The JonBenét Conspiracies： The Family Theory — Ep. 2 ｜ MK Confidential
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
9
sentences flagged
Toxicity
8
sentences flagged
Hate speech
4
sentences flagged
Summary
In 1996, a 6-year-old girl named JonBenet Ramsey was found murdered in the basement of her Boulder, Colorado home. The case would go on to become one of the most infamous unsolved child homicide cases of all time.
Transcript
00:00:17.000
We can help you reduce your debt by up to 80% and feel great again.
00:00:21.000
Farber Debt Solutions. Licensed Insolvency Trustees.
00:00:30.000
It is the day after Christmas, 1996, and a veteran FBI agent named Ron Walker stands inside a crime scene that does not add up.
00:00:40.660
Walker works out of the Bureau's Denver field office, one of the only federal agents to set foot inside the Ramsey home the day JonBenet's body is found.
00:00:50.200
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.
00:01:00.740
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.
00:01:23.960
To a man who has worked cases like this many times before,
00:01:30.340
Virtually every staged murder case that I have seen,
00:01:45.480
or they are with the perpetrator as the body is discovered.
00:01:52.980
By 1.05 in the afternoon, it is something else entirely.
00:02:06.140
and only a handful of people who are inside the house all night.
00:02:10.740
The question is no longer who took JonBenet out of the house on Christmas night.
00:02:25.560
When you sign your insurance policy for some brokers, that's the finish line.
00:02:31.700
Then you may not hear from them again until it's time for renewal.
00:02:34.620
But your business runs all year, and so do the gaps and the risk,
00:02:37.820
which is why I want to tell you about super sure. If your company has more than 25 employees,
00:02:43.380
whether you're the owner, CFO, or HR manager, it can be too complex to just buy a policy online.
00:02:49.520
Super sure is the super agency built for you licensed in every state for your business
00:02:54.440
insurance and employee benefits with year round support for you and your team at super sure.com.
00:03:00.500
You can access tools like fine print facts, which translates your current policy into plain English.
00:03:05.680
so you see what's covered and what's not. Plus a business value calculator so you can estimate
00:03:10.900
what your business is worth and know what actually needs protecting. Go to supersure.com
00:03:15.540
slash Megan. One super agency, one powerful platform, all your policies in one place.
00:03:21.340
Go to supersure.com slash Megan. Paid for by Supersure Insurance Agency, LLC, a licensed
00:03:26.480
insurance agency. Agent Ron Walker brings the FBI's playbook with him and the playbook is old
00:03:34.420
and blunt. When a child is killed inside her own home, investigators start with the people who are
00:03:40.480
in the home and work outward. It's not insensitivity, it's math. FBI data going back
00:03:46.980
decades suggests that the younger a child is when murdered, the more likely that a family member
00:03:53.080
is involved. From almost the first hours, the eyes of the Boulder Police Department
00:03:58.300
turn toward John and Patsy Ramsey. The trouble with that playbook is that a statistic is a
00:04:05.080
starting point, not a finish line. Investigators can lock onto a suspect early and let the theory
00:04:11.540
start bending the evidence to fit instead of the other way around. Walker's Denver Bureau
00:04:18.420
offers Boulder its full weight, its labs, its profilers, its experience with exactly this kind
00:04:24.600
of murder. But Boulder Police, a department that sees roughly one homicide per year, passes on the
00:04:31.760
help. The most complicated child killing in America will be worked almost entirely by a
00:04:37.920
department with virtually no experience solving homicides, not by federal investigators.
00:04:43.960
Two detectives hand me their business cards and one says narcotics officer and the other says
00:04:48.400
auto theft. And I bury my head into my hands because I knew at that point we were in a bad
00:04:54.400
spot. Inside the Ramsey house, the family theory does not stay a hypothesis for long. As word
00:05:01.520
spreads among the officers that JonBenet's body has been found in the basement, one cop says the
00:05:06.920
quiet part out loud. Investigative reporter Paula Woodward has ears in the room. She later tells
00:05:13.780
Netflix what it is she heard. There was a group of police investigators that had gathered at the
00:05:21.120
Boulder Police Department that morning. When the word came in that Jomini's body had been found,
00:05:26.940
a person inside that meeting told me that one investigator hissed in kind of an undertone and
00:05:36.300
a whisper to another one. I knew it. They killed their daughter. Internally, John and Patsy are
00:05:41.740
considered suspects. Both of them, yes, are considered to have probably been involved in the
00:05:51.960
The Boulder PD detective who carries that conviction most strongly
00:06:03.560
and now he's leading one of the most scrutinized child murders in America.
00:06:09.080
Someone needs to stand up and speak for JonBenet.
00:06:22.780
Over the next 18 months, Detective Thomas builds the most complete case ever assembled against the Ramsey family.
00:06:31.000
Steve Thomas starts with the ransom note on the Ramsey's own notepad
00:06:34.960
and the possible practice line found inside the notebook belonging to Patsy.
00:06:40.480
But he comes to believe the notepad was concealing much more than that.
00:06:45.740
Thomas concludes there was an earlier draft, a first attempt, written on pages that were torn out and carried away, but never recovered.
00:06:56.000
Two runs at a ransom note inside the victim's own house on the family's own paper.
00:07:03.080
To Thomas, that note becomes the single strongest piece of evidence in the entire case, and he thinks it points squarely at the woman of the house, Patsy Ramsey.
00:07:16.820
Three pages written with a black felt tip pen telling John to listen carefully and claiming to represent a small foreign faction.
00:07:26.540
Quote, at this time, we have your daughter in our possession.
00:07:32.280
And if you want her to see 1997, you must follow our instructions to the letter.
00:07:37.180
speaking to anyone about your situation, such as police, FBI, etc., will result in your daughter
0.97
00:07:43.780
being beheaded. Don't try to grow a brain, John. Use that good Southern common sense of yours.
1.00
00:07:51.440
It never uses the little girl's name. It even pauses in the middle of a kidnapping to compliment
00:07:57.860
the father's company, saying, we respect your business. The Ramseys hire retired FBI profiler
00:08:05.300
John Douglas, to investigate the case. He reads the same note and comes to the opposite conclusion.
00:08:13.040
Douglas hears a mind steeped in action movies. The note is filled with paraphrases from Dirty
00:08:18.820
Harry, Speed, and Ransom, Mel Gibson's child kidnapping movie, which was in theaters just
00:08:25.160
a month before JonBenet's death. Douglas says that's a lot of very similar material to be
00:08:31.240
merely coincidental and it's difficult to imagine patsy sitting alone in the kitchen writing out a
00:08:37.560
fake ransom note after she's killed her own daughter and coming up with multiple action
00:08:43.080
movie phrases the profiler raises an unsettling possibility that the note may have been written
00:08:50.760
before john benet ever died both readings of the note agree on one thing whoever wrote those three
00:08:58.120
theatrical pages did it slowly calmly comfortably and they did it inside that house then there's
00:09:07.000
the number the ransom demand is a hundred and eighteen thousand dollars not a round figure
00:09:14.200
not a kidnappers clean million and it lands within a few hundred dollars of the bonus
00:09:19.800
john ramsey received from his company the year before douglas sees this number as a real clue
00:09:26.440
and tells NBC that Patsy did not know John's bonus amount.
00:09:36.340
This is money that's electronically placed in his 401k
00:09:43.120
So to me, it's kind of like the manifesto in the Unabomber.
00:09:47.200
It begins to tell me more about the person who's responsible.
00:09:52.540
This person has a very unique, intimate knowledge about his financial workings.
00:10:00.940
Whoever wrote it knew the Ramseys personally, observed John professionally,
00:10:07.000
or saw this number on a piece of paper inside the home.
00:10:11.220
Of course, someone inside the house is not the same thing as a parent.
00:10:15.200
A housekeeper could have seen that figure, a visitor, a former employee.
00:10:19.520
John Ramsey suspected a creepy guy who had been in the house playing Santa Claus.
00:10:24.180
It could be anyone who spent real time in the home.
00:10:27.560
And as many as 20 keys to that home are unaccounted for in other people's hands.
00:10:36.060
will later offer a very different explanation for that oddly specific sum.
00:10:40.440
But for now, the connection to John's bonus dominates the discussion about the $118,000.
00:10:46.380
And then there's the phone. The note promises a call between 8 and 10 in the morning. It never
00:10:54.560
comes. Not by 10, not by 1, not ever. A kidnapping in which the kidnapper never makes contact,
00:11:02.880
in which there's been no kidnapping. To Boulder Detective Steve Thomas, that silence
00:11:08.920
is not a mystery. He surmises no one's calling because no one was ever going to call,
00:11:15.040
and someone in that house knows it. We wouldn't be celebrating America 250 if it wasn't for a
00:11:21.960
strong foundation set by the framers. Hamilton built America's financial foundation on the
00:11:26.960
principle of sound, stable money, a principle later embodied by the gold standard. However,
00:11:31.740
we abandoned that discipline in 1971 and have seen inflation erode the dollar's value ever since.
00:11:39.580
What's the foundation of your savings? Is it gold? Is gold even in there? Or is it something
00:11:44.800
that could be shaken, disrupted, devalued. Birch Gold Group has been helping Americans
00:11:50.080
solidify their savings with gold for the past 15 years. They will help you convert in whole
00:11:56.660
or in part an existing IRA or 401k into a tax sheltered IRA in gold. Learn how gold can fit
00:12:03.820
into your portfolio by texting MK, my initials, to the number 989898. You will receive a free
00:12:10.800
no-obligation info kit. With an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau and countless
00:12:15.300
five-star reviews, consider having Birch Gold help build your foundation with gold.
00:12:20.380
Text MK to the number 989898. When John Ramsey searches the house that afternoon on December
00:12:26.220
26th, Detective Thomas sees a man who does not search so much as travel straight down to the
00:12:32.860
basement, straight to the one room that matters. The quiet phone line does not deepen the kidnapping
00:12:39.160
in the detective's eyes, it ends part of the mystery altogether.
00:12:43.940
Two images harden early in the minds of the police
00:12:46.760
as JonBenet's body lies lifeless by the Christmas tree.
00:13:24.500
Within days on the advice of a close family friend
00:13:37.640
with police that will drag on for months to the investigators and soon to the country
00:13:44.360
that looks like the behavior of people with something to hide the ramses attorneys wanted
00:13:49.960
all the questions they said they wouldn't go in for an interview with the police because they
00:13:54.280
didn't know what the police were going to ask on new year's day 1997 a week after the murder the
00:14:01.560
The Ramseys sit for a television interview, this long before sitting down with police.
00:14:08.020
Detective Thomas sees this as the start of a pattern, a family that answers reporters
00:14:12.960
who have agreed in advance not to ask about the murder while evading and delaying the
00:14:24.720
The Ramseys' former FBI man, John Douglas, reads it differently.
00:14:27.900
He sees the Ramseys' behavior as exactly how wealthy, well-connected families behave inside a legal catastrophe.
00:14:36.200
They involve lawyers, they distance themselves, and they proceed with caution.
00:14:41.180
These are the same instincts the Lindbergh family showed in 1932 when their 20-month-old baby boy was kidnapped and killed.
00:14:50.020
Many suspected the boy's famed pilot father, Charles Lindbergh, after his baby Charlie disappeared, because Charles seemed cold and aloof.
00:15:00.140
But Lindbergh believed he functioned best in a crisis by staying controlled.
00:15:07.300
A veteran Navy pilot, self-made executive, who had already endured the loss of one beloved daughter, and the despair that followed.
00:15:15.760
The distress that looks wrong on camera looks wrong because there's no version of grief over a murdered child that a parent performs correctly.
00:15:33.220
The day they're called to the Ramsey house, detectives notice a bowl of fresh cut pineapple on the breakfast table upstairs with a spoon resting in it.
00:15:41.760
The prints on that bowl belong to Patsy Ramsey and to nine-year-old Burke, not to JonBenet.
00:15:50.020
I didn't put the bowl there, okay? I did not put the bowl there. I would not do this.
00:15:55.840
And yet JonBenet's stomach contains fresh, partly digested pineapple.
00:16:05.460
The Whites, who hosted Christmas dinner the night before, served cracked crab, no pineapple.
00:16:12.640
The Ramseys say their daughter fell asleep in the car and went straight to bed and never ate again.
00:16:22.840
A forensic examiner named Werner Spitz, known for his work on the JFK autopsy,
00:16:28.520
studies how far the pineapple traveled through JonBenet's system.
00:16:32.060
He fixes JonBenet's time of death at, around, or before one in the morning.
00:16:39.160
Detective Steve Thomas turns that into a single question
00:16:42.500
that he cannot make fit into the family's account.
00:17:03.400
and then wait two hours for it to digest before killing her.
00:17:08.180
When the detectives show Burke a photo of the bull, he knows it on sight.
00:17:16.640
The pineapple is the first moment the family's timeline cracks, and Detective Thomas never
00:17:24.180
By the summer of 1997, Steve Thomas has interpreted the facts and built a theory of the whole
00:17:30.400
night JonBenet died, and he believes every word of it.
00:17:34.300
if i told you right now that we have praise evidence that appears to link you to the death
00:17:42.580
of john bonnet what would you tell me i don't give a flying flip how scientific it is go back
0.95
00:17:51.680
to the damn drawing board i didn't do it john ramsey didn't do it and we didn't have a clue
0.73
00:18:27.800
wets the bed that night a chronic problem in the months before her death and then sometime before
00:18:33.660
one in the morning an exhausted frazzled mother comes apart in her little girl's bathroom one of
00:18:40.560
the doctors the detectives consult tells them the toilet training problems are a textbook trigger
0.96
00:18:46.520
for exactly this kind of parental rage the way thomas pictures it patsy slams her daughter against
0.88
00:18:52.840
something hard like the edge of the tub, delivering a blow that fractures her skull.
00:18:58.380
The child goes still. And Patsy, Thomas believes, thinks that in that instant, her daughter is
00:19:05.300
already dead. What Thomas describes next is not a murder plan. It is sheer panic. A mother who
00:19:12.820
could call for help and instead decides to hide what she's done. She carries the body down to
00:19:18.760
the basement, goes back upstairs for her notepad and a felt-tip pen, and writes a kidnapping into
00:19:24.580
existence, discarding one draft, then another, before the three pages are done. She builds a
00:19:30.820
garrote from a broken paintbrush in her own art kit, just a few feet away from JonBenet's body.
00:19:37.820
She ties her small wrists loosely in front, a binding that would never hold a living child,
00:19:48.080
She wraps her daughter in a blanket and leaves a favorite pink nightgown beside her.
00:19:53.880
Patsy then lays a strip of tape across her mouth, and beneath it, later, officers find
00:19:59.900
a perfect set of lip prints, no sign of a struggle, no sign the child fought the tape.
00:20:06.560
And when Patsy Ramsey opens the door to the first officer at nearly six in the morning,
00:20:12.640
She is in the same clothes she wore the night before.
00:20:25.840
The lawman said as much when he squared off against John and Patsy on Larry King in 2000.
0.98
00:20:31.540
My theory is that Patsy, in a violent confrontation with her daughter...
00:20:50.720
for you to come out and call me a murderer of my child.
00:20:56.480
I put together what you think happened that night.
00:20:59.800
Well, I think there was a toileting issue that night
00:21:10.160
Thomas does not believe John Ramsey killed his daughter.
00:21:16.040
Our child wet her bed and we slaughtered her.
0.90
00:21:26.200
I was there. I know Paxi. I've been with her for 20 years.
00:21:30.300
I know that she loved that child more than anything in the world.
00:21:33.780
The detective hypothesizes that John reads the ransom note in his wife's hand
00:21:39.040
understands what he sees and makes a choice not to expose her but to stand in front of her with
00:21:46.020
lawyers and to hold the line well will you agree patsy that almost none of it makes sense
00:21:51.840
right none of it what was the guy doing why did the why did the intruder do this evil evil person
00:21:58.880
god knows and the truth is going to prevail john and patsy also strongly dispute any notion that
00:22:08.520
nine-year-old Burke was involved in his sister's death in any way.
00:22:15.140
This was a violent, vicious, sexually assault case.
00:22:20.520
Not something that a nine-year-old could even possibly do.
00:22:26.060
So that's just, it's really disgusting that people jump to that kind of a conclusion.
00:22:33.660
Within days of JonBenet's murder, satellite trucks start lining the block
00:22:38.340
outside the Ramsey house on 15th Street. Reporters stand on the frozen lawns of the neighbors.
00:22:45.280
News producers are pulling home video and pageant tape, the footage of a darling little girl in
00:22:50.840
makeup and sequins, smiling beneath stage lights, about to run on a loop from coast to coast.
00:22:58.600
Inside police headquarters, confidential reports are starting to slip out to reporters,
00:23:03.460
some of it wrong, some of it half true, all of it moving faster than the investigation itself.
00:23:11.100
But what about the broken window and the suitcase beneath it? What about the ransom note
00:23:16.780
and the unidentified male DNA found on JonBenet's underwear? These conflicting data points do not
00:23:24.320
fit neatly on a magazine cover, nor do they play well in a 30-second TV spot. The local and national
00:23:31.960
media are about to hand America a version of this story with every contradiction sanded away.
00:23:39.480
A version with a verdict that's clean and easier for some to handle than the possibility that
00:23:45.520
killers roam loose and kill innocent children in their homes at night. The parents did it.
00:23:52.960
You may have heard this version before, a sweeping narrative that tries to tie up all the loose ends
00:23:58.400
with a pretty bow, but in reality leaves many mysteries dangling. Tomorrow, we will step
00:24:05.000
through that narrative piece by piece through the eyes of the people who told it and saw it
00:24:10.140
plastered on magazine racks nationwide. Join me tomorrow right here on MK Confidential.