﻿For whatever reason, news stories about murder and tragedy always garner huge
attention from the masses, but few cases have ever grabbed the nation’s attention
much like the tragic story and murder of Jonbenet Ramsey. In today’s video we’re taking a deeper
look into this mysterious and confusing unsolved case involving a nonsensical ransom letter,
a house full of suspects, and the deeply sad death of a 6 year old beauty queen.
JonBenet Ramsey was born August 6th, 1990, in Atlanta, Georgia to John Bennet Ramsey
and Patricia Ramsey. She was the youngest of Ramsey's two children, with her older sibling
being her brother Burke Ramsey who had been born three years prior, making him 9 years
old at the time of her muder. The Ramsey’s were the classic American Family living the dream.
John had made the family into multi-millionaires after selling a company he started to
Lockheed Martin, a technology and defense corporation known for making weapons of war,
and Patricia had been a renown Pageant Queen herself, being named Miss West Virginia in 1977.
The family had multiple homes, with one in Boulder , Colorado, and another in Michigan,
and both houses were absolute mansions. Their Colorado home was especially large,
with a whopping 15 rooms spanning a basement, main floor, 2nd floor with the children’s rooms, and a
finished attic floor that served as the parent’s master suite. Obviously this house was massive,
and it was able to comfortably hold even 30 people all at once, which it did on December 23rd, 1996,
when the Ramseys were throwing a Christmas party. During this party a police officer allegedly
showed up to the house and knocked on the door which was answered by a guest named Susan Stein.
The officer informed Susan that he was responding to a 911 call that was dialed inside the house,
which she immediately dismissed, insisting someone must have either dialed by accident or
drunk dialed, causing the officer to leave. Two days later Christmas arrived and the Ramsey
family had a day filled with joy, gifts, and laughter. During the afternoon the Ramseys went to
spend time with their friends and neighbors Fleet and Priscilla White, exchanging gifts and eating
dinner around 5:30 before leaving about three hours later. Once they left the Ramseys reportedly
drove by some other neighbors' houses to drop off presents before arriving home around 10:00 p.m.
Jonbenet was hard asleep in the car by the time the family got home, and according to her mother
Patsy she picked her daughter up and brought her up to her bed, tucking Jonbenet in without waking
her up. At 2:00 A.M that night, next door neighbor Melody Stanton reportedly heard a child’s scream,
as well as the sound of metal on concrete. Writing it off as a child having a nightmare, Melody
thought nothing was off about what she heard and simply went back to bed. Patsy woke up around 5:30
the next morning and heard her husband John in the shower. She got back into the clothes she had worn
the previous night over to her neighbors’, and went down to make some coffee. While walking down
their spiral stairs, Patsy noticed something odd on the last three steps of the stairs, and when
she leaned down and figured out what it was she shrieked so loud it alerted her husband.
Patsy had stumbled upon a letter strewn across the stairs. It read: “Mr. Ramsey, Listen Carefully! We
are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction. We respect your business but not
the country that it serves. At this time we have your daughter in our possession. She is safe and
unharmed and if you want her to see 1997, you must follow our instructions to the letter” The
ransom note then went on to explain that the kidnappers wanted John to withdraw $118,000
and await a call between 8 and 10 A.M that would inform him on where to deliver the money.
The note was also very clear that if the Ramseys tried to contact the police about this situation
then Jonbenet was going to be beheaded, and that the men who currently had her did not like John,
and would strike at the smallest of provocations. Even weirder than everything else in the letter,
after two and a half pages of half threats and half rambling, the letter was signed Victory!,
S.B.T.C. Patsy immediately phoned the police, and when they arrived they did some relatively
light searches of the house, not expecting to find much given that Jonbenet had been kidnapped
and thus would not still be in the house. With the police watching over everything, John
got the ransom money and went about his day while waiting for the phone call. 8 A.M turned to 9 A.M,
and eventually 10 A.M came and went with no phone call. Lead Detective Linda Arndt would
later comment how weird she thought it was that John seemed nonplussed when he didn’t
receive a phone call from the kidnappers. Not only this, but during this time John had been keeping
himself busy putting together a public relations team and making plans for the family to go to
Michigan the next day, which the police quickly informed him was not going to be a possibility.
By 1:00 P.M there was still no phone call and Detective Arndt could feel something was off.
She asked John and neighbor Fleet to search the house from top to bottom, just to make
sure nothing was amiss. The two men decided to start their search in the basement, and made their
way through the basement’s boiler room which was the only way to access the Ramsey’s Wine cellar.
While this area had been checked before by police, the police hadn’t been sure where the light switch
was and instead just left the room. Reportedly. John entered the room, screamed that he had found
his daughter’s body, and then flicked the light on. When the light illuminated the room Fleet
could see the body of six year old Jonbenet, who was lying on the floor with tape over her mouth,
her hands bound, and a garrote made of wire and one of Patsy’s paint brushes around her neck,
as well as with a white blanket covering her body. A later autopsy would reveal that the
child had been killed by strangulation and a skull fracture related to blunt force trauma.
There wasn’t any semen or evidence of rape found at the seen of the crime,
however that same autopsy revealed the the girl had experienced vaginal trauma, and so the police
refused to completely rule out the idea that there may have been sexual assault, either the night of
her muder or possibly in the recent past. After discovering the body, John picked up his
daughter’s corpse and carried her up the stairs to the first floor, successfully contaminating
the body and crime scene. According to Detective Arndt, she saw John carrying Jonbenet up the last
three stairs and it was evident that the poor child had been dead for quite a while. She then
ordered him to place the child down, and once he did Patsy sprawled herself over Jonbenet’s corpse.
While it is completely understandable that both the Ramsey parents would be in unbelievable states
of distress, it is still slightly suspicious that both of them contaminated the crime scene
and made a point of touching the corpse in front of everyone, as if to supply an excuse in case
their fingerprints were found on the body. To add to the mounting list of oddities about the case,
it did not go unnoticed by Detective Arndt how strange it was that JonBenet, who had
supposedly been kidnapped and held for ransom, was found dead in the basement of her own home.
Speaking of the kidnapping, let’s re-address that ransom note.
The note in question was three pages long, which is incredibly abnormal for a ransom letter,
and is in fact the longest recorded ransom note in history. Not only this, but the letter was
written on a pad of paper and with a pad of paper that had been found in the Ramsey home.
A first draft of the letter was also found, which instead of beginning by addressing just Mr.Ramsey,
addressed both Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey. For what reason would these apparent kidnappers break
into the house and risk getting caught using the Ramseys' own pen and paper, before kidnapping
Jonbenet and keeping her in the house as well. The evidence wasn’t lining up, and it was beginning to
look more and more like the family themselves may have been involved in JonBenet’s death.
John and Patsy were the initial suspects, with many oddities about the case seeming to point to
one or both of them as the culprit, however both were later ruled via DNA and handwriting analysis.
Following them the next suspect was Bill McReynolds, who had been to the Ramsey
house just two days before the credit. Bill said he felt close to JonBenet,
possibly due to the fact that his own child had been abducted and murdered around 20 years prior,
and he even kept a vial of glitter gifted to him by JonBenet on him at all times,
including when he went into heart surgery, and would even later ask for it to be mixed into his
ashes with when he died. It goes without saying that this level of attachment was incredibly
creepy and definitely gave the police red flags, but McReynolds was cleared by the DNA evidence
found on JonBenet’s body. The next suspect was a nearby neighbor named Gary Oliva. In 2011 Oliva
was arrested on unrelated drug charges and was found with a photo of JonBenet that he apparently
kept with him in his bag. When questioned, Oliva merely explained this away by stating he kept
the photo around because the tragedy that occured touched him and he was trying to honor her memory.
Oliva would be later arrested with child pornography charges in 2016, and in an interview
a friend of Oliva named Michael Vail revealed in an interview that the day after JonBenet’s murder,
Oliva had called him and said “I hurt a little girl”, and told him the child was hurt in Boulder,
Colorado.Despite this, Oliva was also not a match to the DNA found on JonBenet and he was dropped
as a suspect. Last but unfortunately not least we have the final suspect, a man named John Mark
Karr. In 2006 Karr emailed a confession to the crime to a Journalism Professor named Michael
Tracey. Michael played along with the emails in order to pull more information out of Karr before
turning him in, however it would later be revealed that Karr was in georgia at the time of the crime
and could not be responsible for the murder, once again leaving the police without a suspect.
Recently, Dr. Henry Lee, a DNA expert, was able to prove that the DNA pulled from JonBenet’s body,
which came from her underwear, likely came from the hands of the workers who made it, and proved
this theory could be true by using an unopened pack of underwear. What this means is that even
though several of these suspects were cleared with DNA evidence, the DNA evidence in question is most
likely not even relevant to the case, taking us right back to square one. With this in mind, the
more and more time passes the less and less likely it becomes that JonBete will ever receive justice.
Her tragic murder continues to grip the hearts of the public, and even though we’re 25 years
out from her crime, any advancements on the case will surely cause a ripple throughout the nation.
Tell us your thoughts and theories about the case down below, and let us know any other
cases you’d like us to cover. If you enjoyed the video then hit that like button and subscribe to
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