Amanda Knox and John Ramsey - Megyn Kelly's "Double Feature" of Fascinating Interviews

28:05Instead of saying crap, they should have said, phew, thank God we found out the truth before we put this innocent girl and her boyfriend in jail. But they didn't. They went a different way. So over the course of the next few days, I guess it was about five days, what I read was they interrogated you for nearly 60 hours. And this is an important piece of it, too. And I'm not going to say this doesn't happen in the United States, but we have a lot more strict rules on what you're at least supposed to be doing in an interrogation. So describe what the police were doing to you over those days. Yeah.

28:39So it's interesting because it's almost like my family, especially my aunt in Germany, had a feeling that something was off. It didn't make sense to my family that I was spending hours and hours and hours answering the same questions over and over again in the police office. My mom, of course, thought there's a killer on the loose in Perugia who almost killed my daughter. I want her to come home. My aunt in Germany is saying, I'm going to come down there and get you. You need to go talk to the embassy. You're clearly not safe. But of course, the police were telling me, no, Amanda, you're a very, very important witness in this case.

29:19You were the first person to arrive at home and discover the crime scene. You were the roommate who was closest to Meredith. You are too important to us and our investigation to leave. And I believed them. And so I believed them when over the course of those interrogations, they told me that I didn't need a lawyer and that I was not a suspect and that I didn't know. And they and I and they lied to me. They didn't. They told me that they knew who the murderer was. They had tapped my phone and I had no idea. They went through my phone and found my my text message exchange between myself and Patrick Lumumba, my boss.

30:03And they interpreted that message that I sent him, which was a poorly translated Italian phrase. I intended to say, see you later, whenever they interpreted that to mean I'll see you later tonight, this night, the night that the crime happened. And they interpreted that to mean that I had met with my boss, Patrick Mamumba, and that he had murdered Meredith. They lied to me and told me that everything that I thought I remembered about that night was wrong, that Raffaele said that I had not spent the night with him, and that I was so traumatized by what I had witnessed Patrick do that I could no longer remember it.

30:45and they pushed me, slapped me, yelled at me, told me to remember the truth, remember what Patrick did to her and very leading, suggestive, coercive techniques, like even just saying, well, did you hear Meredith scream? And I said, I don't know. And they say, well, of course you would hear Meredith scream. She's being murdered. And I said, OK, I guess I heard Meredith scream like this was the conversation I was having. And this is what the police wrote up in their report and had me sign. And of course, this was without an interpreter. This was without a lawyer. And this was in Italian. I was doing this in Italian.

31:28Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. I didn't I'm only now realizing this. I did read that they were sending in two different detectives or police officers pretty much every couple of hours so that they would be fresh and could keep coming at you. You got no breaks. You didn't get water. They kept you up overnight. This is how it's done. This is how false confessions are given. And when you see a false confession, I mean, it's like nine times out of 10. It looks just like this. How does it happen? Just like this. You break down a person's willpower to the point where they'll say anything just to get out of the room, just for you to leave them alone.

32:02And they'll believe anything like I genuinely believed at a certain point that the only explanation for the police's behavior towards me was that I must have amnesia and I must have witnessed the murder. And it wasn't until they stopped screaming at me and stopped hitting me that I had a moment to take a breath, to regain a sense of composure and realize what had just happened. And I recanted immediately. But of course, at that point, the police had already gotten what they wanted, signed statements from me. And so they ignored me. They told me, don't worry about it. Your true memories will return.

32:36In the meantime, we're going to be taking you to a holding place for your own protection. Then you'll get to see your mom. Why would they I mean, why would they be so focused on getting you to point the finger at your boss from Le Chic, right? That was the restaurant. That was the bar. Why? Like, I could understand them trying to get you to say, I did it. But why were they so focused on you getting, you know, getting you to point the finger at him? You know, I don't think that they actually thought at the beginning that I did it. I especially we're looking at, you know, a sexual assault murder.

33:10These are almost always committed by men. And I think that's something that is overlooked in this case, the way that it's been made so much of a like girl on girl, sexualized fantasy crime. Like when we're talking about the realities of violence against women, we're talking about male against female violence against women. And they I think what they believed at the beginning was that I genuinely knew something because they misread my behavior. They inaccurately interpreted my behavior to mean that I was not surprised by Meredith's murder and that I was that I knew something that I wasn't telling them.

33:51And so they pressured me into implicating someone because they believed that I knew who it was. And it was over the course of my interrogations that I think they settled upon Patrick, who they didn't know from from Bob or John. Like they had just seen a text message between me and a person named Patrick on my phone in their mind, setting up an appointment. And they thought, this is it. This is the guy. Amanda let him in. Amanda knows what happened. We got to get her to admit it. So did they arrest him right away? They arrested him right away without checking his alibi, without doing anything, despite the fact that I recanted.

34:32and they kept him in prison for two weeks, even though numerous people came forward saying that they had been with him the entire night. Wow. I mean, it just shows there, they had no appetite for the truth. And he, question about him before we move on from him, because I read that he recently said something like, why hasn't she ever apologized to me? Or this is, this is not that reason. It was like 2011. There was a quote from him saying, she never reached out to me. Is that still true? No. And I did apologize to him in court. So I don't know what he means. I'm assuming that he's potentially talking about how his lawyer at a certain point reached out to me asking for money and wanting me to give to admit to this whole situation, his imprisonment being my fault.

35:24And my point was, this was not my fault. I was coerced into signing statements. And this is the police's fault. I was going to say, they should sue someone, but it shouldn't be Amanda Knox. Okay, so that's Patrick. Then he gets out because after a short amount of time, he's able to prove to them he has an alibi and they're not going to be able to pin this on them. And so you're sitting, you go to jail. They not only arrest him, they arrest you and they arrest Rafael, but no charges. Right, right. But no charges are actually filed against you and you sit there for a year before they actually charge you with murder?

36:04Yeah. So they sat me there for eight months before I was officially indicted and charged with a crime. And that's another one of those differences between the American system and the Italian system. In this Italian system, they can hold you in custody for up to a year without charging you while you're under investigation. Wow, that is scary. So at what point do you say to them, you might want to consider this guy Rudy Gaudet, because he was not in your immediate friend circle, but he was kind of on the periphery. So it was a name you knew. And when they were asking you, tell us everybody, tell us everybody who could be, who's been in the house, who you guys are friends with, and so on.

36:45You had mentioned that name, and he was a known criminal. I mean, he was somebody who had been known as a robber in the area. He was apparently into drugs. He was on the police radar prior to all of this. So I would think that name would have been like, oh, he likes to rob people. Oh, and he'd also been he'd also threatened people with knives prior to this. So you'd think that they'd be like, oh, red flag. Yes. Let's follow that one up. When did you first mention his name and how long did it take them to focus on him? Actually, it's interesting. I didn't mention his name because I didn't know his name.

37:20I knew him to be the guy like I had met him once and sure, I had been introduced like Rudy, but I didn't remember his name. I remembered that he was a guy who played basketball with the guys who lived below us. And I didn't know anything about his history. I'd never really hung out with him. I only knew him from having encountered him that one time. And and, you know, I'd seen him around like he played in the basketball court near the university. But he wasn't like a friend of mine. In fact, in the very beginning, I had mentioned a character named I think his name was shaky. His nickname was shaky because I remember he was a sort of sketchy guy who liked to dance and hang out with Meredith and her friends who once tried to like take sort of forcefully take me home with him.

38:11And I raised the police's attention to that person. But of course, he had nothing to do with the crime. And I remember the moment when Rudy Gaudet's name was finally made public. It was after they had already found his fingerprints and footprints in her or fingerprints, at the very least, in her blood, in Meredith's blood at the crime scene. They they were able to process those fingerprints, identify him from having his, you know, long history of burglaries and identify this person and track him down. And there's this like really interesting sort of moment of timing where the police released Patrick Lumumba almost at the exact same time that they arrested Rudy Gaudet so that they had someone sort of a switcheroo that they didn't have to once again admit fault in a big way because here they were.

39:01They found the real guy. And I remember sitting there in my prison cell watching the news as this happened, as Rudy Gaudet was being arrested in Germany. And I saw his face. I heard his name. And I thought, that guy, the basketball guy, like that's the guy like, sure, I've seen him before, but it never occurred to me that he would do this. Of course, I didn't know about his history of criminality. And I had this like moment of like relief, even when they found him, because I thought, oh, my gosh, this is going to be over soon. They found out who really did it and that it wasn't over soon, of course.

39:44But boy, were you were you wrong on that? Up next, I'm going to ask Amanda about the lies the prosecutor was openly telling about her, the active misleading they did with the press to try to get people to believe that it was Amanda, all of which fell completely apart. We're going to do that right after this quick break and we'll come back with Amanda Knox.

40:09So, Amanda, the prosecutor put out, among other things, he and his team put out a picture of a bloody sink. And this sink was covered in blood. I mean, it was a wash in red. And they basically were like, she's a liar. She came home. She saw that. She didn't think anything was wrong. And it was a complete lie because the actual sink you saw, and there are pictures of that, too, just had a couple of drops of blood. The picture they put out had been treated with some sort of a chemical that is supposed to show them if there's blood and the substance itself is red. So it's all over the sink. This is my understanding.

40:47It was an active attempt to mislead. I mean, you could get disbarred for doing such a thing as a lawyer here, but this is just one of the examples. And I know that there are others of the ways in which they tried to unfairly portray you in the media. Yeah. And I, you know, I discussed this on Labyrinths with about media selection bias, because I think there's this ongoing perception that even if I'm innocent, I must there must be something wrong with me or there must be this wrongful conviction must be my fault because no reasonable person would act the way that Amanda acted. And, you know, even as recently as Malcolm Gladwell's book, Talking to Strangers, where he analyzes the case and he, you know, from the very get go is like, we know who did this crime.

41:32It's Rudy Gaudet. But he then goes on to say, well, the reason why Amanda was wrongly convicted was because she's ultimately an innocent person who acts guilty. And maybe that's why wrongful convictions happen. Innocent people act guilty. And I just wanted to push back against that because, again, who, first of all, has agency in the equation? Who's the one who's doing the wrongful, like the wrongful convicting? Who is the one who is pursuing a case against an innocent person despite what the evidence is telling them and who is presenting false pictures to the media in order to misrepresent the evidence against her in court?

42:12Right. Who is whose decisions are shaping these events? They certainly were not mine. And if anything, I was the one who had the least amount of agency in this in this equation. So, you know, when I think about the ways that even just the ways that they portrayed Meredith versus me, right, like they acted like Meredith and I were two extreme opposites of the ideals of femininity. They turned this into a morality play about female sexuality and morality. They portrayed Meredith as this perfectly invisible, ideal, serious, studious, non-casual like person who would never, ever, ever just go out with boys or have fun or do anything like that.

43:01She was a serious young woman who had a fidanzato, a fiance, someone who we can all agree is a perfect victim. Well, of course, you don't have to be, you know, a studious person who never goes out and has fun to be a victim of a horrible crime on the first place. And Meredith was not someone who didn't just like Meredith did like to go and hang out and have fun with friends and go dancing and have like casual, you know, relationships like this. that was her as well. And on the flip side, there was the portrayal of me as when in reality, I was actually quite similar to Meredith as someone who was uninhibited and lustful and at odds, like jealous of Meredith's purity and everything depraved that you could accuse a woman of, particularly through her sexuality.

43:53And using that as an excuse to say, well, if she's capable, of all of this sex, she must also be capable of violence, very much playing into the Madonna whore dichotomy. It's how did they find out the number of sexual partners you had had? I know you've talked about it, but like, how did they know that? Yeah, after I was arrested, I was in prison. I was very uncomfortably being talked to by an official in the prison who would bring me into a private room every day and interrogate me about my sex life. And one day he accompanied me into the doctor's office where I was informed that I had tested positive for HIV.

44:37And me thinking suddenly that I'm dying and my life is over was told by the VICE Comandante that I should think about and write down all of the people that I had ever had sex with in order to determine who had given me HIV. So I went right back into my cell, started journaling, crying, thinking that I was dying, wrote down every single person I had ever had sex with in my entire life and what kind of protection we had used. And the very next day, the police raided my cell and took every scrap of paper that I had ever written on. And then a few days later, it was released to the press. It's disgusting.

45:21It's so disgusting. You make such a good point about Gladwell, who I love and who's, you know, he's on your side, but you're right. He's got it a little wrong. You know, and I, in his defense, I get it because we didn't get to like the cartwheels. I'll ask you about the cartwheels because that's what people think about. But honestly, it wasn't, it wasn't your behavior. People may not really fully understand the extent to which they have been manipulated by a dishonest prosecutor who is, he's like the Mike Nifong of Italy. You know, he, Mike Nifong's the guy who tried to put those three Duke University kids in jail for an alleged rape that they did not commit.

45:58And he knew it was false, but he didn't care. That's, that's what I think McNini is. And people don't realize at home how he tried to manipulate them from, from the sink to, he went out and said, Amanda Knox went home and she bought bleach and she bleached that entire bathroom. She scrubbed it. Now you look at the actual photos of post Amanda Knox's visit to the bathroom. It's covered in blood. It's still got the feces in the toilet. Clearly nobody has been there doing any cleaning. And he said, we've got receipts. Well, they never released them. There never were receipts showing you do that. But there's never any follow up.

46:32Nobody ever goes back to the prosecutor and says, where's the receipt? It's just, did you win or lose? And he lost and still whatever maintained his story. So we've been manipulated the diary, the HIV positive, which was, thank God, untrue. That was a lie. And that leads me to the disgusting, vile media, the disgusting, vile media that played along willingly. And I get it. I get it. Very salacious. So many elements to the story. You're so beautiful. I mean, that was probably your biggest sin in attracting media coverage to this. You know, just you are. You're just you're beautiful. And that will sell papers.

47:05And thanks, Megan. Yeah. And then like you add in possible sex fiend in like some weird, sudden, I don't know what they thought you were doing, an orgy where you slip people's throats. I mean, it was just none of it made any sense. And as soon as Patrick fell apart as your third partner, you, Raffaele, and Patrick, your boss, he fell apart because of his alibi. Then they just subbed in Rudy. Oh, Rudy was the third guy. And they held her down because why? Because she wouldn't have sex with him. Like there was nothing. He was making it up, making it up as he went along. But the media portrayed you.

47:35I mean, there's one of the headlines was satanic sex ritual, satanic now. They called you a she devil. Certainly the narrative was that you were a whore. The Foxy Noxy thing came from an innocent thing on your own social media about, as I understand it, you as a soccer player and how you were sly as a fox on the on the field. I don't I can't even understand. I've been attacked by the media in vicious ways, but nothing compares to this. yeah well and it's interesting because i wasn't in a place to even defend myself at that point i was locked away and at the mercy of what the police was releasing to the press and i i'm so glad that you brought up like the the claim that i must have cleaned up my dna because i remember interviewing mark olshaker on labyrinths and he said if rafaeli and i could have somehow selectively cleaned up our DNA from that crime scene and left all of the other evidence there intact.

48:30We deserve a Nobel prize for chemistry. It's just it's but it's interesting because that was like if you imagine the sort of confirmation bias, the mental gymnastics that my prosecutor had to do to account for the fact that here's this crime scene where there's Meredith's body, Meredith's DNA and Rudy Gade's DNA and fingerprints and footprints all over the space. and nothing implicating me or Raffaele, that has to be explained somehow. Well, in his mind, it was, I was somehow able to clean up all evidence, all traces of me, and in order to implicate Rudy Gaudet. And I think the thing that, like, I mentioned this in the episode of Labyrinths, where I talk about Rudy Gaudet, because for me, like, and maybe we'll get to this later, but like for me, I cannot get over the fact that because the police and the prosecution did not want to admit from the get go that there was no evidence against me and that and drop the charges and release me and Raffaele from prison instead of doing that, they actually pursued a case that let Meredith's actual rapist and murderer off the hook.

49:42Yeah, he was tried separately from me. He was tried before me. The prosecution was not interested in having him be fully responsible for his crimes. So they never charged him to be fully responsible for his crimes. He was charged with being a part of the murder and but never having actually plunged to the knife himself. And so when Rudy Gaudet points to that today and says, well, no one says I killed her. Someone else killed her. It's like, well, the reason for that is because the police and prosecution were covering their butts. Yeah. And they allowed him, they allowed him the ability to make this argument, this crazy argument, notwithstanding all the proof pointing to him and only him.

50:25Now there was a knife and this is at the heart of the case. The prosecutor claimed that it had both Meredith's DNA on the blade and Amanda's DNA on the handle. It's one of the reasons why the trial went south for Amanda. And it's also one of the reasons why I don't believe this was an inadvertent mistake by this prosecutor who really was out to get her. That's where we pick it up next and we'll go back into the media when we come back from a quick break. Don't go away. LinkedIn is pretty great at a lot of things, like helping you tap into the latest trends and insights in your field. We cannot stop your co-worker from tapping her pencil.

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51:57So on the subject of Rudy Gaudet, one thing we missed is that he's recorded on tape and the prosecutors had it. talking to what he believed was a friend, but was actually an informant, saying he places himself at the crime scene that night. He claims he slept with Meredith the night of the murder, that he was using the bathroom, and that's when he heard Meredith screaming, that he opened the door and saw an assailant fleeing, and Meredith was then dead. But he says on that tape, quote, Amanda was not there. She had nothing to do with it. So this is him talking to a friend. He's like he had no reason to say to that person that you weren't there, that you had nothing to do with it.

52:36But still, this wasn't enough for the prosecutor. Your absence of DNA, not enough for him. Nothing, absolutely no proof other than you telling that weird story at the hands of these police that maybe Patrick did it and maybe you saw some piece of that. But there's one thing. There's the knife. They find what they believe they've pronounced. It's the murder weapon because they say they tested it for DNA. It's got your DNA in the handle, Meredith's DNA on the blade. This would lead to the stunning moment in the first trial, January 16th, 2009, where you stood up to hear the verdict and you heard what?

53:14Guilty. Coltevole. Oh, so this happens in large part because of the DNA at Evans. And what do we now know about that? Well, gosh, there's so much to say about the knife. That's not just the fact that independent experts eventually examined it during my appeals trial and discovered that, first of all, the the result or the the DNA trace that was linked to Meredith was so small that it actually couldn't be reliably linked to anyone. And furthermore, it was tested in the context of 50 other samples of Meredith's DNA. And so contamination couldn't be ruled out. But I think that like for me, it's astonishing that it got that far in the first place, because to believe that this knife was used in the crime, you have to believe a number of very, very strange things.

54:07the knife didn't match meredith's stab wounds and so you have to believe that whoever if if i killed meredith with that knife i would have half stabbed her with the knife but not all the way i would it was a knife that was not found at the crime scene it was pulled at random from a kitchen drawer in raphael's apartment which was across town meaning that this crime the re the way that this knife could have taken part in this crime is if I was carrying that knife with me between Raffaele's apartment and my house. And the prosecution has always maintained that this was not a premeditated crime. This was a crime that just happened spontaneously in this sort of drug-fueled orgy atmosphere.

54:56But if that's true, then you are logically saying that I'm just carrying around a large kitchen knife in my bag with me. For what reason? I don't know. And then brought it back to Raffaele's apartment, cleaned it up and put it back into the drawer. Like this. I remember the moment when some when the Vichai Comandante, that same guy, brought me into his office and said, how do you explain this knife? And I remember being told it's Meredith's DNA. Her blood is on the knife. And I thought, I have no idea how that happened. I felt like I was being framed, honestly, because I couldn't explain that.

55:33But of course, but of course it wasn't true. And when eventually independent experts looked at that evidence, they threw out any sort of link to Meredith or blood in the first place. It did not test positive for blood. And actually, it was ruled that it was more likely potato starch from having been having for me having used it to cook things. Wow. Yeah, apparently it was such a trace amount and they had tried to amp it up and amp it up, trying to get more and more and more through the same machine that it just processed 50 other Meredith samples. And that's how they believe it was contaminated, as found by the highest court in Italy, eventually, that this evidence had been contaminated and could not be relied upon.

56:18But then there was the clasp of Meredith's bra, and that, seven weeks after her murder and the evidence was being processed, finally this prosecutor announces he's got Rafael, he's got his DNA on Meredith's bra clasp, which had been detached somehow, I mean, presumably during the struggle, from her actual bra. And I don't I mean, you tell me, Amanda, I look at this and somebody somebody put that there. What how else did Raphael's DNA? We know Raphael did not commit this crime or have anything to do with it. How did his DNA get on Meredith's bra clasp if it wasn't police misconduct? Well, not just Raphael's DNA, also the DNA of two unknown males were also found on that bra clasp.

56:59And, you know, all I can think of is that Raphael had been to my house, right? He had been to my room. He had been in the common area. I think they even found the other trace of DNA that they found of Raffaele in my house was from a cigarette stub that was in like an ashtray in the kitchen. And so it's not that Raffaele's DNA wasn't at the house. It just wasn't in the crime scene where Meredith had been murdered. And it wasn't until the police, who were not very highly trained, were going in and out of that room, carrying pieces of evidence with them. Like by the time they actually discovered this bra clasp, it was long after not just the forensic police had gone through that house, but also the regular police had gone through like turning over mattresses, throwing clothes around, like ripping apart all of the house looking for not DNA evidence, but other kinds of evidence.

57:53And it was over 40 days that they were touching things and moving things around without gloves that they eventually then found the bra clasp under a rug somewhere completely different in Meredith's room and said, oh, here's our link proving that Rufa that Rafaela was there in the room that night. But of course, there's no other trace of Raffaele in that room. How could he have participated in sexual assault and murder and only left one trace along with two unknown males? Meanwhile, like there's a huge semen stain on the pillow found underneath Meredith's body that the prosecution decided not to test and refused to test, even when my defense and Raffaele's defense asked for it to be tested.

58:42We're looking at a sexual assault case. Meredith was raped before she was murdered and they refused to test it. And the only reason I think of why is because they weren't interested in pursuing a case against a male. They were interested in pursuing a case against me and I don't produce semen. So it wasn't relevant to them. My gosh, this is so scary. You know, the question I'm asking myself right now is, did you just have a terrible defense lawyer in the first trial? Like, why? Why wouldn't all of this have been persuasive first time around? Well, that's a really good question, because I don't think that I didn't have a good defense lawyer.

59:25I think my lawyers pursued a very, very staunch defense in this case. But what was happening was, you know, one of the things that I remember my lawyer saying was zero plus zero plus zero plus zero plus zero still equals zero. There was this sense that the prosecution was throwing the kitchen sink at this case. And so if the kitchen, if there's all this stuff that is being thrown into this case and debated and talked about something, there must be some substance to it. There must be Amanda's guilt is in there somewhere, even if we can't really determine which piece of evidence is the thing that does it.

1:00:04There's so much that's being thrown in there that there must be something to it. And indeed, this is what and that got me convicted the second time. You know, after I was acquitted and the DNA evidence in that case with the bra clasp and the knife was thrown out, I was still tried for that same crime using this same kitchen sink approach where it's like, oh, Amanda confessed to the crime and all these witnesses say maybe they saw her or maybe they didn't. Or how do you explain her DNA in the bathroom? Like there's there was this sense of like this overwhelming if if the prosecution is so convinced there must be something to it.

1:00:40And it wasn't like I think it was really, really hard for people to, first of all, put themselves in my shoes and imagine what it's like to be in an interrogation room and coerced into signing statements as a 20 year old surrounded by adults speaking in a foreign language and without the assistance of a lawyer. But I think also they couldn't really understand how the case could have gone this far if there wasn't something to it. Well, especially back to our original point of the media, every headline telling them how awful you are. You're just a terrible person. You're a freak. You're a devil worshiper.

1:01:19You're I mean, just stuff completely made up. A massive manipulation was taking place by the media, of the media, by the prosecutor, of the people. And people need to get smart. You know, they have to be their own advocates when it comes to information consumption. If you want to willingly jump in and believe the tabloid headlines, just know what you're being fed. You know, it's garbage in, garbage out. It remains such to this day. So just the quick, without getting into the lengthy procedural stuff, I mean, so you were found guilty on nightmare. Then, miraculously, it was reversed. Yay! That's what we wanted.

1:01:58You got to fly home to Seattle. It was like, thank God this horrible nightmare is over. I'm done. Whatever. And then the innocence was reversed. It was overturned. A new trial was ordered and you were found guilty again. So this is your second time being found guilty. And then thank God that guilty, that conviction was reversed again by Italy's highest court, this time for good. And the court cited errors and omissions by the prosecutor, sensational failures by the investigator and his helpers and contaminated evidence. I mean, ultimately, they saw what went on here and declared you not just not guilty, but you and Raffaele innocent that you did not commit this crime, which is huge.

1:02:48I mean, in Italy's defense, that is something we don't do here. And, you know, I'm sure a lot of people would like to see it. Absolutely. And it's something that the Supreme Court never does. That's why that clip at the very beginning when you showed me reacting to them, it was because that wasn't even something that I dreamed was possible. And of course, it's within their power. But it is such a rare thing for the Supreme Court to not just overturn a wrongful conviction, but to definitively acquit someone. I'm really glad you talked about the media because I think that, like you said, to this day, we find criminal trials becoming politicized.

1:03:27And instead of the media doing its job, which is to hold authorities and power to account, to hold them to a higher standard, to the truth, we instead find media who are selling us stories that we want to hear. And that is the reason why I got into journalism myself. The reason why I'm an independent journalist who, you know, only has I the reason I have a podcast is because I have subscribers who believe in my work. Like go to patreon.com slash Knox Robinson and you can do it. But like this is do it. I'm not I'm not you know, like this is a world where you you should we all need to be a little more media literate because the media is.

1:04:12not doing what it's intended to do. It is selling a story and it's going to sell the story that makes the most money, not the story that is the most truthful. And that's true in mainstream media and not just tabloids. That's what people may not realize. One of the things I liked about the documentary is it pulled clips of so-called respected news anchors saying a lot of this stuff. It wasn't just, you know, the star. It was in the mainstream, these characterizations of you. And that leads me to the unfortunate moment that you had with Chris Cuomo, who continued the character assassination in a bizarre interview he did with you.

1:04:57We have the tape queued up. It didn't do well at the time. It was from 2013. I was in the primetime at Fox at the time. It hasn't aged well. It looks even worse in retrospect. And now it looks particularly bad knowing that he's been publicly accused of sexually harassing his his former executive producer of being such a bully to his female executive producer, a different woman that she was forced to leave the show. And now we have multiple allegations in the news today about him actively campaigning against the women who accused his brother, Andrew Cuomo. CNN at this moment is reviewing his future at the company.

1:05:32But here he is interviewing you in 2013, fresh off of all of this. This is their theory that you went in there for some kind of freaky sexual activity that went wrong and your roommate wound up dying. Fair? That's what they say. That's what it is. Forget the headlines. That's the truth of the proposition, isn't it? Is there truth to that proposition? Were you into deviant sex? Insensitive question, but hey, we got to get to what it is. This fuels the doubt. There's no evidence of that. But that's the theory. Knox is into some freaky sexual things. Do you have any type of experimental activities there you're embarrassed to talk about?

1:06:10No.

1:06:14Yeah, that doesn't age well, does it? But yeah, at the you know, at the time, it's interesting because at the time I was putting up with a lot of that kind of thing from media. I've learned a lot since then. And a lot of times people have said to me, you know, I have to ask you these, quote, hard questions because it's what's good for you. You should have the chance to respond. This is this is what's best for you. And Chris Cuomo, among other people, said this to me as a sort of justification for pursuing this line of questioning towards me and questioning me in a frankly humiliating way. And I and I believed him.

1:06:54And the thing that I've realized now as a journalist myself is that he didn't actually have to pursue that line of questioning. He could have instead called out that theory in the first place, because one, what my sexuality is ultimately has nothing to do with the crime. There was no evidence that put me that placed me at the crime scene. So why is my sexuality being the thing that's on trial? And instead, I thought that this was an opportunity to point out that there is a whole lot of smoke that is deeply irresponsible and is the deeply irresponsible storytelling that gets in the way of justice.

1:07:35So, you know, when I think about the kinds of like the way that I interview people on Labyrinths, I know what the stories are about them. That doesn't interest me. What interests me is the story that you can unearth that is true and just and puts the person who you're looking at, gives them a sense of voice and ownership over their own story. The way that I was questioned in that interview was, again, putting me making me have to respond to other people's stories about me instead of giving me the opportunity to tell my own story, which he would have known with just a minor bit of homework had absolutely no factual basis.

1:08:17There was nothing to it and there never had been. And it would take you about two minutes of a Google search to know that. I believe what he was trying to do was gin up a sexy moment of him pushing this beautiful, smart, famous woman on her sex life and whether it's deviant in a way that he thought would get clicks or eyeballs or generate something good for him. That's what that was about. That's one of the reasons why I find it so infuriating. It's maddening to watch that. It's not like having somebody who's actively on trial for their life. They're accused of committing a murder. And you say, were you at the crime scene?

1:08:52Did you do that? Yes, of course you have to do that. What he asked you wasn't necessary. It was intentionally salacious. He was I don't know if he was trying to embarrass you, but he was trying to promote himself at your expense, just like everyone before him had done to you so many times. Yeah, and and and take in like presenting it to me as the opportunity. to address it head on, I think was, when I look back on it now, disingenuous, because it's again, not asking me to talk about the way that I was wrongly portrayed and how my sexuality was used to vilify me. It was instead putting me on the spot and asking me to sort of respond to what was presented as a kind of legitimate question and a legitimate reason to suspect me.

1:09:42so and even the tone amanda i mean the tone right like an insensitive question but yeah it's got to be like just the way you approach somebody who's been victimized the way you have you've been victimized whether you want to call yourself a victim or not you've been victimized rafaeli has too meredith obviously um is not that way you know this is i remember when i interviewed tara reed joe biden's accuser she said she gave the interview to me because she wanted somebody who was quote trauma informed and that i don't know whether tara reed was telling the truth about joe Biden or not. But I understood she was making the allegations and how to treat somebody like that respectfully while asking about their story and sensitively.

1:10:19Right. And being careful, being ginger while still being a good reporter. And it's no wonder she had turned down CNN. And gee, no wonder why she turned on Chris Wallace. I'm not surprised by that one either. I just feel like reporters that that was about him. And too often they make it about themselves and their pocket books. And they have no thought for the pain that they continue to inflict on innocent people like you. It goes on. You know, I wonder what you saw, what you thought when you saw like the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse and all the jumping the gun about him. You know, we had so many press errors.

1:10:53The Kyle Rittenhouse trial, I mean, I think I have a sort of unpopular opinion from, you know, I run in liberal circles and I do a lot of social justice. But I do think that like Like people really wanted Kyle Rittenhouse to be a villain and they weren't a lot of people weren't willing to take the evidence of the case seriously. And instead, we're trying to convict him based upon us, like their interpretation of his character. And I think it was radically, radically irresponsible of the prosecutor to charge him with murder in the first place, because, you know, why like this? This was not a murder case.

1:11:32If you don't like, you know, there there's an interesting discussion to be had about like, OK, if you walk into a really highly charged emotional space that's uncontrolled and you walk into that space with a gun, are you provoking an attack? And I can see from the perspective of of his, you know, the people who were shot that like, yeah, if you see someone, you hear shots around and you see a guy with a gun, you might think, oh, my gosh, I got to stop the shooter from shooting people. But that doesn't mean that Kyle Rittenhouse did not have the right to defend himself if he was not shooting people.

1:12:05And if you don't like the way that the laws are written, then you like if you don't like the self-defense law, then you can you can go to your legislature and say that you don't believe in self-defense. But like, I think that with the Kyle Rittenhouse case, there was so much focus on irrelevant information and character assassination instead of the specific actions that led up to this tragic moment, which isn't to say that, like, I think that Kyle Rittenhouse should be celebrated as a hero either, because, you know, that's, again, playing him as a political football. He's a kid who made a mistake, but he doesn't deserve to spend the rest of his life in prison for it.

1:12:42Yeah, there's some similarities in the cases in that, you know, he didn't have quite as much coverage as you did. And his story didn't go on as long. But he had the president of the United States, now president, then candidate, calling him a white supremacist. I mean, talk about poisoning the jury pool. And there is no evidence for that. You know, I mean, even I, at the beginning, I'm like, oh, well, they said he was with the Proud Boys and he was making racist symbols. And we've actually taken a hard look at it on this show more than once. And there's just it's that's not that's not what happened.

1:13:11He went to a bar where they were. They came over. They asked for a picture with him. He posed. And then they all did the OK sign, which Kyle Rittenhouse, his lawyers presented to the judge and the prosecution had nothing to debunk it. He didn't even know what that was. He thought it was an OK sign, which it's been since the beginning of time. There was nothing, nothing on his social media. They scoured him. The Anti-Defamation League apparently did an investigation. The prosecutors looked at all of his cell phones, all of his social. Nothing. Didn't follow a white supremacist. Didn't know a white supremacist.

1:13:38It was a lie. And so people are still confused about him and want him in jail because they think he hates people of color. There's no evidence, right? At some point, you have to say, show me the evidence. And if they cannot, we as a responsible society have to move on. Absolutely. And also, I would say that, like, whether or not he knows that he was doing an OK sign or a white supremacist sign is ultimately irrelevant in the same way that, like, if I were a professional dominatrix at the time that Meredith was murdered, it also would not have made a difference. It's irrelevant to the question of whether or not he's guilty of murder.

1:14:16That's right. So much more to go over with Amanda. Really enjoying this conversation. I hope you are, too. We're going to take a quick break.

1:14:27so i wanted to ask you on the subject because you as you point out you travel in social justice circles and i know you've connected with the innocence project which is brilliant that's perfect um that plus your job as a journalist i love it i love what you're carving out for yourself um but one of the things i've been i've been hot on basically my whole career is what's happening to college men on college campuses and obviously neither you nor i want to see young women get sexually assaulted on college campuses. But I also don't want to see due process taken away from the young men who get accused.

1:14:59And that's what's happened, right? Obama did it, where and now Joe Biden's trying to bring it back. Trump sort of righted the ship and Biden's trying to bring it back. It's deeply problematic. Democrats and Republicans need to pay attention because the way it was and the way Biden wants it to be, Mr. Biden wants it to be, is no right to counsel, no right to cross-examination, no right to discovery. You get tried in front of a kangaroo court stacked with, quote, victims rights advocates and not like an independent body who might be open minded to the fact that you might not be accused. And if you lose as a young man, you're expelled, you're labeled a sex offender.

1:15:34Good luck getting into another college. And it's near impossible to appeal. Your thoughts on it? Yeah, great. So I'm not actually familiar with what Biden is doing currently. But what I can say about this is I remember at the very beginning of the Me Too movement, which I do think was an incredibly important moment of like reckoning with the fact that this happens over and over and over again to young or to women in general, not even just young women, but a lot on college campuses is I remember my friend Brian Banks, who tweeted like, yes, you know, we need to be taking these accusations really seriously and doing what we can to prevent sexual assault from happening.

1:16:13But also, here I am a young man who was wrongly accused of sexual assault based solely on a young woman's accusation. And I went to prison and for that crime. And that is unfair. Like due process still is incredibly important. And while we need to take sexual assault accusations extremely seriously, that does not mean that we don't take sexual assault accusations for the person who's being accused not seriously. Like it, there is a difficult balancing act of not just fairness, but also safety that needs to be brought into consideration. And we can't pretend that if someone who is accused, that means that they're necessarily guilty.

1:16:58You are living proof that when due process starts getting eroded in the name of something, right, prosecutorial zeal, a desire by the prosecution to be loved by the community for having made an arrest. Or now, you know, it could be different things from pushing of other cultural agendas. It's it can be devastating, unfairly devastating on the person targeted. And we just can't start throwing away lives in the name of causes. You know, there's a reason we want the justice system to to follow the procedures we put in place long, long ago. That's the only way we can count on it to work. Well, that's why I think that sexual education is so important, because like one of the reasons why these things happen, especially on college campuses, is because these are highly charged sexual environments with young people who don't have a ton of experience sexually, who are who are, you know, pushing boundaries for the first time, exploring themselves and others.

1:17:55And of course, there are going to be slip ups and mistakes on both sides in terms of communication, both physical and and verbal. So I think that these are complex situations that require us to have sophisticated conversations about them instead of treating them as black and white narratives. Absolutely. Okay, a couple of random questions for you, just following up on the information. I read that you wrote to the prosecutor. You wrote to him? So I can't speak a ton on this because I promised him I wouldn't. But yes, I am in communication with Giuliano Mignani. Wow. I tip my hat to you, Amanda.

1:18:38I don't know if I could do it. I mean, I see you because I see you being very generous toward everybody involved in the case, even Rudy, even Rudy, who's now out of prison and stirring up trouble again. He's trying to bring you back into it, pointing the finger at you, which we all know is nonsense. But you've been very generous. I don't know if I could find it in me to be generous toward Mignani. yeah the biggest thing for me has always been wanting to understand why why this happened to me and why these things happen and i don't find like the more i i sort of understand the way human minds work the less impulse i have to um it's like to hate people or anything and it's more i i get a sense of like okay i understand why you think you did the right thing in that moment but But the next step beyond that is, can we then arrive at a place of reconciling the truth that may be something that makes someone have to reevaluate themselves as a human being?

1:19:41And that's tricky. I mean, that is the ultimate labyrinth, is you believe that you are one thing and you turn out to be another. And someone tries to point that out to you. And I, you know, I as someone who has been a victim of the criminal justice system and also an indirect victim of crime, like I understand that these things are complicated. And the the most important thing that we can do when someone is hurt, when someone is harmed, is to acknowledge that harm. But of course, that means that we have to reevaluate ourselves and our actions in light of new evidence. Let me know how that works out.

1:20:17Yeah, I will. Let's talk about Rudy. Let's talk about Rudy. Rudy finally got out of jail. He served 16 years. That was a reduction of sentence for him. He comes out and apparently spoke to the son. His message to Meredith's family was that he's so sorry for their loss. He says he's written a letter to her family that explains how sorry he is, quote, for not doing enough to save her that night, to save her. He says the court convicted me of being an accessory to murder purely because my DNA was there. But the legal documents say others were there and that I did not inflict the fatal wounds. He's pointing the finger at you, saying Amanda Knox, quote, knows the truth.

1:20:55So your response to him is what? Well, it's a complicated one. I have a whole episode of Labyrinths called The Forgotten Killer, where I discuss him being released from prison and never having been found fully accountable for his crimes. And also for my name to be the name that is most associated with his crime. Yes, yes. So true. So first of all, I have to to point my gaze, my critical gaze on the tabloid media who has decided to give a platform to a rapist and murderer in order for him to continue to harm others by lying and allowing other peoples to take responsibility for his crime. So shame on the son, shame on Nick Pisa for the platforming and amplifying his lies, damaging my reputation and honestly just putting the Kircher family through yet more, you know, loops of pain like this, that shame on them.

1:21:55But for Rudy Gaudet, I honestly have to say that, like, I was almost rooting for him a little bit. Like, here's someone who spent 13 years in prison. I had hoped that he had rehabilitated in some kind of capacity. And while I could, you know, he has over the years, ever since he was arrested, taken the opportunity of the prosecution's unfair gaze on me and use that exploited that opportunity in order to not be fully held accountable for his actions. I thought that if he had more time and distance from his crimes, that he would have had a more mature response. And instead, I believe that he's just continuing to do what he's done since the day he was arrested, which is to exploit the way that this case has been misrepresented and and to try to continue to have me be taken, have me take the burden of his crimes onto my life so that he can continue on with his as if nothing's wrong.

1:23:02So glad you are out there speaking about it because you have a much bigger microphone than he does and people need to hear your message. Thank you. The Kircher family, I understand you have reached out to them. in various ways and various times over the years. It's a it's a delicate issue, right? Because I as far as I know, they do still associate me with Meredith's death in some way or another. And that's not their fault in the sense that like, too, they were misled, too. And it's a very, very difficult thing to look at objectively when it's someone that you lost that you care about so much. And so I have let them know through various channels that I understand that there's this great potential for healing if we can connect and grieve about this incredible injustice and tragedy that links us forever.

1:24:06That said, I also don't want to put them on the spot. And I'm always hesitant to talk about this when people ask me because I don't want to put them on the spot and make them feel like they have to respond to me. That is not the way that you achieve healing. So, you know, I'm, I want them to know that I'm there and ready whenever they are ready. I wonder if it's even harder for someone to get past their beliefs in a situation like this, when the imprint that was made on them happened during their most vulnerable time of life, you know, when they were at their weakest, hurting their worst. That's when, you know, This prosecutor, the press misled them so severely, all the information pointing in the wrong direction.

1:24:50It's probably even harder to come back to stasis where you can take in truth and see, separate the wheat from the chaff. The damage that was done to you was done in those circumstances. It's actually a really fascinating theory because they call that cognitive opening. And, you know, that's that's something they talk about with like the radicalization of people to terrorism, where something bad happens to them. tragedy happens to a person like a sister or a daughter dies. And suddenly your mind, like your, your sort of feeling of security and place and your foundations in the world are shook. And you then latch on to a new ideology, because it sort of gives you a new sense of purpose and stability.

1:25:44And I think you're maybe right that in that moment of intense vulnerability, they latched on to the ideology that the prosecution put forth to them, which is that I am an evil whore who was jealous of their daughter and murdered her for it. And it's like, the truth is right there. And I think once they come to terms with it, they'll they'll somehow feel better. I bet it would be a nice moment for the two of you like to come together because you were her friend. I'm sure she cared for you and you cared for her and that all that gets lost entirely. Right. I mean, you've have you ever had the chance to grieve the loss of your friend?

1:26:25That's a really great question. And I always appreciate it when someone tells me, like, I'm sorry, your friend was lost because that's something that not a lot of people say to me, like, I'm sorry that your friend was murdered that way. And I do look forward to the day that I get to visit her grave. I just don't want to do that without the permission of her family. And so that's something that remains a deep desire and goal for me. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. It's so complicated. You know, I've been thinking about you a lot lately, And I and I thinking about everything you've been through, it's like, in a way, you were given a huge hefty gift of wisdom, wisdom early in your life.

1:27:14You know, like you learn so much about police and law enforcement and, you know, the justice system, media about human nature. Yes. Yes. Right. Human nature and the importance of family. Right. the support and all that. It makes me want to ask you whether, like, if you could undo, of course, you would undo what happened in Meredith. But if you could undo what happened to you, would you? You know, that is a question that I never ask myself, because none of us ever, ever, ever get to choose that. And instead, I think my goal with my life and also my work now with labyrinths is to look at how, when we are at our most lost, how do we find our way out?

1:28:03And what do we gain in the process? Because of course there is the opportunity to lose so much, but there's also so much to gain in whatever struggle that you are going through. Post-traumatic growth is a real thing, just as much as post-traumatic stress is. And we all have the ability with a sort of mindfulness to examine whatever it is that life throws at us and try to make the best out of it. And I'm always, always, always fascinated by the stories of people who similarly find themselves in different situations of feeling lost or the existential crisis of their life isn't what they thought it was going to be.

1:28:43And they found their way somehow. It's great to hear you say that. I completely agree with you. But it's great, too, to see, you know, people, you get upset, you lose a job or you don't get that house you really wanted or whatever it is. Have you been convicted of murder when you didn't do it and sat in a foreign country thinking, I will never get out of here. I will never get married. I will never have children. I will never be able to hug my family again. Like that is next level stress. When you look back on it, you know, what do you, what would you say was the lowest moment? Was it when you heard guilty in Italian or was it a different time, like sitting back in the prison cell?

1:29:28No, the scariest, scariest moment was in that interrogation room when I was made to, I was, I started to doubt my own sanity. That was the scariest moment for me in this entire process. It was the one where I felt the most vulnerable. And then years later, I still felt a ton of self-blame until someone finally presented me with the actual truth about coercive interrogation techniques. I had no idea. I think the thing that makes innocent people so vulnerable to wrongful conviction is the idea of being wrongly convicted is not on our radar. Our minds will come up with any other explanation for why this bad thing is happening to us, including self-blame.

1:30:17And especially when the world is blaming you, it's very easy to believe the rest of the world that there's something wrong with you. And I'm really grateful to those who are dedicating all their careers to studying this and revealing the truth about these processes. And in the meantime, like, you know, I'm not one to compare tragedies because I can't tell you, like I interviewed a ton of women for Labyrinths about infertility and how they had lived their whole lives knowing that they were going to be parents, they were going to be mothers. And suddenly they were faced with the realization that, oh, my gosh, I'm struggling with this.

1:30:59And oh, my gosh, am I ever is it ever going to happen? And how you have to retell yourself who you are in light of these kinds of struggles is real. And and is like some of those interviews that I had with those women are some of the most emotionally impactful interviews that I've ever had with people. Wow. I know you live some of that yourself. you did just have a baby girl. I mean, you just had her, right? Is she? Oh, yeah. Like I still have like throw up on me a little bit. Oh, my gosh. First of all, you look amazing. So she's healthy. Eureka, right? Her name is Eureka. I love it. You're now Mrs.

1:31:38Robinson. And you and your husband does the podcast with you. Absolutely. Yes. So we are co-hosts, co-producers. We do everything ourselves. We do not have like a team of people behind us. We are independent. We are ad free. So if anyone wants to become a patron to support our work, that's how we do what we do. Wow. All right. So I've got to ask, like, what was it awkward or difficult to find, you know, love after all of this? I mean, all the stuff that's been said about you. And I like I would imagine there was enormous pressure on him. Like, oh, God, I don't know how to act or how to be. Well, you know what?

1:32:17Chris is an incredibly was the perfect person for me to meet because he's not a true crime guy. He didn't follow the case. When he started, when he became friends with me, we were friends at first, like other people would come up to him and ask him, like, do you think she did it or didn't she do it? And he was like, look, I'm not interested in that lens through which to view her. I'm interested in this person that I met like a regular person and how we interact. And of course, eventually when we started dating officially and people noticed and started photoshopping knives into pictures of him and making claims about what kind of person he was to even associate with me, he did eventually do the Google search and read all the case files and read my book and do all the research so he could be informed.

1:33:03But that wasn't the lens through which he first viewed me. And that's the ongoing struggle. Like I am for better or for worse, for worse defined by a crime that I had nothing to do with. I am defined by someone else's horrific actions. And as much as I try to put good work out into the world to this day, that is not what people know me for. And so that's, that's sort of my ongoing struggle is trying to acknowledge my experience and put my perspective to good work and not allow others to use my experience and exploit my story for their own ends and at my expense. Yeah, I know. Raffaele has spoken publicly about the same feelings for him and difficulties he's faced because of the media storm and the unfair conviction.

1:34:00And I loved with the New York Times, I will, I'll give a shout out to the New York Times, what they said about you in doing the story. I think it was about the birth of your daughter, but they were saying Amanda Knox's legal purgatory has ended. Her cultural purgatory has not, and it needs to. I mean, you're not the only one who should be fighting for truth here. The people who put you in this position, which includes the media, need to do their part and certainly not pile on and continue the abuse. But to say what we know is true, which is you had nothing to do with this crime. We know who committed this crime.

1:34:36His name is Rudy Gaudet. He's served a sentence that was rather close to a slap on the wrist. And what I pray for now is for people to realize that, for you to have health and wellness and many more children, if that's what you want. Keep telling your story and keep helping others. I feel like there's a reason you've been through this. And I feel like we're all starting to see what it is. Oh, thank you so much, Megan. It's been such a such pleasure to talk to you. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Oh, thank you. I really admire you, Amanda. I hope we talk again. LinkedIn is pretty great at a lot of things, like helping you tap into the latest trends and insights in your field.

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1:36:00Rethink pasta night. Take the Alfredo. Bertolli. Buy now at a grocer near you. Source Circona. Total U.S. multi-outlet. White sauce dollars units. Pound sales. Calendar year 2025. Today on the program, we are speaking with John Ramsey, the father of little JonBenet Ramsey. JonBenet's murder remains one of the most covered stories of the 20th and 21st centuries. Yet despite decades of intense media attention, police investigations, and over 20 ,000 tips in this case, we still don't know the person or persons responsible for her death. But there are several new developments in the case, and John is here to walk us through what they are and whether he believes they could lead to finding his daughter's killer after all these years.

1:36:49First, a reminder of how this story began. It was Christmas night, 1996, Boulder, Colorado. The Ramsey home was decorated with holiday wreaths tied with bows. John and his now late wife, Patsy Ramsey, had put six-year-old John Bonet to bed after returning home from a Christmas dinner with friends. When Patsy woke up early the next morning and went downstairs, she found a ransom note at the bottom of the steps. It read in part, we have your daughter in our possession. Patsy ran to JonBenet's room. She would later tell authorities, but she was nowhere to be found. Patsy called 911. Her voice was hysterical, begging for police to come as soon as possible.

1:37:33At the end of the call, You can hear Patsy praying and pleading, help me, Jesus. Help me.

1:38:04Oh my God, please. Okay, girl. I am, honey. Please. Take a deep breath. Please. Hurry, hurry, hurry. Patsy? Patsy? Patsy?

1:38:17Patsy?

1:38:22You couldn't hear it as well there, but she is on there saying, help me, Jesus. Help me, Jesus. Oh, hours later, their little girl's body was found in the basement of their home. not by police, but by John, who was sent around by the detective who was there saying, go look for any belongings of hers that may be out of place. And he found his own child. John Benet had been strangled and left for dead on a concrete floor. Police focused their investigation almost solely on John and Patsy, believing there was no way an intruder was responsible. Why? That's one of the big questions here. Why did they believe that?

1:39:00because there's a lot of evidence suggesting the opposite. They believe the parents did it. Case pretty much closed in their eyes. It would take years before DNA evidence would clear them in 2008. But Patsy would never live to see that day. She died of ovarian cancer two years earlier, 10 years after the death of her little six-year-old. Oh, so tragic. To this day, John's hope is that this case will be solved and that hope remains in the hands of the same police department that pointed the finger at him wrongly.

1:39:42John Ramsey is here today. John, thank you so much for being with us. Well, it's my pleasure. Thank you for having me on. I've been following you for so many years, following the case and seeing so many of your interviews and you've handled it with such dignity. I appreciate the fact that here we are 25 years later and you're still, still trying to keep interest on the case and try to call attention to what you need, you think, to solve it. And there's breaking news, I should say, about the detectives involved in your case. That's extraordinary. The very guy who interviewed you and Patsy, who you've been kind of complaining about, like he didn't follow up on leads, he didn't do this, he didn't do that.

1:40:21There's news about him today. I assume you've heard what's happened to him. Yes. Yeah, it was a big step forward, I think, in this case because it was a roadblock. When he was assigned to this case 25, 26 years ago, he was at that time a auto theft investigator. And now he's put on the investigation of a murder of a child. And I've never criticized the Boulder Police for not knowing what they're doing. or not having any experience. They didn't even have a homicide department. But I have criticized them over the years for the reason that they would not accept help from those who offered it. And lots of help was offered.

1:41:10Right in the beginning, the Denver police offered to put two experienced homicide detectives on Boulder's staff at Denver's expense for as long as they needed them. Boulder said, no, we don't need that. We've got this under control. That's been going on for 26 years. and we've just kind of had it. It's time to do something different, put some people in charge that know what they're doing and be willing to put their ego and arrogance aside and accept help. Yeah. The detective's name was Tom Trujillo. He was one of the lead investigators in JonBenet's case. He just received an involuntary transfer to another division where he's going to be working the midnight shift, not a promotion, in addition to a three-day suspension.

1:41:57And they've basically said that he and another were not, they were not investigating, appropriately investigating several cases. They said JonBenet's case was not one of them. These are the cases that he's being accused of, you know, half-assing it on were not homicide cases. But he is being accused of not doing his job and not following through on leads and so on and other significant investigations. Do you feel, you know, validated at all by that? Well, in a way, yes. We've known that he's been a problem and not really capable of thinking out of the box. And more importantly, his arrogance, I guess, and ego prevented anybody from coming in to help.

1:42:50You know, our system, the way it's set up is kind of crazy, but, you know, there's 18 ,000 police jurisdictions in this country. Each one's a little island of authority. And if crime happens on that island, it's up to the local police to deal with it. With the exception of a few things like bank robberies, nobody can come in and help them unless they're invited. and uh that's a real uh crazy system because there's tons of qualified help that could have come in wanted to come in but unless they were invited and asked to come in to help they can't and um it's been a huge frustration uh and that's really what I'm very critical of the police department on that issue of course because you see the bigger cities tend to have a higher homicide rate and thus more experienced homicide detectives and people who know how to preserve a crime scene and, you know, preserve evidence.

1:43:49And that's the problem. That was one of the major problems right from the get-go with this, which let's take a step back now and talk and set up the crime so that people have a better feeling for what they did and didn't do and why you really kind of want this case wrested from them right now. I mean, it's been 26 years. It's kind of time. You know, there should be a statute of limitations for the police. If they haven't solved it, they should be able to be compelled to give the evidence to the family or to somebody else who might be able to have a go at it. But we'll get to that. Exactly. So let's go back.

1:44:20Let's go back to December 26, 1996. You were living in Boulder, Colorado with Patsy, your wife, with little JonBenet, who was six. You had a son to Burke at the time who was 10. And things are going well for you. You were a successful business executive. Was Patsy a stay-at-home wife? Yes. Yes, she was. Okay. She's very devoted to the kids. She was taking care of the children. Okay. Very devoted mom. We've seen the videos of her. She seemed like a very loving mother. And you just celebrated Christmas Day. Was there anything out of the ordinary on that day, Christmas Day? No. It was a very normal day.

1:44:57We had gotten up early, of course, and had made a breakfast. And then all day long, kids were in and out of the house with their friends. coming and going and playing with new toys and very normal, very normal Christmas day for us. So you went out over to a friend's house to eat Christmas evening dinner, dinner on the 25th with the kids. Yes. Okay. So you go over there and you, you go ahead. Well, I say the friends we visited have kids our age, our kids age. And so they were buddies and it was a logical place to have a family get together. So what time did you get home from that dinner? Well, I think if I recall, it was about 930.

1:45:47John Benet had fallen asleep on the way home and it was only maybe six blocks, but she was tired. She'd been up all day and having fun and playing. And so I carried her upstairs and put her on her bed. And then Patsy came up and got her ready for bed and tucked her in. So Patsy put on JonBenet's pajamas that night, and this would later become an issue, what she was wearing. What did Patsy put JonBenet in? I don't remember, quite frankly. I'd have to look at the pictures, but it was just night clothes. But my understanding, the reason I ask you, Jon, is that I've been reading up on the case that there was an allegation that Patsy said she put her in a red outfit, like red PJs.

1:46:34And when she was found, she was in white. Is that familiar to you? Yeah. Well, I didn't know about the red nightgown. I had never heard that. But when I found her, she had on like a black and white pants and top. Okay. So Patsy puts her in bed. So probably by 10 o 'clock, JonBenet was in her bed. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And what time did you guys go to bed in Burke, too? It had been shortly after that, probably 1030, I guess. Yeah. And your son, too? Yes. Yeah, he went to bed immediately when we got home. Yeah, he's also a little guy. It's not like you have a teenager at that point who likes to stay up late.

1:47:25No, he was nine years old. To go to bed. Worn out from Christmas Day as well. Okay. So everybody goes to bed by 1030. and you, like in our house, before we go to sleep, we lock all the doors, make sure the security's on, you know, all that stuff. Did you have any of that on your house? We had an alarm system that was in the house when we bought it. And it was the type that, at that time, the theory was you scare everybody out of the house, including the intruder. It was just this horrible, loud noise. and so we didn't use it. It went off once. JonBenet, about dinner time, I don't know, six months or eight months before, was playing.

1:48:12We didn't know it, but she was punching the buttons on the alarm system and this horrible sound came up and I ran into where the control box was and I remember JonBenet looking at me like, and said, this makes my ears loud. so we've all been there those security systems can be they can definitely be more annoying than you know they ought to be when they go off when you don't want them to in this case this would have given you a heart attack if it went off so what about what else was there did you were there locks on the doors or the windows what was the security setup it was an old house built in 1927 it yes there were locks on the doors and just typical window locks, but I didn't check them that night.

1:49:00And that's to my deep regret. We were tired and, you know, we always assumed Boulder was kind of a, you know, Ozzie and Harriet, flowers coming up, quiet, safe place. And so you get complacent. And I regretfully admit we are complacent. No, I know it. I know it. I mean, I grew up in upstate New York. We never locked our doors ever. We go away for vacation for a week and not even lock the door. And there was never an incident. It's, you know, I've told people, I said, you know, just be aware there are bad people everywhere. Not just because you live in a nice neighborhood or don't live in South L.A.

1:49:45that you're safe. But don't be paranoid, but just be aware of that. And your home should be your sanctuary. and that's a huge regret on my part to become complacent. Do you know if you had locked just the doors? Of course, you say you didn't check the windows, but had you locked the doors? Well, I thought I did, yeah. There was a door found open that morning, not by me, but by the police. it shouldn't have been open it's possible the kids were playing and went through it and didn't close it I doubt it because it was kind of in a sub-basement area they wouldn't have been going down there but I think the killer was in the house and we got home and it

1:50:41he waited until we were in bed and And took John Bonet from her room. It's a chilling thought. It's a chilling thought just to have him lying in wait there for murder. Can I ask you, too, just before we leave the subject of security, was there a dog? Was there any other layers? John Bonet had a little dog. His name was Jock. and we had taken over the neighbors before we went out to dinner because we were going to leave town the next morning and have a second Christmas with my older children. And then we had a reservation for the family on the Disney Big Red Boat. And that was our, you know, take place, you know, right after Christmas.

1:51:29So we took the dog and took him to our neighbors and they were going to take care of him until we got home. Right. That's, oh gosh, I'm certain, like all these things you'd like to have back and who knows whether they would have made a difference, but yeah, the dog, they basically say as many layers as you can put between a potential bad guy and those you love, the better. Yes. You know, you're, you're most vulnerable at night when you're asleep, for sure. And it's just prudent to, to pay attention to that. regardless of where you live. How far away were your children's bedrooms from your bedroom?

1:52:15Well, it was an old house. There were basement, ground floor, second floor, and the second floor is where the kids were, and then the upstairs attic we converted into a master bedroom. So in terms of distance, I don't know, 30 feet, maybe something like that, 40 feet. but also on a different level. Did you sleep with the doors closed to your bedrooms? Like, do you believe if you would, if she had, so do you believe if she had yelled, you would have heard it? I think so. Yeah, I really do.

1:52:58I think with virtual certainty, we're sure a stun gun was used. perhaps when she was asleep in her bed. Don't know that for a fact, but I think if she had screamed or

1:53:19there'd been noise, we would have heard it, I think. There were marks on her face and I think her neck, too, that suggested a stun gun had been used on her. John, forgive me because I don't know the answer to this, but what would a stun gun do to a person when used? I mean, would it incapacitate you for a time? What would it do? Well, apparently it does. I don't know. But we had it looked at. Police discounted that idea. And we had it looked at by a doctor who specializes in that kind of stuff somehow. And he said with 99 % certainty, those are stun gun marks. but I think because we didn't hear anything you know you would think at least if this creature had come in and started to take Jaminia from her bed she would have screamed and we would certainly have heard that even if he covered her mouth you know you'd hear something some sort of signs of a struggle but if the stun gun were used and of course I know that you found her with duct tape on her mouth that could have kept her quiet it.

1:54:32All right. So let's back up. So you, so Patsy comes downstairs early. They say it was 5.52 a.m. was that 911 call. So it was early in the morning. You say you were taking a trip. And was that your first sign that something was wrong? She finds this ransom note at the bottom of the stairs. And then what, does she come find you or what happens now? Well, she screamed and it was, you know, I was getting ready to get dressed and she screamed. I could tell from the scream, It was something was very, very wrong. And I ran down and she had this ransom note. And, you know, it was just an unbelievable thing.

1:55:17And we went, or I did, I think I did, looked to make sure Brooke was okay because his bedroom was on kind of the other end of the house. And he was still in bed and appeared to be asleep. So he knew he was safe. And so I, you know, I took the note. And Patsy explained, said, hey, this is a ransom note. Gemini's gone. I checked her room. And so I tried to grasp what was in the ransom note. It was three pages.

1:55:53And just told Patsy to call the police, call the police, call 911. And, of course, funny thing, we were criticized for that because the ransom note told us not to do that. Well, that's silly. Of course, we did. Of course. Of course. You're going to call the police and you don't follow the directions of a kidnapper to not call law enforcement. Yeah. So that Patsy called immediately. She was standing by the phone at that time. And I was still trying to comprehend what the note said and what was going on. I'll get to the note one second. I think it's worth reading so that the audience can understand how bizarre it was.

1:56:31Before we do that, I want to play the longer Patsy 911 call because to this day, even though you've been totally exonerated, people say, oh, the parents did it. You know how that, you know how. Oh, yeah. That'll continue even after the killer's arrested and convicted. Of course. And DNA has exonerated you. So it's like, okay. But I, as a mother, you hear Patsy Ramsey in this 911 call, and you can hear the sheer panic in her voice. And especially if you listen to the longer version, which I'll play here. It's sound by two. 911 emergency. Police. What's going on there, man? We have a kidnapping.

1:57:12All right, please. Explain to me what's going on, okay? There, we have a note left, and our daughter's gone. A note was left, and your daughter is gone? How old is your daughter? Six years old. She's gone. Six years old. How long ago was this? I don't know. I just found the note. And my daughter's gone. Does it say who took her? What? Does it say who took her? I don't know. There's a ransom note here. It's a ransom note? It says F-B-T-C. Victory.

1:57:48Please. Okay, what's your name? Are you... Kathy Lambs and I'm the mother. Oh, my God. Please. Okay, I'm sending you a knock to throw over, okay? Do you know how long she's been gone? No, I don't. Please, we just got out and she's not here. Oh, my God, please. Okay. I am, honey. Please. Take a deep breath from me, okay? Hurry, hurry, hurry. Patsy, Patsy, Patsy, Patsy.

1:58:21That's where she says, help me, Jesus. She's in a sheer panic. You were there. All she knew at that point was JonBenet was missing because she wasn't in her bed. And you can feel, you must have been feeling the same, Jon, just the slow reveal of, wait, a ransom note, and wait, she's actually not in her room. What on earth is going on here?

1:58:46Well, we didn't know. We knew she, according to, we believed what the note said, that she, they have our daughter and we were not to call the police. And if we did, she would be beheaded. and it was dark, it was cold out. It was a horrible feeling. I tell people it's like when, if you're with your child and you're at a department store or grocery store and you look around and the child's gone, you have this instinctive, just horrible feeling in your stomach that, you know, where's my child? And it's a terrible feeling. And I think all parents have experienced that from time to time when their little ones go on out of sight.

1:59:31You don't know where they are. And that was the feeling we had. And it went on for until, I don't know, one in the afternoon. And then an even worse feeling came. We've all had that. We've all had that. And the moment of relief when you find your child well is overwhelming. And you kept waiting, kept waiting for that to happen. and you can hear Patsy, you know, waiting for it with the 911 operator and doing the only thing you can do at that point, which is pray to Jesus. Just pray, pray, pray, pray. It's not as you think it is. The note, the note is one of the most important and bizarre things of this whole case.

2:00:11The handwritten note, which for our listening audience, we've put on the screen and it's, you can see it on YouTube. It's handwritten. It's three pages long, as you point out. I'm going to read it just so the audience understands what you guys read. It was addressed to you, you, John Ramsey, right, dear Mr. Ramsey. And then it reads as follows. Listen carefully, exclamation point. We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction. We do respect your business, spelled wrong, but not the country it serves. At this time, we have your daughter in our possession, spelled wrong. She is safe and unharmed.

2:00:53And if you want to see her, if you want her to see 1997, you must follow our instructions to the letter. You will withdraw$118 ,000 from your account. $100 ,000 will be in$100 bills, the remaining$18 ,020 bills. Make sure that you bring an adequate size attache to the bank. When you get home, you will put the money in a brown paper bag. I will call you between 8 and 10 a.m. tomorrow to instruct you on delivery. The delivery will be exhausting. So I advise you to be rested. If we monitor you getting the money early, we might call you early to arrange an earlier delivery of the money and hence a earlier delivery pickup of your daughter.

2:01:35Another grammatical error. Any deviation of my instructions will result in the immediate execution of your daughter. You will also be denied her remains for proper burial. The two gentlemen watching over your daughter do not particularly like you. So I advise you not to provoke them. Speaking to anyone about your situation, such as police, FBI, etc., will result in your daughter being beheaded. If we catch you talking to a stray dog, she dies. If you alert bank authorities, she dies. If the money is in any way marked or tampered with, she dies. You will be scanned for electronic devices, and if any are found, she dies.

2:02:09You can try to deceive us, but be warned that we are familiar with law enforcement, countermeasures, and tactics. you stand a 99 % chance of killing your daughter if you try to outsmart, two words, us. Follow our instructions and you stand a 100 % chance of getting her back. You and your family are under constant scrutiny as well as the authorities. Don't try to grow a brain, John. You are not the only fat cat around, so don't think that killing will be difficult. Don't underestimate us, John. Use that good Southern common sense of yours. It is up to you now, John. Victory, exclamation point, S-B-T-C.

2:02:52Absolutely bizarre. When you read that, other than the obvious, was there anything, you know, I've had a chance to read it and reread it. What jumped out at you? Well, there's several things that you wonder, What did that mean to the killer? One was the amount of the ransom money request, 118 ,000. Why not a million? Why not, you know, 100 ,000? Why 118? That had some significance to the killer. And then the other, of course, was the beheading concept. You know, that's very – you don't think about that as a punishment or a penalty, but yet that's a very common thing nowadays. We read about some of the terrorists and stuff that goes off.

2:03:49You wonder, well, is it really a terrorist group or terrorist individuals? And that's a common threat they can make. And then, of course, the final thing was SBTC. What does that mean? Victory. That's sign off. So those are kind of the three elements in my mind that just didn't make sense. And the 118 ,000 happened to be my annual bonus that year, and I was paid in January of 1996.

2:04:27And that is somewhat of a logical where that number came from. They would have had to known that. But the rest of it just didn't make sense. It was a bizarre note. I mean, I've been told, too, that in a way it's a gift because I've been told by handwriting experts that with that long of a sample, three pages, if we had the handwriting of the killer, it'd be very easy to conclusively say this person wrote this note. It's a big sample of their handwriting. What did the handwriting analysts say could be gleaned about the writing? Could they tell anything about age, gender? psychological state, any of that?

2:05:12Well, we didn't get that from the handwriting people. Typically, they just told us what their findings were, and they rank their findings on a scale of one to five. One is absolutely this person wrote it when they're doing comparison. A five is absolutely no way. And I was a one. They said, absolutely, you did not write it. Passy was a four and a half. and you say, well, why four and a half? And I was told that there's, depending on who you're taught to write, what generation, there are certain things that are kind of common, but they're not significant and they're not a lot of them. So the police were told, hey, you guys better look somewhere else because we don't see that either parent wrote the note.

2:06:05Wait, but wait, wait, Back up, because I thought you said one means you wrote it. Five means no way. Right. And then you just said that you were a one, suggesting. Oh, no, I was a five. Sorry. Okay. Yeah. You were a five. Patsy was a four and a half. Okay. So you were both on exactly the scale of you didn't write it, or there's virtually no chance that you wrote it. Right. Yes. Okay. Got it. So what about since then, the psychologist, the psychiatrist? I'm sure you've had people like that, FBI profilers who have read it. And were they able to glean any sort of a profile from it? Yeah. John Douglas, who started the whole FBI profiling program and is pretty much considered the top of the heap as far as that skill set and accomplishments.

2:06:55We spent a couple, three days with him early on. Our attorneys asked him to spend some time with us. and um but his conclusion was and prediction is it's a young person fascinated by movies you know probably in his 20s maybe early 30s um and he said this was not about john benet this was directed at you to hurt you john uh somebody is either extremely angry with you or extremely jealous of you and this was done to hurt you. And I thought, well, I couldn't possibly know anybody that I'd made angry to that degree. And he said, you may not even know who they are. They've either observed you in the newspaper or, you know, whatever and developed this either anger or jealousy at me.

2:07:54That was John's conclusion. And I think he's right. Now, Lou Smith, who was the legendary detective from Colorado out of retirement, was put on this case by the district attorney early on. And Lou felt it was a kidnapping going wrong. And I always thought, well, those are two opposite theories. And Lou was a legendary detective in Colorado. and somebody put up to me recently that, well, that could be, those two are not incompatible, those two theories. I thought, well, you're right. They're not. Yeah. Yeah. That's somebody who wanted to hurt you went in there to kidnap your child. Right. And that thought hadn't occurred to me in a good while because I thought, well, here you've got two top experts giving me two theories, but they're compatible.

2:08:49Yeah, they're compatible. Incredible. But what about, I mean, the thing about just random intruder coming in that doesn't make sense if you look at the note is how do they know? You are from Atlanta originally, no? Like you are from the South. The 118 ,000, how would they know your bonus? I mean, it has to be somebody who, and I realize there's a chance they just randomly picked the number that was your bonus, but it seems like a small chance. It seems much more likely if somebody worked at your company or had reason to know that that was your number. Well, two ways I guess they could have known that, you know, they worked in our company that that amount was on my paycheck stub since the previous January as a as a deferred compensation bonus.

2:09:33So those, you know, we weren't real careful with that kind of stuff in our house. We could have been tucked in a drawer or somebody that knew that from some connection inside of our company.

2:09:49To me, that's the logical explanation. The only other explanation I heard was Psalm 118 is right in the middle of the Bible. It references the stone. Stone becomes the cornerstone is one of the passages. And, you know, could that be the SPTC? And it's that's possible as well. One of the suspects that we are interested in signed his high school yearbook. Stone becomes his cornerstone. So. Whoa. It's a very bizarre note. And what did they say, John? What did they say about and I want to know, like, did they go and speak to everybody or company? I mean, that'd be like the first place I would start as a detective.

2:10:41Right. Like somebody knows what he made. Somebody doesn't like him. They've made that clear. They know where his roots are. They know you're from the south. So let's talk to everybody from the company. Well, that kind of stuff just wasn't done. They should have done a neighborhood survey that morning, gone around the houses to the neighborhood. And, you know, if you see anything unusual, what have you, you know, they didn't do any of that. So they basically, in fact, the detective, the only detective so-called that was there that morning concluded that I was the killer because, quote, she saw it in my eyes.

2:11:16And that became the conclusion before they even looked at evidence or investigated anything. This is Linda Arndt. Yeah. Yeah. And we were just dealing with incompetence. Well, in Linda's case, not just incompetence, but maybe a desire to cover up her incompetence because she isn't she the one who said search the house after seven hours of sitting there? She didn't search the house. The foot patrolman who got there per the 911 call earlier, he didn't search the house adequately. She didn't do it. And that's the reason you were put in the position of finding your own little girl. Well, that's exactly right.

2:11:58In fact, to show you what kind of environment she was working in, the chief of police said, we didn't treat this as a crime scene because it was a kidnapping. And you shake your head and think, where do these people come from? Horrifying. I mean, just because at that point they didn't know that it was a homicide, you've got a six-year-old girl who's been taken from her bed in the middle of the night. That's a five-alarm fire. Yeah, exactly. If that's not a crime, I don't know what it is. But that was the quote. Because I could give you a dozen quotes that were just astounding from the police department over the years.

2:12:34But that was really the first one that was just unbelievable. What about the misspellings and the improper grammar and the use of the word attache, which is not really a thing we say in America? It can mean either diplomatic assistant or it can mean bag in the way they're using it here. But it's a bizarre – we're a small foreign faction. Just for people who think – forgive me again for raising your son. He too was ruled out, as I understand it, by the DNA in 2008. But this is not the writing of a nine-year-old. We're a small foreign faction. Like people, you got to use your head. But anyway, these misspellings and the improper grammar throughout tells us something.

2:13:18It could be used intentionally, but this doesn't sound like a very well-educated person. No. I got a letter. We got a lot of people trying to help. And I got a letter from a teacher. She taught English to non-English speaking people. And she said the misspellings in this are typical of a Hispanic person migrating to English based on her experience teaching them to read and write English and speak English. And I thought that was pretty interesting and possibly could explain that. And, you know, we were a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin and or at that time, just Lockheed. And, you know, I take that.

2:14:08You'll see. Well, anyway, Lockheed Martin bought Lockheed sometime in there. But we had to they required us to put a sign on the front of our building, which is downtown Boulder, a Lockheed Martin Corporation. And at the time, I thought that's like waving a red flag in front of a bull. Boulder is an ultra liberal place. And to put a, I'm sure in their minds, a manufacturer of weapons sign in downtown Boulder was just inviting trouble. It made me nervous, frankly, to do that at the time. Right. And they referenced your company. We do respect your business, spelled wrong, spelled B-U-S-S-I, double S, S-S-I-N-E-S-S, but not the country that it serves.

2:14:59so interesting. They clearly they're referencing something about what you do. Yeah, that was bizarre as well. And I start, you know, I'm of course trying to think who this possibly could have been and I've wondered at times whether this was kind of a amateur terrorist group or person that fantasized some things and you know. I'm sure you've got to consider everything. I mean, the guy, you know, the Unabomber, he used to write about himself as we and suggest it was some sort of international thing. Like he wanted to make himself sound bigger and more important than just an I. And this guy slips into the first person later in the ransom note.

2:15:47But, yeah, there's it wouldn't be unusual for an individual to try to make themselves sound bigger, more nefarious in this way. Very true. Now, you know, I really do subscribe to John Douglas's theory that this was somebody that wanted to hurt me. And that's a tough burden to carry. But, thankfully, John said you may not even know him. You know, we'd been in the paper a few weeks before having hit, for us, a significant sales goal. And our marketing people wanted to put it in the paper. And I sort of had this gut feeling that that's not really a good idea. But I wanted our people to be proud of their company.

2:16:27And so we did it. And that could have targeted me because I always had a picture of me in quotes and stuff in the paper. That could have been a. You never know how you're affecting a sick mind who's going to transfer onto you. Who knows? Yeah, that's the problem. We hired two detectives to work this early on because we knew the police weren't capable of it. And, in fact, we tried very hard in the early days to get the case moved somewhere else to another jurisdiction. They could have put it in the sheriff's department's office, which is a competent organization, it was at the time, and had dual authority over it.

2:17:11We could have very easily had a sheriff's officer come to our home that morning instead of the city police department. And that was a tragic first mistake, I guess, or luck of the draw, that's what happened.

2:17:29So, you know, it just wasn't ever properly handled and to this day is still not properly handled. Well, and the theory that it's someone who didn't like you, because, of course, the other theory is that it's some pedophile, right? That's what a lot of people believe in the little girl. And I thought at the time conflicting theories between John Douglas and Lou Smith. Well, I thought we were talking about someone who knew you versus random intruder. But random intruder doesn't necessarily mean pedophile there to get your little girl, right? Because that's one of the questions in the case about whether she was the victim of somebody who was a pedophile or whether it was somebody who just hurt her.

2:18:17Right. Because it was unclear. Forgive me for the details, John, but it was unclear whether she was sexually penetrated by a man. Well, first of all, this was not a random intruder. This is somebody who had watched us, knew what our patterns were, knew we were going to be out that evening. left the note on the back stairway, which is the stairway we always used, but would not have been obvious to somebody that just came into the house. We had a front stairway, but we never used that. And so why did they leave the ransomware on the back stairway? How did they know that's where we would be coming down in the morning?

2:19:04So it would have, I mean, there's some elements where somebody could have come into our home. It was not a hard home to break into and regret to say and really understood where things were. Or they could have been in the house for hours before we got home. Are we sure that are we sure that the person that says sexual gratification was a goal of the killer? I don't know. I think, you know, there's another case seven months later that happened in the neighborhood. Yes, I know about Amy, and I want to talk to you about Amy. Forgive me for interrupting you because I want to go down this line, but I want to give us the proper time.

2:19:44And I got to squeeze in a quick commercial break. So let me pause you right there, John Ramsey, and we'll come right back. So much more to discuss. It's an honor to have you here. I know it's not easy to discuss even 26 years later. Even just losing any loved one is tough to discuss, and certainly under these circumstances, even harder. Stand by, John. LinkedIn is pretty great at a lot of things. like helping you tap into the latest trends and insights in your field. We cannot stop your coworker from tapping her pencil. LinkedIn can help you find new jobs that align with your career goals. We cannot help you find the source of that weird smell in the office fridge.

2:20:21And while we can't stop your coworkers from bringing their hobbies into the office, LinkedIn can help you bring your career to the next level. LinkedIn is the network that works for you. Refresh your next pasta night by shaking up your red sauce routine with Bertolli Alfredo, America's number one selling Alfredo sauce. Bertolli Alfredo is made with fresh cream, real butter, and aged Parmesan cheese. And just like all Bertolli sauces, it's inspired by Tuscany and rooted in over 160 years of Italian tradition. Rethink pasta night. Take the Alfredo. Bertolli. Buy now at a grocer near you. A couple things we're going to discuss when John comes back on in a minute, and that is on the ransom note, do the police believe it was written before or after the murder?

2:21:17That's one of the big questions because I know the police had said originally not even a serial killer would have the steadiness to write a note like this after a murder. So what do they think? And by the way, a draft of this had been found. He had started, the killer had started on a legal pad. It was found in the Ramsey house by saying, dear Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey, and then started over addressing it just to Mr. Ramsey. And then you heard what followed. So there are a lot of questions still about this note and what can be gleaned from it. Before we get to all that, I'm going to play you Patsy Ramsey's describing of the ransom note in a 1997 interview with CNN.

2:21:54I didn't, um, I couldn't read the whole thing. I, I'd just gotten up. We were on our, it was the day after Christmas, and we were going to go visiting. And it was quite early in the morning, and I'd gotten dressed and was on my way to the kitchen to make some coffee. And we had a back staircase from the bedroom areas. And I always come down that staircase, and I'm usually the first one down. And the note was lying across the three pages across the run of one of the stair treads. And it was kind of dimly lit. It was very early in the morning. and I started to read it and it was addressed to John.

2:22:56It said, Mr. Ramsey.

2:23:01And it said, we have your daughter.

2:23:08And I, you know, it just wasn't registering. And I may have gotten through another sentence. It's like, I can't, we have your daughter, and I don't know if I got any further than that. And that's when she called 911. The whole thing is just, I mean, what was on the note? Were there fingerprints? Was there touch DNA of any kind? John Ramsey's been saying, even if you didn't find fingerprints, there might have been DNA. Even if the person had worn gloves, there might have been DNA on that letter. Has it been tested? If not, why not? Apparently, there are several crime scene items that have not been tested for DNA, even in 2022, when touch DNA is out there.

2:23:59DNA has evolved so much. We're going to discuss all of that with John, plus the neighbor Amy, a young girl who was sexually assaulted by a man in her bedroom in the middle of the night, just months after John Benet. Wait until you hear what the police did in that case.

2:24:17so john on the subject of the the ransom note before we leave that there had been a draft addressed to both of you then the final was just you it was written on a legal pad found in your home um and that's the question whether was it were there any fingerprints has it been tested for dna do you know where it came from in the house and was that area tested for fingerprints et cetera, at the time? I don't know. I think my feeling was that the forensics people that came in did a pretty good job in finding a palm print that was unidentified, untracked anybody, footprints that don't match any shoes of ours in the house, things like that.

2:25:04But whether this stuff was ever tested or not, I don't know. We know there's five or six, maybe seven items that were originally taken from the crime scene, sent to an outside lab for testing along with others. And five or six of those items were not tested. They were returned to the police. I don't know why. The police didn't want to pay for it because back then it was expensive to do DNA testing. But we know there's five or six items that had never been tested. And so what else was it? I do know that the forensic people spent about – the detectives spent a couple hours in the house and then told the DA, well, we're finished.

2:25:42And he said, you can't be finished. Get back in there. So they took a very cursory look at it and then were ordered back in by the DA. A forensics investigator experienced one told me they'll spend three days on a murder site looking for evidence, not two hours. So God only knows what was compromised. And I know Linda Arndt, the detective, also didn't secure the scene. She let your friends come over and come into the house. She sent you to look around as we discussed. And then after you found JonBenet, as I understand it, she actually moved JonBenet's body again from one spot to closer by the Christmas tree, which just should never be done when you're dealing with a homicide victim.

2:26:30Right. No, yeah, she just was way in over her head. And, you know, I was criticized for disturbing the crime scene when I found John May by picking her up and holding her. And what parent wouldn't do that? It's just insane to be to that kind of level of misunderstanding of a parent's love for a child. No, it's not possible not to pick up your child and hold her. And at that point, you didn't know whether she was gone. Can we spend a minute on that? Because we talked about how Linda said, okay, search the house. It's one o 'clock now in the afternoon. No one's called, you know, no kidnapper. And I understand the note said, well, I'll call tomorrow.

2:27:15So it was unclear whether they meant the 26th or the 27th. Right. But you're sitting there and you're waiting and nothing's happening. And now it's one o 'clock in the afternoon. She says, go look around the house. And the people who want to say, oh, you know, look at John. One of the things they say is, oh, he went right to the room. He went to the basement and he went right to, There's a storage room off the basement where she was found. Is that true? Like, what did you do after Linda said, go search the house? Well, a friend of mine that was there to help console us, she said for both of us to go search the house.

2:27:52And so we went to the basement, which to me was a logical place to start. Third floor, you couldn't get into the third floor from outside. so we went to the basement and went into what we called the train room where the kids had a train set up and there was an open window and a suitcase propped up under the window as if it were to be a step and I told my friend I said that suitcase should not be there that's way out of place we wouldn't have put it there and so we then i went into the um the only other room in that basement was this we called it a wine cellar but it was an old coal cellar uh dark one door going into it no uh entrances from the outside and i opened the door and of course immediately found john bonnet And, you know, I don't, we heard Lindar say on the media or on an interview that, well, I told him to go from top to bottom and he started out in the bottom.

2:28:57Why did he do that? This just was logical to me, but yeah, it. Do you remember that moment? I mean, do you remember, was it, did it switch from concern to panic? Do you remember emotionally? It was a switch from panic and it was a relief. Thank God I found my child. And that was the immediate feeling that I'd found her. She's safe. But it fairly quickly concluded that she wasn't all right. and so I just picked her up and carried her screaming actually I was screaming

2:29:51to upstairs to take her to help I mean I don't know it's just an instinctive reaction I guess but and we laid her down on the floor of the living room in front of the Christmas tree and And Linda Art had looked for a pulse and looked up at me and said, no, she's gone. And I guess it was that moment when she saw in my eyes that I was a killer. So, and then we rush her out of the house pretty quickly. And we never went back in that home. That was the last time we were in that home. John, can I ask you, because I know that one of the things that JonBenet was wearing was her cross, her cross necklace.

2:30:42And according to what I read, and we heard Patsy praying to Jesus, you know, to help her, help her. And I wondered if you were a family of faith and if, you know, what this did to that, right? If you were able to carry that on. Well, that's a good question. And I really had to face that issue when my oldest daughter was killed in a car accident about four years before. And the first words that came out of my mouth was, there is no God. There is no God. How could a loving God let this happen to a beautiful young child? She was 20, 21. But it really forced me to think about my faith. And I had a friend came alongside of me and said, I'm going to help you study the Bible.

2:31:29And he was a real mentor to me in that struggle to understand why this would happen. You know, I was a Christian. I had joined the club. You know, if you're in the club, you shouldn't be subject to harm or tragedy. And, of course, that's not at all what the Bible says. You're going to get persecuted. But I struggled with that really for three or four years. is there an afterlife? Will I see Beth, my oldest daughter, again? It was tough for three or four years. But I'd kind of wrestled that down to, yeah, there is more to life than just what we see here. And so when we lost JonBenet, I didn't have to go through that struggle.

2:32:21I'd already been through, why did God let this happen? And so it was – my faith was not challenged when JonBenet was killed only because I'd gone through that challenge when I lost my oldest daughter. Then you go through the added pain of being not outright accused by the authorities but pretty close. I mean the DA earlier, before Mary Lacey, the DA said they didn't do it. The DNA rules them out. Four months after JonBenet died, the DA, Alex Hunter, said, Patsy and Jon are the focus. They're the focus. Opened up a grand jury proceeding, and the grand jury came back and said, don't see anything that you're going to be able to pursue as a, you know, beyond a reasonable doubt.

2:33:09And the DA ultimately had to admit that. But, I mean, you're going through being accused. And then on top of all that, John, you've got the media coverage, right, which basically tried to make JonBenet and Patsy into this bizarre daughter-mother team. You know, she was exploited. She was sexualized. The beauty pageant videos on endless loop, on endless loop. So talk about that for a bit and what that was like for you. Well, you know, the media, of course, jumped on it, but they were being fed information that was misleading, wrong. And we were told by Mary Lacey several years after she got into her position as the due DA, she said that was the police strategy that was defined to them by someone, whether it was the FBI or some wacko psychologist.

2:33:59But it pends pressure on the family. We know it's one of the two. They're in the house. Either the father killed her or the mother did. one of them will confess eventually if we put enough pressure on him. And Mary Lacey, the DA, said that was their strategy to solve the case. And so they released a lot of information, misleading information, incorrect information to the media. And, of course, the media ran with it. And we were quickly convicted in the court of public opinion. We didn't know that's exactly what was happening, But it was confirmed by the DA. And the problem for the police was they did a great job of convicting us in the court of public opinion with the assistance of the media.

2:34:44But they couldn't charge us. We would have – it had been a bloodbath for them in a court because the evidence was quite contradictory to that as they got into looking at the evidence because they'd made their conclusion on the day or the day after of John Bonet's murder. and then went about, let's find the evidence to prove it. Well, the evidence they were finding was contradicted to that conclusion. And that became a problem for them because, you know, the media and the public was, you know, screaming, hey, you arrest them, you know, charge them. And they couldn't. Well, and meanwhile, in the interviews, you held firm.

2:35:28I mean, Patsy, they got all up in her grill. and when I watch her, because I've spent a lot of time with this guy's name is Phil Houston. He invented the CIA's deception detection technique that they still use today. It was there 25 years. There's all sorts of ways you can tell somebody's lying and they're pretty foolproof if you know how to apply them. And one of the things is just sort of no BS. You don't do convincing behavior. You're just hardcore. No, no, you know, stop. Like, I mean, I'm sure if I showed him that Patsy Ramsey tapes with the cops, he'd be like, why did they waste so much time with her?

2:36:04Right, like it was pretty obvious. And I'll just show some to the audience, a clip. This is from 1998, two years later, police interview with Patsy. They're telling her falsely that they have trace evidence linking her or you to the murder. I would be suggesting, if I had that, how would you react? Here it is, top five. If I told you right now that we have trace evidence that appears to link you to the death of John Bonnet? What would you tell me? That is totally impossible. Totally impossible. How is it impossible? Do a retest. I did not kill my child. I didn't have a thing to do with it. And I'm not talking, you know, somebody's guess or some rumor or some story.

2:36:56I don't care what you're talking about. I'm talking about scientific evidence. I don't give a flying flip how scientific it is. Go back to the damn drawing board. I didn't do it. John Ramsey didn't do it, and we didn't have a clue of anybody who did do it. My life has been hell from that day forward, and I want nothing more than to find out who was responsible for this. Okay? I mean, I want to work with you, not against you. Okay? This child was the most precious thing in my life. And I can't stand the thought, thinking somebody's out here walking on the street. God knows we might do it again with some other child.

2:37:45You know, quit screwing around asking me about things that are ridiculous and let's find the person that did this. wow the frustration it's palpable because it's like as she's points out he could be hurting other children all right yes and probably did there's a high probability i'm told that that creature kind of creature doesn't just stop with one maybe has done it before the um this is right around the time where lou smith walked out the the detective the retired detective who they brought in because they couldn't solve the case and he solved every single case he ever worked on except for this one they brought him in take fresh eyes what do you think and lou took the his fresh eyes and every looked at everything and said they didn't do it this is not patsy and ramsay are that's the wrong tree to bark up yep and they didn't listen to him to the point where he quit.

2:38:46He called this a travesty and said they were trying to railroad you. It's crazy, John, that that wasn't the end of the story. It would take another 10 years for Mary Lacey to get that DNA test and say, just stop. Stop with the obsessive focus on the Ramseys. No, that's true. Lou told me, you know, after he resigned and we were able to talk to him freely that he'd looked at the case for several months and all the evidence and said, no, police are going the wrong direction. So he said he went to their war room where they were strategizing this assault, frankly, and said, you know, you guys have looked at this case longer than I have, but, you know, I've looked at it, and have you ever thought maybe you're going the wrong direction?

2:39:31And he said it was like pouring a bucket of water on the participants. They wouldn't talk to him after that. They banned him from their war room and just wouldn't listen. And that's what he said. I'm not going to be part of persecuting an innocent person and resign and continue to work on the case for the rest of his life, which I was very grateful for. And he was an amazing fellow. Well, I think it was a 60 Minutes Australia piece I watched. They had old tapes of him. And he went to the crime scene, to your old house. and he went to that window that was broken in your basement because one of the theories was nobody got in through that window.

2:40:16That was a window you had broken not long before because you locked yourself out of the house and you were trying to get in. That's true. Yeah. So, so people were saying, no, somebody said only a midget could get through, a little person could get through that window. That wasn't it. This is back on, it had to be one of the mother, the mother of the father. And he goes right through it. But the video shows him going right through it. Was that something, by the way, I meant to ask you, did you go through it when you had locked yourself out? Had you gone through that window to get in? Yes. I had locked myself out one, I don't know, one day and nobody was home.

2:40:51And so that was the way I got into the house so I could unlock the door. I didn't have a key. You know, the person that said, no, it's impossible for someone to get through that window was the detective investigating the case. It was purely misleading, purely false information, but it biased everybody, the public, the media towards us once more. That was the whole strategy. And so that was confirmed by the district attorney to us that that was the whole strategy. And she also said their only evidence that they would present, and it's really not evidence, that led them to think that we were guilty was we did not act right that morning.

2:41:35And that's what happened. The allegation was that Patsy was distraught, but that you didn't cry. And one of the cops on the scene said, I never saw them console each other. And in my presence, I never saw them hold one another. Yeah, well, look, they've watched too much crime scene movie or TV, I think. When I lost my first daughter, Beth, I got a phone call from my brother and he said, Beth is gone. She's killed. And there's nothing I could do. I couldn't get her to the best doctors. I couldn't rush to her side. It was over. That morning with JonBenet, it wasn't over yet. I could get her back if I kept my wits about me and focused on getting her back to whatever I could possibly do.

2:42:25I didn't, I was focused on getting her back and I felt I could get her back. I'd arranged for the ransom money to be available almost immediately. one of the again this linda art i think wrote in her report that john was observed casually going through the mail that morning yeah there was a mail drop and where the mail came through the house or the front door and i was going through i was looking for another possible communication from the kidnapper the police should have been doing that i was not casually going through the mail, but that was her interpretation of that. Again, biased perspective by someone who has never been in that situation to evaluate whether somebody's acting right or not.

2:43:16So that was my focus. You know, Patsy was rough. She was in bad shape. She had a bowl in front of her in case she threw up. But I was focused 100 % on whatever I could do to get JonBenet back. That was my job. LinkedIn is pretty great at a lot of things, like helping you tap into the latest trends and insights in your field. We cannot stop your coworker from tapping her pencil. LinkedIn can help you find new jobs that align with your career goals. We cannot help you find the source of that weird smell in the office fridge. And while we can't stop your coworkers from bringing their hobbies into the office, LinkedIn can help you bring your career to the next level.

2:43:58LinkedIn is the network that works for you.

2:44:33Can we talk about two things? We've touched on the Mary Lacy exoneration of 2008 based on DNA. DNA came along. Thank God they did get some DNA and preserve it back in 96. DNA's come leaps and bounds since then, and it had to some extent by 2008. So she said, we've tested it and we've identified the perpetrator as one, possibly two, unidentified males. so nothing no hit in the database but they could tell it was a male and they could tell it was one possibly two that's when she said it's not the ramses can i just say for the record does did that include burke yeah it did and burke was exonerated early on he had to be interviewed by the child psychologists that were associated with the police department they said absolutely no way Burke was not faultless.

2:45:24He was a nine-year-old, 60-pound child. Because CBS would do a piece really pointing the finger at Burke in 2016, and he sued over it, and they settled. I don't know what they settled for, but in later years, armchair detective wannabes have decided maybe it was him, maybe it was the nine-year-old. But the Mary Lacey conclusion was it was not Burke. Right. And that was a conclusion that even the police came to very early on and they ruled out that possibility. Yeah. In fact, they offered to support us in this suit against CBS if we needed their help. Wow. To discount that ridiculous accusation.

2:46:10So he went on Dr. Phil not long, not long after that. And then it just stirred up more. You know, people were like, he wasn't acting right. I'm going to play a soundbite. I'd love to get your thoughts. I really don't know. I don't know how people sort of fly into the case. You've been living it in the worst way for 26 years. So put this in perspective for us. This is Burke on Dr. Phil in 2016. A police officer comes in your room, which I assume is the first time in your entire life that a police officer has come in your room with a flashlight looking around and you still just stay in bed. To be fair, I didn't know it was a police officer.

2:46:46It's just kind of. But somebody comes in your room with a flashlight, and you never get up and say, what is going on here? I guess I kind of like to avoid conflict, or I don't know, I guess I just felt safer there. Were you curious? I'm not the worry type. I'm not the, I guess part of me doesn't want to know what's going on. Critics would say you weren't curious because you already knew. He didn't have to get up and go check because he knew exactly what had happened. I was scared, I think. I mean, I didn't know if there was some bad guy downstairs and my dad was chasing off with a gun or, you know, I had no idea.

2:47:28Let's clear this up once and for all. Did you do anything to harm your sister, JonBenet? No. Did you murder your sister, JonBenet? No. And just for the listening audience, Burke's answers are all said through what looks like a smile, which is one of the things his critics would react to. Go ahead, John, your thoughts on it. Well, Burke smiles all the time. When he talks, he just naturally smiles. And those are just laughable criticisms. This was a violent, vicious, sexually assault case. Not something that a nine-year-old could even possibly do. So that's just, it's really disgusting that people jump to that kind of a conclusion.

2:48:22Let's move on because one of the other storylines, as we touched on a minute ago, was the pageants and whether a pedophile was, you know, she captured the attention of a pedophile. And they do say that some of these pageants can be very attractive to pedophiles in the same way that, you know, most pedophiles, like if you want to find a pedophile, you don't go to like an AARP meeting. You know, they wind up, they volunteer for the Boy Scouts and they, you know, it's sad, but it's true. They go where children are. So that was, forget the blame, right? I'm not interested in that storyline. line. But it is possible that this person was a pedophile and had seen JonBenet at one of these pageants where she was a darling.

2:49:07I mean, she was winning them. She was absolutely beautiful in every way. So what do you make of that theory if we're thinking of the possible intruder? Maybe they also knew you, but a possible intruder pedophile. It's possible. Patsy had been diagnosed with stage four cancer a couple of years before this happened. And she went through some pretty rough chemotherapy treatments and was declared remission. And she didn't say it, but I know she was trying to pack a lot of mother-daughter time into what she maybe felt was a limited lifetime. And I didn't really care for these little passions. I mean, I'm a father and I had preferred my daughters wear burqas until they were about 30.

2:49:52But that wasn't my choice. And I thought, well, this is just wonderful mother-daughter time for Patsy and JonBenet. They didn't take it seriously. Yeah, so we got to win. We got to win. In fact, Patsy and I joked, it'd be good if she lost a few of these pageants because she needs to understand you'd always win in life. But she just, JonBenet loved doing it. It was fun. She was an extreme extrovert, and people accused Patsy of dragging JonBenet to these pageants for her own satisfaction. That wasn't true at all. It was just something JonBenet enjoyed doing, and Patsy wanted her to try a lot of different things, which she did.

2:50:35But I always thought the people at these little pageants were just moms and grandmoms. And that's quite – there was one indication, of course, we learned later, that, yeah, there was at least one guy there that wasn't there for his daughter based on some questioning that came out and some comments. But it's possible. But I still fall back to, I think, John Douglas' theory and Lou Smith. It might have targeted who JonBenet is, and she was my daughter. And she was obviously, I'm told, and I never read the autopsy. I just couldn't break myself to do that. But I, of course, hear through the news that she was sexually assaulted.

2:51:30and that wouldn't have been necessary to hurt me as much as to satisfy this creature's desires. So this is why, forgive me, and if you don't want to go here, we don't have to, but this is why when I was reading the autopsy report, and we don't have to get into the details, but the one thing they said, it was unclear to me whether they had semen, semen, whether that was one of the DNAs that they were able to retrieve. And there was a suggestion that maybe there was some sort of, you know, they hurt her in some way sexually that didn't involve, you know, a male body part. And that's kind of interesting if you think about this being a person whose goal was just to hurt you.

2:52:15Like maybe it wasn't a pedophile. Maybe it was somebody who was just trying to hurt her as opposed to sexualize her or do anything sexual with her. Yeah, that's possible. And there was no semen found, but not dissimilar to this situation, a case similar break in that happened a few months later in the same neighborhood. with Amy yes okay so let's talk about that um there are many people who Lou Smith had been taking a hard look at you know the honest investigator who quit um before he died unfortunately at in 2010 and he gave the list of suspects to his daughter which is how we know who he's looking at and the daughter's a hero she's running around getting these people's DNA without them knowing it.

2:53:06It's kind of amazing, this piece of the story. I'm so grateful for that group. Before we get to Lou and his daughter and what happened there, there's this neighbor. And we're calling, and the papers are calling the daughter Amy. Her parents don't want her outed. Understandable, as a sexual assault victim. But Amy, I think, was very young too, nine or 12, right around there. I didn't know a whole lot about that case. I knew that it happened, but I think she and JonBenet were in a dance class together. And I think she was a year older than JonBenet, maybe. Oh, no. Actually, my producers are telling me she's 12.

2:53:45So she's a young girl. And she's at home. This is months after JonBenet was killed. Amy is in the same neighborhood. And she had a man wake her up, dressed in black, in the middle of the night, who tried to muzzle her so that she couldn't scream and sexually assaulted her. And by the grace of God, her mother heard something. By the grace of God, truly, her mother heard something and heard muffled voices coming from her 12-year-old daughter's room in a way that sounded very unsafe. The mother grabbed pepper spray and went into the room. I mean, it's an extraordinary story. And the guy jumped out the second floor window and ran.

2:54:31I mean, it's a miracle. Thank God that unfortunately the daughter was molested, but she was not killed. And they went to the Boulder cops and said, we think this might've had something to do with JonBenet. It's too close in time. And here's our evidence. And the dad is on record as saying the Boulder cops could not have cared less, were not interested in pursuing any link between the two cases. And they really felt like it was because they were just focused on you two. Right. That's what I've learned. When I first heard about this, I thought, well, that's a very similar M.O. for the criminal as it was in our case.

2:55:18He was in the house when they came home that night. They went to bed, and then at 3 in the morning, he entered the little girl's room. And I thought, well, that's – man, that's so similar to what I think happened in our case.

2:55:36And Chief Beckner, who was the police chief, chief of police, was asked, is there a connection? He said, oh, no, these cases aren't the same because the second little girl wasn't murdered. and it was one more of the unbelievable statements that came out of the police department. Of course, it's similar, and thankfully she wasn't murdered. But I'd heard that the father was quoted as saying on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of police performance, I'll give them a minus 5. So he was very unhappy with them as well, but only because they just kind of blew off the case and went on. There's a real danger when the police get tunnel vision.

2:56:16I mean, every defense attorney who's ever represented a murder defendant argues they had tunnel vision on my guy. My guy didn't do it. They had tunnel vision on him. But in some cases, it really is true, and it can result in the wrong person being arrested and put on trial. Thankfully not in your case, but you were heading down that lane. Oh, absolutely. And we weren't worried about this. I mean, it was distressing, but our attorney said, look, the system's broken. The police don't know what they're doing. We cannot promise you you won't be charged with murder. We'll promise you one thing with 100 % money-back guarantee.

2:56:50We will destroy him in court. So don't worry about that. But it's not going to be fun. But do not worry about being convicted. We'll kill him because we knew what the evidence was and what they were trying to do. We had one experienced district attorney tell us, look, I have never, ever seen police try to explain away unidentified male DNA in a sexual assault case. Never. That's the key piece of evidence. And yet that's what the Boulder Police tried to do is that was a real problem for them that we had this unidentified male DNA. Yes. That's a massive problem, and it's the reason you've never been charged.

2:57:31And it's the reason Mayor Casey says it wasn't you guys. on the subject of DNA, I read that the coroner did not examine the body until seven hours after she was discovered and that the coroner only spent 10 minutes at the crime scene. That's a crazy amount of time. That's, I mean, seven hours is a long delay. And I wonder, John, whether they, have you ever been told whether they were able to determine the time of death? I've never been told. No, I don't know. Do you have any reason to believe there's any chance she was alive in the morning, you know, before, I hate to go there, but like when the first cop got there, you know, is there any chance she was alive?

2:58:17I don't think so. She was strangled to death is my interpretation of what I've heard. And then struck with the object that created a pretty good And cracking her skull took to be totally accurate. So I don't think she could have possibly been alive that morning. Okay. But that's another area of DNA that absolutely should be examined because there was a murder weapon. There was like a rope, they call it a garotte. And it was tied to a little piece of wood. And so one of the questions I know, John, people are asking is, do they ever, one end of the rope had a knot and one had two knots or something like that?

2:59:13But the question was, did they ever untie the knots and test in there for DNA? To my knowledge, no. They had sent a number of samples like that to Bodie Labs, which is an outside DNA lab. and for some reason chose not to test or not to pay for the tests of five or six items, one of which was the groat. And that's one of the things we're asking the governor to make happen is let's get those items tested. Why weren't they tested? Was it because it was too expensive? They want to save money? I don't know. What do you think is in the box of things that have not been tested? I don't know. And I don't know.

2:59:59One journalist that has followed this case almost in the beginning has that information, and I need to get that from her, but I don't know exactly what it is. She said there's five or six items that have ever been tested. And the police keep referring back to, well, it's just a minute amount of DNA. We don't want to ruin it. Well, that just tells me they haven't tested the other items or they've lost them or misplaced them. And for some reason, they always stay away from these other five or six items that have never been tested or checked for DNA evidence. And that's what we're asking to be done.

3:00:35And their reluctance to even mention those items makes me think they've either misplaced them or lost them. Oh, goodness. Yes. I know. And you're on a push to have the governor remove this case from the Boulder PD and let these sophisticated DNA labs have access to this as opposed to relying on the same cops and detectives that have blown it thus far. There are really sophisticated DNA labs. Do you have confidence that if they had access to this box, for lack of a better descriptor, they could make whatever progress is possible, they could make it? And that's really all we're asking the governor to do is push the case either out of the boulder hands or require them to take this evidence to be tested by one of the one or two really cutting edge labs in this country and see what we get.

3:01:33If we can get some more good DNA evidence, then you take that evidence and put it in the public database and see what you come up with. Yes. This has been done in the last few years with remarkable success. And really what got me, had me in my mind take the gloves off with the police is we had spent some time with the regional FBI folks there in Denver and got a relationship where we said, look, this is what needs to happen. And in fact, they're the ones that said, look, the government does not have the latest DNA technology. We'll get it eventually, but we don't have it. We don't have it at the FBI.

3:02:14They certainly don't have it at the state level. And, of course, not even ridiculous to think they have it at the police level. They told us that we've got to get this DNA testing done by one of these one or two very cutting-edge labs outside. And then use this new approach of genealogy tracing. And there's a hope that would move this case along to conclusion. They went to the Boulder police and we're here to help. We'd like to make this happen. We'd help you. You can take all the credit. And the Boulder police blew them off. Said, no, we don't need your help. And that was the game's over as far as I'm concerned.

3:02:52We got to start. When was that? How long ago? Oh, it was probably six months ago. Just so people know, I had this woman on my show at NBC. Cece Moore is her name, and I know you must have talked to her. She's the one who was really at the center of this genealogy research. And what they do is they take a piece of DNA, and we already know that the DNA that they found on JonBenet, it did not produce a hit in the databases that are available, at least as of the last time they told us. so the perpetrator had not gone into the system yet but they don't need that all they need is for somebody related to the perpetrator to be in the dna system so if i were in the dna system let's say i wanted to do 23andme let's see what my ancestry is whatever um then if my results got uploaded on this other website that ccmore uses that that a lot of people who upload the dna results use because you get more information from it it's not 23andme it's something related So let's say they're sitting there.

3:03:53She can access them. She may not, you know, she can see a lot of things on there. And let's say I have a relative who commits a crime. That relative's DNA was not going to pop up. Like maybe they committed a crime, but the crime scene, they didn't see him because he hadn't been arrested yet. But mine will. And this is what CeCe Moore, she's like, all I can tell you is that Megyn Kelly is related to this killer. And so I'm going to build this big family tree around Megyn Kelly. I'm going to figure out who her grandfather, great grandfather, look at her husband's side. I'm going to look at, because all this stuff is publicly available.

3:04:25She looks at their wedding announcements and birth announcements. It's crazy great detective work. Yes, it is. And she gets her man. I mean, CeCe Moore, it's like, they saw a case a week doing this. And so if we could take a fresh look at the JonBenet DNA, from that perspective, even if the guy's never gotten into the system from the last time they tested it, somebody might be in the system that could lead us to him. That's right. The COVID system that the FBI uses, the federal database of criminals or arrested felons, is fairly small. And the states can contribute or not to that database. It takes nine markers out of 15 to be accepted in the database.

3:05:09But it's people that have already been found criminal or at least arrested for felonies. And it depends on the state what that rule is, but it's not a very big database. And what the public database of the 23andMe, both Jan and I submitted our$35, get our ancestry to that database. They find a reasonably close match or something of interest. And they do almost a backwards family tree. And then they find, hey, here's a relative that lived in Boulder in December 1996. And then they start looking at that guy or that person and get his DNA. And these remarkable success solutions to these old, old cases have been using that technique.

3:06:13And most of these people were not on anybody's radar. They weren't in the COVID or the federal database. And in fact, the Golden State Killer, which was, I think, the first one found this way, was a 40-year-old case. And he was a retired cop. So he wasn't in the criminal database. But it's a remarkable technique. But our relative was. And that's what we're asking the governor to make happen. I don't care how it happens. That's what has to happen. And now what he's saying, John, is, well, he doesn't said anything, as I understand it. But the Bullard PD, they're like, hey, we have great news. We're now going to refer this case to the cold case unit.

3:06:57And the cold case unit, we believe, is going to do better than the other case unit. Why? Don't know. I don't know. I've never heard of this cold case unit. Why? And they said we're going to refer to them next year. Well, that could be 12 months from now. But I guess you say, well, it's no big rush. It's been 26 years. What's the hurry? And it's a huge frustration for us. Do you believe that's just a, is that just cover? Is that a CYA? Yeah, absolutely. That was put out before I even released the governor's letter, which I only released because he never responded. I thought that was, I would have at least expected to say, we'll take a look at it.

3:07:34Or I received your letter. Still hasn't responded? No. No. We're going to follow up with him. Yeah, I'm not asking him to, you know, apologize to us for the faulty performance of the Colorado justice system. I don't want that. I just want to do the right thing. This is what can be done. You need to do it. Yeah, well, we're definitely going to follow up with his office and find out what is his response. And we'll stay on it and we'll annoy him to the point where he's going to have to respond. Because I know a lot of people in media who would be very happy to help me annoy him. I would love that.

3:08:12That's what it's going to take. It's going to take intense public pressure to do the right thing. That's what we're asking them to do. None of them will do anything unless forced to by the public. And the people of Colorado and the country are on your side. They're not on the side of some law enforcement group that's trying to protect its own backside. So I actually think we can make progress with this. But first, I have to squeeze in a break. All right, stand by, John. A quick break. I'll be right back to you. after this.

3:08:46John, Dylan Howard put together an extraordinary podcast called The Killing of JonBenet Ramsey. And it's a 12 part series in which he took a very deep dive into possible suspects. In the case, I recommend it to everybody. And in part, based off of Lou Smith's work and the work of his daughter. Having listened to all of that and cooperated with that, do you have a chief suspect?

3:09:11You know, it's easy to say, well, that's the guy based on circumstantial evidence. In fact, that happened fairly early on. A person was brought to our attention by his girlfriend, former girlfriend, and had some pretty compelling data that would lead you to believe, hey, this is the guy. In fact, I said that to our attorneys. I said, whoa, this is the guy. And they said, no, no, no, don't do a boulder police on us. We can't jump to conclusions. It was a reminder that that's exactly what happened and that we've got to be careful too. So there's been four or five people like that that have come up on the radar, on our radar, but it's never been enough evidence.

3:09:53And, you know, private individuals can only do so much. They need the authority of the government to really dig into stuff. And so we can only go so far in some of these investigations. And so these people are still, in my mind, suspects of interest, people of interest. But, you know, they need to be investigated. That's the point. They need to be investigated. One of the things Lou Smith suggested was that there was that window broken in the basement. Saw there was a scuff mark below the window. There was a suitcase there, which we talked about briefly, that wasn't normally there. And in it, they found a duvet, a Dr.

3:10:31Seuss book, and fibers of the outfit JonBenet was wearing that night, indicating perhaps the murderer might have tried to kidnap her or remove her from the scene in the suitcase, but it was too big. But that would explain quite a bit about the crime scene if only we had a talented investigator devoted to following up on these leads. The point is the governor must get involved. The governor must remove this case from the Boulder PD. They must get the fibers and the DNA that is available to a qualified lab and start working with the family instead of against them after all these years. And the time we have left, how do you do it?

3:11:11Because I know you said you've forgiven whoever did this to JonBenet. And, Jon, it just seems like a mountain too high. How do you do that? Well, I dealt with forgiveness a lot. over the few years after John Bonet was killed. And I looked back at how I felt and progressed with that challenge. Certainly in the first couple of years, there was no forgiveness. In fact, I've told people, if you put this guy in the same room with me and I know he's the killer, he won't come out alive. And I would be able to do that with no remorse. And that's not right, but that's how I felt. And then I got to the point where I said, okay, well, forgiveness belongs to the victim and I'm really not the victim.

3:11:57JonBenet was a victim. So only she can forgive. And that's, of course, not possible. And that kind of got me off the hook. And then I finally realized forgiveness is really a gift you give yourself. You release that anger and that desire for revenge. Doesn't mean you feel sorry for the, in our case, the killer. I still want him held to accountability to the extreme level of our justice system. But I've released that anger, and it still crops up every now and then. But it's a benefit to myself to release that in the form of forgiveness. Don't want him held. Staying connected to God helps, I know.

3:12:45And I'm sure this time of year, even all these years later, is very tough on you. I know you've remarried. I'm so happy to hear that. God bless you, John, and your family. And I think there's a way of finding a Merry Christmas. You know, I hope that you've found that way. And I'll be praying for you this year in particular. We had a hard time with Christmas for several years. finally realized you got to remember what Christmas is for. And that's reassuring in our case that we know John Bonet is safe and we'll see her again. Amen to that. Take care. Thank you so much for coming on and telling your story and we'll stay on it.

3:13:27Thank you, Megan. I really appreciate it. Wow. Just keep them in your prayers and keep their family in your prayers. That little girl's with her mama now. For that, we can be thankful.

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