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

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00:00:30.520 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.

00:00:42.220 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and today's Sunday

00:00:46.220 mega episode. Today we're starting something new, bringing you our MK Confidential five-part

00:00:52.800 series in full each week. Today, all five episodes of our deep dive into the JonBenet

00:00:58.520 Ramsey case covering every angle. You can find new episodes of MK Confidential every night this

00:01:04.960 summer at 9 p.m. Eastern on our podcast feeds and our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash

00:01:10.760 Megan Kelly. Enjoy, and we'll see you Monday. In Colorado, it has all the makings of a classic

00:01:18.020 murder mystery, a ransom note, a dead body, strange twists and turns. For nearly 30 years,

00:01:24.080 The murder of JonBenet Ramsey has haunted America, not just because she was a beautiful six-year-old girl, not just because she was found dead inside her own home the day after Christmas, but because almost every piece of this case seems to point in two directions at once.

00:01:41.180 Was there an intruder or was the family in fob?

00:01:45.200 I did not kill my daughter, JonBenet.

00:01:47.760 What parent would ever strangle their own child?

00:01:50.540 Over the next five episodes, we will go back to the beginning of the JonBenét Ramsey case,

00:01:56.160 and we'll be back every day for the next eight weeks with many more cases.

00:02:00.940 This is true crime like you've never heard it before.

00:02:03.580 This is MK Confidential.

00:02:08.100 There have been suspects, confessions, theories, explosive accusations, and more TV documentaries

00:02:14.460 on JonBenét Ramsey than we can count.

00:02:17.020 but underneath all of that noise is the story of a six-year-old girl whose death became a national

00:02:24.020 obsession to much of america john benet first appeared not as a child but as a pageant image

00:02:30.860 big hair makeup sequined costumes a practice smile beneath the stage lights her mother patsy

00:02:39.620 had been a pageant queen herself miss west virginia and john benet was following in her

00:02:44.760 footsteps. After her death, the videos played over and over on a loop. JonBenet waving from a parade

00:02:52.040 float, JonBenet singing in a sparkling outfit. Those images fascinated the country and in some

00:02:59.260 ways distorted the case right from the start because the pageant girl America saw on TV was

00:03:05.360 only one version of this little girl. She was also a kindergartner, a daughter, a little sister,

00:03:13.160 A six-year-old kid who played with friends and loved to perform.

00:03:16.780 She just had this effervescent personality, just like Patsy.

00:03:20.760 I mean, just, ta-da, here I am, you know?

00:03:23.280 That Christmas, she asked her father for one more turn on her brand new bike.

00:03:27.820 She wanted to keep riding her bike, and I said, well, we'll do it later.

00:03:33.960 And of course, there wasn't a later.

00:03:36.500 Within days of her killing, JonBenet was no longer simply a murdered child.

00:03:40.740 she'd become a symbol. The child beauty queen, the little girl in makeup, the face on every

00:03:47.880 supermarket tabloid and television screen in America. And while the country argued over her

00:03:53.400 parents and her pageants and her family's private life, the most important fact remained unchanged.

00:04:00.380 Someone had killed her. Someone killed this six-year-old child. We know that.

00:04:06.900 This is the story of a murdered child, and the family, the police, the lawyers, and community

00:04:13.200 forever changed by what happened inside that house.

00:04:17.640 She did mean something in this world.

00:04:20.560 I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

00:04:31.660 It's the day after Christmas, December 26th, 1996.

00:04:35.480 It is a clear, chilly morning in Boulder, Colorado, less than four degrees outside.

00:04:42.140 Candy canes line the winding walkway to the Ramsey house at 755 15th Street.

00:04:48.300 It's a large brick Tudor-style home in a well-to-do neighborhood, elegantly decorated for Christmas.

00:04:55.180 John Ramsey is up before dawn, puttering around.

00:04:59.020 He talked about that morning with CNN.

00:05:01.480 We were planning to get up early and fly to Michigan to meet my older kids for like a second Christmas.

00:05:10.440 Our normal routine like that, if we're going to go somewhere, is let the kids stay in bed.

00:05:15.740 And then when we're ready to go, we get them up and then we go.

00:05:19.840 They might stay in their pajamas in the car.

00:05:22.980 The Ramseys' private plane is prepped for the trip to Michigan, loaded with presents.

00:05:28.240 John's a tech entrepreneur and CEO worth $7 million.

00:05:32.240 His company, Access Graphics, just cleared $1 billion in annual profits.

00:05:38.220 John met his wife Patsy in Atlanta back in 1979.

00:05:42.540 They married a year later.

00:05:44.700 He hesitated at first due to their 13-year age gap,

00:05:48.000 but he eventually asked the beauty queen out for a date, and the rest is history.

00:05:53.340 Patsy was a former pageant queen, crowned Miss West Virginia in 1977.

00:05:58.800 Their six-year-old daughter, JonBenet, seems to be following in Patsy's footsteps

00:06:02.880 and is already active in child beauty pageants.

00:06:07.100 Jon had been married before Patsy.

00:06:09.420 He was divorced and brought three kids into their marriage.

00:06:13.020 When JonBenet was born, she had four siblings,

00:06:15.700 two older sisters, Beth and Melinda, and an older brother, Jon Andrew,

00:06:20.860 all from Jon's first marriage.

00:06:23.020 Patsy gave birth to John Benet's older brother, Burke, in 1987.

00:06:28.800 Burke is nine years old at Christmastime, just one month shy of the big double-digit birthday.

00:06:34.680 That night, before bed, Burke asks his dad to help put together one of his new toys.

00:06:40.400 John sits with him, and the two build it together.

00:06:43.600 The Ramsey family had already endured extraordinary loss.

00:06:47.980 John's eldest daughter, Beth, died in a car accident a few years earlier.

00:06:52.600 I spoke with John about this.

00:06:54.780 I got a phone call from my brother and he said, John, Beth is gone.

00:06:59.320 She's killed.

00:07:00.980 And there's nothing I could do.

00:07:02.580 I couldn't get her to the best doctors.

00:07:04.340 I couldn't rush to her side.

00:07:06.360 It was over.

00:07:07.780 More of that conversation as we move deeper into this case.

00:07:11.520 Shortly after Beth's accident, Patsy received a life-threatening diagnosis.

00:07:16.400 She spoke with Barbara Walters about it on ABC back in 2000.

00:07:19.780 I'm a cancer survivor of stage four cancer.

00:07:23.600 John has lost a child in an automobile accident.

00:07:26.780 That completely changes your outlook.

00:07:28.720 When you are standing on the brink of death with a terminal illness,

00:07:32.020 your priorities suddenly line up in a row,

00:07:35.840 and you know exactly what the important things are in life.

00:07:38.460 John elaborated on that when we spoke.

00:07:40.920 Patsy didn't say it, but I know she was trying to pack a lot of mother-daughter time

00:07:46.300 into what she maybe felt was a limited lifetime.

00:07:50.680 Patsy underwent a grueling course of experimental chemotherapy.

00:07:54.720 At a time when few women successfully fought off ovarian cancer,

00:07:59.100 she beat the odds and went into remission.

00:08:02.780 By Christmas of 1996, the Ramseys see themselves as fortunate,

00:08:08.440 healthy again, financially secure, surrounded by family,

00:08:11.920 and preparing for another Christmas celebration in Michigan.

00:08:16.100 That is the life they believed that they were waking up to.

00:08:20.040 But downstairs, on a narrow back staircase near the kitchen,

00:08:24.220 three sheets of lined white legal paper are waiting.

00:08:28.600 Patsy spoke with CNN a week after the murder.

00:08:31.660 It was quite early in the morning, and I'd gotten dressed

00:08:36.300 and was on my way to the kitchen to make some coffee.

00:08:41.120 and we have a back staircase from the bedroom areas and i always come down that staircase

00:08:52.140 and i'm usually the first one down and the note was lying across

00:09:00.380 the three pages across the run of one of the stair treads.

00:09:08.420 And it was kind of dimly lit.

00:09:13.060 It was very early in the morning.

00:09:16.200 And I started to read it, and it was addressed to John.

00:09:21.520 Here's how John told it to me.

00:09:23.520 You know, I was getting ready to get dressed,

00:09:27.920 and she screamed.

00:09:28.960 And I could tell from the scream, it was something was very, very wrong.

00:09:33.420 And I ran down and she had this ransom note.

00:09:38.140 And, you know, it was just an unbelievable thing.

00:09:48.120 The ransom note is incredibly long, one of the longest in the history of kidnapping.

00:09:54.800 Mr. Ramsey, listen carefully with an exclamation point.

00:09:58.720 We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction.

00:10:03.220 We respect your business.

00:10:05.060 Business is misspelled.

00:10:06.880 But not the country that it serves.

00:10:09.480 At this time, we have your daughter in our possession.

00:10:12.560 Also misspelled.

00:10:13.960 She is safe and unharmed.

00:10:15.620 And if you want her to see 1997, you must follow our instructions to the letter.

00:10:21.880 Patsy's reaction was one of sheer panic.

00:10:24.320 I can't remember exactly what the first few lines said, but somewhere it said, we have your daughter.

00:10:34.280 And it clicked, you know, your daughter.

00:10:40.020 And I just bounded back up the steps and threw her door open.

00:10:47.820 And she was not in her bed.

00:10:50.000 The note continues,

00:11:20.000 If we monitor you getting the money early, we might call you early to arrange an earlier delivery of the money, and hence an earlier pickup of your daughter.

00:11:29.120 Any deviation of my instructions will result in the immediate execution of your daughter.

00:11:35.020 You will also be denied her remains for proper burial.

00:11:38.600 The two gentlemen watching over your daughter do not particularly like you, so I advise you not to provoke them.

00:11:45.760 Speaking to anyone about your situation, such as police, FBI, etc., will result in your daughter being beheaded.

00:11:54.300 If we catch you talking to a stray dog, she dies.

00:11:57.660 If you alert bank authorities, she dies.

00:12:00.320 If the money is in any way marked or tampered with, she dies.

00:12:03.460 You will be scanned for electronic devices, and if any are found, she dies.

00:12:08.920 You can try to deceive us, but be warned that we are familiar with law enforcement countermeasures and tactics.

00:12:14.860 You stand a 99% chance of killing your daughter if you try to outsmart us.

00:12:20.420 Follow our instructions and you stand a 100% chance of getting her back.

00:12:25.080 You and your family are under constant scrutiny as well as the authorities.

00:12:29.240 That was the worst moment.

00:12:31.640 It was suddenly realizing that someone had your daughter, your child, and has taken her.

00:12:41.300 And she was gone and we didn't know where she was.

00:12:43.480 and it was dark.

00:12:45.360 It was cold outside.

00:12:47.640 Don't try to grow a brain, John.

00:12:49.600 You are not the only fat cat around,

00:12:51.960 so don't think that killing will be difficult.

00:12:55.020 Don't underestimate us, John.

00:12:57.460 Use that good Southern common sense of yours.

00:13:00.560 It is up to you now, John.

00:13:02.840 The note is signed,

00:13:04.640 Victory!

00:13:05.580 with an exclamation point

00:13:07.080 and then the letters SBTC.

00:13:11.140 Just told Patsy to call the police,

00:13:13.340 call the police. Call 9-1-1. At 5.52 a.m., Patsy calls 9-1-1 from the Ramsey home landline.

00:13:20.020 We have a kidnapping. All right, please. Explain to me what's going on, okay? There's a note left

00:13:25.560 and our daughter's on. Is it saying who took her? What? Is it saying who took her? I don't know.

00:13:31.960 Oh, my God. Please. Patsy? Patsy? Patsy? Patsy?

00:13:43.340 John's heart sank.

00:13:45.420 You have this instinctive, just horrible feeling in your stomach that, you know, where's my child?

00:13:51.780 After hanging up with 911, Patsy calls two couples who are close to the family and asks them to come over.

00:13:59.080 I called our friends that we had had dinner with the night before.

00:14:05.380 And just kind of, you know, John Bannet is missing, you know, can you come over or help, you know?

00:14:11.240 And then I called another couple, close friend of ours, and they came right over.

00:14:19.260 Within minutes of the 911 call, the first Boulder PD officer pulls up in front of the Ramseys.

00:14:24.900 Officer Rick French shuts off his engine in the pre-dawn dark.

00:14:29.360 John and Patsy meet him at the front door and tell him what's happening.

00:14:33.040 They show him the ransom note, which now lays on the wooden floor outside the kitchen.

00:14:37.480 Their son, Burke, is still sleeping upstairs.

00:14:40.440 Officer French later describes Patsy as visibly shaken and frantic, while John seems calm and under control.

00:14:47.780 That morning with JonBenet, it wasn't over yet.

00:14:51.440 I could get her back if I kept my wits about me and focused on getting her back to whatever I could possibly do.

00:15:00.020 I didn't, I was focused on getting her back and I felt I could get her back.

00:15:07.240 Officer French conducts a quick search of the house,

00:15:09.640 looking for a possible exit route the kidnapper might have used.

00:15:13.300 In the basement, he comes to a door secured with a makeshift latch.

00:15:18.060 He stops in front of the door and studies it.

00:15:20.920 He stops, but does not open it.

00:15:23.200 He will later defend that decision by saying he did not think it was a way out of the home.

00:15:29.660 Police ask John and Patsy if John Benet could have just run away from home,

00:15:34.020 but john is adamant she's six years old it is dark and it's freezing cold outside no she did

00:15:41.200 not just run away john and patsy are thinking we need to close the roads we need to deploy road

00:15:47.020 blocks close the airport but they assume the police know what they're doing the ramsey's

00:15:52.260 friends arrive fleet and priscilla white john and barbara fernie the women take the nearly

00:15:58.580 hysterical patsy into the sunroom victim advocates arrive at the house as well bringing

00:16:03.820 bagels and coffee. They all try to help the Ramseys, washing dishes, cleaning countertops,

00:16:10.620 anything to help pass the time while waiting for the kidnappers' promised phone call.

00:16:15.500 John talked about this moment with Barbara Walters back in 2000.

00:16:18.780 People were making toast in the kitchen. And yes, a kidnapping is a crime scene,

00:16:28.420 but we were so focused on getting John Monnet back. That was the task.

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00:17:04.580 An officer orders the home phone line to be tapped and traced.

00:17:08.780 Sergeant Robert Whitson pulls up to the Ramsey house.

00:17:12.320 He parks and quickly reads the ransom note.

00:17:15.020 He thinks about the unusual nature of a child being held for ransom.

00:17:19.460 The first he's heard of this in 22 years on the force.

00:17:23.600 He calls in the FBI.

00:17:25.500 John takes Burke to a nearby friend's house.

00:17:28.000 He phones a banker friend who raises his credit limit to $118,000, the exact amount of the ransom, and they wait.

00:17:37.120 Hours go by, but no word from the kidnappers.

00:17:40.000 If you're with your child and you're at a department store or grocery store and you look around and the child's gone, it's a terrible feeling.

00:17:47.600 I think all parents have experienced that.

00:17:49.660 And that was the feeling we had.

00:17:50.980 And, you know, it went on for till under one in the afternoon.

00:17:57.300 From the road, the Ramseys is kind of a deceiving house.

00:18:01.480 Outside, it doesn't look that big, but inside, it's huge.

00:18:05.380 The house sprawls across more than 6,500 square feet with multiple floors, additions, staircases,

00:18:12.280 narrow hallways and rooms that do not connect in any obvious way.

00:18:16.920 John and Patsy had converted the top floor into their master suite.

00:18:20.720 JonBenet's bedroom is one level below, near Burke's room, and almost across the house from her parents.

00:18:27.760 A sound in the middle of the night would be nearly impossible to hear.

00:18:32.360 Soon, more police arrive, including detectives and a forensics team.

00:18:36.680 They dust the house for fingerprints and search for other clues, but find no obvious signs of a struggle and no clear crime scene.

00:18:44.760 A phone call is made, and police put a canine unit with a tracking dog on standby.

00:18:50.080 the dog is never called to the house sergeant robert whitson goes upstairs and looks in john

00:18:58.280 benet's bedroom it appears largely undisturbed her clothes and toys are there the bed is not made

00:19:05.520 and has clearly been slept in but no john benet he shuts her door has officers seal it with yellow

00:19:12.780 and black crime scene tape and tells john ramsey nobody goes in there the police do not cordon off

00:19:19.840 the rest of the house. Below all the bedrooms lies the main living level, the kitchen, dining areas,

00:19:26.880 and the back spiral staircase the family uses every day. And then there's the basement,

00:19:32.620 a maze of storage rooms, utility spaces, and passages. Burke keeps an electric train set in

00:19:39.460 the basement in what's known as the train room. Nearby is a small windowless storage room the

00:19:44.860 family calls the wine cellar, even though no wine is kept there. This is the room Officer French

00:19:50.600 passed in his early morning search without opening the door. Officers ask for handwriting

00:19:57.940 samples from John and Patsy to compare to the ransom note. John provides two notepads, one with

00:20:04.300 his writing, one with Patsy's. The Boulder PD handwriting expert, Detective Jeff Kithcart,

00:20:10.700 finds something immediately interesting. Behind the obvious sample of Patsy's handwriting,

00:20:17.180 one page of the notepad contains a partial phrase, Mr. and Mrs., followed by a black vertical line.

00:20:26.260 To Kithcart, this line looks very much like the beginnings of an R and like this page is the

00:20:33.000 first draft of the ransom note. Suddenly, it seems the ransom note was written inside the Ramsey

00:20:39.680 home using the family's very own scribble pad the ransom note had promised that the kidnapper or

00:20:46.800 kidnappers would call between 8 and 10 a.m 8 a.m rolls around 8 30 john paces the floor 9 a.m comes

00:20:57.200 and goes the mood in the house becomes increasingly tense 10 a.m and still nothing patsy sits with her

00:21:06.080 her friends in the sunroom. It's now early afternoon. The forensics team and other officers

00:21:25.520 have packed up and left. Detective Linda Arndt finds herself the only law enforcement officer

00:21:30.800 at the house to control seven civilians, John and Patsy, four family friends, and the Ramseys

00:21:36.860 pastor, the Reverend Roll Hoverstock of St. John's Episcopal Church. These people have been in and

00:21:44.520 all over the house. You've got bagels everywhere, orange juice, coffee, people preparing food and

00:21:50.920 drinks throughout the day, cleaning up the place. John paces around the living room and Patsy sits

00:21:56.280 virtually motionless in a chair.

00:21:59.640 Arndt calls for police backup to help control the scene,

00:22:02.820 but no one arrives.

00:22:04.880 She expressed her frustration to ABC in 1999.

00:22:09.220 Both times I was told everybody's in a meeting,

00:22:12.000 they got your message, and that was it.

00:22:17.840 Around 1 p.m., in an effort to keep John occupied,

00:22:21.640 Arndt pulls him and one of his friends aside.

00:22:24.560 She tells them to conduct a top-to-bottom search of the house to see if anything is amiss.

00:22:30.320 We went to the basement, which to me was a logical place to start.

00:22:34.040 Third floor, you couldn't get into the third floor from outside.

00:22:38.240 So we went to the basement and went into what we called the train room, where the kids had a train set up.

00:22:45.560 And there was an open window and a suitcase propped up under the window as if it were to be a step.

00:22:53.000 And I told my friend, I said, that suitcase should not be there.

00:22:56.980 That's way out of place.

00:22:58.420 We wouldn't have put it there.

00:22:59.900 The only other room in that basement was this, we called it a wine cellar, but it was an old coal cellar.

00:23:09.300 Dark, one door going in to do it, no entrances from the outside.

00:23:14.680 And I opened the door and, of course, immediately found JonBenet.

00:23:18.640 John Benet's body lies in a pile, covered with a white blanket.

00:23:23.540 There's duct tape over her mouth.

00:23:25.640 I knew instantly, instantly what I'd found.

00:23:28.260 I'd found my daughter.

00:23:29.540 John pulls the tape off and throws it aside.

00:23:32.360 His friend bolts up the stairs yelling for someone to call 911.

00:23:36.300 John tries to loosen the bindings on John Benet's wrists, but they're tied too tightly.

00:23:41.880 So I just picked her up and carried her screaming.

00:23:46.120 Actually, I was screaming upstairs to take her to help.

00:23:53.220 Detective Arndt hears John scream from the basement and runs to meet him at the top of the stairs.

00:23:58.480 She quickly tells him to put JonBenet's body down.

00:24:01.380 Then she moves it next to the Christmas tree.

00:24:04.580 And he asked if she was dead.

00:24:07.060 And I said, yes, she's dead.

00:24:09.460 John stays close to JonBenet, repeating the phrase, my little angel, my little angel.

00:24:15.820 The Ramsey's pastor sees John Benet's body and begins praying aloud.

00:24:20.800 Patsy heard John scream from the basement and her friends held her back.

00:24:25.120 And I said, what? You know, what is it?

00:24:28.420 And Barbara, my friend, just grabbed me and said, no, just stay. Just stay right here.

00:24:38.180 And I kept saying, what? What? What is it? What is it?

00:24:40.520 And, um, um, and I think, um, we walked into the living room, and she was there, and John said she's gone.

00:25:07.660 Patsy throws her body over JonBenet's.

00:25:10.940 I remember walking in and seeing her lying there in front of the Christmas tree.

00:25:18.120 I knelt down over her and just laid my body on her body and my cheek against her cheek.

00:25:26.780 And it was cold.

00:25:30.180 And Father Ra was there.

00:25:32.480 and um he started saying the last rites i believe and i just kept saying no no you know ask god

00:25:47.020 ask god to raise her detective arndt asks john to call 9-1-1 and then calls it herself

00:25:58.880 She declares a code black.

00:26:01.560 In other words, a murder.

00:26:03.460 The ambulance arrives about 15 minutes later.

00:26:07.000 Law enforcement and the forensics team rush back to the Ramsey house,

00:26:11.100 though moving the body twice presents a unique challenge for evidence collection.

00:26:16.740 Officers hurry to clear the scene so John and Patsy relocate to a friend's house in South Boulder.

00:26:22.160 We rushered out of the house pretty quickly, and we never went back in that home.

00:26:29.460 That was the last time we were in that home.

00:26:32.260 Past Santa Claus in his sleigh and a double row of candy canes,

00:26:36.640 deputy coroners brought the body of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey from her upscale home.

00:26:41.820 Someone inside this house had made a 911 call saying that little JonBenet had been kidnapped.

00:26:47.260 Well, when police got here, they went inside the house,

00:26:49.780 And a short time later, they found the little girl's body.

00:26:53.020 The Boulder County coroner arrives at the Ramsey home around 8 p.m. on December 26th.

00:26:58.380 His examination is short, lasting about 10 minutes.

00:27:02.100 But several things become clear right away.

00:27:05.260 According to the autopsy, whoever killed JonBenet took white olefin cord and tied her wrists together.

00:27:13.560 The person used the same cord to make what's commonly known as a garrote or a ligature.

00:27:19.780 to strangle JonBenet. A garrote is a brutally simple mechanism. It uses a cord around the neck

00:27:25.960 and some kind of handle to twist that cord tighter. The more it's twisted, the more pressure

00:27:31.800 it puts on the neck, cutting off air and blood flow. It's similar to a tourniquet, but with a

00:27:37.280 deadly purpose. Police say the knot on this garrote was tied by someone who understood how a garrote

00:27:43.580 is made, and the fact that her hair and her gold cross necklace are tangled in it suggests that

00:27:50.820 JonBenet was alive when it happened. JonBenet also has very distinct red marks below her throat

00:27:58.360 that match the shape of her own fingers. It looks like she tried to claw on the cord wrapped around

00:28:04.760 her neck as it choked the very life out of her. The cord is wrapped around JonBenet's neck so

00:28:11.420 tightly that it has caught a deep furrow into the skin. It was so deeply embedded in her skin

00:28:17.440 that I didn't see it. The cord is knotted and attached to a broken stick at the back of JonBenet's

00:28:24.000 neck. That broken stick was part of a paintbrush handle from Patsy's art supplies stored in the

00:28:30.640 basement near the room where JonBenet's body was found. The coroner performs JonBenet's full

00:28:36.900 autopsy the following morning at 8 15 a.m he lists two causes of death either strangulation

00:28:44.020 or a blow to the head he can't determine which happened first but either would have killed her

00:28:49.620 just you can't comprehend that anybody would be that evil there are also microscopic fibers of

00:28:57.400 the paintbrush handle from the garotte found in john benet's vagina as well as signs of injury

00:29:03.440 to the interior tissue. This leads investigators to believe JonBenet was sexually assaulted with

00:29:09.820 the paintbrush handle. The tiny blood vessels inside JonBenet's eyelids had burst, and

00:29:16.300 investigators find surprisingly little bleeding from the massive wound to her head. There's an

00:29:21.960 eight-inch crack in her skull attributed to blunt force trauma. Putting those two facts together,

00:29:27.400 some experts believe the strangulation happened first, meaning that by the time she was struck

00:29:32.720 in the head, her heart may have already stopped or was barely pumping. Boulder police find two

00:29:38.860 items that they think might be involved in the head injury. A baseball bat found outside the

00:29:44.600 Ramsey's house and a maglite flashlight found in the kitchen. But there is no physical evidence

00:29:51.080 on either one. No useful fingerprints, no DNA, nothing. It's two weeks after the murder and

00:29:58.640 Boulder Chief of Police Tom Coby holds a town hall to answer reporters' questions about the ongoing investigation.

00:30:05.960 JonBenet's death was the first murder reported in Boulder for 1996, and it happened with just five days left in the year.

00:30:13.520 That lack of homicide experience matters, as there have been major mistakes at the crime scene, mistakes that cannot be undone.

00:30:22.540 Did police search the house after the 911 call, but before the body was found?

00:30:28.100 They did a preliminary search of the house.

00:30:32.280 And remember, this is a very big house.

00:30:34.660 Did they look in the room where John Ramsey said the girl's body was or did they not?

00:30:39.920 It doesn't appear that they got down.

00:30:42.600 That room was down in a part of the basement that doesn't appear that they got to.

00:30:49.800 But one person has zero doubt in her mind about who the killer is.

00:30:55.020 Boulder detective Linda Arndt.

00:30:57.000 And John leaned down opposite me, and his face was just inches from mine.

00:31:06.880 And we had a nonverbal exchange that I will never forget.

00:31:15.160 As we looked at each other, I remember, and I wore a shoulder holster,

00:31:19.820 tucking my gun right next to me

00:31:24.380 and consciously counting I've got 18 bullets

00:31:27.680 because I didn't know if we'd all be alive

00:31:30.160 when people showed up.

00:31:31.700 I knew what happened.

00:31:33.420 You were afraid because you thought

00:31:34.720 the killer was still in the house.

00:31:39.360 I knew it.

00:31:41.740 Absolutely?

00:31:42.900 Absolutely.

00:31:44.640 And she's not the only one.

00:31:47.500 Join me tomorrow for the next chapter in our story

00:31:49.780 on MK Confidential.

00:31:57.500 It is the day after Christmas, 1996,

00:32:01.900 and a veteran FBI agent named Ron Walker

00:32:04.700 stands inside a crime scene that does not add up.

00:32:09.000 Walker works out of the Bureau's Denver field office,

00:32:11.820 one of the only federal agents to set foot

00:32:14.360 inside the Ramsey home the day JonBenet's body is found.

00:32:18.560 Standing inside the house on 15th Street, with the Christmas trees still up and JonBenet's body lying at the foot of it, he considers the events of that morning.

00:32:29.120 The ransom note, a stolen child, the 911 call, the long wait for the kidnapper's call, the father who walks straight down to a basement room and comes back up screaming, his dead child in his arms.

00:32:43.020 The main floor is empty, but Agent Walker can hear the mother sobbing at the rear of the Ramsey house.

00:32:50.120 He keeps walking the rooms.

00:32:52.340 To a man who has worked cases like this many times before, the setup feels very familiar.

00:32:58.560 Virtually every staged murder case that I have seen,

00:33:02.280 the perpetrator manipulates the arrival of friends or other family members

00:33:08.700 who are then put in a situation where they actually discover the body

00:33:13.840 or they are with the perpetrator as the body is discovered.

00:33:17.960 At 5.52 that morning, this was a kidnapping.

00:33:21.360 By 1.05 in the afternoon, it is something else entirely.

00:33:25.900 There is no kidnapper.

00:33:28.160 There is no call.

00:33:30.040 There is a murdered six-year-old girl in the basement of an upscale home

00:33:34.480 and only a handful of people who are inside the house all night.

00:33:38.700 The question is no longer who took JonBenet out of the house on Christmas night.

00:33:44.280 The question is, who was already inside?

00:33:48.440 I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

00:33:54.920 Agent Ron Walker brings the FBI's playbook with him, and the playbook is old and blunt.

00:34:01.720 When a child is killed inside her own home, investigators start with the people who are

00:34:06.460 in the home and work outward.

00:34:08.700 it's not insensitivity it's math fbi data going back decades suggests that the younger a child

00:34:15.740 is when murdered the more likely that a family member is involved from almost the first hours

00:34:22.220 the eyes of the boulder police department turned toward john and patsy ramsey the trouble with

00:34:28.140 that playbook is that a statistic is a starting point not a finish line investigators can lock

00:34:35.260 on to a suspect early and let the theory start bending the evidence to fit instead of the other

00:34:41.260 way around walker's denver bureau offers boulder its full weight its labs its profilers its

00:34:48.780 experience with exactly this kind of murder but boulder police a department that sees roughly

00:34:54.460 one homicide per year passes on the help the most complicated child killing in america will be worked

00:35:02.220 Almost entirely by a department with virtually no experience solving homicides, not by federal

00:35:08.780 investigators. Two detectives hand me their business cards and one says narcotics officer

00:35:13.620 and the other says auto theft. And I bury my head into my hands because I knew at that point

00:35:19.080 we were in a bad spot. Inside the Ramsey house, the family theory does not stay a hypothesis

00:35:25.460 for long. As word spreads among the officers that JonBenet's body has been found in the basement,

00:35:31.980 One cop says the quiet part out loud.

00:35:35.220 Investigative reporter Paula Woodward has ears in the room.

00:35:39.020 She later tells Netflix what it is she heard.

00:35:42.680 There was a group of police investigators that had gathered at the Boulder Police Department that morning.

00:35:48.760 When the word came in that Jomini's body had been found, a person inside that meeting told me that one investigator hissed in kind of an undertone and a whisper to another one.

00:36:03.820 I knew it. They killed their daughter.

00:36:06.200 Internally, John and Patsy are considered suspects.

00:36:09.160 Both of them?

00:36:10.160 Yes.

00:36:11.140 Are considered to have probably been involved in the death of their daughter?

00:36:16.060 Probability, yes.

00:36:17.360 The Boulder PD detective who carries that conviction most strongly is a man named Steve Thomas. Thomas came up through narcotics. He has never worked a homicide in his life, and now he's leading one of the most scrutinized child murders in America.

00:36:34.160 Someone needs to stand up and speak for JonBenet.

00:36:45.760 She can't speak for herself.

00:36:48.880 Over the next 18 months, Detective Thomas builds the most complete case ever assembled against the Ramsey family.

00:36:56.980 Steve Thomas starts with the ransom note on the Ramsey's own notepad

00:37:00.940 and the possible practice line found inside the notebook belonging to Patsy.

00:37:06.780 But he comes to believe the notepad was concealing much more than that.

00:37:12.140 Thomas concludes there was an earlier draft, a first attempt,

00:37:16.620 written on pages that were torn out and carried away, but never recovered.

00:37:21.460 Two runs at a ransom note inside the victim's own house on the family's own paper.

00:37:29.080 To Thomas, that note becomes the single strongest piece of evidence in the entire case,

00:37:34.040 and he thinks it points squarely at the woman of the house, Patsy Ramsey.

00:37:39.900 The ransom note is perplexing.

00:37:42.780 Three pages written with a black felt-tip pen telling John to listen carefully

00:37:48.060 and claiming to represent a small foreign faction.

00:37:52.520 Quote, at this time, we have your daughter in our possession.

00:37:56.640 She is safe and unharmed, and if you want her to see 1997,

00:38:00.820 you must follow our instructions to the letter.

00:38:03.700 Speaking to anyone about your situation, such as police, FBI, etc.,

00:38:07.960 will result in your daughter being beheaded.

00:38:11.120 Don't try to grow a brain, John.

00:38:13.840 Use that good Southern common sense of yours.

00:38:16.340 It never uses the little girl's name.

00:38:20.360 It even pauses in the middle of a kidnapping to compliment the father's company, saying,

00:38:25.980 we respect your business.

00:38:28.320 The Ramseys hire retired FBI profiler John Douglas to investigate the case.

00:38:34.340 He reads the same note and comes to the opposite conclusion.

00:38:39.040 Douglas hears a mind steeped in action movies.

00:38:42.440 The note is filled with paraphrases from Dirty Harry, Speed, and Ransom, Mel Gibson's child

00:38:48.980 kidnapping movie, which was in theaters just a month before JonBenet's death. Douglas says

00:38:54.400 that's a lot of very similar material to be merely coincidental. And it's difficult to imagine Patsy

00:39:01.220 sitting alone in the kitchen writing out a fake ransom note after she's killed her own daughter

00:39:06.920 and coming up with multiple action movie phrases.

00:39:10.960 The profiler raises an unsettling possibility

00:39:14.120 that the note may have been written before JonBenet ever died.

00:39:19.920 Both readings of the note agree on one thing.

00:39:22.860 Whoever wrote those three theatrical pages

00:39:25.240 did it slowly, calmly, comfortably,

00:39:29.220 and they did it inside that house.

00:39:32.320 Then there's the number.

00:39:34.440 The ransom demand is $118,000, not a round figure, not a kidnapper's clean million.

00:39:42.700 And it lands within a few hundred dollars of the bonus John Ramsey received from his company the year before.

00:39:49.820 Douglas sees this number as a real clue and tells NBC that Patsy did not know John's bonus amount.

00:39:57.020 Well, who has this knowledge? The wife didn't have the knowledge. She doesn't know anything about that.

00:40:02.040 This is money that's electronically placed in his 401k at the end of the year.

00:40:09.300 So to me, it's kind of like the manifesto in the Unabomber.

00:40:13.460 It begins to tell me more about the person who's responsible.

00:40:18.700 This person has very unique, intimate knowledge about his financial workings.

00:40:27.020 Whoever wrote it knew the Ramseys, personally, observed John professionally, or saw this number

00:40:34.120 on a piece of paper inside the home. Of course, someone inside the house is not the same thing

00:40:39.980 as a parent. A housekeeper could have seen that figure, a visitor, a former employee.

00:40:45.500 John Ramsey suspected a creepy guy who had been in the house playing Santa Claus.

00:40:49.700 It could be anyone who spent real time in the home. And as many as 20 keys to that home,

00:40:56.340 are unaccounted for in other people's hands one detective who has yet to join the case will later

00:41:03.060 offer a very different explanation for that oddly specific sum but for now the connection to john's

00:41:08.420 bonus dominates the discussion about the 118 grand and then there's the phone the note promises

00:41:17.300 a call between 8 and 10 in the morning it never comes not by 10 not by one not ever a kidnapping

00:41:25.940 in which the kidnapper never makes contact,

00:41:28.920 in which there's been no kidnapping.

00:41:32.360 To Boulder Detective Steve Thomas,

00:41:34.320 that silence is not a mystery.

00:41:36.940 He surmises no one's calling

00:41:38.800 because no one was ever going to call,

00:41:41.520 and someone in that house knows it.

00:41:45.640 Hey, my name is Samantha.

00:41:47.940 I work as an assembly technician for Ford of Canada.

00:41:51.180 What I love about working at Ford

00:41:52.940 is knowing I'm part of something I'm proud to stand behind.

00:41:55.940 And when Ford does something like employee pricing, it makes me even prouder to work here.

00:42:01.520 And that means you pay what I pay.

00:42:04.740 Ford employee pricing is on now.

00:42:06.840 On select 2026 Maverick models, get over $2,800 in employee price adjustments.

00:42:12.060 For details, visit your Ontario Ford store or Ford.ca.

00:42:15.600 When John Ramsey searches the house that afternoon on December 26th,

00:42:19.560 Detective Thomas sees a man who does not search so much as travel straight down to the basement

00:42:25.660 straight to the one room that matters the quiet phone line does not deepen the kidnapping in the

00:42:32.140 detective's eyes it ends part of the mystery altogether two images harden early in the minds

00:42:38.620 of the police as john benet's body lies lifeless by the christmas tree responding officers see

00:42:45.460 patsy on the floor clutching a crucifix wailing john a few feet away composed controlled and not

00:42:54.680 going to her to detectives a husband's steadiness at the worst moment of his life starts to read as

00:43:01.800 something colder we're not soap opera actors i mean i i suppose if i was an actor i could act

00:43:07.720 really angry but i'm not that's who i am it's what you see and i'm angry this is angry for me

00:43:17.000 within days on the advice of a close family friend and former prosecutor named michael

00:43:21.800 bynum the ramseys retain lawyers root their words through those lawyers and begin to negotiate over

00:43:29.000 a formal interview with police that will drag on for months to the investigators and soon to the

00:43:35.720 country that looks like the behavior of people with something to hide the ramsey's attorneys

00:43:42.120 wanted all the questions they said they wouldn't go in for an interview with the police because

00:43:46.520 they didn't know what the police were going to ask on new year's day 1997 a week after the murder

00:43:53.640 the ramsays sit for a television interview this long before sitting down with police

00:43:59.440 detective thomas sees this as the start of a pattern a family that answers reporters who have

00:44:06.380 agreed in advance not to ask about the murder while evading and delaying the harder questions

00:44:12.300 from cops. The natural question is, why? The Ramsey's former FBI man, John Douglas,

00:44:19.680 reads it differently. He sees the Ramsey's behavior as exactly how wealthy, well-connected

00:44:24.820 families behave inside a legal catastrophe. They involve lawyers, they distance themselves,

00:44:31.340 and they proceed with caution. These are the same instincts the Lindbergh family showed in 1932

00:44:37.720 when their 20-month-old baby boy was kidnapped and killed.

00:44:42.520 Many suspected the boy's famed pilot father, Charles Lindbergh,

00:44:47.400 after his baby Charlie disappeared,

00:44:49.620 because Charles seemed cold and aloof.

00:44:52.620 But Lindbergh believed he functioned best in a crisis by staying controlled.

00:44:57.560 John Ramsey's very similar.

00:44:59.760 A veteran Navy pilot, self-made executive,

00:45:03.060 who had already endured the loss of one beloved daughter

00:45:05.640 and the despair that followed. The distress that looks wrong on camera looks wrong because there's

00:45:12.620 no version of grief over a murdered child that a parent performs correctly. Weeping reads as staged,

00:45:21.060 composure reads as guilt. The camera convicts either way. The day they're called to the Ramsey

00:45:27.040 house, detectives notice a bowl of fresh cut pineapple on the breakfast table upstairs with

00:45:32.960 the spoon resting in it. The prints on that bowl belong to Patsy Ramsey and to nine-year-old

00:45:39.540 Burke, not to JonBenet. I didn't put the bowl there, okay? I did not put the bowl there. I would

00:45:46.200 not do this. And yet JonBenet's stomach contains fresh, partly digested pineapple.

00:45:55.480 The detectives pull that thread hard. The Whites, who hosted Christmas dinner the night before,

00:46:01.360 served cracked crab, no pineapple. The Ramses say their daughter fell asleep in the car and went

00:46:08.180 straight to bed and never ate again. Yet the fruit is in her body, cut fresh. A forensic examiner

00:46:16.580 named Werner Spitz, known for his work on the JFK autopsy, studies how far the pineapple traveled

00:46:23.100 through JonBenet's system. He fixes JonBenet's time of death at, around, or before one in the

00:46:30.360 morning. Detective Steve Thomas turns that into a single question that he cannot make fit into the

00:46:37.420 family's account. When and where did JonBenet eat the pineapple? To Thomas, the math is plain.

00:46:45.160 A bowl with the mother's fingerprints and the same fresh cut fruit inside the child.

00:46:51.360 A stranger would have had to break in, feed a six-year-old a bedtime snack, and then wait two

00:46:57.000 hours for it to digest before killing her. When the detectives show Burke a photo of the bull,

00:47:03.520 he knows it on sight. It belongs in the house. It was not carried in by a stranger. The pineapple

00:47:09.640 is the first moment the family's timeline cracks, and Detective Thomas never lets it go.

00:47:16.620 By the summer of 1997, Steve Thomas has interpreted the facts and built a theory of the whole night

00:47:23.160 JonBenet died, and he believes every word of it. If I told you right now that we have

00:47:30.140 trace evidence that appears to link you to the death of JonBenet, what would you tell me?

00:47:39.520 I don't give a flying flip how scientific it is. Go back to the damn drawing board.

00:47:46.200 I didn't do it. JonRamsey didn't do it, and we didn't have a clue of anybody who did do it.

00:47:53.160 So we all got to start working together from this day forward to try to find out who the hell did it.

00:48:01.320 A 40th birthday bearing down on Patsy, the exhaustion of Christmas,

00:48:06.780 a couple of glasses of wine and a small, ordinary fight over a dress

00:48:11.660 between a mother who liked to dress as her daughter's twin

00:48:14.800 and a little girl who did not want to match.

00:48:18.760 Thomas believes that JonBenet wets the bed that night,

00:48:21.640 chronic problem in the months before her death and then sometime before 1 in the

00:48:26.620 morning an exhausted frazzled mother comes apart in her little girl's

00:48:31.120 bathroom one of the doctors the detectives consult tells them the

00:48:35.860 toilet training problems are a textbook trigger for exactly this kind of

00:48:40.540 parental rage the way Thomas pictures it Patsy slams her daughter against

00:48:45.380 something hard like the edge of the tub delivering a blow that fractures her

00:48:49.700 skull the child goes still and patsy thomas believes thinks that in that instant her daughter

00:48:57.540 is already dead what thomas describes next is not a murder plan it is sheer panic a mother who could

00:49:05.380 call for help and instead decides to hide what she's done she carries the body down to the

00:49:11.220 basement goes back upstairs for her notepad and a felt-tip pen and writes a kidnapping into

00:49:17.060 existence, discarding one draft, then another, before the three pages are done. She builds a

00:49:23.260 garrote from a broken paintbrush in her own art kit, just a few feet away from JonBenet's body.

00:49:30.280 She ties her small wrists loosely in front, a binding that would never hold a living child,

00:49:37.040 a gesture meant only to appear like restraint. She wraps her daughter in a blanket and leaves

00:49:43.180 a favorite pink nightgown beside her. Patsy then lays a strip of tape across her mouth and beneath

00:49:50.320 it later, officers find a perfect set of lip prints. No sign of a struggle, no sign the child

00:49:57.280 fought the tape. And when Patsy Ramsey opens the door to the first officer at nearly six in the

00:50:03.900 morning, she is in the same clothes she wore the night before. Her hair done, her makeup fresh.

00:50:12.040 To Detective Thomas, this detail settles it.

00:50:15.900 She had never been to bed.

00:50:18.300 The lawman said as much when he squared off against John and Patsy on Larry King in 2000.

00:50:24.260 My theory is that Patsy, in a violent confrontation with her daughter...

00:50:29.340 Accidentally killed her?

00:50:30.300 No, not accidental, I hypothesize, in the sense that it lacked motive.

00:50:36.040 Tell me exactly, step by step, how you envision...

00:50:39.220 I wasn't there, Patsy, you were in the hospital.

00:50:40.680 You must have conjured something in your head

00:50:43.180 for you to come out and call me a murderer of my child.

00:50:46.680 Now, I want to hear one of the ransom.

00:50:48.940 I put together what you think happened that night.

00:50:52.260 Well, I think there was a toileting issue that night

00:50:54.180 that has been dismissed and underplayed.

00:50:56.260 Really explain.

00:50:57.040 A bedwetting or a toileting issue.

00:50:59.100 It caused Patsy to get mad at her daughter.

00:51:01.420 Absolutely.

00:51:02.660 Thomas does not believe John Ramsey killed his daughter.

00:51:05.940 He finds nothing to put John in that bathroom.

00:51:08.500 Our child wet her bed, and we slaughtered her.

00:51:14.120 That is so preposterous.

00:51:17.320 You weren't there, John. You can't...

00:51:18.660 I was there. I know Paxi.

00:51:20.700 I've lived with her for 20 years.

00:51:22.760 I know that she loved that child more than anything in the world.

00:51:26.240 The detective hypothesizes that John reads the ransom note in his wife's hand,

00:51:32.020 understands what he sees, and makes a choice not to expose her,

00:51:36.680 but to stand in front of her with lawyers and to hold the line.

00:51:41.240 Well, will you agree, Patsy, that almost none of it makes sense?

00:51:45.320 Right.

00:51:45.940 None of it.

00:51:46.400 What was the guy doing?

00:51:47.560 Why did the intruder do this?

00:51:49.160 Evil, evil person.

00:51:52.140 God knows, and the truth is going to prevail.

00:51:57.760 John and Patsy also strongly dispute any notion that nine-year-old Burke was involved in his sister's death in any way.

00:52:05.320 John told me this explicitly.

00:52:07.420 This was a violent, vicious, sexually assault case.

00:52:12.860 Not something that a nine-year-old could even possibly do.

00:52:18.160 So that's just, it's really disgusting that people jump to that kind of a conclusion.

00:52:26.500 Within days of JonBenet's murder, satellite trucks start lining the block outside the Ramsey house on 15th Street.

00:52:34.080 Reporters stand on the frozen lawns of the neighbors.

00:52:37.740 News producers are pulling home video and pageant tape.

00:52:41.500 The footage of a darling little girl in makeup and sequins,

00:52:45.220 smiling beneath stage lights, about to run on a loop from coast to coast.

00:52:51.040 Inside police headquarters, confidential reports are starting to slip out to reporters.

00:52:56.740 Some of it wrong, some of it half true.

00:52:59.680 All of it moving faster than the investigation itself.

00:53:03.160 But what about the broken window and the suitcase beneath it? What about the ransom note and the unidentified male DNA found on JonBenet's underwear? These conflicting data points do not fit neatly on a magazine cover, nor do they play well in a 30-second TV spot.

00:53:22.400 The local and national media are about to hand America a version of this story with every contradiction sanded away.

00:53:31.500 A version with a verdict that's clean and easier for some to handle than the possibility that killers roam loose and kill innocent children in their homes at night.

00:53:43.160 The parents did it.

00:53:45.240 You may have heard this version before.

00:53:47.200 A sweeping narrative that tries to tie up all the loose ends with a pretty bow, but in reality leaves many mysteries dangling.

00:53:56.400 Tomorrow we will step through that narrative piece by piece through the eyes of the people who told it and saw it plastered on magazine racks nationwide.

00:54:05.960 Join me tomorrow right here on MK Confidential.

00:54:17.200 It's November 1997, a makeshift television studio in Boulder, Colorado, dressed up as a courtroom, a bench, a witness stand, a jury box, and a studio audience.

00:54:30.480 But it is not a courthouse. It is a daytime talk show hosted by Geraldo Rivera.

00:54:36.300 And over several days, he puts the parents of a murdered six-year-old little girl on trial live on national television.

00:54:44.280 No one has been arrested.

00:54:45.860 No one's been charged.

00:54:47.600 There is no real defense, no judge, no law.

00:54:51.440 The defendants, John and Patsy Ramsey, are not even in the room.

00:54:55.800 And at the end of it, Geraldo's jury returns a verdict.

00:54:59.700 We, the jury, find John Bennett Ramsey liable for the wrongful death of JonBenet Ramsey.

00:55:05.660 And that's to Patsy.

00:55:06.840 We, the jury, find Patsy Ramsey liable for the wrongful death of JonBenet Ramsey.

00:55:11.020 To the best of our knowledge, there is no real evidence in this case that points in any direction other than straight into the faces of John and poor Patsy Ramsey.

00:55:23.700 Liable for the wrongful death of their own baby girl.

00:55:27.920 The verdict is not handed down by a court, but by a TV audience.

00:55:31.800 An audience made up of staff from Boulder TV stations, guests at the local hotel, and other, quote, invite-only attendees.

00:55:42.500 This, in a case where no one has been charged with anything.

00:55:47.580 Geraldo and his squadron of producers, with no due process to the family, give us a final verdict.

00:55:55.160 This is where the JonBenet Ramsey case is really being decided, not in a court of law,

00:56:01.220 but on TV, in the so-called news, in the court of public opinion.

00:56:07.000 And by the time this spectacle airs, that court has all but made up its mind.

00:56:12.280 The question is not how the Ramseys became suspects.

00:56:15.180 The question is how millions of people became dead certain they were guilty.

00:56:21.680 I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

00:56:28.100 This started out as a simple but tragic murder of a child beauty queen,

00:56:33.380 but then questions arose, curiosity arose, and suddenly the media descended on Boulder.

00:56:38.600 We are told now that as many as 300 media representatives may be here right now following this story.

00:56:44.140 To understand how it comes to a mock trial on daytime TV,

00:56:48.280 we must look at the exact moment this story lands.

00:56:52.360 It is the dead stretch between Christmas and New Year's in 1996.

00:56:56.780 The news is quiet as a church mouse.

00:56:59.900 The cable channels are young and hungry,

00:57:02.520 the 24-hour cycle still figuring out how to fill a week when nothing is happening.

00:57:07.720 And into that massive silence drops a story that has everything.

00:57:12.820 Cops and kidnappers, a beautiful little girl,

00:57:16.060 a bizarre ransom note, a black body bag wheeled out in front of Christmas lights,

00:57:22.220 and to top it all off, millionaire parents who love child beauty pageants.

00:57:27.800 It is Christmas all over again for lovers of murder mystery, beach reads, and ratings.

00:57:34.700 JonBenet's murder arrives barely a year after the O.J. Simpson trial

00:57:38.740 into an America that just spent months litigating that murder from its couch

00:57:43.060 and is ready to do it all over again.

00:57:46.060 The shadow of O.J. falls on the investigators, too.

00:57:49.940 Boulder PD Detective Steve Thomas followed the O.J. Simpson trial

00:57:53.240 and remembered how Simpson's attorneys ripped apart the LAPD's case by attacking their work.

00:57:59.820 He watched the Simpson case collapse under its own mistakes

00:58:02.980 and feared the same thing might happen in the Ramsey case.

00:58:06.540 He wanted to be careful not to be the next office earned on live television.

00:58:12.680 Here is the strange part.

00:58:14.120 The Ramseys are not celebrities. John runs a very successful company, but no one outside Boulder

00:58:20.720 knows their names. There is no famous face, no star power, nothing that should turn one local

00:58:26.800 homicide into a national obsession. What there is instead is timing and a little girl who photographs

00:58:34.380 like a movie star. Most murdered children leave behind a snapshot or two. This one left behind

00:58:42.140 hours of tape, pageants, parades, recitals, home video, a short life spent performing for a camera.

00:58:50.200 John Bidet, over here. So when the networks need pictures and videos to fill those empty

00:58:55.960 holiday hours, the supply never runs out. And the same few seconds of a small girl in pageant makeup

00:59:03.160 run again and again and again. That's 24 hours around the clock, coast to coast, we never close,

00:59:11.480 open seven days a week. On the 2nd of January, 1997, a Denver station airs pageant video of

00:59:20.000 JonBenet and the networks run it within the hour. There she is at a pageant weeks before her death.

00:59:27.580 There she is in a spangled showgirl style costume, six years old,

00:59:32.140 under stage lights with her hair bleached and her lips painted.

00:59:41.480 To a country that has never heard of Boulder, these videos become JonBenet Ramsey.

00:59:47.980 Not a precious kindergartner who likes to jump into leaf piles, but an image of big hair, makeup, and that practiced little wave.

00:59:57.580 In the world the Ramseys came from, the Georgia pageant circuit, none of this is unusual.

01:00:03.020 In some parts of the South, dressing a daughter up and putting her on stage is just a Saturday.

01:00:08.920 Patsy had been Miss West Virginia herself, but to the rest of America, the sequins, the mascara, the hairspray come across as something eerie and disturbing.

01:00:21.580 Major publications start describing JonBenet as moving on stage in a way that's adult, seductive, precocious, and wrong.

01:00:32.100 In the pageant world, it is just choreography that a coach taught a child.

01:00:37.700 No one bats an eye.

01:00:39.400 But on national news broadcasts, stripped of that context,

01:00:43.440 JonBenet's performances read as evidence of something far more sinister inside that home.

01:00:49.760 While the country stares at the pageant videos, the case is leaking.

01:00:54.980 Inside the Boulder PD, detectives are growing certain the family is the answer,

01:00:59.980 and information to that end keeps surfacing in the newspapers.

01:01:04.480 A reporter at the Rocky Mountain News, Charlie Brennan, becomes a regular destination for material coming out of the investigation.

01:01:13.540 And some of the leaks are not accidental at all.

01:01:17.040 Part of it is a police strategy to apply pressure through the press in the hope that a guilty parent cornered in public will finally crack.

01:01:26.220 Sweat out, John and Patsy.

01:01:28.460 But it doesn't start that way for the Ramseys.

01:01:30.900 On New Year's Day 1997, six days after their daughter is found dead, and before they have sat for a single formal police interview, John and Patsy go on CNN. Patsy's voice cracks.

01:01:44.380 there is a killer on the loose i don't know who it is i don't know if it's a he or a she

01:01:53.820 but if i were a resident of boulder i will tell my friends to keep

01:02:03.760 keep your babies close to you there's someone out there

01:02:15.140 Keep your babies close.

01:02:17.980 From a grieving mother, it is a warning.

01:02:20.400 To a lot of the country, it sounds like something else.

01:02:23.020 A woman talking to the media before she talks to the police.

01:02:26.740 And the town does not want the warning either.

01:02:30.060 Two days after the Ramsey's first CNN interview, the mayor of Boulder steps up to a microphone.

01:02:36.560 People in Boulder have no need to fear that there is someone wandering the streets of Boulder,

01:02:42.880 has been portrayed by some people, particularly in talk radio, looking for young children to attack.

01:02:50.980 Boulder is safe. It's always been a safe community. It continues to be a safe community.

01:02:56.260 The city says, in effect, there is no stranger out there,

01:02:59.960 which leaves the public only one place to look back inside that house.

01:03:05.860 A friend of Patsy's, a photographer named Judith Phillips, who had shot the family's

01:03:11.060 portraits, goes to the mayor's office in person to ask for protection for the Ramseys.

01:03:16.340 She is told plainly, there is no murderer out there.

01:03:20.960 Across town, a mother whose little girl heard Patsy's warning on television cannot get her

01:03:26.400 child to sleep in her own room for months.

01:03:30.040 And around the Ramseys, something stranger is happening.

01:03:33.440 Their circle goes quiet.

01:03:35.860 Friends start getting calls from inside that circle with the same instruction, do not talk

01:03:41.940 to reporters, do not talk to the police. Most of them comply. The photographer who went to the

01:03:48.560 mayor does not. Judith Phillips opens her door to reporters, and she sits down with detectives

01:03:55.020 twice. And for that, she is cut off, dropped by the people she thought were family, told she has

01:04:02.340 betrayed them and every silence the family leaves the tabloids are happy to fill the leaks are not

01:04:10.020 always true and the most damaging ones are the simplest in march of 1997 charlie brennan's paper

01:04:17.700 runs a story sourced to police saying there were no footprints in the snow around the ramsey home

01:04:23.860 the morning after john benet's murder if no one left footprints the reasoning goes then no intruder

01:04:30.180 came or went and the family must have done it it travels everywhere at light speed it sounds

01:04:37.220 airtight here is what does not spread quickly with that story the sergeant who walked the

01:04:43.220 property that freezing morning noted a light dusting of snow on the grass but the sidewalks

01:04:49.060 and the driveway where a person would actually walk were dry bare concrete there was nothing

01:04:55.540 there to hold a footprint in the first place. One source, one phrase, and a false fact that

01:05:01.760 outlives the correction by decades. Then there is the plane. In the days after the family flies

01:05:09.720 to their former home, Georgia, to bury their daughter, a story takes hold that John Ramsey,

01:05:16.280 cold and composed, piloted his own plane to the funeral. Here's how Paula Woodward,

01:05:22.460 and investigative reporter out of Colorado,

01:05:25.280 describes the shock of this story to Netflix.

01:05:28.640 I remember saying to my husband,

01:05:31.740 what kind of person is he?

01:05:34.960 How could he do this

01:05:36.560 when he's got to be so distraught

01:05:39.260 over the terrible way his daughter died

01:05:41.400 and the fact that she was murdered?

01:05:43.560 How could he fly his plane to Atlanta?

01:05:46.960 The tricky part here, a piece of it is true.

01:05:50.200 John Ramsey is a licensed pilot.

01:05:52.460 The family does own a small private plane, a twin engine kept at an airport outside Boulder.

01:05:58.380 This is the plane they had planned to take on their second Christmas trip to Michigan,

01:06:02.420 so the detail feels plausible.

01:06:04.780 But it's not true.

01:06:06.420 John Ramsey did not fly to his daughter's funeral.

01:06:09.540 He later said he was too shaken to even consider it.

01:06:12.580 His company, Lockheed Martin, loaned the family a corporate jet

01:06:16.320 and its own two pilots for the trip to Georgia.

01:06:19.920 The story painted an image of a father calmly flying himself across the country to bury his little girl.

01:06:26.920 But it never happened.

01:06:28.760 Years later, Brennan himself would look back on the story.

01:06:32.440 When I reported that John Ramsey had piloted his own plane back to Atlanta for the funeral, that was inaccurate.

01:06:40.800 It came from a source that I thoroughly trusted and had given me other solid information.

01:06:47.300 That information was wrong.

01:06:48.700 my source was wrong in that case and that was a mistake. But the picture sticks because it fits

01:06:55.920 the story the public has already been sold. And then the media seizes on the handwriting.

01:07:02.560 Report after report tells the country Patsy Ramsey wrote the ransom note that the experts

01:07:08.860 have tied her hand to that page. Sources say the ransom note written by the alleged kidnapper is

01:07:15.020 considered a key piece of evidence. Handwriting experts have ruled out John Ramsey and others

01:07:20.760 close to the family. They have not excluded Patsy Ramsey, who has submitted several samples.

01:07:27.160 The reality, however, is not quite so clean. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation hands the

01:07:34.720 ransom note to its examiner, Chet Ubowski, who studies it for the better part of a year

01:07:40.240 and puts Patsy Ramsey through five separate handwriting tests.

01:07:44.760 And his finding is not the one the leaks describe.

01:07:48.820 He can find no evidence Patsy disguised her writing.

01:07:52.180 He sees some shared letter formations

01:07:54.540 and weighed against the number and consistency of the differences.

01:07:58.760 He writes that he is unable to identify Patsy Ramsey

01:08:02.460 as the author of that ransom note.

01:08:05.360 Quote, could not be ruled out, end quote,

01:08:09.120 is as far as anyone will responsibly go.

01:08:13.140 But in the papers, magazines, and on TV,

01:08:16.260 it becomes the handwriting matches.

01:08:20.120 One man does go further.

01:08:22.340 A Vassar College professor named Donald Foster,

01:08:25.700 who analyzes text for a living,

01:08:28.200 publicly announces that Patsy is the author.

01:08:31.220 What the audience never hears is that this same professor

01:08:34.080 had earlier written Patsy a private letter

01:08:36.700 declaring her innocent,

01:08:38.140 or that he had once used his methods to name an anonymous internet commenter as the killer,

01:08:44.720 a person who turned out to be a middle-aged housewife in North Carolina with zero connection

01:08:49.840 to this case. His credibility does not survive even mild scrutiny, yet the headline lives on.

01:08:57.460 Then the pageant footage and the rumors braid together into something uglier,

01:09:02.500 that JonBenet had been sexually abused

01:09:05.680 and that the answer lay somewhere inside her own family.

01:09:10.100 Investigators lean into it.

01:09:12.000 Twice, police bring in a boulder-raised former Miss America,

01:09:17.040 Marilyn Van Derber,

01:09:19.080 a woman who had spent years telling the world

01:09:21.060 that a polished, admired, wealthy family

01:09:23.860 can hide a monstrous secret because hers had.

01:09:29.380 Her own story is real, and it is harrowing.

01:09:32.560 You don't talk about it in families.

01:09:34.920 Siblings don't talk to siblings.

01:09:36.760 No, JonBenet had tape over her mouth.

01:09:40.280 That is the strongest message we have.

01:09:42.760 You will never speak of it.

01:09:45.720 Bringing Marilyn into the Ramsey investigation is not evidence.

01:09:49.980 It is insinuation by resemblance.

01:09:53.260 And on the actual evidence, that insinuation collapses.

01:09:56.920 JonBenet's pediatrician and the doctors who reviewed her history,

01:10:00.660 none of them find physical or historical proof

01:10:04.180 that this child had been abused before the night she died.

01:10:07.840 The damage from the abuse story is hard to measure.

01:10:11.700 It recasts a murdered six-year-old as a victim of her own family

01:10:15.800 on the strength of costumes and speculation,

01:10:18.480 and that colors everything the public sees.

01:10:22.020 The accusation runs at the top of the hour.

01:10:25.060 The correction, when it comes at all, is a line buried at the bottom of a story no one reads to the end.

01:10:31.500 The Ramseys refuse to let this story be told without them.

01:10:35.300 They fight back in public, on camera.

01:10:38.300 Through 1997 and the years that follow, they give interviews, they sit for documentaries,

01:10:43.780 they hire a Washington media consultant to manage the press,

01:10:47.100 and in the spring of 1997, about four months after the murder,

01:10:51.520 John and Patsy finally sit for formal police interviews.

01:10:56.040 Then they walk straight out to a bank of microphones to announce that they've done so.

01:11:02.080 Patsy looks into the cameras.

01:11:04.440 I'm appalled that anyone would think that John or I would be involved in such a hideous, heinous crime.

01:11:18.060 But let me assure you that I did not kill Jean Benet.

01:11:23.900 I did not have anything to do with it.

01:11:26.740 I love that child with my whole of my heart and soul.

01:11:33.900 But every public appearance becomes a new piece of evidence in a trial no one declared.

01:11:39.840 America does not watch to be reassured.

01:11:42.120 It watches to judge.

01:11:43.660 The tone, the tears, the pauses.

01:11:46.620 On CNN, viewers freeze the moment a reporter asks

01:11:49.980 whether the Ramseys are certain their daughter was taken by an outsider.

01:11:54.700 And Patsy shakes her head no, while John says yes.

01:11:59.500 Every frame is parsed. Every silence is read.

01:12:03.700 Our family is a loving family. It's a gentle family.

01:12:08.000 A father insists, unprompted, that his family is gentle

01:12:13.960 And analysts spend years asking why he needed to say that at all.

01:12:18.640 This is what the media coverage runs on now.

01:12:20.880 Not new evidence, but the same handful of clips replayed, re-read,

01:12:25.500 until a shaken head, a glance, or an unlucky phrase hardens into proof of guilt.

01:12:31.360 By November of 1997, a Gallup poll finds 88% of Americans with an opinion about who killed JonBenet

01:12:39.360 point to one or both of her parents.

01:12:42.360 This verdict is built almost entirely on 11 months' worth of leaked and distorted information,

01:12:48.260 not on anything a court of law would ever admit.

01:12:50.940 Which is how the country arrives, that November, at a talk show studio and mock jury.

01:12:57.580 Nearly 30 years later, the man who built that spectacle, Geraldo Rivera,

01:13:02.340 would apologize to John Ramsey in a conversation on NewsNation.

01:13:06.360 I deeply apologize to you for what you and your family have suffered.

01:13:12.940 When I say I am sorry, I don't apologize for my reporting.

01:13:17.920 I believe that at least half the reporters and half the nation believe that the that the shadow of suspicion, half the Boulder Police Department, for those who have retired because of this case, believe it.

01:13:32.660 But I don't know what happened.

01:13:34.900 I just want you to know that I lament contributing to the hurt that you have endured.

01:13:44.160 No one deserves to go through what you went through.

01:13:47.580 Well, thank you.

01:13:49.000 Off camera, the investigation is breaking apart.

01:13:53.400 The Boulder PD and the district attorney are barely speaking,

01:13:57.160 and each side shapes the story its own way for reporters.

01:14:01.500 One of the officers who worked the case,

01:14:04.080 former Boulder PD officer Gretchen Smith,

01:14:06.840 later described the internal rot to a CBS documentary team.

01:14:11.380 The JonBenet case destroyed morale completely.

01:14:15.900 There was no morale.

01:14:17.460 The district attorney's office and some of administration

01:14:20.380 did not want to hear that an affluent member of the community

01:14:23.820 was guilty of a crime like this.

01:14:26.160 They didn't want to hear that.

01:14:28.700 I don't think they wanted to solve this crime.

01:14:31.300 And if they had to go down a different path that might not have been the truth,

01:14:34.700 I think they were willing to do that.

01:14:36.860 Another friend of the Ramseys breaks the silence in their social circle.

01:14:41.180 Fleet White, one of the Ramseys' closest friends, was beside John when the body was found.

01:14:47.120 Fleet would later describe how his family's life changed after the murder.

01:14:51.500 On Christmas Day, 1996, John and Patsy Ramsey and their children,

01:14:56.160 Burke and JonBenet were dinner guests at our home.

01:14:59.020 The next day, we were present at the Ramsey home.

01:15:02.180 When JonBenet's body was found, Priscilla and I and our children instantly became witnesses

01:15:06.720 in the Boulder police investigation of JonBenet's death.

01:15:10.980 In August of 1998, Fleet and his wife Priscilla criticized the investigation in an open letter

01:15:17.580 to the people of Colorado.

01:15:19.480 Here's part of it.

01:15:20.480 Quote,

01:15:21.980 After JonBenet Ramsey was killed in Boulder nearly 20 months ago,

01:15:25.700 Her parents immediately hired prominent criminal defense attorneys with close professional, political, and personal ties to prosecutors, the Denver and Boulder legal and judicial communities, state legislators, and high-ranking members of the Colorado government, including Governor Roy Romer.

01:15:43.240 The investigation of her death has since been characterized by confusion and delays.

01:15:48.960 The district attorney and the Ramsey attorneys have simultaneously rebuked the police for focusing their investigation on the Ramseys,

01:15:56.760 when in fact police were simply following evidence.

01:15:59.820 During the course of the investigation, the district attorney has used inexplicable methods,

01:16:04.700 including the recruitment of magazine writers and tabloids,

01:16:07.620 to leak information concerning the case

01:16:10.100 and to needle witnesses, suspects, and police detectives.

01:16:14.180 He has provided evidence to Ramsey defense attorneys

01:16:17.120 at their request, but denied reasonable requests

01:16:20.040 by witnesses for their own statements to police.

01:16:23.620 He has thoroughly alienated police detectives

01:16:26.080 and key witnesses whose cooperation is vital

01:16:29.000 to the investigation and prosecution.

01:16:31.620 His public statements regarding the investigation

01:16:33.940 have been erratic, evasive, and misleading.

01:16:37.620 We must be mindful, however, of the first cause of the investigation's failure,

01:16:43.140 the refusal of John and Patsy Ramsey to cooperate fully and genuinely

01:16:47.740 with those officially charged with the responsibility

01:16:50.300 of investigating the death of their daughter, John Benet.

01:16:54.380 End quote.

01:16:55.900 The people who knew the Ramseys best are splitting up into camps,

01:17:01.000 on the record, off the record,

01:17:02.880 and America gobbles up every word of both.

01:17:07.320 Week after week, the supermarket racks turn JonBenet into a symbol and the Ramseys into characters.

01:17:13.000 The cold father, the ambitious mother, the perfect family with something rotten underneath.

01:17:18.500 Rumor becomes packaging, speculation becomes a headline.

01:17:22.080 And by the time anyone asks what has actually been proven,

01:17:26.040 millions of people have already accepted the accusation as fact.

01:17:30.080 And here is the piece of evidence that should have stopped all of this.

01:17:34.360 On JonBenet's body, under her fingernails, and inside her underwear, there is DNA from an unknown man.

01:17:43.460 It's not Jon's, it's not Patsy's, not Burke's.

01:17:47.260 It belongs to a stranger, left physically on the murdered child.

01:17:52.480 The Colorado Bureau of Investigation confirms it in a lab report within about three weeks of the killing in January 1997,

01:17:59.640 the single strongest piece of evidence pointing away from the Ramsey family.

01:18:04.360 There is no press conference for this revelation.

01:18:08.140 No leaks about the unidentified male DNA.

01:18:11.560 Boulder police sit on the finding.

01:18:13.720 Roughly six months go by before the district attorney's office is even told what the lab found.

01:18:19.900 The public waits far longer.

01:18:22.720 The fact that could have broken the case was filed in a drawer until 2003,

01:18:28.280 when the DNA is uncovered and given to the FBI for testing.

01:18:32.080 It does not match anyone in the FBI's criminal database, and to this day remains a mystery.

01:18:39.980 In 2016, nearly 20 years after the murder, the media machine turns on John and Patsy's surviving child, Burke.

01:18:48.940 Burke was nine years old when his sister was killed.

01:18:52.060 The Ramseys say he was asleep the entire night just down the hall.

01:18:56.080 CBS airs a primetime special built around the theory that Burke killed his sister with paid experts and a staged reenactment.

01:19:04.640 Burke Ramsey sues the network.

01:19:06.480 Well, the Boulder Daily Camera reports the brother of JonBenet Ramsey has reached a settlement with CBS.

01:19:13.180 Burke Ramsey sued CBS after a television series the network aired suggested he killed his six-year-old sister in Boulder.

01:19:21.520 No court ever finds that Burke did anything.

01:19:24.980 The detectives and the prosecutors who actually worked this case never charged Burke,

01:19:28.900 but the theory is now in prime time, 20 years later.

01:19:33.380 In this story, no one's ever really cleared.

01:19:36.540 They're only re-accused on a later night for a new audience.

01:19:40.820 This is the cost of a trial by television, by the news media,

01:19:44.560 the footprints that were never there,

01:19:47.600 the plane he never flew, the handwriting that never matched,

01:19:50.580 the alleged history of abuse that was never proven.

01:19:54.400 Each one is corrected quietly, if at all, and long after the smear has done its dirty work.

01:20:01.120 Underneath the entire narrative lies the DNA of a man no one can name.

01:20:06.460 That DNA sits in a drawer because it does not fit the story the country has already chosen to believe, the one it's been led to.

01:20:14.060 Before a single charge is ever filed, in the only court that seems to matter, the Ramseys have long ago been found guilty.

01:20:23.400 But while the whole country is staring inside that house, one veteran detective is about to walk into this case, all but certain the parents did it, and walk out believing the exact opposite.

01:20:36.460 Tomorrow, we'll hear his side of the story and the compelling picture he paints on MK Confidential.

01:20:43.320 november 22nd 1963 in dallas texas the day jfk is assassinated it had rained overnight but by

01:20:57.060 mid-morning the sky is clear and the day is warm look at the photographs of the crowd waiting for

01:21:02.640 the president's motorcade and you will see it no raincoats no galoshes not a single open umbrella

01:21:09.360 because it is a beautiful day, except that is for one man. In all of Dealey Plaza, in all of Dallas,

01:21:18.560 there is exactly one man standing under an open black umbrella, and he is standing on the grass

01:21:25.780 at the precise spot where seconds later, President Kennedy's body will jolt forward and back as the

01:21:33.400 bullets find him. For years, that man is a gift to conspiracy theorists. Investigators call him

01:21:40.220 the Umbrella Man. One theory holds that the umbrella itself is a weapon, that its shaft

01:21:46.320 conceals a dart gun fired into JFK's throat. Some come to believe the Umbrella Man is the real

01:21:53.000 assassin, because what possible innocent reason could a man have to stand under an umbrella on

01:21:59.360 a cloudless day exactly where all the shots killed President John F. Kennedy. And then in 1978,

01:22:06.880 someone finally just asks him. The Umbrella Man comes forward and testifies before Congress

01:22:13.420 with his umbrella. And his explanation is so strange, so wacky, it can only be true.

01:22:21.480 The umbrella was a protest, not against JFK, but against his father, Joseph P. Kennedy.

01:22:29.360 and his father's appeasement of Hitler and the Nazis in the lead-up to World War II.

01:22:34.800 I just knew that it was a sore spot for the Kennedys. The umbrella that the

01:22:39.120 Prime Minister of England came back with got to be a symbol with the, in some manner, with the

01:22:44.000 British people. By association, it got transferred to the Kennedy family.

01:22:49.520 The black umbrella is a visual insult, a reference to the British Prime Minister

01:22:54.400 Neville Chamberlain, who carried one everywhere. That's the secret. A grieving nation's darkest

01:23:01.400 riddle, and the answer is a man making an obscure political protest with an umbrella.

01:23:08.480 The investigator, Josiah Thompson, who chased that mystery for years, drew one lesson from it.

01:23:14.420 If you have any fact which you think is really sinister, right,

01:23:22.860 is really obviously a fact which can only point to some sinister underpinnings,

01:23:29.920 hey, forget it, man, because you can never on your own

01:23:33.820 think up all the non-sinister, perfectly valid explanations for that fact.

01:23:40.540 A cautionary tale.

01:23:41.700 That is the warning of the Umbrella Man.

01:23:45.300 The strangest fact in a case is not always what it seems.

01:23:50.380 And the murder of JonBenet Ramsey is full of strange facts.

01:23:55.160 A ransom note on the family's own paper.

01:23:58.580 A mother who talks to the cameras before the police.

01:24:01.560 A father composed when he should be falling apart.

01:24:04.820 In the spring of 1997, one man walks into this case and refuses to trust his eyes.

01:24:13.240 He wants the evidence, and only the evidence, to tell the story.

01:24:18.200 His name is Lou Smit.

01:24:20.780 I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

01:24:29.240 Lou Smit is not a defense lawyer.

01:24:31.660 He is not a Ramsey friend.

01:24:33.280 He is a career homicide detective out of Colorado Springs.

01:24:37.800 More than 200 murders worked, a clearance rate nearly 90 percent.

01:24:43.640 Lou is a deeply religious and methodical man whom they call the Sherlock of the Rockies.

01:24:49.020 His reputation is built on cases like Heather Dawn Church, a 13-year-old girl who vanished from her home in 1991.

01:24:56.760 The case sat cold for years until Smit went back through the file and lifted a single fingerprint off a window screen that everyone before him had missed.

01:25:08.180 That print put her killer away.

01:25:11.460 Lou is a finder of things other people failed to see.

01:25:15.560 In March of 1997, three months after JonBenet's murder, Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter brings Smit onto the JonBenet Ramsey task force.

01:25:26.460 The case is already going sideways, and the police and prosecutors are at each other's throats.

01:25:32.440 Lou Smit had retired just the previous year to spend time with his wife, Barb, who was battling cancer.

01:25:38.800 Now he's back on the force and in a different city away from his family and investigating another family affected by cancer.

01:25:47.660 Smit starts on the Ramsey case exactly where the police did, with the parents.

01:25:52.620 He knows the stats.

01:25:54.660 He knows a child found dead inside a home usually means someone who lived there is responsible.

01:26:00.620 He arrives expecting to help prove that the family did it.

01:26:05.280 Then Smith sits down with the file, and he works the way he always works,

01:26:09.880 by a principle he learned decades before, the transfer theory.

01:26:15.160 Whenever a person commits a crime, they leave something of themselves at the scene

01:26:19.640 and carry something from the scene away with them.

01:26:23.920 Find what was brought in and what was taken out, and the evidence will tell you who was there.

01:26:30.960 So Lou Smith stops asking who had a motive and instead asks a colder question.

01:26:37.100 What does the physical evidence on its own actually say?

01:26:41.620 And the longer he looks, the more he believes a new story.

01:26:46.520 It starts in the basement with a window.

01:26:49.460 low in the basement wall on the south side of the ramsey house there is a window found wide open on

01:26:56.640 the morning of december 26th the crime lab photographs it that way hours before john ramsey

01:27:02.900 ever finds john benet's body beneath it inside on the white painted wall a black scuff mark

01:27:11.380 and on the floor directly below a hard-sided samsonite suitcase stood upright on its end

01:27:18.020 in a spot where no one in the family says it belongs.

01:27:22.860 Inside the suitcase, a pink duvet, a Barbie doll,

01:27:26.960 and one of JonBenet's Dr. Seuss books.

01:27:30.480 The Boulder detectives tell Smith that the window is nothing.

01:27:34.440 No one could have come through there.

01:27:36.100 There's a metal grate over the outside window well.

01:27:39.440 So Smith studies the grate himself.

01:27:41.700 And in the crime lab photos from that morning,

01:27:44.340 he finds leaves and vegetation disturbed underneath it and dirt brushed clean off the frame of the

01:27:52.880 open window. To all appearances, it looks like someone has passed through there or at least

01:27:58.940 has tried. Then Lou does the thing that becomes his signature. A retired detective in his 60s

01:28:06.800 lowers himself into that window well and squeezes through that basement window on video

01:28:13.520 to prove a grown man can do it.

01:28:16.860 Now, this is where I think the killer actually got in at some point.

01:28:21.280 The grate has to be picked up and put down.

01:28:24.200 John Ramsey had broken that window himself the summer before

01:28:27.640 when he was locked out of the house, and he believed it had been fixed.

01:28:32.660 To Smith, the open pane is the point of entry.

01:28:36.800 The scuff on the wall is where a body scraped through,

01:28:39.660 and the suitcase is not clutter, it is a step.

01:28:43.340 something the killer stood on to climb back out.

01:28:46.960 Lou comes to believe the intruder may have meant to carry JonBenet out of the house inside that suitcase

01:28:53.260 and found it too big to force up through the window.

01:28:58.000 Near her body in the basement, there is white foam packing debris and brown leaves,

01:29:03.060 the same material that lines the bottom of that window well.

01:29:07.200 Smit believes the killer brought that into the house and left behind two traces,

01:29:12.500 a partial boot print from a brand NoRamsey owns,

01:29:16.700 and an unidentified palm print on the door of the little room where JonBenet was found.

01:29:23.660 But Lou keeps building.

01:29:25.880 He looks at the house itself.

01:29:28.540 JonBenet's bedroom is on the second floor.

01:29:30.900 her parents sleep one flight up in a converted attic suite at the very top of the house.

01:29:37.320 Investigators run sound tests and find that a voice in JonBenet's room is barely audible from

01:29:44.120 the master bedroom. Smit looks around the home and thinks, this is a big, chopped up, four-level

01:29:50.360 house in a college neighborhood with foot traffic at all hours and an alarm system the family had

01:29:56.080 switched off months before. This is not a sealed fortress. It is a place a patient stranger could

01:30:02.600 move through in the dark for hours, unseen and unheard. He studies how JonBenet was bound,

01:30:11.520 a garrotte built from white cord and the broken handle of one of Patsy's paintbrushes

01:30:16.700 tied with slipknots that only tighten as the victim pulls against them. To Smith, that is

01:30:23.400 not the panicked improvisation of a parent covering up an accident. It is the equipment.

01:30:29.480 It is intent. And the Ramseys owned none of the raw materials. No parachute cord, no roll of

01:30:36.880 duct tape. Police searched the house, the cars, the office, even the airplane hanger, and found

01:30:42.720 none of it. Whoever built that garage and taped the little girl's mouth shut, he brought his tools

01:30:49.640 in and carried most of them back out. And then there are the marks. Lou Smit is the first person

01:30:57.880 on the case to take them seriously. On JonBenet's body, there are two sets of small red marks,

01:31:04.840 a pair on her back and a pair on the right side of her face. Smit measures the gap and matches it

01:31:11.760 to the twin metal contacts of a specific weapon, an air taser, a stun gun.

01:31:18.420 what i'd like to show you is what i think is one of the most important clues left behind by the

01:31:25.060 killer stunk up there's marks on john benet those are marks on her back those are marks on her face

01:31:40.900 and there's the same distance of heart slightly rectangular and shape somebody made those marks

01:31:47.700 In Smith's reconstruction of JonBenet's murder, the stun gun is used twice, once upstairs, pressed to the child's jaw and throat while she sleeps, enough to stun her silent so she can be carried down without a sound, and once more in the basement on her back as she struggles.

01:32:07.800 A forensic pathologist reviews the comparison and calls the stun gun evidence compelling.

01:32:12.820 Unless some other evidence is presented to me, the most likely explanation for those injuries that they were caused by a stun gun.

01:32:21.480 That hands Lou the answer to a detail that never fit any other version of the night, the scream.

01:32:28.460 A neighbor, Melody Stanton, asleep across the street from the Ramseys with her window open, 150 feet away, reports hearing a child scream around 2 a.m. that morning.

01:32:40.980 A scream the Ramsey family inside the house say they never heard.

01:32:46.540 If it came from the basement, they might not have.

01:32:50.480 Beneath all of it, beneath the broken window and the stuffed suitcase and the pairs of red marks,

01:32:56.800 sits the evidence Lou Smith calls the key to this entire case, and that is the DNA.

01:33:03.880 The Colorado lab finds a small partial profile of male DNA drawn from a bloodstain in JonBenet's underwear.

01:33:15.300 It belongs to no one in the family nor to any suspect ever tested.

01:33:20.460 This sample, however, is too small and too degraded for the lab to identify the fluid or the tissue behind it.

01:33:26.760 Whether the DNA came from spit or sweat or shed skin, no one has ever been able to say.

01:33:35.440 It is male. It is not from the Ramsey family. And past that, a blank.

01:33:42.580 During the autopsy, a Boulder PD detective runs an ultraviolet light over the body and thinks he sees traces of semen.

01:33:50.120 But it turns out to be a smear of blood. No semen is ever found on JonBenet.

01:33:56.760 The autopsy indicates that the sexual assault is consistent with penetration by a finger or an object.

01:34:05.140 Broken blood vessels in JonBenet's vagina show she was penetrated that night,

01:34:10.160 and a microscopic fleck of wood is found inside of her,

01:34:14.380 most likely from the splintered paintbrush used to build the garage.

01:34:18.760 The unknown male DNA is not only found on JonBenet's underwear,

01:34:22.960 the same profile is found as touch DNA from skin cells inside the waistband of her long johns.

01:34:31.360 To a detective raised on the idea that every killer leaves a piece of himself behind,

01:34:36.280 one stray speck might be a fluke.

01:34:39.420 But the same stranger's DNA twice on a murdered child is a person who was there.

01:34:46.640 Smit argues one more point, and it is the shakiest part of his case,

01:34:51.780 that a predator who would do this would not do it once.

01:34:57.460 That somewhere there is a pattern,

01:34:59.960 other home invasions, other children,

01:35:01.820 and that Boulder is not the safe, sealed community

01:35:05.020 its officials keep insisting it is.

01:35:07.880 And there is one case that haunts that argument

01:35:10.780 more than any other.

01:35:12.720 It happens in September of 1997,

01:35:15.940 nine months after John Benet is killed,

01:35:18.440 less than two miles from the Ramsey home.

01:35:21.540 Late one night, a masked man breaks into a house and sexually assaults a 12-year-old girl in her own bed.

01:35:29.780 He has slipped past the alarm system and past the family dog, and by the family's account, he did not force his way in that night at all.

01:35:38.240 He appears to have gotten inside earlier while the house was empty and then hidden there, waiting until the family came home, locked the doors, and fell asleep.

01:35:49.400 He is stopped only when the girl's mother comes down the hall after hearing whispers in the dark.

01:35:55.920 He escapes out the bedroom window and vanishes into the night.

01:35:59.960 He is never caught.

01:36:02.160 That 12-year-old girl was a student at the very same local dance studio as JonBenet.

01:36:08.680 Two little girls from one small dance school, two miles apart.

01:36:13.480 One strangled in her basement on Christmas night.

01:36:16.240 The other, nine months later, attacked in her own bed by a masked man who had hidden inside her home and then vanished back into the neighborhood.

01:36:26.620 To John Ramsey and to the detectives who came to believe him, that is not a coincidence.

01:36:32.000 It's a pattern, possibly the very same man.

01:36:36.340 Lou never stops making the argument.

01:36:39.560 There is evidence of an intruder.

01:36:41.600 I say this over and over and over again.

01:36:44.040 Nobody wants to listen.

01:36:45.940 And as a result of that, there's a very good chance that tragedy could again strike this family.

01:36:52.600 That is the case for the intruder as Lou Smith built it.

01:36:58.000 Now here is what stands against it.

01:37:01.280 Start with the window and the spider web.

01:37:04.760 To reach that basement window, an intruder first has to lift the metal grate over the outside well.

01:37:11.400 and a spider web runs across that grate, its strands anchored from the metal down to the

01:37:18.760 bricks of the wall, or at least that's how it appears. The original web is never photographed

01:37:23.860 and whether it connects the grate itself to the house is a point of contention. The officers who

01:37:31.160 inspect it find the web whole. That spells trouble for the intruder theory. If the spider web is

01:37:37.540 intact and connects the metal to the house, it suggests the grate above the window well

01:37:43.360 was never lifted at all. It is the single hardest fact against Lou Smit's window theory.

01:37:50.140 But Smit reads that same grate the opposite way.

01:37:53.980 Now, this is where I think the killer actually got in at some point. And there is a gas grill

01:38:00.740 here and then there's a south door to the house. Right behind this gas grill is a grate. And you

01:38:07.140 put the grate up, you're looking straight down into the window. There's three windows there.

01:38:12.840 The center one was the one that was open, and you're going to see foliage, that green foliage

01:38:17.960 under the leading edge of that grate. Don't grow that way. The grate has to be picked up and put

01:38:24.960 down. Smith says the grate is not bolted down, and he is sure that a patient hand can ease it up

01:38:32.800 and set it back without snapping a strand.

01:38:36.840 During one walkthrough of the house,

01:38:38.660 Smit eases the grate open without breaking a fresh web

01:38:42.180 that has grown between the grate and the house.

01:38:45.500 Even Detective Steve Thomas notes that Smit was able to navigate the grate

01:38:50.080 without breaking the web,

01:38:52.040 while detectives who try lifting the grate break several web strands.

01:38:57.060 So the web does not settle the question.

01:38:59.860 It only sharpens it.

01:39:00.860 There's one more possible explanation for the web, an industrious spider.

01:39:07.400 Detective Michael Everett from Boulder PD consults two spider experts, Dr. Brent Opel of Virginia Tech and Dr. Robert Bennett of the British Columbia Ministry of Forests.

01:39:20.340 Both identify the web as a funnel web, a kind of web that a spider spins and repairs for as long as it's alive.

01:39:28.640 The night JonBenet died, the temperature in Boulder dropped to around 6 degrees.

01:39:34.960 By the next afternoon, it was back up into the low 50s.

01:39:38.720 The open window faces southwest into the afternoon sun.

01:39:43.780 While the funnel weaver spider hibernates through a Colorado winter,

01:39:49.000 Bennett says the Ramsey window well had perfect conditions for a hibernating spider

01:39:53.920 to wake up and repair its web and re-spin it that day or the next.

01:40:01.540 However, it's unclear precisely what time of day officers first observed the fully intact spider web

01:40:08.240 and whether there would have been enough time for the spider to spin it fresh.

01:40:12.320 Like all the other evidence in this case, even the spider web points two ways at once.

01:40:19.420 Then we get to the stun gun.

01:40:21.480 The cold case team in the 2016 CBS documentary tests this part of the theory by using a stun gun on a volunteer.

01:40:30.300 The marks it leaves behind do not match those on JonBenet.

01:40:34.480 And the effect is the opposite of silence.

01:40:38.600 Taser, taser.

01:40:41.240 If this were done to this kid, you would have a scream from this kid that goes through the entire building.

01:40:50.180 everybody in that house would have heard it so the stun gun like the window stays contested

01:40:57.960 but the marks are still there on dead john benet's skin and no version in which the parents did it

01:41:05.760 has ever fully explained them then the dna where the counter is technical and it is fair

01:41:13.940 This is a tiny amount of touch DNA, and skilled scientists caution that trace DNA like this can travel.

01:41:23.000 It could be carried to the scene by a factory worker who handled the underwear or transferred from one service to another.

01:41:29.900 It is not on its own a name.

01:41:33.740 The DNA profile has been run against a great many people over the years, and it's never matched a single one of them.

01:41:41.800 John Ramsey will spend the rest of his life saying those three letters are the answer.

01:41:48.240 That the identity of the man who killed his daughter is sitting in an evidence locker, waiting for science to catch up to him.

01:41:55.160 The police find no definitive connection between the 1997 home invasion in Boulder and the murder of John Benet.

01:42:02.440 No forensic thread that ties the same hand to both crimes.

01:42:07.440 One Boulder PD officer bluntly sums up the department's stance on the Ramsey murder.

01:42:12.500 This was one of a kind.

01:42:14.840 Lou never manages to prove the link.

01:42:18.440 Smith's intruder theory has two more potential holes, and they are not small.

01:42:23.900 First, it has to explain the ransom note, three pages long written on a pad from inside the house,

01:42:30.660 demanding a ransom that almost exactly matches John Ramsey's annual bonus.

01:42:36.940 It has to explain why a stranger who broke in to steal a child

01:42:40.840 would then sit down in that dark house and compose three theatrical pages

01:42:45.340 instead of simply carrying her out the door.

01:42:48.920 And it is not only the ransom note.

01:42:52.120 Remember the garrotte.

01:42:54.000 Its handle is a piece of Patsy's own paintbrushes

01:42:57.040 taken from her art kit in the basement.

01:43:00.340 The pad, the pen, the paintbrush.

01:43:02.980 The killer builds this crime, in part, out of the family's own belongings.

01:43:08.620 A stranger organized enough to arrive with a stun gun, duct tape, and cord,

01:43:13.460 who then fashions the murder weapon from a mother's paintbrush

01:43:16.680 and writes his ransom demand on the household notepad, is a genuinely odd figure.

01:43:22.720 To the bolder detectives, it is the strangest, the damnedest thing,

01:43:26.760 about the whole intruder theory, an outsider who behaves at the decisive moment exactly like

01:43:32.880 someone who already lives there. Lou has an answer. He believes the original plan of a kidnapping for

01:43:40.660 ransom went wrong in the basement. In Lou's mind, the murderer entered the house through the open

01:43:46.600 basement window while the family was out at Christmas dinner. He wrote the ransom note on

01:43:51.780 the family notepad, then hid inside the house. Once the family was asleep, the killer crept

01:43:57.340 into JonBenet's room and used a stun gun to incapacitate her. He then carried her down to

01:44:03.420 the basement, fashioned a garrotte with Patsy's paintbrush handle, and sexually assaulted JonBenet

01:44:10.440 with his fingers. I believe he brought her down to the farthest, deepest part of that basement

01:44:15.460 and did very brutal things to her.

01:44:20.200 Lou believes the killer used the garrote

01:44:22.040 both as a tool of erotic asphyxiation

01:44:25.260 or strangulation fantasy

01:44:27.340 and actual deadly strangulation.

01:44:32.300 Lou believes that JonBenet came to at some point

01:44:34.880 and started to fight back.

01:44:36.660 That the attacker then panicked

01:44:38.440 and hit her over the head,

01:44:40.120 possibly with a flashlight

01:44:41.400 or an aluminum baseball bat,

01:44:43.340 both found in the Ramsey house.

01:44:45.460 The killer then believed that JonBenet was dead and fled out the basement window.

01:44:51.120 As for the oddly specific ransom amount, Lou explains that $118,000 would have yielded exactly 1 million Mexican pesos at that time.

01:45:01.800 If the intruder were planning to run to the border, 1 million pesos sounds like a nice round number to help with an escape.

01:45:09.380 by 1998 the john benet ramsey case is no longer just a murder investigation it has devolved

01:45:16.880 into two camps at war the boulder pd believes the answer lies inside the ramsey house lou smith and

01:45:24.880 the district attorney's office are convinced it came in from the outside the police and prosecutors

01:45:31.040 barely trust each other early on the two sides fought over how to handle john benet's body

01:45:36.440 the police wanting to hold it back from burial as leverage to force the parents into an interview

01:45:41.940 and the DA's office shaming police for ransoming a dead child it is a small ugly fight over a

01:45:49.820 child's body it is also the first crack in a divide that will run through everything to come

01:45:56.200 and swallow this entire case and within a few weeks of each other that war produces two major

01:46:03.780 casualties. Two detectives with opposite conclusions, both quitting the case in protest.

01:46:11.280 In August of 1998, Steve Thomas, the lead detective who believes Patsy killed John

01:46:17.020 Benet, resigns with a public letter blasting the D.A. for refusing to charge the Ramsey

01:46:22.860 family. And in September of 1998, Lou Smit resigns for the exact opposite reason. He

01:46:30.660 writes the district attorney that he cannot in good conscience be part of the persecution of

01:46:35.880 innocent people. Smith does not walk away from the case itself, however. He keeps working it for free

01:46:42.500 for the rest of his life. I don't know if I could solve it without the help of the police department

01:46:47.960 and I'm sure I'm not going to get that. But I know that God had a plan and I'm part of it and I'm

01:46:54.100 just going to continue to work in it as long as he needs to. Lou hauls around his boxes of

01:47:00.720 photographs and his slide deck of the window and the marks and the DNA from meeting to meeting

01:47:06.700 right up until his death in 2010. Friends later say he took this case to his grave.

01:47:13.460 Lou's adult children carry the torch forward and continue to investigate to this day.

01:47:18.460 Back in 1998, the investigation stalled because the people the detectives most needed to talk to stopped talking.

01:47:28.960 John and Patsy Ramsey, on their lawyer's advice, will not sit for open police interviews at this point.

01:47:36.280 Friends who are around the house that Christmas, they've lawyered up as well.

01:47:40.900 A grand jury is the one tool that can break this wall.

01:47:46.360 It can subpoena witnesses, force testimony under oath, and demand evidence the police cannot otherwise get.

01:47:53.560 It can lock down memories in testimony before they fade, including the account of Ramsey's young son, Burke.

01:48:01.200 In March of 1998, the Boulder PD formally asks District Attorney Alex Hunter to take this case to a grand jury,

01:48:10.120 and the PD announces it in a press release.

01:48:12.560 quote, while there is still some investigation left to be done, both Chief Kobe and Commander

01:48:18.820 Beckner believe the investigation has progressed to the point at which the authority of a grand

01:48:23.860 jury is necessary in order to complete the investigation, end quote. For months, D.A.

01:48:30.280 Hunter resists. In his meetings with the police, he calls a grand jury a political solution,

01:48:35.660 not a way to solve the case. In public, his office calls the idea premature. But now the

01:48:42.660 police are demanding it in public. And Hunter is out of good options. So he gives in. And in

01:48:50.320 September 1998, Alex Hunter convenes a grand jury. He brings in an outside specialist,

01:48:57.880 former federal prosecutor Michael Caine, to run it. And he hands the biggest question in the case,

01:49:03.880 whether anyone can be charged in JonBenet's death

01:49:07.440 to a group of ordinary, bolder citizens

01:49:10.540 sworn to lifelong secrecy.

01:49:13.520 They hear from former FBI profiler John Douglas,

01:49:17.620 whom the Ramseys hired to investigate this case,

01:49:20.040 who believes that an intruder killed JonBenet.

01:49:23.240 I've sat down across a table

01:49:24.860 from some of the country's greatest liars in the world, really,

01:49:30.440 and I can sense it.

01:49:32.580 and things just did not fit the crime scene data just doesn't doesn't fit when i'm looking at this

01:49:39.940 man mr ramsey if you did it you are one hell of a liar you you are one hell of a liar if you did it

01:49:48.340 and you're putting on a great production here but i just don't believe in my heart he did this and

01:49:55.860 not just in my heart from what from the analysis of the of the scene they hear from lou smith too

01:50:02.880 Smit brings the grand jury the case of his life.

01:50:05.960 More than 600 slides, built one photograph at a time,

01:50:09.480 the open window, the disturbed grate, the suitcase,

01:50:13.440 the marks on the child's skin, the DNA, all of it.

01:50:17.320 And at the end of it, the question that has hung over the Ramsey family

01:50:21.480 for two years is finally going to get an answer.

01:50:25.780 Will John and Patsy be charged with the murder of their daughter or not?

01:50:31.140 That grand jury will sift through evidence for more than a year.

01:50:35.920 But it turns out that what the grand jury decides and what the public is told are two wildly different things.

01:50:43.520 We'll open that door and everything behind it tomorrow on MK Confidential.

01:50:53.600 It is October 13th, 1999, a lovely fall Wednesday in Boulder, Colorado.

01:51:00.620 13 months of testimony in the grand jury proceeding looking into the murder of JonBenet Ramsey.

01:51:05.900 More than 30,000 pieces of evidence, dozens of witnesses,

01:51:10.040 all of which culminates in one man walking up to a bank of microphones.

01:51:15.460 District Attorney Alex Hunter steps up onto the outdoor platform.

01:51:19.520 Reporters are huddled and the cameras are already rolling.

01:51:23.420 Alex Hunter has a single page of paper in hand.

01:51:26.360 the grand jurors have done their work extraordinarily well

01:51:31.300 bringing to bear all of their legal powers

01:51:35.000 life experiences and shrewdness

01:51:38.900 yet I must report to you

01:51:42.420 that I and my prosecution task force

01:51:46.540 believe we do not have sufficient evidence

01:51:49.940 to warrant the filing of charges against anyone

01:51:54.020 who has been investigated at this time.

01:51:59.440 Thank you very much.

01:52:02.520 And that's it.

01:52:04.500 No charges, no indictment, no arrest.

01:52:08.240 The reporters filed their stories that night

01:52:10.340 with a single headline,

01:52:11.540 the grand jury found nothing.

01:52:14.580 Except the grand jury did not find nothing.

01:52:18.580 What no one in that room knows

01:52:20.520 is that those grand jurors voted to indict

01:52:23.280 John and Patsy Ramsey. They signed true bills, the formal charges a grand jury returns when it

01:52:30.160 believes there is enough evidence to proceed, not for murder, but for child abuse resulting in death

01:52:36.640 and for accessory to first-degree murder for helping to hide whoever killed JonBenet.

01:52:44.580 Alex Hunter declined to sign and file those true bills. How it works is a grand jury indicts on

01:52:51.200 probable cause, the lowest bar in the law, a prosecutor then has to decide whether this case

01:52:56.280 can be proved at trial beyond a reasonable doubt, the highest bar there is. Hunter decided he could

01:53:02.500 not clear that distance, so he sealed the true bills away, walked to the microphone, and told

01:53:09.240 the world he had nothing. The district attorney will keep that secret for 14 years. The case will

01:53:17.100 outlast Alex Hunter. It will outlast the detectives who fought over it. It will even outlast

01:53:23.180 one of the two parents living under its shadow. But this case was never really closed. It was

01:53:30.020 only sealed. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential with our final episode in the

01:53:36.620 investigation into the death of JonBenet Ramsey. For the Ramseys, Alex Hunter's decision not to

01:53:48.100 press charges does not bring freedom. It's a strange kind of life sentence. They're never

01:53:53.680 arrested, never tried, never convicted. They live as prime suspects. They walk through airports,

01:54:01.180 grocery stores, church parking lots carrying an accusation no jury will ever test and no court

01:54:07.620 can lift. The accusation cost them more than their piece. John Ramsey once ran a billion-dollar

01:54:14.440 company, but as John himself told Barbara Walters, this case has ruined the family financially.

01:54:21.180 Before John Benet's death, you were reportedly worth millions of dollars,

01:54:27.500 But that money seems to have gone.

01:54:29.800 I was told by a very experienced FBI person that most victims of violent crime end up broke.

01:54:38.540 Very expensive to deal with, the justice system.

01:54:42.020 You make bad decisions.

01:54:43.580 You sell your home, you move, you quit your job, you change job.

01:54:48.580 In defending themselves, the Ramseys enlist a small army of lawyers, investigators, publicists,

01:54:55.040 handwriting experts, and a former FBI profiler. A fortune once estimated north of $7 million

01:55:01.820 shrinks toward one. They sell the house on 15th Street, the house where JonBenet was murdered,

01:55:08.580 and never spend another night in it after the Christmas of 1996. They're not spending this

01:55:13.980 money to win a case. They are spending it to prove a negative, that they did not murder their

01:55:18.780 own child. While the family fights the accusation in public, Detective Lou Smith works the case

01:55:24.840 in private, chasing his intruder theory, the lone man, he is certain, is out there somewhere.

01:55:31.160 And Lou is not the only one chasing the lone wolves. Every few years, new names surface,

01:55:37.220 the possible break everyone's been waiting for. In March of 1997, Boulder police get a call from

01:55:44.500 the state of North Carolina about a drifter named John Brewer Eustace. He's charged with the rape

01:55:51.180 and kidnap of a two-year-old girl in Charlotte. He pried open a basement apartment's window

01:55:56.460 screen, snatched the child from a bedroom, and took her out the window. Eustace is also

01:56:02.280 the suspect in the murders of three other young girls across the country. When police

01:56:06.720 go into Eustace's house, there's a shrine to John Benet. So Boulder detectives travel

01:56:13.440 halfway across the country to Charlotte and review the evidence themselves. Could Eustace

01:56:18.660 have been in Colorado in December?

01:56:21.620 Unfortunately, Eustace has a rock-solid alibi for that night.

01:56:25.940 He worked in a factory, and he had clocked in,

01:56:28.940 covering the time period in which JonBenet had died.

01:56:32.480 There is Gary Oliva, a convicted pedophile

01:56:35.500 who the morning after JonBenet's murder

01:56:37.480 calls an old high school friend sobbing into the phone,

01:56:41.400 saying, I just heard a little girl.

01:56:43.840 He's written a series of letters,

01:56:45.180 including ones where he has admitted taking the life of JonBenet Ramsey.

01:56:51.680 He's in custody right now, but he sent these letters.

01:56:54.600 And the question is, is this for real?

01:56:57.680 In December of 2000, police arrest Gary on drug charges,

01:57:02.180 and he's found carrying a photograph of JonBenet, a stun gun, and a poem he has written to her.

01:57:09.500 Living on the streets, Gary often visited a local church, which fed homeless people,

01:57:14.260 and is located less than 10 houses away from the Ramsey home.

01:57:18.980 Police run his DNA against the unknown male fluids on JonBenet's body

01:57:23.040 and on her clothes, and no match.

01:57:27.480 There is Randy Simons, the photographer who took JonBenet's pageant portraits.

01:57:32.580 Shortly after JonBenet's death, multiple beauty pageant mothers report to police

01:57:36.480 that Randy called them up hysterical, saying,

01:57:39.000 I did not kill JonBenet. I did not kill JonBenet.

01:57:42.700 No one was saying he did.

01:57:44.260 A year later, Randy was walking down the street naked and the police were called.

01:57:50.080 During his arrest, he blurts out to police unprompted, I did not kill JonBenet.

01:57:54.860 A red flag again, but no match on the DNA.

01:58:00.340 There is Michael Helgoth, a Boulder area man who works near the Ramsey home and has a history of violence and sexual abuse.

01:58:08.900 Just weeks after JonBenet's killing,

01:58:11.160 Helgoth turns up dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound,

01:58:15.040 right as word spreads that the DA is closing in on a suspect.

01:58:19.820 Among his possessions, a stun gun and a pair of high-tech boots,

01:58:24.440 the same brand as a print left on the concrete near where JonBenet was found.

01:58:30.600 But his DNA, too, does not match.

01:58:33.400 behind those four names is a parade of thousands more boulder pd follow up on more than 21 000 tips

01:58:42.280 letters emails traveling across 19 states talking to more than 1 000 people possibly connected to

01:58:48.820 this crime and then in the summer of 2006 comes the biggest thunderbolt of them all it does not

01:58:57.000 come from Boulder or the old list of suspects. It comes from the other side of the world,

01:59:02.740 8,500 miles away, Thailand. It comes to Boulder through an inbox. Starting in 2002, a stranger

01:59:11.760 calling himself Daxus begins emailing University of Colorado professor Michael Tracy. Tracy has

01:59:19.160 spent years making documentaries about JonBenet's murder, and now this stranger, Daxus, wants to

01:59:25.500 talk. Daxas begins to inundate the Colorado professor with emails, hundreds of them. At

01:59:31.960 first, the emails read like the outpourings of an obsessive JonBenet fan. But over the months

01:59:37.420 that follow, they curdle into something far more revolting. Slowly, Daxas starts to say that

01:59:43.320 he killed JonBenet. In one email, he writes, are you asking me why I killed JonBenet?

01:59:49.760 I don't see it that way. Her and I were engaging in a romantic and very sexual interaction.

01:59:56.560 It went bad and it was my fault. Daxus gives specifics on the Ramsey staircase, describes

02:00:02.900 the basement, the blanket, and the exact room where JonBenet was killed. He messages about

02:00:08.560 a check stub for 118,000 he saw on Jon Ramsey's desk. Daxus claims to be under federal investigation

02:00:16.320 for, quote, child murder and child molestation in four states.

02:00:22.400 Michael Tracy is skeptical.

02:00:24.940 By this point, so much information has been casually released by the police,

02:00:28.940 is out in news specials and magazines, or just leaked onto the Internet.

02:00:34.300 And people confess to notorious crimes all the time for attention.

02:00:38.080 So the Colorado professor tests Daxus.

02:00:41.840 I said, how come I don't know you're just pulling this from the Internet

02:00:44.500 and feeding me what is out there already.

02:00:47.920 And he said, ask John Ramsey

02:00:51.100 what Jean-Mané's nickname was for Nedra, her grandmother,

02:00:56.060 and it will be this.

02:00:57.700 So I emailed John.

02:00:59.640 What was the nickname?

02:01:01.140 It comes back, Neddy.

02:01:04.060 It was right, it was correct.

02:01:05.700 Because John searched, there was nowhere

02:01:08.260 that that nickname was known in the public domain.

02:01:11.000 Michael discusses Daxus with Boulder detective Lou Smith.

02:01:14.500 as well. I would share some of the emails with Lou Smith. And I said, look, you know, I've got

02:01:20.000 this from this guy. I have no idea where this guy is, where he is. He could be next door. I have no

02:01:24.060 idea. And I would say to Lou, just tell me it's a nutcase and we can end it. And Lou said,

02:01:30.460 no can do, Michael. Got to keep at it. The emails with Daxas go on for four years. He's a ghost.

02:01:38.160 His emails untraceable. During all of this, the woman at the center of this case

02:01:43.140 is running out of time. Patsy Ramsey has been fighting ovarian cancer since 1993.

02:01:50.020 It went into remission in 1995, then came back in 2002. And this time, the cancer is resistant

02:01:57.620 to treatment and slowly overwhelms Patsy. In 2006, it reaches her brain. The matter is hopeless.

02:02:06.360 So John makes a tough decision. At the doctor's urging, he stops Patsy's treatment,

02:02:11.620 but cannot bring himself to tell her.

02:02:15.220 The cancer had migrated to her brain,

02:02:17.320 so she was not her normal self.

02:02:20.340 So she didn't know that we'd given up.

02:02:25.180 She would ask me, when's my next treatment?

02:02:27.020 And I knew in my heart there was no next treatment.

02:02:31.400 That was hard.

02:02:33.860 This is exactly when Daxus begins asking to speak to Patsy.

02:02:37.960 He starts asking Michael Tracy to connect him with Patsy so he can apologize for killing her daughter.

02:02:46.320 The Colorado professor stalls and stalls, and then the ding of another incoming Daxus email turns this into something else entirely.

02:02:56.220 Tracy reads Daxus's message.

02:02:58.900 I'll be in the house before you give me that contact information, won't I?

02:03:04.560 Tracy takes that as a threat.

02:03:06.140 He takes everything he has to the new Boulder District Attorney, Mary Lacey, and the investigation goes wide.

02:03:12.960 Her office, Homeland Security, ICE, every set of eyes they have.

02:03:17.460 Then Daxus raises the stakes even further.

02:03:20.620 He asks Tracy, do you want to hear my voice?

02:03:24.700 Tracy says, sure.

02:03:26.720 That's quick to finally talk.

02:03:29.320 I must admit, I was a bit surprised when you sent the phone number, you know?

02:03:34.320 Yeah.

02:03:34.600 Why did you do that, by the way?

02:03:36.280 I don't know. I've lost it in my senses.

02:03:40.400 11 hours.

02:03:42.120 That's how much tape Michael Tracy records of Daxus over the calls that follow.

02:03:46.980 And Michael's not the only one listening.

02:03:49.300 By now, various intelligence agencies are on the line, too.

02:03:53.340 On these tapes, Daxus finally tells the story of what he says he did to JonBenet.

02:03:58.900 Sort of.

02:03:59.880 He dances around the story, but there is one word he will not say.

02:04:04.600 at what point did you decide you had to tell me that you killed her

02:04:08.780 i never have said that i have but it's heavily implied isn't it i know and i can't say that

02:04:15.660 i just can't say that word kill he won't say kill because in his mind this is not a murder

02:04:23.020 what daxis describes in a soft almost tender voice is a love story he recasts the killing

02:04:32.820 of a six-year-old little girl as some private, intimate ritual, an erotic game, with what

02:04:38.400 he insists on calling a special necklace, a game of pressure and release, of taking

02:04:45.140 JonBenet to the edge of consciousness and back.

02:04:47.960 He savors the telling of it.

02:04:50.420 I just kind of knelt down in the forever, and I said, JonBenet, I want to make another

02:04:55.340 necklace for you.

02:04:56.980 And it had some interesting knots in it.

02:05:02.820 So I slowly apply the crusher on her neck with that second necklace.

02:05:09.780 And I just say, yes, sweetheart, go into the sweet dream.

02:05:14.740 At that point, her little body started to involch and twitch a little bit.

02:05:21.100 And then, in his telling, the game goes too far.

02:05:24.660 I was just in the droves of ecstasy with her.

02:05:27.720 and then all of a sudden

02:05:31.180 my gaze just was suddenly broken

02:05:33.380 and I was just like

02:05:34.860 oh my god

02:05:36.040 Jean Benet are you okay

02:05:39.080 and

02:05:40.300 I knew she wasn't okay

02:05:44.880 because I knew that she wasn't breathing

02:05:47.020 and

02:05:48.940 I just

02:05:50.560 was terrified

02:05:52.660 I said oh god

02:05:55.100 I'm gonna have to finish this

02:05:56.960 I know what I'm going to have to do because I can't take the chance that she could still be alive.

02:06:01.800 What he describes next is a man making sure, cold, deliberate steps to guarantee a little girl could not still be alive.

02:06:11.240 He tells it like a man who is still in love with the memory of it.

02:06:14.960 I don't know if I gathered everything up. I don't know if I left something behind.

02:06:18.720 But I had to go back to that window.

02:06:22.180 That's where I came in. That's where I have to go out.

02:06:24.520 i withered the grate i got out of the grate and i was like oh god i left my my little girl in

02:06:33.820 that horrible state she's in that little piney room and worse than that she's dead

02:06:38.060 and god what have i done so boulder has a man confessing in detail to the murder that has

02:06:46.380 haunted this town for a decade there is just one problem nobody has any idea who he is or even what

02:06:54.440 continent he's on, nor whether one word of this is true. And Daxus knows it.

02:07:01.560 I'm Interpol's biggest nightmare, because I know I have to evade.

02:07:07.240 The law enforcement will run into the biggest brick wall when they try to trace this phone

02:07:11.620 number. It leads to no body. I am not a fool. So how do you catch a man who is nowhere?

02:07:19.980 Well, the DA's office thinks they have found one weakness, his obsession.

02:07:27.300 In all those emails, all those calls, Daxus is desperate to talk to Patsy.

02:07:33.120 So the investigators make a cold calculation.

02:07:36.860 Let's milk that.

02:07:38.500 John and Patsy agree to a call with Daxus.

02:07:41.820 Police set up a phone at Patsy's bedside.

02:07:44.680 They tap the line, the one Daxus has been so intent on calling.

02:07:48.700 and then they wait. Patsy is in bed. She's not in good shape. She's quickly dying, the cancer

02:07:55.740 taking her. Yet she is prepared to talk to the man who says he strangled her only daughter,

02:08:01.720 just to keep him on the line long enough for police to trace him. A dying mother waits by

02:08:07.940 the phone, ready to hear her child's killer apologize. He never calls.

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02:08:46.360 June 24th, 2006.

02:08:49.220 It is a warm, hazy Saturday outside Atlanta.

02:08:53.000 That day at her father's home in Roswell, Georgia, with John at her side, Patsy Ramsey dies.

02:08:59.580 She was 49 years old.

02:09:02.440 Patsy dies in the very same limbo she'd been living in since 1996.

02:09:06.720 Accused, uncharged, and with no answers.

02:09:11.020 She is buried in Georgia beside the daughter she was accused of killing.

02:09:16.120 Later that summer, Colorado Professor Michael Tracy calls Daxus.

02:09:21.460 Daxus, this is my Tracy.

02:09:24.260 Hey, Michael.

02:09:25.220 There's some really bad news.

02:09:27.820 Patsy died.

02:09:29.700 I can never hear her say that she broke his name.

02:09:33.620 Patsy's death does something else.

02:09:36.000 It cracks a door open.

02:09:38.340 Daxus learns Tracy has the last photograph ever taken of JonBenet alive, and he wants it.

02:09:45.240 He emails and asks Tracy to scan it and send it over.

02:09:49.500 An investigator sees the opening.

02:09:51.760 Don't scan it, he tells Tracy.

02:09:53.760 Offer him the original.

02:09:55.180 Offer to mail it to him.

02:09:56.980 And Daxus, this man who has bragged for years that he is untraceable, bites.

02:10:04.080 He agrees to pick up the photo at a UPS box in Bangkok, Thailand.

02:10:09.460 Thai authorities put the UPS store under surveillance and wait.

02:10:15.260 Daxas, still talking to Tracy, can't help himself.

02:10:19.040 He mentions a mountain bike he just bought, describes it, says he's going to ride it to work at a school.

02:10:24.940 So one day in the summer of 2006, 10 years after JonBenet was killed,

02:10:30.240 a man rides up on that exact bike, walks into the UPS store, and collects his package.

02:10:38.160 They have him on camera.

02:10:39.980 And for about one week, Thai police follow him.

02:10:44.460 He's identified as John Mark Carr, 41 years old, American, and it gets worse.

02:10:51.740 because in Bangkok, John Mark Carr is teaching at an elementary school

02:10:56.760 with rooms full of small children.

02:11:00.900 Thai police move in.

02:11:03.660 It's a case that had run cold for a decade.

02:11:06.460 In a bizarre twist, while he was being paraded before cameras,

02:11:10.220 Carr actually responded to reporters' questions.

02:11:13.420 In front of the cameras in Bangkok, Carr does not deny it.

02:11:17.500 I love Rabin A and you die accidentally.

02:11:21.740 Are you an innocent man?

02:11:23.600 No.

02:11:24.100 Off my leg.

02:11:24.800 What happened?

02:11:25.820 Were you playing with her?

02:11:28.000 What happened?

02:11:32.560 Her death was an accident.

02:11:36.220 Investigators start delving into who this man actually is and what they find is disturbing.

02:11:41.280 In 2001, in Petaluma, California, working as a teacher again, John Mark Carr is arrested and charged with possession of child pornography.

02:11:53.060 He's heading for trial, and he runs, flees the country.

02:11:57.940 And everywhere he lands, Asia, Europe, Latin America, he finds the very same job, teaching young children.

02:12:06.540 John Mark Carr, 41 years old, was arrested for the murder of JonBenet Ramsey yesterday morning at approximately 6 a.m. in Bangkok, Thailand.

02:12:20.900 He began his employment as a second grade teacher in the international school system in Bangkok on Tuesday morning of this week.

02:12:31.460 In off-camera comments recorded by the AP, Carr restated his claim that JonBenet's death was an accident.

02:12:38.320 It's very important for me that everyone knows that I love her very much and that her death was unintentional and it was an accident.

02:12:48.140 The whole media machine roars back to life.

02:12:51.240 Carr is deported from Thailand and flown to Boulder in the front cabin of a commercial jet served shrimp and champagne.

02:12:58.340 A picture of the tabloids splash across every front page.

02:13:02.560 Forty cameras camp out in John Ramsey's front yard.

02:13:06.200 To a watching world for 12 days, this is the man who killed JonBenet Ramsey.

02:13:11.780 It feels impossibly like it might finally be over.

02:13:17.160 There's only one thing left to check.

02:13:19.700 The DNA.

02:13:21.400 They compare John Mark Carr's DNA to the unknown male profile,

02:13:26.300 The sample from under JonBenet's fingernails, from her clothing, it does not match.

02:13:33.240 The man who says he was with JonBenet Ramsey when she was killed in 1996 will not be charged in the case.

02:13:40.760 The Boulder County District Attorney says no charges will be filed against John Mark Carr.

02:13:45.260 Boulder County DA Mary Lacey released a statement.

02:13:47.920 It had long been known that there was some DNA thought to be the killers in JonBenet's underclothes.

02:13:53.160 Lacey says they took a DNA sample from Carr and it didn't match that DNA.

02:13:59.060 The DNA isn't close.

02:14:01.660 John Mark Carr, who confessed for hours, was never actually inside the Ramsey home.

02:14:07.380 The confession was a fantasy.

02:14:09.700 The biggest break in the history of this case collapses in a matter of days.

02:14:15.680 To put a bow on it, investigators went looking for where John Mark Carr was in December of 1996.

02:14:21.700 and the answer comes from his own family.

02:14:25.440 He was in Alabama with them that Christmas.

02:14:28.660 There is no record that John Mark Carr ever set one foot in Colorado before 2006.

02:14:36.620 In 2008, Boulder District Attorney Mary Lacey sends John Benet's clothing

02:14:41.520 to a private lab for a newer, more sensitive kind of analysis called TouchDNA.

02:14:47.440 It looks for tiny traces of DNA left behind when someone touches something.

02:14:53.360 Even a small number of skin cells can sometimes be enough.

02:14:57.680 The lab pulls a male profile off the waistband of the long johns JonBenet was wearing in two separate spots,

02:15:05.620 and it matches the unknown male DNA already found in her underwear.

02:15:10.660 One unidentified male profile detected in three different locations on two garments.

02:15:17.440 To Lacey, this is no stray speck of contamination.

02:15:21.340 This is the residue of the hands that hurt JonBenet.

02:15:25.820 She makes a decision no Boulder prosecutor has made in 12 years.

02:15:30.380 Two years after Patsy Ramsey dies, Lacey clears the Ramsey family.

02:15:35.820 Publicly, completely, and in writing.

02:15:40.460 Lacey does something else unheard of for a prosecutor.

02:15:43.820 She writes the Ramseys a letter and she apologizes.

02:15:47.440 She writes that the office does not consider John Patsy or Burke Ramsey to be under any suspicion in the commission of this crime.

02:15:55.740 And then this, quote, to the extent that we may have contributed in any way to the public perception that you might have been involved in this crime.

02:16:03.800 I am deeply sorry.

02:16:05.860 Of course, that doesn't settle anything in this case, because not everyone believes the DNA means what Mary Lacey says it means.

02:16:15.140 One of the loudest skeptics is a man named James Kolar,

02:16:19.260 a former investigator who worked the JonBenet case files

02:16:22.200 and comes away certain the answer was inside the house all along.

02:16:27.000 Here he is in October 2013.

02:16:30.160 I think it's extremely unlikely that an intruder was involved in this situation.

02:16:34.880 And what's frustrating for me is that the DNA evidence continues to be proffered as proof

02:16:44.040 that an intruder was involved.

02:16:47.180 There are six unidentified samples of DNA, trace amounts.

02:16:51.880 There were three people in the home that evening.

02:16:53.720 I think investigators needed to look at all three of them.

02:16:58.240 Kolar means the three people in the house that night,

02:17:01.320 John, Patsy, and the only child left, Burke.

02:17:05.160 And in 2013, the grand jury secret Alex Hunter carried

02:17:09.800 out of that 1999 press conference

02:17:12.120 finally breaks open.

02:17:14.900 A daily camera reporter named Charlie Brennan

02:17:17.600 sues the Boulder DA's office for the sealed grand jury records and wins.

02:17:22.800 And the public learns for the first time what Hunter has known all along,

02:17:27.880 that the grand jury had voted to indict the Ramseys.

02:17:32.040 Alex Hunter could have announced that afternoon

02:17:35.020 that the grand jury has elected not to indict anybody.

02:17:39.740 He could have said, the grand jury indicted somebody, but we're not going to prosecute it.

02:17:46.800 He didn't say either of those things.

02:17:50.060 A number of years down the road, two sources of mine told me, you can't report this, but they indicted both John and Patsy Ramsey.

02:18:02.120 So I set out to contact grand jurors directly.

02:18:06.180 and multiple grand jurors confirmed for me that's what happened here is what the documents

02:18:14.960 did not do they did not accuse burke ramsey by name accessory is a charge that only makes sense

02:18:22.420 if there is a principle someone the accessory is protecting and the indictments left that person

02:18:28.360 unnamed but the ambiguity left room for others to fill in the blank and a legacy tv network does

02:18:34.820 precisely that. On the 20th anniversary of the murder in 2016, CBS News puts the theory into

02:18:42.100 primetime that a nine-year-old Burke Ramsey struck his sister JonBenet and that his parents staged

02:18:49.000 everything else. A little boy who was never charged with anything, now 29 years old, is put on trial

02:18:56.020 again on television for a brand new audience. And for the first time in 20 years, Burke Ramsey

02:19:02.660 answers for himself weeks after the cbs special airs he sits down with dr phil on national

02:19:09.620 television now a grown man quiet uneasy in the chair facing questions about a night he was a

02:19:16.820 nine-year-old boy asleep down the hall from his sister do you remember the last time you saw john

02:19:24.580 manet alive i want to say it was in the car on the way back from the whites do you remember waking up

02:19:32.040 that morning? Yep. The first thing I remember is my mom, first thing in my room, looking for

02:19:38.980 Jamonet. And the next thing I remember is a police officer coming to my room and shining a flashlight.

02:19:44.720 Did you hit your sister over the head with a baseball bat or a flashlight? Absolutely not.

02:19:52.460 Burke sues CBS for $750 million. The lawsuit ends the way almost everything in this case ends,

02:20:00.640 quietly behind closed doors in a sealed settlement with no finding of fact on either side.

02:20:08.480 The record in the end holds three official judgments that pull in opposite directions,

02:20:14.800 a grand jury that voted to indict the parents as accessories and a prosecutor who buried that vote,

02:20:22.080 a district attorney who years later cleared the whole family by name in writing on the strength

02:20:28.080 of the dna and a sealed set of indictments pried loose later still whose unanswered language would

02:20:35.580 be used to point suspicion toward the only other person known to be in that house a little boy

02:20:42.100 three official acts three different directions no answers nothing an indictment is not a conviction

02:20:52.100 because a grand jury hears only one side.

02:20:56.160 Mary Lacey's letter purported to clear the family,

02:20:59.440 but it never named the killer.

02:21:01.640 And Alex Hunter's decision not to charge

02:21:03.760 explained nothing and exonerated no one.

02:21:08.180 Nearly 30 years after JonBenet's murder,

02:21:10.400 the only thing left to hope for

02:21:12.300 is an answer from the actual evidence.

02:21:16.660 That is where Jon Ramsey has put his energy

02:21:19.040 in the years since Patsy's death.

02:21:22.100 He is chasing the DNA and a new technology that did not exist when his daughter was killed.

02:21:28.960 Genetic genealogy changes what a single unknown DNA profile can do.

02:21:34.560 The old method needed the suspect's DNA to be sitting already in a database.

02:21:40.500 The new method does not.

02:21:42.440 It looks for any genetic link in a DNA database to this person,

02:21:48.020 then works the family tree of that person generation by generation toward a name of a

02:21:55.940 possible suspect. This is the method that finally put a name to the Golden State Killer,

02:22:01.520 decades after his crime stopped. And in November of 2022, when four University of Idaho students

02:22:08.500 are murdered in their beds, it is genetic genealogy that identifies the suspect,

02:22:13.380 Brian Kohlberger in a matter of weeks, thanks to touch DNA on the knife sheath the killer left

02:22:20.000 behind. John Ramsey wants the same science used on his daughter's case, but the obstacle is not the

02:22:27.720 science, it's jurisdiction. The evidence belongs, you see, to the Boulder PD, and only the Boulder

02:22:34.860 PD can decide to test it. So John takes his fight to the governor of Colorado. When John sat down

02:22:41.820 with me in December 2022, this is one of the primary things he wanted to discuss.

02:22:47.760 And that's really all we're asking the governor to do is push the case either out of the boulder

02:22:54.440 hands or require them to take this evidence to be tested by one of the one or two really

02:23:04.880 cutting edge labs in this country and see what we get. If we can get some more good DNA evidence,

02:23:10.860 then you take that evidence and put it in the public database and see what you come up with

02:23:17.340 in fact they're the ones that said look the government does not have the latest dna

02:23:21.360 technology we'll get it eventually but we don't have it we don't have it at the fbi they certainly

02:23:26.640 don't have it at the state level and of course not even ridiculous to think they have it at the

02:23:30.900 police level they've told they told us that we've got to get this dna testing done by one of these

02:23:37.360 one or two very cutting-edge labs outside, and then use this new approach of genealogy tracing.

02:23:47.660 John talks about specific items still sitting in evidence, five, six, maybe seven pieces from the

02:23:54.120 crime scene that were sent years ago to an outside lab, and he says, came back untested,

02:24:00.880 returned to a shelf. Among them, he says, is the garage, the murder weapon itself,

02:24:07.360 With knots, he believes, have never been untied and swabbed for the skin cells of the hands that tied them.

02:24:15.000 Nearly 30 years on, the object used to strangle his daughter may still hold an answer that existing testing has not produced.

02:24:23.740 In December of 2025, there is movement.

02:24:28.200 In their annual update on the case, the Boulder police say they have done something close to what John Ramsey has been asking for.

02:24:34.680 new interviews, new evidence collected, and old evidence retested, this time with the newest DNA

02:24:42.220 technology available. Officials will not say what that evidence is or where it points.

02:24:49.120 The Boulder chief of police, Steve Redfern, says only that the department will keep working with

02:24:54.560 DNA experts around the country until this tragic case is solved. My direction to our department

02:25:00.340 has been clear. Leave no stone unturned. Our detectives have conducted several new interviews

02:25:05.660 as well as re-interviewed individuals based on tips that we've received.

02:25:10.100 We've also collected new evidence and tested and retested other pieces of evidence to generate

02:25:15.920 new leads. Nearly 30 years in, this is the closest thing to forward motion this case

02:25:21.720 has produced in a very long time. Still, no name, no arrest, no answers. But for the first

02:25:29.360 time in a while, the sense that someone is finally looking again. 30 years on, the public interest in

02:25:37.940 the case of JonBenét Ramsey remains high. JonBenét is about to become a prestige streaming

02:25:44.840 drama, The Murder of JonBenét Ramsey, an eight-part Netflix series starring Melissa McCarthy

02:25:50.720 as Patsy and Clive Owen as Jon. The story retold once more for an audience that was not alive when

02:25:58.720 she died. But a television series is not going to solve this. Nothing is going to solve this,

02:26:06.540 except perhaps those tiny, imperceptible specks of human cells sitting in a Colorado evidence room.

02:26:14.740 In sealed bags and paper envelopes, in a property room in Boulder, the answer is most likely already

02:26:22.060 there, on a length of cord, on the waistband of a child's long johns, in the profile of

02:26:29.480 an unknown male that has waited, patient and silent, to be discovered since the day

02:26:35.360 after Christmas, 1996.

02:26:38.180 The science to read it has finally arrived.

02:26:41.560 The question remaining is whether anyone will let it speak.

02:26:47.100 I'm Megan Kelly.

02:26:48.960 Tune in next week as we unpack another mystery on MK Confidential.

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The Megyn Kelly Show - August 09, 2026

JonBenét Ramsey： The FULL MK Confidential Series

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