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The JonBenét Conspiracies: Presumed Guilty — Ep. 3 | MK Confidential
00:28:33
“MK Confidential” continues its deep dive into the murder of JonBenét Ramsey. It is 1997, and the case is being decided not in a courtroom, but on cable news, in the tabloids, and in the court of public opinion. Megyn Kelly traces how a local homicide became a national media obsession: the pageant tapes, police leaks, disputed footprints, handwriting claims, sexual-abuse rumors, Geraldo Rivera’s mock trial, and unidentified male DNA that barely made a headline. By November of that year, 88% of Americans with an opinion blame one or both parents, a verdict built on months of media spin, not evidence tested in court. This is Episode 3 of 5 in The JonBenét Conspiracies. Birch Gold: Text MK to 989898 and get your free info kit on gold. Supersure: Ditch the Jargon: Simplify Your Insurance at https://Supersure.com/Megyn Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKelly Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShow Instagram: http...
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- [00:00]
Narrator/Advertiser
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Megyn Kelly
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.
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Narrator/Advertiser
And as to Patsy, we the jury
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Megyn Kelly
find Patsy Ramsey liable for the wrongful death of JonBenet Ramsay.
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Narrator/Advertiser
To the best of our knowledge, there is no real evidence in this that points in any direction other than straight into the faces of John and poor
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Megyn Kelly
Patsy Ramsey 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 Ramseys became suspects. The question is how millions of people became dead certain they were guilty. I'm Megyn Kelly and this is MK confidential. We wouldn't be celebrating America 250 if it wasn't for a strong foundation set by the Framers. Hamilton built America's financial foundation on the principle of sound, stable money, a principle later embodied by the gold standard. However, we abandoned that discipline in 1971 and have seen inflation erode the dollar's value ever since. What's the foundation of your savings? Is it gold? Is gold even in there? Or is it something that could be shaken, disrupted, devalued? Birch Gold Group has been helping Americans solidify their savings with gold for the past 15 years. They will help you convert, in whole or in part an existing IRA or 401k into a tax sheltered IRA in gold. Learn how gold can fit into your portfolio by texting M.K. my initials to the number 989-898. You will receive a free no obligation info kit with an A rating with the Better Business Bureau and countless five star reviews. Consider having Birch Gold help build your foundation with Gold. Text MK to the number 989898. This started out as a simple but tragic murder of a child beauty queen. But then questions arose, curiosity arose, and
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Narrator/Advertiser
suddenly the media descended on Boulder.
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Megyn Kelly
We are told now that as many
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Narrator/Advertiser
as 300 media representatives may be here right now following this story.
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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 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. 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 networks 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 Ramsay. Not a precious kindergartener 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, 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.
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Interviewee/Guest
There is a killer on the loose. I don't know who it is. I don't know if it's a he or a she. But 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.
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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 has been portrayed by 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 Ramses 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 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. Here's how Paula Woodward, an investigative reporter out of Colorado, describes the shock of this story to Netflix.
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Interviewee/Guest
I remember saying to my husband, what
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Megyn Kelly
kind of person is he?
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Interviewee/Guest
How could he do this when he's
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Megyn Kelly
got to be so distraught over the terrible way his daughter died and the 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 on the story.
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Witness/Commentator
When I reported that John Ramsey had piloted his own plane back to Atlanta for the funeral, that was inaccurate. It came 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.
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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 that 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. When you sign your insurance policy, for some brokers, that's the finish line. Handshake commission done. Then you may not hear from them again until it's time for renewal. But your business runs all year, and so do the gaps and the risk. Which is why I want to tell you about Super Sure. If your company has more than 25 employees. Whether you're the owner, CFO or HR manager, it can be too complex to just buy a policy online. Supersure is the super agency built for you, licensed in every state for your business, insurance and employee benefits with year round support for you and your team. @super sure.com you can access tools like Fine Print Facts, which translates your current policy into plain English so you see what's covered and what's not. Plus a business value calculator so you can estimate what your business is worth and know what actually needs protecting. Go to super sure.commegan1super agency1 powerful platform all your policies in one place. Go to supersure.commegan paid for by Super Sure Insurance Agency, LLC, a licensed insurance
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Megyn Kelly
discount 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. Quote 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 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 Ramsey 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 6 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 set 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.
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Interviewee/Guest
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 did not kill JonBenet. I did not have anything to do with it. I love that child with my whole of my heart and soul.
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Megyn Kelly
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.
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Witness/Commentator
Our family is a loving family. It's a gentle family.
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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 read 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.
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Narrator/Advertiser
I deeply apologize to you for what you and your family have suffered. When I say I am sorry, I don't 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.
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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.
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Interviewee/Guest
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 not have been the truth. I think they were willing to do that.
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Megyn Kelly
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.
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Witness/Commentator
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 of Jon Bonet's death.
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Megyn Kelly
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 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 at 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 Ramses 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 Ramses 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 1997, 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 while 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 primetime. Twenty 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 a 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.
- [30:05]
Trevor Noah
Hey, what's going on over there? It's me, Trevor Noah. You know me. You don't know me. Oh, you do. I was worried there for a second. Well, if you know anything about me, you'll know I love having interesting conversations. Conversations where we scratch beneath the surface, like what's really going on in the news? Or what is that celebrity really thinking about that scandal that they had? Or what's the worst way to be a parent? I mean, you want to find that out so you can be the best parent, right? Well, regardless of what it is, this podcast is all about figuring that out. Talking to interesting people who have interesting ideas that give us an interesting perspective on the world that we're living in. So make sure you tune in. Check out what now with Trevor Noah, available Now on the SiriusXM app.
- [30:58]
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