The Megyn Kelly Show - July 24, 2026


The JonBenét Conspiracies： The Intruder Theory — Ep. 4 ｜ MK Confidential

Topics
stun gun evidence spider web intruder theory
Hosted by
Megyn Kelly
Mentioned
JonBenet Ramsey Lou Smith Patsy Ramsey Alex Hunter John Ramsey Joseph Kennedy Lou Smit Boulder John F. Kennedy Robert Bentley Steve Thomas Megan Kelly John Benet Dale Neville Chamberlain Michael Everett Melody Stanton Virginia Tech Michael Caine John Douglas and 15 more
The JonBenét Conspiracies： Presumed Guilty — Ep. 3 ｜ MK Confidential The JonBenét Conspiracies： The Ghost in the Evidence — Ep. 5 ｜ MK Confidential

Episode Stats


Length

33 minutes

Words per minute

150.94

Word count

5,001

Sentence count

297

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas, Texas. The evidence points to a man who was standing under an open black umbrella in the exact spot where the shots were fired. But who was that man, and why did he have to be there?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:00:30.000 November 22nd, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, the day JFK is assassinated.
00:00:37.320 It had rained overnight, but by mid-morning, the sky is clear and the day is warm.
00:00:43.100 Look at the photographs of the crowd waiting for the president's motorcade, and you will see it.
00:00:48.120 No raincoats, no galoshes, not a single open umbrella, because it is a beautiful day.
00:00:55.200 Except, that is, for one man.
00:00:57.380 In all of Dealey Plaza, in all of Dallas, there is exactly one man standing under an open black umbrella, and he is standing on the grass at the precise spot where seconds later, President Kennedy's body will jolt forward and back as the bullets find him.
00:01:17.640 For years, that man is a gift to conspiracy theorists.
00:01:21.620 Investigators call him the Umbrella Man.
00:01:24.500 One theory holds that the umbrella itself is a weapon,
00:01:27.920 that its shaft conceals a dart gun fired into JFK's throat.
00:01:33.140 Some come to believe the umbrella man is the real assassin,
00:01:36.000 because what possible innocent reason could a man have
00:01:39.660 to stand under an umbrella on a cloudless day
00:01:42.800 exactly where all the shots kill President John F. Kennedy?
00:01:46.980 And then in 1978, someone finally just asks him. 0.97
00:01:51.620 The Umbrella Man comes forward and testifies before Congress with his umbrella, and his explanation is so strange, so wacky, it can only be true. 1.00
00:02:03.720 The umbrella was a protest, not against JFK, but against his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, and his father's appeasement of Hitler and the Nazis in the lead-up to World War II. 1.00
00:02:17.080 I just knew that it was a sore spot for the Kennedys. The umbrella that the Prime Minister
00:02:22.260 of England came back with got to be a symbol with the, in some manner, with the British people
00:02:27.400 by association. It got transferred to the Kennedy family.
00:02:32.080 The black umbrella is a visual insult, a reference to the British Prime Minister
00:02:36.940 Neville Chamberlain, who carried one everywhere. That's the secret. A grieving nation's darkest
00:02:43.920 riddle and the answer is a man making an obscure political protest with an umbrella the investigator
00:02:52.480 josiah thompson who chased that mystery for years drew one lesson from it if you have any fact
00:03:01.120 which you think is really sinister right is really obviously a fact which can only point to some
00:03:10.560 sinister underpinnings. Hey, forget it, man, because you can never on your own think up all
00:03:17.720 the non-sinister, perfectly valid explanations for that fact. A cautionary tale. That is the warning
00:03:25.700 of the Umbrella Man. The strangest fact in a case is not always what it seems.
00:03:32.820 And the murder of JonBenet Ramsey is full of strange facts. A ransom note on the family's
00:03:40.020 own paper, a mother who talks to the cameras before the police, a father composed when he
00:03:46.300 should be falling apart. In the spring of 1997, one man walks into this case and refuses to trust
00:03:54.280 his eyes. He wants the evidence and only the evidence to tell the story. His name is Lou
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00:05:14.240 Lou Smith is not a defense lawyer. He is not a Ramsey friend. He is a career homicide detective
00:05:20.120 out of Colorado Springs. More than 200 murders worked, a clearance rate nearly 90 percent.
00:05:28.140 Lou is a deeply religious and methodical man whom they call the Sherlock of the Rockies.
00:05:33.520 His reputation is built on cases like Heather Dawn Church, a 13-year-old girl who vanished
00:05:39.480 from her home in 1991. The case sat cold for years until Smith went back through the file
00:05:46.200 and lifted a single fingerprint off a window screen
00:05:49.480 that everyone before him had missed.
00:05:52.700 That print put her killer away.
00:05:55.960 Lou is a finder of things other people failed to see.
00:06:00.020 In March of 1997, three months after JonBenet's murder,
00:06:05.280 Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter
00:06:07.100 brings Smith onto the JonBenet Ramsey task force.
00:06:10.980 The case is already going sideways
00:06:12.660 and the police and prosecutors are at each other's throats.
00:06:16.960 Lou Smit had retired just the previous year to spend time with his wife, Barb, who was battling cancer.
00:06:23.300 Now he's back on the force and in a different city away from his family and investigating another family affected by cancer.
00:06:32.560 Smit starts on the Ramsey case exactly where the police did, with the parents.
00:06:36.600 He knows the stats. He knows a child found dead inside a home usually means someone who lived there is responsible.
00:06:45.080 He arrives expecting to help prove that the family did it.
00:06:49.760 Then Smith sits down with the file, and he works the way he always works, by a principle he learned decades before, the transfer theory.
00:06:59.200 Whenever a person commits a crime, they leave something of themselves at the scene and carry something from the scene away with them.
00:07:08.700 Find what was brought in and what was taken out, and the evidence will tell you who was there.
00:07:14.940 So Lou Smith stops asking who had a motive and instead asks a colder question.
00:07:21.600 What does the physical evidence on its own actually say?
00:07:26.100 And the longer he looks, the more he believes a new story.
00:07:31.040 It starts in the basement with a window.
00:07:35.100 Low in the basement wall on the south side of the Ramsey house, there is a window found
00:07:40.000 wide open on the morning of December 26th.
00:07:42.800 The crime lab photographs it that way hours before John Ramsey ever finds JonBenet's body.
00:07:51.220 Beneath it, inside on the white painted wall, a black scuff mark.
00:07:56.460 And on the floor directly below, a hard-sided Samsonite suitcase stood upright on its end in a spot where no one in the family says it belongs.
00:08:07.020 Inside the suitcase, a pink duvet, a Barbie doll, and one of JonBenet's Dr. Seuss books.
00:08:14.980 The Boulder detectives tell Smith that the window is nothing.
00:08:18.960 No one could have come through there.
00:08:20.600 There's a metal grate over the outside window well.
00:08:24.000 So Smith studies the grate himself.
00:08:26.640 And in the crime lab photos from that morning, he finds leaves and vegetation disturbed underneath it.
00:08:33.680 and dirt brushed clean off the frame of the open window.
00:08:38.400 To all appearances, it looks like someone has passed through there,
00:08:42.740 or at least has tried.
00:08:45.480 Then Lou does the thing that becomes his signature.
00:08:49.060 A retired detective in his 60s lowers himself into that window well
00:08:54.220 and squeezes through that basement window on video
00:08:58.000 to prove a grown man can do it.
00:09:01.380 Now, this is where I think the killer actually got in at some point.
00:09:05.780 The grate has to be picked up and put down.
00:09:08.700 John Ramsey had broken that window himself the summer before when he was locked out of the house and he believed it had been fixed.
00:09:17.160 To Smith, the open pane is the point of entry.
00:09:20.980 The scuff on the wall is where a body scraped through and the suitcase is not clutter.
00:09:26.580 It is a step, something the killer stood on to climb back out.
00:09:30.660 Lou comes to believe the intruder may have meant to carry JonBenet out of the house inside that suitcase and found it too big to force up through the window.
00:09:42.500 Near her body in the basement, there is white foam packing debris and brown leaves, the same material that lines the bottom of that window well.
00:09:51.700 Smith believes the killer brought that into the house
00:09:54.520 and left behind two traces,
00:09:57.000 a partial boot print from a brand NoRamsey owns
00:10:00.620 and an unidentified palm print
00:10:03.480 on the door of the little room where JonBenet was found.
00:10:08.160 But Lou keeps building.
00:10:10.400 He looks at the house itself.
00:10:13.040 JonBenet's bedroom is on the second floor.
00:10:15.400 Her parents sleep one flight up in a converted attic suite
00:10:19.300 at the very top of the house. Investigators run sound tests and find that a voice in JonBenet's
00:10:26.140 room is barely audible from the master bedroom. Smit looks around the home and thinks, this is a
00:10:32.880 big, chopped up, four-level house in a college neighborhood with foot traffic at all hours
00:10:38.640 and an alarm system the family had switched off months before. This is not a sealed fortress.
00:10:44.200 It is a place a patient stranger could move through in the dark for hours, unseen and unheard.
00:10:52.980 He studies how JonBenet was bound, a garrotte built from white cord and the broken handle of one of Patsy's paintbrushes tied with slipknotes that only tighten as the victim pulls against them.
00:11:06.620 To Smith, that is not the panicked improvisation of a parent covering up an accident.
00:11:12.200 It is the equipment. It is intent. And the Ramseys owned none of the raw materials. No parachute cord, no roll of duct tape. Police searched the house, the cars, the office, even the airplane hanger, and found none of it. Whoever built that garage and taped the little girl's mouth shut, he brought his tools in and carried most of them back out.
00:11:36.920 And then there are the marks
00:11:39.940 Lou Smit is the first person on the case
00:11:42.840 To take them seriously
00:11:44.020 On John Benet's body
00:11:46.060 There are two sets of small red marks
00:11:48.900 A pair on her back 0.98
00:11:50.460 And a pair on the right side of her face 1.00
00:11:52.740 Smit measures the gap
00:11:55.020 And matches it to the twin metal contacts
00:11:57.920 Of a specific weapon
00:11:59.560 An air taser
00:12:01.100 A stun gun
00:12:02.200 What I'd like to show you is
00:12:04.580 but I think is one of the most important clues
00:12:07.420 left behind by the guilty.
00:12:11.440 Stun gun.
00:12:14.740 There's marks on JonBenet.
00:12:18.200 Those are marks on her back.
00:12:21.220 Those are marks on her face.
00:12:25.140 And there's the same distance of heart,
00:12:27.300 slightly rectangular and shaped.
00:12:30.200 Somebody made those marks.
00:12:32.320 In Smith's reconstruction of JonBenet's murder, the stun gun is used twice.
00:12:37.840 Once upstairs, pressed to the child's jaw and throat while she sleeps,
00:12:43.060 enough to stun her silent so she can be carried down without a sound.
00:12:48.000 And once more in the basement, on her back, as she struggles.
00:12:52.320 A forensic pathologist reviews the comparison and calls the stun gun evidence compelling.
00:12:57.320 Unless some other evidence is presented to me, the most likely explanation for those injuries that they were caused by a stun gun.
00:13:05.940 That hands Lou the answer to a detail that never fit any other version of the night, the scream.
00:13:12.960 A neighbor, Melody Stanton, asleep across the street from the Ramseys with her window open, 150 feet away,
00:13:20.880 reports hearing a child scream around 2 a.m. that morning.
00:13:25.480 A scream the Ramsey family inside the house say they never heard.
00:13:31.140 If it came from the basement, they might not have.
00:13:34.940 Beneath all of it, beneath the broken window and the stuffed suitcase and the pairs of red marks,
00:13:41.280 sits the evidence Lou Smith calls the key to this entire case, and that is the DNA.
00:13:48.380 The Colorado lab finds a small partial profile of male DNA drawn from a bloodstain in JonBenet's underwear.
00:13:59.820 It belongs to no one in the family nor to any suspect ever tested.
00:14:04.960 This sample, however, is too small and too degraded for the lab to identify the fluid or the tissue behind it.
00:14:11.260 Whether the DNA came from spit or sweat or shed skin, no one has ever been able to say.
00:14:19.940 It is male. It is not from the Ramsey family. And past that, a blank.
00:14:27.080 During the autopsy, a Boulder PD detective runs an ultraviolet light over the body and thinks he sees traces of semen.
00:14:34.620 But it turns out to be a smear of blood. No semen is ever found on JonBenet.
00:14:41.260 The autopsy indicates that the sexual assault is consistent with penetration by a finger or an object. 0.79
00:14:49.640 Broken blood vessels in JonBenet's vagina show she was penetrated that night, 0.79
00:14:54.640 and a microscopic fleck of wood is found inside of her, 0.95
00:14:58.880 most likely from the splintered paintbrush used to build the garage.
00:15:03.260 The unknown male DNA is not only found on JonBenet's underwear,
00:15:07.460 the same profile is found as touch DNA from skin cells
00:15:11.840 inside the waistband of her long johns.
00:15:15.860 To a detective raised on the idea
00:15:17.360 that every killer leaves a piece of himself behind,
00:15:20.780 one stray speck might be a fluke.
00:15:23.940 But the same stranger's DNA twice on a murdered child
00:15:27.400 is a person who was there.
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00:17:03.760 connexontario.ca. Smith argues one more point, and it is the shakiest part of his case that a
00:17:11.460 predator who would do this would not do it once. That somewhere there is a pattern, other home
00:17:19.140 invasions, other children, and that Boulder is not the safe, sealed community its officials keep
00:17:24.820 insisting it is. And there is one case that haunts that argument more than any other. It happens in
00:17:32.380 September of 1997, nine months after John Bonnet is killed, less than two miles from the Ramsey
00:17:39.220 home. Late one night, a masked man breaks into a house and sexually assaults a 12-year-old girl
00:17:46.400 in her own bed. He has slipped past the alarm system and past the family dog. And by the
00:17:53.060 family's account, he did not force his way in that night at all. He appears to have gotten inside
00:17:58.720 earlier while the house was empty and then hidden there waiting until the family came home,
00:18:05.240 locked the doors, and fell asleep. He is stopped only when the girl's mother comes down the hall
00:18:11.800 after hearing whispers in the dark. He escapes out the bedroom window and vanishes into the night.
00:18:18.260 He is never caught. That 12-year-old girl was a student at the very same local dance studio
00:18:25.080 as JonBenet. Two little girls from one small dance school two miles apart. One strangled in
00:18:33.500 her basement on Christmas night. The other, nine months later, attacked in her own bed by a masked
00:18:39.100 man who had hidden inside her home and then vanished back into the neighborhood. To Jon
00:18:45.780 Ramsey and to the detectives who came to believe him, that is not a coincidence. It's a pattern,
00:18:52.040 possibly the very same man.
00:18:55.040 Lou never stops making the argument.
00:18:58.640 There is evidence of an intruder.
00:19:00.320 I say this over and over and over again.
00:19:02.700 Nobody wants to listen.
00:19:04.580 And as a result of that,
00:19:06.700 there's a very good chance that tragedy could again strike this family.
00:19:10.880 That is the case for the intruder as Lou Smit built it.
00:19:16.640 Now here is what stands against it.
00:19:19.040 start with the window and the spider web to reach that basement window an intruder first has to lift
00:19:27.460 the metal grate over the outside well and a spider web runs across that grate its strands
00:19:34.900 anchored from the metal down to the bricks of the wall or at least that's how it appears
00:19:40.060 the original web is never photographed and whether it connects the grate itself to the house
00:19:46.300 is a point of contention.
00:19:48.980 The officers who inspect it find the web whole.
00:19:52.600 That spells trouble for the intruder theory.
00:19:55.180 If the spider web is intact and connects the metal to the house,
00:19:59.540 it suggests the grate above the window well was never lifted at all.
00:20:04.300 It is the single hardest fact against Lou Smith's window theory.
00:20:08.420 But Smith reads that same grate the opposite way.
00:20:12.280 now this is where I think the killer actually got in at some point and there
00:20:18.440 is a gas grill here and then there's a south door to the house right behind this
00:20:23.140 gas grill is a grate and you put the grate up you're looking straight down
00:20:27.900 into the window there's three windows there the center one was the one that
00:20:32.680 was open and you're gonna see foliage that green foliage under the leading
00:20:37.760 edge from that grate. Don't grow that way. The grate has to be picked up and put down.
00:20:44.600 Smith says the grate is not bolted down, and he is sure that a patient hand can ease it up and
00:20:51.840 set it back without snapping a strand. During one walkthrough of the house, Smith eases the grate
00:20:58.380 open without breaking a fresh web that has grown between the grate and the house. Even Detective
00:21:04.860 Steve Thomas notes that Smith was able to navigate the grate without breaking the web,
00:21:10.700 while detectives who try lifting the grate break several web strands. So the web does not settle
00:21:17.680 the question. It only sharpens it. There's one more possible explanation for the web,
00:21:23.240 an industrious spider. Detective Michael Everett from Boulder PD consults two spider experts,
00:21:32.080 Dr. Brent Opel of Virginia Tech and Dr. Robert Bennett of the British Columbia Ministry of
00:21:38.320 Forests both identify the web as a funnel web, a kind of web that a spider spins and repairs
00:21:45.280 for as long as it's alive. The night JonBenet died, the temperature in Boulder dropped to around
00:21:52.300 six degrees. By the next afternoon, it was back up into the low 50s. The open window faces southwest
00:21:59.500 into the afternoon sun.
00:22:02.380 While the funnel weaver spider hibernates
00:22:05.300 through a Colorado winter,
00:22:07.660 Bennett says the Ramsey window well
00:22:09.420 had perfect conditions for a hibernating spider
00:22:12.560 to wake up and repair its web
00:22:15.820 and re-spin it that day or the next.
00:22:20.480 However, it's unclear precisely what time of day
00:22:23.300 officers first observed the fully intact spider web
00:22:26.920 and whether there would have been enough time
00:22:28.960 for the spider to spin it fresh like all the other evidence in this case even the spider web points
00:22:35.140 two ways at once then we get to the stun gun the cold case team in the 2016 cbs documentary
00:22:43.980 tests this part of the theory by using a stun gun on a volunteer the marks it leaves behind
00:22:50.600 do not match those on john benet and the effect is the opposite of silence
00:22:55.960 taser taser
00:22:58.460 if this were
00:23:02.700 done to this kid
00:23:03.960 you would have a scream from this kid
00:23:06.620 that goes through the entire building
00:23:08.840 everybody in that
00:23:11.000 house would have heard it
00:23:12.040 so the stun gun like the window
00:23:15.000 stays contested
00:23:16.600 but the marks are still there
00:23:18.740 on dead JonBenet's
00:23:20.780 skin and no version
00:23:22.780 in which the parents did it
00:23:24.400 has ever fully explained them. Then the DNA, where the counter is technical and it is fair.
00:23:33.360 This is a tiny amount of touch DNA and skilled scientists caution that trace DNA like this can
00:23:40.400 travel. It could be carried to the scene by a factory worker who handled the underwear or
00:23:45.920 transferred from one service to another. It is not on its own a name. The DNA profile has been
00:23:54.200 run against a great many people over the years, and it's never matched a single one of them.
00:24:00.440 John Ramsey will spend the rest of his life saying those three letters are the answer,
00:24:06.540 that the identity of the man who killed his daughter is sitting in an evidence locker,
00:24:11.320 waiting for science to catch up to him. The police find no definitive connection between the 1997
00:24:17.520 home invasion in Boulder and the murder of John Benet. No forensic thread that ties the same hand
00:24:24.180 to both crimes. One Boulder PD officer bluntly sums up the department's stance on the Ramsey
00:24:30.120 murder. This was one of a kind. Lou never manages to prove the link. Smith's intruder theory has
00:24:38.780 two more potential holes, and they are not small. First, it has to explain the ransom note,
00:24:45.860 three pages long written on a pad from inside the house, demanding a ransom that almost exactly
00:24:52.620 matches John Ramsey's annual bonus.
00:24:56.000 It has to explain why a stranger
00:24:57.600 who broke in to steal a child
00:24:59.480 would then sit down in that dark house
00:25:01.620 and compose three theatrical pages
00:25:04.000 instead of simply carrying her out the door.
00:25:07.600 And it is not only the ransom note.
00:25:10.760 Remember the garrote.
00:25:12.660 Its handle is a piece of Patsy's own paintbrushes
00:25:15.680 taken from her art kit in the basement.
00:25:18.980 The pad, the pen, the paintbrush.
00:25:21.620 The killer builds this crime in part out of the family's own belongings.
00:25:27.320 A stranger organized enough to arrive with a stun gun, duct tape, and cord,
00:25:32.480 who then fashions the murder weapon from a mother's paintbrush
00:25:35.340 and writes his ransom demand on the household notepad,
00:25:38.820 is a genuinely odd figure.
00:25:41.280 To the bolder detectives, it is the strangest, the damnedest thing,
00:25:45.780 about the whole intruder theory.
00:25:47.120 an outsider who behaves at the decisive moment exactly like someone who already lives there.
00:25:55.060 Lou has an answer. He believes the original plan of a kidnapping for ransom went wrong in the
00:26:01.640 basement. In Lou's mind, the murderer entered the house through the open basement window while the
00:26:06.540 family was out at Christmas dinner. He wrote the ransom note on the family notepad, then hid inside
00:26:12.740 the house. Once the family was asleep, the killer crept into JonBenet's room and used a stun gun to
00:26:18.960 incapacitate her. He then carried her down to the basement, fashioned a garrotte with Patsy's
00:26:25.820 paintbrush handle, and sexually assaulted JonBenet with his fingers. I believe he brought her down
00:26:31.580 to the farthest, deepest part of that basement and did very brutal things to her. Lou believes
00:26:39.360 the killer used the garrote both as a tool of erotic asphyxiation or strangulation fantasy
00:26:46.020 and actual deadly strangulation. Lou believes that JonBenet came to at some point and started
00:26:54.020 to fight back, that the attacker then panicked and hit her over the head, possibly with a flashlight
00:27:00.060 or an aluminum baseball bat, both found in the Ramsey house. The killer then believed that JonBenet
00:27:06.160 was dead and fled out the basement window. As for the oddly specific ransom amount,
00:27:12.700 Lou explains that $118,000 would have yielded exactly 1 million Mexican pesos at that time.
00:27:20.460 If the intruder were planning to run to the border, 1 million pesos sounds like a nice
00:27:25.780 round number to help with an escape. By 1998, the JonBenet Ramsey case is no longer just a
00:27:33.260 murder investigation. It has devolved into two camps at war. The Boulder PD believes the answer
00:27:40.020 lies inside the Ramsey house. Lou Smith and the district attorney's office are convinced
00:27:45.400 it came in from the outside. The police and prosecutors barely trust each other.
00:27:51.960 Early on, the two sides fought over how to handle JonBenet's body, the police wanting to hold it
00:27:56.900 back from burial as leverage to force the parents into an interview, and the DA's office shaming
00:28:02.820 police for ransoming a dead child. It is a small, ugly fight over a child's body. It is also the
00:28:10.920 first crack in a divide that will run through everything to come and swallow this entire case.
00:28:18.260 And within a few weeks of each other, that war produces two major casualties,
00:28:23.860 two detectives with opposite conclusions, both quitting the case in protest.
00:28:29.200 In August of 1998, Steve Thomas, the lead detective who believes Patsy killed JonBenet, resigns with a public letter blasting the DA for refusing to charge the Ramsey family.
00:28:42.740 And in September of 1998, Lou Smith resigns for the exact opposite reason.
00:28:49.200 He writes the district attorney that he cannot, in good conscience, be part of the persecution of innocent people.
00:28:56.260 Smith does not walk away from the case itself, however.
00:28:59.440 He keeps working it for free for the rest of his life.
00:29:04.140 I don't know if I could solve it without the help of the police department,
00:29:06.740 and I'm sure I'm not going to get that.
00:29:09.100 But I know that God had a plan, and I'm part of it,
00:29:12.500 and I'm just going to continue to work in it as long as he needs it.
00:29:17.680 Lou hauls around his boxes of photographs and his slide deck of the window
00:29:21.720 and the marks and the DNA from meeting to meeting, right up until his death in 2010.
00:29:28.720 Friends later say he took this case to his grave.
00:29:32.120 Lou's adult children carry the torch forward and continue to investigate to this day.
00:29:38.020 Back in 1998, the investigation stalled because the people the detectives most needed to talk to
00:29:45.340 stopped talking.
00:29:46.700 John and Patsy Ramsey, on their lawyer's advice, will not sit for open police interviews at this
00:29:53.640 point. Friends who are around the house that Christmas, they've lawyered up as well. A grand
00:29:59.980 jury is the one tool that can break this wall. It can subpoena witnesses, force testimony under
00:30:07.860 oath, and demand evidence the police cannot otherwise get. It can lock down memories in
00:30:14.120 testimony before they fade, including the account of Ramsey's young son, Burke. In March of 1998,
00:30:22.120 the Boulder PD formally asks District Attorney Alex Hunter to take this case to a grand jury,
00:30:28.300 and the PD announces it in a press release. Quote, while there is still some investigation
00:30:33.980 left to be done, both Chief Kobe and Commander Beckner believe the investigation has progressed
00:30:39.700 to the point at which the authority of a grand jury is necessary in order to complete the
00:30:45.440 investigation, end quote. For months, D.A. Hunter resists. In his meetings with the police, he calls
00:30:52.380 a grand jury a political solution, not a way to solve the case. In public, his office calls the
00:30:58.320 idea premature. But now the police are demanding it, in public, and Hunter is out of good options.
00:31:06.020 So he gives in. And in September 1998, Alex Hunter convenes a grand jury. He brings in an
00:31:14.980 outside specialist, former federal prosecutor Michael Caine, to run it. And he hands the
00:31:20.880 biggest question in the case, whether anyone can be charged in JonBenet's death to a group of
00:31:27.440 ordinary Boulder citizens sworn to lifelong secrecy. They hear from former FBI profiler
00:31:34.920 John Douglas, whom the Ramseys hired to investigate this case, who believes that an intruder killed
00:31:40.740 JonBenet. I've sat down across the table from some of the country's greatest liars in the world,
00:31:48.520 really, and I can sense it. And things just did not fit. The crime scene data just doesn't fit.
00:31:57.540 When I'm looking at this man, Mr. Ramsey, if you did it, you are one hell of a liar. 1.00
00:32:03.940 You are one hell of a liar if you did it. 1.00
00:32:07.060 And you're putting on a great production here. 0.99
00:32:10.740 But I just don't believe, in my heart, he did this.
00:32:14.360 And not just in my heart, from the analysis of the scene.
00:32:19.220 They hear from Lou Smit, too.
00:32:21.520 Smit brings the grand jury the case of his life.
00:32:24.680 More than 600 slides have built one photograph at a time.
00:32:28.140 the open window, the disturbed grate, the suitcase, the marks on the child's skin, the DNA,
00:32:34.560 all of it. And at the end of it, the question that has hung over the Ramsey family for two years
00:32:41.140 is finally going to get an answer. Will John and Patsy be charged with the murder of their daughter
00:32:47.780 or not? That grand jury will sift through evidence for more than a year. But it turns out that what
00:32:55.840 The grand jury decides, and what the public is told are two wildly different things.
00:33:02.360 We'll open that door and everything behind it tomorrow on MK Confidential.