The Megyn Kelly Show - The JonBenét Conspiracies： Presumed Guilty — Ep. 3 ｜ MK Confidential

00:00:00.000 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.

00:00:12.640 But it is not a courthouse. It is a daytime talk show hosted by Geraldo Rivera.

00:00:18.220 And over several days, he puts the parents of a murdered six-year-old little girl on trial, live on national television.

00:00:26.280 No one has been arrested.

00:00:27.880 No one's been charged.

00:00:29.620 There is no real defense, no judge, no law.

00:00:33.440 The defendants, John and Patsy Ramsey, are not even in the room.

00:00:37.800 And at the end of it, Geraldo's jury returns a verdict.

00:00:41.680 We, the jury, find John Bennett Ramsey liable for the wrongful death of JonBenet Ramsey.

00:00:47.680 Am I asked to Patsy?

00:00:48.820 We, the jury, find Patsy Ramsey liable for the wrongful death of JonBenet Ramsey.

00:00:53.020 To the best of our knowledge, there is no real evidence in this case that points in any direction

00:00:59.020 other than straight into the faces of John and poor Patsy Ramsey.

00:01:05.700 Liable for the wrongful death of their own baby girl.

00:01:10.100 The verdict is not handed down by a court, but by a TV audience.

00:01:13.820 An audience made up of staff from Boulder TV stations, guests at the local hotel,

00:01:20.520 and other, quote, invite-only attendees.

00:01:24.240 This, in a case where no one has been charged with anything.

00:01:29.620 Geraldo and his squadron of producers,

00:01:32.340 with no due process to the family,

00:01:35.000 give us a final verdict.

00:01:37.140 This is where the JonBenet Ramsey case

00:01:39.380 is really being decided,

00:01:41.760 not in a court of law, but on TV,

00:01:44.760 in the so-called news,

00:01:46.980 in the court of public opinion.

00:01:48.240 And by the time this spectacle airs, that court has all but made up its mind.

00:01:54.480 The question is not how the Ramseys became suspects.

00:01:57.560 The question is how millions of people became dead certain they were guilty.

00:02:03.640 I'm Megyn Kelly, and this is MK Confidential. 0.55

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00:03:12.320 989898. This started out as a simple but tragic murder of a child beauty queen, but then questions

00:03:20.020 arose, curiosity arose, and suddenly the media descended on Boulder. We are told now that as

00:03:25.200 many as 300 media representatives may be here right now following this story. To understand

00:03:30.820 how it comes to a mock trial on daytime TV, we must look at the exact moment this story lands.

00:03:37.260 It is the dead stretch between Christmas and New Year's in 1996.

00:03:42.540 The news is quiet as a church mouse.

00:03:45.720 The cable channels are young and hungry, the 24-hour cycle still figuring out how to fill

00:03:51.120 a week when nothing is happening.

00:03:53.460 And into that massive silence drops a story that has everything.

00:03:58.560 Cops and kidnappers, a beautiful little girl, a bizarre ransom note, a black body bag wheeled

00:04:06.000 out in front of Christmas lights and to top it all off, millionaire parents who love child beauty

00:04:12.460 pageants. It is Christmas all over again for lovers of murder mystery, beach reads, and ratings.

00:04:20.440 JonBenet's murder arrives barely a year after the O.J. Simpson trial into an America that just spent

00:04:26.320 months litigating that murder from its couch and is ready to do it all over again. The shadow of O.J.

00:04:32.900 falls on the investigators too. Boulder PD detective Steve Thomas followed the OJ Simpson

00:04:38.560 trial and remembered how Simpson's attorneys ripped apart the LAPD's case by attacking their

00:04:44.400 work. He watched the Simpson case collapse under its own mistakes and feared the same thing might

00:04:50.780 happen in the Ramsey case. He wanted to be careful not to be the next office earned on live television.

00:04:58.380 Here is the strange part.

00:05:00.320 The Ramseys are not celebrities.

00:05:02.700 John runs a very successful company, but no one outside Boulder knows their names.

00:05:08.060 There is no famous face, no star power,

00:05:11.020 nothing that should turn one local homicide into a national obsession.

00:05:15.440 What there is instead is timing and a little girl who photographs like a movie star.

00:05:22.040 Most murdered children leave behind a snapshot or two.

00:05:26.880 This one left behind hours of tape, pageants, parades, recitals, home video, a short life spent performing for a camera.

00:05:35.940 John Bidet, over here!

00:05:37.860 So when the networks need pictures and videos to fill those empty holiday hours, the supply never runs out.

00:05:45.240 And the same few seconds of a small girl in pageant makeup run again and again and again.

00:05:52.740 That's 24 hours around the clock, coast to coast, we never close, open seven days a week.

00:05:59.860 On the 2nd of January, 1997, a Denver station airs pageant video of JonBenet, and the networks run it within the hour.

00:06:09.760 There she is at a pageant weeks before her death.

00:06:12.460 There she is in a spangled, showgirl-style costume, six years old, under stage lights, with her hair bleached and her lips painted.

00:06:25.700 To a country that has never heard of Boulder, these videos become JonBenet Ramsey.

00:06:33.260 Not a precious kindergartner who likes to jump into leaf piles, but an image of big hair, makeup, and that practiced little wave.

00:06:43.340 In the world the Ramseys came from, the Georgia pageant circuit, none of this is unusual. 0.71

00:06:48.780 In some parts of the South, dressing a daughter up and putting her on stage is just a Saturday. 0.83

00:06:54.880 Patsy had been Miss West Virginia herself, but to the rest of America, the sequins, the mascara, the hairspray,

00:07:03.260 come across as something eerie and disturbing major publications start describing john benet

00:07:10.380 as moving on stage in a way that's adult seductive precocious and wrong in the pageant world it is

00:07:19.900 just choreography that a coach taught a child no one bats an eye but on national news broadcasts

00:07:27.020 Stripped of that context, JonBenet's performances read as evidence of something far more sinister

00:07:33.360 inside that home. While the country stares at the pageant videos, the case is leaking.

00:07:40.720 Inside the Boulder PD, detectives are growing certain the family is the answer, and information

00:07:46.800 to that end keeps surfacing in the newspapers. A reporter at the Rocky Mountain News, Charlie

00:07:53.860 Brennan becomes a regular destination for material coming out of the investigation.

00:07:59.280 And some of the leaks are not accidental at all. Part of it is a police strategy to apply pressure

00:08:05.540 through the press in the hope that a guilty parent cornered in public will finally crack.

00:08:11.960 Sweat out, John and Patsy. But it doesn't start that way for the Ramseys. On New Year's Day,

00:08:18.180 1997 six days after their daughter is found dead and before they have sat for a single formal

00:08:25.060 police interview john and patsy go on cnn patsy's voice cracks there is a killer on the loose

00:08:34.340 i don't know who it is i don't know if it's a he or a she

00:08:39.220 But if I were a resident of Boulder, I would tell my friends to keep your babies close to you.

00:08:57.180 There's someone out there.

00:09:00.740 Keep your babies close.

00:09:03.660 From a grieving mother, it is a warning.

00:09:06.000 To a lot of the country, it sounds like something else.

00:09:08.320 A woman talking to the media before she talks to the police.

00:09:12.660 And the town does not want the warning either.

00:09:15.900 Two days after the Ramsey's first CNN interview, the mayor of Boulder steps up to a microphone.

00:09:22.300 People in Boulder have no need to fear that there is someone wandering the streets of Boulder,

00:09:28.920 has been portrayed by some people, particularly in talk radio, looking for young children to attack.

00:09:36.700 Boulder is safe. It's always been a safe community. It continues to be a safe community.

00:09:41.540 The city says, in effect, there is no stranger out there, which leaves the public only one place to look back inside that house.

00:09:51.760 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.

00:10:02.060 She is told plainly there is no murderer out there.

00:10:06.220 Across town, a mother whose little girl heard Patsy's warning on television cannot get her

00:10:12.140 child to sleep in her own room for months. And around the Ramseys, something stranger is

00:10:18.100 happening. Their circle goes quiet. Friends start getting calls from inside that circle

00:10:25.080 with the same instruction, do not talk to reporters, do not talk to the police. Most

00:10:30.980 of them comply. The photographer who went to the mayor does not. Judith Phillips opens her door to

00:10:38.060 reporters, and she sits down with detectives twice. And for that, she is cut off, dropped by

00:10:45.120 the people she thought were family, told she has betrayed them. In every silence the family leaves,

00:10:51.900 the tabloids are happy to fill. The leaks are not always true, and the most damaging ones

00:10:58.300 are the simplest. In March of 1997, Charlie Brennan's paper runs a story sourced to police

00:11:05.380 saying there were no footprints in the snow around the Ramsey home the morning after John

00:11:10.920 Benet's murder. If no one left footprints, the reasoning goes, then no intruder came or went

00:11:17.000 and the family must have done it. It travels everywhere at light speed. It sounds airtight.

00:11:23.560 Here is what does not spread quickly with that story.

00:11:27.380 The sergeant who walked the property that freezing morning noted a light dusting of snow on the grass,

00:11:33.860 but the sidewalks on the driveway where a person would actually walk were dry, bare concrete.

00:11:40.800 There was nothing there to hold a footprint in the first place.

00:11:43.760 One source, one phrase, and a false fact that outlives the correction by decades.

00:11:51.080 Then there is the plane.

00:11:52.660 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.

00:12:06.920 Here's how Paula Woodward, an investigative reporter out of Colorado, describes the shock of this story to Netflix.

00:12:13.520 I remember saying to my husband, what kind of person is he? How could he do this?

00:12:22.660 when he's got to be so distraught over the terrible way his daughter died and the fact

00:12:27.860 that she was murdered how could he fly his plane to atlanta the tricky part here a piece of it is

00:12:34.980 true john ramsey is a licensed pilot the family does own a small private plane a twin engine kept

00:12:41.940 at an airport outside boulder this is the plane they had planned to take on their second christmas

00:12:46.980 trip to michigan so the detail feels plausible but it's not true john ramsey did not fly to his

00:12:53.860 daughter's funeral he later said he was too shaken to even consider it his company lockheed martin

00:13:00.340 loaned the family a corporate jet and its own two pilots for the trip to georgia the story painted

00:13:06.580 an image of a father calmly flying himself across the country to bury his little girl but it never

00:13:13.140 happened. Years later, Brennan himself would look back on the story. When I reported that

00:13:20.260 John Ramsey had piloted his own plane back to Atlanta for the funeral, that was inaccurate.

00:13:26.160 It came from a source that I thoroughly trusted and had given me other solid information.

00:13:33.040 That information was wrong. My source was wrong in that case, and that was a mistake.

00:13:37.680 But the picture sticks, because it fits the story the public has already been sold.

00:13:45.180 And then the media seizes on the handwriting.

00:13:48.280 Report after report tells the country Patsy Ramsey wrote the ransom note,

00:13:53.700 that the experts have tied her hand to that page.

00:13:57.380 Sources say the ransom note written by the alleged kidnapper is considered a key piece of evidence.

00:14:03.140 Handwriting experts have ruled out John Ramsey and others close to the family.

00:14:07.680 They have not excluded Patsy Ramsey, who has submitted several samples.

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00:15:17.400 insurance agency. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation hands the ransom note to its examiner,

00:15:24.480 Chet Eubowski, who studies it for the better part of a year and puts Patsy Ramsey through five

00:15:30.820 separate handwriting tests. And his finding is not the one the leaks describe. He can find no

00:15:37.620 evidence Patsy disguised her writing. He sees some shared letter formations and weighed against the

00:15:44.160 number and consistency of the differences. He writes that he is unable to identify Patsy Ramsey

00:15:50.480 as the author of that ransom note, quote, could not be ruled out, end quote, is as far as anyone

00:15:58.880 will responsibly go. But in the papers, magazines, and on TV, it becomes the handwriting matches.

00:16:08.120 One man does go further. A Vassar College professor named Donald Foster, who analyzes

00:16:14.520 text for a living publicly announces that Patsy is the author. What the audience never hears is

00:16:21.080 that the same professor had earlier written Patsy a private letter declaring her innocent or that he

00:16:27.000 had once used his methods to name an anonymous internet commenter as the killer, a person who

00:16:33.660 turned out to be a middle-aged housewife in North Carolina with zero connection to this case.

00:16:38.580 His credibility does not survive even mild scrutiny, yet the headline lives on.

00:16:45.480 Then the pageant footage and the rumors braid together into something uglier, that JonBenet

00:16:52.020 had been sexually abused and that the answer lay somewhere inside her own family.

00:16:58.040 Investigators lean into it.

00:17:00.020 Twice, police bring in a boulder-raised former Miss America, Marilyn Van Derber, a woman 0.62

00:17:07.580 who had spent years telling the world that a polished, admired, wealthy family can hide a

00:17:13.460 monstrous secret because hers had. Her own story is real and it is harrowing. You don't talk about

00:17:21.880 it in families. Siblings don't talk to siblings. No, Jean Benet had tape over her mouth. That is

00:17:28.680 the strongest message we have. You will never speak of it. Bringing Marilyn into the Ramsey

00:17:35.520 investigation is not evidence it is insinuation by resemblance and on the actual evidence that

00:17:42.880 insinuation collapses john benet's pediatrician and the doctors who reviewed her history

00:17:48.560 none of them find physical or historical proof that this child had been abused before the night

00:17:54.640 she died the damage from the abuse story is hard to measure it recasts a murdered six-year-old as

00:18:02.400 victim of her own family on the strength of costumes and speculation and that colors everything

00:18:08.160 the public sees the accusation runs at the top of the hour the correction when it comes at all

00:18:14.720 is a line buried at the bottom of a story no one reads to the end the ramses refuse to let

00:18:20.800 this story be told without them they fight back in public on camera through 1997 and the years

00:18:27.840 that follow they give interviews they sit for documentaries they hire a washington media

00:18:33.440 consultant to manage the press and in the spring of 1997 about four months after the murder john

00:18:40.320 and patsy finally sit for formal police interviews then they walk straight out to a bank of microphones

00:18:47.600 to announce that they've done so patsy looks into the cameras i'm appalled that anyone would think

00:18:56.960 that John or I would be involved in such a hideous heinous crime but let me assure

00:19:07.940 you that I did not kill John Benet I did not have anything to do with it I love

00:19:15.260 that child with my whole of my heart and soul but every public appearance becomes

00:19:24.020 a new piece of evidence in a trial no one declared america does not watch to be reassured it watches

00:19:30.580 to judge the tone the tears the pauses on cnn viewers freeze the moment a reporter asks whether

00:19:38.180 the ramsays are certain their daughter was taken by an outsider and patsy shakes her head no while

00:19:45.300 john says yes every frame is parsed every silence is read our family is a loving family

00:19:54.900 it's a gentle family a father insists unprompted that his family is gentle and analysts spend years

00:20:03.620 asking why he needed to say that at all this is what the media coverage runs on now not new

00:20:09.220 evidence but the same handful of clips replayed re-read until a shaken head a glance or an unlucky

00:20:16.820 phrase hardens into proof of guilt by november of 1997 a gallup poll finds 88 percent of americans

00:20:25.140 with an opinion about who killed john benet point to one or both of her parents this verdict is

00:20:31.220 built almost entirely on 11 months worth of leaked and distorted information not on anything a court

00:20:37.300 of law would ever admit. Which is how the country arrives that November at a talk show studio and

00:20:44.180 mock jury. Nearly 30 years later, the man who built that spectacle, Geraldo Rivera, would

00:20:50.780 apologize to John Ramsey in a conversation on News Nation. I deeply apologize to you for what

00:20:59.280 you and your family have suffered. When I say I am sorry, I don't apologize for my reporting. I

00:21:06.060 believe that at least half the reporters and half the nation believe that the shadow of suspicion,

00:21:14.540 half the Boulder Police Department, for those who have retired because of this case, believe it.

00:21:20.620 But I don't know what happened. I just want you to know that I lament contributing to the hurt

00:21:29.300 that you have endured. No one deserves to go through what you went through.

00:21:34.900 off-camera the investigation is breaking apart the boulder pd and the district attorney are

00:21:43.720 barely speaking and each side shapes the story its own way for reporters one of the officers

00:21:50.420 who worked the case former boulder pd officer gretchen smith later described the internal rot

00:21:56.960 to a cbs documentary team the john benet case destroyed morale completely really there was

00:22:04.200 no morale. The district attorney's office and some of the administration did not want to hear that

00:22:10.260 an affluent member of the community was guilty of a crime like this. They didn't want to hear that.

00:22:16.720 I don't think they wanted to solve this crime. And if they had to go down a different path that

00:22:21.320 might not have been the truth, I think they were willing to do that. Another friend of the Ramseys

00:22:26.240 breaks the silence in their social circle. Fleet White, one of the Ramseys' closest friends,

00:22:31.420 was beside John when the body was found.

00:22:35.140 Fleet would later describe how his family's life changed after the murder.

00:22:39.520 On Christmas Day 1996, John and Patsy Ramsey and their children,

00:22:44.980 Burke and JonBenet, were dinner guests at our home.

00:22:47.040 The next day, we were present at the Ramsey home.

00:22:50.200 When JonBenet's body was found, Priscilla and I and our children

00:22:53.040 instantly became witnesses in the Boulder Police investigation of JonBenet's death.

00:22:58.160 in august of 1998 fleet and his wife priscilla criticized the investigation in an open letter

00:23:05.600 to the people of colorado here's part of it quote after john benet ramsey was killed in boulder

00:23:12.400 nearly 20 months ago her parents immediately hired prominent criminal defense attorneys with

00:23:17.700 close professional political and personal ties to prosecutors the denver and boulder legal and

00:23:24.420 judicial communities, state legislators, and high-ranking members of the Colorado government,

00:23:29.740 including Governor Roy Romer. The investigation of her death has since been characterized by

00:23:34.420 confusion and delays. The district attorney and the Ramsey attorneys have simultaneously rebuked

00:23:40.900 the police for focusing their investigation on the Ramseys, when in fact police were simply

00:23:46.060 following evidence. During the course of the investigation, the district attorney has used

00:23:51.240 inexplicable methods, including the recruitment of magazine writers and tabloids to leak information

00:23:57.040 concerning the case and to needle witnesses, suspects, and police detectives. He has provided

00:24:03.340 evidence to Ramsey defense attorneys at their request, but denied reasonable requests by witnesses

00:24:08.680 for their own statements to police. He has thoroughly alienated police detectives and key

00:24:14.720 witnesses whose cooperation is vital to the investigation and prosecution. His public

00:24:20.280 statements regarding the investigation have been erratic, evasive, and misleading. We must be

00:24:26.220 mindful, however, of the first cause of the investigation's failure, the refusal of John

00:24:32.580 and Patsy Ramsey to cooperate fully and genuinely with those officially charged with the responsibility

00:24:38.320 of investigating the death of their daughter, John Benet, end quote. The people who knew the Ramseys

00:24:46.000 best are splitting up into camps on the record off the record and america gobbles up every word

00:24:54.000 of both week after week the supermarket racks turn john benet into a symbol and the ramses into

00:25:00.080 characters the cold father the ambitious mother the perfect family with something rotten underneath

00:25:06.400 rumor becomes packaging speculation becomes a headline and by the time anyone asks what has

00:25:12.240 actually been proven millions of people have already accepted the accusation as fact and here

00:25:18.960 is the piece of evidence that should have stopped all of this on john benet's body under her

00:25:25.440 fingernails and inside her underwear there is dna from an unknown man it's not john's it's not patsy's

00:25:33.680 not burke's it belongs to a stranger left physically on the murdered child the colorado

00:25:41.280 Bureau of Investigation confirms it in a lab report within about three weeks of the killing

00:25:46.260 in January 1997, the single strongest piece of evidence pointing away from the Ramsey family.

00:25:53.220 There is no press conference for this revelation, no leaks about the unidentified male DNA.

00:25:59.620 Boulder police sit on the finding. Roughly six months go by before the district attorney's

00:26:04.200 office is even told what the lab found. The public waits far longer.

00:26:10.340 The fact that could have broken the case was filed in a drawer until 2003,

00:26:16.400 when the DNA is uncovered and given to the FBI for testing.

00:26:20.720 It does not match anyone in the FBI's criminal database, and to this day remains a mystery.

00:26:28.060 In 2016, nearly 20 years after the murder,

00:26:31.020 the media machine turns on John and Patsy's surviving child, Burke.

00:26:36.960 Burke was nine years old when his sister was killed,

00:26:39.620 The Ramseys say he was asleep the entire night just down the hall.

00:26:44.100 CBS airs a primetime special built around the theory that Burke killed his sister with paid experts and a staged reenactment.

00:26:52.660 Burke Ramsey sues the network.

00:26:55.020 Well, the Boulder Daily Camera reports the brother of JonBenet Ramsey has reached a settlement with CBS.

00:27:01.160 Burke Ramsey sued CBS after a television series the network aired suggested he killed his six-year-old sister in Boulder.

00:27:09.620 No court ever finds that Burke did anything.

00:27:13.100 The detectives and the prosecutors

00:27:14.460 who actually worked this case never charged Burke,

00:27:17.300 but the theory is now in prime time, 20 years later.

00:27:21.480 In this story, no one's ever really cleared.

00:27:24.640 They're only re-accused on a later night for a new audience.

00:27:28.860 This is the cost of a trial by television,

00:27:31.300 by the news media, the footprints that were never there,

00:27:35.800 the plane he never flew, the handwriting that never matched,

00:27:38.600 alleged history of abuse that was never proven each one is corrected quietly if at all and long

00:27:46.120 after the smear has done its dirty work underneath the entire narrative lies the dna of a man no one

00:27:53.080 can name that dna sits in a drawer because it does not fit the story the country has already chosen

00:27:59.000 to believe the one it's been led to before a single charge is ever filed in the only court

00:28:05.560 that seems to matter, the Ramseys, have long ago been found guilty. 0.73

00:28:10.880 But while the whole country is staring inside that house,

00:28:14.560 one veteran detective is about to walk into this case

00:28:18.360 all but certain the parents did it

00:28:20.520 and walk out believing the exact opposite.

00:28:24.480 Tomorrow, we'll hear his side of the story

00:28:26.900 and the compelling picture he paints on MK Confidential.

The Megyn Kelly Show - July 23, 2026

The JonBenét Conspiracies： Presumed Guilty — Ep. 3 ｜ MK Confidential

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