The Mystery of JonBenet: Inside the Coldest Case of the ’90s

The Mystery of JonBenet: Inside the Coldest Case of the ’90s

In 1996, six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was found dead in her family’s home after her mother, Patsy Ramsey, reported her missing on Christmas morning. The case quickly took a bizarre turn when a lengthy ransom note was discovered, asking for the exact amount of her father's Christmas bonus. In this episode, we break down the details of this tragic case, diving into the oddities of the investigation, theories about an intruder, and the suspicions surrounding the Ramsey family themselves. With no sign of forced entry and a staged crime scene, was JonBenet’s death the result of a tragic accident or something far more sinister? Revisit one of the most haunting cold cases in true crime history.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:34):
On Christmas morning nineteen ninety six, the police in Boulder,
Colorado received an unusual phone call. The caller was Patsy Ramsey,
and she told them that her daughter, six year old
John Bennay, had been kidnapped and ransom note had been
left in the house. Within three minutes of the call,
officers arrived at the Ramsey family house. They didn't see

(00:57):
any signs that someone had broken in. From the very start,
investigators noticed that the ransom note was unusual. While ransom
notes were usually brief and rushed, this one was extremely
detailed and it was two and a half pages long.
The amount of money they asked for, one hundred eighteen

(01:18):
thousand dollars, was the exact amount of money that John
had received for last year's Christmas bonus at work. This
made it appear as if the note had been written
by someone intimately familiar with the Ramsey family, close enough
that they would know how much John's Christmas bonus was.
During the early part of the investigation, nobody made an

(01:40):
effort to preserve the forensic evidence in the house. Apart
from John Benet's bedroom. Patsy called several family friends and
a minister, all of whom quickly arrived at the Ramsey
house to support her and John John started making plans
to pay the ransom. In the early afternoon of that day,

(02:01):
one of the detectives asked John Ramsay and one of
his friends to take another look through the house and
see if they could find anything. John decided to examine
the basement, and within minutes he found his daughter. John
Benet was lying on the basement floor behind a closed door,
her wrists tied with a nylon cord duct tape covering

(02:23):
her mouth and a crudely made garrat around her neck.
She was dead, and she had been dead since before
she was reported missing. Instead of waiting for investigators to
examine the crime scene, John immediately picked up his daughter
and carried her body upstairs. Rigor mortis had already set
in and John Benet's body was frozen in place, with

(02:45):
her arms stretched above her head. Unable to cradle her
in his arms, John held her at arm's length. There
had never been a kidnapping. John Benet had never left
the house. In the investigation, police recognized two main theories
about who could have killed John Beney Ramsey. The first

(03:05):
theory relied on the ransom note being at least partially true.
Although John Benay was never actually kidnapped, an intruder broke
into the house and murdered the six year old girl.
The evidence for this theory was limited to the ransom
notes and a partial bootmark left in the basement of
the house, which was never matched to any of the ramseys.

(03:27):
One of the detectives working the case theorized that an
intruder broke into the house through one of the basement windows,
which was broken. However, when searching the house, investigators had
noted that the cobwebs on the broken window had not
been disturbed, and neither had the dust on the windowsill.
It seemed impossible that somebody had managed to squeeze through

(03:48):
the window in the dark without touching any of the
cobwebs or disturbing any of the dust. John Benay's autopsy
ruled that her cause of death was a combination of
a fractured skars goal and strangulation with the garrot. However,
both the injuries had not occurred at once. John Beney
had been hid in the head with a blunt object,

(04:09):
causing an injury that would eventually become fatal, but it
hadn't killed her instantly. She had laid dying for around
an hour before the second injury, the strangulation had occurred.
Her killer had used a paintbrush handle and some nylene
cord to make a garrot, strangling the six year old
to death. Although no seaman was found on John Benet's body,

(04:33):
there was an injury to her genitalia which appeared to
have been caused by the same broken paint brush which
was later used to create the grot around her neck.
The genital injury had occurred after the head wound, closer
to the time that John Beney died. According to the pathologist.
Somebody had also used a cloth to wipe her genitalia

(04:54):
shortly before she died, and her stomach partially digested pieces
of pineapple were found. There's one key problem with the
intruder theory. Investigators never found any concrete evidence proving that
an additional person had been inside the Ramsey house that night.
In fact, the only people confirmed to be home that

(05:17):
night where John, Patricia, their son Burke, and John Beney.
The second theory, which is what the initial investigation focused on,
is that one of the Ramses was the killer. While
investigators didn't uncover evidence that somebody else had broken into
the house, there was clear evidence that the crime scene

(05:38):
had been staged. Someone had left behind a false ransom note,
despite John Benney never being moved from the place where
she was killed. Additionally, the Ramsey family weren't helpful to
law enforcement during the early stages of the case. John
and Patricia later claimed that this was because they were
concerned that they would be framed. Most of the theories

(06:00):
surrounding the Ramsey family focused on Patsy and nine year
old Burke. Some people believed that John Bennay had infuriated
her mother by wetting the bed, and Patsy had seriously
injured her by hitting her on the head, then bizarrely
decided to strangle her daughter with the garat and stage
a kidnapping in an attempt to get away with the crime.

(06:21):
One of the main reasons that Patsy was suspected was
the belief that she had been the one to write
the ransom note. During the nine to one one call,
Patsy stated that she had realized John Bena had gone
missing after she discovered the note, which had been left
sitting on the stairs. Not only was the ransom note
incredibly long, but there was evidence that it had been

(06:43):
written inside the Ramsey house, meaning that the author had
risked being discovered while they took the time to write
not only a two and a half page long ransom note,
but also a first draft which was discarded. The author
of the note appeared to have no idea what a
ransom note should actually contain. Instead, they referenced dialogue from

(07:06):
several movies, including Dirty Harry and Escape from New York.
Despite the note warning that any attempts to contact the
police or the FBI would result in John Benay being beheaded,
Patsy had read the note and immediately called nine to
one one. The pen and the paper used to write
the note both belonged to the Ramseys. No unknown fingerprints

(07:28):
were found on the paper. The only person who had
handled it appeared to be Patsy. Forensic pathologist Michael Bodden
stated that in his sixty years in the field, he
had never seen a ransom note similar to the one
found in the John Benney case, and he believed that
there was no way an intruder unknown to the family
had written it. A Colorado Bureau of investigation report came

(07:51):
to the conclusion that there were indications that the author
of the note was Patsy Ramsey. However, they didn't find
enough evidence to say for sure. Likewise, another theory is
that Burke her brother hit John Benay due to a
sibling dispute, and when he or one of his parents
realized how seriously she was injured, they fatally strangled her

(08:15):
and then staged the kidnapping. Burke was interviewed by the
police several times, and unlike his parents, he was never
officially considered to be a suspect. By two thousand and two,
the case remained unsolved and a new district attorney took over.
While the previous investigation had focused almost exclusively on the
Ramses as suspects, the new DA was interested in looking

(08:38):
into the intruder theory. A year later, trace amounts of
unknown male DNA were found on swabs taken from John
Benney's clothing. Investigations carried out numerous DNA tests trying to
find somebody who matched. Despite a long list of potential suspects,
they never found a match. In two thousand and eight,

(08:59):
the d D sent a letter to the family apologizing
for the suspicion and claiming that they were now completely
cleared as suspects. By this time, Patsy Ramsey had been
dead for two years. She died of cancer at the
age of forty nine. However, not everyone agreed with the
decision to clear the Ramses. The following year, the Bolder

(09:21):
Police Force reclaimed the case and opened the investigation again.
It has remained open ever since. In twenty sixteen, a
show titled The Case of John Beney Ramsey was released
on CBS. The experts featured on the show explained the theory
that nine year old Burke had hit John Bennay in

(09:41):
the head with a flashlight, and that even though he
hadn't meant to kill her, the injury had been fatal
and the ransom letter had been written by Patsy to
try and avoid her son facing the consequences. Burke then
filed several defamation lawsuits and response to the show's claims,
which were settled in Janey twenty nineteen. That's ten minute

(10:20):
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for the show. I love the podcast, Always listening wherever
I can I always wonder what the people in the
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was listening to on my AirPods as I shop for
the ingredients for my family's dinner. Anyway, I got to know,
where do you get the background info in these people?
Like how do you find out about their abusive backgrounds
and what their childhood was like? Not just the victims,

(11:45):
but the purpse too. I can hardly find my high
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It's just search engines. Some of them take a long time,
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(12:31):
stuff that isn't true to find the stuff that is true.
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(12:54):
are documentaries that happen, and all of that combined is
where you get the information. And that's mostly how the
information is found. There are a couple other ways that
you probably can guess, but I'm not going to go
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