JonBenét Ramsey’s murder case is one of America’s most notorious cases. The pageant star’s murder has been a staple in true crime, and JonBenét’s family won’t stop until the killer is caught.
The Ramsey family called the Boulder Police Department after JonBenét’s mother Patsy Ramsey had discovered a lengthy ransom note demanding $118,000 for their daughter. After hours of searching, they found their daughter’s body in the basement. She was strangled with a makeshift garrote and she had been struck on the head. the crime scene had been contaminated by friends and family who gathered at the house after Patsy’s 911 call, critical evidence was potentially compromised, and police faced criticism for not immediately securing the scene. Her parents were exonerated from being suspects after DNA evidence didn’t match
Related: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey? A List of All the Suspects
Is the JonBenét Ramsey Case solved?
More than 28 years after her body was found, JonBenét Ramsey’s murder case still has not been solved. Her police and family are still not giving up hope to find who was behind the murder. The Boulder Police Department, under new chief Steve Redfearn, issued a statement to NBC News saying they are “continuing to work with DNA experts and our law enforcement partners around the country until this tragic case is solved.” JonBenét’s father John Bennett Ramsey expressed cautious optimism about the new leadership, noting, “The new chief of police seems like a good guy, (an) open communicator. All he’s got to do is open the door and let all this help in that’s standing there waiting to help.”
A source behind the scenes told Us Weekly that solving the crime is a priority for the Boulder Police Department. “It’s embarrassing that we haven’t been able to solve this yet, and [Police Chief Stephen] Redfearn wants this solved,” the insider shared with the outlet. “He wants that feather in his cap. He wants to take away this stigma that we are corrupt or incompetent, and solving this case would be the best way to publicly show it.”
With new technology emerging, John Bennett wants to investigate his daughter’s case with exact precision. “What we are advocating for—and have been doing so for the last year or so, aggressively, is we know there’s five or six items that were taken from the crime scene. They were sent into a lab for DNA sampling and were not sampled,” John Ramsey explained in the Netflix documentary. “We want those items sampled. We want what has been sampled to be retested. Then use the public genealogy database to look for — not only a match — but a similar relative,” he added. “That’s been used very successfully in the last few years by police departments to find the killer of very old cold cases.”
In a new interview with People, John Bennett is convinced that he knows who killed his daughter. He claims that a masked intruder who snuck inside the home of a 12-year-old girl two miles away from the Ramsey home, nine months after JonBenét’s murder. The suspect raped the girl and then ran away when the child’s mother scared him off. “They came home, set the burglar alarm, and the killer was already in the house,” he said. “A very similar method, and yet the police blew it off. It was the same investigator as our case. But even the father of the little girl said, ‘On a scale of one to 10, I rate the police minus five.’ They just … just bone-headed ignorance. But yes, I think that was very possibly the same person.”
