CHAPTER 26

WHO?

Hi-Tec boot print found in wine/storage cellar next to JonBenét’s body. Courtesy Boulder Police and Boulder County District Attorney.

ONE OF THE MOST PERPLEXING MYSTERIES about the killing of JonBenét Ramsey is the absolute dichotomy between the style and length of the rambling ransom note and the seemingly precise, methodical way in which the six-year-old was tortured and killed.

Who would write a note that was two and a half pages long, possibly using quotes from movies about kidnappings, who wasn’t particularly sophisticated, yet included words like attaché with the accent correctly placed? Who would also have shown no great anger in the note, and why would they write it at all if in fact no actual kidnapping was planned?

Who would make a garrote with unusual knots and use it to slowly strangle a child to unconsciousness, taking every last breath from her and then bringing her back, only to strangle her a second time? And was the garrote used both times? Something was pulled so tightly that it not only left two different rope furrows/ligatures in the skin on her neck, but left the rope embedded in her neck.

Who would sexually penetrate a six-year-old with a wooden object? Who would hit her so hard in the head that a portion of her skull caved in and an 8.5-inch crack was left in her skull and would have left her with only minutes to live according to two coroners on the case?

What was the motive? Was it a sexual homicide, a kidnapping gone wrong, an accident or a genuine kidnapping attempt? Why was JonBenét tortured and killed? Only the killer likely knows.

(The profiles and psychological background of the possible killers in the different scenarios presented in this chapter come from discussions and interviews with psychologists, forensic psychiatrists, forensic coroners, behavioral specialists, profilers and homicide investigators.)

Let’s look at the strongest possibilities of who that killer might have been by looking at what evidence is known. Some evidence is presented here for the first time:

SCENARIO #1
PATSY RAMSEY KILLED HER DAUGHTER, JONBENÉT

Patsy was tired and in bed. It had been a long and fun Christmas Day, but her family had arrived home late, and they all needed to be up early for a trip to Michigan. John, who had taken a sleeping pill after playing with Burke and putting their son to bed, was asleep in bed beside Patsy.

Patsy heard JonBenét cry out for her. She knew she was the one who needed to get up to attend to her daughter, but getting out of bed was almost more than she could bear. She became angry. Finally, she got up and went to JonBenét’s room to see why her daughter was crying.

At this point, something happened that led Patsy to become enraged with her daughter.

A variety of possible situations in this scenario have been considered by law enforcement officials since JonBenét was found murdered. But the case evidence never supported most of those initial theories. According to one theory, JonBenét had wet her bed, and Patsy lost control and eventually murdered her daughter because of her daughter’s accident. That theory was questioned for various reasons, including the fact that it was contradicted by evidence—including the presence of fibers from JonBenét’s clothing on her sheets that indicated those sheets (which showed no sign that a child had recently urinated on them) had not been changed during any kind of cover-up attempt.

Did Patsy learn John was assaulting their daughter that night and hit her daughter for this reason? Not according to the evidence. JonBenét’s pediatrician, the coroner and a colleague of the coroner with firsthand knowledge of JonBenét’s physical condition all said there had been no ongoing sexual abuse. JonBenét’s teachers also reported no signs of suspected physical or sexual abuse.

What about the pineapple, grapes and cherries found in JonBenét’s stomach during her autopsy? Discussions about when JonBenét had eaten these foods and how long it had taken her to digest them ran rampant in the months following her murder. Did Patsy become so furious over something to do with JonBenét and the food she’d eaten that she hit her daughter? A small bowl of pineapple was found in the Ramsey kitchen on the Thursday morning of JonBenét’s disappearance. The bowl had Burke’s and Patsy’s fingerprints on it. Patsy would later tell Boulder Police Department investigators that she had not fed JonBenét pineapple at any time on Christmas Day or that evening, and that her sleeping daughter had been taken out of the family’s car and put to bed upon their arrival home Christmas night. Patsy also said that JonBenét and Burke were allowed to get food from the refrigerator whenever they were hungry, so she may not have known about JonBenét getting such a snack. After JonBenét’s autopsy, many different estimates on how long it would take to digest the fruit were offered, but no definitive answer was provided.

So, in the theory that Patsy killed her daughter, she became so outraged that she struck JonBenét with some sort of heavy, blunt object or pushed her daughter with such force that JonBenét hit her head on something hard enough to cave in part of her skull and cause an 8.5-inch crack in her skull. The skull fracture, however, did not break her skin and couldn’t be seen until her skull was exposed when the autopsy was performed.

After harming her child so seriously that she believed she may have killed her, the theory continues, Patsy became at once horrified and devastated and yet cold and detached. In a flash frame of reality, she realized she was not willing to lose everything and must do something drastic in order to ensure that didn’t happen. She knew her life and family would all vanish if JonBenét was indeed dead. Yet Patsy didn’t want to go to prison, and she didn’t want her husband to leave her. A smart woman, she decided to think through a way to blame her daughter’s death on someone else. But who would that be? The only people in the home were John and Burke. So it had to be someone from the outside, she reasoned … an intruder who had been after JonBenét. Better yet, someone who had broken into her family’s home and kidnapped JonBenét. By staging things to look like an intruder had killed her daughter and even dumping her daughter’s body outside their home, Patsy could convince everyone, including the police, that she’d had nothing to do with her child’s death.

At some point during that night, this theory continues, Patsy wrote the ransom note, peppering it with lines from various action movies. Critics of this scenario have said it was unlikely Patsy would know quotes from these movies because she and her husband did not go to movie theaters; they had told the police this fact, and their friends had supported it. Furthermore, all the movies found in the Ramsey home had been made for children. Boulder Police Department investigators had even checked movie rental stores and learned the Ramseys had never rented any of the action movies featuring quotes consistent with those used in the ransom note.

Why did Patsy write a ransom note that included phrases that very likely came from thriller movies? How long did it take her to write it, or was the note premeditated and written several days before? If she wrote the note beforehand, why had she planned ahead to hurt and kill her daughter? Why did she leave a partially finished greeting in the tablet and tear out seven pages after that greeting and then the three pages for the ransom note? Had she been practicing in those seven missing pages? Investigators determined the number of pages that had been torn out because of the page tears at the top of the tablet, including those that matched the tears at the top of the ransom note pages.

Only one fingerprint was found on the ransom note, and that was later traced to a police investigator, so Patsy must have worn some sort of gloves to hide her fingerprints and DNA while she wrote the note. While no expert involved in the case was ever able to identify Patsy as the note writer, the theory that asserts her guilt also suggests she was so crazed from the pressures of her daughter’s death or near-death that she became a different personality, a development that affected her handwriting to the degree that it wasn’t easily recognizable by experts. Some Boulder Police Department investigators operated on this theory in the late 1990s, and still do.

To summarize this theory, Patsy was shocked by the initial harm she’d caused to her child but able to think through a complicated plan to take what she thought was her dead daughter out of her home to abandon her. When she realized that JonBenét was still breathing, Patsy once again became furious (instead of relieved) and realized her plan to dump her daughter’s body somewhere wouldn’t work. Somehow Patsy determined that she must muster the strength to finish what she knew at this point was inevitable, because her daughter was either going to die or be terribly damaged, and there was no reason to further destroy her family over this.

At this point, Patsy’s actions under the scenario that she killed her daughter became even more bizarre. She made a garrote using rope that was never found in her home. How many people even know what a garrote is? Devising one would surely be a deliberate and time-consuming act for anyone, especially a distraught parent. The garrote used to kill JonBenét was considered unusual by those who studied it, including a knot expert from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, especially due to the slipknots it contained. Could that mean that the person who had made it was not an experienced killer, because an experienced killer would have kept it simple? While at least one homicide expert has suggested this possibility, who can explain the reasoning of this killer’s mind?

The Boulder County Coroner described the garrote and the rope used to make it in his official report: “Tied loosely around the right wrist, overlying the sleeve of the shirt is a white cord. At the knot there is one tail end which measures 5.5 inches in length with a frayed end. The other tail of the knot measures 15.5 inches in length and ends in a double loop knot. This end of the cord is also frayed.

“Wrapped around the neck with a double knot in the midline of the posterior neck is a length of white cord similar to that described as being tied around the right wrist. This ligature cord is cut on the right side of the neck and removed … The posterior knot is left intact; extending from the knot on the posterior aspect of the neck are two tails of the knot, one measuring 4 inches in length and having a frayed end, and the other measuring 17 inches in length with the end tied in multiple loops around a length of a round tan-brown wooden stick which measures 4.5 inches in length … Blonde hair is entwined in the knot on the posterior aspect of the neck as well as in the cord wrapped around the wooden stick. The white cord is flattened and measures approximately ¼ inch in width. It appears to be made of a white synthetic material.”

According to homicide experts and profilers and testimony from retired homicide detective Lou Smit, garrotes are used in murder and sexual bondage activities. A garrote can be as simple as a wire or rope looped around the neck from behind a person to pull the head back and, as both hands pull on the wire or rope, tighten pressure on the front of the throat. The first Godfather movie, released in 1972, showed a garrote used as a method of killing, and garrotes have been used in other movies as well as television series since then.

The rope garrote used to kill JonBenét was described by some as complex and by others as simple. It had a loop with a slipknot at the back of its open noose portion so it could be tightened at the back of the neck. Then the garrote rope extended to the wooden paintbrush stick, where several tight loops were made around the stick in order to strengthen it and allow for more pressure against the child’s neck. Another slipknot was made at the bottom of those loops on the stick. The knots were used to alternately loosen and tighten for strangling. What kind of person would make a garrote and then use it as described?

Evidence also showed two distinct furrows in JonBenét’s neck, one with a rope still embedded in it, leading the coroner to state that there had to have been at least two instances of near strangulation. According to a forensic psychiatrist, such findings indicate JonBenét suffered through an excruciatingly painful and torturous death, and her killer was not only cruel but sadistic.

This theory continues to suggest that, at some point, Patsy would also have had to sexually penetrate her daughter with a broken-off portion of her paintbrush forcefully enough to cause her to bleed. None of Patsy’s DNA was found on any part of the garrote, rope or duct tape. Nor was anyone’s.

With her dead daughter’s body on the floor of the basement storage room alongside JonBenét’s favorite nightgown, according to this theory, Patsy then had to stage not only a kidnapping but a cover-up of a gruesome murder.

Considering the stressful situation and all she’d already been through that night, Patsy must have made her next decisions with impressive exactness and thoroughness. First she wiped her daughter’s body with an unknown and never-found substance to ensure she hadn’t left any of her own DNA behind. She then left a boot print from a Hi-Tec shoe next to her daughter’s body and tossed some personal items next to it, too. She also left a partial footprint (with a different shoe) nearby on the floor of the storage room and on the northeast basement bathroom toilet lid.

Patsy then unlocked various doors and windows in her home so they would be considered possible entry or exit points for “her intruder.” Back in the basement, she went in the storage room where her son’s train set was kept and adjusted the window that John had broken the summer before so it also looked like another possible point of entry. She even moved debris in the window well to the sides so it appeared as though the center section of the three-paned window had been entered. But she forgot to make marks on the window sill to make it look like a person had entered there. How did she move the debris inside the window well without making marks on the window sill? And how did she lift the heavy basement window well grate and mash the grass underneath it, just as evidence indicated, so it would look like the grate had been recently opened?

Patsy then collected some of her daughter’s belongings, including a duvet cover. Prior to putting everything in a suitcase often used by another family member, she returned to the storage room to rub the duvet cover on her daughter’s clothed body in order to leave fabric evidence behind on both JonBenét’s clothing and on the duvet. This, she must have theorized, would indicate that the kidnapper had planned to take her daughter away inside the suitcase.1 The duvet placed in the suitcase with other items, Patsy then moved the suitcase next to the broken basement window in the train room.

Patsy would have had to make a long scuff mark on the basement wall underneath the broken window and scatter pieces of window glass and outside debris on top of the suitcase to add credibility. She also moved material from the window well into the storage room and into the northeast basement bathroom.

Back upstairs, this theory continues, Patsy washed the wet sheets on JonBenét’s bed and put them in the dryer. She then remade JonBenét’s bed with new sheets, carefully pulling the covers back halfway and throwing her daughter’s pillow onto the end of the bed to disguise the scene. She also somehow made sure to leave fiber evidence from JonBenét’s clothing on the clean changed sheets she’d just put on the bed. She left the washed sheets in the dryer. The sheets in the dryer would become possible evidence of Patsy’s assumed motive for attacking and killing her daughter because JonBenét had wet her bed. While some would speculate that fiber evidence on the bed indicated the sheets hadn’t been changed, others would insist the evidence showed the sheets had been very cleverly manipulated.

Eventually, the theory continues, Patsy realized she had to get rid of some of what she had used to kill her daughter: the rope, the duct tape, part of the paintbrush, anything she could think to grab. Or maybe she was methodical enough to see what she had left in the basement, and that’s what she took. She had to have left home to go somewhere, unseen, through the dark cold of the frigid December night, in order to get rid of at least part of the evidence. How did she decide what to take out of her home? Where did she dump it? Did she use a car, go down the alley or go down the front walk?

Soon, her adrenaline waning, Patsy must have realized she was exhausted. Though she was also aware that she had just brutally tortured and murdered her daughter, Patsy maintained her determined detachment that wouldn’t let reality in, at least until she got up the next morning.

Only then did Patsy Ramsey release her emotions over what she had done and begin to emerge back into her regular life, confident that she had, in her delusional mind, saved her family.

This theory concludes by asserting that Patsy was so smart that— after finding the ransom note she’d planted on the back staircase of her home, screaming for her husband and checking on her son with him and then calling 911—she immediately called family friends to come to her house, not because she needed their emotional support, but in order to add to the confusion in the home.

She also cleverly remained in character by telling police investigators some time later that “Whoever left the note knew I always came down those staircases in the morning.” (BPD Reports #5-402, #5-9999.)

If Patsy killed her daughter, this theory holds that true evil exploded openly during those brief hours in the middle of the night between December 25 and December 26, 1996. Patsy Ramsey, a savage psychopath, during those hours was alternately enraged and cruelly detached. Only after returning to bed and finally getting some sleep did her “normality” surface at some point, returning her to her everyday persona, allowing her to hide in the open, her evil side never to appear again.

SCENARIO #2
JOHN HELPED PATSY KILL JONBENÉT

In this slightly modified scenario, after Patsy hurt her daughter and began to believe she’d killed her, Patsy ran upstairs to her husband and frantically awakened him. Somehow he sorted through her incoherence, began to understand that Patsy was certain she had killed their daughter, and ran to JonBenét, finding that she was still alive. Instead of calling for an ambulance to help his daughter, however, he decided her condition was so devastating that she wouldn’t survive and it was more important to save his wife by killing his daughter and then helping Patsy cover up what she has done.

How did they come up with a kidnapping scheme? John asked Patsy to write a ransom note, took JonBenét to the basement and destroyed her there, using sexually based acts as part of the kidnapper staging. John and Patsy did this solely to save their way of life. They rehearsed their story and finalized the staging during the rest of the night while their dead daughter lay on the concrete floor of a dingy basement room, arms above her head, a blanket casually covering part of her body.

This theory was developed by some Boulder investigators shortly after the murder of JonBenét despite the fact that John Ramsey had discovered his daughter’s body, thereby ruining the staging he and his wife had supposedly so carefully devised. Why wouldn’t John have instead allowed his friend, who was with him during the search, discover JonBenét, thus not interfering with the elaborate staging he and Patsy had created? The two men were in close proximity to each other at that moment. John could have easily pointed his friend toward the storage room where he’d left his daughter’s body. Or would he have considered that action too contrived?

What are the odds that two psychopaths who had been married for sixteen years suddenly had their perversions surface at the same time, leading them to brutally kill their daughter and then attempt to return to a normal life? Were they in strict survival mode? Where did they dispose of the items used in the murder that were never found? How did they decide to stage a kidnapping and then torture and murder their daughter? Those are just some of the considerations that must be successfully addressed in order for this theory to work.

“Psychopaths are all about control and winning,” Eric Hickey, PhD, a criminology consultant and an expert in psychopathic personalities, has said. He was describing the personality of a psychopath without drawing any analogy to the Ramsey murder. “They are very good at manipulating. They are expert liars and charming. They are narcissistic and completely absorbed in themselves and satisfying their own needs. Psychopaths are users. They use people to gratify their personal needs and have no empathy, shame or remorse. Psychopaths don’t have fear and they have a higher intelligence. Ted Bundy was a classic psychopath.” A serial killer executed in Florida in January 1989, Ted Bundy raped and killed a twelve-year-old girl and killed two sorority sisters. He never confessed to the number of women he killed, but he was suspected of killing more than thirty in several states including Colorado, where he was jailed but eventually escaped.

SCENARIO #3
JOHN DISCOVERED PATSY HAD KILLED JONBENÉT AND COVERED FOR HER

The day after Christmas, according to this theory, John realized Patsy had been involved in his daughter’s death. To save his wife and since his daughter was already dead, John decided to keep the terrible secret of what actually happened and to trade any justice for his daughter for his wife’s sake so together he and Patsy could continue on with their way of life. In this scenario, Patsy had tortured and killed JonBenét and completed all the staging herself.

SCENARIO #4
BURKE RAMSEY WAS INVOLVED IN HIS SISTER’S MURDER

In this variation, Burke fatally hurt his sister in some kind of accident, and his parents decided they must ruthlessly cover up for him.

Burke was nine years old when two Boulder Police Department detectives interviewed and tape-recorded him on the morning of JonBenét’s disappearance without his parent’s permission. That would not be an unusual procedure, according to one homicide expert who added that he would have insisted neither parent be present when the child was interviewed. A child psychologist representing the Boulder County Department of Social Services also interviewed Burke on January 8, 1997. A third interview occurred in Atlanta, when two detectives questioned Burke with his attorney present. All of these interviews were taped. None of his interrogators detected that Burke might be lying about his sister’s death and his lack of involvement in it. The Boulder Department of Human Services (Social Services) went even further, stating in their March 1997 Evaluation of the Child report related to Burke Ramsey that, “From the interview it is clear that Burke was not a witness to JonBenét’s death.”

The theory that Burke was involved was not considered seriously for very long, but talk radio speculated about it and tabloid headlines and bloggers advanced the idea enough for the rumor to spread internationally. Law enforcement leakers in Boulder did nothing to discourage such rumors, which continued to resurface for months on slower news days.

SCENARIO #5
AN INTRUDER KILLED JONBENÉT2

When the Ramsey family came back the night of December 25, 1996 from their Christmas dinner at a friend’s home, an intruder was already hidden in the guest room next to JonBenét’s bedroom. Evidence has shown that unidentified rope left in a sack was found underneath the bed in that room.

He had what he needed. He’d written the ransom note, made the garrote and left the suitcase in the basement, out of the way. Did the idea for the note come to him from watching action movies, most involving kidnappings? Had the language used in those movies matched the message he wanted to get across in his note? He had planned and prepared for weeks or months, and he’d been in the house before. He listened to John and Patsy put their daughter to bed. Patsy then went to the third floor master suite to bed, while John played with Burke for a few minutes on the other end of the house on the second floor.

He was excited—thrilled, really. He waited until the home was quiet and everyone was asleep.

Then he approached JonBenét’s bedroom on the thick plush carpet. His footsteps were silent. He used a stun gun to incapacitate his six-year-old victim and bound her mouth shut with duct tape. JonBenét had been so tired from days of Christmas excitement that she’d been sound asleep in her bed.

He carried her downstairs to the basement. The suitcase, packed with a few items to help keep JonBenét comfortable, was ready to go. Perhaps he’d planned to take her out of the home inside the suitcase along with the duvet and other items. Or he’d known he was going to kill his victim in the basement and escape alone, and the suitcase was just staging.

Whatever his original intentions, apparently something went wrong with his plan. Why else would he have struck JonBenét on the head so hard? If a stun gun was indeed used, why else would it have been used twice, leaving two sets of marks? Maybe JonBenét woke up and struggled, or her kidnapper couldn’t fit her in the suitcase. Either way, he struck her on the head with a weapon and knocked her out, and/or he shocked her again with the stun gun.

Then he continued his rampage. He slipped the garrote over JonBenét’s head and pulled, choking her unconscious. He pulled down her long johns and assaulted her with part of a paintbrush handle. He tightened the garrote again. The little girl died from the combination of a blow to the head and strangulation, according to the coroner who did her autopsy.

JonBenét’s killer left her body in a dark storage room. Her hands had landed above her head, or perhaps he’d posed her that way. He tossed the blanket over her and left her Barbie nightgown next to her on the floor. He paused over her body, and his weight sunk into the dirt and mold, leaving either a clear footprint or a partial one, or he had someone with him as the two separate footprints found in that room didn’t match. Would he have been clever enough to bring an extra unmatched shoe for that extra footprint? When did he take the time to leave a footprint on the basement bathroom toilet, or was that footprint made when he broke into the house through the bathroom?

Finally, JonBenét’s killer pushed the makeshift door of the storage room open and then shut and dropped the latch above the door into place. He picked up what he wanted to take, left the ransom note on the circular staircase and left the house.

In such a scenario, what might have been the motive? Why would someone do this?

Retired detective Lou Smit, who considered pedophilia and psychopathic personality for a motive, has suggested that the killer likely watched JonBenét for months, and what he saw was not what anyone else saw. Others saw a cute little girl at school, playing, maybe in the neighborhood or in a pageant, maybe with her mother at the grocery store. He saw someone he had to have. He wouldn’t say no to his own addiction. He was angry, desperate and selfish. Society would label him a pedophile. In his world, he wanted children sexually, and didn’t care, really, whether it was considered right or wrong. He would find a way to have what he wanted. His need did not touch a conscience because he didn’t have one.

Experts have also speculated that JonBenét Ramsey’s killer could have been a pedophile, a psychopath or both.

Kidnapping from a home is rare but not without precedent: Many remember Elizabeth Smart of Salt Lake City. Elizabeth was fourteen years old on June 5, 2002, when she was abducted from her home at night. Elizabeth lived in a large home, like JonBenét. She was part of a loving family. Her mother, father and five siblings were in the home, asleep. Elizabeth and her younger sister slept in the same bedroom. Her kidnapper came into the home and forced Elizabeth to go with him. Her sister was too terrified to go for help for two hours.

For nine months, Elizabeth Smart was assaulted and kept from her family while living with her kidnapper, Brian David Mitchell, and his wife, Wanda Barzee. The couple was homeless and panhandled and preached on the street. Mitchell had seen Elizabeth when he was hired off the street to do odd jobs around the Smart home. He came back six months later and kidnapped Elizabeth from her bed in the middle of the night.

Elizabeth was effectively brainwashed with daily abuse and threats against her family. She was eventually rescued when a Good Samaritan reported seeing Mitchell, his wife and possibly Elizabeth, to the police.

Mitchell had a history of sexual crime. He’s now serving life in prison. His wife plea bargained with federal prosecutors and got fifteen years in prison. The prosecutors said going into the Smart home was high-risk behavior. Like the Ramsey killer in the intruder theory, Mitchell cared about nothing except satisfying his own needs, according to Salt Lake City investigators.

The kidnapping and murder of Heather Dawn Church in September 1991 showed pre-planning, surveillance and violence. Thirteen-year-old Heather lived near Colorado Springs in an area called Black Forest. She was babysitting her little brother that night when an intruder removed a screen in the home, entered through an open window and kidnapped her. Authorities had no leads for two years until her skull was discovered several miles from her home.

Robert Charles Browne had lived just down the road from Heather Church and coveted and stalked her. He confessed to her murder in 1995, when a fingerprint from the window screen matched one taken after he was convicted on motor vehicle theft and burglary charges in Louisiana. That was the only physical evidence in the case. While Browne said he had strangled Heather or broken her neck, law enforcement never knew for sure how she died because the rest of her body was never found.

Browne was sentenced to life in prison without parole. He later wrote to investigators that he had killed others. Detective Lou Smit was on the cold case team that finally solved Heather Dawn Church’s murder. Credit was given to Smit for finding her killer. Smit described Browne as a “violent sexual predator, pedophile and psychopath.”

Thirteen-year-old Dylan Redwine disappeared November 19, 2012 from his father’s home in Vallecito, Colorado. He was staying with his father on a court-ordered visit. His mother and father were divorced. His father said he last saw Dylan at home while he went out to run errands. When he got home, he said, Dylan was gone. That was the Monday before Thanksgiving weekend. In June, 2013, parts of the boy’s remains were found in a high-mountain range near Vallecito by law enforcement officers involved in one of several searches. The parents blamed each other for Dylan’s death, but law enforcement officials as of this writing say they have no suspects.

If the perpetrator in the Ramsey murder case was not a pedophile, perhaps the motive to kill JonBenét was anger and jealousy of John Ramsey and his seemingly ideal life and family. Renowned former FBI profiler John Douglas suggested this possibility when he was first hired by the Ramsey team. Nowhere in the ransom note was JonBenét mentioned by name. The focus of the note was on John. So, an alternative motive could have been hatred or resentment of John. Perhaps the killer was someone who had suffered an imagined slight by Ramsey, someone who obsessed about such things and refused to forgive John. Seen in this light, the ransom note becomes a taunting puzzle. The writer of the note used it to build upon his outrage and continue to build upon his grievances enough to plot a complicated way to get his revenge. His resentment escalated, nourished by his sadistic plan to torment John Ramsey by attacking his beloved daughter.

Douglas was criticized by some in the media who learned through law enforcement leaks that he’d made the decision that the Ramseys were not involved in their child’s murder after having only been briefed by the Ramsey attorneys. Yet, according to Douglas as well as the Ramsey attorneys and an attorney at the Boulder District Attorney’s Office, he had also talked with Boulder Police Department officials and with attorneys in the DA’s Office.

Of course there is a third possible motivation for choosing the Ramsey family to victimize, and it’s possibly the most terrifying suggestion because it’s random. The killer may have chosen to break into the Ramsey family home and attack their daughter without knowing anything about them. Instead, he simply chose this family as his target because he wanted to assault and kill or needed a victim to kidnap.

The Polly Klaas case is one example of a seemingly random, violent murder. Though her murder had been planned, it had involved no cover-up, staging or elaborate and extensive planning.

On October 1, 1993, Richard Allen Davis, who had been paroled from prison only three months before, broke into the Klaas home through a window. Twelve-year-old Polly was having a slumber party that night with some friends at her small home in Petaluma, California, near San Francisco. Davis had been seen loitering around the home that day. His plan was short term, organized and involved only those present in the home. He entered the house and, while Polly’s mother was asleep in a nearby room, tied up Polly’s friends and took Polly out of her home while holding a knife against her neck.

Davis had an extensive criminal history of kidnapping and violence against females. On December 4, 1993, he confessed to kidnapping and killing Polly Klaas and led law enforcement officials to her body. He was convicted of kidnapping, first-degree murder and committing a lewd act.

According to California Supreme Court transcripts, a clinical therapist and psychologist testified that Davis had antisocial disorder and sexual sadism. A psychiatrist who testified had diagnosed Davis with avoidance personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder and schizoid personality disorder. Basically, they said, Davis enjoyed hurting others and inflicting both physical and emotional pain. He was also a very organized offender. Richard Allen Davis was sentenced to death and, in January 2013, was denied all but one of his appeals by the California Supreme Court. He currently remains on California’s death row.

Such depravity was also portrayed in the kidnapping of a child in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. The eleven-year-old girl was on her way to school in June 1991 near her home when she was grabbed, thrown into a vehicle and stun gunned. For eighteen years, her abductor, Phillip Garrido, and his wife, Nancy, kept the girl prisoner in an extensive rundown backyard compound.

From the moment the girl was captured, Garrido began raping her. She had two daughters while in captivity, both fathered by Garrido. With his wife’s help, Garrido kept their three prisoners locked away in a life of unimagined hell.

Garrido was a registered sex offender who had been convicted of rape and was on parole. During the eighteen years following the kidnapping, parole officers visited his house sixty times and saw the young woman and eventually her daughters, but did not investigate.

Garrido’s prisoners were finally rescued following his attempt to get a permit to sell a “book” that was actually a four-page essay he’d written about religion and sexuality. Two employees at the University of California, Berkeley events office grew suspicious of Garrido and the girls who had stopped by their office with him and reported their suspicions to police. Garrido was forced to bring his “children” in for a parole check that resulted in his three victims being rescued in August 2009. Garrido was sentenced to more than 400 years in prison. His wife got more than 30 years.

There was shock and horror when neighbors rescued three young women in Cleveland in May 2013. The three had disappeared in kidnappings that occurred between 2002 and 2004, when they were fourteen, sixteen and twenty years old. Each had accepted a ride from a part-time school bus driver, Ariel Castro, when he kidnapped them. They were found in his local neighborhood home. One of them had a six-year-old child fathered by Castro. One of the girls knew the kidnapper’s daughter. It was unclear whether Castro had known the other two girls before he took them. The three women were kept mostly in the basement of Castro’s rambling two-story house. There was confusion in the neighborhood about the kidnapper because he had seemed, as one neighbor told reporters, to be just like the rest of them. But Castro had beaten, starved and sexually assaulted his captives at various times. He was not one of them.

In July 2013, Ariel Castro pleaded guilty to kidnapping and sexual assault in order to avoid the death penalty. He was sentenced to life in prison, plus 1,000 years. Part of his plea agreement included signing over the deed to the house where he had kept the three girls. The house was torn down in August 2013. Castro committed suicide by hanging himself in prison the next month.

In 2005 in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Joseph Edward Duncan III kidnapped an eight-year-old girl and her nine-year-old brother from their home. He had targeted the family without knowing them. Duncan first killed the two young children’s older brother and mother and their mother’s fiancé. He then kidnapped and sexually traumatized the two and finally killed the boy in front of his sister.

The little girl was rescued after being spotted with her abductor seven weeks later at a local restaurant.

Duncan was a convicted sex offender who later confessed to other killings. The majority of his victims were children. He had spent most of his life in prison. In 2008, he received three death penalties. He told the jury in one of the death penalty sentencing stages of his trial, “You people really don’t have any clue yet of the true heinousness of what I’ve done … My intention was to kidnap and rape and kill until I was killed, preferring death easily over capture.”

On October 5, 2012, ten-year-old Jessica Ridgeway of Westminster, Colorado, was kidnapped on her way to school. Parts of her body were identified just days later on October 10 in an open space area near her home. Her body had been dismembered and mutilated. Seventeen-year-old Austin Sigg, who was interested in mortuary science and enrolled in a nearby junior college, was arrested on October 23 after he confessed to his mother and she called the police. Experts and research indicate that it is unusual for someone of Sigg’s age to so violently destroy a body. Sigg pleaded guilty to fifteen counts, including first-degree murder and sexual assault of Jessica and an attack on a female jogger in May 2012. That woman had been able to fight Sigg off after he tried to disable her with a rag saturated with a chemical over her mouth. “Evil is apparently real. It was present in our community on October 5, 2012,” the judge said when he sentenced Sigg after the teenager had pleaded guilty. Sigg got life in prison, plus an additional eighty-six years to be served consecutively.

On October 28, 2013, in Aurora, Colorado, a white, blonde male broke or cut the screen off an eight-year-old girl’s first-floor bedroom window, opened it, grabbed her and pulled her outside. She screamed, and her father ran out of the house to find she had escaped from the man. He saw the man’s car drive away. The next day, then Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates was quoted in The Denver Post as saying, “We think there’s a predator out there.” Police believed this had been an attempted “stranger” kidnapping. They charged a twenty-six-year-old man for the attempted kidnapping on November 1, 2013. By then, John Stanley Snorsky was already in jail on theft charges. He pleaded guilty to first-degree burglary and second-degree kidnapping in September 2014, when he was sentenced to thirty years in prison as part of a plea agreement.

No one will know the mindset of JonBenét Ramsey’s killer until that person is caught, and maybe not even then. “Why?” is the question most easily asked and agonized over. It is also the most difficult to answer.

One of the questions still unanswered is how JonBenét’s killer became so familiar with the Ramsey home. This question contributed to the widespread belief that her family had been involved in her murder. Yet in the case of Elizabeth Smart, her kidnapper came back to her family’s large home to kidnap her several months after being hired to work there for part of one day.

Early in the Ramsey murder investigation, investigators surmised that JonBenét’s killer had been someone who knew the house well, knew the Ramsey family’s plans and possibly had a key to the Ramsey home in their possession. At first, such reasoning pointed to family members as likely suspects, but soon other intruder possibilities were suggested.

The Ramseys were careless about their home security. They’d given out keys to friends and to people working on their lengthy home renovations. One key, hidden outside in front of their house, turned up missing. An intruder without a key also could have entered through an unlocked window or door. The family never set their security alarm.

Part of the intruder theory includes the belief that the killer had been in the home not once but several times and therefore had little fear of being caught. It’s also possible that the killer had browsed through the family’s belongings, including John’s pay stubs or tax returns showing information about his $118,000-plus bonus.

The Ramsey family also spent their summers in Michigan and often traveled to visit friends in Georgia and other states. The intruder could have wandered the home during one of these family trips earlier in 1996. It’s interesting to note that such an intruder could also have known about the unusual set-up with the house’s doorbell and its phone. As the Ramseys had told friends and neighbors, the doorbell was connected to the telephone, so if you rang the doorbell and heard the telephone inside keep ringing, you knew no one was home.

Questions about missing items that had apparently been used to torture and kill JonBenét also led to suggestions by experts that the killer would have brought with him his own personal “crime kit” with the tools he needed and taken most of them back out of the house with him. Law enforcement investigators use the term “crime kit” when referring to the survival pack of tools and weapons that a criminal might bring along in order to limit the possibility that anything is left to chance.

Patsy Ramsey kept her day planner in the kitchen and also jotted reminders down elsewhere in her home, so it’s possible an intruder would have known of the family’s plans to be out of their home on the evening of Christmas 1996. He could have taken the notepad and the paintbrush used for the garrote shortly before Christmas Day, writing on the notepad and fashioning the garrote at his leisure outside of the home. While Patsy was organized in her daily planning for her family, she was casual about keeping her house organized. She wouldn’t have missed the paintbrush and may have assumed she’d misplaced the tablet, according to John Ramsey.

If an intruder did indeed kill JonBenét, he would have been called an “organized offender” by law enforcement officials because of his elaborate planning. He was able to either lie in wait for the family to return the evening of December 25, or enter after they were asleep because of his familiarity with their home. He was also apparently able to cope with the unexpected.

If JonBenét Ramsey’s killer had been a true psychopath, he could have walked among the Ramseys and their friends undetected. According to experts, psychopaths copy others in their everyday behavior by watching them closely. They also view themselves as being smarter than most, especially law enforcement.

It’s possible that while JonBenét’s killer ultimately wanted her, he also gained enormous satisfaction from his meticulous planning to either kidnap or torture and murder her.

The murder of JonBenét Ramsey was a unique crime, out of the norm for even the most experienced homicide detectives. There are no valid national statistics on the use of garrotes in child murders.

POSSIBLE SUSPECTS

On February 13, 1997, Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter held a news conference during which he addressed the killer directly. “I want to say something to the person or persons that committed this crime,” he said. “You have stripped us of any mercy that we might have had in the beginning of this investigation.

“The list of suspects narrows,” he also warned. “Soon there will be no one on the list but you. We will see that justice is served in this case, and that you pay for what you did.”

Hunter’s statements were made on the advice of behavioral advisors who had conceived that such a challenge might cause the killer to react in some public way. Right after the news conference, Patsy called Hunter to thank him for his perseverance and message to the killer. That phone call confounded Hunter and his advisors. As Hunter said privately, “The message was designed [for] and directed at Patsy.”

On February 14, 1997, one day after Hunter’s direct statement to the killer, twenty-six-year-old Michael Helgoth committed suicide at his home, according to a Boulder County Sheriff’s report. Helgoth worked for his aunt and uncle in a salvage yard in Boulder and lived with them. He was estranged from his mother and father. In Helgoth’s bedroom, detectives found a pair of Hi-Tec shoes similar in size to the footprint that had been left in the basement where JonBenét’s body was found. Helgoth also had a stun gun and a 9mm pistol.

Helgoth’s hands were swabbed for gunshot residue (GSR), but the sheriff’s office never tested the gunshot residue swabs to see if the deceased man had fired the weapon used to kill him, because Helgoth’s death was considered a suicide. According to experts, a GSR test cannot determine whether someone fired a gun, only that the person was in the vicinity when the weapon was fired.

The on-call Boulder Police Department detective when Michael Helgoth’s suicide was reported was a sex crimes investigator, not a trained homicide investigator.

Serious questions were raised by some of the Ramsey investigators about whether Helgoth had actually killed himself. They said photos from the investigation showed Helgoth would have been in an awkward position to shoot himself in the chest.

Michael Helgoth’s Hi-Tec boots found after his suicide. Courtesy Ramsey Defense attorneys.

Boulder Police Department officials tested Helgoth for DNA and said it didn’t match the foreign DNA found on JonBenét Ramsey’s body.

One man, forty-one-year-old teacher John Mark Karr, confessed to the slaying of JonBenét Ramsey in August 2006, nearly ten years after the murder, saying to the media: “I was with JonBenét when she died.” Karr’s criminal history included jumping bail in California on a 2001 child pornography charge. Following his “confession,” he was arrested in Thailand and transported back to Boulder. He had e-mailed about the case for four years to a University of Colorado professor. But Karr’s DNA didn’t match the DNA found on JonBenét’s body, and several investigators who talked with him said he did not know basic and key information about the murder scene. Charges were dropped, and Karr willingly appeared on several talk shows at the time. While he has not been further pursued by law enforcement, Karr continues to correspond with some who are searching for answers in the murder of JonBenét Ramsey and continues to reveal more information related to the case.

Another man who was investigated because his wife had been fired from Access Graphics told me he was retested for DNA in 2011 by Boulder Police Department investigators. Detective Lou Smit had come up with the theory about this man being a possible suspect because of the signature on the ransom note. That signature, “S. B. T. C” matched the initials of the first names of three of this possible suspect’s family members. But his DNA did not match the forensic evidence found on JonBenét’s body, according to Boulder police. For this reason, his name is not being used in this book.

Another person briefly considered as a possible suspect was Chris Wolf. His ex-girlfriend turned him in to authorities, saying he disappeared the evening of December 25, 1996, came back early in the morning, washed the clothes he was wearing, took a long shower and then was fixated on the Ramsey case. She said he was capable of violent behavior. His handwriting was reportedly more similar to the ransom note than the handwriting of any of the others who had been tested. John and Patsy named Wolf as a possible suspect in their first book, leading Wolf to sue the Ramseys for libel in the defamation case eventually dismissed before trial by Federal Judge Julie Carnes in Georgia.

Wolf’s DNA did not match the DNA found at the scene, according to Boulder Police Department officials. His ex-girlfriend, according to one detective, was obsessed with the idea that he had killed JonBenét. Ten years after the murder, she hired her own handwriting expert and a publicity firm to hold a news conference, saying her ex-boyfriend’s handwriting had many characteristics that matched the writing in the ransom note.

The photographer who took some professional photographs of JonBenét was also suspected and tested for DNA comparisons. He was arrested in the fall of 1998 for walking nude down the main street of a small town in eastern Colorado. When apprehended, he told law enforcement, “I didn’t kill JonBenét.” He was also not a DNA match.

These are just a few of the people whom the Boulder Police Department and the Ramsey defense team have investigated. According to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, 165 people in Boulder County in 1996 and 1997 were registered as sexual offenders.