The JonBenét Conspiracies： Presumed Guilty — Ep. 3 ｜ MK Confidential
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
1
sentences flagged
Hate speech
4
sentences flagged
Summary
JonBenet Ramsey was a 6-year-old girl who was found murdered in front of a house in Boulder, Colorado in 1996. Her parents, Jon and Patsy Ramsey, were charged with her murder, but no one has ever been charged for her death.
Transcript
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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.
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But it is not a courthouse. It is a daytime talk show hosted by Geraldo Rivera.
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And over several days, he puts the parents of a murdered six-year-old little girl on trial, live on national television.
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The defendants, John and Patsy Ramsey, are not even in the room.
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And at the end of it, Geraldo's jury returns a verdict.
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We, the jury, find John Bennett Ramsey liable for the wrongful death of JonBenet Ramsey.
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We, the jury, find Patsy Ramsey liable for the wrongful death of JonBenet Ramsey.
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To the best of our knowledge, there is no real evidence in this case that points in any direction
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other than straight into the faces of John and poor Patsy Ramsey.
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Liable for the wrongful death of their own baby girl.
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The verdict is not handed down by a court, but by a TV audience.
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An audience made up of staff from Boulder TV stations, guests at the local hotel,
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This, in a case where no one has been charged with anything.
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And by the time this spectacle airs, that court has all but made up its mind.
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The question is not how the Ramseys became suspects.
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The question is how millions of people became dead certain they were guilty.
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I'm Megyn Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.
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989898. This started out as a simple but tragic murder of a child beauty queen, but then questions
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arose, curiosity arose, and suddenly the media descended on Boulder. We are told now that as
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many as 300 media representatives may be here right now following this story. To understand
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how it comes to a mock trial on daytime TV, we must look at the exact moment this story lands.
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It is the dead stretch between Christmas and New Year's in 1996.
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The cable channels are young and hungry, the 24-hour cycle still figuring out how to fill
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And into that massive silence drops a story that has everything.
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Cops and kidnappers, a beautiful little girl, a bizarre ransom note, a black body bag wheeled
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out in front of Christmas lights and to top it all off, millionaire parents who love child beauty
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pageants. It is Christmas all over again for lovers of murder mystery, beach reads, and ratings.
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JonBenet's murder arrives barely a year after the O.J. Simpson trial into an America that just spent
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months litigating that murder from its couch and is ready to do it all over again. The shadow of O.J.
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falls on the investigators too. Boulder PD detective Steve Thomas followed the OJ Simpson
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trial and remembered how Simpson's attorneys ripped apart the LAPD's case by attacking their
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work. He watched the Simpson case collapse under its own mistakes and feared the same thing might
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happen in the Ramsey case. He wanted to be careful not to be the next office earned on live television.
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John runs a very successful company, but no one outside Boulder knows their names.
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nothing that should turn one local homicide into a national obsession.
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What there is instead is timing and a little girl who photographs like a movie star.
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Most murdered children leave behind a snapshot or two.
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This one left behind hours of tape, pageants, parades, recitals, home video, a short life spent performing for a camera.
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So when the networks need pictures and videos to fill those empty holiday hours, the supply never runs out.
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And the same few seconds of a small girl in pageant makeup run again and again and again.
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That's 24 hours around the clock, coast to coast, we never close, open seven days a week.
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On the 2nd of January, 1997, a Denver station airs pageant video of JonBenet, and the networks run it within the hour.
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There she is at a pageant weeks before her death.
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There she is in a spangled, showgirl-style costume, six years old, under stage lights, with her hair bleached and her lips painted.
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To a country that has never heard of Boulder, these videos become JonBenet Ramsey.
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Not a precious kindergartner who likes to jump into leaf piles, but an image of big hair, makeup, and that practiced little wave.
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In the world the Ramseys came from, the Georgia pageant circuit, none of this is unusual.
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In some parts of the South, dressing a daughter up and putting her on stage is just a Saturday.
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Patsy had been Miss West Virginia herself, but to the rest of America, the sequins, the mascara, the hairspray,
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come across as something eerie and disturbing major publications start describing john benet
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as moving on stage in a way that's adult seductive precocious and wrong in the pageant world it is
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just choreography that a coach taught a child no one bats an eye but on national news broadcasts
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Stripped of that context, JonBenet's performances read as evidence of something far more sinister
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inside that home. While the country stares at the pageant videos, the case is leaking.
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Inside the Boulder PD, detectives are growing certain the family is the answer, and information
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to that end keeps surfacing in the newspapers. A reporter at the Rocky Mountain News, Charlie
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Brennan becomes a regular destination for material coming out of the investigation.
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And some of the leaks are not accidental at all. Part of it is a police strategy to apply pressure
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through the press in the hope that a guilty parent cornered in public will finally crack.
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Sweat out, John and Patsy. But it doesn't start that way for the Ramseys. On New Year's Day,
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1997 six days after their daughter is found dead and before they have sat for a single formal
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police interview john and patsy go on cnn patsy's voice cracks there is a killer on the loose
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i don't know who it is i don't know if it's a he or a she
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But if I were a resident of Boulder, I would tell my friends to keep your babies close to you.
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To a lot of the country, it sounds like something else.
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A woman talking to the media before she talks to the police.
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Two days after the Ramsey's first CNN interview, the mayor of Boulder steps up to a microphone.
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People in Boulder have no need to fear that there is someone wandering the streets of Boulder,
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has been portrayed by some people, particularly in talk radio, looking for young children to attack.
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Boulder is safe. It's always been a safe community. It continues to be a safe community.
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The city says, in effect, there is no stranger out there, which leaves the public only one place to look back inside that house.
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A friend of Patsy's, a photographer named Judith Phillips, who had shot the family's portraits, goes to the mayor's office in person to ask for protection for the Ramseys.
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She is told plainly there is no murderer out there.
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Across town, a mother whose little girl heard Patsy's warning on television cannot get her
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child to sleep in her own room for months. And around the Ramseys, something stranger is
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happening. Their circle goes quiet. Friends start getting calls from inside that circle
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with the same instruction, do not talk to reporters, do not talk to the police. Most
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of them comply. The photographer who went to the mayor does not. Judith Phillips opens her door to
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reporters, and she sits down with detectives twice. And for that, she is cut off, dropped by
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the people she thought were family, told she has betrayed them. In every silence the family leaves,
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the tabloids are happy to fill. The leaks are not always true, and the most damaging ones
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are the simplest. In March of 1997, Charlie Brennan's paper runs a story sourced to police
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saying there were no footprints in the snow around the Ramsey home the morning after John
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Benet's murder. If no one left footprints, the reasoning goes, then no intruder came or went
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and the family must have done it. It travels everywhere at light speed. It sounds airtight.
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Here is what does not spread quickly with that story.
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The sergeant who walked the property that freezing morning noted a light dusting of snow on the grass,
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but the sidewalks on the driveway where a person would actually walk were dry, bare concrete.
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There was nothing there to hold a footprint in the first place.
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One source, one phrase, and a false fact that outlives the correction by decades.
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In the days after the family flies to their former home, Georgia, to bury their daughter, a story takes hold that John Ramsey, cold and composed, piloted his own plane to the funeral.
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Here's how Paula Woodward, an investigative reporter out of Colorado, describes the shock of this story to Netflix.
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I remember saying to my husband, what kind of person is he? How could he do this?
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when he's got to be so distraught over the terrible way his daughter died and the fact
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that she was murdered how could he fly his plane to atlanta the tricky part here a piece of it is
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true john ramsey is a licensed pilot the family does own a small private plane a twin engine kept
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at an airport outside boulder this is the plane they had planned to take on their second christmas
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trip to michigan so the detail feels plausible but it's not true john ramsey did not fly to his
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daughter's funeral he later said he was too shaken to even consider it his company lockheed martin
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loaned the family a corporate jet and its own two pilots for the trip to georgia the story painted
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an image of a father calmly flying himself across the country to bury his little girl but it never
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happened. Years later, Brennan himself would look back on the story. When I reported that
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John Ramsey had piloted his own plane back to Atlanta for the funeral, that was inaccurate.
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It came from a source that I thoroughly trusted and had given me other solid information.
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That information was wrong. My source was wrong in that case, and that was a mistake.
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But the picture sticks, because it fits the story the public has already been sold.
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Report after report tells the country Patsy Ramsey wrote the ransom note,
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that the experts have tied her hand to that page.
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Sources say the ransom note written by the alleged kidnapper is considered a key piece of evidence.
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Handwriting experts have ruled out John Ramsey and others close to the family.
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They have not excluded Patsy Ramsey, who has submitted several samples.
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insurance agency. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation hands the ransom note to its examiner,
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Chet Eubowski, who studies it for the better part of a year and puts Patsy Ramsey through five
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separate handwriting tests. And his finding is not the one the leaks describe. He can find no
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evidence Patsy disguised her writing. He sees some shared letter formations and weighed against the
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number and consistency of the differences. He writes that he is unable to identify Patsy Ramsey
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as the author of that ransom note, quote, could not be ruled out, end quote, is as far as anyone
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will responsibly go. But in the papers, magazines, and on TV, it becomes the handwriting matches.
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One man does go further. A Vassar College professor named Donald Foster, who analyzes
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text for a living publicly announces that Patsy is the author. What the audience never hears is
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that the same professor had earlier written Patsy a private letter declaring her innocent or that he
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had once used his methods to name an anonymous internet commenter as the killer, a person who
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turned out to be a middle-aged housewife in North Carolina with zero connection to this case.
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His credibility does not survive even mild scrutiny, yet the headline lives on.
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Then the pageant footage and the rumors braid together into something uglier, that JonBenet
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had been sexually abused and that the answer lay somewhere inside her own family.
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Twice, police bring in a boulder-raised former Miss America, Marilyn Van Derber, a woman
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who had spent years telling the world that a polished, admired, wealthy family can hide a
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monstrous secret because hers had. Her own story is real and it is harrowing. You don't talk about
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it in families. Siblings don't talk to siblings. No, Jean Benet had tape over her mouth. That is
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the strongest message we have. You will never speak of it. Bringing Marilyn into the Ramsey
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investigation is not evidence it is insinuation by resemblance and on the actual evidence that
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insinuation collapses john benet's pediatrician and the doctors who reviewed her history
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none of them find physical or historical proof that this child had been abused before the night
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she died the damage from the abuse story is hard to measure it recasts a murdered six-year-old as
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victim of her own family on the strength of costumes and speculation and that colors everything
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the public sees the accusation runs at the top of the hour the correction when it comes at all
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is a line buried at the bottom of a story no one reads to the end the ramses refuse to let
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this story be told without them they fight back in public on camera through 1997 and the years
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that follow they give interviews they sit for documentaries they hire a washington media
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consultant to manage the press and in the spring of 1997 about four months after the murder john
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and patsy finally sit for formal police interviews then they walk straight out to a bank of microphones
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to announce that they've done so patsy looks into the cameras i'm appalled that anyone would think
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that John or I would be involved in such a hideous heinous crime but let me assure
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you that I did not kill John Benet I did not have anything to do with it I love
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that child with my whole of my heart and soul but every public appearance becomes
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a new piece of evidence in a trial no one declared america does not watch to be reassured it watches
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to judge the tone the tears the pauses on cnn viewers freeze the moment a reporter asks whether
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the ramsays are certain their daughter was taken by an outsider and patsy shakes her head no while
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john says yes every frame is parsed every silence is read our family is a loving family
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it's a gentle family a father insists unprompted that his family is gentle and analysts spend years
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asking why he needed to say that at all this is what the media coverage runs on now not new
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evidence but the same handful of clips replayed re-read until a shaken head a glance or an unlucky
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phrase hardens into proof of guilt by november of 1997 a gallup poll finds 88 percent of americans
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with an opinion about who killed john benet point to one or both of her parents this verdict is
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built almost entirely on 11 months worth of leaked and distorted information not on anything a court
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of law would ever admit. Which is how the country arrives that November at a talk show studio and
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mock jury. Nearly 30 years later, the man who built that spectacle, Geraldo Rivera, would
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apologize to John Ramsey in a conversation on News Nation. I deeply apologize to you for what
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you and your family have suffered. When I say I am sorry, I don't apologize for my reporting. I
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believe that at least half the reporters and half the nation believe that the shadow of suspicion,
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half the Boulder Police Department, for those who have retired because of this case, believe it.
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But I don't know what happened. I just want you to know that I lament contributing to the hurt
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that you have endured. No one deserves to go through what you went through.
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off-camera the investigation is breaking apart the boulder pd and the district attorney are
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barely speaking and each side shapes the story its own way for reporters one of the officers
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who worked the case former boulder pd officer gretchen smith later described the internal rot
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to a cbs documentary team the john benet case destroyed morale completely really there was
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no morale. The district attorney's office and some of the administration did not want to hear that
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an affluent member of the community was guilty of a crime like this. They didn't want to hear that.
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I don't think they wanted to solve this crime. And if they had to go down a different path that
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might not have been the truth, I think they were willing to do that. Another friend of the Ramseys
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breaks the silence in their social circle. Fleet White, one of the Ramseys' closest friends,
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Fleet would later describe how his family's life changed after the murder.
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On Christmas Day 1996, John and Patsy Ramsey and their children,
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Burke and JonBenet, were dinner guests at our home.
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The next day, we were present at the Ramsey home.
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When JonBenet's body was found, Priscilla and I and our children
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instantly became witnesses in the Boulder Police investigation of JonBenet's death.
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in august of 1998 fleet and his wife priscilla criticized the investigation in an open letter
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to the people of colorado here's part of it quote after john benet ramsey was killed in boulder
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nearly 20 months ago her parents immediately hired prominent criminal defense attorneys with
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close professional political and personal ties to prosecutors the denver and boulder legal and
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judicial communities, state legislators, and high-ranking members of the Colorado government,
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including Governor Roy Romer. The investigation of her death has since been characterized by
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confusion and delays. The district attorney and the Ramsey attorneys have simultaneously rebuked
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the police for focusing their investigation on the Ramseys, when in fact police were simply
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following evidence. During the course of the investigation, the district attorney has used
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inexplicable methods, including the recruitment of magazine writers and tabloids to leak information
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concerning the case and to needle witnesses, suspects, and police detectives. He has provided
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evidence to Ramsey defense attorneys at their request, but denied reasonable requests by witnesses
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for their own statements to police. He has thoroughly alienated police detectives and key
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witnesses whose cooperation is vital to the investigation and prosecution. His public
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statements regarding the investigation have been erratic, evasive, and misleading. We must be
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mindful, however, of the first cause of the investigation's failure, the refusal of John
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and Patsy Ramsey to cooperate fully and genuinely with those officially charged with the responsibility
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of investigating the death of their daughter, John Benet, end quote. The people who knew the Ramseys
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best are splitting up into camps on the record off the record and america gobbles up every word
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of both week after week the supermarket racks turn john benet into a symbol and the ramses into
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characters the cold father the ambitious mother the perfect family with something rotten underneath
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rumor becomes packaging speculation becomes a headline and by the time anyone asks what has
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actually been proven millions of people have already accepted the accusation as fact and here
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is the piece of evidence that should have stopped all of this on john benet's body under her
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fingernails and inside her underwear there is dna from an unknown man it's not john's it's not patsy's
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not burke's it belongs to a stranger left physically on the murdered child the colorado
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Bureau of Investigation confirms it in a lab report within about three weeks of the killing
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in January 1997, the single strongest piece of evidence pointing away from the Ramsey family.
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There is no press conference for this revelation, no leaks about the unidentified male DNA.
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Boulder police sit on the finding. Roughly six months go by before the district attorney's
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office is even told what the lab found. The public waits far longer.
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The fact that could have broken the case was filed in a drawer until 2003,
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when the DNA is uncovered and given to the FBI for testing.
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It does not match anyone in the FBI's criminal database, and to this day remains a mystery.
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the media machine turns on John and Patsy's surviving child, Burke.
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Burke was nine years old when his sister was killed,
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The Ramseys say he was asleep the entire night just down the hall.
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CBS airs a primetime special built around the theory that Burke killed his sister with paid experts and a staged reenactment.
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Well, the Boulder Daily Camera reports the brother of JonBenet Ramsey has reached a settlement with CBS.
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Burke Ramsey sued CBS after a television series the network aired suggested he killed his six-year-old sister in Boulder.
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who actually worked this case never charged Burke,
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but the theory is now in prime time, 20 years later.
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They're only re-accused on a later night for a new audience.
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by the news media, the footprints that were never there,
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the plane he never flew, the handwriting that never matched,
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alleged history of abuse that was never proven each one is corrected quietly if at all and long
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after the smear has done its dirty work underneath the entire narrative lies the dna of a man no one
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can name that dna sits in a drawer because it does not fit the story the country has already chosen
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to believe the one it's been led to before a single charge is ever filed in the only court
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that seems to matter, the Ramseys, have long ago been found guilty.
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But while the whole country is staring inside that house,
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one veteran detective is about to walk into this case
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and the compelling picture he paints on MK Confidential.