MURDERED: JonBenét Ramsey | Crime Junkie

Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm Ashley Flowers.

And I'm Britt. And I'm finally freaking doing it.

We're going on tour.

Well, yes. Yeah. So that's happening.

Crime Junkie tour is real.

Make sure you're in the fan club.

If you want to buy tickets early, fan club will get access on Monday, December 2nd.

Go to our website. I'll link to all the things in the show notes.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

That's not what I actually meant.

I am doing the case that I said I would never do.

The case that is our Crime Junkie origin story.

Yeah. We've said it a million times, but I mean, never say never, right?

Yeah. And I think it is for a long time, I just didn't think that there was anything that I could add.

Right. Like it's been done seven ways to Sunday.

I literally feel like there are more or less versions of the Bible than there are of books written by people who like maybe even tangentially touch this case.

So like what would we have to add?

Right. That's kind of how it always felt.

But what I didn't realize is like I didn't know the whole story.

And I, of course, am talking about the case of Jean -Banné Ramsey.

And when you say like our origin story, like we were tabloid height when it happened.

This is what made us crime junkies.

Yeah. People always ask like, how did you become a crime junkie?

And I'm like, you know, my mom, my grandma, they got me into mysteries.

I was reading everything.

But really we're about the same age as Jean -Banné, which her dad reminded me of when I sat down with him and we were in the grocery store and it was like the first time you look at somebody who looks like you, who's your age.

And all you see is like murdered across her forehead.

And it's when those like mysteries, I was like, oh, this thing, these kind of things happen in real life.

So for a generation who didn't grow up tabloid height staring into the green eyes of a beauty queen in the making.

And for those of us who did, but maybe don't know all the facts or maybe just know this case like on a surface level and you want to really know how we got here and what you can do now, I got you.

I have dug deep. I thought I knew everything there was to know about Jean -Banné because I grew up with the case.

But I found out that what I knew was just the tip of the freaking iceberg, you guys, I have all the same questions that you do.

And I even got to ask those questions to one of the people at the center of this case, someone who has been dubbed a child killer by the media, but says that it is all a lie and he and his family have been victimized twice, once by an unknown killer and once again by the media.

I actually filmed my conversation with him.

You can find that and this episode on the Crime Junkie YouTube channel.

And I promise you, you're not gonna wanna miss it.

But first, let me tell you the story.

Not from any side, I have no theory.

I thought one thing when I was young, another thing when I was older.

But what I realized when I actually dug deep is that I never had a real understanding of the facts.

And that is what I hope to give you.

So if you were looking for a one stop shop to give you the case, a layer deeper than you will hear anywhere else, this episode's for you.

This is the story of Jambuné Ramsey.

The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The or or the the Or or Yeah.

How old is your daughter?

Pictures old. She's broad.

Pictures old. How long ago was it?

I don't know. I just held my note.

My daughter - Is it the same gender?

What? Is it the same gender?

I don't know. There's a ransom note here.

It's a ransom note?

It says, F -B -T -C. Victory.

Please. Okay. What's your name?

Are you - I'm the mother.

Oh my God. Please. Okay.

I'm sending an officer to help.

Do you know how long she's been gone?

No I don't. Please, we just got out.

Can she run here? Oh my God.

Please. Okay. I am hunting.

Please. Take a deep breath.

Please. Hurry. Hurry.

Happy. Happy. Happy.

That feels like the 911 call heard around the world by this point.

But when it first came into Boulder Police on December 26, 1996 at 552 in the morning, they had no clue how infamous this call was going to become.

All they knew was that they had a report of a kidnapping in an upscale neighborhood of their safe little community.

Now Patsy says that she made two more calls to friends of theirs after the 911 call, the whites and the fernies.

She was asking them to come over for support before she went to like pace in front of their window.

Now, what in actuality was probably just a couple of minutes, felt to her like hours.

And when the marked car pulled up at 555, she says her heart sank because the ransom letter had said not to call police and that kidnappers were watching.

And if they saw police, that they would hurt John Bonet.

But it was too late now.

When Officer French made it inside, John immediately took him to where the three page handwritten ransom note was like splayed out on the wooden floor just off the kitchen near the stagers that Patsy had found it on.

And Britt, I'm going to have you, would you mind actually reading it?

Oh, sure. The ransom note says, Mr.

Ramsey, listen carefully.

We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction.

We respect your business, but not the country that it serves.

At this time, we have your daughter in our possession.

She is safe and unharmed.

If you want her to see 1997, you must follow our instructions to the letter.

You will withdraw $118 ,000 from your account.

$100 ,000 will be in $100 bills and the remaining $18 ,000 in $20 bills.

Make sure that you bring an adequate size attaché to the bank.

When you get home, you will put the money in a brown paper bag.

I will call you between 8 and 10 a .m.

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 the immediate execution of your daughter.

You will also be denied her remains for a 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, etc., 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 percent chance of killing your daughter if you try to outsmart us.

Follow our instructions and you stand a 100 percent chance of getting her back.

You and your family are under constant scrutiny as well as the authorities.

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's up to you now, John.

SBTC. So, OK, so that's the letter that they're working with.

And what we know is the Ramses had an alarm system, but they hadn't said it the night before or actually even in a long time, not since it had gone off accidentally and scared the living pants off Jon Bonet and her older brother Burke, who, by the way, is nine at this point and still asleep upstairs

in his room, according to mom and dad.

Now, they say that they had checked on him once when they realized that Jon Bonet was missing, but once they saw that he was OK, they wanted to just let him sleep.

I like I'm assuming they probably just didn't want him to worry till they had a better idea of what was going on and what they were going to do.

Like once they knew that there was going to be help, then they would worry about it.

So Officer French does this quick skim of the house.

And I say quick, but this puppy was over six thousand.

I mean, I've heard one place like seven thousand square feet, had like 15 rooms, four different floors if you include the basement.

But French does this quick look through.

He doesn't see anything that jumps out.

His report says that there were no signs of fourth century or a struggle and obviously no signs of the missing six year old.

So he moved to instructing another officer, Sergeant Riekenbach, to control the scene.

And A, I don't know when Riekenbach showed up, but you'll see more people kind of start like flooding in and B, controlling the scene is a loose term in this story and something Boulder police will get roasted for down the line, because within 15 minutes of French's arrival, those friends that Patsy

had called start showing up.

Priscilla and Fleet White had been their first call, followed by John and Barbara Ferny.

And somehow the family priest gets contacted along the way.

And like one by one, these people are showing up and they're there by like seven thirteen.

Now, while John Ramsey made calls to try and line up that hundred eighteen thousand dollars that the kidnapper had asked for, more and more people were showing up to.

So they had victim advocates that came to the house.

There were finally some detectives that got there by like eight ten that morning, namely Linda Arndt, who was charged with managing the situation.

Now, what John told me that he didn't know at the time were that these weren't seasoned homicide or missing persons detectives.

What the detectives didn't know at the time was that this wasn't a missing person's case.

As the clock ticked, every moment in the house was tense.

Burke Ramsey, John Benee's nine year old brother, had been woken up and removed from the home by this point.

Their friend Fleet White, who was one of the people Patsy had called come over, he had taken Burke back to their house.

And while Patsy cried in one room with her friends by her side, John was in another, taking instructions from Detective Arndt about what to do if the kidnapper called.

And he's like going through the mail.

He told me to see if there's any other communications from the kidnapper.

And he told me that he was in just like do, do, do mode, like action mode.

He thought that if he kept his wits about him, that's the saying he always used.

If I keep my wits about me, then if I'm smart, like I could still actually get my daughter back.

Figure this out. Right.

Now, plenty of people had been looking around the house without finding anything.

But John wanted to keep moving.

So at some point that morning, exact time, a little fuzzy TV.

But at some point that morning, he went down to the basement.

Which this is a point that Boulder police gets roasted on, right?

Like people are just all over the house, contaminating the crap out of like, what is actually a crime scene?

Oh yeah, they it's kind of wild.

They had blocked off Jambanay's room like five hours after Detective French got to the house.

But everything else was like a free for all like have at it.

It seems like people were all over the place.

Nothing was off limits.

Except Jambanay's room.

Except her room, right?

And there's nothing that stands out about her room, right?

No. I mean, like, so her covers were pulled back.

Like someone had got her out of bed.

There's some stuff that becomes interesting a little bit later, which I can get into.

But nothing that really stands out in there.

It looks like a room that a kid had just kind of truly gotten like, plucked out from in the middle of the night.

So to get back to it, though.

So John goes to the basement at some point that morning.

When he did his 1997 interview, his best guess was like, maybe it was sometime around or before 10am.

But he goes down. He doesn't report finding anything to Detective Arndt or any of the other officers.

Now no one made no of the time when 10 o 'clock came and went.

And there was no communication from the kidnapper.

Like they said in the note.

There were calls throughout the morning.

I mean, at least three, according to Detective Arndt's report.

And each time John would run to the phone, he would answer the call.

But each time, it was just some well -meaning friend checking in.

And like, word was spreading at this point.

Now, Linda Arndt kept paging for backup.

She had kicked a good number of people out of the house by this point.

Officers, the victim advocates.

But all of the family friends were still there.

And it was a hard scene to control.

But page after page, she was getting no response.

And when she tried to phone in, she was told that everyone was in a meeting.

That's what she said in her Good Morning America interview.

So it's just she's not getting the help that she needs.

And as more time passed, Linda Arndt felt like she needed to keep John's mind occupied.

By 1230, she makes a note that he seems to be isolating himself and just kind of staring.

Like so she's like, I gotta give him something to do.

So after a conversation with one of the family friends, Fleet White, she suggests to John that excluding John Bonnet's room, he should check the house top to bottom.

See if there's anything even missing.

John took the instruction to heart, but he decided and said to search bottom to top.

At 1 p .m., he went for the door to the basement with Fleet close behind him.

And within five minutes, everything was chaos.

There was screams. Fleet was bounding up the stairs and Detective Arndt made it to the doorway in time to see John coming up the final few steps, like holding John Bonnet by her waist.

Her body was already stiff with rigor.

Her head was turned to one side and her arms were above her head with some kind of like white string or core rope kind of thing hanging from one of her wrists.

Detective Arndt told John, you like put John Bonnet down by the front door.

She said that her lips were already blue.

Like she knew she was dead, but she still checks for a pulse anyway.

But she was cold to touch when she touches her.

So Linda Arndt moved John Bonnet's body to another spot on the first floor, and John asked to cover her up with a blanket which she let him do.

Which is more contamination.

This is like the worst case scenario here because it's only just the blanket.

Like, John held her at some point, like he's like laying on the floor.

And when Patsy comes into the room, she laid on top of her while she's crying.

Like, literally, she's like praying to Jesus, like asking him.

The line is like you raise Lazarus, like please raise my baby.

So you to your point, like you have all of this contamination happening.

But Linda aren't called 911 telling them like, I need an ambulance.

I need a coroner. Like whatever, like the delay isn't getting people here.

Like you have to get people here now.

She called again when they still hadn't come a few minutes later.

And then again, after she saw an ambulance drive past the house.

So this is like the Murphy's law of crime scenes.

Everything that could go wrong was going wrong.

But now it's time for everyone to get out.

Ramses and friends included.

So while search warrant was being obtained for the house and John Bonet was sent off for autopsy, detectives tried to speak more with the family.

One detective was sent to go talk to Burke who basically just told him like, everything in our house was normal.

Like our parents weren't abusive.

There weren't any arguments on or leading up to Christmas day.

So like nothing meaningful from him.

And that evening, Linda aren't and another detective went to speak with John Ramsey.

They were staying at a friend's house.

And by the time Linda got there, there were even more people that had come to be with them.

They had more friends.

Even the family doctor, Dr.

Buff was there. And sometimes he's called the family doctor.

Sometimes he's called Dominie's pediatrician.

It might be like a little bit of both.

He'd given Pacia Valium.

So Linda didn't see her when she came by, but she did get to talk to John for about 40 minutes.

And it's worth noting that she talked to John during her time at the home as well.

So she and others had gotten the initial story of the day or days leading up to Dominie's death.

And John points to this fact a lot when I talk to him.

Because if you know this story, you'll know that a big part of the narrative is the fact that the family, they say they didn't cooperate.

They didn't talk to police for a long time.

But John points to this and he says, look, yes, we did.

We talked to them in our home and in our friend's home.

And that is true. And it is also true that they stopped cooperating after that 40 minute meeting.

And here's why. So according to John Ramsey, he told me he had gotten a call within the first like day or two, we're talking the 26th, 27th from the person he told me who ran his HR at his company.

And they told him like, hey, I have this inside source telling me that the police are looking at you and Patsy for this.

You need to lawyer up.

Well, advice taken because of the friends who were sitting alongside John Ramsey that evening when Linda had come during that like 40 minute conversation was a guy named Mike Bynum.

Mike was John Ramsey's corporate counsel at his company.

So when police had left that night, like after that 40 minute thing, they suggested a formal sit down with the Ramses.

Obviously, tensions were high.

Patsy was currently incapacitated.

And the majority of their interactions had been when they thought that Jompanee was a missing person.

Like there was plenty more questions that needed to be asked by police, which I agree with.

Like at least everything that made it into the reports about the conversations they had in those early days when they were speaking, it's pretty surface level.

I mean, we get some like immediate people that they suspect, does anything in the notes stand out to them, like who has keys to the house, et cetera.

But if they were going to find out who killed Jompanee, they were going to have to go a few layers deeper.

So Linda suggested like, let's do this sit down at the station on the 28th.

But either in that moment or maybe later, it's not totally clear from Linda's report.

It seems like Mike put the kibosh on that.

And listen, like we got a rule for a reason, right?

Like always get a lawyer.

But this is the beginning of a decades long battle between the Ramses.

And I think police question mark, but like who is behind what in this case, as you'll come to see, is pretty convoluted.

So the Ramses don't go talk to police on the 28th.

They do have a closed memorial service that day for Jompanee in Colorado before they leave town.

Which I knew happened, but it was that soon?

Yes. So John Ramsey says that they wanted to go back to Atlanta where their support system was.

I mean, they had only just moved to Boulder, like a handful of years before this, like in 91 because his company had gotten bought out by Lockheed.

So he says that he still thought of Atlanta as home.

Like they always had planned to move back.

And like that's where they were planning to bury Jompanee in the same cemetery as her older half sister who had died in a car accident a few years before.

And interestingly about his company, like that bought Access Graphics, Lockheed, John raves about them.

Like you'll see that in my sit down with him.

But one of the things that they did after Jompanee's death was they had offered John a company plane to take him to Atlanta.

So the company plane takes him to Atlanta.

29th, 30th goes by.

31st is Jompanee's funeral.

And then the first, all media help break loose.

In a move that John Ramsey himself will later call a mistake, he and Patsy decide to go on CNN.

I feel like this is one of the most famous parts of this case that you can see.

I can see it. Yeah.

Now they haven't had a formal sit down with police, but they have this sit down with the media and it rubs people all of the wrong ways.

Yes, Ramsey, you found the note.

It was a handwritten note.

Three pages. I couldn't read the whole thing.

I just got up. We were on our it was the day after Christmas and we were going to get visiting.

And it was quite early in the morning and I had gotten dressed and was on my way to the kitchen to make some coffee.

And we have a back staircase from the bedroom areas.

And I always come down that staircase and I'm usually the first one down.

And the note was lying across the three pages across the run of one of the stair treads.

And it was kind of dimly lit because it was very early in the morning and I started to read it.

And it was addressed to John said Mr.

Ramsey. And it said, we have your daughter.

And I, you know, it just wasn't registering and I, I may have gotten through another sentence like, we have your daughter and I don't know if I got any further than that.

And immediately ran back upstairs and pushed up in her door.

And she was not in her bed and I screamed for John.

And John, you've subsequently read the note.

Was there anything in there that struck you in any sense?

Well, no, I mean, I read it very fast.

I was out of my mind and it said don't call the police.

You know, that type of thing.

And I told Patsy he could call the police immediately.

And I think I ran through the house a bit.

We went to check our son.

She sleeps in here.

And we just were. We were just frantic.

The police said a couple of days ago to assure other residents of Boulder, there is no killer on the loose here.

You can be assured everything is under control.

Do you believe it's someone outside your home?

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.

You know, America has just been hurt so deeply with the tragic things that have happened.

The young woman who drove her children into the water.

And we don't know what happened with the O .J.

Simpson. And I mean, America is suffering because they they have lost faith in the American family.

We are a Christian, God fearing family.

We love our children.

We would do anything for our children.

So this interview that they did was actually a lot quicker than I had in my head.

I don't know why. Like growing up, I thought this was like this like long special where they gave statements.

Yeah, statements about everything.

But I feel like the part that you heard about the note was like honestly the most detail that we got.

I think in total it ends up being like, I think I heard the CNN anchor say like 40 minute thing.

But there were other like little things here and there.

But mostly overall it was the Ramses opportunity to let the public know that they were unhappy with the direction of the investigation.

They didn't think that the Boulder Police Department had the right resources allocated to the case.

And so they were going to be putting together their own investigative team and offering up a reward.

So did you ask John why they agreed to do something like this?

Well, just to be clear, they didn't agree to like some incoming ask.

Like John had a friend who knew the president of CNN.

So they really made this interview happen.

But John said something.

This was one of the more interesting parts of our interview about why they decided to do this in the first place.

And listen, I have heard this guy talk a lot.

I've read his books.

I've seen the interviews that he's done.

I mean, his life story is drilled into him.

Like word for word.

He has had a lifetime of people probably asking him the same questions over and over.

And he gives the same answers over and over because he is consistent.

And in the past, what I've seen or read is that he talks about how his friends thought that they should go on.

They should tell their version of events that they should defend themselves.

And what he told me still was that his friends were the ones really pushing the interview.

But the reason behind why was different.

Okay, so in our sit down, John Ramsey told me that his friends wanted him to go on CNN to protect Boulder.

What does that even mean?

Great question. I asked it and I didn't really get a totally clear answer.

And this is truly where when you're done with the episode, I'm telling people you have to go watch the interview with him.

It's on YouTube. He just kept saying that Boulder was this weird place, like this bubble where reality was outside of it.

I know I'm not making sense, but it didn't really make sense to me.

And I don't know, in talking to them and seeing stuff that they've done in the past, it doesn't seem like they liked the place all that much.

I mean, it was a far cry from the conservative South where they'd come from.

Either way, I'm not sure that they nailed the assignment.

Remember, Patsy fully still did a hide your kids, hide your wife without a killer roaming the streets kind of thing.

So wasn't all pro Boulder.

I've always wondered a little if she went off book in that interview.

You can kind of tell she's still pretty medicated.

Yeah. And listen, people have all of the thoughts on both parents, but lots of thoughts on Patsy at the time.

And here's what I'll say.

I don't think that that interview is a fair one to read into too much, like behavior on camera wise.

Just because I mean, you're talking a week out from when their daughter was murdered.

I don't know that I could even sit up straight like at that point, like if it were me.

And so it might be one of the first times that Patsy was upright.

I mean, she even said that in those first few days, she was so out of it that John and her friends were literally having to feed her and to bathe her, help her go to the bathroom.

So demeanor, in my mind, throw this out the window.

But I do think we need to talk about the substance of that interview.

The words matter, especially when we're going to get into some of the statements, the early statements from them about what happened on December 25th and December 26th.

Now, like I said, there wasn't a lot of substance in what we got.

But there were the first signs of cracks, at least compared to what's an Officer French's report from the 26th and Detective Arnz report, which technically she actually hadn't written up yet when they go on CNN.

She actually writes up hers a week from that on January 8th.

So there's also, you know, how much is lost in her memory in that time between writing it.

So were there a lot of inconsistencies in the little that we did get?

No. So the only one that really pops out is when Patsy was talking about seeing the letter and then going to Jambenay's room to see if she was there.

In some of the early reports, there is a note that mentions her actually going and checking Jambenay's room first and then going down the stairs and finding the note.

But there are no follow up questions.

Like after this interview is over and despite what they seemingly told CNN, they told the reporter because at the time they're like, yeah, we are going to go back to Boulder.

We're going to work with police.

We're going to do anything we can to cooperate and help find our daughter's killer.

But that doesn't actually happen.

Okay, but why not? I know.

So it's what eats people alive.

No one can understand why they wouldn't just sit down with police and go through the facts that day in the days leading up to it as well, like the intimate details of their lives.

Like there is so much that police just don't know at this point.

And again, I will acknowledge, I do see that that first day or two, you know, everyone's still trying to figure out everything there, but there's they did top it.

There is this huge gap in what police know about their lives from that.

And I get it, like I want to shake them too and be like, just like help them help you.

Like even, I don't know if you remember Polly class, her story, but her dad eventually speaks out about this and he's like, I don't get it.

Like I did everything I could when my daughter was murdered.

I begged them to give me a polygraph so that they could move beyond me.

But John will just tell you like, till he is blue in the face, that they were following the advice of the lawyers that they had.

And why have these lawyers if you're not going to listen to them?

And by the way, their lawyer game has been upped by this point.

They're no longer just relying on Mike Bynum to give them some advice.

According to John, Mike connects him and Patsy to a law firm that could handle more like criminal matters.

So the law firm is called Haddon, Morgan and Foreman, who like, by the way, if you Google them, like, and you go to news, like what pops up is like, interesting clientele.

I was like, Oh, okay.

But that's either here nor there.

The point is that these new lawyers are like the big guns.

They have big connections, not just to the DA's office, but to Colorado politics as a whole.

And so these lawyers, Patsy and John each have their own, by the way, like they're each being looked at as a suspect.

So they have to have their own lawyers.

Their lawyers are basically like, listen, we know how this works.

The police are narrowly focused in on you.

They are going to want to just like get you in a room and drill you until you break down, which is why you have a lawyer in the room with you, but you need to go into the room.

You need to be there to be in the room.

And listen, like I, the lawyers always plan to be in the room, but they were particular about the conditions of getting in that room.

They wouldn't come to terms with police on what that was.

When I talked to John, he was like, well, they wanted us to come at late at night and their lawyers were like, they want you to be tired.

They want you to be like, they know we're not sleeping.

And he's like, yeah.

And he's like, we offered to have them come in our home.

And they were like, no, only at the police station.

So they go back and forth trying to like come to terms with the conditions of this interview.

And that doesn't happen.

They don't agree to something until April of 1997.

That is when police get the first real opportunity to sit down and drill in.

And then after that, it would be another year before their next sit down.

That one didn't happen until June of 1998.

And then there is just one more in the year 2000.

Now, in all of that time, it was a media frenzy.

I mean, in an era of tabloids, Jean Benet reigned supreme next in line only to a literal almost queen princess Diana.

Like I don't know if you remember, we talked about this being our origin story, but it was all over all the time.

You could not go to the grocery store everywhere and not see her face.

And it was all over the news, even in a time when like we weren't paying attention to news.

And I think it like it garnered so much attention because it was this like perfect storm of Christmas time, a beautiful child, a rich family.

And then I mean, put the pageant stuff on top of all of that.

Like there were not only a plethora of images of Jean Benet, but being sold to tabloids and newspapers and magazines because these photographers had so much footage of her.

But the pictures they had of her were of this little girl made to look like a young woman.

And people had a field day with it.

And even though there was plenty of talk of people asking the questions of whether or not the pageantry put Jean Benet in the path of someone dangerous, spoiler alert, like, yeah.

The conversations always kind of came back to the parents.

Yeah, but they made her do those pageants, which the family says is an inaccurate statement.

They're like, no, this is something she liked to do with her mom.

Like Patsy was a former Miss West Virginia.

But all of the tabloids were all about the family.

So like the family was right in saying that they were out to get them.

Yes, but like, which came first, right?

Like, it's a very chicken and egg situation.

If they talked to the police and the police had cleared them, would there be the tabloid that put them in the center of things or are they in the center of things?

It definitely fed it.

Like, again, I think that it started so surprisingly early.

But yeah, I think it definitely fed the monster to be like they're not talking to police.

Like, oh, they left Colorado and now they're in Georgia.

And things don't get better.

Like the more time that passed, the more contentious things got, not just between the Ramses and the police, but also between the police and the DA's office.

Like things are being leaked seemingly from every which way.

I mean, it was so bad that at one point her autopsy photos were leaked to the globe.

And those actually plan to print those autopsy photos.

And it's like the police, they had become convinced that the Ramses were involved.

And so it actually came out in a deposition at one point, like years down the line, that the police were giving information to reporters to try and put external pressure on the Ramses, hoping that they would crack.

Like they couldn't do the thing they wanted to do inside of the interrogation room.

So they were going to have the media do it.

So at this point, it sounds like police are relying on other details, almost like not just we don't like how the family is acting to support all these suspicions that they have.

Correct. Because like during this time, things are getting leaked.

Like I said, you have the police department, things are coming out of the DA's office too.

The Ramses had their own team.

So like, who is leaking what?

Like it is a messy, messy game.

But let me actually give you a little bit of the lay of the land of some of the stuff that we were learning in the time after Jambene's death.

I'm going to go into her autopsy.

I think that's a big part of it.

But before I do that, I think we just need to talk about some of the physical evidence at the house, some of the observations that were made, because I think all of that like was informing police's opinion on the situation very early on.

Right. So one of the big ones, one of the ones that the Ramses say kind of like defines the case is that police just didn't like how they were acting.

Linda Arndt, I'll talk about her probably a lot in this episode, she was the first detective there that day.

And she does this like one really infamous interview with Good Morning America in 1999.

And the interviewer asked her like, how was John that morning?

And she just keeps saying cordial.

And she's like, okay, but cordial, what does that mean?

It's the only word she would say, cordial cordial.

So she didn't like how he was acting.

Now, John tells me, he's like, and told everyone like I was trying to keep my wits about me.

Like I don't like Patsy was deeply upset.

Like she was just in the room with her friend.

She's laying down. She's crying.

He's like, I had to go into action.

Like autopilot. Exactly.

Which I truly I understand a little bit, I look at me and my husband and we're very different that way where I think Eric would be the one in the chair crying laying on the floor.

And I'm going to be like, okay, I've got to get the money.

I'm going to get this.

I'm lining everything up to be like, what can I do to fix this situation?

Because I can't just sit here.

Yeah, John's the CEO of a company.

I see him going in that way.

But the other thing that Linda talks about is that they're like in separate rooms the whole time.

So she just found that strange and people have like weighed in over the years, like put their own spin on it.

I don't like, I don't know that you could say one way or another that means anything.

Like I don't think people could say conclusively, but she just felt it was strange that like Patsy is in one room crying.

Again, John is like over here in action mode, but in this giant house in a giant house, I think she expected them to be like a unit and comforting each other.

But that's not what she saw that day, which I think played into the beliefs that first day.

The other thing that gets talked about a ton and that she really, and I think officer French and a lot of people there that day honed in on was the fact that, so John had just been like freshly showered when he had just gone out of the shower when Patsy made that 911 call.

And so he's fresh in the morning.

She has like fresh makeup, but she's also wearing the same clothes that she'd worn the night before.

So they say, it depends on who you talk to, right?

Like they thought it was really weird that at five something in the morning, she's got full hair and makeup, but wearing the same clothes.

I don't know what to make of that.

I'll tell you like completely honestly, I went to dinner with John Ramsey and then interviewed him the next day and I wore the exact same outfit, like and not even intentionally, I didn't realize it until later, but like throwing on the same thing to me is not a big deal.

Everyone says, oh, well, Patsy was so into her image and like there's no way she would have done that.

They were about to get on a flight to go to Michigan.

So maybe she was just like, It was like the holidays.

Like I would wear the same outfit.

The makeup she says, and she is from the South.

She was born in West Virginia.

They spent so much time in Atlanta.

She's like, my mother drilled it in me.

You do not leave the house.

Like, unless you're fully done up, which I like, I've met people like that too.

So, but people will read and be like, she just never had the chance to go to bed that night.

And so like it was odd to the people there that first morning.

Now, I also told you that first responders, they didn't notice any sign of forced entry in their initial reports.

But there was a broken window in the basement, which I don't get how that's just missed.

Not everyone did miss it.

I'm gonna have to come back to that.

Like when we get into people's like stories and statements for now, what we need to know is like the window was broken, but it wasn't broken recently.

So there wasn't glass all over.

And John had apparently broken it over the summer.

Like he's like, no, that's why there's no glass.

Like I broke it when I got locked out of the house.

And they thought they had asked their housekeeper's husband or something like that to fix it.

But there must have been some kind of confusion or miscommunication.

The window didn't get fixed.

So I think they view it as like, oh, this is a, you know, it's the perfect thing to like, if someone were scoping out their house, to say like, here's a broken window, you can easily get access to the home.

But it wasn't something that was done necessarily by an intruder.

And the other thing that they point to is there's also this hard shell suitcase that was supposed to have been right under the window that they're thinking someone used to maybe get in or get out.

And then there's the note.

The Ramses, to this point, like more than the broken window, they point to the note as proof that Jean Benet was kidnapped.

They're basically like, listen, if it looks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck, like it's probably a freaking duck.

Like we have a ransom note.

We probably have a kidnapping.

But there were things about this note that even really early on police were finding odd.

The first thing is like they end up concluding that the note was written on Patsy's notepad with a pen from inside the house.

Like I guess John and Patsy each had like their own notebooks for phone messages or whatever.

But they determined that it was from Patsy's one that the paper came from.

And what's interesting is that the pad of paper and the pen were put back.

Like they were put away.

It wasn't just like left out, but they were like put back in different places.

Now, when they made this connection about it being Patsy's notepad, they also found out that there was a first attempt at writing the note before the writer started over.

So there is a page that starts out Mr.

and Mrs. and then there's like a line.

Like it's going to start Ramsey, but that's it.

Like they call this, everyone calls it the practice note, but it just says Mr.

and Mrs. R. And then we know the final note is just addressed to Mr.

Ramsey. Now it's already a little sus that this thing was written with items inside the house, because I think what everyone starts thinking is like this person didn't come prepared.

Like usually in kidnapping cases, you see them, if they're going to leave a note, that's like something they come with.

If you're going to hold someone for ransom, you should probably have the ransom note written.

Yeah, it's a thought.

And if not, when they look at like the sheer amount of words here, two and a half pages, I think I heard someone say it would take someone like 20 minutes to write this thing.

They're like, when would they have done that?

Now, the Ramses think that this person, this intruder snuck into their house while they were at a Christmas dinner earlier that night was like sitting there laying in wait for everyone to like go to bed.

And they said like, Oh, we think it was written then, which gives the person like hours, ample amount of time, but it also like doesn't fit with a lot of like what will come to know if the goal was to just like, get her out of the house.

We know that she's found with everything done to her inside the house.

So if you, if you prewrote that note, it like something about that doesn't add up.

But then if you wrote the note afterwards, that also doesn't make sense.

Because why would you like hope that there's a notebook and a pen readily available for you to and 20 minutes?

Well, and also like she's dead.

Right. Like so what was the point of the ransom note for an intruder if they were going to leave her deceased in the basement?

And beyond like when the note was written, the contents of the note were super weird to me.

So for starters, it's like really focused on John.

I don't know if like as you're reading it, I know you've probably seen that a zillion times, but like, everything is about John and his business.

And even his role in the business in the business, and it's like, John, make sure you get enough like sleep, John, make sure you do this, John, your dog, like, which, and if it is about John in the business, then like the, you know, the Ramses have said there's like this sexual component to Jean Bonnet's

death that we're going to get into.

But like, if it's about that, then that part doesn't line up.

And like I said, there's a lot of in the note dimensions, like make sure you get some sleep.

Make sure you there's like this weird sense of like, if you want her earlier, just get the money earlier, and we'll figure this out.

It's really, it's really strange, the way that it focuses on them and like, again, I don't care is the right word.

But it's like, if this isn't, it doesn't make sense.

Like nothing about the notes makes sense.

And then there are all of these quotes that when people have like gone through and really like broken it down, all of these quotes from movies where kidnappings happened.

And so is this like, is this a movie buff?

Sure. I mean, surely someone's not like, going through and watching a bunch of movies as they're writing this, if they wrote this in the house in 20 minutes or a couple hours, whatever it is.

And finally, no one knows what the SBTC is, like, there are theories out the wazoo about what it could be.

I've heard saved by the cross.

I've heard rumors that where John Ramsey was stationed in the Navy in the Philippines, that there was like some it's like some military faction acronym.

Yeah, which then they're like, Oh, is that foreign faction?

But like, that's never been proven.

So people can have and honestly, like, again, some people can come up with like is pretty wild.

Lots of wild theories.

But in almost 30 years, there is no conclusive proof about what that is connected to.

And the other thing we don't know is this amount of money.

It's so specific. $118 ,000, not 100 150 in like, and split to in like different bills.

And john was like, I mean, they were kind of loaded, they could have asked for way more, you could ask for in like, I don't know, like I want 118.

So we're why not half a million, $1 million, $10 million, like, or even lower at like a round number of like $100 ,000.

Like, the 18, the 18.

It's so weird throws me off so badly.

And it's kind of almost like the SBTC thing where people are like, Oh, it's a Bible verb, like it's a proverb or something 118.

Like you can anything with like the number honestly, 18 in there or 118 people will like drill in on the thing that I think most people believe, or at least they think is like, the most relevant information is that it comes out and john and past in the early days are like, there's no significance to that number

for us. Like we don't know what it is.

Police end up finding out that john Ramsey's bonus that year for his company was $118 ,000 that exact amount.

Yeah. And like some change like, don't give it like, the lump sum, the big number, the weird $118 ,000.

And he says Yeah, it may be that's it.

The interesting thing is, so I think what gets mixed up a lot, like for people is that they're like, Oh, that was his Christmas bonus.

He got that in December, like everyone must have known it actually was issued to him, he says in like January or February of 1996.

So it had been the whole year.

But he said that that bonus was like a line item on all of his pay stubs.

So if somebody were like going through documents in their house, like they would have seen that and I asked him I was like, was there evidence of somebody who's like gone through documents in your house?

And he said he says no, but that doesn't mean that that didn't happen.

And it's kind of like his best theory of if it's this number, this might be how someone would have found that exact yeah, specific number, the police would say, well, no one needed to find it someone in your home knew it.

Yeah, yeah. So they have all this weird stuff in the note.

And then they start getting handwriting samples from people in the family trying to find out who wrote this.

They got a few actually from Patsy and everyone is ruled out except Patsy.

Now to be very clear, like they don't say it was her handwriting, they just say that she can't be excluded or they can't rule her out, which is like a very important distinction.

Well, and the language itself felt like her if I'm remembering like her interviews, right?

Like it's kind of flowery over the top, like they linked words like hence and attach.

I was like, whoo, that's a word like that stuff that she would say though, right.

Not words like she invented, like lots of people know those words, but there is this like strange juxtaposition in the writing where some of the words are actually like spelled wrong.

And then you have words like attaché with like the little like mark accent over it.

Yeah. And they're so they're like, oh, someone must have like spelled other words wrong intentionally, which kind of fed into this idea of Oh, this random note isn't real, like it was some kind of staging of some sort.

But like, fun fact, like I also spelled the word attaché wrong when I was writing like this story out.

So like, I would be floored if you hadn't.

I was just gonna say like, but I also like, I know words that are outside of my normal vocabulary.

And then like, I can't, there are some basic words, like I can't spell her like, it's just like fooling anyone.

And also say that like, you would be able to tell the difference if you and I wrote complete like the same things because we would use completely different words.

Yeah, yeah. So to get back to it, though, there are a lot of strange things about the note.

But there are other random things around the house that if you really want to go down this rabbit hole, you can spend days.

So like, I mean, there's a baseball bat outside, there's a rope in another bedroom of the house.

But the important thing is like none of it is forensically linked to the crime, at least not or hasn't been to the public.

So for the sake of keeping people with me, like we still got a lot of room here, like a lot of episodes ago, I want to move to the autopsy.

So when Jean -Bénez found she had what is described as a grot like device tied around her neck using white like rope or cord or some kind of like substance and then the broken off handle of a paintbrush.

Now, grot, grot, whatever, like that is the word that gets used all the time.

It's the only reason I know what that is.

It's like this case.

But it actually isn't a grot that got used.

I don't know if it matters, but it feels like with this case, the devil is in the details.

So for accuracy's sake, what they're actually like, at least when I was like looking it up, a grot is like some kind of like string cord, rope chain, whatever, and then like two handles on the end.

What was actually used in Jean -Bénez's case was a white cord that was tied around her neck.

It was fastened in the back and it was fastened to that broken end of the paintbrush.

And I think the thinking was that or if people are still trying to call it a grot, is that maybe you could like twist the paintbrush and then that would tighten it.

But investigators said that it was tied more like a noose than it was any kind of grot.

And particularly, they've made note that the knots weren't especially complicated.

Now, the brush itself is from inside the house like a lot of the other stuff we're finding.

And we find out that it came from Patsy's art supply.

So she had been taking painting classes at the time at the local university.

So she had this little like carrier bucket thing full of stuff like that.

Now, what wasn't obvious in the Ramsey house that morning that she was found, but what would become clear when her autopsy was done is that along with having this cord around her neck, she also had suffered severe blunt force trauma to her head.

Like they're quite literally when you see the pictures, there's like a chunk of her skull that is like caved in and then this like eight inch crack across her skull as well.

So I was never really clear like, which one of these things was her cause of death though.

Yeah, so the autopsy report says it was just a combination.

Do they know which one was first?

I don't know. So I think like first you need to know that the rope around her neck, like if you see the pictures that got released, it's like embedded in there.

Like, I mean, looks like somebody truly tied it so tight, but it actually wasn't tied really tight.

So like, just like the bindings I mentioned that were loose on her wrist, the cord I think initially around her neck probably was as well because in the autopsy report, there is a note that even though she's got the external wounds, there is no internal damage to her neck, which you would see if there

was like severe strangulation, if that makes sense.

So it's possible that maybe her body like got swollen after death or like, as she was dying, like, and it made it look so much tighter.

But she was definitely alive when it happened.

Yes. So yes. So she definitely did get choked in some way because we have external signs of her being choked, like so we've got abrasions, we've got the teak heel hemorrhage on her neck and her eyes and her face.

Which all that makes sense, but I still don't, I'm not seeing what came first.

I'm saying like, really, the only two options are either she was being lightly choked.

But again, the choking was not the thing that was going to kill her because we don't see those internal injuries.

She was being lightly choked.

And she either still has the cord around her neck or it's taken off and then she's hit and then it's put back on or it's like I said, it's just left on, or she is hit in the head and then it is put on.

And if she's swelling, that caused the choke.

Those really aren't only two options.

Either way, the hit in the head was so severe that even the light choking, whether it was someone doing it or just the cord being on, it contributed to her death in conjunction with the head wound.

So there seems to be a consensus from a number of people that the asphyxiation happened like 45 minutes after the hit.

And it really is like authorities who believe this.

On the Ramsey camp, they have this investigator, Lou Smith, who really reaches a different conclusion.

He thinks she was hit in the head after she was choked and that the choking was done as part of a sexual act.

Now, I mentioned this briefly, but when John was bringing Jean Bonnet upstairs, like when he first found her in the basement, there was some of that white cord, same stuff that's around her neck is around her wrist or her hand, just one of them.

And he says that they were bound together, but I think it's only left on one and it's pretty loose.

The knots themselves were loose.

A lot of people who've looked at this, they wouldn't have actually held her.

Right. So again, the people who look at this like a staging, they'll say, this is more proof that it wasn't to actually restrain her.

This was something done after the fact.

But could the knots have gotten loose?

Another way we look at a scene that we know is so severely contaminated.

She wasn't left in the place that she was found.

I don't know. Now, she also had a piece of tape over her mouth.

And when John found her, he had actually ripped that off and he leaves it in the basement.

That's when he brings her upstairs and it's left in the basement along with the white blanket that was covering her.

And then one of the things that I never knew in this case was that along with the white blanket, there was a Barbie nightgown.

And I don't know what it means, but all accounts, it's not what she was wearing that evening.

It doesn't seem like it was soil.

Nobody knows if it's like clean, dirty, like was it?

Did they go up to her room to get like, where was it?

Was it just shuffled in maybe with the blanket that they brought down?

Like, nobody knows.

It's just kind of this weird piece that I can't quite make sense of, but there's a Barbie nightgown down there, too.

So the nightgown I already said wasn't what she was wearing.

What she was wearing was a white shirt with a silver star.

And she had worn that shirt to a Christmas dinner that they went to the night before.

That's where they were before they all came home and went to bed.

She was also wearing white Long John pants.

And under those, she was wearing a pair of underwear.

And this is such a weird part of the case.

The underwear that she was wearing was a size 12, which for my non -kid people, usually the general rule is you can usually go size by age.

Obviously, every kid's different.

But pretty close. May is six.

She wears an eight.

Yeah. And Jominy was a pretty average height weight for her age.

So a six -year -old to be in 12 underwear, they were...

they even said, when they were taking off her clothes and doing her autopsy, they were huge on her.

And the other interesting thing is that her Long John's and her underwear were both stained with urine, mostly on the front of the garments, which indicates to me that she was probably laying face down when her bladder was empty.

Because I think it's especially important when you think about the fact that that cord was tied around her neck, was tied in the back.

Did they find urine anywhere else in the house?

If she was laying down, and I've seen the pictures of the underwear and the pants, they're saturated.

If she's laying down, empties her bladder that much to just drench her clothes.

It should be somewhere.

There should be a little puddle somewhere.

Theoretically, yes.

But I can't say for sure based on the stuff that we have.

I told you, a lot of the stuff that we have is because stuff got leaked, not because it doesn't...

There isn't other stuff that exists.

I can tell you that the sheets that were on her bed were not stained.

There is some conjecture that maybe there was a possible urine stain on the carpet outside of the wine cellar room that she's actually found in, but I can't source that to actual police documents.

I don't know if that's true.

And of course, Boulder Police Department, the prosecutor's office, they wouldn't talk to us for this episode.

So all in all, I don't actually know, but it feels like we should be able to determine where in the house that happened.

And the where that happened feels really important.

If we can't find where, that means that someone cleaned it up, which adds this whole other element to this already really confusing case.

Now, the other things that get discovered that are of interest are the following in her autopsy.

So there was vaginal trauma, but not from penetration.

It was more like an irritant or the skin cells.

And what they found is I believe there were traces of the actual, the broken paintbrush.

What they determined is that that paintbrush had been inserted.

Interestingly though, there's like that that they know happened at the time of her death, but the autopsy also notes some wounds or some trauma that is more chronic.

And chronic doesn't mean it's happening for a very, very, very long time over and over.

Chronic means before like that.

And so there's at least some evidence that seven to 10 days before her death, something else happened, but you can't say what.

And anyone who tries to say what, we do not know, but there is some vaginal trauma to this young girl that happened seven to 10 days before her death.

So they're not sure if she was abused?

No one can say that.

Like definitively. Definitively.

There have been a number of experts who came in, like the, when Boulder Police had this case, they brought in a number, I think it was like five or six experts that said that based on what they saw from the autopsy report, like they would categorize that as abuse.

What we also find out in all of this time, it's not necessarily the autopsy, but we find out that Jean Bonnet had been having issues with soiling herself.

So she was, I mean, Patsy still had like pull -ups in the house.

She was still wetting the bed, even soiling the bed.

And Patsy would say like, listen, like this happens, kids have accidents.

She said that her stepdaughter, one of John's from his previous marriage did the same thing till she was like eight.

Apparently Burke had the same things.

So Patsy was like, there's just kids, but people who do want to say that she was abused will point to this as like more evidence of that.

But no, like there is no definitive proof that she was being sexually abused in the time leading up to it.

Like there's, but clearly something happened.

Like in the seven to 10 days and this, but we don't know what that is.

Like I did so much of this case.

We will never know what was happening in that house on that night or the days before, or John Bay was doing so many things outside of the home too.

I also want to make it clear that if there was abuse, which I think there's evidence of, and it's something that I talked to John about actually in our interview.

I was like the proof is like, it feels like the proof is there, but that doesn't mean it has to be a family.

That's like, she came into contact with so many people.

So I know I just like went on and on and on, but the short answer is no, there's no like proof she was abused, but a lot of experts who believe she had been.

To go back to the evidence.

So there are some fibers that are found as well.

They're found on the sticky side of the tape that was on her mouth.

Some that are found like in the ligature, like knots that we've got, you know, I don't know, there's some found in the ligature and some that were on the white blanket as well.

And they are consistent, the police say, with a jacket that Patsy was wearing the night of the 25th.

Additionally, there is one mention of some black fibers that were found in her underwear that they say were consistent with a wool sweater of John's.

But this is a super important caveat.

Hey, this is only thrown out in Patsy's 2000 interview.

And we know like the person interview here says this, we know that you can straight up lie in those.

So I don't know if this actually is true because I like it's not anywhere else as fact.

I don't know if like the fibers were actually in the underwear.

I don't know if they were, if they actually got tied to John.

I have no idea. And the family lawyer actually makes note later on a different one.

He says that just saying those things skews the picture because he's like, hey, when you talk about the coat fibers, the shirt fibers, he's like, how many other things did you try and test to match it, first of all.

And you're not even talking about all of the other fibers that were found that aren't tied to any.

Right, there weren't only these like two or three fibers that could be a lot in there.

And also people do laundry.

Yeah. And he's like, so just to just say those couple of things really skews the record as he says.

So you've got a lot of the physical evidence, but like the thing I think everyone wants to talk about when we talk about this case, there is foreign DNA.

Exactly. So we've got foreign DNA under her nails, her right and her left in her underwear and on the cord around her neck.

We know Jambane was the main contributor in all of it.

In 1997, there was an indication of an unknown contributor, but the testing was super basic.

Back in 97. Yeah, it was so basic that what I can tell from like what I've seen is that we're dealing with like an allele that is off out of like multiple markers.

So they were like far from a real profile that we could do anything with back then.

But one of the things that really frustrated the family and made them feel like this was targeted against them is that no one was sharing that they were ruled out from that in those early days, which seems pretty significant.

Like everyone's looking for an excuse of like, it almost feels like they were trying to like write it off.

Like, how can it still be them and not be this?

And instead of just being like, Oh, like, was there someone else in the house?

Like all put your theory aside?

Like the question is, was there someone else in the house?

And I think that's the question everyone should be asking.

And then the final thing that we have as far as evidence, or at least that I'm going to get into, is the pineapple.

I was waiting for you to get to the pineapple.

So the pineapple, there are remnants of pineapple found in her stomach.

If you know, you know, if you don't, that's why you have me.

But to understand why the pineapple becomes important, like, or why it's a big deal, we have to go backward a little bit.

So now that you have the physical evidence, like the stuff that we're working with, most of which was getting, again, I just want to remind you, getting leaked like little bit by little bit to the public over weeks and months, all during the time when the Ramses are lawyered up, I want to go into the actual statements

that we get. So the stuff that police say that they were told on December 26, the statements given to authorities by John and Patsy in the months after that fateful day, and even in the years that follow.

So there are two reports that have been leaked from first responders that I found.

One is from Officer French.

He's the first guy that shows up at the house that morning.

And the other is from Detective Linda Arndt.

Let's start with French, since he was the first one who was there that day.

And so actually, I have, if you wouldn't mind just like reading, I think it's...

The report says, I spoke with Mr.

and Miss Ramsey while Burke continued to sleep.

Miss Ramsey told me that she had gone into Jambenet's room at about 545 hours to wake her in preparation for a short family trip the family was to take later that day.

She found Jambenet's room empty and then discovered the note as she walked down the stairs.

She immediately called police.

Okay, so then just go to that.

So there's like, there's not a section, I'm making it tight for them.

They told me they had spent Christmas night with the redacted and that they arrived home at 2200 hours.

Miss Ramsey said that Jambenet's and Burke's bedrooms are separate and are located on the second floor of the three -story house with the master bedroom on the top floor.

Jambenet's bedroom has an access door to the second floor porch, which was locked and undamaged.

Okay, so if you wouldn't mind now, I've got Linda Arts.

Okay, Linda says, Officer French told me that when he arrived he met with Patsy Ramsey, Jambenet's mother.

Patsy was very upset and distraught and it was difficult for Officer French to obtain information from her.

Officer French also spoke with John Ramsey, Jambenet's father.

Officer French learned that the Ramsey family had been at a friend's house on the late afternoon and evening of December 25th.

Jambenet and her brother Burke went to bed shortly after the family returned home.

John Ramsey had read to Jambenet after she'd gone to bed and before she went to sleep.

Jambenet had last been seen wearing a red turtleneck and white long underwear.

Patsy woke up this morning and discovered the suspected ransom note at the bottom of the spiral staircase.

Patsy originally thought that the note may have been left by the housekeeper.

Officer French has been told that the Ramsey family had been planning to leave early this morning for Michigan.

The Ramsey family has a home in upper Michigan.

After Patsy discovered the note, she went to Jambenet's bedroom.

Patsy discovered Jambenet was missing.

Okay, so then go to the next part where she talks about actually being able to speak with Patsy.

I did ask Patsy a few questions and was able to receive some information.

The following is information I received from Patsy.

Patsy has gotten up on the morning of December 26th, 1996 and had gone downstairs from her bedroom to the kitchen.

Patsy used the back, i .e.

west stairway. The back stairway consists of a spiral staircase leading from just outside Jambenet's to the northwest corner of the first floor of the house.

At the bottom of the spiral staircase, Patsy discovered a three -page handwritten note.

The note had been written on legal pad -sized paper.

Patsy said she originally thought the note might have been left by her housekeeper.

After Patsy looked at the note and read it, she ran to Jambenet's bedroom.

Jambenet was missing.

Okay, so that keeps going after that just basically like repeating a lot of the stuff that we already know like they had an alarm, they didn't set the alarm like kind of talks their housekeeper a little bit, who she had a key early on when Jambenet was still just like a missing person police were asking

about anyone who like had access to the house.

And then if you want to keep going so Linda talks to John.

Okay. John Ramsey told me that he and his family had been at a dinner party held at the redacted home on the afternoon and evening of December 25th, 1996.

John Patsy, Burke, and Jambenet had returned home at approximately 2200 hours.

John told me that Patsy and Burke immediately went to bed.

John had read a book to Jambenet, tucked her into bed, then John went to bed.

John said he went to bed at approximately 2230 hours.

For anyone who's mine doesn't work like mine, 10 and 10 30.

Yeah. I don't work in military David, like I every time I'd be like backwards from 24.

Anyways, so it keeps going.

I mean, again, for anyone who's like, as deeply obsessed as I am, like, I'll have all of this info in the show notes so you can go like read the full thing for yourself.

But for now, you have what you need to know.

So that's what police have from the day of about like them getting home, going to bed, finding the note.

There's a bunch more that they talk about.

Like I don't want to give you the impression that the Ramses only said like three words to them.

Like they answered all the questions that they had day of, but police were expressly told to treat them like victims in the early days, not like suspects.

Now, you know, after this, Mike Bynum steps in, tells John like, listen, I want to help you out.

I want to put someone like in place because like you really need representation in a criminal matter like this.

And you know, he's like, Jesus, Mike Bynum, Jesus, take the wheel.

Like, go ahead. Now we know that they don't sit down for a formal interview.

They leave for Atlanta.

And then they did that disaster of an interview on CNN, which if John's insider source was wrong about police like initially looking at them, like they definitely were now.

Right. Because some of the stuff in that interview conflicted with the little information that police already knew.

And again, why even talk to CNN in the first place?

To protect Boulder.

Right. Hashtag protect Boulder.

And which is like, when I sat down with John, as soon as he told me that I was like, but that's weird.

Right. And he's like, yeah, no, it's definitely weird.

But to protect Boulder.

I don't know. So anyways, do you heard some of the clips?

Like they don't go into a ton of detail, but they do say a couple of things that stick out.

And I thought that maybe we could just like read it a little bit.

Mrs. Ramsey, you found the note.

Was it a handwritten note?

Three pages. I didn't.

I couldn't read the whole thing.

I had just gotten up.

We were on our, it was the day after Christmas and we were going to go visiting.

And it was quite early in the morning and I got dressed and was on my way to the kitchen to make some coffee.

And we have a back staircase from the bedroom areas.

And I always come down that staircase.

And I'm usually the first one down and the note was lying across the three pages across the run of one of the stair treads.

And it was kind of dimly lit.

It was just very early in the morning and I started to read it and it was addressed to John.

It said, Mr. Ramsey.

And it said, we have your daughter.

And I, you know, it just wasn't registering.

And I, I may have gotten through another sentence.

I can't. We have your daughter.

And I don't know if I got any further than that.

And I immediately ran back upstairs and pushed open her door and she was not in her bed.

And I screamed for John.

John, you subsequently read the note.

Was there anything in there that struck you in any sense?

And then John says, well, no, I mean, I read it very fast.

I was out of my mind and it said, don't call the police, you know, that type of thing.

And I told Patsy, call the police immediately.

And I think I ran through the house a bit.

We went to check our son.

Checked our son's room.

Sometimes she sleeps in there and we just were, we were just frantic.

And then there's another section that I have here that I just want to read.

I'll read again for John and you read for Patsy.

To those of you who may want to ask, let me address it very directly.

I did not kill my daughter, John Bonet.

There have also been innuendos that she has been or was sexually molested.

I can tell you that those were the most hurtful innuendos to us as a family.

They are totally false.

John Bonet and I had a very close relationship.

I will miss her dearly for the rest of my life.

I'm appalled that anyone would think that John or I would be involved in such a hideous heinous crime.

But let me assure that I did not kill John Bonet.

I did not have anything to do with this.

I love that child with my whole of my heart and soul.

We feel like there are at least two people on the face of this earth that know who did this.

And that is the killer and someone that that person may have confided in.

The big thing that people took away from this were a couple of things.

One, Patsy says that she only read the first line of the letter, which is hard to understand because in the 911 call, she tells the operator how it is signed.

At the very end of the letter.

SBTC victory. And in one of the first reports, she says that she was nervous.

Remember when she was standing at the window, she was nervous about the car pulling up and being marked because the letter had said not to call the police.

But it doesn't quite make sense how she would have known that if she only read the first line or two.

She also talks about screaming for John and that's new.

Didn't she say she called the police immediately or even in one version didn't she say she saw John Bonet was not in her bed before she even saw the letter.

Right. So that's what's in the reports.

But I will say that when Detective Arndt was kind of, if you remember like that you read it in one of them, she's kind of rehashing what French told her.

It looks like in that version she saw the note first.

So some of the first reports might like the something might be getting lost in translation.

And we talked about like, you know, there's time in between.

There's the Ramses basically say like, you know, there's so much in the initial reports that are just like straight up wrong like everyone's misremembering or saw things differently or heard things differently or like misinterpreted stuff.

So the other thing that is interesting about what we learned from that little bit from CNN is that there is no excuse for the pineapple that we know about everything they say is they like, get home, go to bed.

There is no like snack later and granted this is just like a tidbit that we're getting but Patsy goes to bed.

Bert goes to bed. John takes John Bonet up, reads to her puts her to bed, always in like half an hour.

Yeah. And we got like in some of that from the early reports, but it's we don't understand when that would have happened because they don't say like, Oh, we got home and then this happened.

And so like there it's just kind of left is a little bit of a mystery.

And so all of that to say that after they do the CNN thing, police have their antenna up and they really want to sit down with them once they come back.

There's something weird that happens before they go back to Boulder because they will go back to Boulder like even though they never set foot in that house again, they have to go back.

So let me back up for a second.

Remember how I told you that John's company gave them a plane to use to go back to Atlanta?

Yeah, like the company plane.

Okay. Yeah. So I don't know who exactly was on it.

I don't have the manifest, but in a 1998 interview with authorities Patsy says that there is some kind of quote unquote, like scuttlebutt confusion or something around Fleet white.

So apparently he was planning to get on the plane back, but he didn't.

And what she said, I think I have like heard that I think it's important to read what she said.

So Patsy says, quote, I picked up on something that fleet was not acting right.

And they were going to keep him from going on the private plane back to Atlanta.

Well, so I don't know what happened.

Something happened.

He's not on the plane with the family to Atlanta.

But I know he makes his way out to Atlanta somehow.

And then it sounds like he loses his ever loving mind.

Something happens, but I like I don't know what.

Okay. So fleet and his wife are staying with John's brother, Jeff, it seems like.

And according to Patsy, fleet kind of flips out on Jeff.

Like he, at one point, like grabs his collar, gets upset about something.

And then Jeff calls over to where John and Patsy are staying.

And he's like, fleet's coming.

Do you have a gun? And Patsy says that her and Burke and her mom, like go to the basement.

They're like trying to stay quiet.

And John and Patsy's dad go handle this thing upstairs.

Handle what though?

I don't, I'm not following what's happening.

Me freaking either.

So like everyone apparently comes out of this fine.

I mean, like physically, I know whatever altercation they had, like is over with, but I don't know what happened.

Whatever it was about begins to fracture the friendship between the whites and the Ramses.

And has no one asked John about this?

Of course they have.

I asked John about this.

Did you? I asked him and I'm telling you, this is what I'm saying to people, go watch.

Like in other places, I've heard John say that fleet was upset that they did the CNN thing.

But in an interview, John eventually does in 1998 with Lou Smit.

He says that fleet was the one who pushed him to do the CNN thing.

Like the one who insisted on it.

He's the one who told him to go and like protect Boulder.

Well, no, he didn't say that in 1998.

Like that was something he said to me.

But what he says is that fleet told them to do it because of what the media was saying about them, that they needed to defend themselves.

The protect Boulder thing was again new to me.

I don't know what it means.

But defend themselves, protect Boulder.

Either way, John kind of chalks up whatever this meltdown is to trauma.

Like fleet obviously knew the family super well.

They were at his house for Christmas dinner, for goodness sakes.

He and his wife were called over by Patsy that morning when they knew John but he was missing.

It was traumatic for everyone.

And John says that fleet just isn't cool under pressure.

And fleet was one of the people who were like down there when he found her.

But that still doesn't answer my question.

Like what was he saying when he was flipping out?

Okay, so police do ask her, right?

Like because she was there.

But when she's asked by police about this, her only explanation because she said she doesn't know.

But she just says, I wasn't having that conversation.

What? I know. And like this, this is a little hard for me to understand because I'm like, but you're part of this like family.

Like something is happening.

Yeah. And it's hard for me to understand like you're running to the basement staying quiet and that like you ask no follow up questions like after you came out of the basement.

Just like it's fine, move on.

And like on one hand, I'm like, I don't buy it for a second because that's not how I would respond.

On the other, I have seen like more and more of, I don't know the family dynamic, like truly know the family dynamic.

I think there's like a world that you and I grew up in where we saw a lot of like, I'm like, what are all the right words?

Submissive isn't necessarily the right exact word, but like the dad, husbands, they're handling it.

Yeah, they're handling it.

And we don't need to worry about it.

And so we don't ask any questions.

So seemingly, that could be that could be what happened here, because she's like that is not a conversation I had.

And what does John say about this though?

Like the guy who was actually in the conversation, the conversation with you.

So Luthman doesn't really ask him about the altercation, or at least not what became part of like the transcript.

I tried to ask him, but John says he doesn't remember.

He doesn't remember the exchange, what words were said.

He also doesn't remember what fleet flipped out about at the next altercation they have when they get back to Boulder.

I'm sorry, what is happening?

And how did I not know any of this?

I know. So like, the media that we got served really has had its own take, right?

Everyone just kind of talks about the things that fit their theory, the police were doing it, the DA was doing it, the Ramses do it.

And I get it like, I mean, truly how far in are we right now?

Like you literally can't talk about everything in this case, unless you had a 400 part miniseries, even this episode, I don't feel like it's really gonna cover it.

Paging Delia, the crime junkies need you.

Yeah, the next season of Counterclock is John Mayday.

Seriously, though, I told you, I'm trying to go a layer deeper.

I'm trying to show everyone that like to get to the bottom of who it is so much more complicated than you think it is.

There's like, so much more than I think people think that they know.

And truly, like, this is not the end of the story.

But here is the main takeaway from today.

I don't think anyone should have a strong opinion anyway, until you consume all of it.

And that is really hard to do.

So like, I, again, as we're going through this, keep an open mind, even our episode won't be the end all be all.

But I'll get back to the facts.

So they come back to Boulder.

This is after the funeral.

I don't know who travels with who.

Priscilla and Fleet might even leave early.

There's like this talk about how they didn't like how they were treated by everyone in Atlanta, like they were expecting them to act like things were fine, or everything was just too formal, like they were grieving.

I don't know. But eventually, everyone goes back to Boulder.

Oh, sorry, just wait one more thing.

So it's a weird fleet thing.

So before we go back to Boulder, so when Patsy was telling authorities about this Fleet altercation, she said something that set off like truly like fire alarms in my head.

Okay, so this is after Fleet is kept from getting on the plane.

But before he flips out, and Patsy's like hiding in the basement.

So Patsy says that when they're in Atlanta, she sort of remembers Priscilla White, who's Fleet's wife, standing in her mom's living room saying something like, Well, I know what's going on.

If you would give me a few minutes of your time, I could let you in on some things.

And Patsy turns to her and she says, Priscilla, how can you know so much?

I'm the mother of this child.

And I know nothing.

So the person asking her interviewing her when she's like talking about this asked her what she was talking about.

And Patsy's like, I don't have a clue.

Like, you know, I really wish I would have taken her up on the offer to like see what she knew.

But but what like, we still have time here.

What did Priscilla know?

I don't know, man. We don't know.

Our team tried to reach out to the whites like nothing back.

Maybe they would say that like they never even said that.

Maybe they would say that whatever they said was taken out of context.

Maybe they would say what John says, and nobody remembers.

Surely police talk to them at some point though, right?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. And from everything that's been reported, the whites are super cooperative.

They wanted to help in any way that they could.

You could help by telling us what you were saying to them when you were freaking out.

That seems like a really good place to start.

And I like it had to have gotten asked.

And maybe there is a very vanilla answer.

But Boulder PD has been super tight lipped on the whites or honestly, pretty much any other people that they interviewed who weren't the Ramses.

All the stuff that gets leaked are about the Ramses.

Everything has a slant.

Like, I mean, seriously, no matter what side you take, things are slanted.

And I feel like I'm dealing like I have a thousand puzzle pieces that I'm trying to put together.

And I feel like I'm still missing like 30 ,000.

Like no matter how much this case, like we do not have all the information.

But I do think the part of the reason that Patsy never went back and like got the answers from Priscilla that we would want or like I might go and get is because of this rift that forms between the families.

Because according to Patsy, two more things happen.

And after that, I don't think they ever speak again.

So Priscilla says that thing, Fleet has his meltdown, and they're all back in Boulder.

And it's strange because Patsy says to this next thing, she's like, Oh, I wasn't really privy to it.

It's kind of like the same thing.

I wasn't really privy to this.

But she is there when it happens.

It's not like she's even removed like she was in the basement before.

So her and John are meeting with their priest, Father Wool.

And they're at the church.

And the three of them, she says, are like praying.

And Fleet White bursts into the office, eyes wide.

He gets on his knees, apparently, has this business card.

And he's like literally like hanging over John.

And he says, you know what this is, John, you know what this means, John, you know what I'm going to have to do with this, John, I am going to have to handle this my way, John.

And Patsy says he keeps going on and on.

And she's asking Fleet what it is that's in his hand, and he answered this business card.

And it's for someone, like a journalist or something.

And there's a note on the back.

She said she can't recall word for word, but she says it's something to the effect of quote, this is her quote in the interview.

Mr. White, there's been some question as to whether it was you or John Ramsey who removed the tape from John, but his mouth, you know, and about the sequence of the basement discovery, because we had been talking about this.

Wait, they've been talking about the basement discovery?

I don't know. And like who had and when?

Exactly. I don't know.

They don't ask her, like she just kind of keeps going and they don't circle back to this.

And she says that Fleet basically says they're after him and his family now and he's going to have to handle this his way.

Like I said, so she says he's like manic at this point.

And then the story just kind of fizzles.

Like it's not clear how it deescalates.

I know Father Rawls like jumps in at some point, but I don't know how it ends.

I don't know what was said.

I don't know what journalist it was like who gave the card who's asking these questions or like if that even was the question.

Well, calling a holder journalist who gave a card to Fleet White, the crime junkies kind of want to know some things.

I have a laundry list of people that I want to talk to like any of them are welcome to hit me up any time after this episode.

So that was the one thing I told you there are two things.

So Patsy says that Fleet tries to get FaceTime with them one more time.

So by this point, when the Ramses go back to Boulder, they kind of like hop around, but they end up like settling in and moving in with some of their friends the Stines, who weirdly like John called acquaintances before all of this.

But I don't know, man, like trauma bonding is real.

So like they become obviously much closer.

The Patsy says that Fleet goes to Glenn Stine's office at Colorado University and demands to see the Ramses.

Again, I don't know what said.

I don't know how it fizzles, deescalates, whatever, but like that's that.

And I want to be clear.

No one in the White family was ever considered suspects by any department.

By all accounts, they have cooperated fully with the investigation and they have even been staunch critics of how the case was handled and have they've actually fought legal battles trying to get documents like released that they feel would further the case or would bring more light to the case.

But for now, in our story and with the Ramses, the Whites are up.

The Stines are in. They're the new besties.

And it's interesting because it turns out what we learn when John and Patsy finally do sit down with police in April, 1997, and then again in June of 98 and the more 2000, is that the Stines, they may have been some of the last people to actually see John Bonet before she died.

Okay, so we're like eight hours into this episode.

Do you want to finally get into more details about the days leading up to the 26th?

I'm gonna, I know. You need backstory.

No, I know. I'm loving all of it.

This is so much. So I'm gonna start with the 23rd.

On December 23rd, the Ramses hosted a Christmas party with all of their friends, even family members of these friends who were in town visiting.

So we have the Whites, we have the Fernies, the Stines, the Barnhills, all these kids.

It's the kids that are decorating gingerbread houses.

Everything was merry and bright.

At least we assume.

But there is one weird thing that happens that night.

On the 23rd, from the same house where 911 will be called in less than 72 hours, someone dials 911.

On the 23rd. On the 23rd.

According to an LA Times article, the call was placed from the Ramses at 648pm, but it was like a hang up call.

Dispatchers tried to call back a few minutes later.

Nobody answered. So then police sent an officer to the house.

What happened? Great question.

I don't know. The officer who was dispatched never filed a report.

Now I have heard that it was Fleet White who made that call.

And there's like a number of like explanations around like going around like, oh, he was trying to like dial.

His mom is said to have been in the hospital at the time.

He was trying to like call and get some medication for her and mis -dialed or something like that.

I asked John specifically about it.

And he's again, like does not remember, he says.

So file that whole thing under like WTF.

It's just like, it's weird.

And it's one of those.

We talk about this all the time.

Like, is it a coincidence that someone in that house calls 911 and then this happens or like, are there no coincidences?

Right. I don't know.

So the 24th, nothing super notable happens.

They go to church. They go out to dinner.

They eat at this place called Pasta J's.

John knows the owner.

And then they go around and look at Christmas lights.

Patsy thinks that maybe they might have gone to the whites at some point.

Like they were by there.

They might have like stopped by for a little bit, but no big deal.

They all go home, go to bed.

And then everyone wakes up the 25th on Christmas day.

Like any kids on Christmas day, they wake up first.

They let go and get the parents.

We want to open presents.

John Bonet got a bike and this life -size twin doll thing and Burkina Nintendo 64, hello 1996.

And they eat this big breakfast as a family that they make.

And then in the middle of the day, everyone kind of does their own thing.

So they were planning to leave early in the next morning.

This would have been like the 26th.

Right. Yeah. So they're planning to leave the 26th to go to Charlevoix, Michigan to spend Christmas with John's older kids from another marriage.

So they were planning on flying private.

So John was going to go.

He's going to check on the plane, make sure everything's ready.

Where's Charlevoix?

So Michigan, so for my crime janky people, do you remember the episode we did on North Fox Island?

Of course, I remember.

There was like a whole trafficking ring, like Father Sheldon, whatever.

So North Fox Island is like, Charlevoix is like the main little town.

Okay. That's like the closest.

Yeah. Like a bay. So now it's a crime janky context.

Got it. That's where Charlevoix is.

So it's not like on and out.

It's on the mainland, but like it still is pretty hard to get to.

So like, hence the private plane.

Right. So he's going to check the plane.

Patsy's like finishing packing.

She's wrapping some gifts for all the kids to open in Michigan.

Some neighborhood kids come over at some point to play with Jambanay and Burke.

And everything's going well.

Like in the evening, they get ready to go to the White's House for a Christmas dinner.

Patsy wants her and Jambanay to match like black pants.

Red shirt. Jambanay is not into it.

She wants to wear this, like her shirt with a silver star.

Six year old wins. Like if you have a six year old...

That is so true. Yeah.

And so they go to the White's.

They have crab. Like that's really like the only, like we know they eat crab for dinner.

So like it's interesting because not much has been leaked about this party.

Like I haven't, there's no pictures.

I don't know what happens.

And like it's not a huge party.

From my understanding, it's like their family Christmas dinner that they had invited the Ramses to like the year before and then this year.

So it just became kind of this little tradition, but it seems small and intimate -ish.

So the family goes to this dinner.

Then they leave, but they make some stops first.

Patsy had gotten some gift baskets for other friends.

So they go to the home of the walkers first.

They drop off the gift basket.

Patsy just like runs in while the rest of the family stays in the car.

Then they go to the Stein's, what I was talking about.

They drop off a gift there.

Patsy goes in for like 10 to 15 minutes.

She can't really remember if Burke went in with her, but like he might have because he has a friend or the Stein's have a kid that's like his age.

So like it would make sense if he did.

John doesn't remember for sure who went in or not.

Like nobody remembers if John donated.

They don't think so, but whatever.

Nothing notable. They had one more shop.

They were supposed to make another gift basket, but it was getting late.

They had to get up early in the morning.

So they decided to just go home.

Now it's just a couple minute drive to their house from the Stein's, and when they get there, they say that John Bonet was already like zonked out.

So as they're giving these like longer statements to police, this is again where we get like.

No, she was never awake and John read a story to her.

Like she was asleep is what they say.

John had to carry her up to her room.

He put her in the bed.

He took off her coat, took off her shoes and then Patsy took over from there and she said she changed her out of her pants.

Like just put those long johns on and the whole time she's like John Bonet was so tired that she didn't even wake up at all.

Which I've heard people like rumble about.

Yeah, but I mean this literally happened to me yesterday.

May fell asleep in a car, Justin fully unbuckled her out of her seat, carried her in later on her bed, and she slept for another hour.

I fully like, yeah changed Josie the other day and she was like zonked.

So like especially come from like a party with friends and stuff like kids can get it.

Yeah, but when does the big like size 12 underwear get put on her?

I don't know. It is so weird.

The underwear is like a big thing.

I can't explain because it seems like the underwear was originally bought for another family member like a young girl in the family who would have been like a size 12.

I've heard that maybe it was wrapped up like as a gift to take with them like as a present in the basement somewhere.

But then like, oh, maybe john bonet decided she wanted them.

There's never like a good, clear answer on why she's wearing them where they came from where they came from when they got on her any of that.

So again, question mark question mark.

So patsy put john bonet down john is downstairs with burke because I guess he still wanted to play a little bit.

He had this toy or something that he wanted to like put together.

Dad was helping him with that for a little while.

Patsy finishes up some last minute things then she goes to bed she said she probably does her normal routine like brush her teeth, wash her face, whatever.

And then when john went to bed, he said she's already there that she you know, I don't know that she's necessarily asleep.

But he's like we don't like have an interaction she's down and I read for a little bit and then I fall asleep.

And then we didn't wake up until the morning.

So the big differences here now are that john bonet is asleep when they get home, whereas before we see an early reports that she was awake that john read to her, that's not the case anymore.

And the Ramses say, and I've said this before, like everyone the day of misunderstood them, they wrote their reports wrong, that john didn't read the john bonet that he read when he went to bed.

And again, people will be like, so everyone who wrote a report got it wrong.

And they say like, I don't know if information was flowing from one person to another, right?

I was gonna say a lot of like transcription and using reports as references that might have been happening.

Yes, they say they have always been consistent.

That's not the case.

They don't know where they got that from.

Now, the next morning, john is the first one up.

But like before the alarm, he took a shower.

Patsy wakes up then, while he's like in the shower, she throws on the same clothes we talked about this from the night before she puts on her makeup does her hair, and then she goes downstairs where she finds the note.

And then when she finds the note, she calls for john Burke is asleep the whole time.

And at some point, john checked on him to make sure that he was there and okay.

But they again leave him to sleep till they knew what to do.

So you already know they call police, even though the note says in the statement I do not call police john tells her to call the scene isn't preserved in any way.

And a little after one o 'clock in the afternoon, john finds john bonnet in the wine cellar where presumably she had been all along.

What always baffles me is how had no one looked in this room is wine cellar, like the whole day.

There were so many people in the house, and they were everywhere except for somebody's room.

But this is one of like the great mysteries.

And it's potentially another example of Murphy's law, or like, maybe not.

Maybe this is something that just doesn't make sense.

I don't know. So officer French admits that when he went and looked around the house, like he saw that door, but he saw that it was a latch and he I don't know if it's because the latch was high or like what about it that he was like, oh, this wouldn't make sense for a little girl to go through or something

doesn't even open it and look which is just like bananas to me.

Yeah. Now I've heard fleet white even went down in the basement at some point that day and looked around.

He even oh he opened the door so more than French he actually opened the door to the room that they end up finding john bonnet in but doesn't see anything.

The one thing I'll say is john says, or like his old interviews, it's like not clear.

He can't remember if he was off, which I can understand, right?

Like in that moment, like that's not a detail I would remember.

So is it possible that fleet didn't turn it on john could also just like naturally like break like instinctively know where the switches because it's his house.

Right. And I think the other thing that sticks with me is I've heard it before that he'd made like a beeline for this wine cellar.

Like is yes and not true.

Yes and no. So he does.

When she says Hey, go look top to bottom.

He does go right for the basement.

I think he makes he goes to the broken window first I think or at least like draws fleets attention to the broken window.

And then he goes to the wine cellar but it is pretty immediate.

And here's the other thing that I can't explain.

So remember how a year ago when we started the story I told you that john that john went to the basement like at some point that morning when he was looking around.

So he says that he goes down this is like a before or right about like 10am.

So he says he goes down and he noticed the broken window.

And he said the window was like unlatched and open.

And he at first he says like slightly later reports.

It's like wide open.

But either way, it's really strange because like he says later what he did is he just like latched it back up.

And then I mean, I told you he comes up to the basement and he doesn't say anything.

He doesn't say the windows broken.

He doesn't say the window was open, which like your daughter is missing at that point.

If you're looking for like a point of entry or exits.

It's notable, it's notable.

And I think that people wonder why he wouldn't bring that up in that moment.

But again, you do so many things that don't make sense in the middle of trauma.

Now this window does end up becoming a huge part of the narrative later when the Ramses have to go hire a team to look into the idea of an intruder because again, they say that the police are only focused on them.

So there are a lot of strange things happening in this case that the media latches on to.

This is how we got so many of those wild tabloid stories, which by the way, like I don't know if you noticed, I ordered a bunch of these like on eBay just because like I wanted to like go back and get a sense of like what what what was the tone?

Yeah, what was everyone seeing?

And it's kind of wild.

I definitely wasn't allowed to buy these.

Oh no, we could see the covers at the grocery store and that was it.

I think I showed you like I was looking at like the fashion in here.

So we were never allowed to look inside the tablets.

I like I don't know what it's like when we the bye bye birdie when my mom always taped over a part that she thought was too scandalous for us to watch.

And we thought it was going to be so bad.

It was so much worse in our heads.

And we watched it and it was just a dance scene that she had cut.

Yeah. That was it. That was it.

So it's like a side story.

It's so interesting because like the store there's like no meat there.

They have like no wild headline and then like two interesting lines and then like a bunch of nothing to back it up.

Like 17 different lines saying the exact same thing written slightly different just to back up the headline.

It's truly headline only and all of the headlines were mom this dad that and the tabloids were freaking ruthless like they were following them.

They were harassing them.

They said or John told me that they had to like hide Burke on the floorboard of the car just to like get him to school like is nothing off limits.

I mean I already told you about her autopsy photos getting released.

Earlier we talked about her like bedwetting and stuff that got released because they ended up releasing her medical records like someone leaked this girl's medical records to reporters in some way.

And I like I don't want to go into like every single visit or not visit.

The point is like people were coming out of the woodwork and anyone with pictures or stories were like trying to just make a buck.

Some of them were fabricated some of them were true and one of them that has become like a central part of the story is the fact that John Bonet was having toileting issues.

And this information in particular I feel like kind of becomes the crux of Detective Steve Thomas's theory.

He was very clear that he thought Patsy was the one who killed John Bonet.

His idea was that John Bonet wet herself that night and everything else was done to like stage a cover -up.

He even wrote a book on the case and like his theory of it the Ramses ended up suing him and his publisher over it.

They settle out of court.

Detective Art had a different theory like she very much was suspicious of John like she thought he had something to do with her death and like I think I brought up her Good Morning America interview already from 1999.

A cordial statement.

Yeah right right. So I don't need to rehash the whole thing.

I'm gonna link it out.

It's gonna mean all the source material.

It is interesting to watch because she looks like a woman who's shook or people like throw out nasty things too and she doesn't give a motive.

Maybe she doesn't know what the motive totally was but she seems to straight up be perceived as like scared of John Ramsey.

Like she talks about this moment when he brings her like John Bonet's body up and they're both like over her and she's like I look at him and like in that moment I just know and then she like tells him to go call 911 and she says she grabs her shoulder holster like her gun and she counts her bullets

because she didn't know if everyone would make it out of there alive or like or it would be alive when they come like first responders.

Now I said she like looks scared to me but she gets written off as a crazy lady like a lot of people call her crazy like I think that's an easy out when you're talking about a woman like we that's just something that I think is just an easy thing to say like and really John in our interview like he

stressed that to me like just how crazy she was how like incompetent but I asked him in the interview because I do know that later on Patsy and Linda end up having some kind of like at least cordial exchanges where Linda like goes and meets with Patsy for like an hour like just the two of them and I

asked him because he was he was still like she's so crazy she's so crazy and I was like but clearly there's some kind of relationship and at first he was like well you know she was the detective I'm like no no but like it was after she got taken off the case what did they talk about and John says he

doesn't know he was a part of the conversation so that answer probably died with Patsy I think John still like to me he still called her crazy and I think she gets a lot of the flack for bungling the scene that first day but she actually ended up suing her department saying that she was they had kind

of like an unofficial gag order from what I understand and she says she was kept from defending herself like it wasn't all on her she says and it ruined her career and she does she kind of like unceremoniously just like gets taken off the case she got harassed by question mark I don't really know I

don't know if anyone knows for sure she doesn't do interviews anymore there was a rumor she was writing a book but I haven't seen like a peep about that so she probably saw what happened to Steve Thomas with his book and her case against the department ended up getting dismissed so there was like no winning

for her to talk about this case like I couldn't even reach her for like an off -the -record conversation so she's far removed from this now moral of the story the loud theories among law enforcement were family -centric and it seems like even they couldn't agree on who or why because things were a mess

many people were calling for a grand jury to be convened so that they could decide what is just tabloid fodder and what is real evidence like was there someone in the house responsible for something that night or should we be out there looking for an intruder like the ramsays have been saying all along

it takes almost two years but the dam finally breaks in september of 1998 that is when a grand jury finally gets called but before that gets going two very big letters get published publicly one from fleet white in anticipation of the grand jury and then another from detective steve thomas who is like

dunzo with this he resigns from the department in like a pretty dramatic way and listen the next part is gonna be like just a little bit long but girl it's like it is spicy and remember you guys like you signed up for this so i am going to edit each of these just a little bit um down for like clarity

but i'm gonna have links to the full thing in our show notes so you can go read them in full grab your popcorn let's get comfy the first from detective steve thomas chief bechner on june 22nd i submitted a letter to chief kobe requesting a leave of absence from the boulder police department in response

to persistent speculation as to why i chose to leave the ramsey investigation this letter explains more fully those reasons the primary reason i chose to leave is my belief that the district attorney's office continues to mishandle the ramsey case i had been troubled for many months with many aspects

of the investigation albeit an uphill battle of a case to begin with it became a nearly impossible investigation because of the political alliances philosophical differences and professional egos that block progress in more ways and on more occasions than i can detail in this memorandum on june 1st

and 2nd 1998 we crunched 30 000 pages of investigation to its essence and put our cards on the table delivering the case in a formal presentation to the district attorney's office we stood confident in our work very shortly thereafter though the detectives who know this case better than anyone were advised

by the district attorney's office that we would not be participating as grand jury advisory witnesses how were we expected to solve this case when the detectives were not crippling us with their positions i believe they were literally facilitating the escape of justice during this investigation consider

the following during the investigation detectives would discover collect and bring evidence to the district attorney's office only to have it summarily dismissed or rationalized as insignificant the most elementary of investigative efforts such as obtaining telephone and credit card records were met

without support search warrants denied the significant opinions of national experts were casually dismissed or ignored by the district attorney's office even the experienced fbi were waved aside in a departure from protocol police reports physical evidence and investigative information we shared with ramsey

defense attorneys all of this in the district attorney's office spirit of cooperation i served a search warrant only to find later defense attorneys were simply given copies of the evidence it yielded an fbi agent whom i didn't even know quietly tipped me off about what the da's office was doing behind

our backs conducting investigation the police department was wholly unaware of i was advised not to speak to certain witnesses and all but dissuaded from pursuing particular investigative efforts innocent people were not cleared publicly or otherwise even when it was unmistakably the right thing to

do as reputations and lives were destroyed some in the district attorney's office to this day pursue weak defenseless and innocent people and shameless tactics that one couldn't believe more bizarre if it were made up i was told by one in the district attorney's office about being unable to break a particular

police officer from his resolute accounts of events he had witnessed in my opinion this was not trial preparation this was an attempt to derail months of hard work there is evidence that was critical to the investigation that to this day has never been collected because neither search warrants nor other

means were supported to do so not to mention evidence which still sits today untested in the laboratory as differences continue about how to proceed while investigative efforts were rebuffed my search warrant affidavits and attempts together evidence in the murder investigation of a six -year -old child

were met with refusals and instead the suggestion that we ask the permission of the ramesses before proceeding and just before conducting the ramsey interviews i thought it inconceivable i was being lectured on building trust these are but a few of the many examples of why i chose to leave having to

convince to plead at times to a district attorney's office to assist us in the murder of a little girl by way of the most basic of investigative requests was simply absurd i believe the district attorney's office is thoroughly compromised when we were told by one in the district attorney's office months

before we had even completed our investigation that this case is not prosecutable we shook our heads in disbelief will there be a real attempt at justice i may be among the last to find out it is my belief the district attorney's office has effectively crippled this case the time for intervention is now

what i witnessed for two years of my life was so fundamentally flawed it reduced me to tears everything the badge ever meant to me was so foundationally shaken one should never have to sell one's soul as a prerequisite to wear it on june 26 after leaving the investigation for the last time and leaving

the city of boulder i wept as i drove home removing my detective shield and placing it on the seat beside me later putting it on a desk drawer at home knowing i could never put it back on at 36 years old i thought my life's passion as a police officer was carved in stone i realized that although i may have to

trade my badge for a carpenter's hammer i will do so with a clear conscience it is with the heavy heart that i offer my resignation from the boulder police department in protest of this continuing travesty detective steve thomas number 638 detective division boulder police department okay that was so much

i i knew i added it down yeah you see you you trimmed this up for like clarity we only got the big parts the important parts but i mean i guess what i'm taking away from it is he's thinking that the police and the d -a well he's saying so he he was on boulder he was on boulder pd and he's basically highlighting

the rift that i think was kind of becoming evident like it very much felt like they were a little bit on different teams and they tried like publicly to like be a united front but it was like it was pretty clear that's not what was happening and you know one of the things i actually he kind of like

touched on the search warrants and stuff um when i was interviewing john i was like you know one of the things i heard was that like they didn't get your like cell phone records and stuff like that he's like no no no like the second they asked for something we gave it to them and it's like this is one

of those things were like it's all true so it seems like the d -a's office was delaying the pd in requesting those things like they weren't signing the search warrants they were asking them not to go ask the family so there were times when maybe things weren't collected in a timely manner but it wasn't

because the ramseys were withholding things it's because things weren't like flowing properly on the law enforcement side yeah and like and at the same time not because law enforcement didn't want it it's because they were like being bureaucracy it's like yeah like yes and maybe more yes and but why

but why but why so the ramseys have been clear that they feel like no other suspects were investigated properly and if you read legal depositions or watch any of the clips that have come out from them like again that letter from steve thomas is scathing his book is as well but i like went through and i

was like reading the deposition and watching some of the clips and there are times that in my opinion steve thomas gets caught where like i do think there were areas pointed out where like they could have done more investigating or ways that he he frames things in his book that i don't like when you're

literally like on the line legally maybe it's not as like strong as like you again framed it and then i also think we're very clear and that there is not a symbiotic relationship between the da's office and the police and the second letter i mentioned the fleet white letter i think it really raises

the question of why that was which is what we're saying but why so here you go again edited down a little bit but i'll link you the phone to the people of colorado in anticipation of receiving a subpoena to appear before that grand jury we wish at this time to address matters concerning the investigation which we

feel are of great importance to the people of colorado and the boulder community after john benay ramsey was killed in boulder nearly 20 months ago her parents john and patsy ramsey immediately hired prominent democrat criminal defense attorneys with the law firm of hadden morgan and foreman this firm

and its partners have close professional political and personal ties to prosecutors the denver and boulder legal and judicial communities state legislators and high -ranking members of colorado government including governor roe romer we knew john benay and her parents very well and have been closely

involved in the investigation as witnesses during the past year we have also come to know and respect mr thomas and we're sat in and discouraged by his departure from the investigation we share mr thomas's view regarding the district attorney and his contention that overwhelming pressure brought to

bear on the district attorney and police leadership from various quarters has thwarted the investigation and delayed justice in the case while it is unlikely that the district attorney has been corrupted by ramsey defense attorneys it is certain that the district attorney and his prosecutors have been

greatly influenced by their metro area district attorney advisors and by defense attorneys chummy persuasiveness and threats of reprisals for anyone daring to jeopardize the civil rights of their victim clients indeed the district attorney and ramsey attorneys have simultaneously rebuked the police

for focusing their investigation on the ramseys when in fact police were simply following evidence notwithstanding what the public has been led to believe boulder police leadership and detectives have been under the effective control of the district attorney and his advisors since the early days of the investigation in december

1997 we met with governor romer to request that the state intervene and appoint an independent special prosecutor to take over the investigation and prosecution of the case citing the growing conflict between police and prosecutors and the delay of any progress in the investigation we expressed our

view that boulder authorities were incapable of seeking justice most developments in the case brought to the public's attention throughout 1997 should be regarded as well publicized but clumsy attempts by the district attorney and police leadership to look busy follow long task lists and clean up investigative

files while the district attorney killed time and spread out responsibility for the case on the other hand advances and the case since early this year have been carefully planned to condition the public for a grand jury investigation the district attorneys passed indecision and the need for police to

ask him for a grand jury investigation were deliberate attempts to mislead the public if based on nothing other than the district attorney's repeated public statements and leaks characterizing the case as not prosecutable there can be little doubt that absent a confession the people running the investigation had

long ago decided against filing charges in the case instead they manipulated public opinion to favor the use of the grand jury there is compelling evidence however that their motivation for presenting the case to a grand jury has little or nothing to do with obtaining new evidence grilling reluctant

witnesses or returning an indictment and everything to do with sealing away facts circumstances and evidence gathered in the investigation in a grand jury transcript it is our firm belief that the district attorney and others intend to use the grand jury and its secrecy and attempt to protect their

careers and also serve the conflicting interests of powerful influential and threatening people who have something to hide or protect or who simply don't want to be publicly linked to a dreadful murder investigation and direct response to mr thomas's recent letter governor roamer met on august 12th

1998 with district attorneys grant ritter peters and thomas later that day governor roamer announced at a press conference that hunter had told him that the case was on track for a grand jury roamer said that it would be improper to appoint a special prosecutor now but that to improve public confidence

in the case he would make available to hunter additional prosecutorial expertise on august 13th 1998 the rocky mountain news offered an editorial entitled calling in the cavalry in which the editor generally supported governor roamer's action but insightfully asked the obvious question why has it taken

so long for hunter's office to present the case to a grand jury there is a relatively simple but compelling answer to the question raised by the rocky mountain news editorial since very early in the case there has been at least a tacit understanding among the district attorney police leadership those

persons advising these agencies and ramsey defense attorneys that the case would be presented to a grand jury but not until the statutory boulder grand jury was convened in april 1998 this delay was deemed necessary by some or all of these parties in order to take advantage of a new statute concerning

grand jury reporting procedures by law however this change in procedure would only apply to reports issued by grand juries convened after october 1st 1997 in order to take advantage of the new statute a boulder grand jury would have to wait until april 1998 the next convening of the statutory boulder

grand jury subsequent to october 1st 1997 in order to accomplish this it was necessary for these people to stall and cynically rely on the public's relative ignorance of the statute and the purpose and general nature of grand juries speaking in favor of the bill before the committee were district attorneys

ritter thomas and grant all of these district attorneys along with jim peters would be named publicly as advisors to alex hunter on the ramsey case the original intent of the colorado district attorney council draft and that of representative koffman was to make it easier for grand juries to issue reports

in cases where there is not an indictment returned but where in the public interest the grand jury wishes to address allegations of misconduct by public employees falling short of criminal conduct the final bill made it possible for a grand jury to address allegations of first and second degree murder

and the two classes of child abuse resulting in death the new statute would enable a boulder grand jury investigating the death of john benet ramsey to publicly exonerate someone who'd been alleged to have committed one of these crimes but only in the event an indictment was not returned the bill was signed

into law by governor romer on april 8th 1997 it is certain that boulder county district attorney alex hunter the metro area district attorneys advising mr hunter the current leadership of the boulder police department the three attorneys advising the boulder police department and ramsey defense attorneys

have known that to take advantage of the new statute it would be necessary to delay a grand jury investigation of the ramsey case until april 1998 the people of colorado are entitled to be frustrated and angry with those public officials and other persons who have brought this case to its current status

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 john benet fleet russell white jr and priscilla brown

white august 17th 1998 boulder colorado okay what i know my head is absolutely spinning i can barely get my thoughts straight on this i know we obviously weren't reading colorado newspapers in 1998 and like this seems a little too hard hitting for like the grocery store tablets when we were in like

third grade so i think a lot of people missed this so basically in a nutshell fleet is saying that there's just mad corruption not so much corruption but like conflict of interest so a bill was made with the intention of clarifying the law so there was more like transparency in the process for the public

which would basically let them issue certain reports from grand jury proceedings but still keep other parts of things confidential mhm check but by the time that visited the system timing it like right after john benet's death and with the help of people providing advisement consultation our representation in her

case it was a little different different yeah because i know this is going i'll cut right to the chase one of the main things that it would allow them to do is say that like oh the jury didn't indict which means there's no case my hands are tried blah blah blah yeah bingo and you do know where this is going

so the grand jury is called lots of witnesses we know some through reporting like who was going to court and whatnot like i know detective lynda aren't you know burke i know the ramsey's pilot the whites lots lots lots more kidders yeah not steve thomas as we know from his letter not the ramsey like

john patsy though john has always maintained that they were more than willing to go to participate in any way necessary but ultimately they were not called and then in october of 1999 their hearings come to an end and the district attorney makes this long awaited announcement the boulder grand jury

has completed its work and will not return no charges have been filed 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 that 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 under colorado law the proceedings of the grand jury are secret under no circumstances will i or any of my advisors prosecutors the law enforcement officers working on the case or grand jurors discuss the grand jury

proceedings today or ever unless ordered by the court so basically everyone decided the ramseys had nothing to do with it because the grand jury didn't indict yes that was basically the implied message to the public like hey no tabloid bs like these are the facts and these people decided that there

would be no charges is the implied message and did lynda aren't ever speak out after that no so she did her good morning america thing that i talked about she did that right before this happened okay so she did that interview in september and the ramseys lawyers they made a statement about her appearance

that i found in the denver post um because they like comment on the timing so they said quote we question the timing of this interview the statement from the ramseys attorney said the grand jury will conclude its work in the next month there is no good reason why miss arn could not have sought publicity

after the grand jury process was concluded end quote now after this is when momentum really picks up i think for the ramsey family who finally feels this small amount of vindication and they hope that maybe now investigators will focus on looking for the intruder that they say came into their home that they've

been saying all along came into their home a home which they sell and move away from to go back to georgia and john told me that his company had this relocation program where they would buy your house like i've seen stuff like this with like big organizations especially for like high up execs like they

would buy it from you so that you can move when they need you to move and not be like held up by this house or whatever so they buy it and then would sell or whatever but it's interesting because like the documentation around this is kind of weird so from the records that i pulled from the assessor's

office i see where the house was bought presumably by the ramseys in 1991 for 500 000 then in december of 1997 so this is about a year after jon bonnet it looks like there is a transfer of the deed but it is a zero dollar transfer so like no one bought it it was like me giving a house to you or something

like that there's no money association from the assessor's office records and i can't see who it went to like they don't have that publicly available there's just a transfer on record right then we see another transfer happen in february of 1998 for 650 000 according to statements made to reporters

mike binam says that a group of investors purchased the ramsey house from like this laki middleman thing but they didn't purchase it under any like one person's name or or person's names which again is like a totally normal thing the llc formed is named after the address so it's 7 5 5 15th street llc

mike binam told the daily camera that this group of investors was composed of individuals assisting the ramsey family what does that even mean i can't tell you because i looked up the the property records and then the business record so i went and looked for 7 5 5 15th street llc the company doesn't

list individuals names under its member so instead it lists group two partnership group four partnership and then there's a registered agent because you have to have someone's name you have just like human there yeah you can't just like go company your company or else whatever and the registered agent

is a woman named ann bork and there's a listed address of 1900 15th street in boulder so i did a newspaper .com archive look up with that address and like listen newspapers .com it's great it's not the end all be all in fact i found that it's like actually very hard to find a lot of boulder things in there

i don't think they're included but i did find one article in total when i google that address there is one article that comes up and is from the daily sentinel from february 6th 1997 it's this article about like the cost of the ramsey investigation like what it's costing like the police the city yeah

and then towards the end it says wednesday the ramsey family announced the address to male contributions for a children's advocacy group founded in their daughter's memory donations may be sent to the john bonnet ramsay children's foundation in care of the colorado business bank of boulder 1900 15th

street boulder 80302 and so then i got into this like weird rabbit hole with this bank because then when i started looking up the bank i found this next article from the daily sentinel from january 13th 1997 and it says women's bank has changed its name to colorado business bank a sign of the progress

women have made since the business was founded 20 years ago but in a piece then later that i saw in like denverlibrary .org it says that the women's bank sold in 1994 and that the name change happened in 1995 not 1997 when this article that i found was and according to the nice librarian at the carnegie

library of local history in boulder colorado um that address the 1915th street was listed for colorado business bank in their phone books in 1997 and 1998 but then it wasn't there anymore in 1999 and then i saw that like when i look at the colorado business bank it got bought by bok financial in 2018

so it's not like it got bought and changed you know back then in 99 when it disappears and it all probably means nothing like i don't know who ann bork is it's probably not weird that she with the house is tied to this address where like they're doing foundation donations because we know that the group

who bought the house was like composed of like people who are supporting the ramsay family it almost feels like um almost like an executor of a will type situation like a figurehead for an organization and a foundation or whatnot yeah so i don't know again she might have some connection i like tried

reaching out to people who might have like known her i've had any luck getting anyone to talk to me but let's go back to the house for a second so the statements made about the house at the time about this like mystery purchase was that this group was going to hold onto the house for like tbd amount

of time and then all of the profits from the house are going to go to the japane ramsay children's foundation which by this point john patsy had set up in memory of japane with the help of like buying him he's always there according to the denver post the foundation was formed with the goal to like

i think they said gather funds to be used in the education and care of children all in the memory of japane so do you know when the house sold i do so the house didn't sell until 2004 okay so this is a total aside but i just read a book it's called tell me everything the story of a private investigation and it's

about this private investigators like assistant who is investigating university of colorado and one of the people that she's investigating is like someone who is living in the ramsey house at the time of the investigation which is like wait what year late 90s early 2000s so it's like in in this interim

period in this interim period i think too odd and like he's not a person who should be able to necessarily afford a 6 000 square foot mansion the timing is just weird i wanted to mention it and we know that there's no like transaction in that period right so like someone must have been like renting

it or letting him stay there i wish i could tell you who i but i don't know who i don't know who who is holding the property at that point yeah weird just just a thought just a aside just a weird you just like happy to read that book i love literally like a month ago okay so to go back so i looked at the foundation a little

bit so we they say that they're gonna hold the house for tbd amount of time maybe rent it out we don't know and then they're gonna donate the money from like the proceeds of like whatever profit from the house to the foundation right i didn't find what i was expecting to find so the 990 forms for the organization they

filed in 1998 1999 and 2000 and they don't show any huge transactions after 2000 i think they actually stopped filing and then the foundation gets shut down in 2003 shutting it down 2003 meant that contributions from the sale of the house in 2004 couldn't go there oh so i don't know where they went

you would have to ask group two partners and group four partners if anyone knows who that is unfortunately we can't ask anne bork because she died in 2009 so so again i see why maybe the house didn't go there i was also expecting though to see money from the sale of john and patsy's book so they wrote

a book called the death of innocence and many of the statements that i have seen from them from their team from all these different people is that the proceeds from the book were going to go towards two things so the ramsey legal fees and the foundation now per john it seems like their legal fees like

bled them dry um at one point his lawyers represented him he said pro bono because they couldn't afford to pay them anymore well what i find interesting is that the goal must have changed to be that two -prong approach at some time because when i sat down john he actually gave us this these box of like

tapes and most of them are like pageant stuff or home movies wet like family weddings whatever but actually one of those tapes appears to be of john and patsy practicing their book promotion interviews with a media trainer which is very normal like i did media training before i went on the today show

just talking about my book but this is where like again in this at least it seems like it started that the money was going to only go to one place here take a listen okay one that's uh you are you have written a very uh thorough and interesting book what did you intend to do with the prophets if that's

not your personal question and should i always wait for patsy to answer or should i just no just if i'm looking at you okay well we've established a foundation in to honor her and to leave a legacy for her and the prophets from the book will go to the foundation foundation is going to focus on protecting

children against predators is that i guess that's it then i don't know it just sort of um it leaves me hanging here i mean that's a very generous and good thing for you to do is it uh how will you know how to protect children against predators and how would you use the money to do that well we've seen

a number of flaws in our system as it relates to the murder of a child we are the strongest most powerful nation on earth and yet we don't respond with our might when one of our children is murdered that's wrong we want to advocate change you know would it be possible for you to cite some of the cases

that you're talking about other one of the best examples that i that that we have learned about through all of this is that when your child's photograph is taken at school or at church or in any kind of activity dance recitals piano recitals that photograph becomes the property of the photographer and he

or she may publish that photograph at any time any place that they so choose without your permission so for a day on the copyright well what danger can happen if you have a picture of your child's photograph is is some place in in a pedophile or someone who has reason to want to zero in on that child

and do harm to that child that is a bad thing so are you associating that with with your own tragedy are you saying that there were so many photographs of john benay because of the work that you did in in pageants that that could have incited something i'm saying that that is an example of one way that we

need to we do not need to put our children out there in newspaper articles and the photographs should be for family memories not for public release well and and most important when a child is murdered in this country we need to respond with the best we have to fight the killer that does two things it

sends a message that we're not going to tolerate it if you think about harming our child our children you better think twice and secondly it ensures that we capture these monsters uh before they kill again i don't doubt that you have you know beneficent and wonderful feelings about about doing this kind

of thing but how would you go about protecting a child against a perpetrator i would i would advocate that the murder of a child be the most serious offense in our society it should be a federal crime to murder a child in this country and once found once the murderer was found he should be given he

should be executed or given away he should be he should be put away forever that's the most horrible thing that you and me can do is to pray to the child okay what i'm getting at is i think the wonderful and very generous thing to do to to donate the profits of your book to such a cause i don't know

how you're going to implement it and how you're going to make it happen i just wanted to do educational awareness through legislation they're all have you done any of that yet no no okay um all right hasn't the foundation already been set up i mean i heard you say well we can offer rewards substantial

rewards for information we can establish a tip center an information center we can establish databases that track known child sex offenders we can put experts in place make experts available to local law enforcement we can advocate in the united states congress that the murder of a child should be mandated

as a as a federal crime federal resources should be put on attacking that but so far you haven't done anything like that no nor nor has anyone else we're going to try it where you do the best we can because it's a horrible flaw in our system we respond aggressively when a bank is robbed so john and i

when i talked to him we didn't get into where the house money went during our conversation because if he sold it i'm not sure he's the person who has the answers that i'm looking for we did get a little bit into john bernet's legacy and what's happening in place at the foundation i'm going to touch

on that a little bit later i don't think the ramses were ever planning to fund the whole foundation themselves perhaps there weren't many contributions at most like i said i only saw small transactions and at most there was like twelve thousand dollars that i saw like in the thing so while starting

the foundation was like a noble effort it perhaps wasn't the undertaking that they were ready for as someone who started like a true 501c3 like it is a heck of a lot of work and like to keep it running to keep it sustainable on its own it is like a massive undertaking so whatever they were planning

i mean in that interview it's like have you done this no like are you planning to do it yes like it that doesn't actually come to fruition so in 2003 the foundation goes defunct oh there's something 2003 was a weird year so the foundation goes defunct in 2003 and then something else happens and it's

one of those other things that i had never known about before okay so here is a media release that was sent out on wednesday june 4th 2003 that has been archived on boulder colorado .gov the boulder police department recently became aware that someone was unlawfully sending emails using the name of chief

beckner on april 25 2003 rocky mountain news columnist charlie brennan received an email titled as being from chief beckner complimenting mr brennan for a recent column he had written on the john vanay ramsey case according to embedded information within the message the email was sent from an msn hotmail

account beckner bpd at hotmail .com the email was then signed off with regards mark please see below message text from chief beckner sent friday april 25th 2003 1 16 pm to brennan c at rocky mountain news .com subject great articles charlie just want you to know i thought those two articles you wrote

today were excellent you got everything right as you always do thanks for all your support eventually will be proven right regards mark being skeptical of the message's authenticity mr brennan telephone chief beckner to ask him about the message chief beckner confirmed that he did not send the message

the chief was alarmed that someone was apparently using his title and name without authorization to communicate about the john vanay ramsey case with members of the search warrants were obtained and executed for msn hotmail in california according to msn hotmail the beckner bpd at hotmail .com account

was established in 2000 the account creator provided information stating that the owner was chief beckner from boulder colorado and furthermore provided an accurate birth year for the chief further investigation led police to the internet protocol ip numbers from where the suspect had been accessing

the beckner bpd at hotmail .com account since early march 2003 all access to the beckner bpd at hotmail .com account were from a single netcom now owned by earthlink dial -up account a search warrant was obtained and executed for earthlink in georgia according to earthlink's records the account holder

that accessing the beckner bpd at hotmail .com email account is susan b stein 5760 longgrove drive atlanta georgia susan stein is known as a close friend of john and patsy ramsey and has been interviewed as a witness in reference to the ramsey investigation the search warrants also yielded other messages

that had been received by the beckner bpd at hotmail .com account a number of messages indicate that the beckner bpd at hotmail .com user had been attempting to convince others that he or she was chief mark beckner others appeared to be nonsensical please note that the investigators were able to confirm

that the messages to and from rocky mountain news reporter charlie brennan and rita johnson were received or sent by those individuals the other messages were not confirmed as received or sent by those parties at the request of the boulder police department members of the georgia bureau of investigation gbi

went to miss stein's residence in an attempt to interview her on june 3rd 2003 however she refused to talk with the gbi agent chief mark beckner is alarmed by the discovery that his name and position as boulder police chief has been used in an effort to communicate with others given the history of the ramsey

case and the concerns we have had with information being distributed to the public oftentimes inaccurate information this discovery is disturbing stated chief beckner i want the media and public to know that if they have received communications from this email address purporting to be me that it is bogus

my official email address is public and is beckner m at boulder colorado .gov under colorado law criminal impersonation is a class six felony and impersonating a police officer is a class one misdemeanor the boulder police department and the boulder county district attorney's office have agreed to issue

a letter to susan stein advising her of the unlawful conduct and that the use of chief beckner's name in such a manner must cease immediately the beckner bpd at hotmail .com account has been frozen by msn hotmail the boulder police department would like anyone receiving email messages from any reported

member of the boulder police department to know that official email addresses use the member's last name and first initial followed by at boulder colorado .gov if you are not sure that a message is legitimate please call the department member to confirm that they did in fact send the message we are concerned

that there could be other messages out there reportedly from either me or other department members that are fake in an attempt to either receive information or communicate false information stated beckner on june 3rd 2003 chief beckner did receive an email from susan stein in which she apologized for using

the hotmail account describing it as a sophomoric prank and apologizing for any distress she may have caused anyone with additional information is encouraged to call boulder police detective jim mcpherson at 303 -441 -3330 i'm sorry what was that isn't that weird yeah but i think i'm confused i thought

the stein's lived in boulder yes and no the stein's did live in boulder in 1996 they were the ones who the ramses stopped to give that present they were like the last stop on they lived there for a little bit yep they lived at their house for a little bit after and some way somehow some reason the stein's

end up moving to atlanta either at the same time as the ramses or after like the ramses move back to atlanta like the timing is unclear but they do like pick up their their family and their lives and move to atlanta i love you so much we've never moved together we've we've done a lot of moving we've

never followed one another no i love you too and it's it's interesting because as of monday march 17th 1997 there is this time article that's published that day where the article is not like what matters like it's talking about like the cost of tuition or whatever but glenn stein is quoted in that article

but they give his title and he's the vice president for finance at the university of colorado which is like a pretty sweet gig to walk away from but still i mean i know people move before that the article says that he was a senior budget official at penn from like i think it was like 82 to 90 uh the sandusky

years the sandusky era yeah so lots of reason to leave right like yeah so maybe he left colorado to go to another university like i i don't have a record of where he went after colorado so i don't know well and again not to reference this book but like the timing is interesting because the scandal that the book

was investigating was a sex scandal at the university of colorado he's not mentioned though right no but it's happening at the university and there's a cover -up and there's money involved so maybe so the same way he could have been like interesting timing that's all yeah i'm gonna say so the same reason like

i mean i can understand wanting to like leave pen for something like all the reason to want to leave or like find a new something yeah whatever so maybe maybe that's why like i could never like i don't i didn't understand the timing of it but like maybe something was going on at the university that he

was ready to leave and moving to a place where you already know people it's good to it is like when you when you think about like okay if my time here is up like i'm gonna pick up and leave we could go anywhere it's good to go to a community where you have community you have community right like you

have some kind of like a friend like grounding you whatever it's so much easier to like integrate into a new life and maybe they thought about like going to their friends who like who was who were you know they've become really good friends clearly we're living together like they're going through such

a hard time and maybe part of it was not only for them to have a community but for them to like support these newfound friends and the ramesses still needed the support because even though they weren't physically in boulder like it didn't none of it stopped like the personal attacks didn't stop the being

hounded by the tabloids didn't stop like they followed them across the country no matter where they went i even found actually one of the tabloid articles it's by um these two guys david wright and david duffy it's from march 11th 1997 where someone had taken the same plane as the ramesses from one

end of the country to the other just to like report on their every move like who sat where who looked at who who didn't look at who how were they interacting like who got off the plane where like they were all over them so i understand for the ramesses again stein so maybe they wanted to go support

them the ramesses just needed to get out of there but they did the thing i will say too is everyone's like oh they like how do you leave when this investigation is going on for your daughter don't you want to be a part of that they did have boots on the ground on their behalf in boulder so loose mitt

is on their team by this point so he was an investigator who was originally brought in by the das office to look at this case he ended up leaving because like the official capacity because he got so frustrated he felt like everyone was so narrowly focused on the family that they were like missing the bigger

picture he felt like there wasn't enough being done right and this dude straight up devoted his like life to jon banay ramesses case honestly his family legacy to this case because even after he died his family has like gone on to continue his work like they've picked up the torch they were actually

a part of this really actually interesting podcast i listened to called the killing of jon banay ramsey which i will link to admittedly i when it first came out i saw it and i avoided it and i think it's like so much of this case where i'm like i already know like i cannot believe like why are we rehashing

this and it was like you know the pageant pictures of her but once i was like diving into it there was actually a ton i didn't know in that podcast about potential suspects and about the work that loose mitt has done to where he did his family did to like go down those paths to vet things to like put

an order of like who should we look at like you know we've got a limited number of resources prioritized prioritization yes but anyway so loose mitt is like all over this case and i think he really gets people for the first time to think about like if it's not the ramesses not just like oh it's not the ramesses

but really think about like okay if not then then who and how and why now lou feels confident that the intruder came through that basement window it was already broken so they could just like reach in unlatch it open it up like he even demonstrates how easy it would be for someone to like slip down

into the window stuff okay but what about the spider webs yeah i don't the spider webs do you like do you want to just give a quick uh breakdown of the spider webs yeah there was like this great thing covering the area to get into the window and there were like officers who said they saw spider webs

on this great they said it had been there for a while someone would have messed it up if the great had been moved to get into the window yeah i never really see anything like to fully refute that i think maybe i heard once they said that maybe the webs weren't like as fresh as they thought they were yeah

like they were saying that um like if someone had like moved the great and then put it back they would expect the spider webs to be more fresh looking yeah but they the interpretation you get from people who are giving us the interpretation of this is that they had been there for a long time they were more

like cobwebby spider webs but like there aren't any pictures we don't know what it looks like they they didn't find her body for hours so also like maybe the intruder was like the most lucky person on earth like i don't have enough information to like see for myself to like make my own opinion of this so you

just have these two sides right like the one saying like it is impossible for those spider webs to be there and for your theory to be right lou smith being like it means nothing like the spiders mean nothing this is probably how they got in and then there's also like this third option where like maybe

neither like john in early days like there and this is where like the conflicting early reports will be like oh they say he told them that he locked up that night but in all of john's statements afterwards he's like we left the doors i don't know if i checked them like we leave the doors like partially

unlocked like there could have been other entry points for this person to come into our home and i also said lots of people had keys or like keys were missing or floating around or this person had it or like we never got this key back so all that to say in my mind though that was like very much lou

smith's theory is it had to do with this window them dropping down them using this the suitcase to like get in and out the window is not the only it's not the only option if you are thinking about an intruder theory so like i don't want to like die on that hill or get so caught up in that that again you

can't look at the bigger picture and there are some other stuff that lou points out that we haven't really got into yet and that is the cord used on jambene on her neck and her hands that is never sourced to anything in the house we don't know where that cord came from same thing with the tape that was over

her mouth like that never gets sourced to anything in the house so in lou smith's mind that means that someone had to have brought those things in or taken them out if they were already in the house right versus like the legal pad that was left there the pen the paintbrush right things that were sourced

in the house but also left and left right so i don't know that you can say that they like didn't come from we just don't know there's nothing there so they like took something with them is what lou's saying would find them here even if we step away from the evidence in the home because truly like you

could go back and forth back and forth back and debate this till you're blue in the face i told you it's there i don't want to argue about the meaning of it that's not my job i want to get to the facts so in 2003 more dna testing is done and from her underwear guess what they get an unknown male profile

dna like before but this time it is enough for a full profile good enough to put into codis which i don't know where i was like sleeping at the wheel before i was like deep in this like hi i didn't even realize there was a codis profile on the jambone ramsay case uh neither did i there of course have been

no matches or we would have heard about that by now yeah it's just sitting in the database hopefully still is that was actually one of my questions i wanted to ask boulder pd because i have seen in other cases that we've worked where the requirements have changed over the years and i've seen where like

the dna was in but then there was a change like an update and like it was no longer eligible matches the criteria yeah so that's what as far as everything i've read is that it's in codis i wanted to ask them specifically that nothing had changed but in all that time no hits so in later years additional

testing is done by some other crime labs and even other like outside of the state agency like bode bode's a big lab still to the state who's doing a ton of genealogy stuff a ton of advanced testing season of justice works a lot with them so bode comes in they do some more testing and they get an unidentified

male profile from her underwear and lots of people say here's like the caveat lots of people say this is from saliva and they might have done an amylase test which can amylase can be found in saliva it can also be found in other things but it's usually like the levels are so much higher in saliva so i

don't know if that's where they like that comes from of like we know it's saliva because it wasn't you know any other fluid that they've been able to like definitively link it to and i can't get like too far or i like i'm afraid i want to say something wrong because that's you know you get to really

technical so what i can go back to is what is very clear in my mind and what i do understand is that when they do this testing they find more dna so we know we've got the dna in the underwear but they also test like places on her long john specifically i think places where they think if someone was going

to like pull down her pants upper pants and they're able to get touch dna on the outsides on the left and the right and on one side the unidentified male one profile that we have in the underwear can't be excluded so we can't exclude excluded on the other side it's too small that it can't be included

or excluded okay so we don't know anything well we know that it might match we know that the the dna in the underwear might match or it's at least consistent with the touch dna on the outsides now i think it's important to note there is this like note that the dna might come from more than two contributors

which actually makes reading the results like from my understanding even more complicated but i keep coming back to like the word like consistent because i almost have to like retrain my brain because what i had always heard in the public and from like statements and stuff is that we have a match we

have the same dna here here and here and it is not a match in that you can say 100 these are like the exact same profiles it is cannot be excluded cannot be included or excluded it's like consistent with it's enough to be like in my mind probative like it's it's still very interesting that we have unknown

male profiles in all these places like but like let's be clear make sure we're using the right language now it is powerful enough of a fine that the boulder dna at the time this one's name is mary lacy she actually sent the ramseys a letter of apology she actually sent it to john ramsey because by that time

john told me that patsy had lost her battle with ovarian cancer so once again this letter is slightly edited for clarity but this is what she told john ramsey be a letter july 9 2008 mr john ramsey as you are aware since december 2002 the boulder district attorney's office has been the agency responsible

for the investigation of the homicide of your daughter john benet i understand that the fact that we have not been able to identify the person who killed her is a great disappointment that is a continuing hardship for you and your family however significant new evidence has recently been discovered

through the application of relatively new methods of dna analysis this new scientific evidence convinces us that it is appropriate given the circumstances of this case to state that we do not consider your immediate family including you your wife patsy and your son berk to be under any suspicion in the commission of this crime

i wish we could have done so before mrs ramsey died we became aware last summer that some private laboratories were conducting a new methodology described as touch dna one method of sampling for touch dna is the scraping method this is a process in which forensic scientists scrape places where there

are no stains or other signs of the possible presence of dna to recover for analysis any genetic material that might nonetheless be present we contracted with the bode technology group a highly reputable laboratory recommended to us by several law enforcement agencies to use the scraping method for touch

dna on the long johns that john benet wore and that were probably handled by the perpetrator during the course of this crime the bode technology laboratory was able to develop a profile from dna recovered from the two sides of the long johns the previously identified profile from the crotch of the underwear

worn by john benet at the time of the murder matched the dna recovered from the long johns at bode unexplained dna on the victim of a crime is powerful evidence the match of male dna on two separate items of clothing worn by the victim at the time of the murder makes it clear to us that an unknown male

handled these items despite substantial efforts over the years to identify the source of this dna there is no innocent explanation for its incriminating presence at three sites on these two different items of clothing that john benet was wearing at the time of her murder solving this crime remains our

goal and its ultimate resolution will depend on more than just matching dna however given the history of the publicity surrounding this case i believe it is important and appropriate to provide you with our opinion that your family was not responsible for this crime based on the dna results and our

serious consideration of all the other evidence we are comfortable that the profile now in codis is the profile of the perpetrator of this murder 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 no innocent

person should have to endure such an extensive trial in the court of public opinion especially when public officials have not had sufficient evidence to initiate a trial in a court of law i have the greatest respect for the way you and your family have handled this adversity i am aware that there will be

those who will choose to continue to differ with our conclusion but dna is very often the most reliable forensic evidence we can hope to find and we rely on it often to bring to justice those who have committed crimes i am very comfortable that our conclusion that this evidence has vindicated your family

is based firmly on all the evidence including the reliable forensic dna evidence that has been developed as a result of advances in that scientific field during this investigation we intend in the future to treat you as the victims of this crime with the sympathy do you because of the horrific loss

you suffered otherwise we will continue to refrain from publicly discussing the evidence in this case we hope that we will one day obtain a dna match from codus databank that will lead to further evidence and to the solution of this crime with recent legislative changes throughout the country the number

of profiles available for comparison in the codus databank is growing steadily law enforcement agencies are receiving increasing numbers of cold hits on dna profiles that have been in the system for many years we hope that one day soon we will get a match to this perpetrator we will of course contact

you immediately perhaps only then we will begin to understand the psychopathy or motivation for this brutal and senseless crime respectfully mary t lacey district attorney 20th judicial district boulder colorado so there's been a profile in codus for like 20 years with no hits no hits not a single one

and you know there's an abc news article saying that they checked that profile against everyone in the family along with 200 other potential suspects as well and all of them have been excluded from this profile in that same article actually mary lacey kind of gives her theory which i believe is like

close if not exact to what the ramsey is subscribed to which is that while they're out at the christmas party or not the christmas dinner at the whites someone snuck into their home wrote that note laid in wait they had plenty of time and when the ramseys got home they waited for everyone to go to bed

so they could go upstairs where john bain was sleeping and grab her now lu smith also strongly believed that a stun gun was used to subdue her i'm sure that like this theory like part of this theory has become pretty popular yeah aren't there like two like little marks that are right next to each other

on her back that lu said like look like they could be stun gun marks or something yeah now so there's the two marks there's no burn marks which i said to be really common with stun guns which is maybe why the original pathologist just noted them as abrasions it was you know to there's like a lot of back

and forth with this like was it a sun gun was it not lu smith's like confidence so this point where it's recommended to the ramseys like oh we should exhume john bain and have someone else look at her to to confirm that like now that we've got this idea like which could someone else like look at this i

wouldn't i don't even say with a more critical view but like with that in mind but the ramseys don't want to do that now keep in mind this is happening like a lot closer to so like there's like it's not like we're talking years and years so it would have been like useful timing wise something might have been

there yeah there's still a lot of value in it lu smith seemed to be really on board with this like yes let's do an exclamation let's get a second autopsy but i think it was barbara walters when john and patsy went on they were just saying like we don't want to have her exhumed like it we just buried

her like that is a lot of trauma yeah it's too painful like we we want our daughter to rest in peace and in their in in their mind they're like you have the original pathology report you have pictures of this like everything we need is here for lu to even come to this conclusion like we don't need to

exhume her so with the intruder theory i get the what and the how of the idea i think it like lines up it makes sense there's elements to it that makes sense but i guess that leaves us with like the two major questions left which is who and why which one you have first uh let's go with why so there's

no one so there is no one you have to go with the intruder theory that i have heard the ramsey camp discuss one is like this idea that this was a pedophile some kind of sexual deviant all around scary mother for roaming the suburban streets of boulder don't get me wrong like scary mother is like every

brand of the person who did this but around this theory what they point to is the paintbrush being put in her the choking around her neck and i would hear lu say that he believes she was hit in the head after she was choked i think i said that like so all of that that's that's one potential avenue theory

why the other is that it was someone who hated john ramsey like the note was clearly about john everything was addressed to him like when i sat down with him he even talked more about this theory i feel like then the other total like a lot like he just kept saying like they seem to hate him but then

the sexual stuff doesn't really make any sense it's like we're best friends because literally like i asked him that and he and he agrees he's like i'm just like okay but john if they're like if they if this is about you and your business and they don't like you why did they have to do you're saying

all of the other stuff like was sexual it's not a staging it was sexually motivated so like why that doesn't make sense and he's like no like i can't make sense almost like both things can't be true at the same time yeah but i think i think what they've said before what i think he would say and what i

know they've said before is like you can't make sense of someone like this so we've said that before we've said that before yeah so like no this like doesn't make sense to us but does that mean it couldn't have happened like that so you gave us two possible whys but without really landing on one how

do you even get to who i think it makes your list really long like really long i know as part of their defense team the ramseys actually hired john douglas like the father of the bau john douglas to consult on the case and he firmly believes in their innocence like i actually asked him for an interview

he couldn't because of some family things but he like told us in an email that he was never asked to provide a written profile to either the ramsey defense or the boulder pd but he provided his analysis verbally to both he thinks the boulder pd even recorded it but he said he could tell that even when they

were like hearing him they still seem squarely focused on the family but he firmly believes in the ramseys he said and i actually he gave us a quote to make his position extremely clear he said there are no words that can describe what a family goes through when their child is a victim of a violent

crime however what is profoundly even worse on top of that is to have your child murdered and then be wrongfully accused or even convicted of killing your child the ramseys are not murderers but victims they are victims of investigative incompetence as well as intentional and prejudicial news coverage

i've worked many cases where parents have killed a child but this is not one of those cases end quote so to go back to the who if you know this case you've heard that santa did it santa santa yep this the santa we're talking about is this santa from the ramseys christmas party on the 23rd there were a lot

of really odd things about him his family like just like circumstantial things you're like oh my god like those things it all is just like lined up in a very strange way there was even supposedly john bonnet was even telling people that like santa was going to make a special visit to her after christmas

which was like a thing that everyone pointed to a lot there were pedophiles that were found within the pageant circuit like there is one that surfaces to the top of the list but not until years later but when this like one comes about it kind of like proved what people were screaming all along like

very scary people were close to john bonnet and other children throughout pageantry because it's actually like the guy who was like her photographer for her pageant stuff ends up being like a prolific pedophile like he has wild imagery out the wazoo so there's that whole segment of things there was this guy

named gary olivia who like early days was said to have confessed to killing john bonnet and listen people want to say that patsy's handwriting is like a close and again she's the only one that couldn't be excluded but like i saw this dude's hand like gary's handwriting and it's like scary close to the ransom

note there's another guy named john marcar he confessed to killing john bonnet too i remember those headlines yeah but like that's that's what i remember because i remember thinking when i was younger that it got solved yeah like oh my god this could be it yeah and it was it was huge i remember being

so huge because he was like living out of the country at the time and here's the thing i like bits and pieces from the headlines from like what i was seeing because we were a little bit older at that time but i never knew the full story about john marc carb until i saw the netflix doc that's coming

out november 25th and like we actually got early screeners like how they got to him was wild and like i i know i've said this a thousand times people are gonna get tired of me saying it like when you're deep in a case like i could point to you think there's gonna be like one person who looks so good

for it but then i'm like i could tell you stories of like five people ten people who if i only told you about them you'd be a hundred percent behind them that's how it is like that's how it is with like santa with her like pageant photographer with john marc car like they go in deep and it's it is so interesting

it's stuff i never knew i don't actually want to like spoil all of that because like the netflix doc is going to be out really close to when we're releasing this so i encourage everyone to just like go watch that for yourselves and i mean i don't want to we already we've already been here for so long

i don't want to spend too much time because at the end of the day we also know that no one's dna has matched the profile they have not even the pedophile john marc car the santa like like not even the 200 people i told you they compared dna to whoever this was their their ghost and without a name and a face

to associate with the crime it has left a lot of room for old rumors to maybe like surface again or at least like there's rumblings underneath and those rumblings got very loud in 2013 when the daily camera started reporting that years after the grand jury convened remember the grand jury back in 1999

okay so we're in 2013 they start saying like maybe things weren't as they seemed all right so jurors confirmed to the daily camera that there was actually an indictment that came out of those proceedings back in 1999 so here's how this came about a reporter named charlie brennan and the reporter's committee

for freedom of press filed a lawsuit to have the documents from the proceeding unsealed they had been sealed like most grand jury things like since 1999 okay so when that happened there are 18 pages that get sent to a judge to review to see which ones could be released and what needed to stay sealed

to protect like what a grand jury is and in total four of those 18 pages were released to the public count seven on or about december 25th and december 26th 1996 in boulder county colorado john bennett ramsey did unlawfully knowingly and feloniously render assistance to a person with intent to hinder

delay and prevent the discovery detention apprehension prosecution conviction and punishment of such person for the commission of a crime knowing the person being assisted has committed and was suspected of the crime of murder in the first degree and child abuse resulting in death as to count seven

accessory to a crime a true bill signature redacted no true bill count 4a on or between december 25th and december 26th 1996 in boulder county colorado john bennett ramsey did unlawfully knowingly recklessly and feloniously permit a child to be unreasonably placed in a situation which posed a threat of injury

to the child's life or health which resulted in the death of john bennett ramsey a child under the age of 16 asked to count 4a child abuse resulting in death a true bill signature redacted no true bill count 4a on or between december 25th and december 26th 1996 in boulder county colorado patricia paw

ramsey did unlawfully knowingly recklessly and feloniously permit a child to be unreasonably placed in a situation which posed a threat of injury to the child's life or health which resulted in the death of john bennett ramsey a child under the age of 16 asked to count 4a child abuse resulting in death

a true bill signature redacted count seven on or about december 25th and december 26th 1996 in boulder county colorado patricia paw ramsey did unlawfully knowingly and feloniously render assistance to a person with intent to hinder delay and prevent the discovery detention apprehension prosecution conviction and punishment

of such person for the commission of a crime knowing the person being assisted has committed and was suspected of the crime of murder in the first degree and child abuse resulting in death asked to count seven accessory to a crime a true bill signature redacted no true bill i don't know what the other

counts were or why they weren't unsealed but whoa like i mean how did the d .a get away with saying that they didn't get an indictment because he didn't say that what he said it's important because like it the wording is specific it is here so he said quote the boulder grand jury has completed its work

and will not return no charges have been filed 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 that 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 blah blah blah blah so it's careful wording like he was going to say he stalked himself and this became a legal dust up because some said by law he was required to sign the indictment and then if he wanted to move to dismiss the charges

he could have but just not signing them wasn't a thing he should have been able to do now other analysts say that the law was more ambiguous i don't know i don't know if your head's hurting but mine is like and listen the burden of proof to indict versus convict is like completely different mad difference

so indicting just means like hey there's like the abundance of evidence says that something probably happened but when you go to trial you have to be you have to prove that it actually did buttoned up beyond a reasonable doubt so i get an indictment that doesn't necessarily lead to a trial but like

other things in this case it is the way that it was handled that just feels so shady so after this comes out the internet enters their burke era and here is where i like i do roll my eyes a little bit you guys like just because like it cannot be everyone i feel like it can't be it can't be mom did it

like because of a wedding accident and dad did it because like she's getting molested and burke did it because she ate the pine like it cannot be all of the things it can't be santa and a foreign faction and john mark car like it feels a little like the world kind of just like latches on to a theory

for a while and if that doesn't go anywhere or they get bored they like pick a new thing but it's not things like all of these are real people who i say again cannot all be guilty or all murdering her so i don't think we have the right to say that we know what happened when we just straight up do not know

what happened but at this point in our story like the world is coming for burke and maybe i think a small part of it like that at least like spawns this is this isn't like a brand new idea but like the way the certain indictments that they did release those counts they were ones about assisting about placing

her in harm's way like not actually indicting you for murder yourself and so i think it gets people being like okay well if it wasn't them like who would they be assisting who would they be protecting and the only other person that we know of in that home was her nine -year -old brother and this reaches

like peak crazy in 2016 when two things happen one burke goes on dr fill and two cbs releases this like ridiculous special reinvestigating the case do you remember that i remember both of these things yes so like i hate to ruin tv for everyone they legit did zero reinvestigating it was basically just

like one of the books that had been written forever ago just like rehash they were all just like sitting around a table getting paid but they say that in this like reinvestigation they have this like revolutionary theory that burke was up that night eating pineapple john bonet tried to maybe like eat some

he got mad whacked her in the head with the flashlight and then like everything was staged to cover up for him the pineapple we're finally we're at the pineapple we're at the pineapple okay so we know there's pineapple in her stomach that cannot be explained by any version of any events that we've every

single story does not include a great example i agree i could spiral four days here because without a doubt there is more to what happened that night that we just do not know like this is the one thing i can point to to be like we don't have the full story right now it could be that she just got up

and got it herself or that someone else gave it to her it could be that someone in the house that could be someone in the house it could be someone not in the house but she did not go right to bed and then die like she ate pineapple pineapple we can all agree on that so there is a bowl of what looks

like pineapple and condensed milk next to a glass of tea on the table that was photographed by police like at the house that day like when they're processing the scene when they fingerprint these things it's patsy and burke's prints on the bowl and burke's prints on the tea neither claims to have gotten

like gotten that out or eaten it that night patsy suggests that maybe when they had everyone over like someone got that out like the morning of because she doesn't know where it came from i like i don't know why like this is like stuff in their home like i don't get like too hung up on patsy's prints

being on a bowl maybe unless like lint their housekeeper put everything away but i think about like unloading the dishwasher yeah or getting something out for burke like so we see this in a in an image we think that like okay it could be the pineapple it also might not beat the pineapple like you know

what i mean it also could just be someone else's pineapple yeah and then we still don't know where the pineapple in her stomach came from but there's also a mag light found on the counter in the house which it's been theorized that it could be the murder weapon but there's like zero forensic evidence

on that mag light to actually support that it's the murder weapon no one knows why the light was taken out no one knows where it came from even like they don't even know this flashlight or some flashlight and it must be true because they show another nine -year -old a little kid hitting a watermelon with it

it is yeah it's like awful it's 10 out of 10 detectives here guys so so that that's going to come out in 2016 before that comes out john ramsey gets a call he has a new lawyer by this point he has cozied up with a guy they become or he or at least she's like with him legally for a long time he's his name

is linwood he's also another fun google if you have a minute lin has been representing john as john and patsy and like the family has been like suing the tabloids who publish really defamatory things about the family well linwood knows phil mcgrath aka dr phil and so dr phil supposedly according to

john like gives them a call and it's like hey heads up cbs the network that i'm on is about to do this show where they take aim at birth like you should you burke should come on my show and like say your piece and burke does and the world just eats that kid alive yeah i remember watching this and it

almost being painful to watch and then watching what happens after it was like even worse and i i feel bad empathy for him because like he's already going through a lot in his life and then to be on camera it changes so much of like who you are how you react like what you say and he didn't like and keep

in mind he didn't grow up on camera no he was like sequestered is like the best word i can think of like we didn't see burke in tabloids we didn't see burke on the news john said that's something they were really intentional about they wanted him to try and have like as much of a normal life as they

could today would really protect him they moved to atlanta for a while they end up moving from atlanta back to charlotte boy so he like grows up in this like small michigan town and so he's not used to a camera like it does it comes off awkward it comes off weird it's a little uncomfortable but like

pick any number of reasons why that is and there's been like theorizing out the wazoo but like someone's not guilty of something because they smile too much like right i'm sorry no no and i'm sure the way that we saw like john and patsy prepped for their interviews i'm sure there was some prep here

and like listen dr phil was like throwing softballs like that's the one thing i will say and burke got his point across like he says he doesn't know what happened to his sister he certainly wasn't involved he said his parents were good parents and that this is all a media circus that has like kind of ruined

his family's life so there's like so many things that i'm just like this interview means nothing he's not doing the best he can but then he says this one thing that like i i'm like did i miss like what did i hear that right so he's talking to dr phil and and i actually like i actually just want to play

the clip i think your dad had said he used the flashlight that night to put you to bed and then you snuck downstairs to play yeah i had some toy that i wanted to put together i remember being downstairs after everyone was kind of in bed and wanting to get this thing out did you use the flashlight so you

wouldn't be seen i don't remember i just remember being downstairs i remember this toy did you hit your sister over the head with a baseball bat or a flashlight this is not a version of any story we've heard ever ever heard and i asked john specifically about this because in my mind i'm like oh my god

this is like if burke is downstairs when all this happened like did he hear something did he see something and i asked john about this and again i go back to like i know john and passie did media training like did they just like throw burke to the wolves like without it like in dr phil says that john's

the one that told him this so i asked john about it and at first john john was like oh no like that's so much has gotten misreported that's not real and i said no john like dr phil says you told him this and then burke responds and agrees and says yes i was downstairs yeah and john just said like i

didn't know that okay so i asked him you know in our interview i was like i know people have talked to brook like they had a lot of child psychologists at the time trying to like you have to handle that really sense he's nine i know those people were talking to him but did at any point you and patsy

have conversations with him and like john like immediately shut it down he's like no there's no way he did this and i'm like actually that's not what i'm saying like when we were when we were young like we grew up with siblings i'm like now there's a world where he's downstairs even if he wasn't say

that all that was like dr phil weird slip up there's in my mind things that like kids see a relationship and a bond that like siblings have and you don't necessarily like put the weight in them as a kid yeah and like like there are things like i knew about my siblings all right i saw them in a different

way than my parents saw them i saw the way that we interacted with other people differently than my parents saw like also kids are like attuned to things like like that you notice so much yeah especially when like sweet people are ignoring you as a kid like you just pick up on a lot that i asked him

i was like like there could be something he knows that he doesn't even know he knows if you've never talked to him in all these years and john said that like he's confident that burke would have told him if there were something so i mean i think that you're like how do you how do you balance that of like

trying to do right by your one kid trying to get justice for the other one and i think what he he is trusting that burke would tell him something if there was something to tell or if he you know years and years and years down the line if something comes to him like he's going to come forward as his sister

he he loved her the same way the rest of his family would have so after that cbf special so dr phil then there's a cbf special linwood represents burke in a 750 million dollar lawsuit against cbs and in the suit they lay out what they what they call the statement of fact and i will say they do try to

correct the record here so i mean there's like nump like when they statement of fact they like list these different things and number 29 it says that burke exercised his right of reasonable response by granting one interview to dr phil mcgraw in which he denied any involvement in jambonese murder so i

i actually think like there like there was a legal strategy even coming into this because he would have either i believe if i'm understanding it right had to have give statement to cbs in some way like in response to like the claims they were making or have like publicly stated it and he had never done

interviews before so he had to give an interview to someone so i think that was part of the reason he came forward when dr phil gave him that call like he needed some statement out there saying like he had nothing to do with his sister's death now the other thing is it's number 130 and 131 it says that burke

was not awakened during the night and burke did not leave his bedroom during the night so unless those facts were challenged which i don't believe they were because they ended up settling that kind of becomes the de facto record so even though we have burke on dr phil saying he went downstairs we have this like

legal document where they're the fact is he didn't wake up and he didn't go downstairs and on paper that's i think the law right i wish we could talk ask him yeah because i'm with you like i don't think he did anything but there is just so much yeah that my siblings would do that i would do that they

knew about that our parents just didn't see like it's as kids you kind of live in your own worlds like below the the line of sight of your parents in a certain way i think if there's something to say that he can say he'll say it i know he's met with investigators like so it's not like he hasn't even

like talked to police he did he's met with child psychologists so yeah to go all the way back to your question of like how do you get to the who i don't know so you know we shared when we met with john like we shared our information and obviously told him like if if work is open to talking i know he

doesn't do interviews and john said you know he's an adult if he wants to do it like he will but we haven't heard from him so i don't know to get back to your question of like how do you get to the who i think you just start you've got to just start chipping away at this case if i think that's what certainly

lou smith was doing with his work it's what his family continues to do again i'm going to link to the podcast that i mentioned i think it's interesting they kind of go person by person that they were actually like going out there and collecting dna samples from these people ruling them out one by one

suspects that like i had never heard of and not even just the usuals that i mentioned like santa and john marcar like lou left this list behind that people like made up of people he thought were worth looking into and in the order he thought that they should be looked into and so that's what they're

working off of but you i mean like you have to wonder if the name of jambonese killer is even on i know or if like has the other question i have is like has the dna led us astray because there was this thing that recently happened in colorado that has me like all kinds of nervous for this case so in 2023

it came to light that its analyst at the cbi lab this woman named yvonne missy woods she was manipulating the dna testing process like this this investigation is still ongoing as of this recording in november 2024 so far they have found that she omitted material facts in official criminal justice records

and tampered with dna testing by altering or omitting some test results from the case file so far they haven't found any evidence that she falsified any dna matches like thank god so far but that is all from cases that she worked between 2008 and 2023 now they have to go back and look at paper records

from 1994 to 2008 so she was there the whole time of john bay's case yeah and listen not all of the dna testing was done by like state agencies like the long dong stuff came from bode but there was definitely some pretty critical work that came out of the crime lab in the state which has me shook because like

if this is a dna case like lewis mitt and the ramsey say what do we do if the dna was wrong this is not the answer that anyone wants to hear but you have to start all over you have to i don't know if you can now okay here here's two things so i'll say i asked john about this and he says that he's been

told by like the people who give him information over he's been told that confidently missy woods didn't work on the ramsey case like so he feels confident that the results have not been skewed by whatever she was doing i mean like in my mind the investigation is still ongoing so like i don't know but he

he told me he is confident he has been told it's not applicable here like we don't have to worry but if we have to start all over like the good news is like there's even better forms of testing right like you think about all the genealogy stuff that's being done now there's no mention of utilizing this technology

to assist with the case yet and john ramsey said in my interview with him that he's afraid because he's trying to find out where the evidence is like what can we do now right like he's starting over or not starting over like there's just new testing that needs to be done yeah and he doesn't can't get

a straight answer he says about if the evidence is secure where it is so he doesn't know like his biggest fear is maybe someone lost it or maybe they're protecting someone hashtag protect boulder i don't think anyone's looking out for boulder anymore um but everyone says that they're committed to looking

out for john bernay i'll say that there was a cold case review um this team was brought in and like recently like 2023 they're said to have made recommendations about how to move the case forward what those were if they're being acted on unclear to me we did like i said we reached out to the da's office

and the boulder pd surprised i've had nothing juicy from them so obviously they declined my offer but they did give us statements so the da's office pio said quote the murder of john bernay ramsey was a tragedy our office has successfully prosecuted cold case homicides and many other murder cases our

office appreciates the continued collaboration with cdps cbi the fbi and the boulder police department as with any cold case homicide the overarching goal is to look at the facts and evidence with fresh eyes and an open mind armed with the latest developments in forensic science the presentation to

the cold case review team generated helpful recommendations our office is continuing to work with federal state and local agencies to make progress on this tragic case end quote boulder pd gave us this statement the killing of john bernay was an unspeakable crime and this tragedy has never left our

hearts boulder police chief steve redfern said we are committed to following up on every lead and we are continuing to work with dna experts and our law enforcement partners around the country until this tragic case is solved this investigation will always be a priority for the boulder police department

because this is an open and ongoing investigation the boulder police department is unable to give any interviews or comment on specific aspects of this crime we continue to investigate and encourage anyone with information to contact detectives at boulders most wanted at boulder colorado .gov or by calling

the boulder police tip line at 303 -441 -1974 as for john ramsay he says that he is fighting for his daughter in the last few years he recently started doing more interviews and his eldest son john andrew has even gotten really involved as well and they're both featured in the new documentary on netflix

they are pushing for authorities to do more testing they've met with authorim labs themselves they feel that genealogy could be the thing that this case has been waiting for if the evidence is still there and john hasn't gotten an answer about that yet and that is where he asks for crime junkies help

like i think it is something that no matter where you come out on this case like this is something we can all get behind because there is unknown dna there and we have to find out who that belongs to because there is no world where anyone could be prosecuted in this case without that dna being explained

now john also says that he encourages people to write to their congressman about something called the victims families rights act it was signed into law federally by joe biden in 2021 but john says that it needs to be passed in each state and what this would do is it would allow families of loved ones

to request a federal review of their loved ones case after it's been called for three years and this is something that he says that he wishes he would have had so i mean i asked him if he's going to be pushing for this in colorado he's moved out of state now but again the case is still there but he

says that he doesn't have connections in colorado anymore now john says that he has heard that they're just waiting for him to die so that this case will go away but if i believe one thing about this case it's that it's not going away anytime soon we are not going away so if you have made it to the end

thank you thank you for being a crime junkie being a crime junkie means that you're into more than just the headlines and there is still so much more to this case i would encourage you to go check out the netflix documentary it's dropping on november 25th 2024 it is called cold case who killed jon banne

and you can go right now to our youtube if you're listening you could watch this episode or you can go check out the interview that i have with john ramsey it's available right now did i i didn't tell you so when i was when i was there for the interview yeah i um i'm walking back from dinner to my hotel

and i like i see this restaurant and i'm like wait pasta jade's pasta why do i know pasta jade shut up i'm like why do i know pasta jade's and i'm like oh my god ashley you've been living in the shop name ramsey case like that's where they had dinner on christmas eve yeah they're friends with with pasta jade

and i was like that's so strange and so i'm like googling i'm like i didn't know it was a franchise it's not a franchise it's it's literally in boulder and then where do he lives and so the next day he said something about um i can't remember what it was but he's like oh yeah my friend owns pasta jade's

and i was like yeah i was gonna ask you about that i saw it last night and he's like oh yeah and by the way mike binam owns the hotel that you were saying at crime junkie is an audio chuck production so what do you think chuck do you approve

[The Unsolved Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey: A Deep Dive into the Case]-[MURDERED: JonBenét Ramsey]

📋 Summary

The Tragic Case of JonBenét Ramsey: Beyond the Headlines

The Discovery and Initial Investigation

The "Intruder" vs. "Family" Divide

The Forensic Complexity

Corruption and Conflict

The Grand Jury and Beyond

The Legacy of Uncertainty

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript