00:00:57.380In 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.
00:01:17.640For years, that man is a gift to conspiracy theorists.
00:01:21.620Investigators call him the Umbrella Man.
00:01:24.500One theory holds that the umbrella itself is a weapon,
00:01:27.920that its shaft conceals a dart gun fired into JFK's throat.
00:01:33.140Some come to believe the umbrella man is the real assassin,
00:01:36.000because what possible innocent reason could a man have
00:01:39.660to stand under an umbrella on a cloudless day
00:01:42.800exactly where all the shots kill President John F. Kennedy?
00:01:46.980And then in 1978, someone finally just asks him.0.97
00:01:51.620The 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
00:02:03.720The 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
00:02:17.080I just knew that it was a sore spot for the Kennedys. The umbrella that the Prime Minister
00:02:22.260of England came back with got to be a symbol with the, in some manner, with the British people
00:02:27.400by association. It got transferred to the Kennedy family.
00:02:32.080The black umbrella is a visual insult, a reference to the British Prime Minister
00:02:36.940Neville Chamberlain, who carried one everywhere. That's the secret. A grieving nation's darkest
00:02:43.920riddle and the answer is a man making an obscure political protest with an umbrella the investigator
00:02:52.480josiah thompson who chased that mystery for years drew one lesson from it if you have any fact
00:03:01.120which you think is really sinister right is really obviously a fact which can only point to some
00:03:10.560sinister underpinnings. Hey, forget it, man, because you can never on your own think up all
00:03:17.720the non-sinister, perfectly valid explanations for that fact. A cautionary tale. That is the warning
00:03:25.700of the Umbrella Man. The strangest fact in a case is not always what it seems.
00:03:32.820And the murder of JonBenet Ramsey is full of strange facts. A ransom note on the family's
00:03:40.020own paper, a mother who talks to the cameras before the police, a father composed when he
00:03:46.300should be falling apart. In the spring of 1997, one man walks into this case and refuses to trust
00:03:54.280his eyes. He wants the evidence and only the evidence to tell the story. His name is Lou
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00:05:14.240Lou Smith is not a defense lawyer. He is not a Ramsey friend. He is a career homicide detective
00:05:20.120out of Colorado Springs. More than 200 murders worked, a clearance rate nearly 90 percent.
00:05:28.140Lou is a deeply religious and methodical man whom they call the Sherlock of the Rockies.
00:05:33.520His reputation is built on cases like Heather Dawn Church, a 13-year-old girl who vanished
00:05:39.480from her home in 1991. The case sat cold for years until Smith went back through the file
00:05:46.200and lifted a single fingerprint off a window screen
00:06:12.660and the police and prosecutors are at each other's throats.
00:06:16.960Lou Smit had retired just the previous year to spend time with his wife, Barb, who was battling cancer.
00:06:23.300Now he's back on the force and in a different city away from his family and investigating another family affected by cancer.
00:06:32.560Smit starts on the Ramsey case exactly where the police did, with the parents.
00:06:36.600He knows the stats. He knows a child found dead inside a home usually means someone who lived there is responsible.
00:06:45.080He arrives expecting to help prove that the family did it.
00:06:49.760Then Smith sits down with the file, and he works the way he always works, by a principle he learned decades before, the transfer theory.
00:06:59.200Whenever a person commits a crime, they leave something of themselves at the scene and carry something from the scene away with them.
00:07:08.700Find what was brought in and what was taken out, and the evidence will tell you who was there.
00:07:14.940So Lou Smith stops asking who had a motive and instead asks a colder question.
00:07:21.600What does the physical evidence on its own actually say?
00:07:26.100And the longer he looks, the more he believes a new story.
00:07:31.040It starts in the basement with a window.
00:07:35.100Low in the basement wall on the south side of the Ramsey house, there is a window found
00:07:40.000wide open on the morning of December 26th.
00:07:42.800The crime lab photographs it that way hours before John Ramsey ever finds JonBenet's body.
00:07:51.220Beneath it, inside on the white painted wall, a black scuff mark.
00:07:56.460And 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.
00:08:07.020Inside the suitcase, a pink duvet, a Barbie doll, and one of JonBenet's Dr. Seuss books.
00:08:14.980The Boulder detectives tell Smith that the window is nothing.
00:09:01.380Now, this is where I think the killer actually got in at some point.
00:09:05.780The grate has to be picked up and put down.
00:09:08.700John Ramsey had broken that window himself the summer before when he was locked out of the house and he believed it had been fixed.
00:09:17.160To Smith, the open pane is the point of entry.
00:09:20.980The scuff on the wall is where a body scraped through and the suitcase is not clutter.
00:09:26.580It is a step, something the killer stood on to climb back out.
00:09:30.660Lou 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.
00:09:42.500Near 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.
00:09:51.700Smith believes the killer brought that into the house
00:10:13.040JonBenet's bedroom is on the second floor.
00:10:15.400Her parents sleep one flight up in a converted attic suite
00:10:19.300at the very top of the house. Investigators run sound tests and find that a voice in JonBenet's
00:10:26.140room is barely audible from the master bedroom. Smit looks around the home and thinks, this is a
00:10:32.880big, chopped up, four-level house in a college neighborhood with foot traffic at all hours
00:10:38.640and an alarm system the family had switched off months before. This is not a sealed fortress.
00:10:44.200It is a place a patient stranger could move through in the dark for hours, unseen and unheard.
00:10:52.980He 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.
00:11:06.620To Smith, that is not the panicked improvisation of a parent covering up an accident.
00:11:12.200It 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.
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00:25:47.120an outsider who behaves at the decisive moment exactly like someone who already lives there.
00:25:55.060Lou has an answer. He believes the original plan of a kidnapping for ransom went wrong in the
00:26:01.640basement. In Lou's mind, the murderer entered the house through the open basement window while the
00:26:06.540family was out at Christmas dinner. He wrote the ransom note on the family notepad, then hid inside
00:26:12.740the house. Once the family was asleep, the killer crept into JonBenet's room and used a stun gun to
00:26:18.960incapacitate her. He then carried her down to the basement, fashioned a garrotte with Patsy's
00:26:25.820paintbrush handle, and sexually assaulted JonBenet with his fingers. I believe he brought her down
00:26:31.580to the farthest, deepest part of that basement and did very brutal things to her. Lou believes
00:26:39.360the killer used the garrote both as a tool of erotic asphyxiation or strangulation fantasy
00:26:46.020and actual deadly strangulation. Lou believes that JonBenet came to at some point and started
00:26:54.020to fight back, that the attacker then panicked and hit her over the head, possibly with a flashlight
00:27:00.060or an aluminum baseball bat, both found in the Ramsey house. The killer then believed that JonBenet
00:27:06.160was dead and fled out the basement window. As for the oddly specific ransom amount,
00:27:12.700Lou explains that $118,000 would have yielded exactly 1 million Mexican pesos at that time.
00:27:20.460If the intruder were planning to run to the border, 1 million pesos sounds like a nice
00:27:25.780round number to help with an escape. By 1998, the JonBenet Ramsey case is no longer just a
00:27:33.260murder investigation. It has devolved into two camps at war. The Boulder PD believes the answer
00:27:40.020lies inside the Ramsey house. Lou Smith and the district attorney's office are convinced
00:27:45.400it came in from the outside. The police and prosecutors barely trust each other.
00:27:51.960Early on, the two sides fought over how to handle JonBenet's body, the police wanting to hold it
00:27:56.900back from burial as leverage to force the parents into an interview, and the DA's office shaming
00:28:02.820police for ransoming a dead child. It is a small, ugly fight over a child's body. It is also the
00:28:10.920first crack in a divide that will run through everything to come and swallow this entire case.
00:28:18.260And within a few weeks of each other, that war produces two major casualties,
00:28:23.860two detectives with opposite conclusions, both quitting the case in protest.
00:28:29.200In 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.
00:28:42.740And in September of 1998, Lou Smith resigns for the exact opposite reason.
00:28:49.200He writes the district attorney that he cannot, in good conscience, be part of the persecution of innocent people.
00:28:56.260Smith does not walk away from the case itself, however.
00:28:59.440He keeps working it for free for the rest of his life.
00:29:04.140I don't know if I could solve it without the help of the police department,
00:29:06.740and I'm sure I'm not going to get that.
00:29:09.100But I know that God had a plan, and I'm part of it,
00:29:12.500and I'm just going to continue to work in it as long as he needs it.
00:29:17.680Lou hauls around his boxes of photographs and his slide deck of the window
00:29:21.720and the marks and the DNA from meeting to meeting, right up until his death in 2010.
00:29:28.720Friends later say he took this case to his grave.
00:29:32.120Lou's adult children carry the torch forward and continue to investigate to this day.
00:29:38.020Back in 1998, the investigation stalled because the people the detectives most needed to talk to