The Megyn Kelly Show - Amanda Knox and John Ramsey - Megyn Kelly's ＂Double Feature＂ of Fascinating Interviews

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00:00:27 Alright, full-time thoughts. Craig, who stood out?

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00:00:57 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at New East.

00:01:08 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and today's Sunday double feature.

00:01:14 Today, a look back in the archives and two fascinating conversations with people who had

00:01:18 moments in the spotlight when tragic crimes changed their lives forever. First up, Amanda

00:01:24 Knox. She came on in November 2021 to talk through her entire story in a revealing interview that

00:01:31 went through every detail. A lot of people still think that she was the one responsible for her

00:01:37 roommate, Meredith Kircher's death. You'll hear this interview and you'll be able to make up your

00:01:42 own mind. You'll hear what I think too. And then John Ramsey, JonBenet's father, who came on in

00:01:48 December 2022 to go through the horrors of that day in 1996 and some last hopeful updates

00:01:57 in what has clearly become a cold case. Enjoy, and we'll see you Monday.

00:02:03 Joining me now is Amanda Knox. She's a writer, a new mother, and co-host of the podcast

00:02:09 Labyrinths with her husband, Christopher Robinson. Amanda is a household name,

00:02:15 not just in our country, but worldwide, but not by choice. She has spent the past six years trying 0.54

00:02:21 to reclaim her life, her story, and her freedom after she was wrongfully convicted of a murder

00:02:28 she did not commit in Italy in 2009. And she joins me now. Amanda, thank you for being back

00:02:34 with me. We interviewed when I was on NBC, and I'm so happy to see you doing so well,

00:02:39 and congratulations on the birth of your daughter. Thank you so much, Megan. It's great to reconnect.

00:02:44 So I've been like neck deep in Amanda Knox in preparation for this interview. And of course, I was in the media when this happened to you. So I covered it, not in the way the British tabloids did, but I covered it as a, you know, news story.

00:02:58 And as a young woman myself, I was skeptical of the claims being made about you.

00:03:04 As a lover of Italy, I was not wanting to believe that they'd be doing this to an innocent

00:03:11 American, that there was any sort of anti-Americanism going on there, but it for sure was a dynamic

00:03:15 at play.

00:03:17 And as I sort of went back through your story, through the Netflix documentary and your book

00:03:22 and so on. And a bunch of interviews about you and involving you. I felt the trauma on your

00:03:28 behalf. It was never ending. It wasn't like, oh, my God, one year of my life was so awful.

00:03:33 It went on and on and on. And you're still you're still trying to get out from under it in some

00:03:40 ways. So let's just start at the beginning. I think a lot of people know generally,

00:03:45 wasn't she that girl, Foxy Noxie, as the newspapers called her? And what happened?

00:03:50 or she was she did she murder somebody what happened right i think that's how people think

00:03:53 about your name because they're living their own lives so let's just talk about what happened

00:03:58 because i think i think if you go through it stage by stage and talk about the evidence and

00:04:04 what the prosecutor was releasing about you it the story tells itself your exoneration you don't have

00:04:08 to prove anything it it it tells itself when you realize what was done to you it was deeply wrong

00:04:15 OK, so let's do that. And then we'll talk about what you're doing today. So take us back to Amanda, age 20. And you decide, as I did when I was the same age, to study abroad as I did in Italy. It's like a dream come true. So you go over there. I'm sure excited for a semester of who knows what. And what was the year?

00:04:34 2007 so i was 20 years old 2007 a language student and um really for the first time

00:04:44 going out into the world on my own without my parents right there next door to to be right by

00:04:50 me and support me so look at your sweet face we're in a way for the first time so we're doing

00:04:56 this on sirius xm live triumph 111 but we are also do a youtube version of the show and we have

00:05:01 the picture of you and you're so cute and you're so young and you're so you look so sweet with your

00:05:06 little headband and you know it's like god god only knew if that girl only knew it was about to

00:05:12 come her way so you go over there and you you hadn't exactly been a world traveler or you know

00:05:18 all that experienced in living independently but you managed to find a place to live to find your

00:05:23 own roommate so it wasn't like where i went i went to syracuse both at home and abroad and they they

00:05:28 kind of provided all that for you. You did it on your own. Yeah, yeah. I had a number of jobs to

00:05:35 save up money to be able to spend that year abroad. And when I arrived in Perugia, like I knew that I

00:05:42 was signed up for classes, but I had to get my own visa. I had to find my own place to live.

00:05:47 But fortunately, this is a small town where a lot of young people are moving through it. So there

00:05:52 were a lot of like places to rent. And just outside of my university, there was a young

00:05:57 Italian woman who was putting up a poster for a room for let. And I met with her and immediately

00:06:02 we hit things off. So, you know, it was actually a really ideal situation. I was just a few steps

00:06:09 away from my university in this beautiful little cottage that was overlooking the valley and living

00:06:14 alongside three other young women who are all students, two of whom were Italian and one of

00:06:19 whom was British. The Brit was a woman named Meredith Kircher, who you met on September 20th,

00:06:26 2007 and within 42 days she would be dead and your life would have changed forever bringing you here

00:06:36 today you um found that roommate and the and the other two gals you found a boyfriend rafael uh

00:06:43 solacito you'd been dating for just five days which is a little known fact when when meredith

00:06:48 i think when people like they've called us lovers they've called us boyfriend and girlfriend i think

00:06:54 that at the time of like to be perfectly honest we knew each other for five days so we were at

00:07:00 the very beginning of a like very sweet romantic who knows what it was going to be but it was only

00:07:06 five days old so it wasn't like you know we the way that it was portrayed is that we were like

00:07:12 in cahoots in some like deep in like inextricable way right really we were just getting to know each

00:07:18 other right later it will be like part of a sex cult the two of them together it's like well i

00:07:22 barely know the guy's last name i mean i'm not a sex cult with him um and we're not you know

00:07:27 plotting murders and so on and in any event um okay so that you you found meredith on september

00:07:33 20th and and november 1st 2007 um take us to that night you you were not at home that night in your

00:07:42 apartment no i was not no um so this is the day after halloween um it was like a day off from

00:07:48 school basically. And we were, you know, I was hanging out with Raffaele that day and Meredith,

00:07:55 I knew had gone, I had saw her in the morning. She had taken a shower to wipe off the Halloween

00:08:00 makeup, did a load of laundry, said, I'll see you later. And that was last I saw of her.

00:08:06 I was around like late in the morning, early afternoon. And then I spent the day with Raffaele

00:08:11 and I spent the night with Raffaele. You know, as soon as I met this guy and he was so sweet and

00:08:15 charming. And we made plans to go to another town nearby called Gubio in which we would spend the

00:08:23 weekend and eat truffles like that. That was the world I was in. And I was technically supposed to

00:08:30 work that night. I was doing some like basically all around work, like handing out flyers or

00:08:38 serving drinks at this local bar. And my boss, Patrick Lumumba, called me that night and said

00:08:44 that I or sent me a text message and said that I didn't have to come in. So I stayed the night

00:08:49 with Raffaele and we made plans to leave the next day to go to Gubbio. So you decide to swing by

00:08:54 your apartment before going on your trip. And you you walk in and you as you approach the apartment,

00:09:02 you did notice something was off. Take us through that walkthrough. Yeah, absolutely. So coming back

00:09:10 to my apartment. My thought process was, I'm going to go change. I'm going to grab some clothes,

00:09:15 grab some things that I can take with me to Gubbio. And so I went back to my place and I

00:09:21 noticed the first thing that was off was that the front door was wide open. And of course,

00:09:26 this is a huge red flag if you think about it. This isn't the middle of the summer. It's early

00:09:31 November. It's cold. Why is the front door wide open? Well, I thought that too, except there was

00:09:38 one little trick to our front door, which is that it didn't actually stay closed unless you locked

00:09:45 it with a key. So I thought maybe someone left in a hurry and forgot to close the door and lock it

00:09:51 with a key and the wind blew it open. So there was a plausible explanation, but still it seemed

00:09:57 off. I went into the house. I called out, hello, is anyone there? No one answered. So I went about

00:10:03 my business to take a shower. Inside the main area where I was and in my own bedroom, nothing

00:10:08 seemed amiss. The first next sign that something was amiss was when I went to my bathroom to take

00:10:14 a shower, I brushed my teeth. And as I was brushing my teeth, I noticed a few droplets of blood in the

00:10:21 sink. And this is, again, I didn't automatically think at that moment, a few drops in the sink

00:10:29 of the door open that someone had been murdered. What I thought was, oh, this is a room full or

00:10:35 this is a house full of girls. Maybe someone had their period, who knows what's going on. 1.00

00:10:40 So I took a shower and I came out of the shower and then I noticed more blood, another splotch

00:10:47 of blood on the bath mat. And again, I thought that's odd, but it's not like a bathroom full

00:10:53 of blood. It didn't look like a crime scene to me. It looked like a few drops of blood again.

00:10:58 So I got dressed. I went to go dry my hair. And while I was in our second bathroom drying our hair using my Italian roommate's hairdryer, I noticed that there was feces left in the sink or sorry, not in the toilet.

00:11:13 And I thought that is odd. That is not something that my roommates would do. My especially my Italian roommates were very, very meticulous about cleanliness. So I could understand maybe, you know, menstrual issues, but leaving feces in the sink or in the in the toilet totally off.

00:11:34 I got this weird, creepy feeling that someone was in the house with me and I immediately left and reached, started calling my roommates and reaching out to Raphael or asking Raphael, like, what do you think? Should I, do I need to call? Like, this is something off. I didn't notice that anything was taken from the house, but I feel like I need to know what's going on.

00:11:54 At that point, I started calling my roommates. Meredith was not answering the phone. Neither was Laura. The only one of my roommates who did answer was Philomena. And Philomena said, definitely come home. We need to check out to see if our house was broken into.

00:12:10 so rafaeli and i went back together to see what was going on i was feeling creeped out he was

00:12:17 there to support me and we opened up the door to filomena's room and found it ransacked window was

00:12:24 broken the entire room a mess meanwhile laura's room was totally untouched we went and checked

00:12:30 her room and we went to check meredith's room and found that her door was locked and again we thought

00:12:36 this is really strange because the only time i've ever seen meredith lock her door was when she was

00:12:42 like changing or something and didn't want to be disturbed so i thought is meredith in there is she

00:12:47 is she's not answering like we knocked on the door didn't answer rafaeli even tried kicking

00:12:53 down the door didn't didn't succeed we called the cops rafaeli called the cops to be more specific

00:12:59 because at that point i didn't even know how to call the cops he explained there was a break-in

00:13:03 and we stepped outside of the house to wait for the police to arrive within minutes two plainclothes

00:13:12 police officers arrived and said that they were there because they had discovered some cell phones

00:13:17 in a nearby garden and we thought wait you aren't here for the break-in call and they said no we're

00:13:22 here for these cell phones they belong to filomena romanelli and i thought that's weird i was just

00:13:27 talking to filomena on the phone she's on her way you can ask her about them when she gets here

00:13:31 philomena arrives the police who are investigating or they don't arrive yet so philomena arrives

00:13:39 she says those phones belong to meredith i let her borrow an sms card from me so they belong to

00:13:46 meredith where is meredith and i say well her door is locked and philomena says well someone

00:13:51 needs to break down the door there was a conversation between her and the police officers

00:13:55 arguing about whether or not they were allowed to break down the door but ultimately what happened

00:14:00 is Philomena, her boyfriend, their friends, and the police all sort of charged Meredith's door

00:14:06 and broke it down while me and Raffaele were standing in the kitchen. And that is when they

00:14:14 discovered the crime scene. And I think this is a really important point. A lot of people have asked

00:14:21 me, when did I think everything started going wrong? And of course, it's hard for me to be in

00:14:28 the hearts and minds of the investigators and the prosecution and how they could think that I had

00:14:33 something to do with this or not. A lot has been said about my behavior versus my roommate's

00:14:39 behaviors. And I think that there is a very important difference between my reaction and

00:14:47 Philomena's reaction in the immediacy of discovering the crime scene. That major difference

00:14:54 is that filomena saw inside meredith's room and i did not i never saw the crime scene with my own

00:15:03 eyes and filomena did and so of course filomena seeing meredith's body on the floor blood

00:15:09 everywhere this horrible nightmare flipped out started screaming started crying was hysterical

00:15:17 was inconsolable everyone was yelling in italian forcing us outside of the house

00:15:22 And I barely understood what was going on. I barely understood Italian at this time. I never saw into Meredith's room. I never saw the horror of that tragedy. And so I was pushed out of the house, bewildered, but not horrified because I didn't know what was going on.

00:15:41 And so when the police and everyone talks about just outside of the crime scene, of course, there's two there's two roommates here to this girl who just died.

00:15:51 One of them is flipping out and hysterical. The other one is just kind of standing there looking confused and getting a kiss from her boyfriend.

00:15:58 Well, the big difference is not that one of them is innocent and one of them is guilty.

00:16:03 It's that one of them knows exactly what's going on and the other does not.

00:16:08 and so i always that always struck me as a little odd because it's like having lived in italy as

00:16:13 well for for many months i went over there a few times as an exchange student um the italians in

00:16:20 general are are bigger in their personalities and in their emotions and there's absolutely no social

00:16:26 um i don't know caution about showing your emotions or expressing your upset or your tears

00:16:31 none it's expected americans i would say are a little different in that way i know you you've

00:16:36 got some german heritage same you know for the germans so i even if you had known to me that was

00:16:41 never real i don't know if that wasn't a real selling point um in whether you had done anything

00:16:46 or not but i understand why you're sensitive about it because now you've had a million headlines

00:16:50 written about every move every turn of your head in the weeks and months that's a fair point megan

00:16:56 because like that's it you know it's another fair point to say what what constitutes guilty versus

00:17:04 innocent behavior in the immediacy of discovering a crime scene. And I think there's a lot of

00:17:10 speculation about the turn of the head or the look or whether or not you would get a hug or

00:17:15 whether or not you would cry. And I think these are all excuses for people to sort of retroactively

00:17:22 justify their original opinion about you. But that isn't to say that there aren't actual

00:17:28 you know, behaviors that do indicate guilt. And a really great example of this is the man who

00:17:34 actually killed Meredith Kircher, Rudy Gaudet, fled the country. That's I think that's a pretty

00:17:40 like, you know, I think one could argue that he wasn't just fleeing the country for so that he

00:17:46 could have a vacation in Germany like he was fleeing the country specifically because he had

00:17:50 committed this horrible crime and was trying to get away with it. Well, the other thing is, I mean,

00:17:54 you could easily spin it the other way. If you had gotten hysterical and were out there like,

00:17:59 oh my God, oh my God, you could easily say, oh, she's acting. She's overcompensating so that 0.67

00:18:05 people think she's upset when she's not. There's no perfect way of handling it. And I've seen 0.98

00:18:09 enough criminal cases to know you really can't deduce that much from a person's emotional state

00:18:14 when they call 911, when they first talk to investigators. But you're right. Fleeing is so

00:18:20 much evidence of guilt. They'll allow it in in a court of law as evidence of guilt many times.

00:18:25 So there you are. And that's where we see the video of you and Raffaele comforting each other

00:18:30 and you're kissing. Now that I know you'd only been dating five days, that actually makes more

00:18:34 sense, too. I mean, you find a new hot Italian boyfriend. You're over there. It's like you do

00:18:38 spend a lot of time kissing. You're young. You're like a babe. You're there. You're scared. You're

00:18:43 kissing. People would use this against you as evidence of criminality. We now know it's nothing

00:18:47 of the sort um then then enter we've got to introduce uh Giuliano I always struggle with

00:18:55 his last name but Giuliano is it Mignani or Mignani what is it Mignini Mignini okay so we

00:19:02 go with the true Italian Mignini M-I-G-N-I-N-I this is I mean if he wanted you to be the villain

00:19:09 of this movie, he winds up being one of the villains of this movie. And this guy had a long

00:19:17 history in Italy before he ever met Amanda Knox. He had investigated a serial murderer there

00:19:22 who was dubbed the Monster of Florence. And he had made some, I don't know, 10 or 20 arrests,

00:19:29 all of which were ultimately thrown out. He was censured by the Italian courts. He had already

00:19:36 been disciplined for unethical behaviors before he met you and he got he was actually on trial

00:19:44 for abusive office while trying me for oh meredith's murder oh my gosh case yeah so it's not

00:19:51 like it is here because people hear that and they think well no if that happened to a lawyer or

00:19:54 prosecutor here he would be he'd be benched you know he wouldn't be allowed to go back out there

00:19:59 that's not the way it worked there and in fact he's still doing well in his job in italy um

00:20:05 but he settled on you very early. They brought you, I guess, back to the crime scene after you

00:20:12 had left that morning. They made you search through a knife drawer to see if anything was

00:20:17 missing. You started crying and the documentary about you on Netflix shows him reaching all these

00:20:23 crazy conclusions, right? Like because you cried when they made you search through the knife drawer

00:20:29 in the home in which your friend had just been murdered, he deduced what?

00:20:35 He deduced that I was remembering the murder somehow. So again, like this is really like,

00:20:41 it's a really important point. And I'm glad that you brought this up because again, you talk about,

00:20:45 you know, what footage is endlessly recycled that is meant to make me look guilty and what

00:20:52 is forgotten. And of course, there were moments when I was feeling scared and crying. And even

00:20:58 those were pitched in the in through the lens of me being a guilty person for of me being involved

00:21:03 and I think that that that is you know that moment when they asked me to search through

00:21:11 the cutlery drawer to see if there was anything missing that's when I had like this first like

00:21:17 wave of sudden horror at what Meredith had gone through the full gravity of it the full like just

00:21:23 pain of it. And I was shocked and scared. And it was sort of my equivalent to Philomena's shock at

00:21:31 seeing the crime scene herself. Like that was my moment of like sudden realization and horror. And

00:21:37 I lost it. I was hysterical. But of course, by that point, I was not just a witness in the eyes

00:21:43 of the prosecution. Another really important point about the difference between the Italian

00:21:48 justice system and the American justice system is we think that prosecution, the prosecution and the

00:21:54 detectives work really closely here in the United States. Well, they work even more closely in

00:22:00 Italy, where prosecutors actually are the head of the investigation in a case. And so they don't

00:22:07 just take whatever evidence the detectives give them and decide whether or not a case should be

00:22:12 brought to court. They are there from the beginning, building their case with the help of the

00:22:17 detectives. And so when my prosecutor decided at the very beginning that I must know something that

00:22:24 I'm not telling, that he understood that, or he looked at me through this lens of Amanda's not

00:22:32 being fully forthcoming, and whatever Amanda is experiencing must have something to do with her

00:22:39 involvement with this crime. The whole system, that's so messed up. I mean, there's a reason

00:22:44 we separated out over here. And that's one of them is the prosecutor's role is to seek justice.

00:22:50 It's not to get a conviction. It's to seek justice, no matter what that is. And so if the case as it

00:22:56 goes along, even at trial reveals to the prosecutor, he or she has the wrong defendant, they have an

00:23:02 ethical obligation to drop it, to abandon the case because they they're there to get a just result,

00:23:09 not to put somebody in prison. And yet if you are the investigator, soup to nuts, and then the guy

00:23:14 who tries the case, they're setting you up to want to get her from day one. Once you've settled on

00:23:20 somebody, the rest of your days are spent building your case against her. And you really don't have

00:23:26 much incentive to keep an open mind or think about overall justice. You just want to win.

00:23:31 And this guy's history showed it. And unconsciously or consciously. I mean, I think there's a lot of

00:23:35 cognitive science research that shows that you could even think that you have the best intentions

00:23:40 and yet still be doing what ultimately results to unethical work and an injustice because of

00:23:49 confirmation bias and because of certain prejudices that you have in your own mind.

00:23:54 Tunnel vision is a very natural thing that we all get sometimes. But if you are in that position

00:23:59 of authority who has the power to take away the freedom of a citizen, you should constantly be

00:24:08 doing self-auditing in order to make sure that you are following the evidence instead of building a

00:24:13 case and finding the evidence that you want and ignoring the evidence that you don't want.

00:24:18 To the contrary, this guy Mignini is on the record talking about the accolades he was receiving in

00:24:26 going after you. And that's where I'm going to pick it up right after this quick break. And later

00:24:31 we'll get to the media and Hollywood and how Amanda's trying to reclaim her own story and her 0.55

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00:25:08 Alright, full-time thoughts. Craig,

00:25:10 who stood out? Brazil's lime cheesecake

00:25:12 started bright, didn't let up. Nah, for me,

00:25:14 Italian cappuccino was the standout in the

00:25:16 box. But if we're talking decadent performance,

00:25:18 that's all France. Chocolate creme brulee

00:25:20 had the richest finishes.

00:25:21 Canadian fireworks really showed up big too.

00:25:23 And Mexico's Caramel Churro Ice Cap

00:25:26 gave me chills.

00:25:27 We are, of course, talking about

00:25:28 Tim's Taste of the Globe lineup.

00:25:30 New globally-inspired Timbits and Ice Cap flavors

00:25:32 available at Tim Hortons for a limited time.

00:25:34 Pick some up today.

00:25:35 And while you're at it, check out Footy Prime Daily.

00:25:41 So, Amanda, the prosecutor's putting you

00:25:45 through these paces, and this is all

00:25:46 within a matter of days before, days after the murder. And I just, before I leave the subject

00:25:53 of this prosecutor, I want to, I want to read the audience, the quote, I was going to play you the

00:25:57 soundbite from the documentary, but it's in Italian. So that's not much help, much help

00:26:02 without the subtitles to our listeners. This is what he said, quote, normally people say that

00:26:07 nobody is a prophet in his own country, but that's not what I experienced. Complete strangers would

00:26:13 come up to me and ask to shake my hand. They would congratulate me. It gives me satisfaction

00:26:18 because Perugia is my little homeland. He loved it. He was trading off of gunning for you.

00:26:28 Yeah. And I think that, you know, the biggest sign of this, it wasn't just Giuliano Menini,

00:26:35 although he was head of the investigation. It seemed like the entire Italian legal system,

00:26:43 ultimately, in the end, what was banking on me being guilty in order to not admit fault. And so

00:26:51 also, I, you know, if I'm going to empathize with someone like Giuliana Mignini, I have to admit

00:26:56 that we all have ego. And it's really hard to admit when we're wrong, especially when we've

00:27:01 made a mistake in such a public way. I was arrested before any evidence was made available,

00:27:08 Any forensic evidence was was there. So they made a gut feeling about whether or not that I was guilty. They arrested me. They imprisoned me. They did a public press conference saying that the case was closed.

00:27:22 And then, lo and behold, the evidence starts coming back, indicating a totally separate figure who had nothing to do with me, his fingerprints, footprints in her blood, his DNA in Meredith's body, a local known burglar named Rudy Gaudet. 0.93

00:27:38 And they thought, crap, they had imprisoned an innocent person. And this instead of admitting fault at the very beginning, they decided to pursue a case in which a convoluted case in which they were forcing these separate figures with very different pieces of evidence into the same equation and making excuses for why it didn't add up.

00:28:03 Instead of saying crap, they should have said, phew, thank God, we found out the truth before we put this innocent girl and her boyfriend in jail. But they didn't. They went a different way. So over the course of the next few days, I guess it was about five days, what I read was they interrogated you for nearly 60 hours. And this is an important piece of it, too.

00:28:24 And I'm not going to say this doesn't happen in the United States, but we have a lot more strict rules on what you're at least supposed to be doing in an interrogation.

00:28:32 So describe what the police were doing to you over those days.

00:28:36 Yeah.

00:28:37 So it's interesting because it's almost like my family, especially my aunt in Germany, had a feeling that something was off.

00:28:44 It didn't make sense to my family that I was spending hours and hours and hours answering the same questions over and over again in the police office.

00:28:57 My mom, of course, thought there's a killer on the loose in Perugia who almost killed my daughter. I want her to come home. My aunt in Germany is saying, I'm going to come down there and get you. You need to go talk to the embassy. You're clearly not safe.

00:29:11 But, of course, the police were telling me, no, Amanda, you're a very, very important witness in this case. You were the first person to arrive at home and discover the crime scene. You were the roommate who was closest to Meredith. You are too important to us and our investigation to leave. And I believed them.

00:29:30 And so I believed them when over the course of those interrogations, they told me that I didn't need a lawyer and that I was not a suspect and that I didn't know and they lied to me.

00:29:45 They told me that they knew who the murderer was. They had tapped my phone and I had no idea. They went through my phone and found my text message exchange between myself and Patrick Lumumba, my boss.

00:30:00 And they interpreted that message that I sent him, which was a poorly translated Italian

00:30:07 phrase.

00:30:08 I intended to say, see you later, whenever they interpreted that to mean, I'll see you

00:30:15 later tonight, this night, the night that the crime happened.

00:30:18 And they interpreted that to mean that I had met with my boss, Patrick Mamumba, and that

00:30:23 he had murdered Meredith.

00:30:24 They lied to me and told me that everything that I thought I remembered about that night

00:30:30 was wrong, that Raffaele said that I had not spent the night with him and that I was so traumatized

00:30:39 by what I had witnessed Patrick do that I could no longer remember it. And they pushed me, slapped

00:30:47 me, yelled at me, told me to remember the truth, remember what Patrick did to her. And very leading

00:30:56 suggestive coercive techniques, like even just saying, well, did you hear Meredith scream? And

00:31:01 I said, I don't know. And they say, well, of course you would hear Meredith scream. She's

00:31:05 being murdered. And I said, okay, I guess I heard Meredith scream. Like this was the conversation

00:31:10 I was having. And this is what the police wrote up in their report and had me sign.

00:31:16 And of course this was without an interpreter. This was without a lawyer. And this was,

00:31:22 Were you doing this in Italian?

00:31:24 I was doing this in Italian, yes.

00:31:26 Oh my gosh.

00:31:27 Oh my gosh.

00:31:28 I'm only now realizing this.

00:31:30 I did read that they were sending in two different detectives or police officers pretty much

00:31:36 every couple of hours so that they would be fresh and could keep coming at you.

00:31:39 You got no breaks.

00:31:40 You didn't get water.

00:31:41 They kept you up overnight.

00:31:43 This is how it's done.

00:31:44 This is how false confessions are given.

00:31:46 And when you see a false confession, I mean, it's like nine times out of 10, it looks just

00:31:50 like this.

00:31:51 How does it happen?

00:31:52 just like this. You break down a person's willpower to the point where they'll say

00:31:57 anything just to get out of the room, just for you to leave them alone.

00:32:00 And they'll believe anything. Like I genuinely believed at a certain point that the only

00:32:05 explanation for the police's behavior towards me was that I must have amnesia and I must have

00:32:10 witnessed the murder. And it wasn't until they stopped screaming at me and stopped hitting me

00:32:15 that I had a moment to take a breath, to regain a sense of composure and realize what had just

00:32:22 happened and i recanted immediately but of course at that point the police had already gotten what

00:32:28 they wanted signed statements from me and so they ignored me they told me don't worry about it your

00:32:33 true memories will return in the meantime we're going to be taking you to a holding place for

00:32:38 your own protection then you'll get to see your mom why would they i mean why would they be so

00:32:44 focused on getting you to point the finger at your boss from le chic right that was the the restaurant 1.00

00:32:50 That was the bar. Why? Like, I could understand them trying to get you to say I did it. But why were they so focused on you getting, you know, getting you to point the finger at him?

00:32:58 You know, I don't think that they actually thought at the beginning that I did it. I especially we're looking at, you know, a sexual assault murder. These are almost always committed by men. And I think that's something that is overlooked in this case, the way that it's been made so much of a like girl on girl sexualized fantasy crime.

00:33:20 I'm like, when we're talking about the realities of violence against women, we're talking about

00:33:25 male against female violence against women.

00:33:29 And they I think what they believed at the beginning was that I genuinely knew something

00:33:34 because they misread my behavior.

00:33:37 They inaccurately interpreted my behavior to mean that I was not surprised by Meredith's

00:33:44 murder and that I was that I knew something that I wasn't telling them.

00:33:49 And so they pressured me into implicating someone because they believed that I knew who it was. And it was over the course of my interrogations that I think they settled upon Patrick, who they didn't know from from Bob or John.

00:34:03 like they had just seen a text message between me and a person named Patrick on my phone

00:34:08 in their mind, setting up an appointment. And they thought, this is it. This is the guy.

00:34:16 Amanda, let him in. Amanda knows what happened. We got to get her to admit it.

00:34:21 So did they arrest him right away? They arrested him right away without checking his alibi,

00:34:27 without doing anything, despite the fact that I recanted. And they kept him in prison for two

00:34:33 weeks, even though numerous people came forward saying that they had been with him the entire

00:34:38 night. Wow. I mean, it just shows there they had no appetite for the truth. And he question about

00:34:45 him before we move on from him, because I read that he recently said something like,

00:34:49 why hasn't she ever apologized to me? Or this is this is not that reason was like 2011. There

00:34:56 was a quote from him saying she never reached out to me is that still true um and no and i did

00:35:03 apologize to him in court so i don't know what he means i'm assuming that he's potentially talking

00:35:10 about how his lawyer at a certain point reached out to me asking for money and wanting me to give

00:35:17 to admit to this whole situation his imprisonment being my fault and my point was this was not my

00:35:25 fault i was coerced into signing statements and this is the police's fault i was gonna say they

00:35:30 should they should sue someone but it shouldn't be amanda knox um yeah okay so so that's patrick

00:35:36 then he gets out because after you know a short amount of time he's able to prove to them he has

00:35:41 an alibi and they're not going to be able to pin this on them um and so you're sitting you you go

00:35:47 to jail they they they not only arrest him they arrest you and they arrest rafael but who's my

00:35:53 charges. Right, right. But so but no charges are actually filed against you. And you sit there for

00:35:59 a year before they actually charge you with murder. Yeah. So they sought they sat me there

00:36:05 for eight months before I was officially indicted and charged with a crime. And that's another one

00:36:12 of those differences between the American system and the Italian system. In this Italian system,

00:36:16 they can hold you in custody for up to a year without charging you while you're under investigation.

00:36:23 Wow. That is scary. So at what point do you say to them, you might want to consider this guy

00:36:30 Rudy Gaudet, because he was not in your immediate friend circle, but he was kind of on the periphery.

00:36:35 So it was a name you knew. And when they were asking you, tell us everybody, tell us everybody

00:36:40 who could be, who's been in the house, who you guys are friends with and so on. You had mentioned

00:36:44 that name and he was a known criminal. I mean, he was somebody who had been known as a robber

00:36:49 in the area. He was apparently into drugs. He was on the police radar prior to all of this.

00:36:56 So I would think that name would have been like, oh, he likes to rob people. Oh, and he'd also

00:37:00 been he'd also threatened people with knives prior to this. So you'd think that they'd be like,

00:37:04 red flag. Yes. Let's follow that one up. When did you first mention his name and how long did it

00:37:11 take them to focus on him? Actually, it's interesting. I didn't mention his name because

00:37:17 I didn't know his name I knew him to be the guy like I had met him once and sure I had been

00:37:23 introduced like Rudy but I didn't remember his name I remembered that he was a guy who played

00:37:28 basketball with the guys who lived below us and I didn't know anything about his history I'd never

00:37:34 really hung out with him I only knew him from having encountered him that one time and and you

00:37:41 know I'd seen him around like he played in the basketball court near the university but I he

00:37:47 wasn't like a friend of mine. In fact, in the very beginning, I had mentioned a character named,

00:37:53 I think his name was Shaky. His nickname was Shaky, because I remember he was a sort of

00:38:00 sketchy guy who liked to dance and hang out with Meredith and her friends, who once tried to like

00:38:06 take sort of forcefully take me home with him. And I raised the police's attention to that person.

00:38:12 But of course, he had nothing to do with the crime. And I remember the moment when Rudy Gaudet's name was finally made public. It was after they had already found his fingerprints and footprints in her or fingerprints, at the very least, in her blood, in Meredith's blood at the crime scene.

00:38:29 They they were able to process those fingerprints, identify him from having his, you know, long history of burglaries and identify this person and track him down.

00:38:40 And there's this like really interesting sort of moment of timing where the police released Patrick Lumumba almost at the exact same time that they arrested Rudy Gaudet so that they had someone sort of a switcheroo that they didn't have to once again admit fault in a big way because here they were, they found the real guy.

00:39:00 And I remember sitting there in my prison cell watching the news as this happened, as Rudy Gade was being arrested in Germany. And I saw his face. I heard his name. And I thought, that guy? The basketball guy? Like, that's the guy? Like, sure, I've seen him before, but it never occurred to me that he would do this.

00:39:23 of course, I didn't know about his history of criminality. And I had this like moment of like

00:39:30 relief even when they found him because I thought, oh, my gosh, this is going to be over soon. They

00:39:36 found out who really did it. And that it wasn't over soon, of course. But boy, were you were you

00:39:43 wrong on that? Up next, I'm going to ask Amanda about the lies the prosecutor was openly telling 0.99

00:39:49 about her, the active misleading they did with the press to try to get people to believe that

00:39:55 it was Amanda, all of which fell completely apart. We're going to do that right after this

00:40:00 quick break, and we'll come back with Amanda Knox. So Amanda, the prosecutor put out, among other 0.99

00:40:10 things, he and his team put out a picture of a bloody sink. And this sink was covered in blood.

00:40:19 I mean, it was a wash in red. And they basically were like, she's a liar. She came home. She saw 0.99

00:40:26 that. She didn't think anything was wrong. And it was a complete lie because the actual sink you saw,

00:40:31 and there are pictures of that too, just had a couple of drops of blood. The picture they put

00:40:35 out had been treated with some sort of a chemical that is supposed to show them if there's blood.

00:40:40 and the substance itself is red so it's all over the sink this is my understanding it was an active

00:40:46 attempt to mislead i mean you could get disbarred for doing such a thing as a lawyer here but this

00:40:52 is just one of the examples and i know that there are others of the ways in which they tried to

00:40:56 unfairly portray you in the media yeah and i you know i discussed this on labyrinths with about

00:41:02 media selection bias because i think there's this ongoing perception that even if i'm innocent i

00:41:09 I must there must be something wrong with me or there must be this wrongful conviction

00:41:13 must be my fault because no reasonable person would act the way that Amanda acted.

00:41:19 And, you know, even as recently as Malcolm Gladwell's book, Talking to Strangers, where

00:41:24 he analyzes the case and he, you know, from the very get go is like, we know who did this

00:41:29 crime.

00:41:30 It's Rudy Gaudet.

00:41:31 But he then goes on to say, well, the reason why Amanda was wrongly convicted was because

00:41:36 she's ultimately an innocent person who acts guilty. And maybe that's why wrongful convictions

00:41:41 happen. Innocent people act guilty. And I just wanted to push back against that because, again,

00:41:51 who, first of all, has agency in the equation? Who's the one who's doing the wrongful,

00:41:56 like the wrongful convicting? Who's the one who is pursuing a case against an innocent person,

00:42:01 despite what the evidence is telling them, and who is presenting false pictures to the media

00:42:06 in order to misrepresent the evidence against her in court right who is whose decisions are

00:42:12 shaping these events they certainly were not mine and if anything i was the one who had the least

00:42:17 amount of agency in this in this equation so you know when i think about the ways that even just

00:42:26 the ways that they portrayed meredith versus me right like they acted like meredith and i were two

00:42:34 extreme opposites of the ideals of femininity. They turned this into a morality play about

00:42:41 female sexuality and morality. They portrayed Meredith as this perfectly invisible, ideal, 0.99

00:42:49 serious, studious, non-casual person who would never, ever, ever just go out with boys or have

00:42:58 fun or do anything like that she was a serious young woman who had a fidanzato a fiance someone

00:43:05 who we can all agree is a perfect victim well of course you don't have to be you know a studious

00:43:11 person who never goes out and has fun to be a victim of a horrible crime on on the first place

00:43:16 and meredith was not someone who didn't just like meredith did like to go and hang out and have fun

00:43:21 with friends and go dancing and have like casual you know relationships like this that was her as

00:43:27 And on the flip side, there was the portrayal of me as when in reality, I was actually quite similar to Meredith as someone who was uninhibited and and lustful and and at odds, like jealous of Meredith's purity and and everything depraved that you could accuse a woman of, particularly through her sexuality.

00:43:51 and using that as an excuse to say, well, if she's capable of all of this sex,

00:43:56 she must also be capable of violence. Very much playing into the Madonna horror dichotomy. 1.00

00:44:03 It's how did they find out the number of sexual partners you had had? I know you've talked about

00:44:07 it, but like, how did they know that? Yeah. After I was arrested, I was in prison. I was

00:44:16 very uncomfortably being talked to by an official in the prison who would bring me into a private

00:44:23 room every day and interrogate me about my sex life. And one day he accompanied me into the

00:44:30 doctor's office where I was informed that I had tested positive for HIV. And me thinking suddenly

00:44:37 that I'm dying and my life is over was told by the vice comandante that I should think about and

00:44:44 write down all of the people that I had ever had sex with in order to determine who had given me

00:44:49 HIV. So I went right back into my cell, started journaling, crying, thinking that I was dying,

00:44:57 wrote down every single person I had ever had sex with in my entire life and what kind of

00:45:01 protection we had used. And the very next day, the police raided my cell and took every scrap

00:45:09 of paper that I had ever written on. And then a few days later, it was released to the press.

00:45:17 Oh, it's disgusting. It's so disgusting. You make such a good point about Gladwell, 0.90

00:45:24 who I love and who's, you know, he's on your side, but you're right. He's got it a little wrong.

00:45:30 You know, and I, in his defense, I get it because we didn't get to like the cartwheels. I'll ask

00:45:34 you about the cartwheels because that's what people think about. But honestly, it wasn't,

00:45:38 it wasn't your behavior. People may not really fully understand the extent to which they have

00:45:42 been manipulated by a dishonest prosecutor who is, he's like the Mike Nifong of Italy. You know,

00:45:50 he, Mike Nifong's the guy who tried to put those three Duke University kids in jail for an alleged

00:45:55 rape that they did not commit. And he knew it was false, but he didn't care. That's, that's what I

00:45:59 think McNini is. And people don't realize at home how he tried to manipulate them from, from the

00:46:07 sink to he went out and said, Amanda Knox went home and she bought bleach and she bleached that

00:46:12 entire bathroom. She scrubbed it. Now you look at the actual photos of post Amanda Knox's visit to 1.00

00:46:17 the bathroom. It's covered in blood. It's still got the feces in the toilet. Clearly nobody has 1.00

00:46:22 been there doing any cleaning. And he said, we've got receipts. Well, they never released them.

00:46:26 There never were receipts showing you do that. But there's never any follow up. Nobody ever goes

00:46:30 back to the prosecutor and says, where's the receipt? It's just, did you win or lose? And he

00:46:34 lost and still, whatever, maintained his story. So we've been manipulated. The diary, the HIV

00:46:39 positive, which was, thank God, untrue. That was a lie. And that leads me to the disgusting,

00:46:46 vile media, the disgusting, vile media that played along willingly. And I get it. I get it. Very 0.97

00:46:52 salacious. So many elements to the story. You're so beautiful. I mean, that was probably your

00:46:55 biggest sin in attracting media coverage to this. You know, just you are. You're beautiful. And that

00:47:01 will sell papers. And thanks, Megan. Yeah. And then like you add in possible sex fiend in like

00:47:08 some weird sudden, I don't know what they thought you were doing, an orgy where you slip people's 0.99

00:47:12 throats. I mean, it was just none of it made any sense. And as soon as Patrick fell apart as your 0.89

00:47:17 third partner, you, Raffaele and Patrick, your boss, he fell apart because of his alibi. Then

00:47:22 they just subbed in Rudy. Oh, Rudy was the third guy. They held her down because why? Because she

00:47:26 wouldn't have sex with him. Like there was nothing. He was making it up, making it up as he went 0.97

00:47:30 along but the media portrayed you i mean there's one of the headlines was satanic sex ritual satanic 1.00

00:47:36 now they called you a she-devil certainly the narrative was that you were a whore um the foxy 1.00

00:47:42 noxy thing came from an innocent thing on your own social media about as i understand you as a 0.99

00:47:46 soccer player and how you were sly as a fox on the on the field i don't i can't even understand

00:47:52 i've been attacked by the media in vicious ways but nothing compares to this yeah well and it's

00:47:58 interesting because i wasn't in a place to even defend myself at that point i was locked away

00:48:03 and at the mercy of what the police was releasing to the press and i i'm so glad that you brought up

00:48:10 like the the claim that i must have cleaned up my dna because i remember interviewing mark

00:48:17 olshacker on labyrinths and he said if rafaeli and i could have somehow selectively cleaned up

00:48:24 our DNA from that crime scene and left all of the other evidence there intact. We deserve a Nobel

00:48:30 prize for chemistry. It's just it's but it's interesting because that was like if you imagine

00:48:36 the sort of confirmation bias, the mental gymnastics that my prosecutor had to do to account for the

00:48:43 fact that here's this crime scene where there's Meredith's body, Meredith's DNA and Rudy Gaudet's

00:48:49 DNA and fingerprints and footprints all over the space and nothing implicating me or Raffaele,

00:48:55 that has to be explained somehow.

00:48:57 Well, in his mind, it was I was somehow able to clean up all evidence, all traces of me

00:49:04 and in order to implicate Rudy Gaudet.

00:49:07 And I think the thing that like I mentioned this in the episode of Labyrinths where I

00:49:12 talk about Rudy Gaudet, because for me, like and maybe we'll get to this later, but like

00:49:17 For me, I cannot get over the fact that because the police and the prosecution did not want to admit from the get go that there was no evidence against me and that and drop the charges and release me and Raffaele from prison, instead of doing that, they actually pursued a case that let Meredith's actual rapist and murderer off the hook.

00:49:40 Yeah, he was tried separately from me. He was tried before me. The prosecution was not interested in having him be fully responsible for his crimes. So they never charged him to be fully responsible for his crimes. He was charged with being a part of the murder and but never having actually plunged to the knife himself.

00:50:03 And so when Rudy Gaudet points to that today and says, well, no one says I killed her. Someone else killed her. It's like, well, the reason for that is because the police and prosecution were covering their butts.

00:50:14 Yeah, they allowed him the ability to make this argument, this crazy argument, notwithstanding all the proof, pointing to him and only him.

00:50:24 Now, there was a knife, and this is at the heart of the case.

00:50:27 The prosecutor claimed that it had both Meredith's DNA on the blade and Amanda's DNA on the handle.

00:50:33 It's one of the reasons why the trial went south for Amanda.

00:50:36 And it's also one of the reasons why I don't believe this was an inadvertent mistake by this prosecutor who really was out to get her.

00:50:44 That's where we pick it up next, and we'll go back into the media when we come back from a quick break.

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00:51:21 All right, full-time thoughts. Craig, who stood out?

00:51:24 Brazil's lime cheesecake started bright, didn't let up.

00:51:26 Nah, for me, Italian cappuccino was the standout in the box.

00:51:29 But if we're talking decadent performance, that's all France.

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00:51:35 Canadian fireworks really showed up big too.

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00:51:54 So on the subject of Rudy Gaudet, one thing we missed is that he's recorded on tape and the prosecutors had it.

00:52:00 Talking to what he believed was a friend, but was actually an informant, saying he places himself at the crime scene.

00:52:07 That nice. He claims he slept with Meredith the night of the murder, that he was using the bathroom.

00:52:12 And that's when he heard Meredith screaming that he opened the door and saw an assailant fleeing.

00:52:18 And Meredith was then dead.

00:52:20 But he says on that tape, quote, Amanda was not there.

00:52:24 She had nothing to do with it.

00:52:26 So this is him talking to a friend.

00:52:28 He's like he had no reason to say to that person that you weren't there, that you had nothing to do with it.

00:52:33 But still, this wasn't enough for the prosecutor.

00:52:35 Your absence of DNA, not enough for him.

00:52:38 nothing absolutely no proof other than you telling that weird story at the hands of these police that

00:52:43 maybe patrick did it and maybe you saw some piece of that um but there's one thing there's the knife

00:52:51 they find what they believe they pronounced it's the murder weapon because they say they tested

00:52:55 for dna it's got your dna in the handle meredith's dna on the blade this would lead to the stunning

00:53:01 moment in the first trial, January 16th, 2009, where you stood up to hear the verdict and you

00:53:09 heard what? Guilty. Coltevole. Oh, so this happens in large part because of the DNA at Evans. And

00:53:19 what do we now know about that? Well, gosh, there's so much to say about the knife. That's

00:53:24 not just the fact that independent experts eventually examined it during my appeals trial

00:53:30 and discovered that, first of all, the result or the DNA trace that was linked to Meredith was so

00:53:37 small that it actually couldn't be reliably linked to anyone. And furthermore, it was tested

00:53:42 in the context of 50 other samples of Meredith's DNA. And so contamination couldn't be ruled out.

00:53:48 But I think that for me, it's astonishing that it got that far in the first place, because

00:53:55 to believe that this knife was used in the crime, you have to believe a number of very,

00:54:02 very strange things. The knife didn't match Meredith's stab wounds. And so you have to

00:54:09 believe that whoever, if I killed Meredith with that knife, I would have half stabbed her with

00:54:16 the knife, but not all the way. It was a knife that was not found at the crime scene. It was

00:54:21 pulled at random from a kitchen drawer in Raphael's apartment, which was across town, meaning that

00:54:27 this crime, the way that this knife could have taken part in this crime is if I was carrying

00:54:35 that knife with me between Raphael's apartment and my house. And the prosecution has always

00:54:42 maintained that this was not a premeditated crime. This was a crime that just happened spontaneously

00:54:48 in this sort of uh drug-fueled orgy atmosphere but if that's true then you are logically saying

00:54:56 that i'm just carrying around a large kitchen knife in my bag with me for what reason i don't

00:55:02 know and then brought it back to rafaeli's apartment cleaned it up and put it back into

00:55:08 the drawer like this i remember the moment when some when the vijay comandante that same guy

00:55:13 brought me into his office and said how do you explain this knife and i remember being told

00:55:20 it's meredith's dna her blood is on the knife and i thought i have no idea how that happened

00:55:26 i felt like i was being framed honestly because i couldn't explain that but of course

00:55:31 but of course um it wasn't true and when eventually independent experts looked at that

00:55:39 evidence they threw out any sort of link to meredith or blood in the first place it did not

00:55:45 test positive for blood and actually it was ruled that it was more likely potato starch from having

00:55:52 been having for me having used it to cook things wow yeah apparently it was such a trace amount

00:55:59 and they had tried to amp it up and amp it up trying to get more and more and more through the

00:56:03 same machine that it just processed 50 other meredith samples and that's how they believe

00:56:07 it was contaminated, as found by the highest court in Italy, eventually, that this evidence

00:56:13 had been contaminated and could not be relied upon. But then there was the clasp of Meredith's

00:56:17 bra. And that, seven weeks after her murder and the evidence was being processed, finally,

00:56:25 this prosecutor announces he's got Raphael, he's got his DNA on Meredith's bra clasp,

00:56:30 which had been detached somehow, I mean, presumably during the struggle, from her actual bra.

00:56:35 Yeah. And I don't I mean, you tell me, Amanda, I look at this and somebody somebody put that there.

00:56:41 What how else did Raphael's DNA? We know Raphael did not commit this crime or have anything to do with it.

00:56:45 How did his DNA get on Meredith's bra clasp if it wasn't police misconduct?

00:56:50 Well, not just Raphael's DNA, also the DNA of two unknown males were also found on that bra clasp.

00:56:57 And, you know, all I can think of is that Raphael had been to my house, right?

00:57:03 He had been to my room. He had been in the common area. I think they even found the other trace of DNA that they found of Raffaele in my house was from a cigarette stub that was in like an ashtray in the kitchen.

00:57:15 And so it's not that Raffaele's DNA wasn't at the house. It just wasn't in the crime scene where Meredith had been murdered. And it wasn't until the police, who were not very highly trained, were going in and out of that room, carrying pieces of evidence with them.

00:57:31 Like by the time they actually discovered this bra clasp, it was long after not just the forensic police had gone through that house, but also the regular police had gone through like turning over mattresses, throwing clothes around, like ripping apart all of the house looking for not DNA evidence, but other kinds of evidence.

00:57:50 And it was over 40 days that they were touching things and moving things around without gloves that they eventually then found the bra clasp under a rug somewhere completely different in Meredith's room and said, oh, here's our link proving that Rufa that Raffaele was there in the room that night.

00:58:11 But of course, there's no other trace of Raffaele in that room. How could he have participated in sexual assault and murder and only left one trace along with two unknown males?

00:58:22 Meanwhile, like there's a huge semen stain on the pillow found underneath Meredith's body that the prosecution decided not to test and refused to test, even when my defense and Raffaele's defense asked for it to be tested.

00:58:39 We're looking at a sexual assault case. Meredith was raped before she was murdered and they refused to test it. And the only reason I think of why is because they weren't interested in pursuing a case against a male. They were interested in pursuing a case against me and I don't produce semen. So it wasn't relevant to them.

00:59:03 My gosh, this is so scary. You know, the question I'm asking myself right now is, did you just have a terrible defense lawyer in the first trial? Like, why? Why wouldn't all of this have been persuasive first time around?

00:59:15 Well, that's a really good question, because I don't think that I didn't have a good defense lawyer. I think my lawyers pursued a very, very staunch defense in this case. But what was happening was, you know, one of the things that I remember my lawyer saying was zero plus zero plus zero plus zero plus zero still equals zero.

00:59:38 There was this sense that the prosecution was throwing the kitchen sink at this case. And so if the kitchen, if there's all this stuff that is being thrown into this case and debated and talked about something, there must be some substance to it.

00:59:54 There must be Amanda's guilt is in there somewhere, even if we can't really determine which piece of evidence is the thing that does it.

01:00:01 There's so much that's being thrown in there that there must be something to it.

01:00:05 And indeed, this is what and that got me convicted the second time, you know, after I was acquitted and the DNA evidence in that case with the bra clasp and the knife was thrown out.

01:00:16 I was still tried for that same crime using this same kitchen sink approach where it's like, oh, Amanda confessed to the crime and all these witnesses say maybe they saw her or maybe they didn't.

01:00:28 Or how do you explain her DNA in the bathroom?

01:00:30 Like there's there was this sense of like this overwhelming if if the prosecution is so convinced, there must be something to it.

01:00:37 And it wasn't like I think it was really, really hard for people to, first of all, put themselves in my shoes and imagine what it's like to be in an interrogation room and coerced into signing statements as a 20 year old surrounded by adults speaking in a foreign language and without the assistance of a lawyer.

01:00:57 But I think also they couldn't really understand how the case could have gone this far if there wasn't something to it.

01:01:07 Well, especially back to our original point of the media, every headline telling them how awful you are. 0.92

01:01:13 You're just a terrible person. You're a freak. You're a devil worshiper. 1.00

01:01:16 I mean, just stuff completely made up. A massive manipulation was taking place by the media, of the media, by the prosecutor, of the people. And people need to get smart. You know, they have to be their own advocates when it comes to information consumption. 0.90

01:01:34 if you want to willingly jump in and believe the tabloid headlines just know what you're being fed 0.87

01:01:40 you know it's garbage in garbage out it remains such to this day um so just the quick without 0.95

01:01:45 getting into the lengthy procedural stuff i mean so you were found guilty on nightmare um then 0.98

01:01:51 miraculously it was reversed yay that's what we wanted you were you got to fly home to seattle

01:01:56 it was like thank god this horrible nightmare is over i'm done whatever and then the the innocence

01:02:02 was reversed. It was overturned. A new trial was ordered, and you were found guilty again.

01:02:08 So this is your second time being found guilty. And then thank God that guilty, that conviction

01:02:14 was reversed again by Italy's highest court, this time for good. And the court cited errors

01:02:22 and omissions by the prosecutor, sensational failures by the investigator and his helpers,

01:02:30 and contaminated evidence. I mean, ultimately, they saw what went on here and declared you not

01:02:38 just not guilty, but you and Raffaele innocent that you did not commit this crime, which is

01:02:44 huge. I mean, in Italy's defense, that is something we don't do here. And, you know,

01:02:49 I'm sure a lot of people would like to see it. Absolutely. And it's something that the Supreme

01:02:53 Court never does. That's why that clip at the very beginning, when you showed me reacting to

01:02:58 them, it was because that wasn't even something that I dreamed was possible. And of course,

01:03:04 it's within their power. But it is such a rare thing for the Supreme Court to not just overturn

01:03:10 a wrongful conviction, but to definitively acquit someone. I'm really glad you talked about the

01:03:16 media, because I think that, you know, like you said, to this day, we find criminal trials

01:03:22 becoming politicized. And instead of the media doing its job, which is to hold authorities and

01:03:29 power to account, to hold them to a higher standard, to the truth, we instead find media

01:03:35 who are selling us stories that we want to hear. And that is the reason why I got into journalism

01:03:42 myself, the reason why I'm an independent journalist who only has, the reason I have a

01:03:49 podcast is because I have subscribers who believe in my work. Like go to patreon.com slash Knox

01:03:55 Robinson and you can do it. But like, this is like, I'm not, I'm not, you know, like this is

01:04:00 a world where you, you should, we all need to be a little more media literate because the media is

01:04:08 not doing what it's intended to do. It is selling a story and it's going to sell the story that

01:04:17 makes the most money, not the story that is the most truthful. And that's true in mainstream media

01:04:24 and not just tabloids. That's what people may not realize. One of the things I liked about the

01:04:30 documentary is it pulled clips of so-called respected news anchors saying a lot of this

01:04:36 stuff. It wasn't just, you know, the star. It was in the mainstream, these characterizations of you.

01:04:44 And that leads me to the unfortunate moment that you had with Chris Cuomo, who continued the character assassination in a bizarre interview he did with you.

01:04:54 We have the tape queued up. It didn't do well at the time. It was from 2013. I was in the primetime at Fox at the time.

01:05:01 It hasn't aged well. It looks even worse in retrospect. And now it looks particularly bad knowing that he's been publicly accused of sexually harassing his former executive producer, of being such a bully to his female executive producer, a different woman, that she was forced to leave the show.

01:05:17 and now we have multiple allegations in the news today about him actively campaigning against the

01:05:23 women who accused his brother, Andrew Cuomo. CNN at this moment is reviewing his future at the

01:05:28 company. But here he is interviewing you in 2013, fresh off of all of this.

01:05:34 This is their theory that you went in there for some kind of freaky sexual activity that went

01:05:39 wrong and your roommate wound up dying. Fair? That's what they say. That's what it is. Forget

01:05:45 the headlines that's the truth of the proposition isn't it is there truth to that proposition

01:05:50 were you into deviant sex insensitive question but hey we got to get to what it is this fuels

01:05:56 the doubt there's no evidence of that but that's the theory nox is into some freaky sexual things

01:06:03 do you have any type of experimental activities there you're embarrassed to talk about no

01:06:07 yeah that doesn't age well does it yeah at the you know at the time it's interesting because at

01:06:17 the time i was putting up with a lot of that kind of thing from media i've learned a lot since then

01:06:24 and a lot of times people have said to me you know i have to ask you these quote hard questions

01:06:30 because it's what's good for you you should have the chance to respond this is this is what's best

01:06:35 for you. And Chris Cuomo, among other people, said this to me as a sort of justification for

01:06:43 pursuing this line of questioning towards me and questioning me in a frankly humiliating way.

01:06:49 And I believed him. And the thing that I've realized now as a journalist myself is that 0.95

01:06:55 he didn't actually have to pursue that line of questioning. He could have instead called out

01:07:02 that theory in the first place, because one, what my sexuality is ultimately has nothing to do with

01:07:09 the crime. There was no evidence that put me that placed me at the crime scene. So why is my

01:07:14 sexuality being the thing that's on trial? And instead, I thought that this was an opportunity

01:07:20 to point out that there is a whole lot of smoke that is deeply irresponsible and is the deeply

01:07:29 irresponsible storytelling that gets in the way of justice. So, you know, when I think about the

01:07:35 kinds of like the way that I interview people on labyrinths, I know what the stories are about

01:07:40 them. That doesn't interest me. What interests me is the story that you can unearth that is true

01:07:47 and just and puts the person who you're looking at gives them a sense of voice and ownership over

01:07:54 their own story. The way that I was questioned in that interview was, again, putting me making

01:08:01 me have to respond to other people's stories about me instead of giving me the opportunity

01:08:06 to tell my own story, which he would have known with just a minor bit of homework had actually

01:08:12 no factual basis. There was nothing to it and there never had been. And it would take you about

01:08:17 two minutes of a Google search to know that. I believe what he was trying to do was gin up a

01:08:23 sexy moment of him pushing this beautiful, smart, famous woman on, you know, her sex life and whether

01:08:30 it's deviant in a way that he thought would get clicks or eyeballs or generate something good

01:08:35 for him. That's what that was about. That's one of the reasons why I find it so infuriating.

01:08:41 It's maddening to watch that. It's not like having somebody who's actively on trial for their life.

01:08:46 They're accused of committing a murder. And you say, were you at the crime scene? Did you do that?

01:08:50 that. Yes, of course, you have to do that. What he asked you wasn't necessary. It was

01:08:54 intentionally salacious. He was I don't know if he was trying to embarrass you, but he was trying

01:08:58 to promote himself at your expense, just like everyone before him had done to you so many times.

01:09:05 Yeah. And and and take in like presenting it to me as the opportunity to address it

01:09:14 head on, I think was, when I look back on it now, disingenuous, because it's, again,

01:09:20 not asking me to talk about the way that I was wrongly portrayed and how my sexuality was used

01:09:26 to vilify me. It was instead putting me on the spot and asking me to sort of respond to what

01:09:33 was presented as a kind of legitimate question and a legitimate reason to suspect me.

01:09:39 so and even the tone amanda i mean the tone right like an insensitive question but yeah it's got to

01:09:45 be like just the way you approach somebody who's been victimized the way you have you've been

01:09:49 victimized whether you want to call yourself a victim or not you've been victimized rafaeli has

01:09:53 too meredith obviously um is not that way you know this is i remember when i interviewed tara

01:09:59 reed joe biden's accuser she said she gave the interview to me because she wanted somebody who

01:10:02 was quote trauma informed and that i don't know whether tara reed was telling the truth about joe

01:10:08 Biden or not. But I understood she was making the allegations and how to treat somebody like

01:10:12 that respectfully while asking about their story and sensitively. Right. And being careful, being

01:10:17 ginger while still being a good reporter. And it's no wonder she had turned down CNN. And gee,

01:10:23 no wonder why she turned on Chris Wallace. I'm not surprised by that one either. I just feel like

01:10:27 reporters that that was about him. And too often they make it about themselves in their pocket

01:10:32 books and they have no thought for the pain that they continue to inflict on innocent people like

01:10:38 you um it goes on you know i wonder what you saw what you thought when you saw like the

01:10:43 the trial of kyle rittenhouse and all the jumping the gun about him um you know we had so many press

01:10:49 errors i the kyle rittenhouse trial i i mean i i think i have a sort of unpopular opinion from

01:10:56 you know i tend i run in liberal circles and i i do a lot of social justice but i do think that

01:11:01 like people really wanted kyle rittenhouse to be a villain and they weren't a lot of people

01:11:08 weren't willing to take the the evidence of the case seriously um instead were trying to

01:11:15 convict him based upon us like their interpretation of his character and i think it was radically

01:11:21 radically irresponsible of the prosecutor to charge him with murder in the first place because

01:11:26 you know why like this this was not a murder case if you don't like you know there there's

01:11:32 an interesting discussion to be had about like okay if you walk into a really highly charged

01:11:37 emotional space that's uncontrolled and you walk into that space with a gun are you provoking an

01:11:43 attack and i can see from the perspective of of his you know the people who were shot that like

01:11:49 yeah if you see someone you hear shots around and you see a guy with a gun you might think oh my

01:11:53 gosh, I got to stop the shooter from shooting people. But that doesn't mean that Kyle Rittenhouse

01:11:58 did not have the right to defend himself if he was not shooting people. And if you don't like

01:12:03 the way that the laws are written, then you like if you don't like the self-defense law, then you

01:12:08 can you can go to your legislature and say that you don't believe in self-defense. But like,

01:12:14 I think that with the Kyle Rittenhouse case, there was so much focus on irrelevant information and

01:12:20 character assassination instead of the specific actions that led up to this tragic moment,

01:12:26 which isn't to say that, like, I think that Kyle Rittenhouse should be celebrated as a hero either,

01:12:30 because, you know, that's, again, playing him as a political football. He's a kid who made a

01:12:36 mistake, but he doesn't deserve to spend the rest of his life in prison for it.

01:12:40 Yeah. There's some similarities in the cases in that, you know, he didn't have quite as much

01:12:44 coverage as you did. And his story didn't go on as long, but he had the president of the United

01:12:49 States, now president, then candidate, calling him a white supremacist. I mean, talk about poisoning

01:12:54 the jury pool. And there is no evidence for that. You know, I mean, even I at the beginning, I'm

01:12:58 like, oh, well, they said he was with the Proud Boys and he was making racist symbols. And we've

01:13:03 actually taken a hard look at it on this show more than once. And there's just it's that's not that's

01:13:07 not what happened. He went into a bar where they were. They came over. They asked for a picture

01:13:11 with him. He posed. And then they all did the OK sign, which Kyle Rittenhouse, his lawyers presented

01:13:16 to the judge and the prosecution had nothing to debunk it. He didn't even know what that was. He

01:13:20 thought it was an OK sign, which it's been since the beginning of time. There was nothing, nothing

01:13:25 on his social media. They scoured him. The Anti-Defamation League apparently did an

01:13:28 investigation. The prosecutors looked at all of his cell phones, all his social, nothing. Didn't

01:13:32 follow a white supremacist, didn't know a white supremacist. It was a lie. And so people are still 0.64

01:13:37 confused about him and want him in jail because they think he hates people of color. There's no

01:13:41 evidence, right? At some point, you have to say, show me the evidence. And we and if they cannot,

01:13:47 we as a responsible society have to move on. Absolutely. And also, I would say that, like,

01:13:54 whether or not he knows that he was doing an OK sign or a white supremacist sign is ultimately

01:13:59 irrelevant in the same way that, like, if I were a professional dominatrix at the time that

01:14:05 Meredith was murdered, it also would not have made a difference. It's irrelevant to the question

01:14:11 of whether or not he's guilty of murder.

01:14:13 That's right.

01:14:14 So much more to go over with Amanda.

01:14:16 I'm really enjoying this conversation.

01:14:17 I hope you are too.

01:14:18 We're going to take a quick break.

01:14:24 So I wanted to ask you on the subject,

01:14:26 because as you point out,

01:14:27 you travel in social justice circles

01:14:28 and I know you've connected with the Innocence Project,

01:14:30 which is brilliant. 0.95

01:14:31 That's perfect.

01:14:33 That plus your job as a journalist.

01:14:34 I love it.

01:14:35 I love what you're carving out for yourself.

01:14:38 But one of the things I've been hot on

01:14:40 basically my whole career, is what's happening to college men on college campuses. And obviously,

01:14:47 neither you nor I want to see young women get sexually assaulted on college campuses.

01:14:52 But I also don't want to see due process taken away from the young men who get accused.

01:14:56 And that's what's happened, right? Obama did it. And now Joe Biden's trying to bring it back. Trump

01:15:02 sort of righted the ship. And Biden's trying to bring it back. It's deeply problematic.

01:15:06 Democrats and Republicans need to pay attention because the way it was and the way Biden wants

01:15:10 it to be, Mr. Biden wants it to be, is no right to counsel, no right to cross-examination,

01:15:15 no right to discovery.

01:15:16 You get tried in front of a kangaroo court stacked with, quote, victims' rights advocates

01:15:21 and not like an independent body who might be open-minded to the fact that you might

01:15:26 not be accused.

01:15:27 And if you lose as a young man, you're expelled, you're labeled a sex offender, good luck getting

01:15:32 into another college, and it's near impossible to appeal.

01:15:35 Your thoughts on it?

01:15:36 Yeah, great. So I'm not actually familiar with what Biden is doing currently. But what I can say about this is I remember at the very beginning of the Me Too movement, which I do think was an incredibly important moment of like reckoning with the fact that this happens over and over and over again to young or to women in general, not even just young women, but a lot on college campuses.

01:15:58 is I remember my friend Brian Banks, who tweeted like, yes, you know, we need to be taking these

01:16:05 accusations really seriously and doing what we can to prevent sexual assault from happening.

01:16:10 But also here I am, a young man who was wrongly accused of sexual assault based solely on a young

01:16:17 woman's accusation. And I went to prison and for that crime. And that is unfair. Like due process

01:16:25 still is incredibly important. And while we need to take sexual assault accusations extremely

01:16:31 seriously, that does not mean that we don't take sexual assault accusations for the person who's

01:16:38 being accused not seriously. There is a difficult balancing act of not just fairness, but also

01:16:45 safety that needs to be brought into consideration. And we can't pretend that if someone who is

01:16:52 accused, that means that they're necessarily guilty. You are living proof that when due process

01:16:59 starts getting eroded in the name of something, right, prosecutorial zeal, a desire by the

01:17:06 prosecution to be loved by the community for having made an arrest, or now, you know, it could

01:17:12 be different things, pushing of other cultural agendas. It can be devastating, unfairly devastating

01:17:18 on the person targeted and we just can't start throwing away lives in the name of causes you

01:17:24 know there's a reason we want the justice system to to follow the procedures we put in place

01:17:28 long long ago that's the only way we can count on it to work well that's why i think like um

01:17:33 sexual education is so important because like one of the reasons why these things happen especially

01:17:38 on college campuses is because these are highly charged sexual environments with young people who

01:17:44 don't have a ton of experience sexually who are who are you know pushing boundaries for the first

01:17:50 time exploring themselves and others and of course there are going to be slip-ups and mistakes on

01:17:56 both sides in terms of communication both physical and and verbal so i think that these are complex

01:18:04 situations that require us to have sophisticated conversations about them instead of treating them

01:18:10 as black and white narratives.

01:18:12 Absolutely.

01:18:14 Okay, a couple of random questions for you,

01:18:16 just following up on the information.

01:18:18 I read that you wrote to the prosecutor.

01:18:20 You wrote to him?

01:18:23 So I can't speak a ton on this

01:18:25 because I promised him I wouldn't.

01:18:29 But yes, I am in communication with Giuliano Menini.

01:18:32 Wow.

01:18:33 I tip my hat to you, Amanda.

01:18:35 I don't know if I could do it.

01:18:37 I mean, I see you

01:18:38 because I see you being very generous

01:18:39 toward any everybody involved in the case, even Rudy, even Rudy, who's now out of prison and

01:18:45 stirring up trouble again. He's trying to bring you back into it, pointing the finger at you,

01:18:48 which we all know is nonsense. But you've been very generous. I don't know if I could find it

01:18:52 in me to be generous toward Mignani. Yeah, the biggest thing for me has always been wanting to

01:18:58 understand why, why this happened to me and why these things happen. And I don't find like the

01:19:04 more i i sort of understand the way human minds work the less impulse i have to um to like to

01:19:13 hate people or anything and it's more i i get a sense of like okay i understand why you think

01:19:20 you did the right thing in that moment but i the next step beyond that is can we then arrive at a

01:19:28 place of reconciling the truth that may be something that makes someone have to reevaluate

01:19:36 themselves as a human being. And that's tricky. I mean, that is the ultimate labyrinth is you

01:19:42 believe that you are one thing and you turn out to be another. And someone tries to point that out

01:19:47 to you. And I, you know, I, as someone who has been a victim of the criminal justice system and

01:19:53 also an indirect victim of crime like i understand that these things are complicated and the the most

01:19:59 important thing that we can do when someone is hurt when someone is harmed is to acknowledge

01:20:04 that harm but of course that means that we have to re-evaluate ourselves and our actions in light

01:20:10 of new evidence let me know how that works out yeah okay i will let's talk about rudy let's talk

01:20:18 about rudy rudy finally got out of jail he served 16 years that was a reduction of sentence for him

01:20:23 He comes out and apparently spoke to the son.

01:20:26 His message to Meredith's family was that he's so sorry for their loss.

01:20:30 He says he's written a letter to her family that explains how sorry he is, quote, for

01:20:34 not doing enough to save her that night, to save her.

01:20:38 He says the court convicted me of being an accessory to murder purely because my DNA

01:20:42 was there.

01:20:42 But the legal documents say others were there and that I did not inflict the fatal wounds.

01:20:47 He's pointing the finger at you saying Amanda Knox, quote, knows the truth.

01:20:52 So your response to him is what?

01:20:55 Well, it's a complicated one.

01:20:57 I have a whole episode of Labyrinth's called The Forgotten Killer, where I discuss him

01:21:01 being released from prison and never having been found fully accountable for his crimes

01:21:06 and also for my name to be the name that is most associated with his crime.

01:21:12 Yes, yes. 0.98

01:21:13 So true.

01:21:13 So first of all, I have to to point my gaze, my critical gaze on the tabloid media who has decided to give a platform to a rapist and murderer in order for him to continue to harm others by lying and allowing other peoples to take responsibility for his crime.

01:21:34 So shame on the son, shame on Nick Pisa for the platforming and amplifying his lies, damaging my reputation and honestly just putting the Kircher family through yet more, you know, loops of pain like this, that shame on them.

01:21:52 But for Rudy Gaudet, I honestly have to say that, like, I was almost rooting for him a little bit, like, here's someone who spent 13 years in prison. I had hoped that he had rehabilitated in some kind of capacity.

01:22:11 And while I could, you know, he has over the years, ever since he was arrested, taken the opportunity of the prosecution's unfair gaze on me and use that exploited that opportunity in order to not be fully held accountable for his actions.

01:22:28 I thought that if he had more time and distance from his crimes, that he would have had a more mature response.

01:22:35 And instead, I believe that he's just continuing to do what he's done since the day he was arrested, which is to exploit the way that this case has been misrepresented and and to try to continue to have me be taken, have me take the burden of his crimes onto my life so that he can continue on with his as if nothing's wrong.

01:22:59 So I'm so glad you are out there speaking about it because you have a much bigger microphone than he does. And people need to hear your message. Thank you. The the Kircher family. I understand you have reached out to them in various ways and various times over the years. It's a it's a delicate issue. Right. Because I as far as I know, they do still associate me with Meredith's death.

01:23:29 in some way or another and that's not their fault in the sense that like too they were misled too

01:23:35 and it's a very very difficult thing to look at objectively when it's someone that you lost that

01:23:42 you care about so much and so i have let them know through various channels that i am i under

01:23:50 i understand i that there's this great potential for healing if we can connect and grieve about

01:23:58 this incredible injustice and tragedy that links us forever. That said, I also don't want to put

01:24:05 them on the spot. And I'm always hesitant to talk about this when people ask me because I don't want

01:24:10 to put them on the spot and make them feel like they have to respond to me. That is not the way

01:24:16 that you achieve healing. So, you know, I want them to know that I'm there and ready whenever

01:24:23 they are ready. I wonder if it's even harder for someone to get past their beliefs in a situation

01:24:30 like this, when the imprint that was made on them happened during their most vulnerable time of life,

01:24:36 you know, when they were at their weakest, hurting their worst. That's when, you know,

01:24:41 this prosecutor, the press misled them so severely, all the information pointing in the

01:24:46 wrong direction. It's probably even harder to come back to stasis, where you can take in truth

01:24:52 and see, you know, separate the wheat from the chaff when, when it, you know, the damage that

01:24:59 was done to you was done in those circumstances. You know, it's actually a really fascinating

01:25:04 theory because they call that like cognitive opening. And you know, that's, that's something

01:25:09 they talk about with like the radicalization of people to terrorism, where something bad happens

01:25:16 to them. Some tragedy happens to a person like a sister or a daughter dies. And suddenly your mind

01:25:22 Like your your sort of feeling of security and place and your foundations in the world are shook and you then latch on to a new ideology because it sort of gives you a new sense of purpose and stability. 0.97

01:25:40 And I think you're maybe right that in that moment of intense vulnerability, they latched on to the ideology that the prosecution put forth to them, which is that I am an evil whore who was jealous of their daughter and murdered her for it. 0.95

01:25:58 And it's like the truth is right there. 0.95

01:26:01 And I think once they come to terms with it, they'll they'll somehow feel better.

01:26:07 I bet it would be a nice moment for the two of you like to come together because you were

01:26:11 her friend.

01:26:12 I'm sure she cared for you and you cared for her and that all that gets lost entirely.

01:26:16 Right.

01:26:17 I mean, you've have you ever had the chance to grieve the loss of your friend?

01:26:22 That's a really great question.

01:26:24 And I always appreciate it when someone tells me, like, I'm sorry, your friend was lost, because that's something that not a lot of people say to me. Like, I'm sorry that your friend was murdered that way. And I do look forward to the day that I get to visit her grave. I just don't want to do that without the permission of her family. And so that's something that remains a deep desire and goal for me.

01:26:54 Oh, my goodness. It's so complicated. You know, I've been thinking about you a lot lately and I and I thinking about everything you've been through.

01:27:03 It's like, in a way, you were given a huge, hefty gift of wisdom, wisdom early in your life.

01:27:12 You know, like you learn so much about police and law enforcement and, you know, the justice system, media, human nature.

01:27:20 Yes. Yes. Right. Human nature and the importance of family. Right. And the support and all that. It makes me want to ask you whether like if you could undo that, of course, you would undo what happened in Meredith. But if you could undo what happened to you, would you?

01:27:37 you know that is a question that i never ask myself because none of us ever ever ever get

01:27:45 to choose that and instead i think my goal um with my my life and also my on my work now with

01:27:53 labyrinths is to look at how when we are at our most lost how do we find our way out and what do

01:28:01 we gain in the process? Because of course, there is the opportunity to lose so much, but there's

01:28:07 also so much to gain in whatever struggle that you are going through. Post-traumatic growth is

01:28:14 a real thing, just as much as post-traumatic stress is. And we all have the ability with a

01:28:20 sort of mindfulness to examine whatever it is that life throws at us and try to make the best out of

01:28:27 it. And I'm always, always, always fascinated by the stories of people who similarly find

01:28:33 themselves in different situations of feeling lost or the existential crisis of their life

01:28:38 isn't what they thought it was going to be. And they found their way somehow.

01:28:44 It's great to hear you say that. I completely agree with you. But it's great, too, to see,

01:28:48 you know, people, you get upset, you lose a job or you don't get that house you really wanted or

01:28:54 whatever it is. Have you been convicted of murder when you didn't do it and sat in a foreign country 0.96

01:29:02 thinking, I will never get out of here. I will never get married. I will never have children.

01:29:07 I will never be able to hug my family again. Like that is next level stress. When you look back on

01:29:15 it, what would you say was the lowest moment? Was it when you heard guilty in Italian or was it

01:29:22 a different time, like sitting back in the prison cell?

01:29:25 No, the scariest, scariest moment was in that interrogation room when I was made to,

01:29:31 I was, I started to doubt my own sanity. That was the scariest moment for me in this entire process.

01:29:39 It was the one where I felt the most vulnerable. And, and then years later, I still felt a ton

01:29:48 of self-blame until someone finally presented me with the actual truth about coercive interrogation

01:29:54 techniques. I had no idea. I think the thing that makes innocent people so vulnerable to wrongful

01:30:01 conviction is the idea of being wrongly convicted is not on our radar. Our minds will come up with

01:30:09 any other explanation for why this bad thing is happening to us, including self-blame.

01:30:14 and especially when the world is blaming you it's very easily easy to believe the rest of the world

01:30:20 that you're just there's something wrong with you and i'm really grateful to those who are

01:30:25 dedicating all like their careers to studying this and revealing the truth about these these

01:30:31 processes and in the meantime like you know i'm not one to compare tragedies because i can't tell

01:30:39 you, like I interviewed a ton of women for Labyrinths about infertility and how they had

01:30:45 lived their whole lives knowing that they were going to be parents, they were going to be mothers.

01:30:49 And suddenly they were faced with the realization that, oh my gosh, I'm struggling with this. And

01:30:56 oh my gosh, am I ever, is it ever going to happen? And how you have to retell yourself who you are

01:31:02 in light of these kinds of struggles is real and is like some of those interviews that I had with

01:31:10 those women are some of the most emotionally impactful interviews that I've ever had with

01:31:15 people. Wow. I know you lived some of that yourself. You did just have a baby girl. I mean,

01:31:22 you just had her, right? Is she even two months old? Oh, yeah. I still have like throw up on me

01:31:26 a little bit. Oh, my gosh. First of all, you look amazing. So she's healthy. Eureka, right? Her name

01:31:33 is Eureka. I love it. You're now Mrs. Robinson. And you and your husband does the podcast with

01:31:39 you. Absolutely. Yes. So we are co-hosts, co-producers. We do everything ourselves. We do

01:31:45 not have like a team of people behind us. We are independent. We are ad free. So if anyone wants

01:31:52 become a patron to support our work. That's how we do what we do. Wow. All right. So I've got to

01:31:58 ask, like, what was it awkward or difficult to find, you know, love after all of this? I mean,

01:32:04 all the stuff that's been said about you. And I like I would imagine there was enormous pressure

01:32:08 on him. Like, oh, God, I don't know how to act or how to be. Well, you know what? Chris is an

01:32:15 incredibly was the perfect person for me to meet because he's not a true crime guy. He didn't

01:32:21 follow the case um when he started when he became friends with me we were friends at first like

01:32:26 other people would come up to him and ask him like do you think she did it or didn't she do it

01:32:29 and he was like look i'm not interested in that lens through which to view her i'm interested in

01:32:34 this person that i met like a regular person and how we interact and of course eventually when we

01:32:40 started dating officially and people noticed um and started photoshopping knives into pictures of

01:32:47 him and making claims about what kind of person he was to even associate with me, he did eventually

01:32:53 do the Google search and read, read all the case, you know, the case files and read my book and do

01:32:58 all the research so he could be informed. But that wasn't the lens through which he first viewed me.

01:33:04 And it's been, you know, that's the ongoing struggle. Like I am for better or for worse,

01:33:10 for worse, defined by a crime that I had nothing to do with. I am defined by someone else's horrific

01:33:19 actions. And as much as I try to put good work out into the world to this day, that is not what

01:33:26 people know me for. And so that's, that's sort of my ongoing struggle is trying to acknowledge my

01:33:36 experience and put my perspective to good work and not allow others to use my experience and

01:33:43 exploit my story for their own ends and at my expense. Yeah, I know. Raffaele has spoken

01:33:50 publicly about the same feelings for him and difficulties he's faced because of the media

01:33:55 storm and the unfair conviction. And I love with the New York Times, I will I'll give a shout out

01:34:01 to the New York Times, what they said about you in doing the story. I think it was about the birth

01:34:05 of your daughter, but they were saying Amanda Knox's legal purgatory has ended. Her cultural 0.85

01:34:10 purgatory has not. And it needs to. I mean, you're not the only one who should be fighting for truth 0.99

01:34:17 here. The people who put you in this position, which includes the media, need to do their part

01:34:24 and certainly not pile on and continue the abuse. But to say what we know is true, which is you had

01:34:30 nothing to do with this crime. We know who committed this crime. His name is Rudy Gaudet.

01:34:34 He's served a sentence that was rather close to a slap on the wrist.

01:34:39 And what I pray for now is for people to realize that, for you to have health and wellness

01:34:43 and many more children, if that's what you want.

01:34:46 Keep telling your story and keep helping others.

01:34:49 I feel like there's a reason you've been through this.

01:34:51 And I feel like we're all starting to see what it is.

01:34:55 Oh, thank you so much, Megan.

01:34:56 It's been such a such pleasure to talk to you.

01:34:58 I really appreciate it.

01:35:00 Thank you.

01:35:01 Oh, thank you.

01:35:02 I really admire you, Amanda.

01:35:04 I hope we talk again.

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01:35:34 call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connexontario.ca. Today on the program, we are speaking

01:35:41 with John Ramsey, the father of little JonBenet Ramsey. JonBenet's murder remains one of the

01:35:47 most covered stories of the 20th and 21st centuries. Yet despite decades of intense

01:35:54 media attention, police investigations, and over 20,000 tips in this case, we still don't know

01:36:00 the person or persons responsible for her death. But there are several new developments in the case

01:36:07 and John is here to walk us through what they are and whether he believes

01:36:10 they could lead to finding his daughter's killer after all these years. First, a reminder of how

01:36:17 this story began. It was Christmas night, 1996, Boulder, Colorado. The Ramsey home was decorated

01:36:24 with holiday wreaths tied with bows, John and his now late wife, Patsy Ramsey, had put six-year-old

01:36:32 JonBenet to bed after returning home from a Christmas dinner with friends. When Patsy woke

01:36:37 up early the next morning and went downstairs, she found a ransom note at the bottom of the steps.

01:36:44 It read in part, we have your daughter in our possession. Patsy ran to JonBenet's room,

01:36:49 she would later tell authorities, but she was nowhere to be found. Patsy called 911. Her voice

01:36:55 was hysterical, begging for police to come as soon as possible. At the end of the call, you can hear

01:37:01 Patsy, praying and pleading, help me, Jesus, help me.

01:37:31 please. Okay, girl. I am, honey. Take a deep breath from me, okay? Patsy? Patsy? Patsy? Patsy?

01:37:48 You couldn't hear it as well there, but she is on there saying, help me, Jesus. Help me, Jesus.

01:37:53 Oh, hours later, their little girl's body was found in the basement of their home,

01:37:59 not by police, but by John, who was sent around by the detective who was there saying,

01:38:05 go look for any belongings of hers that may be out of place. And he found his own child.

01:38:11 John Benet had been strangled and left for dead on a concrete floor.

01:38:16 Police focused their investigation almost solely on John and Patsy, believing there was no way

01:38:21 an intruder was responsible. Why? That's one of the big questions here. Why did they believe that?

01:38:26 because there's a lot of evidence suggesting the opposite.

01:38:29 They believe the parents did it.

01:38:31 Case pretty much closed in their eyes.

01:38:34 It would take years before DNA evidence

01:38:36 would clear them in 2008.

01:38:39 But Patsy would never live to see that day.

01:38:42 She died of ovarian cancer two years earlier,

01:38:46 10 years after the death of her little six-year-old.

01:38:49 Oh, so tragic.

01:38:51 To this day, John's hope is that this case will be solved.

01:38:55 and that hope remains in the hands

01:38:57 of the same police department

01:38:59 that pointed the finger at him wrongly.

01:39:08 John Ramsey is here today.

01:39:10 John, thank you so much for being with us.

01:39:13 Well, it's my pleasure.

01:39:14 Thank you for having me on.

01:39:16 I've been following you for so many years,

01:39:18 following the case

01:39:18 and seeing so many of your interviews

01:39:19 and you've handled it with such dignity.

01:39:22 I appreciate the fact that here we are 25 years later, and you're still, still trying to keep interest on the case and try to call attention to what you need, you think, to solve it.

01:39:33 And there's breaking news, I should say, about the detectives involved in your case.

01:39:38 That's extraordinary.

01:39:39 The very guy who interviewed you and Patsy, who you've been kind of complaining about, like he didn't follow up on leads, he didn't do this, he didn't do that.

01:39:47 There's news about him today.

01:39:49 I assume you've heard what's happened to him.

01:39:52 Yes. Yeah, it was a big step forward, I think, in this case because he was a roadblock when he was assigned to this case 25, 26 years ago.

01:40:08 He was at that time a auto theft investigator, and now he's put on the investigation of a murder of a child.

01:40:17 And I've never criticized the Boulder police for not knowing what they're doing or not having any experience.

01:40:25 They didn't even have a homicide department.

01:40:26 But I have criticized them over the years for the reason that they would not accept help from those who offered it.

01:40:34 And lots of help was offered.

01:40:36 Right in the beginning, the Denver police offered to put two experienced homicide detectives on Boulder staff at Denver's expense for as long as they needed them.

01:40:46 Boulder said, no, we don't need that.

01:40:47 We've got this under control.

01:40:49 That's been going on for 26 years, and we've just kind of had it.

01:40:54 It's time to do something different, put some people in charge that know what they're doing,

01:40:59 and be willing to put their ego and arrogance aside and accept help.

01:41:05 Yeah.

01:41:06 The detective's name was Tom Trujillo.

01:41:10 He was one of the lead investigators in JonBenet's case.

01:41:12 He just received an involuntary transfer to another division where he's going to be working the midnight shift, not a promotion, in addition to a three-day suspension.

01:41:23 And they've basically said that he and another were not—they were not investigating, appropriately investigating several cases.

01:41:32 They said JonBenet's case was not one of them.

01:41:35 These are the cases that he's being accused of, you know, half-assing it on were not homicide cases.

01:41:41 but he is being accused of not doing his job and not following through on leads and so on and other

01:41:48 significant investigations do you feel you know validated at all by that well it in a way yes

01:41:57 um we've uh we've known that he's been a problem and not really capable of uh thinking out of the

01:42:05 And more importantly, his arrogance, I guess, and ego prevented anybody from coming in to help.

01:42:17 You know, our system, the way it's set up, it's kind of crazy.

01:42:20 But, you know, there's 18,000 police jurisdictions in this country.

01:42:23 Each one's a little island of authority.

01:42:25 And if crime happens on that island, it's up to the local police to deal with it.

01:42:31 And with the acceptance of a few things like bank robberies, nobody can come in and help them unless they're invited.

01:42:38 And that's a real crazy system because there's tons of qualified help that could have come in, wanted to come in.

01:42:48 But unless they were invited and asked to come in to help, they can't.

01:42:53 And it's been a huge frustration.

01:42:58 And that's really what I'm very critical of the police department on that issue.

01:43:04 Of course, because you see the bigger cities tend to have a higher homicide rate and thus more experienced homicide detectives and people who know how to preserve a crime scene and, you know, preserve evidence.

01:43:15 And that's the problem.

01:43:16 That was one of the major problems right from the get-go with this, which let's take a step back now and set up the crime so that people have a better feeling for what they did and didn't do and why you really kind of want this case wrested from them right now.

01:43:32 I mean, it's been 26 years.

01:43:34 It's kind of time.

01:43:34 You know, there should be a statute of limitations for the police.

01:43:37 If they haven't solved it, they should be able to be compelled to give the evidence to the family or to somebody else who might be able to have a go at it.

01:43:43 But we'll get to that.

01:43:44 So let's go back. Let's go back to December 26, 1996. You were living in Boulder, Colorado

01:43:50 with Patsy, your wife, with little JonBenet, who was six. You had a son too, Burke at the time,

01:43:56 who was 10. And things are going well for you. You were a successful business executive.

01:44:02 Was Patsy a stay-at-home wife? Yes. Yes, she was. She was taking care of the children.

01:44:09 Okay. Very devoted mom. We've seen the videos of her. She seemed like a very loving mother.

01:44:14 And you just celebrated Christmas Day.

01:44:17 Was there anything out of the ordinary on that day, Christmas Day?

01:44:21 No, it was a very normal day.

01:44:23 We had gotten up early, of course, and had made a breakfast.

01:44:29 And then all day long, kids were in and out of the house with their friends coming and going and playing with new toys.

01:44:36 And very normal Christmas Day for us.

01:44:41 So you went out over to a friend's house to eat Christmas evening dinner, dinner on the 25th with the kids?

01:44:48 Yes.

01:44:49 Okay.

01:44:50 So you go over there and you go ahead.

01:44:53 Well, I say the friends we visited have kids our age, our kids' age.

01:44:58 And so they were buddies and it was a logical place to have a family get together.

01:45:04 So what time did you get home from that dinner?

01:45:06 Well, I think, if I recall, it was about 9.30.

01:45:13 JonBenet had fallen asleep on the way home, and it was only maybe six blocks, but she was tired.

01:45:20 She'd been up all day and having fun and playing, and so I carried her upstairs and put her on her bed, 0.54

01:45:26 and then Patsy came up and got her ready for bed and tucked her in.

01:45:31 So Patsy put on JonBenet's pajamas that night, and this would later become an issue.

01:45:36 what she was wearing. What did Patsy put JonBenet in? I don't remember, quite frankly.

01:45:47 I'd have to look at the pictures, but it was just nightclothes.

01:45:52 But my understanding, the reason I ask you, Jon, is that I've been reading up on the case that

01:45:56 there was an allegation that Patsy said she put her in a red outfit, like red PJs.

01:46:00 And when she was found, she was in white. Is that familiar to you?

01:46:05 Yeah. Well, I didn't know, but I don't know about the red nightgown. I hadn't never heard that, but when I found her, she had on like a black and white pants and, and a top.

01:46:21 Okay. So Patsy puts her in bed. So probably by 10 o'clock, JonBenet was in her bed. 1.00

01:46:28 Oh yeah. Yeah.

01:46:30 And what time did you guys go to bed and Burke too?

01:46:32 uh even shortly after that probably 10 30 i guess um yeah and your son too

01:46:41 yes yeah he went to bed immediately when we got home yeah he's also a little guy it's not like

01:46:48 you have a teenager at that point who likes to stay up late 10 year olds nine years old

01:46:52 worn out from christmas day as well okay so everybody goes to bed by 10 30 and you you like

01:47:02 in our house, before we go to sleep, we lock all the doors, make sure the security's on,

01:47:06 you know, all that stuff. Did you have any of that on your house?

01:47:09 We had an alarm system that was in the house when we bought it. And it was the type that

01:47:15 at that time, the theory was you scare everybody out of the house, including the intruder.

01:47:22 It was just this horrible, loud noise. And so we didn't use it. It went off once.

01:47:30 John Bonet, about dinnertime, I don't know, six months or eight months before, was playing.

01:47:38 We didn't know it, but she was punching the buttons on the alarm system.

01:47:41 And this horrible sound came up, and I ran into where the control box was.

01:47:47 And I remember John Bonet looking at me like, and said, this makes my ears loud.

01:47:55 We've all been there.

01:47:55 Those security systems can be – they can definitely be more annoying than, you know, they ought to be when they go off.

01:48:00 Yeah, and they tend to go off when you don't want them to.

01:48:02 In this case, this would have given you a heart attack if it went off.

01:48:05 So what about – what else was there?

01:48:06 Did you – were there locks on the doors or the windows?

01:48:09 What was the security setup?

01:48:10 Well, it was an old house built in 1927.

01:48:13 Um, it, yes, there were locks on the doors, um, and just typical window locks, but, um, I didn't check them that night.

01:48:26 And that's to my deep regret.

01:48:28 Um, we, uh, retired and, and, um, you know, we, we always assumed Boulder was kind of a, you know, Ozzie and Harriet flowers coming up quiet, safe place.

01:48:43 And so you get complacent.

01:48:45 And I regretfully admit we are complacent.

01:48:49 No, I know it.

01:48:50 I know it.

01:48:50 I mean, I grew up in upstate New York.

01:48:52 We never locked our doors, ever.

01:48:53 We'd go away for vacation for a week and not even lock the door.

01:48:57 And there was never an incident.

01:48:59 It's, you know, I've told people, I said, you know, just be aware there are bad people everywhere.

01:49:06 Not just because you live in a nice neighborhood or don't live in South L.A. that you're safe.

01:49:12 But don't be paranoid, but just be aware of that.

01:49:15 And your home should be your sanctuary.

01:49:17 And that's a huge regret on my part to become complacent.

01:49:23 Do you know if you had locked just the doors?

01:49:27 Of course, you say you didn't check the windows, but had you locked the doors?

01:49:32 Well, I thought I did.

01:49:33 Yeah.

01:49:34 Yeah, there was a door found open that morning, not by me, but by the police.

01:49:45 It shouldn't have been open.

01:49:47 It's possible the kids were playing and went through it and didn't close it.

01:49:50 I doubt it because that was kind of in a sub-basement area.

01:49:54 They wouldn't have been going down there.

01:49:56 But I think the killer was in the house and we got home.

01:49:59 And he waited until we were in bed and took JonBenet from her room.

01:50:14 It's a chilling thought just to have him lying in wait there for murder.

01:50:21 Can I ask you, too, just before we leave the subject of security, was there a dog?

01:50:26 Was there any other layers?

01:50:29 JonBenet had a little dog.

01:50:33 His name was Jock.

01:50:35 And we had taken him over to the neighbors before we went out to dinner because we were going to leave town the next morning and have a second Christmas with my older children.

01:50:44 And then we had a reservation for the family on the Disney Big Red Boat.

01:50:51 And that was our, you know, take place, you know, right after Christmas.

01:50:55 So we took the dog and took him to our neighbors, and they were going to take care of him until we got home.

01:51:03 Right.

01:51:05 Oh, gosh.

01:51:07 Like all these things you'd like to have back, and who knows whether they would have made a difference.

01:51:10 But, yeah, the dog, they basically say as many layers as you can put between a potential bad guy and those you love, the better.

01:51:19 Yes.

01:51:21 You're most vulnerable at night when you're asleep.

01:51:25 For sure. And it's just prudent to pay attention to that, regardless of where you live.

01:51:36 How far away were your children's bedrooms from your bedroom?

01:51:41 Well, it was an old house. There were basement, ground floor, second floor.

01:51:47 And the second floor is where the kids were. And then the upstairs attic, we converted it to a master bedroom.

01:51:52 So in terms of distance, I don't know, 30 feet, maybe something like that, 40 feet, but also on a different level.

01:52:07 Did you sleep with the doors closed to your bedrooms?

01:52:10 Like, do you believe if you had, if she had, so do you believe if she had yelled, you would have heard it?

01:52:18 I think so.

01:52:19 Yeah, I really do.

01:52:19 Um, I think with virtual certainty, we're, we're, we're sure a stun gun was used perhaps when she was asleep in her bed.

01:52:36 Uh, don't know that for a fact, but, but yeah, I think if we, if she had screamed or, or, uh, um, there'd been noise, we would have, we would have heard it, I think.

01:52:48 There were marks on her face and I think her neck, too, that suggested a stun gun had been used on her.

01:52:54 John, forgive me because I don't know the answer to this, but what would a stun gun do to a person when used?

01:53:01 I mean, would it incapacitate you for a time?

01:53:04 What would it do?

01:53:05 Well, apparently it does.

01:53:07 I don't know, but we had it looked at.

01:53:14 police discounted that idea and we had it looked at by a a doctor who specializes in that kind of

01:53:23 stuff somehow and he said with 99 certainly those are stun gun marks yeah but i think

01:53:31 because we didn't hear anything uh we you know you would think at least if this creature had come in

01:53:39 and and uh started to take jamania from her bed she would have screamed and we would certainly

01:53:44 I've heard that. Yeah. Even if he covered her mouth, you'd hear something, some sort of signs

01:53:50 of a struggle. But if the stun gun were used, and of course, I know that you found her with duct tape

01:53:54 on her mouth, that could have kept her quiet. All right. So let's back up. So Patsy comes

01:54:01 downstairs early. They say it was 5.52 AM was that 911 call. So it was early in the morning. You say

01:54:07 you were taking a trip. And was that your first sign that something was wrong? She finds this

01:54:12 ransom note at the bottom of the stairs and then what does she come find you or what happens now

01:54:17 well she screamed and it was you know i was getting ready uh to get dressed and she screamed

01:54:24 i could tell from the scream it was a something was very very wrong and i ran down and and she

01:54:31 had this ransom note and um you know it was just a unbelievable uh thing and uh we went or i did i

01:54:44 think i did it looked to make sure brooke was okay because his bedroom was on kind of the other end

01:54:50 of the house and he was still in bed and appeared to be asleep so um he knew he was safe and uh

01:54:59 And so I, you know, I took the note and, I mean, she, Patsy explained, said, hey, this is a ransom note, Gemini's gone and checked her room.

01:55:09 And so I tried to grasp what was in the ransom note, it was three pages, and just told Patsy to call the police, call the police, call 911.

01:55:23 And, of course, funny thing, we were as criticized for that because the ransom note told us not to do that. 0.55

01:55:29 Well, that's silly.

01:55:30 Of course, we did. 0.93

01:55:32 Of course, of course.

01:55:33 You're going to call the police and you don't follow the directions of a kidnapper to not call law enforcement.

01:55:39 Yeah, so that Patsy called immediately.

01:55:43 She was standing by the phone at that time.

01:55:45 And I was still trying to comprehend what the note said and what was going on.

01:55:52 I'll get to the note in one second.

01:55:53 I think it's worth reading so that the audience can understand how bizarre it was.

01:55:57 Before we do that, I want to play the longer Patsy 911 call because to this day, even though you've been totally exonerated, people say, oh, the parents did it.

01:56:06 You know how that, you know how it was, John.

01:56:07 That'll continue even after the killer's arrested and convicted.

01:56:12 Of course.

01:56:13 DNA has exonerated you.

01:56:16 So it's like, okay.

01:56:16 But I, as a mother, you hear Patsy Ramsey in this 911 call and you can hear the sheer panic in her voice.

01:56:26 And especially if you listen to the longer version, which I'll play here, it's sound by two.

01:56:46 How old is your daughter?

01:56:47 Six years old.

01:56:48 She's gone.

01:56:49 Six years old.

01:56:50 How long ago was this?

01:56:51 I don't know.

01:56:52 I took down the note.

01:56:53 And my daughter says it.

01:56:54 Say who took her?

01:56:55 What?

01:56:56 Does it say who took her?

01:56:57 I don't know.

01:56:58 There's a ransom note here.

01:56:59 It's a ransom note?

01:57:00 It says F-B-T-C.

01:57:01 Victory. 0.90

01:57:02 Please.

01:57:03 Okay.

01:57:04 What's your name?

01:57:05 I don't know.

01:57:06 I don't know.

01:57:07 There's a ransom note here.

01:57:08 It's a ransom note?

01:57:09 It says F-B-T-C.

01:57:10 Victory. 0.90

01:57:11 Please.

01:57:12 Okay.

01:57:13 What's your name?

01:57:15 Okay, what's your name?

01:57:17 Patsy Ramsey, I'm the mother.

01:57:19 Oh, my God.

01:57:20 Please.

01:57:21 Okay, I'm sending an officer over, okay?

01:57:23 Please.

01:57:24 Do you know how long she's been gone?

01:57:25 No, I don't.

01:57:27 Please, we just got out and she's not here.

01:57:29 Oh, my God, please.

01:57:30 Okay, girl.

01:57:31 I am, honey.

01:57:33 Please.

01:57:33 Take a deep breath with me, okay?

01:57:35 Please, hurry, hurry. 0.98

01:57:36 Patsy?

01:57:37 Patsy?

01:57:38 Patsy?

01:57:39 Patsy? 0.98

01:57:45 that's where she says help me jesus she's in a sheer panic you were there um she all she knew

01:57:54 at that point was john benet was missing because she wasn't in her bed and you can feel you must

01:57:59 have been feeling the same john just the slow reveal of wait a ransom note and wait she's

01:58:05 actually not in her room what on earth is going on here well we didn't know we knew she according

01:58:14 We believed what the note said, that they have our daughter, and we were not to call the police.

01:58:23 And if we did, she would be beheaded.

01:58:28 And it was dark. 0.99

01:58:30 It was cold out.

01:58:32 It was a horrible feeling.

01:58:33 I tell people it's like when if you're with your child and you're at a department store or grocery store and you look around and the child's gone, you have this instinctive, just horrible feeling in your stomach that, you know, where's my child?

01:58:47 And it's a terrible feeling.

01:58:50 And I think all parents have experienced that from time to time when their little one's gone out of sight.

01:58:57 You don't know where they are.

01:58:59 And that was the feeling we had.

01:59:01 And, you know, it went on for until, I don't know, one in the afternoon.

01:59:08 And then an even worse feeling came.

01:59:11 We've all had that.

01:59:12 We've all had that.

01:59:13 And the moment of relief when you find your child well is overwhelming.

01:59:17 And you kept waiting, kept waiting for that to happen.

01:59:22 And you can hear Patsy, you know, waiting for it with the 911 operator and doing the only thing you can do at that point, which is pray to Jesus.

01:59:28 Just pray, pray, pray, pray.

01:59:29 It's not as you think it is.

01:59:31 The note, the note is one of the most important and bizarre things of this whole case.

01:59:37 The handwritten note, which for our listening audience, we've put on the screen and you can

01:59:41 see it on YouTube. It's handwritten. It's three pages long, as you point out. And I'm going to

01:59:48 read it just so the audience understands what you guys read. It was addressed to you,

01:59:54 you, John Ramsey, right? Dear Mr. Ramsey. And then it reads as follows.

02:00:00 Listen carefully, exclamation point.

02:00:02 We are a group of individuals

02:00:05 that represent a small foreign faction.

02:00:09 We do respect your business, spelled wrong, 0.99

02:00:11 but not the country it serves.

02:00:13 At this time, we have your daughter

02:00:15 in our possession, spelled wrong.

02:00:17 She is safe and unharmed.

02:00:19 And if you want to see her,

02:00:20 if you want her to see 1997,

02:00:22 you must follow our instructions to the letter.

02:00:24 You will withdraw $118,000 from your account.

02:00:28 $100,000 will be in $100 bills,

02:00:31 the remaining $18,000 in $20 bills.

02:00:33 Make sure that you bring an adequate size attache to the bank.

02:00:37 When you get home, you will put the money in a brown paper bag.

02:00:40 I will call you between 8 and 10 a.m. tomorrow

02:00:44 to instruct you on delivery.

02:00:46 The delivery will be exhausting,

02:00:48 so I advise you to be rested.

02:00:50 If we monitor you getting the money early,

02:00:52 we might call you early to arrange an earlier delivery of the money

02:00:55 and hence a earlier delivery pickup of your daughter.

02:01:01 Another grammatical error.

02:01:03 Any deviation of my instructions 0.97

02:01:04 will result in the immediate execution of your daughter.

02:01:07 You will also be denied her remains for proper burial.

02:01:10 The two gentlemen watching over your daughter

02:01:12 do not particularly like you,

02:01:15 so I advise you not to provoke them.

02:01:17 Speaking to anyone about your situation,

02:01:18 such as police, FBI, et cetera, 0.99

02:01:20 will result in your daughter being beheaded. 0.99

02:01:23 If we catch you talking to a stray dog, 1.00

02:01:25 she dies. If you alert bank authorities, she dies. If the money is in any way marked or

02:01:29 tampered with, she dies. You will be scanned for electronic devices, and if any are found,

02:01:34 she dies. You can try to deceive us, but be warned that we are familiar with law enforcement,

02:01:39 countermeasures, and tactics. You stand a 99% chance of killing your daughter if you try 0.88

02:01:44 to outsmart, two words, us. Follow our instructions, and you stand a 100% chance of 0.96

02:01:52 getting her back. You and your family are under constant scrutiny as well as the authorities.

02:01:57 Don't try to grow a brain, John. You are not the only fat cat around, so don't think that 0.99

02:02:03 killing will be difficult. Don't underestimate us, John. Use that good Southern common sense 0.99

02:02:09 of yours. It is up to you now, John. Victory! S-B-T-C. Absolutely bizarre. When you read

02:02:22 that other than the obvious? Was there anything, you know, I've had a chance to read it and reread

02:02:26 it. What jumped out at you? Well, there's several things that you wonder, what did that mean to the

02:02:34 killer? One was the amount of the ransom money request, 118,000. Why not a million? Why not,

02:02:43 you know, 100,000? Why 118? That had some significance to the killer.

02:02:49 uh and then the other course was the uh the uh the beheading concept you know that's

02:02:58 that's very on um you don't think about that as a as a as a punishment or a penalty but yet that's

02:03:08 a very uh common thing nowadays we read about some of the terrorists and stuff that goes off so

02:03:15 So you wonder, well, are they? Is it really a terrorist group or terrorist individuals? And that's a common threat they can make.

02:03:24 And then, of course, the final thing was SBTC. What does that mean? Victory. That's sign off.

02:03:30 So those are kind of the three elements in my mind that just didn't make sense.

02:03:35 And the $118,000 happened to be my annual bonus that year, and I was paid in January of 1996.

02:03:52 And that is somewhat of a logical where that number came from.

02:04:00 They would have had to known that, but the rest of it just didn't make sense.

02:04:05 It was a bizarre note.

02:04:06 I mean, I've been told, too, that in a way it's a gift because I've been told by handwriting experts that with that long of a sample, three pages, if we had the handwriting of the killer, it'd be very easy to conclusively say this person wrote this note.

02:04:25 It's a big sample of their handwriting.

02:04:27 What did the handwriting analysts say could be gleaned about the writing?

02:04:32 Could they tell anything about age, gender, psychological, state, any of that?

02:04:38 Well, we didn't get that from the handwriting people.

02:04:40 Typically, they just told us what their findings were.

02:04:46 And they rank their findings on a scale of one to five.

02:04:51 One is absolutely this person wrote it when they're doing comparison.

02:04:55 A five is absolutely no way.

02:04:57 And I was a one.

02:04:59 They said, absolutely, you did not write it.

02:05:01 Passy was a four and a half.

02:05:03 And you say, well, why four and a half?

02:05:05 And I was told that there's, depending on who you're taught to write, what generation, there are certain things that are kind of common, but they're not significant and they're not a lot of them.

02:05:20 So the police were told, hey, you guys better look somewhere else because we don't see that either parent wrote the note.

02:05:31 Wait, but wait, wait, wait, back up. Cause I thought you said one means you wrote it. Five

02:05:36 means no way. Is it, is it the, and that you, they, then you just said that you were a one

02:05:40 suggesting. Oh, no, I was five. Sorry. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You were five and Patsy was a four

02:05:47 and a half. Okay. So you were both on exactly the scale of, you didn't write it or there's

02:05:52 virtually no chance that you wrote it. Right. Yes. Okay. Got it. Um, so what about, what about

02:05:58 since then, the psychologist, the psychiatrist, I'm sure you've had people like that, FBI profilers

02:06:03 who have read it. And were they able to glean any sort of a profile from it? Yeah. John Douglas,

02:06:10 who started the whole FBI profiling program and is pretty much considered the top of the heap as

02:06:17 far as that skill set and accomplishments. We spent a couple, three days with him early on.

02:06:24 because our attorneys asked him to to spend some time with us and um but his conclusion was

02:06:33 and prediction is it's a young person fascinated by movies you know probably in his 20s maybe early

02:06:39 30s um and he said this was not about john bonnet this was directed at you to hurt you john

02:06:47 somebody is either extremely angry with you or extremely jealous of you and this was done to

02:06:57 hurt you and i thought well i couldn't possibly know anybody that i've made angry that to that

02:07:04 degree and he said you may not even know who they are they've either observed you in the newspaper

02:07:11 or, you know, whatever, and developed this either anger or jealousy at me.

02:07:20 That was John's conclusion, and I think he's right.

02:07:25 Now, Lou Smith, who was the legendary detective from Colorado out of retirement,

02:07:30 was put on this case by the district attorney early on.

02:07:35 And Lou felt it was a kidnapping going wrong.

02:07:38 And I always thought, well, those are two opposite theories.

02:07:44 And Lou is a legendary detective in Colorado.

02:07:48 And somebody pointed out to me recently that, well, that could be, those two are not incompatible, those two theories.

02:07:54 I thought, well, you're right.

02:07:56 They're not.

02:07:57 Yeah.

02:07:58 That's somebody who wanted to hurt you went in there to kidnap your child.

02:08:02 Right.

02:08:02 Right. And that thought hadn't occurred to me in a good while because I thought, well, here you got two top experts saying, giving me two different theories, but they're compatible.

02:08:15 Yeah, they're compatible.

02:08:16 But what about, I mean, the thing about just random intruder coming in that doesn't make sense, if you look at the note, is how do they know?

02:08:23 You are from Atlanta originally, no?

02:08:25 Like you are from the South. 0.84

02:08:27 Right.

02:08:27 The 118,000, how would they know your bonus?

02:08:30 I mean, it has to be somebody who, and I realize there's a chance they just randomly picked the number that was your bonus, but it seems like a small chance.

02:08:37 It seems much more likely somebody who worked at your company or had reason to know that that was your number.

02:08:42 Well, there's two ways I guess they could have known that.

02:08:45 They worked in our company.

02:08:47 That amount was on my paycheck stub since the previous January as a deferred compensation bonus.

02:08:59 So those, you know, we weren't real careful with that kind of stuff in our house.

02:09:03 We could have been tucked in a drawer or somebody that knew that from some connection inside of our company.

02:09:15 To me, that's the logical explanation.

02:09:21 The only other explanation I heard was Psalm 118 is right in the middle of the Bible.

02:09:28 It references the stone. Stone becomes the cornerstone is one of the passages.

02:09:36 And, you know, could that be the SPTC? And it's that's possible as well.

02:09:40 One of the suspects that we are interested in signed his high school yearbook.

02:09:48 Stone becomes his cornerstone. So.

02:09:51 Whoa.

02:09:54 It's a very bizarre note.

02:09:55 What did they say, John? What did they say about, and I want to know, did they go and speak to everybody at your company? That'd be the first place I would start as a detective, right? Somebody knows what he made. Somebody doesn't like him. They've made that clear. They know where his roots are. They know you're from the South. So let's talk to everybody from the company.

02:10:17 well that kind of stuff just wasn't done they should have done a neighborhood survey that

02:10:22 morning gone around the houses to the neighborhood and you know if you see anything unusual what have

02:10:27 you you know they didn't do any of that so they basically in fact the detective the only detective

02:10:33 so-called that was there that morning concluded that i was the killer because quote she saw it

02:10:40 in my eyes. And that became the conclusion before they had even looked at evidence or

02:10:47 investigated anything. This is Linda Arndt. Yeah. And we were just dealing with incompetence.

02:10:58 Well, in Linda's case, not just incompetence, but maybe a desire to cover up her incompetence, 1.00

02:11:04 because isn't she the one who said, search the house after seven hours of sitting there? 1.00

02:11:09 She didn't search the house.

02:11:11 The foot patrolman who got there per the 911 call earlier, he didn't search the house adequately.

02:11:16 She didn't do it.

02:11:18 And that's the reason you were put in the position of finding your own little girl.

02:11:22 Well, that's exactly right.

02:11:24 In fact, to show you what kind of environment she was working in, the chief of police said, we didn't treat this as a crime scene because it was a kidnapping.

02:11:32 And you shake your head and think, where do these people come from?

02:11:37 uh horrifying i mean just because at that point they didn't know that it was a homicide

02:11:42 you got a six-year-old girl has been taken from her bed in the middle of the night that's

02:11:46 five alarm fire yeah exactly if that's not a crime i don't know what it is

02:11:51 but that was the quote but because i have i could give you a dozen quotes that were just

02:11:57 astounding from the police department over the years but that was really the first one that was

02:12:02 just uh unbelievable what what about the misspellings and the improper grammar and the

02:12:12 use of the word attache which is not really a thing we say in america um it can mean either

02:12:18 you know diplomatic assistant or it can mean bag in the way they're using it here but it's a bizarre

02:12:23 they said that we're a small foreign faction just for people who think you know forgive me again for

02:12:28 raising your son. He too was ruled out, as I understand it, by the DNA in 2008.

02:12:32 But this is not the writing of a nine-year-old. We're a small foreign faction. You got to use

02:12:38 your head. But anyway, these misspellings and the improper grammar throughout tells us something.

02:12:44 It could be used intentionally, but this doesn't sound like a very well-educated person.

02:12:51 No. I got a letter. We had a lot of people trying to help, and I got a letter from a teacher of

02:12:58 She taught English to non-English speaking people, and she said the misspellings in this are typical of a Hispanic person migrating to English based on her experience teaching them to read and write English and speak English.

02:13:20 And I thought that was pretty interesting and possibly could explain that.

02:13:25 And, you know, we were a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin and or at that time, just Lockheed.

02:13:33 You know, I take that. You'll see. Well, anyway, Lockheed Martin bought Lockheed sometime in there.

02:13:37 But we had to they required us to put a sign on the front of our building, which is downtown Boulder, a Lockheed Martin Corporation.

02:13:45 And at the time, I thought that's like waving a red flag in front of a bull.

02:13:51 Boulder's an ultra-liberal place.

02:13:56 And to put a, I'm sure in their minds, a manufacturer of weapons sign in downtown Boulder was just inviting trouble.

02:14:10 It made me nervous, frankly, to do that at the time.

02:14:13 Right, and they referenced your company.

02:14:15 We do respect your business, spelled wrong, spelled B-U-S-S-I, a double S, S-S-I-N-E-S-S, but not the country that it serves.

02:14:25 So interesting.

02:14:26 They clearly, they're referencing something about what you do.

02:14:32 Yeah, that was bizarre as well.

02:14:35 And I start, you know, I, of course, trying to think who this possibly could have been.

02:14:39 And I wondered at times whether this was kind of an amateur terrorist group or person that fantasized some things.

02:14:54 I'm sure you've got to consider everything.

02:14:56 I mean, the guy, you know, the Unabomber, he used to write about himself as we and suggest it was some sort of international thing.

02:15:05 Like he wanted to make himself sound bigger and more important than just an I.

02:15:08 And this guy slips into the first person later in the ransom note.

02:15:13 But, yeah, it wouldn't be unusual for an individual to try to make themselves sound bigger, more nefarious in this way.

02:15:19 Yeah, very true.

02:15:20 Now, you know, I really do subscribe to John Douglas's theory that this was somebody that wanted to hurt me.

02:15:28 And that's a tough burden to carry.

02:15:33 But, frankly, John said you may not even know him.

02:15:36 So, you know, we'd been in the paper a few weeks before having hit, for us, a significant sales goal and our marketing people wanted to put it in the paper.

02:15:46 And I sort of had this gut feeling that that's not really a good idea, but I wanted our people to be proud of their company.

02:15:53 And so we did it.

02:15:57 And that could have targeted me because I had a picture of me in quotes and stuff in the paper.

02:16:06 That could have been a you never know how you're affecting a sick mind who's going to transfer on to you.

02:16:13 Who knows? Yeah, that's that's the problem.

02:16:16 We had people, you know, we we hired two detectives to to work this early on because we knew the police weren't capable of it.

02:16:25 And in fact, we tried very hard early days to get the case moved somewhere else to another jurisdiction.

02:16:30 They could put it in the sheriff's department's office, which is a competent organization.

02:16:34 there was at the time, and had dual authority over it.

02:16:37 We could have very easily had a sheriff's officer come to our home that morning

02:16:42 and sit at the city police department, and that was a tragic first mistake,

02:16:48 I guess, or luck of the draw, that that's what happened.

02:16:52 And so, you know, it just wasn't ever properly handled and to this day is still not properly handled.

02:17:07 Well, and the theory that it's someone who didn't like you, because, of course, the other theory is that it's some pedophile, right?

02:17:13 That's what a lot of people believe it's a little girl.

02:17:15 Well, those are the two conflicting, and I thought at the time, conflicting theories between John Douglas and Lou Smith.

02:17:23 Well, I thought we were talking about someone who knew you versus random intruder, but random intruder doesn't necessarily mean pedophile there to get your little girl, right?

02:17:33 Because that's one of the questions in the case about whether she was the victim of somebody who was a pedophile or whether it was somebody who just hurt her, right?

02:17:43 Because it was unclear, forgive me for the details, John, but it was unclear whether she was sexually penetrated by a man.

02:17:53 Well, first of all, this was not a random intruder.

02:17:57 This is somebody who had watched us, knew what our patterns were, knew we were going to be out that evening, left the note on the back stairway, which is the stairway we always used, but would not have been obvious to somebody that just came into the house.

02:18:15 We had a front stairway, but we never used that.

02:18:19 And so why did they leave the ransomware on the back stairway?

02:18:22 How did they know that's where we would be coming down in the morning?

02:18:27 Um, so it would have, I mean, there's some elements where somebody could have come into our home. It was not a hard home to break into and regret to say, um, and really understood where things were and, or they, they could have been in the house for hours before, uh, we got home.

02:18:48 But are we sure that the person, that sexual gratification was a goal of the killer?

02:18:55 I don't know.

02:18:56 I think, you know, there's another case seven months later that happened in the neighborhood.

02:19:03 Yes, I know about Amy, and I want to talk to you about Amy.

02:19:06 Forgive me for interrupting you because I want to go down this line, but I want to give us the proper time.

02:19:10 And I got to squeeze in a quick commercial break.

02:19:12 So let me pause you right there, John Ramsey, and we'll come right back.

02:19:15 So much more to discuss.

02:19:16 It's an honor to have you here.

02:19:18 I know it's not easy to discuss even 26 years later.

02:19:21 Even just losing any loved one is tough to discuss,

02:19:24 and certainly under these circumstances, even harder.

02:19:27 Stand by, John.

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02:20:02 A couple of things we're going to discuss when John comes back on in a minute,

02:20:06 and that is on the ransom note, do the police believe it was written before or after the murder?

02:20:12 That's one of the big questions, because I know the police had said originally,

02:20:15 not even a serial killer would have the steadiness to write a note like this after a murder.

02:20:20 So what do they think? And by the way, a draft of this had been found. He had started, the killer

02:20:25 had started on a legal pad. It was found in the Ramsey house by saying, dear Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey,

02:20:31 and then started over addressing it just to Mr. Ramsey. And then you heard what followed. So

02:20:36 there are a lot of questions still about this note and what can be gleaned from it.

02:20:39 before we get to all that, I'm going to play you Patsy Ramsey's describing of the ransom note in a

02:20:45 1997 interview with CNN. I didn't, I couldn't read the whole thing. I, I just gotten up. We

02:20:56 were on our, it was the day after Christmas and we were going to go visiting and it was

02:21:03 quite early in the morning and I'd gotten dressed and was on my way to the kitchen to make some

02:21:11 coffee and we have a back staircase from the bedroom areas and I always come down that

02:21:21 staircase and i'm usually the first one down and the note was lying across

02:21:32 the three pages across the run of one of the stair treads and it was kind of dimly lit it was

02:21:43 It was very early in the morning, and I started to read it, and it was addressed to John.

02:21:51 It said, Mr. Ramsey, and it said, we have your daughter.

02:22:04 And I, you know, it just wasn't registering, and I may have gotten through another sentence.

02:22:12 It's like, we have your daughter, and I don't know if I got any further than that.

02:22:22 And that's when she called 911.

02:22:26 The whole thing is just, I mean, what was on the note?

02:22:30 Were there fingerprints?

02:22:32 Was there touch DNA of any kind?

02:22:34 John Ramsey's been saying, even if you didn't find fingerprints, there might have been DNA.

02:22:39 even if the person had worn gloves, there might've been DNA on that letter. Has it been tested? If

02:22:46 not, why not? Apparently there are several crime scene items that have not been tested for DNA,

02:22:51 even in 2022, when touch DNA is out there, DNA has evolved so much. We're going to discuss all

02:22:56 of that with John, plus the neighbor, Amy, a young girl who was sexually assaulted by a man

02:23:01 in her bedroom in the middle of the night, just months after John Benet. Wait until you hear what

02:23:06 the police did in that case. So John, on the subject of the, the ransom note, before we leave

02:23:16 that, there had been a draft addressed to both of you. Then the final was just you. It was written

02:23:21 on a legal pad found in your home. And that's the question, whether, was it, were there any

02:23:27 fingerprints? Has it been tested for DNA? Do you know where it came from in the house? And was that

02:23:32 area tested for fingerprints etc at the time i don't know uh i think the my feeling was that the

02:23:41 forensics people that came in did a pretty good job in finding uh a palm print that was unidentified

02:23:49 trying to track to anybody uh um footprints that don't match any shoes of ours in the house

02:23:58 things like that but whether this stuff was ever tested or not i don't know we know there's

02:24:03 five or six maybe seven items that were originally taken from the crime scene

02:24:08 sent to an outside lab for testing along with others and five or six of those items were not

02:24:15 tested they were returned to the police i don't know why the police didn't want to pay for it

02:24:21 because back then it was expensive to do dna testing uh but we know there's five or six items

02:24:26 had never been tested. And so what else wasn't? I do know that the forensic people spent about,

02:24:33 the detectives spent a couple hours in the house and then told the DA, well, we're finished. And

02:24:37 he said, you can't be finished. Get back in there. So they took a very cursory look at it

02:24:45 and then were ordered back in by the DA. A forensics investigator experienced one told me

02:24:53 They'll spend three days on a murder site looking for evidence, not two hours.

02:25:01 So God only knows what was compromised.

02:25:04 And I know Linda Arndt, the detective, also didn't secure the scene.

02:25:08 She let your friends come over and come into the house.

02:25:10 She sent you to look around, as we discussed.

02:25:12 And then after you found JonBenet, as I understand it, she actually moved JonBenet's body again from one spot to closer by the Christmas tree, which just should never be done.

02:25:23 when you're dealing with a homicide victim.

02:25:25 Right.

02:25:26 No, I, yeah, she just was way in over her head.

02:25:30 And, you know, I was criticized for disturbing the crime scene

02:25:35 when I found John May by picking her up and holding her.

02:25:39 And what parent wouldn't do that?

02:25:41 It's just insane to be, to that kind of level of misunderstanding

02:25:49 of a parent's love for a child.

02:25:51 No, it's not possible not to pick up your child and hold her.

02:25:55 And at that point, you didn't know whether she was gone.

02:25:59 Can we spend a minute on that?

02:26:01 Because we talked about how Linda said, okay, search the house.

02:26:03 It's one o'clock now in the afternoon.

02:26:06 No one's called, you know, no kidnapper.

02:26:07 And I understand the note said, well, I'll call tomorrow.

02:26:10 So it was unclear whether they meant the 26th or the 27th.

02:26:13 You're sitting there and you're waiting and nothing's happening.

02:26:16 And now it's one o'clock in the afternoon.

02:26:17 She says, go look around the house.

02:26:20 And the people who want to say, oh, look at John, one of the things they say is, oh, he went right to the room.

02:26:26 He went to the basement and he went right to, there's a storage room off the basement where she was found.

02:26:31 Is that true?

02:26:32 Like, what did you do after Linda said, go search the house?

02:26:35 Well, a friend of mine that was there to help console us, she said for both of us to go search the house.

02:26:47 And so we went to the basement, which to me was a logical place to start.

02:26:51 Third floor, you couldn't get into the third floor from outside.

02:26:55 So we went to the basement and went into what we call the train room where the kids had a train set up.

02:27:03 And there was an open window and a suitcase propped up under the window as if it were to be a step.

02:27:11 And I told my friend, I said, that suitcase should not be there.

02:27:14 That's way out of place.

02:27:15 We wouldn't have put it there.

02:27:17 And so we, then I went into the, the only other room in that basement was this, we called it a wine cellar, but it was an old coal cellar, dark, one door going into it, no entrances from the outside.

02:27:37 And I opened the door and, of course, immediately found JonBenet.

02:27:40 And, you know, I don't, we heard Lindar say on the media or on an interview that, well, I told him to go from top to bottom and he started out in the bottom.

02:27:52 Why did he do that?

02:27:55 This just was logical to me, but, yeah, it.

02:28:03 Do you remember that moment?

02:28:04 I mean, do you remember, was it, did it switch from concern to panic?

02:28:09 Do you remember emotionally what that happened?

02:28:11 It was a switch from panic, and it was a relief.

02:28:17 Thank God I found my child.

02:28:19 And that was the immediate feeling that I'd found her.

02:28:25 She's safe.

02:28:29 But it fairly quickly concluded that she wasn't all right.

02:28:35 and um so i just picked her up and ran carried her screaming actually i was screaming uh

02:28:43 uh to uh upstairs to take her to help i mean i don't know it's just a instinctive reaction i

02:28:51 guess but uh and we laid her down on the floor of the uh living room in front of the christmas

02:28:58 And Linda Art had looked for a pulse and looked up at me and said, no, she's gone.

02:29:08 And I guess it was that moment when she saw in my eyes that I was a killer.

02:29:15 So, and then we rush her out of the house pretty quickly.

02:29:21 And we never went back in that home.

02:29:25 That was the last time we were in that home.

02:29:28 John, can I ask you, because I know that one of the things that JonBenet was wearing was her cross, her cross necklace, and according to what I read, and we heard Patsy praying to Jesus, you know, to help her, help her, and I wondered if you were a family of faith and if, you know, what this did to that, right, if you were able to carry that on.

02:29:52 Well, that's a good question. And I really had to face that issue when my oldest daughter was killed in a car accident about four years before. And the first words that came out of my mouth was, there is no God. There is no God. How could a loving God let this happen to a beautiful young child? She was 20, 21.

02:30:12 And but it really forced me to think about my faith.

02:30:18 And I spent I had a friend came alongside of me and said, I'm going to help you study the Bible.

02:30:22 And and he was a real mentor to me in that struggle to to understand why why this would happen.

02:30:33 You know, I. I was a Christian, I had joined the club, you know, if you're in the club,

02:30:38 that you shouldn't be subject to harm or tragedy.

02:30:43 And, of course, that's not at all what the Bible says.

02:30:45 You're going to get persecuted.

02:30:49 But I struggled with that for really for three or four years.

02:30:53 Is there an afterlife?

02:30:56 Will I see Beth, my oldest daughter, again?

02:30:59 It was tough for three or four years.

02:31:03 But I'd kind of wrestled that down to, yeah, there is more to life than just what we see here.

02:31:08 And so when we lost JonBenet, I didn't have to go through that struggle.

02:31:17 You know, I'd already been through, why did God let this happen?

02:31:23 So it was, my faith was not challenged when JonBenet was killed, only because I'd gone through that challenge when I lost my oldest daughter.

02:31:32 Mm-hmm. Then you go through the added pain of being not outright accused by the authorities,

02:31:40 but pretty close. I mean, the DA earlier, before Mary Lacey, the DA said they didn't do it. The

02:31:46 DNA rules them out. Four months after JonBenet died, the DA, Alex Hunter, said Patsy and John

02:31:53 are the focus. They're the focus. Opened up a grand jury proceeding, and the grand jury came

02:31:59 back and said, don't see anything that you're going to be able to pursue as a, you know,

02:32:03 beyond a reasonable doubt. And the DA ultimately had to admit that. But I mean, you're going through

02:32:07 being accused. And then on top of all that, John, you've got the media coverage, right?

02:32:12 Which basically tried to make JonBenet and Patsy into this bizarre daughter, mother team.

02:32:21 You know, she was exploited. She was sexualized. The beauty pageant videos on endless loop, 1.00

02:32:27 an endless loop. So talk about that for a bit and what that was like for you.

02:32:32 Well, you know, the media, of course, jumped on it, but they were being fed information that was misleading, wrong.

02:32:40 And we were told by Mary Lacey several years after she got into her position as the due DA,

02:32:46 she said that was the police strategy that was defined to them by someone, whether it's the FBI or some wacko psychologist.

02:32:53 put intense pressure on the family we know it's one of the two they're in the house either the

02:33:00 father killed her or the mother did one of them will confess eventually if we put enough pressure

02:33:06 on them and and mary lacy the da said that was their strategy to solve the case and so they

02:33:11 released a lot of information misleading information incorrect information to the media

02:33:17 And, of course, the media ran with it, and we were quickly convicted in the court of public opinion.

02:33:27 We didn't know that's exactly what was happening, but it was confirmed by the DA.

02:33:32 And the problem for the police was they did a great job of convicting us in the court of public opinion with the assistance of the media, but they couldn't charge us.

02:33:41 We would have – it had been a bloodbath for them in a court because the evidence was quite contradictory to that as they got into looking at the evidence because they'd made their conclusion early on the day or the day after of John Bonet's murder and then went about, let's find the evidence to prove it.

02:34:01 Well, the evidence they were finding was contradicted to that conclusion.

02:34:07 And that became a problem for him because, you know, the media and the public was, you know, screaming, hey, arrest him, you know, charge him.

02:34:16 And they couldn't.

02:34:19 Well, and meanwhile, in the interviews, you held firm.

02:34:23 I mean, Patsy, they got all up in her grill.

02:34:26 And when I watch her, because I've spent a lot of time with this guy's name is Phil Houston.

02:34:31 He invented the CIA's deception detection technique that they still use today.

02:34:35 It was there 25 years.

02:34:36 There's all sorts of ways you can tell somebody's lying.

02:34:38 And they're pretty foolproof if you know how to apply them.

02:34:42 And one of the things is just sort of no BS.

02:34:45 You don't do convincing behavior.

02:34:47 You're just hardcore.

02:34:48 No, no, you know, stop.

02:34:51 Like, I mean, I'm sure if I showed him the Patsy Ramsey tapes with the cops,

02:34:56 he'd be like, why did they waste so much time with her?

02:34:59 Right?

02:34:59 Like, it was pretty obvious.

02:35:00 and I'll just show some to the audience, a clip.

02:35:03 This is from 1998, two years later,

02:35:06 police interview with Patsy.

02:35:07 They're telling her falsely

02:35:08 that they have trace evidence linking her or you

02:35:11 to the murder.

02:35:13 Suggesting, if I had that, how would you react?

02:35:16 Here it is, top five.

02:35:18 If I told you right now that we have trace evidence

02:35:21 that appears to link you to the death of JonBenet,

02:35:26 what would you tell me?

02:35:27 that is totally impossible

02:35:31 totally impossible

02:35:34 how is it

02:35:35 do a retest

02:35:36 I did not kill my child

02:35:38 I didn't have

02:35:40 a thing to do with it

02:35:43 and I'm not talking

02:35:47 you know somebody's guess

02:35:49 or some rumor or some story

02:35:51 I don't care what you're talking about

02:35:53 I'm talking about scientific evidence

02:35:56 I don't give a flying flip how scientific it is. 1.00

02:36:00 Go back to the damn drawing board. 0.99

02:36:02 I didn't do it. 0.99

02:36:04 John Ramsey didn't do it, and we didn't have a clue of anybody who did do it.

02:36:10 My life has been hell from that day forward,

02:36:14 and I want nothing more than to find out who was responsible for this.

02:36:20 Okay?

02:36:21 I mean, I want to work with you, not against you.

02:36:25 Okay?

02:36:25 this child was the most precious thing in my life and i can't stand the thought thinking

02:36:33 somebody's out here walking on the street god knows that we're doing again to some other child 0.97

02:36:39 you know quit screwing around asking me about things that are ridiculous and let's find the 0.86

02:36:45 person that did this wow the frustration it's palpable because it's like as she points out 0.97

02:36:55 he could be hurting other children all right yes and probably did there's a high probability i'm

02:37:02 told that that creature kind of creature doesn't just stop with one maybe has done it before

02:37:09 the um this is right around the time where lou smith walked out the the detective the retired

02:37:18 detective who they brought in because they couldn't solve the case and he solved every

02:37:22 single case he ever worked on except for this one. They brought him in, take fresh eyes. What do you

02:37:27 think? And Lou took his fresh eyes and looked at everything and said, they didn't do it. This is

02:37:33 not, Patsy and Ramsey are, that's the wrong tree to bark up. And they didn't listen to him to the

02:37:39 point where he quit. He called this a travesty and said, they were trying to railroad you. It's

02:37:46 crazy, John, that that wasn't the end of the story. It would take another 10 years for Mary

02:37:50 Lacey to get that DNA test and say, just stop. Stop with the obsessive focus on the Ramseys. 1.00

02:37:56 Now, that's true. Lou told me, you know, after he resigned and we were able to talk to him freely

02:38:02 that he'd looked at the case for several months and all the evidence and said, no,

02:38:11 police are going the wrong direction. So he said he went to their war room where they were

02:38:15 strategizing this assault, frankly, and said, you know, you guys have looked at this case

02:38:20 longer than I have, but, you know, I've looked at it, and have you ever thought maybe you're

02:38:24 going the wrong direction? And he said it was like pouring a bucket of water on the participants.

02:38:30 They wouldn't talk to him after that. They banned him from their war room and just wouldn't listen.

02:38:37 And that's what he said. I'm not going to be part of persecuting an innocent person and resign

02:38:43 and continue to work on the case for the rest of his life,

02:38:47 which I was very grateful for.

02:38:49 And he was an amazing fellow.

02:38:52 Well, I think it was a 60 Minutes Australia piece I watched.

02:38:59 They had old tapes of him.

02:39:01 And he went to the crime scene, to your old house,

02:39:04 and he went to that window that was broken in your basement

02:39:07 because one of the theories was nobody got in through that window.

02:39:11 That was a window you had broken not long before

02:39:14 because you had locked yourself out of the house

02:39:15 and you were trying to get in.

02:39:16 That's true, yeah.

02:39:17 So people were saying, 0.99

02:39:19 somebody said only a midget could get through,

02:39:21 a little person could get through that window. 0.92

02:39:24 That wasn't it.

02:39:25 This is back on,

02:39:26 it had to be one of the mother,

02:39:27 the mother of the father.

02:39:28 And he goes right through it.

02:39:30 The video shows him going right through it.

02:39:33 Was that something, by the way, I meant to ask you,

02:39:35 did you go through it

02:39:35 when you had locked yourself out?

02:39:36 Had you gone through that window to get in?

02:39:38 Yes, I had.

02:39:40 So of course you could.

02:39:41 Locked myself out one, I don't know, one day and nobody was home.

02:39:46 And so that was the way I got into the house so I could unlock the door.

02:39:50 I didn't have a key.

02:39:52 You know, the person that said, no, it's impossible for somebody to get through that window was the detective investigating the case.

02:40:00 It was purely misleading, purely false information, but it biased everybody, the public, the media towards us once more.

02:40:09 That was the whole strategy.

02:40:11 and so that was confirmed by the district attorney to us that that was that was her

02:40:16 whole strategy and she also said their only evidence that they would present and it's really

02:40:22 not evidence that led them to think that we were guilty was we did not act right that morning

02:40:28 and that's that's the allegation was that patsy was distraught but that you didn't cry and one

02:40:36 of the cops on the scene said i never saw them console each other and i in my presence i never

02:40:42 saw them hold one another yeah well look they've watched too much uh crime scenes movie uh or tv

02:40:49 i think when i lost my first daughter beth i got a phone call from my brother and he said john

02:40:57 beth is gone she's killed and i there's nothing i could do i couldn't get her to the best doctors

02:41:03 I couldn't rush to her side.

02:41:05 It was over.

02:41:07 That morning with JonBenet, it wasn't over yet.

02:41:11 I could get her back if I kept my wits about me and focused on getting her back to whatever I could possibly do.

02:41:20 I didn't – I was focused on getting her back, and I felt I could get her back.

02:41:26 I'd arranged for the ransom money to be available almost immediately.

02:41:30 um one of the again this linda art i think wrote in her report that john

02:41:37 was observed casually going through the mail that morning yeah there was a mail drop and

02:41:44 where the mail came through the house for the front door and i was going through i was looking

02:41:49 for another possible communication from the kidnapper the police should have been doing

02:41:53 that i was not casually going through the mail but that was her interpretation of that

02:41:57 again, biased perspective by someone who has never been in that situation to evaluate whether

02:42:08 somebody's acting right or not. So that was my focus. You know, Patsy was rough. She was in bad

02:42:16 shape. She had a bowl in front of her in case she threw up. But I was focused 100% on whatever I

02:42:23 could do to get John Manet back. That was my job. Can we talk about two things? We've touched on

02:42:30 the Mary Lacy exoneration of 2008 based on DNA. DNA came along. Thank God they did get some DNA

02:42:36 and preserve it back in 96. DNA has come leaps and bounds since then, and it had to some extent

02:42:41 by 2008. So she said, we've tested it and we've identified the perpetrator as one, possibly two

02:42:49 unidentified males. So no hit in the database, but they could tell it was a male and they could

02:42:56 tell it was one, possibly two. And that's when she said, it's not the Ramseys. Can I just say

02:43:01 for the record, did that include Burke? Yeah, it did. And Burke was exonerated early on.

02:43:08 He had to be interviewed by the child psychologists that were associated with the

02:43:14 police department, they said, absolutely no way. Burke was not faultless. He was a nine-year-old,

02:43:20 60-pound child. Because CBS would do a piece really pointing the finger at Burke in 2016,

02:43:27 and he sued over it, and they settled. I don't know what they settled for, but

02:43:32 in later years, armchair detective wannabes have decided maybe it was him, maybe it was the nine-year-old,

02:43:40 But the Mary Lacey conclusion was it was not Burke.

02:43:46 Right.

02:43:46 And that was a conclusion that even the police came to very early on.

02:43:50 And they ruled out that possibility.

02:43:53 Yeah.

02:43:53 In fact, they offered to support us in this suit against CBS if we needed their help.

02:43:59 Wow. 0.91

02:44:00 To discount that ridiculous accusation. 0.97

02:44:04 So he went on Dr. Phil not long after that. 0.86

02:44:08 And then it just stirred up more.

02:44:10 People are like, he wasn't acting right.

02:44:12 I'm going to play a soundbite.

02:44:13 I'd love to get your thoughts.

02:44:14 I really don't know.

02:44:15 I don't know how people sort of fly into the case.

02:44:18 You've been living it in the worst way for 26 years.

02:44:21 So put this in perspective for us.

02:44:22 This is Burke on Dr. Phil in 2016.

02:44:25 A police officer comes in your room, which I assume is the first time in your entire life that a police officer has come in your room with a flashlight looking around, and you still just stay in bed.

02:44:37 To be fair, I didn't know it was a police officer.

02:44:40 It was just kind of...

02:44:41 But somebody comes in your room with a flashlight,

02:44:43 and you never get up and say, what is going on here?

02:44:47 I guess I kind of like to avoid conflict, or I'm...

02:44:53 I don't know, I guess I just felt safer there.

02:44:57 Were you curious?

02:44:59 I'm not the worry type.

02:45:01 I'm not the...

02:45:02 I guess part of me doesn't want to know what's going on.

02:45:05 Critics would say you weren't curious because you already knew.

02:45:08 He didn't have to get up and go check because he knew exactly what had happened.

02:45:11 I was scared, I think.

02:45:13 I mean, I didn't know if there was some bad guy downstairs

02:45:16 that my dad was chasing off with a gun or, you know, I had no idea.

02:45:22 Let's clear this up once and for all.

02:45:25 Did you do anything to harm your sister, JonBenet?

02:45:30 No.

02:45:31 Did you murder your sister, JonBenet?

02:45:36 No.

02:45:38 And just for the listening audience, Burke's answers are all said through what looks like a smile, which is one of the things his critics would react to.

02:45:46 Go ahead, Jon, your thoughts on it.

02:45:47 Well, Burke smiles all the time.

02:45:50 When he talks, he just naturally smiles.

02:45:53 And those are just laughable criticisms.

02:45:56 This was a violent, vicious, sexually assault case, not something that a nine-year-old could even possibly do. 0.78

02:46:07 So that's just, it's really disgusting that people jump to that kind of a conclusion.

02:46:14 let's let's move on because one of the other storylines as we touched on a minute ago was

02:46:22 the pageants and whether a pedophile was you know she captured the attention of a pedophile

02:46:30 and they do say that some of these pageants can be very attractive to pedophiles in the same way

02:46:37 that you know most pedophiles like if you want to find a pedophile you don't go to like an AARP

02:46:41 meeting. You know, they wind up, they volunteer for the Boy Scouts and they, you know, it's sad,

02:46:46 but it's true. They go to, they go where children are. So that was, forget the blame, right? I'm 0.98

02:46:52 not interested in that storyline, but it is possible that this person was a pedophile and

02:46:57 had seen JonBenet at one of these pageants where she, she was a darling. I mean, she was winning

02:47:01 them. She was absolutely beautiful in every way. So what do you make of that theory? If we're

02:47:06 thinking of the possible intruder maybe they also knew you but a possible intruder pedophile

02:47:11 it's possible uh we patsy had been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer a couple years before this

02:47:19 happened and she was went through some pretty rough chemotherapy treatments and was declared

02:47:25 remission and she didn't say it but i know she was trying to pack a lot of mother-daughter time

02:47:32 into what she maybe felt was a limited lifetime.

02:47:37 And I didn't really care for these little passions. 0.90

02:47:41 I mean, I'm a father, and I had preferred my daughters wear burqas 0.89

02:47:44 until they were about 30.

02:47:46 But that wasn't my choice.

02:47:48 And I thought, well, this is just wonderful mother-daughter time

02:47:53 for Patsy and JonBenet.

02:47:55 They didn't take it seriously.

02:47:59 Yeah, so we got to win.

02:48:00 We got to win. 0.99

02:48:01 In fact, Patsy and I joked, it'd be good if she lost a few of these pageants because she needs to understand you'd always win in life. 0.56

02:48:07 But she just – JonBenet loved doing it.

02:48:10 It was fun. 0.91

02:48:11 She was an extreme extrovert. 1.00

02:48:13 And people accused Patsy of dragging JonBenet to these pageants for her own satisfaction.

02:48:21 That wasn't true at all.

02:48:23 It was just something JonBenet enjoyed doing.

02:48:25 And Patsy wanted her to try a lot of different things, which she did.

02:48:29 But I always thought the people at these little pageants were just moms and grandmoms, and that's quite – there was one indication, of course, we learned later, that, yeah, there was at least one guy there that wasn't there for his daughter based on some questioning that came out and some comments.

02:48:50 but it's possible

02:48:53 and

02:48:53 but I still fall back to

02:48:57 I think John Douglas' theory

02:48:59 and Lou

02:49:00 Smith

02:49:02 it might have targeted

02:49:05 who JonBenet is and she was my daughter

02:49:07 and

02:49:08 she was obviously I'm told

02:49:11 and I never read the autopsy

02:49:13 I just couldn't bring myself to do that

02:49:15 but I of course

02:49:16 hear through the news that

02:49:19 She was sexually assaulted, and that wouldn't have been necessary to hurt me as much as to satisfy this creature's desires.

02:49:38 So this is why, forgive me, and if you don't want to go here, we don't have to, but this is why when I was reading the autopsy report, and we don't have to get into the details, but the one thing they said, it was unclear to me whether they had semen, whether that was one of the DNAs that they were able to retrieve.

02:49:54 And there was a suggestion that maybe there was some sort of, you know, they hurt her in some way sexually that didn't involve, you know, a male body part.

02:50:02 And that's kind of interesting if you think about this being a person whose goal was just to hurt you.

02:50:09 Like maybe it wasn't a pedophile.

02:50:10 Maybe it was somebody who was just trying to hurt her as opposed to sexualize her or do anything sexual with her.

02:50:18 Yeah, that's possible.

02:50:21 And there was no semen found.

02:50:23 um but um not dissimilar to this situation a case similar break-in that happened a few months later

02:50:32 in the same neighborhood with amy yes okay so let's talk about that um there are many people

02:50:41 who lou smith had been taking a hard look at you know the the honest investigator who quit

02:50:46 before he died, unfortunately, in 2010.

02:50:51 And he gave the list of suspects to his daughter,

02:50:54 which is how we know who he's looking at.

02:50:56 And the daughter's a hero.

02:50:57 She's running around getting these people's DNA

02:50:59 without them knowing it.

02:51:00 It's like kind of amazing, this piece of the story.

02:51:02 Yeah, so I'm so grateful for that group.

02:51:05 Before we get to Lou and his daughter

02:51:07 and what happened there,

02:51:08 there's this neighbor and we're calling

02:51:12 and the papers are calling the daughter, Amy.

02:51:15 Her parents don't want her outed. 0.75

02:51:17 Understandable, as a sexual assault victim.

02:51:19 But Amy, I think, was very young, too, 9 or 12, right around there.

02:51:24 I don't, you know, I didn't know a whole lot about that case.

02:51:27 I knew that it happened, but I think she and JonBenet were in a dance class together.

02:51:33 And I think she was a year older than JonBenet, maybe.

02:51:36 Oh, no, actually, my producers are telling me she's 12.

02:51:39 So she's a little, she's a young girl.

02:51:41 And she's at home.

02:51:42 This is months after JonBenet was killed.

02:51:46 Amy is in the same neighborhood.

02:51:49 And she had a man wake her up,

02:51:53 dressed in black in the middle of the night,

02:51:55 who tried to muzzle her so that she couldn't scream 0.91

02:51:59 and sexually assaulted her.

02:52:01 And by the grace of God, her mother heard something.

02:52:05 By the grace of God, truly, her mother heard something

02:52:08 and heard muffled voices coming from her 12-year-old daughter's room in a way that

02:52:12 sounded very unsafe. The mother grabbed pepper spray and went into the room. I mean, it's an 0.99

02:52:18 extraordinary story. And the guy jumped out the second floor window and ran. I mean, it's a

02:52:26 miracle, thank God. Unfortunately, the daughter was molested, but she was not killed. And they

02:52:32 went to the Boulder cops and said, we think this might have had something to do with

02:52:38 JonBenet. Like, it's too close in time. And, you know, here's our evidence. And the data is on

02:52:45 record as saying the Boulder cops could not have cared less, were not interested in pursuing any

02:52:51 link between the two cases. And they really felt like it was because they were just focused on

02:52:56 you to. Right. That's what I've learned. When I first heard about this, I thought, well, that's

02:53:02 a very similar MO for the criminal as it was in our case. He was in the house when they came home

02:53:14 that night. They went to bed and then at three in the morning, he entered the little girl's room.

02:53:20 And I thought, man, that's so similar to what I think happened in our case.

02:53:28 And Chief Beckner, who was the chief of police, was asked, is there a connection?

02:53:35 He said, oh, no, these cases aren't the same because the second little girl wasn't murdered.

02:53:40 And it was one more of the unbelievable statements that came out of the police department.

02:53:45 Of course, it's similar.

02:53:46 And thankfully, she wasn't murdered.

02:53:49 But I'd heard that the father was quoted as saying on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of police performance, I'll give him a minus 5.

02:53:59 So he was very unhappy with them as well, but only because they just kind of blew off the case and went on.

02:54:08 There's a real danger when the police get tunnel vision.

02:54:10 I mean, every defense attorney who's ever represented a murder defendant argues they had tunnel vision on my guy.

02:54:16 My guy didn't do it.

02:54:17 They had tunnel vision on him.

02:54:19 But in some cases, it really is true, and it can result in the wrong person being arrested and put on trial.

02:54:24 Thankfully not in your case, but you were heading down that lane.

02:54:27 Oh, absolutely.

02:54:28 And we weren't worried about this.

02:54:31 I mean, it was distressing, but our attorney said, look, the system's broken.

02:54:35 The police don't know what they're doing.

02:54:38 We cannot promise you you won't be charged with the murder.

02:54:41 We'll promise you one thing with 100% money-back guarantee.

02:54:44 We will destroy him in court.

02:54:46 so don't worry about that but it's not going to be fun but do not worry about being convicted 0.99

02:54:54 we'll kill them because we we knew what the evidence was and what they're trying to to do 0.92

02:54:59 we had one one uh experienced district attorney tell us look i have never ever seen police try 0.99

02:55:07 to explain away unidentified male dna in a sexual assault case never that's the key piece of

02:55:13 evidence. And yet that's what the Boulder police tried to do is that was a real problem for him,

02:55:17 that we had this unidentified male DNA. Yes. That's a massive problem. And it's

02:55:23 the reason you've never been charged. And it's the reason Mary Casey says it wasn't you guys.

02:55:29 On the subject of DNA, I read that the coroner did not examine the body until seven hours

02:55:36 after she was discovered

02:55:39 and that the coroner only spent 10 minutes

02:55:42 at the crime scene,

02:55:44 that's a crazy amount of time.

02:55:47 That's, I mean, seven hours is a long delay.

02:55:50 And I wonder, John, whether they,

02:55:52 have you ever been told

02:55:53 whether they were able to determine the time of death?

02:55:56 I've never been told.

02:55:58 No, I don't know.

02:56:00 Do you have any reason to believe

02:56:01 there's any chance she was alive in the morning,

02:56:04 you know, before,

02:56:05 I hate to go there,

02:56:06 But, like, when the first cop got there, you know, is there any chance she was alive?

02:56:11 I don't think so.

02:56:14 She was strangled to death is my interpretation of what I've heard.

02:56:22 And then struck with an object that created a pretty good crack in her skull, to be totally accurate.

02:56:36 Um, so I don't think she could have possibly been alive, uh, that morning.

02:56:42 Hmm. Okay. But that's another area of DNA that absolutely should be examined because

02:56:50 there was a murder weapon. There was like a rope, they call it a garotte. And, um, it was tied to a

02:56:57 little piece of wood. And so that one of the questions I know, John, people are asking is,

02:57:01 did they ever, one end of the rope had a knot and one had two knots or something? But the

02:57:07 question was, did they ever untie the knots and test in there for DNA? To my knowledge, no.

02:57:15 They had sent a number of samples like that to Bodie Labs, which is an outside DNA lab,

02:57:22 and for some reason chose not to test or not to pay for the tests of five or six items,

02:57:29 one of which was the groat.

02:57:31 And that's one of the things we're asking the governor to make happen is let's get those items tested.

02:57:37 Why weren't they tested?

02:57:38 Was it because it was too expensive?

02:57:41 They wanted to save money?

02:57:42 I don't know.

02:57:45 What do you think is in the box of things that have not been tested?

02:57:49 I don't know.

02:57:52 I don't know.

02:57:53 Now, one journalist that has followed this case almost in the beginning has that information, and I need to get that from her, but I don't know exactly what it is.

02:58:03 She said there's five or six items that have never been tested.

02:58:07 And the police keep referring back to, well, it's just a minute amount of DNA.

02:58:13 We don't want to ruin it.

02:58:14 Well, that just tells me they've either, well, they haven't tested the other items or they've lost them or misplaced them.

02:58:19 For some reason, they always stay away from these other five or six items that have never been tested or checked for DNA evidence.

02:58:27 And that's what we're asking to be done.

02:58:30 And their reluctance to even mention those items makes me think they've either misplaced them or lost them.

02:58:38 Oh, goodness.

02:58:38 Yes. I know. And you're on a push to have the governor remove this case from the Boulder PD and let these sophisticated DNA labs have access to this as opposed to relying on the same cops and detectives that have blown it thus far.

02:58:54 There are really sophisticated DNA labs. Do you have confidence that if they had access to this box, for lack of a better descriptor, they could make whatever progress is possible, they could make it?

02:59:06 And that's really all we're asking the governor to do is push the case either out of the boulder hands or require them to take this evidence to be tested by one of the one or two really cutting edge labs in this country and see what we get.

02:59:26 If we can get some more good DNA evidence, then you take that evidence and put it in the public database and see what you come up with.

02:59:36 This has been done in the last few years with remarkable success.

02:59:43 And really what got me, had me, in my mind, take the gloves off with the police is we had spent some time with the regional FBI folks there in Denver and got a relationship where we said, look, this is what needs to happen.

02:59:59 And in fact, they're the ones that said, look, the government does not have the latest DNA technology.

03:00:05 We'll get it eventually, but we don't have it.

03:00:07 We don't have it at the FBI.

03:00:08 They certainly don't have it at the state level.

03:00:10 And, of course, not even ridiculous to think they have it at the police level.

03:00:14 They told us that we've got to get this DNA testing done by one of these one or two very cutting-edge labs outside.

03:00:23 And then use this new approach of genealogy tracing.

03:00:29 And there's a hope that would move this case along to conclusion.

03:00:33 And they went to the Boulder police and said, we're here to help.

03:00:36 We'd like to make this happen.

03:00:38 We'd help you.

03:00:38 You can take all the credit.

03:00:40 And the Boulder police blew them off, said, no, we don't need your help.

03:00:43 And that was the game's over as far as I'm concerned.

03:00:46 We got to start.

03:00:46 When was that?

03:00:47 How long ago?

03:00:49 Oh, it was probably six months ago. 1.00

03:00:52 Just so people know, I had this woman on my show at NBC, CeCe Moore is her name.

03:00:57 And I know you must have talked to her.

03:00:59 she's the one who was really at the center of this genealogy research and what they do is they take

03:01:06 a piece of dna and we already know that the dna that they found on john benet that does has not

03:01:11 it did not produce a hit in the databases that are available at least as of the last time they

03:01:15 told us so the perpetrator had not gone into the system yet but they don't need that all they need

03:01:22 is for somebody related to the perpetrator

03:01:26 to be in the DNA system.

03:01:28 So if I were in the DNA system,

03:01:31 let's say I wanted to do 23andMe,

03:01:32 let's see what my ancestry is, whatever.

03:01:35 Then if my results got uploaded on this other website

03:01:38 that CC Moore uses,

03:01:39 that a lot of people who upload the DNA results use,

03:01:42 because you get more information from it,

03:01:43 it's not 23andMe, it's something related.

03:01:46 So let's say they're sitting there,

03:01:47 she can access them.

03:01:48 She can see a lot of things on there.

03:01:51 And let's say I have a relative who commits a crime.

03:01:55 That relative's DNA was not going to pop up.

03:01:57 Like maybe they committed a crime,

03:01:59 but the crime scene, they didn't see him

03:02:01 because he hadn't been arrested yet.

03:02:03 But mine will.

03:02:05 And this is what CeCe Moore, she's like, 0.99

03:02:07 all I can tell you is that Megyn Kelly 0.71

03:02:09 is related to this killer.

03:02:10 And so I'm going to build this big family tree

03:02:13 around Megyn Kelly.

03:02:14 I'm going to figure out who her grandfather,

03:02:15 what great-grandfather, look at her husband's side.

03:02:17 I'm going to look at,

03:02:18 because all this stuff is publicly available.

03:02:19 She looks at their wedding announcements

03:02:20 and birth announcements. 0.96

03:02:21 It's crazy great detective work, and she gets her man.

03:02:26 I mean, CeCe Moore is like, they saw a case a week doing this, and so if we could take

03:02:32 a fresh look at the JonBenet DNA, from that perspective, even if the guy's never gotten

03:02:38 into the system from the last time they tested it, somebody might be in the system that could

03:02:41 lead us to him.

03:02:43 That's right.

03:02:44 The COVID system that the FBI uses, the federal database of criminals or arrested felons,

03:02:51 It's fairly small, and the states can contribute or not to that database.

03:02:57 It takes nine markers out of 15 to be accepted in the database, but it's people that have already been found criminal or at least arrested for felonies, and it depends on the state what that rule is.

03:03:15 But it's not a very big database. And what the public database of the 23andMe, both Jan and I submitted our $35 at our Ancestry to that database.

03:03:31 They find a reasonably close match or something the least of interest, and they do almost a backwards family tree.

03:03:45 And then they find out, hey, here's a relative that lived in Boulder in December 1996, and then they start looking at that guy or that person and get his DNA.

03:03:59 And these remarkable success solutions to these old, old cases have been using that technique.

03:04:06 And most of these people were not on anybody's radar.

03:04:11 They weren't in the COVID or the federal database.

03:04:18 And in fact, the Golden State Killer, which was, I think, the first one found this way, was a 40-year-old case.

03:04:26 And he was a retired cop.

03:04:27 So he wasn't in the criminal database.

03:04:30 Exactly.

03:04:30 But our relative was.

03:04:34 And that's what we're asking the governor to make happen.

03:04:37 I don't care how it happens.

03:04:38 That's what has to happen.

03:04:40 And now what he's saying, John, is, well, he doesn't say anything, as I understand it.

03:04:43 But the Bullard PD, they're like, hey, we have great news.

03:04:47 We're now going to refer this case to the cold case unit.

03:04:51 And the cold case unit, we believe, is going to do better than the other case unit.

03:04:55 Why?

03:04:57 Don't know.

03:04:59 I've never heard of this cold case unit.

03:05:01 They said we're going to refer to them next year.

03:05:03 Well, that could be 12 months from now.

03:05:05 But I guess you say, well, it's no big rush.

03:05:06 It's been 26 years.

03:05:07 What's the hurry?

03:05:09 So it's a huge frustration for us.

03:05:13 Do you believe that's just a, is that just cover?

03:05:15 Is that a CYA?

03:05:16 Yeah, absolutely.

03:05:17 That was put out before I even released the governor's letter, which I only released because he never responded.

03:05:23 I thought that was, I would have at least expected to say, we'll take a look at it.

03:05:28 Or I received your letter.

03:05:30 Still hasn't responded?

03:05:32 No.

03:05:33 Nope.

03:05:34 We're going to follow up with him.

03:05:35 you know i'm not asking him to you know apologize to us uh for the faulty performance of the

03:05:45 colorado justice system i don't i don't want that i just want to do the right thing this is what can

03:05:49 be done you need to do it yeah well we're definitely going to follow up with his office

03:05:55 and find out what what is his response and we'll stay on it and we'll annoy him to the point where

03:06:00 he's going to have to respond because i know a lot of people in media who would be very happy to help

03:06:04 me annoy him. I would love that. That's what it's going to take. It's going to take intense public

03:06:09 pressure to do the right thing. None of them will do anything unless forced to by the public. And

03:06:18 the people of Colorado and the country are on your side. They're not on the side of some law

03:06:23 enforcement group that's trying to protect its own backside. So I actually think we can make

03:06:28 progress with this. But first, I have to squeeze in a break. All right, stand by, John. A quick

03:06:33 break. I'll be right back to you after this. John, Dylan Howard put together an extraordinary

03:06:43 podcast called The Killing of JonBenet Ramsey, and it's a 12-part series in which he took a very

03:06:49 deep dive into possible suspects. In the case, I recommend it to everybody, and in part based off

03:06:54 of Lou Smith's work and the work of his daughter. Having listened to all of that and cooperated

03:06:59 with that do you have a chief suspect you know it's easy to to uh say well that's the guy based

03:07:09 on circumstantial evidence in fact that happened fairly early on a person was brought to our

03:07:14 attention by his girlfriend former girlfriend and had some pretty compelling data that would

03:07:21 lead you to believe hey this this is the guy in fact i said that to our attorneys i said whoa this

03:07:25 is the guy and they said no no no don't do a boulder police on us we can't jump to conclusions

03:07:29 it was a reminder that that's exactly what happened and that we got to be careful too and

03:07:35 so there's been four or five people like that that have come up on the radar on our radar

03:07:40 and but it's never been enough evidence and you know private individuals don't do so much

03:07:49 They needed the authority of the government to really dig into stuff.

03:07:54 And so we could only go so far in some of these investigations.

03:07:58 And so these people are still, in my mind, suspects of interest, people of interest.

03:08:05 But, you know.

03:08:07 They need to be investigated.

03:08:08 That's the point.

03:08:09 They need to be investigated.

03:08:10 One of the things Lou Smith suggested was that there was that window broken in the basement.

03:08:16 Saw there was a scuff mark below the window.

03:08:18 There was a suitcase there, which we talked about briefly, that wasn't normally there.

03:08:23 And in it, they found a duvet, a Dr. Seuss book, and fibers of the outfit JonBenet was wearing that night, indicating perhaps the murderer might have tried to kidnap her or remove her from the scene in the suitcase, but it was too big.

03:08:39 But that would explain quite a bit about the crime scene if only we had a talented investigator devoted to following up on these leads.

03:08:48 The point is the governor must get involved.

03:08:50 The governor must remove this case from the Boulder PD.

03:08:53 They must get the fibers and the DNA that is available to a qualified lab and start working with the family instead of against them after all these years.

03:09:00 In the time we have left, how do you do it?

03:09:05 Because I know you said you've forgiven whoever did this to JonBenet.

03:09:10 And, Jon, it just seems like a mountain too high.

03:09:14 How do you do that?

03:09:15 Well, I dealt with forgiveness a lot over the few years after JonBenet was killed.

03:09:21 And I looked back at how I felt and progressed with that challenge.

03:09:26 uh certainly in the first couple years there was no forgiveness in fact uh i've told people if you

03:09:33 put this guy in the same room with me and i know he's the killer he won't come out alive and i i

03:09:39 would be able to do that with no remorse and that's not right but that's how i felt and then i got to

03:09:45 the point where i said okay well forgiveness belongs to the victim and i'm really not the

03:09:50 victim john bonnet was a victim so only she can forgive and that's of course not possible that

03:09:55 kind of got me off the hook. And then I finally realized forgiveness is really a gift you give

03:09:59 yourself. You release that anger and that desire for revenge. It doesn't mean you feel sorry for

03:10:07 the, in our case, the killer. I still want him held to accountability to the extreme level of

03:10:17 our justice system. But I've released that anger, and it still crops up every now and then, but

03:10:27 it's a benefit to myself to release that in the form of forgiveness. Don't want him held.

03:10:37 Staying connected to God helps, I know. And I'm sure this time of year, even all these years later,

03:10:42 is very tough on you.

03:10:44 I know you've remarried.

03:10:45 I'm so happy to hear that.

03:10:47 God bless you, John, and your family.

03:10:50 And I think there's a way of finding a Merry Christmas.

03:10:56 You know, I hope that you've found that way.

03:10:58 And I'll be praying for you this year in particular.

03:11:00 We had a hard time with Christmas for several years.

03:11:03 And finally, I realized you got to remember what Christmas is for.

03:11:07 and that's reassuring in our case

03:11:12 that we know JonBenet is safe

03:11:14 and we'll see her again.

03:11:16 Amen to that.

03:11:17 Take care.

03:11:18 Thank you so much for coming on

03:11:19 and telling your story

03:11:20 and we'll stay on it.

03:11:21 Thank you, Megan.

03:11:22 I really appreciate it.

03:11:23 Wow.

03:11:24 Just keep them in your prayers

03:11:25 and keep their family in your prayers.

03:11:27 That little girl's with her mama now.

03:11:29 For that, we can be thankful.

03:11:33 Craving lunch?

03:11:34 A crispy chicken sandwich

03:11:35 is back at Tim's.

03:11:36 with ingredients that make it more delicious than ever

03:11:43 at participating restaurants in Canada

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The Megyn Kelly Show - June 28, 2026

Amanda Knox and John Ramsey - Megyn Kelly's ＂Double Feature＂ of Fascinating Interviews

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