of appearances, and the enduring necessity of letting the facts—not the fiction—speak for themselves.

---

For listeners: This summary offers a detailed roadmap through the entire series. For a deeper understanding, refer to the specified timestamps for critical narrative moments and first-person interviews.

Transcript

[Megyn Kelly]

Reese Witherspoon here, checking into my favorite hotel in Paris.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Bonjour.

[Megyn Kelly]

Bonjour. I'm traveling with my Wells Fargo autograph journey card, so I earn rewards wherever I book. Travel five times points with hotels, four times with airlines, three times on restaurants and other travel and one point on other purchases.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Phew.

[Megyn Kelly]

That was a lot. I need to lie down. Is the room ready?

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Visit wells fargo.com autographjourney Terms apply. The snack wrap plus Caesar sauce equals extra crispy chicken Caesary greatness. Sounds delicious. Caesar sauce at McDonald's for a limited time.

[Megyn Kelly]

Welcome to the Megyn Kelly show live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at noon East. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to the Megyn Kelly show and today's Sunday mega episode. Today we're starting something new, bringing you our MK Confidential five part series in full each week. Today, all five episodes of our deep dive into the JonBenet Ramsey case, covering every angle you can find new episodes of MK Confidential every night this summer at 9pm Eastern on our podcast feeds and our YouTube channel. YouTube.com Megan Kelly. Enjoy and we'll see you Monday

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

in Colorado. It has all the makings of a classic murder mystery. A ransom note, a dead body, strange twists and turns.

[Megyn Kelly]

For nearly 30 years, the murder of JonBenet Ramsey has haunted America. Not just because she was a beautiful six year old girl, not just because she was found dead inside her own home the day after Christmas, but because almost every piece of this case seems to point in two directions at once. Was there an intruder or was the family involved?

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I did not kill my daughter, JonBenet.

[Megyn Kelly]

What parent would ever strangle their own child? Over the next five episodes, we will go back to the beginning of the JonBenet Ramsey case. And we'll be back every day for the next eight weeks with many more cases. This is true crime like you've never heard it before. This is MK Confidential. There have been suspects, confessions, theories, explosive accusations, and more TV documentaries on JonBenet Ramsey than we can count. But underneath all of that noise is the story of a six year old girl whose death became a national obsession to much of America. JonBenet first appeared not as a child, but as a pageant image. Big hair, makeup, sequined costumes, a practiced smile beneath the stage lights. Her mother, Patsy, had been a pageant queen herself, Miss West Virginia. And JonBenet was following in her footsteps. After her death, the videos played over and over on a loop. JonBenet waving from a parade float, JonBenet singing in a Sparkling outfit. Those images fascinated the country and in some ways distorted the case right from the start. Because the pageant girl America saw on TV was only one version of this little girl. She was also a kindergartner, a daughter, a little sister, a six year old kid who played with friends and loved to perform.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

She just had this effervescent personality, just like Patsy. I mean just ta da, here I am, you know.

[Megyn Kelly]

That Christmas she asked her father for one more turn on her brand new bike.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

She wanted to keep riding her bike and I said, well, we'll do it later. Of course there was no later.

[Megyn Kelly]

Within days of her killing, JonBenet was no longer simply a murdered child. She'd become a symbol. The child beauty queen. The little girl in makeup, the face on every supermarket tabloid and television screen in America. And while the country argued over her parents and her pageants and her family's private life, the most important fact remained unchanged. Someone had killed her.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Someone killed this six year old child. We know that this is the story

[Megyn Kelly]

of a murdered child. And the family, the police, the lawyers and community forever changed by what happened inside that house.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

She did mean something in this world.

[Megyn Kelly]

I'm Megan Kelly and this is MK Confidential. It's the day after Christmas. December 26, 1996. It is a clear chilly morning in Boulder, Colorado. Less than 4 degrees outside, candy canes line the winding walkway to the Ramsey House at 755 15th St. It's a large brick Tudor style home in a well to do neighborhood with elegantly decorated For Christmas. John Ramsey is up before dawn puttering around. He talked about that morning with cnn.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

We were planning to get up early and fly to Michigan to meet my older kids for like a second Christmas. Our normal routine like that if we're going to go somewhere is let the kids stay in bed and then when we're ready to go, we get them up and then we go. They might stay in their pajamas in the car.

[Megyn Kelly]

The Ramsey's private plane is prepped for the trip to Michigan loaded with presents. John's a tech entrepreneur and CEO worth $7 million. His company Access Graphics just cleared $1 billion in annual profits. John met his wife Patsy in Atlanta back in 1979. They married a year later. He hesitated at first due to their 13 year age gap. But he eventually asked the beauty queen out for a date and the rest is history. Patsy was a former pageant queen crowned Miss West Virginia in 1977. Their six year old daughter John Benet seems to be following in Patsy's footsteps and is already active in child beauty pageants. John had been married before Patsy. He was divorced and brought three kids into their marriage. When JonBenet was born, she had four siblings. Two older sisters, Beth and Melinda, and an older brother, John Andrew, all from John's first marriage. Patsy gave birth to JonBenet's older brother Burke in 1987. Burke is nine years old. At Christmas time, just one month shy of the big double digit birthday. That night before bed, Burke asks his dad to help put put together one of his new toys. John sits with him and the two build it together. The Ramsay family had already endured extraordinary loss. John's eldest daughter Beth died in a car accident a few years earlier. I spoke with John about this.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I got a phone call from my brother and he said, John, Beth is gone, she's killed. And I there's nothing I could do. I couldn't get her to the best doctors. I couldn't rush to her side. It was over.

[Megyn Kelly]

More of that conversation as we move deeper into this case. Shortly after Beth's accident, Patsy received a life threatening diagnosis. She spoke with Barbara Walters about it on ABC back in 2000. I'm a cancer survivor of stage four cancer.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

John has lost a child in an automobile accident. That completely changes your outlook.

[Megyn Kelly]

When you are standing on the brink of death with a terminal illness, your priorities suddenly line up in a row

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

and you know exactly what the important things are in life.

[Megyn Kelly]

John elaborated on that when we spoke.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Patsy didn't say it, but I know she was trying to pack a lot of mother daughter time into what she maybe felt was a limited lifetime.

[Megyn Kelly]

Patsy underwent a grueling course of experimental chemotherapy At a time when few women successfully fought off ovarian cancer. She beat the odds and went into remission. By Christmas of 1996, the Ramses see themselves as fortunate, healthy again, financially secure, surrounded by family and preparing for another Christmas celebration in Michigan. That is the life they believed that they were waking up to. But downstairs, on a narrow back staircase near the kitchen, three sheets of lined white legal paper are waiting. Patsy spoke with CNN a week after the murder. It was quite early in the morning

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

and I had gotten dressed and was on my way to the kitchen to make some coffee.

[Megyn Kelly]

And we had a back staircase from the bedroom areas. And I always come down that staircase

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

and I'm usually the first one down.

[Megyn Kelly]

And the note was lying across

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

the

[Megyn Kelly]

three pages across the run of one of the stair treads. And it was kind of dimly lit,

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

it was very early in the morning

[Megyn Kelly]

and I started to read it and

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

it was Addressed to John.

[Megyn Kelly]

Here's how John told it to me.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

You know, I was getting ready to get dressed and she screamed. I could tell from the scream it was a. Something was very, very wrong. And I ran down and. And she had this ransom note. And, you know, it was just unbelievable thing.

[Megyn Kelly]

The ransom note is incredibly long. One of the longest in the history of kidnapping. Mr. Ramsey, listen carefully, with an exclamation point. We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction. We respect your business. Business is misspelled, but not the country that it serves. At this time, we have your daughter in our possession. Also misspelled. She is safe and unharmed, and if you want her to see 1997, you must follow our instructions to the letter. Patsy's reaction was one of sheer panic.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I can't remember exactly what the first few lines said, but somewhere it said,

[Megyn Kelly]

we have your daughter. And it clicked, you know, your daughter. And I just bounded back up the steps and threw her door open

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

and she was not in her bed.

[Megyn Kelly]

The note continues. You will withdraw $118,000 from your account. 100,000 will be in $100 bills and the remaining 18,000 in $20 bills. Make sure that you bring an adequate size attache to the bank. When you get home, you will put the money in a brown paper bag. I will call you between 8 and 10am tomorrow to instruct you on delivery. The delivery will be exhausting, so I advise you to be rested. If we monitor you getting the money early, we might call you early to arrange an earlier delivery of the money and hence an earlier pickup of your daughter. Any deviation of my instructions will result in in the immediate execution of your daughter. You will also be denied her remains for proper burial. The two gentlemen watching over your daughter do not particularly like you, so I advise you not to provoke them. Speaking to anyone about your situation, such as police, FBI, etcetera, Will result in your daughter being beheaded. If we catch you talking to a stray dog, she dies. If you alert bank authorities, she dies. If the money is in any way marked or tampered with, she dies. You will be scanned for electronic devices, and if any are found, she dies. You can try to deceive us, but be warned that we are familiar with law enforcement countermeasures and tactics. You stand a 99% chance of killing your daughter if you try to outsmart us. Follow our instructions and you stand a 100% chance of getting her back. You and your family are under constant scrutiny as well as the authorities.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

That was the worst moment was suddenly Realizing that someone had your daughter, your child, and it's taken her and she was gone and we didn't know where she was. And it was dark, it was cold outside.

[Megyn Kelly]

Don't try to grow a brain, John. You are not the only fat cat around. So don't think that killing will be difficult. Don't underestimate us, John. Use that good Southern common sense of yours. It is up to you now, John. The note is signed Victory with an exclamation point. And then the letters S, B, T,

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

C. Just told Patsy to call the police. Call the police. Call 911.

[Megyn Kelly]

At 5:52am Patsy calls 91 1-1-4- Ramsey home landline. We have a kidnapping. All right, please explain to me what's going on. Okay.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

There's a note left in. Our daughter's gone.

[Megyn Kelly]

Does it say who took her?

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

What? Does it say who's in there? I don't know. Oh, my God. Please.

[Megyn Kelly]

Patty. Patty.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Patty.

[Megyn Kelly]

Patty. John's heart sank.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

You have this instinctive, just horrible feeling in your stomach that you know, where's my child?

[Megyn Kelly]

After Hanging up with 91 1, Patsy calls two couples who are close to the family and asks them to come over.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I called our friends that we had had dinner with the night before and just in A, you know, JonBenet's missing,

[Megyn Kelly]

you know, can you come over or help, you know. And then I called another, another couple, close friend of ours, and they came right over. Within minutes of the 911 call, the first Boulder PD officer pulls up in front of the Ramses. Officer Rick French shuts off his engine in the pre dawn dark. John and Patsy meet him at the front door and tell him what's happening. They show him the ransom note which now lays on the wooden floor outside the kitchen. Their son Burke is still sleeping upstairs. Officer French later describes Patsy as visibly shaken and frantic, while John seems calm and under control.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

That morning with JonBenet, it wasn't over yet. I could get her back if I kept my wish about me and focused on getting her back to whatever I could possibly do. I didn't. I was focused on getting her back and I felt I could get her back.

[Megyn Kelly]

Officer French conducts a quick search of the house looking for a possible exit route the kidnapper might have used. In the basement, he comes to a door secured with a makeshift latch. He stops in front of the door and studies it. He stops but does not open it. He will later defend that decision by saying he did not think it was a way out of the home. Police ask Jon And Patsy, if JonBenet could have just run away from home. But John is adamant. She's six years old. It is dark and it's freezing cold outside. No, she did not just run away. John and Patsy are thinking we need to close the roads. We need to deploy roadblocks, close the airport. But they assume the police know what they're doing. The Ramsey's friends arrive. Fleet and Priscilla White, John and Barbara Fernie. The women take the nearly hysterical Patsy into the sun room. Victim advocates arrive at the house as well, bringing bagels and coffee. They all try to help the Ramses. Washing dishes, cleaning countertops, anything to help pass the time. While waiting for the kidnappers promised phone call, John talked about this moment with Barbara Walters.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Back in 2000, people were making toast in the kitchen. And yes, a kidnapping is a crime scene. But we were so focused on getting JonBenet back. That was the task.

[Megyn Kelly]

I'm Hannah. I've lost £75 in 20 months with GLP1s/ diet and exercise on Roe. I've gone from struggling to run a mile to running farther every day. You can access FDA approved GLP1s online, get the support you need to reach your weight loss goals. Go to Ro Co Weight to see if you qualify. I'm a paid ROE partner. 20% average weight loss in one year in non diabetics with obesity or overweight with a weight related medical condition versus 3.1% in placebo arm Rx only. To stay informed about serious side effects, go to Ro Co Safety. Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co founder of Angie and one thing I've learned is that you buy a house, but you make it a home.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Because with every fix, update and renovation, it becomes a little more your own.

[Megyn Kelly]

So you need all your jobs done well. For nearly 30 years, Angie has helped millions of homeowners hire skilled pros for the projects that matter from plumbing to electrical roof repair to deck upgrades.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

So leave it to the pros who

[Megyn Kelly]

will get your jobs done well.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Angie the one you trust to find

[Megyn Kelly]

the ones you trust. Find a pro for your project. @angie.com an officer orders the home phone line to be tapped and traced. Sergeant Robert Whitson pulls up to the Ramsey house. He parks and and quickly reads the ransom note. He thinks about the unusual nature of a child being held for ransom. The first he's heard of this in 22 years on the force. He calls in the FBI. John takes Burke to a nearby friend's house. He phones a banker friend who raises his credit limit to $118,000, the exact amount of the ransom. And they wait. Hours go by, but no word from the kidnappers.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

If you're with your child and you're at a department store or grocery store and you look around and the child's gone, it's a terrible feeling. And I think all parents have experienced that. And that was the feeling we had. And, you know, it went on for till, I don't know, one in the afternoon.

[Megyn Kelly]

From the road, the Ramses is kind of a deceiving house. Outside it doesn't look that big, but inside it's huge. The house sprawls across more than 6,500 square feet with multiple floors, additions, staircases, narrow hallways and rooms that do not connect in any obvious way. John and Patsy had converted the top floor into their master suite. JonBenet's bedroom is one level below, near Burke's room and almost across the house from her parents. A sound in the middle of the night would be nearly impossible to hear. Soon, more police arrive, including detectives and a forensics team. They dust the house for fingerprints and search for other clues, but find no obvious signs of a struggle and no clear crime scene. A phone call is made and police put a canine unit with a tracking dog on standby. The dog is never called to the house. Sergeant Robert Whitson goes upstairs and looks in JonBenet's bedroom. It appears largely undisturbed. Her clothes and toys are there. The bed is not made and has clearly been slept in. But no JonBenet. He shuts her door, has officers seal it with yellow and black crime scene tape and tells John Ramsey nobody goes in there. The police do not cordon off the rest of the house. Below all the bedrooms lies the main living level, the kitchen, dining areas and the back spiral staircase the family uses every day. And then there's the basement. A maze of storage rooms, utility spaces and passages. Burke keeps an electric train set in the basement in what's known as the train room. Nearby is a small, windowless storage room the family calls the wine cellar, even though no wine is kept there. This is the room Officer French past in his early morning search. Without opening the door, officers ask for handwriting samples from John and Patsy to compare to the ransom note. John provides two notepads, one with his writing, one with Patsy's. The Boulder PD handwriting expert Detective Jeff Kithcart finds something immediately interesting behind the obvious sample of Patsy's handwriting. One page of the notepad contains a partial phrase Mr. And Mrs. Followed by a black vertical line to kith cart. This Line looks very much like the beginnings of an R. And like this page is the first draft of the ransom note. Suddenly it seems the ransom note was written inside the Ramsey home using the family's very own scribble paddle. The ransom note had promised that the kidnapper or kidnappers would call between 8 and 10am 8am rolls around 8:30. John paces the floor. 9am comes and goes. The mood in the house becomes increasingly tense. 10am and still nothing. Patsy sits with her friends in the sunroom.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

At one point I said, I, well,

[Megyn Kelly]

what are we doing here? You know what, what's the plan of action? You're so frustrated because you don't, I

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

mean, you want the whole world to

[Megyn Kelly]

just stop right there so that you

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

can go find this baby.

[Megyn Kelly]

It's now early afternoon. The forensics team and other officers have packed up and left. Detective Linda Arndt finds herself the only law enforcement officer at the house to control. Seven civilians. John and Patsy, four family friends and the Ramsey's pastor, the Reverend Rol Hoverstock of St. John's Episcopal Church. These people have been in and all over the house. You've got bagels everywhere, orange juice, coffee. People preparing food and drinks throughout the day, cleaning up the place. John paces around the living room and Patsy sits virtually motionless in a chair. Arndt calls for police backup to help control the scene, but no one arrives. She expressed her frustration to ABC in 1999. Both times I was told everybody's in a meeting, they got your message and that was it. Around 1pm in an effort to keep John occupied, Arndt pulls him and one of his friends aside. She tells them to conduct a top to bottom search of the house to see if anything is amiss.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

We went to the basement, which to me was a logical place to start. Third floor. You couldn't get into the third floor from outside. So we went to the basement and went into what we called the train room where the kids had a train set up. And there was an open window and a suitcase propped up under the window as if it were to be a step. And I told my friend, I said, that suitcase should not be there. That's way out of place. We wouldn't have put it there. The only other room in that basement was this. We called it a wine cellar, but it was an old coal cellar. Dark, one door going into it. No entrances from the outside. And I opened the door and of course immediately found JonBenet.

[Megyn Kelly]

JonBenet's body lies in a pile covered with a white blanket. There's duct Tape over her mouth.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I knew instantly, instantly what I'd found. I'd found my daughter.

[Megyn Kelly]

John pulls the tape off and throws it aside. His friend bolts up the stairs yelling for someone to call 91 1. Jon tries to loosen the bindings on JonBenet's wrists but they're tied too tightly.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

So I just picked her up and carried her screaming. Actually, I was screaming to upstairs to take her to help.

[Megyn Kelly]

Detective Arndt hears John scream from the basement and runs to meet him at the top of the stairs. She quickly tells him to put JonBenet's body down. Then she moves it next to the Christmas tree. And he asked if she was dead and I said, yes, she's dead. John stays close to JonBenet repeating the phrase, my little angel, my little angel. The ramses Pastor sees JonBenet's body and begins praying aloud. Patsy heard John scream from the basement and her friends held her back. And I said, what? You know, what, what is it? And, and Barbara, my friend just, you

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

know, grabbed me and said, no, just stay, just, just stay right here. And I kept saying what? What, what is it? What is it?

[Megyn Kelly]

And.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Let them go.

[Megyn Kelly]

We walked into the living room and she was there.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

And John said she's.

[Megyn Kelly]

Patsy throws her body over JonBenet's. I remember walking in and seeing her lying there in front of the Christmas tree. I knelt down over her and just laid my body on her body and my cheek against her cheek and it

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

was cold and Father Ra was there

[Megyn Kelly]

and he started saying the last rites, I believe. And I just kept saying no, no, you know, ask God, ask God to raise her. Detective Arndt asks John to call 911 and then calls it herself. She declares a code black. In other words, a murder. The ambulance arrives about 15 minutes later. Law enforcement and the forensics team rush back to the Ramsey house. Though moving the body twice presents a unique challenge for evidence collection. Officers hurry to clear the scene, so John and Patsy relocate to a friend's house in South Boulder.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

We were ushered out of the house pretty quickly and we never went back in that home. That was the last time we were in that home. Past Santa Claus in his sleigh and a double row of candy canes. Deputy coroners brought the body of six year old JonBenet Ramsey from her upscale home. Someone inside this house had made a 911 call saying that little John Benet had been kidnapped. Well, when police got here, they went inside the house and a short, short time later they found the little girl's body.

[Megyn Kelly]

The Boulder County Coroner arrives at the Ramsey home around 8pm on Dec. 26. His examination is short, lasting about 10 minutes. But several things become clear right away. According to the autopsy, whoever killed JonBenet took white olefin cord and tied her wrists together. The person used the same cord to make what's commonly known as a garrote or a ligature to strangle JonBenet. A garrote is a brutally simple mechanism. It uses a cord around the neck and some kind of handle to twist that cord tighter. The more it's twisted, the more pressure it puts on the neck, cutting off air and blood flow. It's similar to a tourniquet, but with a deadly purpose. Police say the knot on this garrotte was tied by someone who understood how how a garrote is made. And the fact that her hair and her gold cross necklace are tangled in it suggests that JonBenet was alive when it happened. JonBenet also has very distinct red marks below her throat that match the shape of her own fingers. It looks like she tried to claw on the cord wrapped around her neck as it choked the very life out of her. The cord is wrapped around JonBenet's neck so tightly that it has cut a deep furrow into the skin.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

It was so deeply embedded in her skin that I did see it.

[Megyn Kelly]

The cord is knotted and attached to a broken stick at the back of JonBenet's neck. That broken stick was part of a paintbrush handle from Patsy's Art Supplies stored in the basement near the room where JonBenet's body was found. The coroner performs JonBenet's full autopsy the following morning at 8:15am he lists two causes of death, either strangulation or a blow to the head. He can't determine which happened first, but either would have killed her.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

You can't comprehend that anybody would be that evil.

[Megyn Kelly]

There are also microscopic fibers of the paintbrush handle from the garrote found in JonBenet's vagina as well as signs of injury to the interior tissue. This leads investigators to believe JonBenet was sexually assaulted with the paintbrush handle. The tiny blood vessels inside JonBenet's eyelids had burst. And investigators find surprisingly little bleeding from the massive wound to her head. There's an 8 inch crack in her skull attributed to blunt force trauma. Putting those two facts together, some experts believe the strangulation happened first, meaning that by the time she was struck in the head, her heart may have already stopped or was barely pumping. Boulder police find two items that they think might be involved in the head injury, a baseball bat found outside the Ramsey's house and a Maglite flashlight found in the kitchen. But there is no physical evidence on either one. No useful fingerprints, no DNA, nothing. It's two weeks after the murder and Boulder Chief of Police Tom Kobe holds a town hall to answer reporters questions about the ongoing investigation. JonBenet's death was the first murder reported in Boulder for 1996 and it happened with just five days left in the year. That lack of homicide experience matters as there have been major mistakes at the crime scene. Mistakes that cannot be undone.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Did police search the house after the 911 call but before the body was found? They did a preliminary search of the house. And remember this is a very big house. Did they look in the room where John Ramsey said the girl's body was or did they not? It doesn't appear that they got down. That room was down in a part of the basement that doesn't appear that they got to.

[Megyn Kelly]

But one person has zero doubt in her mind about who the killer is. Boulder Detective Linda Arndt and John leaned down opposite me and his face was just inches from mine and we had a non verbal exchanged. Bet I will never forget. As we looked at each other, I remember. And I wore a shoulder holster, tucking my gun right next to me and consciously counting. I've got 18 bullets because I didn't know if we'd all be alive when people showed up.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I knew what happened.

[Megyn Kelly]

You were afraid because you thought the killer was still in the house. I knew it. Absolutely. Absolutely. And she's not the only one. Join me tomorrow for the next chapter in our story on MK Confidential. It is the day after Christmas 1996 and a veteran FBI agent named Ron Walker stands inside a crime scene that does not add up. Walker works out of the Bureau's Denver field office, one of the only federal agents to set foot inside the Ramsey home. The day JonBenet's body is found standing inside the house on 15th street with the Christmas trees still up and JonBenet's body lying at the foot of it. He considers the events of that morning. The ransom note, a stolen child. The night 911 call. The long wait for the kidnappers call the father who walks straight down to a basement room and comes back up screaming, his dead child in his arms. The main floor is empty, but Agent Walker can hear the mother sobbing at the rear of the Ramsey house. He keeps walking the rooms. To a man who has worked cases like this many times before, the setup feels very familiar.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Virtually every staged murder case that I have seen. The perpetrator manipulates the arrival of friends or other family members who are then put in a situation where they actually discover the body or they are with the perpetrator as the body is discovered

[Megyn Kelly]

at 5:52 that morning. This was a kidnapping by 1:05 in the afternoon. It is something else entirely. There is no kidnapper, there is no call. There is a murdered 6 year old girl in the basement of an upscale home and only a handful of people who are inside the house all night. The question is no longer who took JonBenet out of the house on Christmas night. The question is who was already inside? I'm Megyn Kelly and this is MK Confidential. Agent Ron Walker brings the FBI's playbook with him. And the playbook is old and blunt. When a child is killed inside her own home, investigators start with the people who are in the home and work outward. It's not insensitivity, it's math. FBI data going back decades suggests that the younger a child is when murdered, the more likely that a family member is involved. From almost the first hours, the eyes of the Boulder Police Department turned toward John and Patsy Ramsey. The trouble with that playbook is that a statistic is a starting point, not a finish line. Investigators can lock onto a suspect early and let the theory start bending the evidence to fit instead of the other way around. Walker's Denver bureau offers Boulder its full weight. Its labs, its profilers, its experience with exactly this kind of murder. But Boulder police, a department that sees roughly one homicide per year, passes on the help. The most complicated child killing in America will be worked almost entirely by a department with virtually no experience solving homicides, not by federal investigators.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Two detectives hand me their business cards and one says narcotics officer and the other says auto theft. And I bury my head into my

[Megyn Kelly]

hands because I knew at that point we were in a bad spot inside the Ramsey house. The family theory does not stay a hypothesis for long as word spreads among the officers that JonBenet's body has been found in the basement. One cop says the quiet part out loud. Investigative reporter Paula Woodward has ears in the room. She later tells Netflix what it is she heard. There was a group of police investigators

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

that had gathered at the Boulder Police Department that morning when the word came

[Megyn Kelly]

in that Jominet's body had been found.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

A person inside that meeting told me

[Megyn Kelly]

that one investigator hissed in kind of

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

an undertone and a whisper to another one, I knew it. They killed their daughter. Internally, John and Patsy are considered suspects. Both of them. Yes. Are considered to have probably been involved in the death of their daughter. Probability? Yes.

[Megyn Kelly]

The Boulder PD detective who carries that conviction most strongly is a man named Steve Thomas. Thomas came up through through narcotics. He has never worked a homicide in his life. And now he's leading one of the most scrutinized child murders in America.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Someone needs to stand up and speak for JonBenet. She can't speak for herself.

[Megyn Kelly]

Over the next 18 months, Detective Thomas builds the most complete case ever assembled against the Ramsey family. Steve Thomas starts with the ransom note on the Ramsey's own notepad and the possible practice line found inside the notebook belonging to Patsy. But he comes to believe the notepad was concealing much more than that. Thomas concludes there was an earlier draft, a first attempt written on pages that were torn out and carried away but never recovered. Two runs at a ransom note inside the victim's own house on the family's own paper. To Thomas, that note becomes the single strongest piece of evidence in the entire case. And he thinks it points squarely at the woman of the house, Patsy Ramsey. The ransom note is perplexing. Three pages written with a black felt tip pen telling John to listen carefully and claiming to represent a small foreign faction. Quote, at this time we have your daughter in our possession. She is safe and unharmed and if you want her to see 1997, you must follow our instructions to the letter. Speaking to anyone about your situation, such as police, FBI, etc. Will result in your daughter being beheaded. Don't try to grow a brain, John. Use that good Southern common sense of yours. It never uses the little girl's name. It even pauses in the middle of a kidnapping to compliment the father's company, saying, we respect your business. The Ramses hire retired FBI profiler John Douglas to investigate the case. He reads the same note and comes to the opposite conclusion. Double Douglas hears a mind steeped in action movies. The note is filled with paraphrases from Dirty Harry, Speed and Ransom, Mel Gibson's child kidnapping movie which was in theaters just a month before JonBenet's death. Douglas says, that's a lot of very similar material to be merely coincidental. And it's difficult to imagine Patsy sitting alone in the kitchen writing out a fake ransom note after she's killed her own daughter and coming up with multiple action movie phrases. The profiler raises an unsettling possibility that the note may have been written before JonBenet ever died. Both readings of the note agree on one thing. Whoever wrote those three theatrical pages did it slowly Calmly and comfortably. And they did it inside that house. Then there's the number. The ransom demand is $118,000. Not a round figure, not a kidnapper's clean million. And it lands within a few hundred dollars of the bonus John Ramsey received from his company the year before. Douglas sees this number as a real clue and tells NBC that Patsy did not know John's bonus amount. Well, who has this knowledge?

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

The wife didn't have the knowledge. She doesn't know anything about that. This is money that's electronically placed in his 401k at the end of the year. So, to me, it's kind of like the manifesto in the Unabomber. It begins to tell me more about the person who's responsible. This person has very unique, intimate knowledge about his financial workings.

[Megyn Kelly]

Whoever wrote it knew the Ramses personally, observed John professionally, or saw this number on a piece of paper inside the home. Of course, someone inside the house is not the same thing as a parent. A housekeeper could have seen that figure. A visitor, a former employee, John Ramsey, suspected a creepy guy who had been in the house playing Secret Santa Claus. It could be anyone who spent real time in the home. And as many as 20 keys to that home are unaccounted for in other people's hands. One detective, who has yet to join the case will later offer a very different explanation for that oddly specific sum. But for now, the connection to John's bonus dominates the discussion about the 118 grand. And then there's the phone. The note promises a call between 8 and 10 in the morning. It never comes. Not by 10, not by 1, not ever. A kidnapping in which the kidnapper never makes contact, in which there's been no kidnapping. To Boulder Detective Steve Thomas, that silence is not a mystery. He surmises no one's calling because no one was ever going to call. And someone in that house knows it. Hi, Diva. It's Rachel and Jordan. Yeah, hi.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Quick question.

[Megyn Kelly]

Why are you not spending your Venmo balance? Yeah, we're concerned you can, like, buy stuff with it.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Ugh. You love buying stuff.

[Megyn Kelly]

And earn cash back on eligible purchases. Mm.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

You love purchasing eligible things.

[Megyn Kelly]

So the money your friend sent you yesterday, that's today's ramen or rideshare or eye patches.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

The skincare kind, not the pyro kind.

[Megyn Kelly]

Spend with Venmo, and you can earn cash back with Venmo Stash. Venmo Stash bundle terms and exclusions apply. That's $100 cash back per month. See [e-mail] ID verification required to use a Venmo balance. The GLP1 pill you've been waiting for is now on ROE. Yep, it's finally here with the same clinically proven ingredient now in a pill and now on Roe. It's the first FDA approved GLP1 pill for weight loss at the lowest price available. That's one daily GLP one pill for big results now on ro.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Go to ro.

[Megyn Kelly]

Listen to see if you qualify RX only. Go to RO Safety for serious side effects and boxed warning associated with GLP1s. When John Ramsey searches the house that afternoon on December 26, Detective Thomas sees a man who does not search so much as travel straight down to the basement, straight to the one room that matters. The quiet phone line does not deepen the kidnapping in the detective's eyes. It ends part of the mystery altogether. Two images harden early in the minds of the police as JonBenet's body lies lifeless by the Christmas tree. Responding officers see Patsy on the floor clutching a crucifix, wailing John a few feet away, composed, controlled and not going to her. To detectives, a husband's steadiness at the worst moment of his life starts to read as something called we're not soap opera actors.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I mean, I suppose if I was an actor I could act really angry, but I'm not. That's who I am. It's what you see and I'm angry. This is angry for me.

[Megyn Kelly]

Within days, on the advice of a close family friend and former prosecutor named Michael Bynum, the Ramseys retain. Lawyers root their words through those lawyers and begin to negotiate over a formal interview with police that will drag on for months. To the investigators and soon to the country, that looks like the behavior of people with something to hide. The Ramsey's attorneys wanted all the questions. They said they wouldn't go in for an interview with the police because they didn't know what the police were going to ask. On New Year's Day 1997, a week after the murder, the Ramseys sit for a television interview this long before sitting down with police. Detective Thomas sees this as the start of a pattern. A family that answers reporters who have agreed in advance not to ask about the murder while evading and delaying the harder questions from cops. The natural question is why? The Ramsey's former FBI man John Douglas reads it differently. He sees the Ramsey's behavior as exactly how wealthy, well connected families behave in a way such a legal catastrophe. They involve lawyers, they distance themselves and they proceed with caution. These are the same instincts the Lindbergh family showed in 1932 when their 20 month old baby boy was kidnapped and killed. Many suspected the boy's famed pilot father, Charles Lindbergh, after his baby Charlie disappeared because Charles seemed cold and eluded, aloof. But Lindbergh believed he functioned best in a crisis by staying controlled. John Ramsey's very similar. A veteran Navy pilot, self made executive who had already endured the loss of one beloved daughter and the despair that followed. The distress that looks wrong on camera looks wrong because there's no version of grief over a murdered child that a parent performs correctly. Weeping reads as staged. Composure reads as guilt. The camera convicts either way. The day they're called to the Ramsey house, detectives notice a bowl of fresh cut pineapple on the breakfast table upstairs with a spoon resting in it. The prints on that bowl belonged to Patsy Ramsey and to 9 year old Burke, not to JonBenet.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I didn't put the ball there, okay?

[Megyn Kelly]

I did not put the ball there. I would not do this set up like this. And yet JonBenet's stomach contains fresh, partly digested pineapple. The detectives pull that thread hard. The whites who hosted Christmas dinner the night before served cracked crab, no pineapple. The Ramseys say their daughter fell asleep in the car and went straight to bed and never ate again. Yet the fruit is in her body. Cut fresh. A forensic examiner named Werner Spitz, known for his work on the JFK autopsy, studies how far the pineapple traveled through JonBenet's system. He fixes JonBenet's time of death at around or before 1 in the morning. Detective Steve Thomas turns that into a single question that he cannot make face fit into the family's account. When and where did JonBenet eat the pineapple? To Thomas, the math is plain. A bowl with the mother's fingerprints and the same fresh cut fruit inside the child. A stranger would have had to break in, feed a six year old a bedtime snack and then wait two hours for it to digest before killing her. When the detectives show Burke a photo of the bull, he knows it on site. It belongs in the house. It was not carried in by a stranger. The pineapple is the first moment the family's timeline cracks. And Detective Thomas never lets it go. By the summer of 1997, Steve Thomas has interpreted the facts and built a theory of the whole night JonBenet died. And he believes every word of it.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

If I told you right now that we have trace evidence that appears to link you to the death of JonBenet, what would you tell me? I Don't give a blind flip how scientific it is. Go back to the damn drawing board. I didn't do it. John Ramsey didn't do it. And we didn't have a clue of anybody who did do it.

[Megyn Kelly]

So we all got to start working

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

together from here this day forward to try to find out who the hell did it.

[Megyn Kelly]

A 40th birthday bearing down on Patsy. The exhaustion of Christmas. A couple of glasses of wine. And a small, ordinary fight over a dress between a mother who liked to dress as her daughter's twin. And a little girl who did not want to match. Thomas believes that JonBenet wets the bed that night, a chronic problem in the months before her death. And then, sometime before one in the morning, an exhausted, frazzled mother comes apart in her little girl's bathroom. One of the doctors the detectives consult tells them the toilet training problems are a textbook trigger for exactly this kind of parental rage. The way Thomas pictures it, Patsy slams her daughter against something hard, like the edge of the tub, delivering a blow that fractures her skull. The child goes still, and Patsy, Thomas believes, thinks that in that instant, her daughter is already dead. What Thomas describes next is not a murder plan. It is sheer panic. A mother who could call for help and instead decides to hide what she's done. She carries the body down to the basement, goes back upstairs for her notepad and a felt tip pen. And writes a kidnapping into existence, discarding one draft, then another. Before the three pages are done. She builds a garrote from a broken paintbrush in her own art kit, just a few feet away from JonBenet's body. She ties her small wrists loosely in front, a binding that would never hold a living child. A gesture meant only to appear like restraint. She wraps her daughter in a blanket and leaves a favorite pink note nightgown beside her. Patsy then lays a strip of tape across her mouth and beneath it. Later, officers find a perfect set of lip prints. No sign of a struggle, no sign the child fought the tape. And when Patsy Ramsey opens the door to the first Officer at nearly 6 in the morning, she is in the same clothes she wore the night before, her hair done, her makeup fresh. To Detective Thomas, this detail settles it. She had never been to bed. The lawman said as much when he squared off against John and Patsy on Larry King in 2000.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

My theory is that Patsy, in a violent confrontation with her daughter, accidentally killed her. No, not accidental. I hypothesize in the sense that it lacked motive. What? Tell me exactly, step by step, how you envision I wasn't there. That you were in the hospital. You must have conjured something in your

[Megyn Kelly]

head for you to come out and call me a murderer of my child. Now I want to hear one.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I put together what you think happened that night. Well, I think there was a toileting issue that night that has been dismissed and underplayed. Totally. Explain. A bedwetting or a toileting issue caused Ramp Patsy to get mad at her daughter. Absolutely.

[Megyn Kelly]

Thomas does not believe John Ramsey killed his daughter. He finds nothing to put John in that bathroom.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Our child wet her bed and we slaughtered her. That is so preposterous. You weren't there, John. You can't. I was there. I know Patsy. I worked with her for 20 years. I know that she loved that child more than anything in the world.

[Megyn Kelly]

The detective hypothesizes that John reached. Reads the ransom note in his wife's hand, understands what he sees and makes a choice not to expose her, but to stand in front of her with lawyers and to hold the line.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Well, would you agree, Passy, that almost none of it makes sense? Right? None of it. What was the guy doing?

[Megyn Kelly]

Why did that?

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Why did the intruder do this? Evil, evil person. God knows. And the truth is going to prevail.

[Megyn Kelly]

John and Patsy also strongly dispute any notion that 9 year old Burke was involved in his sister's death in any way. John told me this explicitly.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

This was a violent, vicious sexually assault case. Not something that a 9 year old could even possibly do. So that's just. It's really disgusting that people jump to that kind of a conclusion.

[Megyn Kelly]

Within days of JonBenet's murder, satellite trucks start lining the block. Outside the Ramsey House on 15th Street. Reporters stand on the frozen lawns of the neighbors. News producers are pulling home video and pageant tape. The footage of a darling little girl in makeup and sequins smiling beneath stage lights about to run on a loop from coast to coast. Inside police headquarters, confidential reports are starting to slip out to reporters. Some of it wrong, some of it half true. All of it moving faster than the investigation itself. But what about the broken window and the suitcase beneath it? What about the ransom note and the unidentified male DNA found on JonBenet's underwear? These conflicting data points do not fit neatly on a magazine cover. Nor do they play well in a 30 second TV spot. The local and national media are about to hand America a version of this story with every contradiction sanded away. A version with a verdict that's clean and easier for some to handle than the possibility that killers roam loose and Kill innocent children in their homes at night. The parents did it. You may have heard this version before. A sweeping narrative that tries to tie up all the loose ends with a pretty bow, but in reality leaves many mysteries dangling. Tomorrow we will step through that narrative piece by piece, through the eyes of the people who told it and saw it plastered on magazine racks nationwide. Join me tomorrow right here on MK Confidential. It's November 1997. A makeshift television studio in Boulder, Colorado, dressed up as a courtroom, a bench, a witness stand, a jury box and a studio audience. But it is not a courthouse. It is a daytime talk show hosted by Geraldo Rivera. And over several days, he puts the parents of a murdered six year old little girl on trial live on national television. No one has been arrested. No one's been charged. There is no real defense, no judge, no law. The defendants, John and Patsy Ramsey are not even in the room. And at the end of it, Geraldo's jury returns a verdict. We the jury find John Bennett Ramsey liable for the wrongful death of JonBenet Ramsey. And as to Patsy, we the jury find Patsy Ramsey liable for the wrongful death of JonBenet Ramsey. To the best of our knowledge, there is no real evidence in this case

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

that points in any direction other than

[Megyn Kelly]

straight into the faces of John and for Patsy Rams liable for the wrongful death of their own baby girl. The verdict is not handed down by a court, but by a TV audience. An audience made up of staff from Boulder TV stations, guests at the local hotel and other quote, invite only attendees. This in a case where no one has been charged with anything, Geraldo and his squadron of producers with no due process to the family, give us a final verdict. This is where the JonBenet Ramsey case is really being decided. Not in a court of law, but on tv, in the so called news, in the court of public opinion. And by the time this spectacle airs, that court has all but made up its mind. The question is not how the Ramses were became suspects. The question is how millions of people became dead certain they were guilty. I'm Megan Kelly and this is MK Confidential.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

This started out as a simple but tragic murder of a child beauty queen. But then questions arose, curiosity arose, and suddenly the media descended on Bulger.

[Megyn Kelly]

We are told now that as many

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

as 3, 300 media representatives may be here right now following this story.

[Megyn Kelly]

To understand how it comes to a mock trial on daytime tv, we must look at the exact moment this story lands. It is the dead stretch between Christmas and New Year's in 1996. The news is quiet as a church mouse. The cable channels are young and hungry, the 24 hour cycle still figuring out how to fill a week when nothing is happening. And into that massive silence drops a story that has everything cops and kidnappers, a beautiful little girl, a bizarre ransom note, a black body bag wheeled out in front of Christmas lights. And to top it all off, millionaire parents who love child beauty pageants. It is Christmas all over again for lovers of murder, mystery, beach reads and ratings. JonBenet's murder arrives barely a year after the O.J. simpson trial into an America that just spent months litigating that murder from its couch and is ready to do it all over again. The shadow of O.J. falls on the investigators, too. Boulder PD Detective Steve Thomas followed the O.J. simpson trial and remembered how Simpson's attorneys ripped apart the LAPD's case by attacking their work. He watched the Simpson case collapse under its own mistakes and feared the same thing might happen in the Ramsey case. He wanted to be careful not to be the next office burned on live television. Here is the strange part. The Ramseys are not celebrities. John runs a very successful company, but no one outside Boulder knows their names. There is no famous face, no star power, nothing that should turn one local homicide into a national obsession. What there is instead is timing and a little girl who photographs like a movie star. Most murdered children leave behind a snapshot or two. This one left behind hours of tape. Pageants, parades, recitals, home video, a short life spent performing for a camera. JonBenet over here. So when the networks need pictures and videos to fill those empty holiday hours, the supply never runs out. And the same few seconds of a small girl in pageant makeup run again and again and again. That's 24 hours around the clock, coast to coast. We Never close. Open seven days a week. On the 2nd of January, 1997, a Denver station airs pageant video of JonBenet and the network's run it within the hour. There she is at a pageant weeks before her death. There she is in a spangled Showgirl style costume, 6 years old under stage lights with her hair bleached and her lips painted. To a country that has never heard of Boulder, these videos become JonBenet Ramsey. Not a precious kindergartner who likes to jump into leaf piles, but an image of big hair, makeup and that practiced little wave in the world. The Ramseys came from the Georgia pageant circuit. None of this is unusual. In some parts of the south, dressing a daughter up and putting her on stage is just a Saturday. Patsy had been Miss West Virginia herself. But to the rest of America, the sequins, the mascara, the hairspray come across as something eerie and disturbing. Major publications start describing JonBenet as moving on stage in a way that's adult, seductive, precocious and wrong. In the pageant world, we it is just choreography that a coach taught a child. No one bats an eye. But on national news broadcasts, stripped of that context, JonBenet's performances read as evidence of something far more sinister. Inside that home, while the country stares at the pageant videos, the case is leaking. Inside the Boulder PD Detectives are growing certain the family is the answer. And information to that end keeps surfacing in the newspapers. A reporter at the Rocky Mountain News, Charlie Brennan, becomes a regular destination for material coming out of the investigation. And some of the leaks are not accidental at all. Part of it is a police strategy to apply pressure through the press in the hope that a guilty parent cornered in public, will finally crack. Sweat out John and Patsy. But it doesn't start that way for the Ramseys. On New Year's Day 1997, six days after their daughter is found dead, and before they have sat for a single formal police interview, John and Patsy go on cnn. Patsy's voice cracks.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

There is a killer on the loose. I don't know who it is. I don't know if it's a he or. Or a she that if I were a resident of Boulder, I will tell my friends to keep Keep your babies close to you. There's someone out there.

[Megyn Kelly]

Keep your babies close. From a grieving mother, it is a warning. To a lot of the country, it sounds like something else, a woman talking to the media before she talks to the police. And the town does not want the warning either. Two days after the Ramsey's first CNN interview, the mayor of Boulder steps up to a microphone. People in Boulder have no need to fear that there is someone wandering. The streets of Boulder has been portrayed by someone, some people, particularly in talk radio, looking for young children to attack. Boulder is safe. It's always been a safe community. It continues to be a safe community. The city says, in effect, there is no stranger out there. Which leaves the public only one place to look back inside that house, a friend of Patsy's, a photographer named Judith Phillips, who had shot the family's portraits, goes to the mayor's office in person to ask for protection for the Ramseys. She is told plainly there is no murderer out there. Across town, a mother whose little girl heard Patsy's warning on television cannot get her child to sleep in her own room for months. And around the Ramseys, something stranger is happening. Their circle goes quiet. Friends start getting calls from inside that circle with the same instruction. Do not talk to reporters. Do not talk to the police. Most of them comply. The photographer who went to the mayor does not. Judith Phillips opens her door to reporters and she sits down with detectives twice. And for that she is cut off, dropped by the people she thought were family told she has betrayed them and and every silence the family leaves. The tabloids are happy to fill. The leaks are not always true, and the most damaging ones are the simplest. In March of 1997, Charlie Brennan's paper runs a story sourced to police saying there were no footprints in the snow around the Ramsey home the morning after JonBenet's murder. If no one left footprints, the reasoning goes, then no intruder came or went, and the family must have done travels everywhere at light speed. It sounds airtight. Here is what does not spread quickly with that story. The sergeant who walked the property that freezing morning noted a light dusting of snow on the grass. But the sidewalks and the driveway where a person would actually walk were dry, bare concrete. There was nothing there to hold a footprint in the first place. One source, one phrase, and a false fact that outlives the correction by decades. Then there is the plane. In the days after the family flies to their former home, Georgia, to bury their daughter, a story takes hold that John Ramsey, cold and composed, piloted his own plane to the funeral. Funeral. Here's how Paula Woodward, an investigative reporter out of Colorado, describes the shock of this story to Netflix.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I remember saying to my husband, what

[Megyn Kelly]

kind of person is he?

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

How could he do this when he's got to be so distraught over the terrible way his daughter died and the

[Megyn Kelly]

fact that she was murdered? How could he fly his plane to Atlanta? The tricky part here, a piece of it is true. John Ramsey is a licensed pilot. The family does own a small private plane, a twin engine, kept at an airport outside Boulder. This is the plane they had planned to take on their second Christmas trip to Michigan. So the detail feels plausible, but it's not true. John Ramsey did not fly to his daughter's funeral. He later said he was too shaken to even consider it. His company, Lockheed Martin, loaned the family a corporate jet and its own two pilots for the trip to Georgia. The story painted an image of a father calmly flying himself across the country to bury his little girl. But it never happened. Years later, Brennan himself would look back

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

on the story when I reported that John Ramsey had piloted his own plane back to Atlanta for the funeral. That was inaccurate. It came from a. From a source that I thoroughly trusted and had given me other solid information. That information was wrong. My source was wrong in that case, and that was a mistake.

[Megyn Kelly]

But the picture sticks because it fits the story. The public has already been sold. And then the media seizes on the handwriting. Report after report tells the country Patsy Ramsey wrote the ransom note, that the experts have tied her hand to that page. Sources say the ransom note written by the alleged kidnapper is considered a key piece of evidence. Handwriting experts have ruled out John Ramsey and others close to the family. They have not excluded Patsy Ramsey, who has submitted several samples. The reality, however, is not quite so clean. Hi, diva. It's Rachel and Jordan. Yeah, hi.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Quick question.

[Megyn Kelly]

Why are you not spending your Venmo balance? Yeah, we're concerned you can, like, buy stuff with it.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Ugh. You love buying stuff.

[Megyn Kelly]

And earn cash back on eligible purchases. Mm.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

You love purchasing eligible things.

[Megyn Kelly]

So the money your friend sent you yesterday, that's today's ramen or rideshare or eye patches.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

The skincare kind, not the pyro kind.

[Megyn Kelly]

Spend with Venmo, then you can earn cash back with Venmo stash. Venmo stash bundle terms and exclusions apply. That's $100 cash back per month. See terms at Venmo Me Terms, Idaho verification required to use a Venmo balance.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

When you clock in with Ford Pro. We clock in with power. Business driven tech, adaptability and service that comes to you when you're on. We're on Ford Pro.

[Megyn Kelly]

The Colorado Bureau of Investigation hands the ransom note to its examiner, Chet Yubowski, who studies it for the better part of a year and puts Patsy Ramsey through five separate handwriting tests. And his finding is not the one the leaks describe. He can find no evidence Patsy disguised her writing. He sees some shared letter formations, and weighed against the number and consistency of the differences, he writes that he is unable to identify Patsy Ramsey as the author of that ransom note. Could not be ruled out is as far as anyone will responsibly go. But in the papers, magazines, and on tv, it becomes the handwriting matches. One man does go further. A Vassar College professor named Donald Foster, who analyzes text for a living, publicly announces that Patsy is the author. What the audience never hears is that this same professor had earlier written Patsy a private letter declaring her innocent. Or that he had once used his methods to name an anonymous Internet commenter as the killer. A person who turned out to be a middle aged housewife in North Carolina. With zero connection to this case, his credibility does not survive even mild scrutiny. Yet the headline lives in on. Then the pageant footage and the rumors braid together into something uglier. That JonBenet had been sexually abused and that the answer lay somewhere inside her own family. Investigators lean into it twice. Police bring in a Boulder raised former Miss America, Marilyn Van der Ber, a woman who had spent years telling the world that a polished, admired, wealthy family can hide a monstrous secret because hers had her own. Story is real and it is harrowing. You don't talk about it in families. Siblings don't talk to siblings. No. JonBenet had tape over her mouth. That is the strongest message we have. You will never speak of it. Bringing Marilyn into the Ramsay Empire investigation is not evidence. It is insinuation by resemblance. And on the actual evidence that insinuation collapses. JonBenet's pediatrician and the doctors who reviewed her history, none of them find physical or historical proof that this child had been abused before the night she died. The damage from the abuse story is hard to measure. It recasts a murdered scene. Six year old as a victim of her own family on the strength of costumes and speculation. And that colors everything the public sees. The accusation runs at the top of the hour. The correction, when it comes at all, is a line buried at the bottom of a story no one reads to the end. The Ramseys refuse to let this story be told without them. They fight back in public, on camera through 1997 and the years that follow. They give interviews. They sit for documentaries. They hire a Washington media consultant to manage the press. And in the spring of 1997, about four months after the murder, John and Patsy finally sit for formal police interviews. Then they walk straight out to a bank of microphones to announce that they've done so. Patsy looks into the cameras. I'm appalled that anyone would think that John or I would be involved in such a hideous, heinous crime. But let me assure you that I

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

did not kill JonBenet.

[Megyn Kelly]

I did not have anything to do with it. I love that child with my whole of my heart and soul. But every public appearance becomes a new piece of evidence in a trial no one declared. America does not watch to be reassured. It watches to judge. The tone, the tears, the pauses on cnn. Viewers freeze the moment. A reporter asks whether the Ramseys are certain their daughter was taken by an outsider. And Patsy shakes her head no, while John says yes. Every frame is parsed. Every silence is read.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Our family is a loving family. It's a gentle family.

[Megyn Kelly]

A father insists, unprompted, that his family is gentle. And analysts spend years asking why he needed to say that at all. This is what the media coverage runs on now, not new evidence, but the same handful of clips replayed, re reread until a shaken head, a glance or an unlucky phrase hardens into proof of guilt. By November of 1997, a Gallup poll finds 88% of Americans with an opinion about who killed JonBenet point to one or both of her parents. This verdict is built almost entirely on 11 months worth of leaked and distorted information, not on anything a court of law would ever admit, which is how the country arrives that November at a talk show studio and mock jury nearly 30 years later, the man who built that spectacle, Geraldo Rivera, would apologize to John Ramsey in a conversation on News Nation.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I deeply apologize to you for what you and your family have suffered. When I say I am sorry, I don't apologize. I apologize for my reporting. I believe that at least half the reporters and half the nation believe that the that the shadow of suspicion, half the Boulder Police Department, for those who have retired because of this case, believe it. But I don't know what happened. I just want you to know that I lament contributing to the hurt that you have endured. No one deserves to go through what you went through. John, thank you.

[Megyn Kelly]

Off camera the investigation is breaking apart. The Boulder PD and the district attorney are barely speaking and each side shapes the story its own way for reporters. One of the officers who worked the case, former Boulder PD officer Gretchen Smith, later described the internal rot to a CBS documentary team. The JonBenet case destroyed morale completely. Really, there was no morale. The district attorney's office and some of administration did not want to hear that an affluent member of the community was guilty of a crime like this. They didn't want to hear that. I don't think they wanted to solve this crime. And if they had to go down a different path, that might might not have been the truth. I think they were willing to do that. Another friend of the Ramses breaks the silence in their social circle. Fleet White, one of the Ramsey's closest friends, was beside John when the body was found. Fleet would later describe how his family's life changed after the murder.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

On Christmas Day 1996, John and Patsy Ramsey and their children Burke and JonBenet were dinner guests at our home. The next day we were present at the Ramsey home when JonBenet's body was found. Priscilla and I and our children instantly became witnesses in the Boulder police investigation.

[Megyn Kelly]

Of JonBenet's death in August of 1998, Fleet and his wife Priscilla criticized the investigation in an open letter to the people of Colorado. Here's part of it. Quote. After JonBenet Ramsey was killed in Boulder near nearly 20 months ago, her parents immediately hired prominent criminal defense attorneys with close professional, political and personal ties to prosecutors, the Denver and Boulder legal and judicial communities, state legislators and high ranking members of the Colorado government, including Governor Roy Romer. The investigation of her death has since been characterized by confusion and delays. The district attorney and the Ramsey attorneys have simultaneously rebuked the police for focusing their investigation on the Ramseys, when in fact police were simply following evidence. During the course of the investigation, the district attorney has used inexplicable methods, including the recruitment of magazine writers and tabloids to leak information concerning the case and to needle witnesses, suspects and police detectives. He has provided evidence to Ramsey defense attorneys and their request, but denied reasonable requests by witnesses for their own statements to police. He has thoroughly alienated police detectives and key witnesses whose cooperation is vital to the investigation and prosecution. His public statements regarding the investigation have been erratic, evasive and misleading. We must be mindful, however, of the first cause of the investigation's failure, the refusal of John and Patsy Ramsey to cooperate fully and genuinely with those officially charged with the responsibility of investigating the death of their daughter, JonBenet. End quote. The people who knew the Ramseys best are splitting up into camps. On the record, off the record, and America gobbles up every word of both. Week after week, the Supermarket racks turn JonBenet into a symbol and the Ramseys into characters. The cold father, the ambitious mother, the perfect family with something rotten underneath. Rumor becomes packaging, speculation becomes a headline. And by the time anyone asks what has actually been proven, millions of people have already accepted the accusation as fact. And here is the piece of evidence that should have stopped all of this. On JonBenet's body, under her fingernails and inside her underwear, there is DNA from an unknown man. It's not John's. It's not Patsy's. Not Burke's. It belongs to a stranger left physically on the murdered child. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation confirms it in a lab report. Within about three weeks of the killing in January 1990, the single strongest piece of evidence pointing away from the Ramsey family. There is no press conference for this revelation, no leaks about the unidentified male DNA. Boulder police sit on the finding. Roughly six months go by before the district attorney's office is even told what the lab found. The public waits far longer. The fact that could have broken the case was filed in a drawer until 2003 when the DNA is uncovered and given to the FBI for testing. It does not match anyone in the FBI's criminal database and to this day remains a mystery. In 2016, nearly 20 years after the murder, the media machine turns on John and Patsy's surviving child, Burke. Burke was nine years old when his sister was killed. The Ramsey say he was asleep the entire night. Just down the hall, CBS airs a primetime special built around the theory that Burke killed his sister. With paid experts and a staged reenactment. Burke Ramsey sues the network. Well, the Boulder Daily Camera reports The brother of JonBenet Ramsey has reached a settlement with CBS. Burke Ramsey sued CBS after a television series the network aired suggested he killed his six year old sister in Boulder. No court ever finds that Burke did anything. The detectives and the prosecutors who actually worked this case never charged Burke. But the theory is now in prime time. 20 years later in this story, no one's ever really cleared. They're only re accused on a later night for a new audience. This is the cost of attorney trial by television, by the news media. The footprints that were never there. The plane he never flew. The handwriting that never matched. The alleged history of abuse that was never proven. Each one is corrected quietly, if at all, and long after the smear has done its dirty work. Underneath the entire narrative lies the DNA of a man no one can name. That DNA sits in a drawer because it does not fit the story the country has already chosen to believe. The one it's been led to. Before a single charge is ever filed in the only court that seems to matter. The Ramses have long ago been found guilty. But while the whole country is staring inside that house, one veteran detective is about to walk into this case all but certain the parents did it. And walk out believing the exact opposite. Tomorrow we'll hear his side of the story and the compelling picture he paints on MK Confidential. November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas, the day JFK is assassinated. It had rained overnight, but by mid morning the sky is clear. Clear and the day is warm. Look at the photographs of the crowd waiting for the President's motorcade and you will see it. No raincoats, no galoshes, not a single open umbrella. Because it is a beautiful day. Except that is for one man. In all of Dealey Plaza, in all of Dallas, there is exactly one man standing under an open black umbrella. And he is standing on the grass at the precise spot where seconds later, President Kennedy's Body will jolt forward, then back, as the bullets find him. For years, that man is a gift to conspiracy theorists. Investigators call him the Umbrella Man. One theory holds that the umbrella itself is a weapon. That its shaft conceals a dart gun fired into JFK's throat. Some come to believe the Umbrella man is the real assassin. Because what possible innocent reason could a man have to stand under an umbrella on a cloudless day exactly where all the shots killed President John F. Kennedy? And then in 1978, someone finally just asks him. The Umbrella man comes forward and testifies before Congress with his umbrella. And his explanation is so strange, so wacky, it can only be true. The Umbrella was a protest not against jfk, but against his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, and his father's appeasement of Hitler and the Nazis in the lead up to World War II.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I just knew that it was a sore spot for the Kennedys. The umbrella that the Prime Minister of England came back with got to be a symbol with the son, manner with the British people. By association, it got transferred to the Kennedy family.

[Megyn Kelly]

The Black Umbrella is a visual insult. A reference to the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who carried one everywhere. That's the secret. A grieving nation's darkest riddle. And the answer is a man making an obscure political protest with an umbrella. The investigator, Josiah Thompson, who chased that mystery for years, drew one lesson from it.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

If you have any fact which you think is really sinister, right? Is really obviously a fact which can only point to some sinister underpinnings. Hey, forget it, man. Because you can never on your own, think up all the non sinister, perfectly valid explanations for that fact.

[Megyn Kelly]

A cautionary tale that is the warning of the Umbrella Man. The strangest fact in a case is not always what it seems. And the murder of JonBenet Ramsey is full of strange facts. A ransom note on the family's own paper. A mother who talks to the cameras before the police. A father composed when he should be falling apart. In the spring of 1997, one man walks into this case and refuses to trust his eyes. He wants the evidence, and only the evidence, to tell the story. His name is Lou Smit. I'm Megyn Kelly and this is MK Confidential. Lou Smit is not a defense lawyer. He is not a Ramsey friend. He is a career homicide detective out of Colorado springs. More than 200 murders worked. A clearance rate nearly 90%. Lou is a deeply religious and methodical man whom they call the Sherlock of the Rockies. His reputation is built on cases like Heather dawn church, a 13 year old girl who vanished from her home in 1991. The case sat cold for years until Smit went back through the file and lifted a single fingerprint off a window screen that everyone before him had missed. That print put her killer away. Lou is a finder of things other people failed to see. In March of 1997, three months after JonBenet's murder, Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter brings smit onto the JonBenet Ramsey task force. The case is already going sideways, and the police and prosecutors are at each other's throats. Lou Smit had retired just the previous year to spend time with his wife, Barb, who was battling cancer. Now he's back on the force and in a different city, away from his family and investigating another family affected by cancer. Smit starts on the Ramsey case exactly where the police did with the parents. He knows the stats. He knows a child found dead inside a home usually means someone who lived there is responsible. He arrives expecting to help prove that the family did it. Then Smit sits down with the file. And he works the way he always works by a principle he learned decades before. The transfer theory. Whenever a person commits a crime, they leave something of themselves at the scene and carry something from the scene away with them. Find what was brought in and what was taken out, and the evidence will tell you who was there. So Lou Smit stops asking who had a motive and instead asks a colder question. What does the physical evidence on its own actually say? And the longer he looks, the more he believes a new story. It starts in the basement with a window. Low in the basement wall on the south side of the Ramsey house, there is a window found wide open on the morning of December 26th. The crime lab photographs it that way, hours before John Ramsey ever finds JonBenet's body beneath it. Inside, on the white painted wall, a black scuff mark. And on the floor directly below, a hard sided Samsonite suitcase stood upright on its end in a spot where no one in the family says it belongs. Inside the suitcase, a pink duvet, a Barbie doll, and one of JonBenet's Dr. Seuss books. The Boulder detectives tell Smit that the window is nothing. No one could have come through there. There's a metal grate over the outside window. Well, so Smit studies the grate himself. And in the crime lab photos from that morning, he finds leaves and vegetation disturbed underneath it and dirt brushed clean off the frame of the open window. To all appearances, it looks like someone has passed through there, or at least has tried. Then Lou does the thing that becomes his signature. A retired detective in his 60s lowers himself into that window well and squeezes through that basement window on video to prove a grown man can do it.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Now, this is where I think the killer actually got in. At some point, the great has to be picked up and put down.

[Megyn Kelly]

John Ramsey had broken that window himself the summer before when he was locked out of the house. And he believed it had been fixed to Smit. The open pane is the point of entry. The scuff on the wall is where a body scraped through. And the suitcase is not clutter. It is a step, something the killer stood on to climb back out. Lou comes to believe the intruder may have meant to carry JonBenet out of the house inside that suitcase and found it too big to force up through the window near her body. In the basement there is white foam packing debris and brown leaves. The same material that lines the bottom of that window well. Smit believes the killer brought that into the house and left behind two traces. A partial boot print from a brand no Ramsay owns and an unidentified palm print on the door of the little room where JonBenet was found. But Lou keeps building. He looks at the house itself. JonBenet's bedroom is on the second floor. Her parents sleep one flight up in a converted attic suite at the very top of the house. Investigators run sound tests and find that a voice in JonBenet's room is barely audible from the master bedroom. Smit looks around the home and thinks this is a big chopped up four level house in a college neighborhood with foot traffic at all hours and an alarm system the family had switched off months before. This is not a sealed fortress. It is a place a patient stranger could move through in the dark for hours, unseen and unheard of. He studies how JonBenet was bound. A garrote built from white cord and the broken handle of one of Patsy's paintbrushes tied with slip knots that only tighten as the victim pulls against them. To Smit, that is not the panicked improvisation of a parent covering up an accident. It is the equipment. It is intent. And the Ramses owned none of the raw materials. No parachute cord, no roll of duct tape. Police searched the house, the cars, the office, even the airplane hangar and found none of it. Whoever built that garage and taped the little girl's mouth shut. He brought his tools in and carried most of them back out. Then there are the marks. Lou Smit is the first person on the case to take them serious. Seriously. On JonBenet's body, there are two sets of small red marks. A pair on her back and a pair on the right side of her face. Smit measures the gap and matches it to the twin metal contacts of a specific weapon. An air taser. A stun gun.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

What I'd like to show you is what I think is one of the most important clues left behind by the guilt Stunt gun. There's marks on JonBenet. Those are marks on her back. Those are marks on her face. And there's the same distance apart, slightly rectangular in shape. Something made those marks.

[Megyn Kelly]

In Smith's reconstruction of the After JonBenet's murder, the stun gun is used twice. Once upstairs, pressed to the child's jaw and throat while she sleeps, enough to stun her silent so she can be carried down without a sound. And once more in the basement on her back as she struggles. A forensic pathologist reviews the comparison and calls the stun gun evidence compelling.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Unless some other evidence is presented to me. The most likely explanation for those injuries. That they were caused by a stun gun.

[Megyn Kelly]

That hands Lou the answer to a detail that never fit any other version of the night. The scream. A neighbor, Melody Stanton, asleep across the street from the Ramses with her window open 150ft away, reports hearing a child scream around 2am that morning. A scream the Ramsey family inside, inside the house say they never heard. If it came from the basement, they might not have. Beneath all of it, beneath the broken window and the stuffed suitcase and the pairs of red marks, sits the evidence Lou Smit calls the key to this entire case, and that is the DNA. The Colorado lab finds a small partial profile of male DNA drawn from a blood stain in JonBenet's underwear. It belongs to no one in the family, nor to any suspect ever tested. This sample, however, is too small and too degraded for the lab to identify the fluid or the tissue behind it. Whether the DNA came from spit or sweat or shed skin, no one has ever been able to say it is male. It is not from the Ramsey family. And past that, a blank. During the autopsy, a Boulder PD detective runs an ultraviolet light over the body and thinks he sees traces of semen. But it turns out to be a smear of blood. No semen is ever found on JonBenet. The autopsy indicates that the sexual assault is consistent with penetration by a finger or an object. Broken blood vessels in JonBenet's vagina show she was penetrated that night. And a microscopic fleck of wood is found inside of her, most likely from the splintered paintbrush used to build the garrote the unknown male DNA is not only found on JonBenet's underwear. The same profile is found as touch DNA from skin cells inside the waistband of her long johns. To a detective raised on the idea that every killer leaves a piece of himself behind, one stray speck might be a fluke. But the same stranger's DNA twice on a murdered child is a person who was there. Hey, I just Venmo'd you for rent.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Nice. Now I can instantly spend it whether I'm checking out online with Venmo or using a Venmo debit card.

[Megyn Kelly]

Say more.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

More. Exactly. Because the more you do with Venmo, the more you get like earning up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash on a bundle of brands.

[Megyn Kelly]

So order more pizza.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

The meth demands it.

[Megyn Kelly]

Get the Venmo debit card.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Venmo stash bundle terms and exclusions apply. See terms at Venmo Me stash terms. Venmo checkout not available at all merchants. Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank NA when you clock in with Ford Pro, we clock in with power Business, business driven tech, adaptability and service that comes to you. When you're on, we're on Ford Pro.

[Megyn Kelly]

Smit argues one more point and it is the shakiest part of his case that a predator who would do this would not do it once. That somewhere there is a pattern. Other home invasions, other children. And that Boulder is not the safe sealed community its officials keep insisting it is. And there is one case that haunts that argument more than any other. It happens In September of 1997, nine months after JonBenet is killed less than two miles from the Ramsey home. Late one night, a masked man breaks into a house and sexually assaults a 12 year old girl in her own bed. He has slipped past the alarm system and past the family dog. And by the family's account, he did not force his way in that night at all. He appears to have gotten inside earlier while the house was empty and then hidden there waiting until the family came home, locked the doors and fell asleep. He is stopped only when the girl's mother comes down the hall. After hearing whispers, whispers in the dark, he escapes out the bedroom window and vanishes into the night. He is never caught. That 12 year old girl was a student at the very same local dance studio as JonBenet. Two little girls from one small dance school two miles apart. One strangled in her basement on Christmas night. The other nine months later, attacked in her own bed by a masked man. Who had hidden inside her home and then vanished back into the neighborhood. To John Ramsey and to the detectives who came to believe him, that is not a coincidence. It's a pattern. Possibly the very same man. Lou never stops making the argument there

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

is evidence of an intruder. I say this over and over and over again. Nobody wants to listen. And as a result of that, there's a very good chance that tragedy could again strike this family.

[Megyn Kelly]

That is the case for the intruder as Lou Smit built it. Now, here is what stands against it. Start with the window and the spider web. To reach that basement window, an intruder first has to lift the metal grate over the outside well. And a spider web runs across that grate, its strands anchored from the metal down to the bricks of the wall. Or at least that's how it appears. The original web is never photographed, and whether it connects the grate itself to the house is a point of contention. The officers who inspect it find the web whole. That spells trouble for the intruder theory. If the spider web is intact and connects the metal to the house, it suggests the grate above the window well was never lifted at all. It is the single hardest fact against Lou Smith's window theory. But Smit reads that same grate the opposite way.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Now, this is where I think the killer actually got in at some point. And there is a gas grill here, and then there's a south door to the house. Right behind this gas grill is a grate. And you put straight up. You're looking straight down into the window. There's three windows there. The center one was the one that was open. And you're going to see foliage, that green foliage under the leading edge. That's great. Don't grow that way. The grate has to be picked up and put down.

[Megyn Kelly]

Smit says the grate is not bolted down, and he is sure that a patient hand can ease it up and set it back without snapping a strand. During one walkthrough of the house, Smit eases the grate open without breaking a fresh web that has grown between the grate and the house. Even Detective Steve Thomas notes that Smit was able to navigate the grate without breaking the web, While detectives who try lifting the grate break several web strands. So the web does not settle the question, it only sharpens it. There's one more possible explanation for the an industrious spider. Detective Michael Everett from Boulder PD consults two spider experts. Dr. Brent Opel of Virginia Tech and Dr. Robert Bennett of the British Columbia Ministry of Forests. Both identify the web as a funnel web, a kind of web that a spider spins and repairs for as long as it's alive. The night JonBenet died, the temperature in Boulder dropped to around 6 degrees. By the next afternoon, it was back up into the low 50s. The open window faces southwest into the afternoon sun. While the funnel weaver spider hibernates through a Colorado winter. Bennett says the Ramsey window well, had perfect conditions for a hibernating spider to wake up and repair its web and re spin it that day or the next. However, it's unclear precisely what time of day officers first observed the fully intact spider web and whether there would have been enough time for the spider to spin it fresh. Like all the other evidence in this this case, even the spider web points two ways at once. Then we get to the stun gun. The cold case team in the 2016 CBS documentary tests this part of the theory by using a stun gun on a volunteer. The marks it leaves behind do not match those on JonBenet. And the effect is the opposite of silence.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Taser.

[Megyn Kelly]

Taser.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

If this were done to this kid, you would have a scream from this kid that goes through the entire building. Everybody in that house would have heard it.

[Megyn Kelly]

So the stun gun, like the window, stays contested. But the marks are still there on dead JonBenet's skin. And no version in which the parents did it has ever fully explained them. Then the DNA where the counter is technical and it is fair. This is a tiny amount of touch DNA. And skilled scientists caution that trace DNA like this can travel. It could be carried to the scene by a factory worker who handled the underwear or transferred from one service to another. It is not, on its own, a name. The DNA profile has been run against a great many people over the years, and it's never matched a single one of them. John Ramsey will spend the rest of his life saying those three letters are the answer. That the identity of the man who killed his daughter is sitting in an evidence locker waiting for science to catch up to him. The police find no definitive connection connection between the 1997 home invasion in Boulder and the murder of JonBenet. No forensic thread that ties the same hand to both crimes. One Boulder PD officer bluntly sums up the department's stance on the Ramsey murder. This was one of a kind. Lou never manages to prove the link. Smith's intruder theory has two more potential holes, and they are not small. First, it has to explain the ransom note, three pages long, written on a pad from inside the house demanding a ransom that almost exactly Matches John Ramsey's annual bonus. It has to explain why a stranger who broke in to steal a child would then sit down in that dark house and compose three theatrical pages instead of simply carrying her out the door. And it is not only the ransom note. Remember the garrote. Its handle is a piece of Patsy's own paintbrushes taken from her art kit in the basement. The pad, the pen, the paintbrush. The killer builds this crime in part out of the family's own belongings. A stranger organized enough to arrive with a stun gun, duct tape and cord, who then fastened fashions the murder weapon from a mother's paintbrush and writes his ransom demand on the household notepad, is a genuinely odd figure to the Boulder detectives. It is the strangest, the damnedest thing about the whole intruder theory. An outsider who behaves at the decisive moment exactly like someone who already lives there. Lou has an answer. He believes the original plan of a kidnapping for ransom went wrong in the basement. In Lou's mind, the murderer entered the house through the open basement window While the family was out at Christmas dinner. He wrote the ransom note on the family notepad, then hid inside the house. Once the family was asleep, the killer crept into JonBenet's room and used a stun gun to incapacitate her. He then carried her down to the basement, fashioned a garrote with Patsy's paintbrush handle and sexually assaulted JonBenet with his fingers.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I believe he brought her down to the farthest, deepest part of that basement and did very brutal things to her.

[Megyn Kelly]

Lou believes the killer used the garrote both as a tool of erotic asphyxiation or strangulation fantasy and actual deadly strangulation. Lou believes that JonBenet came to two at some point and started to fight back. That the attacker then panicked and hit her over the head, possibly with a flashlight or an aluminum baseball bat. Both found in the Ramsey house. The killer then believed that JonBenet was dead and fled out the basement window. As for the oddly specific ransom amount, lou explains that $118,000 would have yielded exactly 1 million Mexican Mexican pesos at that time. If the intruder were planning to run to the border. One million pesos sounds like a nice round number to help with an escape. By 1998, the JonBenet Ramsey case is no longer just a murder investigation. It has devolved into two camps at war. The Boulder PD believes the answer lies inside the Ramsey house. Lou Smit and the district Attorney's office are convinced it came in from the outside. The police and prosecutors barely trust each other. Early on, the two sides fought over how to handle JonBenet's body. The police wanting to hold it back from burial as leverage to force the parents into an interview, and the DA's office shaming police for ransoming a dead child. It is a small, ugly fight over a child's body. It is also the first crack in a divide that will run through everything to come and swallow this entire case. And within a few weeks of each other. That war produces two major casualties. Two detectives with opposite conclusions, both quitting the case in protest. In August of 1998, Steve Thomas, the lead detective who believes Patsy killed JonBenet resigns with a public letter blasting the DA for refusing to charge the Ramsey family. And In September of 1998, Lou Smit resigns for the exact opposite reason. He writes the district attorney that he cannot in good conscience be part of the persecution of innocent people. Smith does not walk away from the case itself, however. He keeps working it for free for the rest of his life.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I don't know if I could solve it without the help of the police department and I'm sure I'm not going to get that. But I know that God had a plan and I'm part of it and I'm just going to continue to work in it as long as he needs me.

[Megyn Kelly]

Lou hauls around his boxes of photographs and his slide deck of the window and the marks and the DNA from meeting to meeting right up until his death in 2010. Friends leaders say he took the this case to his grave. Lou's adult children carry the torch forward and continue to investigate to this day. Back in 1998, the investigation stalled because the people the detectives most needed to talk to stopped talking. John and Patsy Ramsey, on their lawyer's advice, will not sit for open police interviews at this point, friends who are around the house that Christmas, they've lawyered up as well. A grand jury is the one tool that can break this wall. It can subpoena witnesses, force testimony under oath and demand evidence the police cannot otherwise get. It can lock down memories in testimony before they fade, including the account of the Ramsey's young son Burke. In March of 1998, the Boulder, Penn. Formally asks District Attorney Alex Hunter to take this case to a grand jury. And the PD announces it in a press release, quote, while there is still some investigation left to be done. Both Chief Kobe and Commander Beckner believe the investigation has progressed to the point at which the authority of a grand jury is necessary in order to complete the investigation. End quote. From the months D.A. hunter resists. In his meetings with the police, he calls a grand jury, a political solution, not a way to solve the case in public. His office calls the idea premature. But now the police are demanding it in public, and Hunter is out of good options. So he gives in. And in September 1998, Alex Hunter convenes a grand jury. He brings in an outside specialist, former federal prosecutor Michael Caine, to run it. And he hands the biggest question in the case, whether anyone can be charged in JonBenet's death to a group of ordinary Boulder citizens sworn to lifelong secrecy. They hear from former FBI profiler John Douglas, whom the Ramseys hired to investigate this case, who believes that an intruder killed JonBenet.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I've sat down across a table from some of the country's greatest liars in the world, really, and I can sense it. And things just did not fit. The crime scene data just doesn't fit when I'm looking at this man. Mr. Ramsey, if you did it, you are one hell of a liar. You are one hell of a liar if you did it. And you're putting on a great production here. But I just don't believe in my heart he did this. And not just in my heart. From what, from the analysis of the. Of the scene.

[Megyn Kelly]

They hear from Lou Smit, too. Smit brings the grand jury the case of his Life. More than 600 slides built one photograph at a time. The open window, the disturbed grate, the suitcase, the marks on the child's skin, the DNA, all of it. And at the end of it, the question that has hung over the Ramsay family for two years is finally going to get an answer. Will John and Patsy be charged with the murder of their daughter or not? That grand jury will sift through evidence for more than a year, but it turns out that what the grand jury decides and what the public is told are two wildly different things. We'll open that door and everything behind it tomorrow on MK Confidential. It is October 13, 1999, a lovely fall Wednesday in Boulder, Colorado. Thirteen months of testimony in the grand jury proceeding looking into the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. More than 30,000 pieces of evidence, dozens of witnesses, all of which culminates in one man walking up to a bank of microphones. District Attorney Alex Hunter steps up onto the outdoor platform. Reporters are huddled and the cameras are already rolling. Alex Hunter has a single page of paper in hand.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

The grand jurors have done their work extraordinarily well, bringing to bear all of their legal powers, life experiences and shrewdness Yet I must report to you

[Megyn Kelly]

that

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I and my prosecution task force believe we do not have sufficient evidence to warrant the filing of charges against anyone who has been investigated at this time. Thank you very much.

[Megyn Kelly]

And that's it. No charges, no indictment, no arrest. The reporters file their stories that night with a single headline. The grand jury found nothing. Except the grand jury did not find nothing. What no one in that room knows is that those grand jurors voted to indict John and Patsy Ramsey. They signed true bills, the formal charges. A grand jury returns when it believes there is enough evidence to proceed. Not for murder, but for child abuse resulting in death. And for accessory to first degree murder for helping to hide whoever killed JonBenet. Alex Hunter declined to sign and file those true bills. How it works is a grand jury indicts on probable cause, the lowest bar in the law. A prosecutor then has to decide whether this case can be proved at trial beyond a reasonable doubt, the highest bar there is. Hunter decided he could not clear that distance. So he sealed the true bills away, walked to the microphone and told the world he had nothing. The district attorney will keep that secret for 14 years. The case will outlast Alex Hunter. It will outlast the detectives who fought over it. It will even outlast one of the two parents living under its shadow. But this case was never really closed. It was only sealed. I'm Megyn Kelly, and this is MK Confidential with our final episode in the investigation into the death of JonBenet Ramsey. For the Ramses, Alex Hunter's decision not to press charges does not bring freedom. It's a strange kind of life sentence. They're never arrested, never tried, never convicted. They live as prime suspects. They walk through airports, grocery stores, church parking lots, carrying an accusation no jury will ever test and no court can lift. The accusation cost them more than their peace. John Ramsey once ran a billion dollar company. But as John himself told Barbara Walters, this case has ruined the family financially.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Before JonBenet's death, you were reportedly worth millions of dollars.

[Megyn Kelly]

But that money seems to have gone.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I was told by a very experienced FBI person that most victims of violent crime end up broke. Very expensive. To deal with the justice system, you make bad decisions. You sell your home, you move, you quit your job, you change jobs.

[Megyn Kelly]

In defending themselves, the Ramseys enlist a small army of lawyers, investigators, publicists, handwriting experts, and a former FBI profiler. A fortune once estimated north of $7 million shrinks toward one. They sell the house on 15th street, the house where JonBenet was murdered and never spend another night in it. After the Christmas of 1996. They're not spending this money to win a case. They are spending it to prove a negative, that they did not murder their own child. While the family fights the accusation in public, Detective Lou Smit works the case in private, chasing his intruder theory. The lone man he is certain is out there somewhere. And Lou is not the only one chasing the lone wolves. Every few years, new names surface, the possible break everyone's been waiting for. In March of 1997, Boulder police get a call from the state of North Carolina about a drifter named John Brewer Eustace. He's charged with the rape and kidnap of a two year old girl in Charlotte. He pried open a basement apartment's window screen, snatched the child from a bedroom and took her out the window. Eustace is also the suspect in the murders of three other young girls across the country. When police go into Eustace's house, there's a shrine to JonBenet. So Boulder detectives travel halfway across the country to Charlotte and review the evidence themselves. Could Eustace have been in Colorado in December? Unfortunately, Eustace has a rock solid alibi for that night. He worked in a factory and he had clocked in covering the time period in which JonBenet had died. There is Gary Oliva, a convicted pedophile who the morning after JonBenet's murder calls an old high school friend, sobbing into the phone, saying, I just hurt a little girl.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

He's written a series of letters, including ones where he has hidden, committed, taking the life of JonBenet Ramsey. He's in custody right now, but he sent these letters and the question is, are, is this for real?

[Megyn Kelly]

In December of 2000, police arrest Gary on drug charges and he's found carrying a photograph of JonBenet, a stun gun and a poem he has written to her. Living on the streets, Gary often visited a local church which fed home homeless people and is located less than 10 houses away from the Ramsay home. Police run his DNA against the unknown male fluids on JonBenet's body and on her clothes. And no match. There is Randy Simons, the photographer who took JonBenet's pageant portraits. Shortly after JonBenet's death, multiple beauty pageant mothers report to police that Randy called them up hysterical, saying I did not kill JonBenet. I did not kill JonBenet. No one was saying he did. A year later, Randy was walking down the street naked and the police were called. During his arrest, he blurts out to police unprompted. I did not kill JonBenet. A red flag again, but no match on the DNA. There is Michael Helgoth, a Boulder area man who works near the Ramsey home and has a history of violence and sexual abuse. Just weeks after JonBenet's killing, Helgoth turns up dead of a self inflicted gunshot wound. Right as word spreads that the DA is closing in on a suspect. Among his possessions, a stun gun and a pair of high tech boots. The same brand as a print left on the concrete near where JonBenet was found. But his DNA too does not match. Behind those four names is a parade of thousands more. Boulder PD follow up on more than 21,000 tips, letters, emails, traveling across 19 states talking to more than 1,000 people possibly connected to this crime. And then in the summer of 2006 comes the biggest thunderbolt of them all. It does not come from Boulder or, or the old list of suspects. It comes from the other side of the world. 8,500 miles away, Thailand. It comes to Boulder. Through an Inbox Starting in 2002, a stranger calling himself Daxis begins emailing University of Colorado professor Michael Tracy. Tracy has spent years making documentaries about JonBenet's murder. And now this stranger, Daxus, wants to talk. Daxas begins to inundate the Colorado professor with emails, hundreds of them. At first the emails read like the outpourings of an obsessive JonBenet fan. But over the months that follow, they curdle into something far more revolting. Slowly, Daxas starts to say that he killed JonBenet. In one email he writes, are you asking me why I killed JonBenet? I don't see it that way. Her and I were engaging in a romantic and very sexual interaction. It went bad and it was my fault. Daxas gives specifics on the Ramsey staircase, describes the basement, the blanket, and the exact room where JonBenet was killed. He messages about a check stub for 118,000 he saw on John Ramsey's desk. Daxis claims to be under federal investigation for quote, child murder and child molestation in four states. Michael Tracy is skeptical by this point, so much information has been casually released by the police, is out in news specials and magazines or just leaked onto the Internet. And people confess to notorious crimes all the time for attention. So the Colorado professor tests Daxis.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

They said, how come I don't know, you're just pulling this from the Internet and feeding me what is out there already? And he said, ask John Ramsey what J's nickname was for Nedra, her grandmother. And it will be this. So I emailed John, what was the nickname? It comes back Neddy. He was right. It was correct because Jonam searched. There was nowhere that that name nickname was known in the public domain.

[Megyn Kelly]

Michael discusses Daxis with Boulder detective Lou Smith as well.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I would share some of the emails with Lou Smith and I said, look, you know, I've got this from this guy. I have no idea where this guy is, where he is. He could be next door. I have no idea. And I always say to Lou, just tell me he's a nutcase and we can end it and lose it. Can't nor can do. Michael got to keep at it.

[Megyn Kelly]

The emails with Daxes go on for four years. He's a ghost. His emails untraceable during all of this. The woman at the center of this case is running out of time. Patsy Ramsey has been fighting ovarian cancer since 1993. It went into remission in 1995 and came back in 2002. And this time, the cancer is resistant to treatment and slowly overwhelms Patsy. In 2006, it reaches her brain. The matter is hopeless. So John makes a tough decision. At the doctor's urging, he stops Patsy's treatment, but cannot bring himself to tell

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

her the cancer had migrated to her brain, so she was not her normal self. So she didn't know that we'd given up. And she would ask me, when's my next treatment? And I knew in my heart there was no next treatment. That was hard.

[Megyn Kelly]

This is exactly when Daxus begins asking to speak to Patsy. He starts asking Michael Tracy to connect him with Patsy so he can apologize for killing her daughter. The Colorado professor stalls and stalls. And then the ding of another incoming Daxis email turns this into something else entirely. Tracy reads Daxus's message. I'll be in the house before you give me that contact information, won't I? Tracy takes that as a threat. He takes everything he has to the new Boulder district Attorney, Mary Lacy, and the investigation goes wide. Her office, Homeland Security ice every set of eyes they have. Then Dax's rank raises the stakes even further. He asks Tracy, do you want to hear my voice? Tracy says, sure.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

It's great to finally. To finally talk to you.

[Megyn Kelly]

I must admit, I was a bit

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

surprised when you sent the phone number, you know. Yeah. Why did you do that, by the way? What would you.

[Megyn Kelly]

I don't know.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I've lost. I've lost my senses.

[Megyn Kelly]

11 hours. That's how much tape Michael Tracy record of Daxus over the calls that follow. And Michael's not the only one listening. By now various intelligence agencies are on the line too. On these tapes, Daxas finally tells the story of what he says he did to JonBenet. Sort of. He dances around the story but there is one word he will not say.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

At what point did you decide you had to tell me that you killed her? I never had. But you. It definitely implied, isn't it? I know and I can't say that. I just can't say that word. Kill.

[Megyn Kelly]

He won't say kill because in his mind this is not a murder. What Daxus describes in a soft, almost tender voice is a love story. He recasts the killing of a six year old little girl as some private, intimate ritual, an erotic game with what he insists on calling a special necklace. A game of pressure and Release, of taking JonBenet to the edge of consciousness and back. He savors the telling of it.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I just kind of knelt down in fervor And I said, JonBenet, I want to make another necklace for you. And it had some interesting knots in it. So I slowly apply the crusher on her neck with that second necklace and I just say, yes, sweetheart, go into the sweet dream. At that point her little body started to convulse and twitch a little bit.

[Megyn Kelly]

And then in his telling, the game goes too far.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I was just in the, in the throes of ecstasy with her and then all of a sudden my gaze just was suddenly broken and I was just like, oh my God, JonBenet, are you okay? And I knew she wasn't okay because I knew that she wasn't breathing and I just, and I just was terrified. I said, oh God, I'm gonna have to finish this. I know what I'm gonna have to do because I can't take the chance that she could still be alive.

[Megyn Kelly]

What he describes next is a man making sure cold, deliberate steps to guarantee a little girl could not still be alive. He tells it like a man who is still in love with the memory of it.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I don't know if I gathered everything up. I don't know if I watched something behind, but I had to go back to that window. That's where I came in. That's where I have to go out. I lifted the grate, I got out of the grate and I was just like, oh God, I left my little girl in that horrible state. She's in that little primary room and worse than that, she's dead. And God, what have I done?

[Megyn Kelly]

So boulder Has a man confessing in detail to the murder that has haunted this town for a decade. There is just one problem. Nobody has any idea who he is or even what continent he's on, nor whether one word of this is true and Daxus knows it.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I'm Interpol's biggest nightmare because I know I have to evade law enforcement will run into the biggest brick wall when

[Megyn Kelly]

they try to trace this phone number.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

It leads to no body.

[Megyn Kelly]

I am not a fool. So how do you catch a man who is nowhere? Well, the DA's office thinks they have found one weakness. His obsession. In all those emails, all those calls. Daxus is desperate to talk to Patsy. So the investigators make a cold calculation. Let's milk that. John and Patsy agree to a call with Daxus. Police set up a phone at Patsy's bedside. They tap the line, the one Daxus has been so intent on calling. And then they wait. Patsy is in bed. She's not in good shape. She's quickly dying, the cancer taking her. Yet she is prepared to talk to the man who says he strangled her only daughter just to keep him on the line long enough for police to trace him. A dying mother waits by the phone ready to hear her child's killer apologize. He never calls. Hey, I just Venmo'd you for rent.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Nice. Now I can instantly spend it whether I'm checking out online with Venmo or using a Venmo debit card.

[Megyn Kelly]

Say more.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

More. Exactly. Because the more you do with Venmo, the more you get. Like earning up to 5% cash back with Venmo. Stack stash on a bundle of brands.

[Megyn Kelly]

So order more pizza.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

The meth demands it.

[Megyn Kelly]

Get the Venmo debit card.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Venmo stash bundle terms and exclusions apply. See terms@venmo me dash terms. Venmo checkout not available at all merchants. Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank.

[Megyn Kelly]

NA I'm Hannah. I've lost 75 pounds in 20 months with GLP1s diet and exercise on row. I've gone from struggling to run a mile to running farther every day. You can actually FDA approved GLP1s online. Get the support you need to reach your weight loss goals. Go to RO Co Weight to see if you qualify. I'm a paid ROE partner. 20% average weight loss in one year in non diabetics with obesity or overweight with a weight related medical condition versus 3.1% in placebo arm RX only. To stay informed about serious side effects, go to ro co safety June 24, 2006. It is a warm, hazy Saturday outside Atlanta. That day, at her father's home in Roswell, Georgia, with John at her side, Patsy Ramsey dies. She was 49 years old. Patsy dies in the very same limbo she'd been living in since 1996. Accused, uncharged and with no answers. She is buried in Georgia beside the daughter she was accused of killing. Later that summer, Colorado professor Michael Tracy calls Daxus Daxis.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

This is my Tracy. Hey, Michael. There's some really bad news. Patsy died. I can never hear her say that she forgives me.

[Megyn Kelly]

Patsy's death does something else. It cracks a door open. Daxus learns Tracy has the last photograph ever taken of JonBenet alive and he wants it. He emails and asks Tracy to scan it and send it over. An investigator sees the opening. Don't scan it, he tells Tracy. Offer him the original offer to mail it to him. And Daxus, this man, who has bragged for years that he is untraceable, bites. He agrees to pick up the photo at a UPS box in Bangkok, Thailand. Thai authorities put the UPS store under surveillance and wait. Daxus, still talking to Tracy, can't help himself. He mentions a mountain bike he just bought, describes it, says he's going to ride it to work at a school. So one day in the summer of 2006, 10 years after JonBenet was killed, a man rides up on that exact bike, walks into the UPS store and collects his package. They have him on camera and for about one week, Thai police follow him. He's identified as John Mark Carr, 41 years old, American. And it gets worse, because in Bangkok, John Mark Carr is teaching at an elementary school with rooms full of small children. Thai police move in.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

It's a case that had run cold for a decade. In a bizarre twist, while he was being paraded before cameras, Carr actually responded

[Megyn Kelly]

to reporters questions in front of the cameras in Bangkok. Carr does not deny it.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I love an A die accidental.

[Megyn Kelly]

No.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

What happened last year? Were you, were you playing with her? What happened? Her death was. Was an accident.

[Megyn Kelly]

Investigators start delving into who this man actually is and what they find is disturbing. In 2001, in Petaluma, California, working as a teacher again, John Mark Carr is arrested and charged with possession of child pornography. He's heading for trial and he runs, flees the country and everywhere he lands, Asia, Europe, Latin America, he finds the very same job, teaching young children.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

John Mark Carr, 41 years old, was

[Megyn Kelly]

arrested for the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. Yesterday morning at approximately 6am in Bangkok, Thailand. He began his employment as a second grade teacher in the international school system in Bangkok.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

On Tuesday morning of this week. In off camera comments recorded by the AP, Carr restated his claim that JonBenet's death was an accident. And it's very important for me that everyone knows that I love her very much and that her death was unintelligible and it was an accident.

[Megyn Kelly]

The whole media machine roars back to life. Cars deported from Thailand and flown to Boulder. In the front cabin of a commercial jet served shrimp and champagne. A picture the tabloids splash across every front page. 40 cameras camp out in John Ramsey's front yard to a watching world for 12 days. This is the man who killed JonBenet Ramsey. It feels impossibly like it might finally be over. There's only one thing left to check the DNA. They compare John Mark Carr's DNA to the unknown male profile. The sample from under JonBenet's fingernails from her clothing. It does not match. The man who says he was with JonBenet Ramsey when she was killed in 1996 will not be charged in the case. The Boulder County District Attorney says no charges will be filed against John Mark Carr.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Boulder County DA Mary Lacey released a statement and it had been long been known that there was some DNA thought to be the killers in JonBenet's underclothes. Lacy says they took a DNA sample from Carr and it didn't match that DNA.

[Megyn Kelly]

The DNA isn't close. John Mark Carr, who confirmed confessed for hours, was never actually inside the Ramsey home. The confession was a fantasy. The biggest break in the history of this case collapses in a matter of days to put a bow on it. Investigators went looking for where John Mark Carr was in December of 1996. And the answer comes from his own family. He was in Alabama with them that Christmas. There is no record that John Mark Carr ever set one foot in Colorado before 2006. In 2008, Boulder District Attorney Mary Lacey sends JonBenet's clothing to a private lab for a newer, more sensitive kind of analysis called touch DNA. It looks for tiny traces of DNA left behind when someone touches something. Even a small number of skin cells can sometimes be enough. The lab pulls a male profile off the waistband of the long johns JonBenet was wearing in two separate spots. And it matches the unknown male DNA already found in her underwear. One unidentified male profile detected in three different locations on two garments. To Lacey, this is no stray speck of contamination. This is the residue of the hands that hurt Jonbenet she makes a decision no Boulder prosecutor has made in 12 years. Two years after Patsy Ramsey dies, Lacey clears the Ramsey family publicly, completely, and in writing. Lacey does something else unheard of for a prosecutor. She writes the Ramseys a letter and she apologizes. She writes that the office does not consider John, Patsy or Burke Ramsey to be under any suspicion in the commission of this crime. And then this quote, to the extent that we may have contributed in any way to the public perception that you might have been involved in this crime, I am deeply sorry. Of course, that doesn't settle anything in this case because not everyone believes the DNA means what Mary Lacey says it means. One of the loudest skeptics is a man named James Kohlar, a former investigator who worked the JonBenet case files. And comes away certain the answer was inside the house all along. Here he is in October 2013.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I think it's extremely unlikely that an intruder was involved in this situation. And what's frustrating for me is that the DNA evidence continues to be proffered as proof that Ninjuta was involved. There are six unidentified samples of DNA, trace amounts. There were three people in the home that evening. I think investigators needed to look at all three of them.

[Megyn Kelly]

Kolar means the three people in the house that night. John, Patsy, and the only child left, BURKE. And in 2013, the grand jury secret Alex Hunter carried out of that 1999 press conference finally breaks open. A daily camera reporter named Charlie Brennan sues the Boulder DA's office for the sealed grand jury records and wins. And the public learns for the first time what Hunter has known all along. That the grand jury had voted to indict the Ramseys.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Alex Hunter could have announced that afternoon that the grand jury has elected not to indict anybody. He could have said the grand jury indicted somebody, but we're not going to prosecute it. He didn't say either of those things. A number of years down the road, two sources of mine told me, you can't report this, but they indicted both John and Patsy Ramsey. So I set out to contact grand jurors directly. And multiple grand jurors confirmed for me, that's what happened.

[Megyn Kelly]

Here is what the documents did not do. They did not accuse Burke Ramsey by name. Accessory is a charge that only makes sense if there is a principal someone the accessory is protecting. And the indictments link left that person unnamed. But the ambiguity left room for others to fill in the blank. And a legacy TV network does precisely that. On the 20th anniversary of the murder in 2016. CBS News puts the theory into primetime that a nine year old Burke Ramsey struck his sister JonBenet and that his parents staged everything else. A little boy who was never charged with anything, now 29 years old, is put on trial again on television for a brand new audience. And for the first time in 20 years, Burke Ramsay answers for himself. Weeks after the CBS special airs, he sits down with Dr. Phil on national television. Now a grown man, quiet, uneasy in the chair, facing questions about a night he was a nine year old boy asleep down the hall from his sister. Do you remember the last time you saw JonBenet alive?

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

I want to say it was in the car on the way back from the Whites.

[Megyn Kelly]

Do you remember waking up that morning?

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Yep. The first thing I remember is my mom bursting in my room looking for Jominet. And the next thing I remember is a police officer coming to my room and shining a flashlight. Did you hit your sister over the head with a baseball bat or a flashlight? Absolutely not.

[Megyn Kelly]

Burke sues CBS for $750 million. The lawsuit ends the way almost everything in this case ends. Quietly, behind closed doors in a sealed settlement with no finding of fact on either side. The record, in the end holds three official judgments that pull in opposite directions. A grand jury that voted to indict the parents as accessories and a prosecutor who buried that vote. A district attorney who years later cleared the whole family by name in writing on the strength of the DNA. And a sealed set of indictments pried loose later still, whose unanswered language would be used to point suspicion toward the only other person known to be in that house. A little boy. Three official acts, three different directions. No answers. Nothing. An indictment is not a conviction because a grand jury hears only one side. Mary Lacy's letter purported to clear the family, but it never named the killer. And Alex Hunter's decision not to charge explained nothing and exonerated no one. Nearly 30 years after JonBenet's murder, the only thing left to hope for is an answer from the actual evidence. That is where John Ramsey has put his energy in the years since Patsy's death. He is chasing the DNA and a new technology that did not exist when his daughter was killed. Genetic genealogy changes what a single unknown DNA profile can do. The old method needed the suspect's DNA to be sitting already in a database. The new method does not. It looks for any genetic link in a DNA database to this person, then works the family tree of that person, generation by generation toward a name of a possible suspect. This is the method that finally put a name to the Golden State killer decades after his crime stopped. And In November of 2022, when four University of Idaho students are murdered in their beds, it is genetic genealogy that identifies the suspect, Bryan Kohlberger, in a matter of weeks, thanks to touch DNA on the knife sheath the killer left behind. John Ramsey wants the same science used on his daughter's case. But the obstacle is not the science, it's jurisdiction. The evidence belongs, you see, to the Boulder pd and only the Boulder PD can decide to test it. So John takes his fight to the Governor of Colorado. When John sat down with me in December 2022, this is one of the primary things he to wants, wanted to discuss.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

And that's really all we're asking the Governor to do, is push the case either out of the Boulder hands or in require them to take this evidence to be tested by one of the one or two really cutting edge labs in this country and see what we get. If we can get some more good DNA evidence, then you take that evidence and put it in the public database and see what you come up with. In fact, they're the ones that said, look, the government does not have the latest DNA technology. We'll get it eventually, but we don't have it. We don't have it at the FBI. They certainly don't have it at the state level and of course, not even ridiculous to think they have it at the police level. They've told, they told us that we've got to get this DNA testing done by one of these one or two very cutting edge labs out outside, and then use this new approach of genealogy tracing.

[Megyn Kelly]

John talks about specific items still sitting in evidence. Five, six, maybe seven pieces from the crime scene that were sent years ago to an outside lab and he says, came back untested, returned to a shelf. Among them, he says, is the garage. The murder weapon itself, with knots he believes have never been untied and swabbed for the skin cells of the hands that tied them nearly 30 years on, the object used to strangle his daughter may still hold an answer that existing testing has not produced. In December of 2025, there is movement in their annual update on the case. The Boulder police say they have done something close to what John Ramsey has been asking for. New interviews, new evidence collected, and old evidence retested. This time with the newest DNA technology available, officials will not say what that evidence is or where it points. The Boulder Chief of Police, Steve Redfern, says only that the department will keep working with DNA experts around the country. Until this tragic case is solved.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

My direction to our department has been clear. Leave no stone unturned. Our detectives have conducted several new interviews as well as re interviewed individuals based on tips that we've received. We've also collected new evidence and tested and retested other pieces of evidence to generate new leads.

[Megyn Kelly]

Nearly 30 years in, this is the closest thing to forward motion this case has produced in a very long time. Still no name, no arrest, no answers. But for the first time in a while, the sense that someone is finally looking again. Thirty years on, the public interest in the case of JonBenet Ramsey remains high. JonBenet is about to become a prestige streaming drama. The Murder of JonBenet Ramsey, an eight part Netflix series starring Melissa McCarthy as Patsy and Clive Owen as as John. The story retold once more for an audience that was not alive when she died. But a television series is not going to solve this. Nothing is going to solve this. Except perhaps those tiny, imperceptible specks of human cells sitting in a Colorado evidence room in sealed bags and paper envelopes in a property room in Boulder. The answer is most likely already there. On a length of cord, on the waistband of a child's long johns, in the profile of an unknown male that has waited, patient and silent, to be discovered since the day after Christmas 1996. The science to read it has finally arrived. The question remaining is whether anyone will let it speak. Megan, I'm Megan Kelly. Tune in next week as we unpack another mystery on MK Confidential. Hi, diva. It's Rachel and Jordan. Yeah, hi.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

Quick question.

[Megyn Kelly]

Why are you not spending your Venmo balance? Yeah, we're concerned you can, like, buy stuff with it.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

You love buying stuff and earn cash

[Megyn Kelly]

back on eligible purchases. Mm.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

You love purchasing eligible things.

[Megyn Kelly]

So the money your friend sent you yesterday, that's today's ramen or rideshare or eye patches.

[Various Interviewees and Narrators]

The skincare kind, not the pyro kind.

[Megyn Kelly]

Spend with Venmo and you can earn cash back with Venmo Stash. Venmo Stash bundle terms and Exclusions apply. Makes $100 cash back per month. See terms at Venmo Me Terms, Idaho. Verification required to use a Venmo balance. Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co founder of angie. From roof repair to emergency plumbing and more. When you use Angie for your home projects, you know all your jobs will be done well. Angie the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find a pro for your [e-mail].