JonBenét Ramsey: The FULL MK Confidential Series

27:41Someone inside this house had made a 911 call saying that little John Bonet had been kidnapped. Well, when police got here, they went inside the house, and a short time later, they found the little girl's body. The Boulder County coroner arrives at the Ramsey home around 8 p.m. on December 26th. His examination is short, lasting about 10 minutes. But several things become clear right away. According to the autopsy, whoever killed JonBenet took white olefin cord and tied her wrists together. The person used the same cord to make what's commonly known as a garrote or a ligature to strangle JonBenet.

28:21A garrote is a brutally simple mechanism. them. It uses a cord around the neck and some kind of handle to twist that cord tighter. The more it's twisted, the more pressure it puts on the neck, cutting off air and blood flow. It's similar to a tourniquet, but with a deadly purpose. Police say the knot on this garrote was tied by someone who understood how a garrote is made, and the fact that her hair and her gold cross necklace are tangled in it suggests that JonBenet was alive when it happened. JonBenet also has very distinct red marks below her throat that match the shape of her own fingers. It looks like she tried to claw on the cord wrapped around her neck as it choked the very life out of her.

29:09The cord is wrapped around JonBenet's neck so tightly that it has caught a deep furrow into the skin. It was so deeply embedded in her skin that I didn't see it. The court is knotted and attached to a broken stick at the back of JonBenet's neck. That broken stick was part of a paintbrush handle from Patsy's art supplies stored in the basement near the room where JonBenet's body was found. The coroner performs JonBenet's full autopsy the following morning at 8.15 a.m. He lists two causes of death, either strangulation or a blow to the head. He can't determine which happened first, but either would have killed her.

29:50You can't comprehend that anybody would be that evil. There are also microscopic fibers of the paintbrush handle from the garrote found in JonBenet's vagina, as well as signs of injury to the interior tissue. This leads investigators to believe JonBenet was sexually assaulted with the paintbrush handle. The tiny blood vessels inside JonBenet's eyelids had burst, and investigators find surprisingly little bleeding from the massive wound to her head. There's an eight-inch crack in her skull attributed to blunt force trauma. Putting those two facts together, some experts believe the strangulation happened first, meaning that by the time she was struck in the head, her heart may have already stopped or was barely pumping.

30:37Boulder police find two items that they think might be involved in the head injury, a baseball bat found outside the Ramsey's house and a maglite flashlight found in the kitchen. But there is no physical evidence on either one, no useful fingerprints, no DNA, nothing. It's two weeks after the murder, and Boulder Chief of Police Tom Kobe holds a town hall to answer reporters' questions about the ongoing investigation. JonBenet's death was the first murder reported in Boulder for 1996, and it happened with just five days left in the year. That lack of homicide experience matters, as there have been major mistakes at the crime scene, mistakes that cannot be undone.

31:22Did police search the house after the 911 call, but before the body was found. They did a preliminary search of the house, and remember, this is a very big house. Did they look in the room where John Ramsey said the girl's body was, or did they not? It doesn't appear that they got down. That room was down in a part of the basement that doesn't appear that they got to. But one person has zero doubt in her mind about who the killer is, Boulder Detective Linda Arndt. And John leaned down opposite me and his face was just inches from mine. And we had a nonverbal exchange that I will never forget. As we looked at each other, I remember, and I wore a shoulder holster, tucking my gun right next to me and consciously counting I've got 18 bullets because I didn't know if we'd all be alive when people showed up.

32:31I knew what happened. You were afraid because you thought the killer was still in the house.

32:39I knew it. Absolutely? Absolutely. And she's not the only one. Join me tomorrow for the next chapter in our story on MK Confidential.

33:17body is found. Standing inside the house on 15th Street with the Christmas trees still up and JonBenet's body lying at the foot of it, he considers the events of that morning. The ransom note, a stolen child, the 911 call, the long wait for the kidnapper's call, the father who walks straight down to a basement room and comes back up screaming, his dead child in his arms. The main floor is empty, but Agent Walker can hear the mother sobbing at the rear of the Ramsey house. He keeps walking the rooms. To a man who has worked cases like this many times before, the setup feels very familiar. Virtually every staged murder case that I have seen, the perpetrator manipulates the arrival of friends or other family members who are then put in a situation where they actually discover the body or they are with the perpetrator as the body is discovered.

34:17At 5.52 that morning, this was a kidnapping. By 1.05 in the afternoon, it is something else entirely. There is no kidnapper. There is no call. There is a murdered six-year-old girl in the basement of an upscale home and only a handful of people who are inside the house all night. The question is no longer who took JonBenet out of the house on Christmas night. The question is, who was already inside? I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

34:55Agent Ron Walker brings the FBI's playbook with him, and the playbook is old and blunt. When a child is killed inside her own home, investigators start with the people who are in the home and work outward. It's not insensitivity, it's math. FBI data going back decades suggests that the younger a child is when murdered, the more likely that a family member is involved. From almost the first hours, the eyes of the Boulder Police Department turn toward John and Patsy Ramsey. The trouble with that playbook is that a statistic is a starting point, not a finish line. Investigators can lock onto a suspect early and let the theory start bending the evidence to fit instead of the other way around.

35:42Walker's Denver Bureau offers Boulder its full weight, its labs, its profilers, its experience with exactly this kind of murder. But Boulder Police, a department that sees roughly one homicide per year, passes on the help. The most complicated child killing in America will be worked almost entirely by a department with virtually no experience solving homicides, not by federal investigators. Two detectives hand me their business cards and one says narcotics officer and the other says auto theft. And I bury my head into my hands because I knew at that point we were in a bad spot. Inside the Ramsey house, the family theory does not stay a hypothesis for long.

36:26As word spreads among the officers that JonBenet's body has been found in the basement, one cop says the quiet part out loud. Investigative reporter Paula Woodward has ears in the room. She later tells Netflix what it is she heard. There was a group of police investigators that had gathered at the Boulder Police Department that morning. When the word came in that Jomini's body had been found, a person inside that meeting told me that one investigator hissed in kind of an undertone and a whisper to another one. I knew it. They killed their daughter. Internally, John and Patsy are considered suspects.

37:09Both of them? Yes. Are considered to have probably been involved in the death of their daughter? Probability, yes. The Boulder PD detective who carries that conviction most strongly is a man named Steve Thomas. Thomas came up through narcotics. He has never worked a homicide in his life. And now he's leading one of the most scrutinized child murders in America.

37:37Someone needs to stand up and speak for JonBenet. but she can't speak for herself. Over the next 18 months, Detective Thomas builds the most complete case ever assembled against the Ramsey family. Steve Thomas starts with the ransom note on the Ramsey's own notepad and the possible practice line found inside the notebook belonging to Patsy. But he comes to believe the notepad was concealing much more than that. Thomas concludes there was an earlier draft, a first attempt, written on pages that were torn out and carried away, but never recovered. Two runs at a ransom note inside the victim's own house on the family's own paper.

38:29To Thomas, that note becomes the single strongest piece of evidence in the entire case. And he thinks it points squarely at the woman of the house, Patsy Ramsey. The ransom note is perplexing. Three pages written with a black felt tip pen telling John to listen carefully and claiming to represent a small foreign faction. Quote, at this time, we have your daughter in our possession. She is safe and unharmed. And if you want her to see 1997, you must follow our instructions to the letter. speaking to anyone about your situation, such as police, FBI, etc., will result in your daughter being beheaded.

39:11Don't try to grow a brain, John. Use that good Southern common sense of yours. It never uses the little girl's name. It even pauses in the middle of a kidnapping to compliment the father's company, saying, we respect your business. The Ramseys hire retired FBI profiler John Douglas to investigate the case. He reads the same note and comes to the opposite conclusion. Douglas hears a mind steeped in action movies. The note is filled with paraphrases from Dirty Harry, Speed, and Ransom, Mel Gibson's child kidnapping movie, which was in theaters just a month before JonBenet's death. Douglas says that's a lot of very similar material to be merely coincidental and it's difficult to imagine Patsy sitting alone in the kitchen writing out a fake ransom note after she's killed her own daughter and coming up with multiple action movie phrases the profiler raises an unsettling possibility that the note may have been written before JonBenet ever died both readings of the no degree on one thing.

40:22Whoever wrote those three theatrical pages did it slowly, calmly, comfortably, and they did it inside that house. Then there's the number. The ransom demand is $118 ,000. Not a round figure, not a kidnapper's clean million. And it lands within a few hundred dollars of the bonus John Ramsey received from his company the year before. Douglas sees this number as a real clue and tells NBC that Patsy did not know John's bonus amount. Well, who has this knowledge? The wife didn't have the knowledge. She doesn't know anything about that. This is money that's electronically placed in his 401k at the end of the year.

41:09So to me, it's kind of like the manifesto in the Unabomber. It begins to tell me more about the person who's responsible. This person has a very unique, intimate knowledge about his financial workings. Whoever wrote it knew the Ramseys personally, observed John professionally, or saw this number on a piece of paper inside the home. Of course, someone inside the house is not the same thing as a parent. A housekeeper could have seen that figure, a visitor, a former employee. John Ramsey suspected a creepy guy who had been in the house playing Santa Claus. It could be anyone who spent real time in the home.

41:53And as many as 20 keys to that home are unaccounted for in other people's hands. One detective who has yet to join the case will later offer a very different explanation for that oddly specific sum. But for now, the connection to John's bonus dominates the discussion about the 118 grand. And then there's the phone. The note promises a call between 8 and 10 in the morning. It never comes. Not by 10, not by 1, not ever. A kidnapping in which the kidnapper never makes contact, in which there's been no kidnapping. To Boulder Detective Steve Thomas, that silence is not a mystery. he surmises no one's calling because no one was ever going to call and someone in that house knows it.

42:46Reese Witherspoon here checking into my favorite hotel in Paris. Bonjour. Bonjour. I'm traveling with my Wells Fargo autographed journey card so I earn rewards wherever I book travel. Five times points with hotels, four times with airlines, three times on restaurants and other travel and one point on other purchases. Phew, that was a lot. I need to lie down. Is the room ready? Visit wellsfargo.com slash autograph journey. Terms apply. Hey, Chicagoland, the Wayfair store is in your neighborhood at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals and even open the refrigerators.

43:25Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget. Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for? Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Wayfair, every style, every home. When John Ramsey searches the house that afternoon on December 26th, Detective Thomas sees a man who does not search so much as travel straight down to the basement, straight to the one room that matters. The quiet phone line does not deepen the kidnapping in the detective's eyes.

44:03It ends part of the mystery altogether. Two images harden early in the minds of the police as JonBenet's body lies lifeless by the Christmas tree. Responding officers see Patsy on the floor clutching a crucifix, wailing. Jon, a few feet away, composed, controlled, and not going to her. To detectives, a husband's steadiness at the worst moment of his life starts to read as something colder. We're not soap opera actors. I mean, I suppose if I was an actor, I could act really angry. But I'm not. That's who I am. It's what you see. And I'm angry. This is angry for me. Within days on the advice of a close family friend and former prosecutor named Michael Bynum, the Ramseys retain lawyers, root their words through those lawyers, and begin to negotiate over a formal interview with police that will drag on for months.

45:03To the investigators and soon to the country, that looks like the behavior of people with something to hide. The Ramseys' attorneys wanted all the questions. They said they wouldn't go in for an interview with the police because they didn't know what the police were going to ask. On New Year's Day, 1997, A week after the murder, the Ramseys sit for a television interview, this long before sitting down with police. Detective Thomas sees this as the start of a pattern, a family that answers reporters who have agreed in advance not to ask about the murder while evading and delaying the harder questions from cops.

45:44The natural question is why? The Ramseys' former FBI man, John Douglas, reads it differently. He sees the Ramsey's behavior as exactly how wealthy, well-connected families behave inside a legal catastrophe. They involve lawyers, they distance themselves, and they proceed with caution. These are the same instincts the Lindbergh family showed in 1932 when their 20-month-old baby boy was kidnapped and killed. Many suspected the boy's famed pilot father, Charles Lindbergh, after his baby Charlie disappeared, because Charles seemed cold and aloof. But Lindbergh believed he functioned best in a crisis by staying controlled.

46:27John Ramsey's very similar. A veteran Navy pilot, self-made executive, who had already endured the loss of one beloved daughter, and the despair that followed. The distress that looks wrong on camera looks wrong because there's no version of grief over a murdered child that a parent performs correctly. Weeping reads as staged. Composure reads as guilt. The camera convicts either way. The day they're called to the Ramsey house, detectives notice a bowl of fresh-cut pineapple on the breakfast table upstairs with a spoon resting in it. The prints on that bowl belong to Patsy Ramsey and to nine-year-old Burke, not to JonBenet.

47:12I didn't put the bowl there, okay? I did not put the bowl there. I would not do this. And yet, JonBenet's stomach contains fresh, partly digested pineapple. The detectives pull that thread hard. The Whites, who hosted Christmas dinner the night before, served cracked crab, no pineapple. The Ramseys say their daughter fell asleep in the car and went straight to bed and never ate again. Yet the fruit is in her body, cut fresh. A forensic examiner named Werner Spitz, known for his work on the JFK autopsy, studies how far the pineapple traveled through JonBenet's system. He fixes JonBenet's time of death at, around, or before one in the morning.

48:01Detective Steve Thomas turns that into a single question that he cannot make fit into the family's account. when and where did JonBenet eat the pineapple? To Thomas, the math is plain. A bowl with the mother's fingerprints and the same fresh cut fruit inside the child. A stranger would have had to break in, feed a six-year-old a bedtime snack, and then wait two hours for it to digest before killing her. When the detectives show Burke a photo of the bowl, he knows it on sight. It belongs in the house. It was not carried in by a stranger. the pineapple is the first moment the family's timeline cracks and detective thomas never lets it go by the summer of 1997 steve thomas has interpreted the facts and built a theory of the whole night john benet died and he believes every word of it if i told you right now that we have trace evidence that appears to link you to the death of John Bonet.

49:07What would you tell me? 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. so we all got to start working together from here this day forward to try to find out who the hell did it a 40th birthday bearing down on patsy the exhaustion of christmas a couple of glasses of wine and a small ordinary fight over a dress between a mother who liked to dress as her daughter's twin and a little girl who did not want to match thomas believes that john benet wets the bed that night, a chronic problem in the months before her death.

49:54And then sometime before one in the morning, an exhausted, frazzled mother comes apart in her little girl's bathroom. One of the doctors the detectives consult tells them the toilet training problems are a textbook trigger for exactly this kind of parental rage. The way Thomas pictures it, Patsy slams her daughter against something hard like the edge of the tub, delivering a blow that fractures her skull. The child goes still, and Patsy, Thomas believes, thinks that in that instant, her daughter is already dead. What Thomas describes next is not a murder plan, it is sheer panic. A mother who could call for help and instead decides to hide what she's done.

50:39She carries the body down to the basement, goes back upstairs for her notepad and a felt-tip pen, and writes a kidnapping into existence, discarding one draft, then another, before the three pages are done. She builds a garrote from a broken paintbrush in her own art kit, just a few feet away from JonBenet's body. She ties her small wrists loosely in front, a binding that would never hold a living child, a gesture meant only to appear like restraint. She wraps her daughter in a blanket and leaves a favorite pink nightgown beside her. Patsy then lays a strip of tape across her mouth, and beneath it later, officers find a perfect set of lip prints, no sign of a struggle, no sign the child fought the tape.

51:29And when Patsy Ramsey opens the door to the first officer at nearly six in the morning, she is in the same clothes she wore the night before, her hair done, her makeup fresh. To Detective Thomas, this detail settles it. She had never been to bed. The lawman said as much when he squared off against John and Patsy on Larry King in 2000. My theory is that Patsy, in a violent confrontation with her daughter... Accidentally killed her? No, not accidental, I hypothesize, in the sense that it lacked motive. Tell me exactly, step by step, how you envisioned... I wasn't there, Patsy. You were in the hospital.

52:11You must have conjured something in your head for you to come out and call me a murderer of my child. Now, I want to hear one. I put together what you think happened that night. Well, I think there was a toileting issue that night that has been dismissed and underplayed. Explain. A bedwetting or a toileting issue. It caused Patsy to get mad at her daughter. Absolutely. Thomas does not believe John Ramsey killed his daughter. He finds nothing to put John in that bathroom. Our child wet her bed and we slaughtered her. That is so preposterous. You weren't there, John. You can't... I was there. I know Paxi.

52:51I've lived with her for 20 years. I know that she loved that child more than anything in the world. The detective hypothesizes that John reads the ransom note in his wife's hand, understands what he sees, and makes a choice not to expose her, but to stand in front of her with lawyers and to hold the line. Well, will you agree, Patsy, that almost none of it makes sense? Right. None of it. What was the guy doing? Why did the intruder do this? Evil, evil person. God knows, and the truth is going to prevail. John and Patsy also strongly dispute any notion that nine-year-old Burke was involved in his sister's death in any way.

53:35John told me this explicitly. 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. Within days of JonBenet's murder, satellite trucks start lining the block outside the Ramsey house on 15th Street. Reporters stand on the frozen lawns of the neighbors. News producers are pulling home video and pageant tape. The footage of a darling little girl in makeup and sequins, smiling beneath stage lights, about to run on a loop from coast to coast. Inside police headquarters, confidential reports are starting to slip out to reporters.

54:26Some of it wrong, some of it half true. All of it moving faster than the investigation itself. But what about the broken window and the suitcase beneath it? What about the ransom note and the unidentified male DNA found on JonBenet's underwear? These conflicting data points do not fit neatly on a magazine cover, nor do they play well in a 30-second TV spot. The local and national media are about to hand America a version of this story with every contradiction sanded away. A version with a verdict that's clean and easier for some to handle than the possibility that killers roam loose and kill innocent children in their homes at night.

55:13The parents did it. You may have heard this version before. A sweeping narrative that tries to tie up all the loose ends with a pretty bow, but in reality leaves many mysteries dangling. Tomorrow we will step through that narrative piece by piece through the eyes of the people who told it and saw it plastered on magazine racks nationwide. Join me tomorrow right here on MK Confidential.

55:48It's November 1997, a makeshift television studio in Boulder, Colorado, dressed up as a courtroom, a bench, a witness stand, a jury box and a studio audience. But it is not a courthouse. It is a daytime talk show hosted by Geraldo Rivera. And over several days, he puts the parents of a murdered six year old little girl on trial live on national television. No one has been arrested. No one's been charged. There is no real defense, no judge, no law. The defendants, John and Patsy Ramsey, are not even in the room. And at the end of it, Geraldo's jury returns a verdict. We, the jury, find John Bennett Ramsey liable for the wrongful death of JonBenet Ramsey.

56:35And as to Patsy? We, the jury, find Patsy Ramsey liable for the wrongful death of JonBenet Ramsey. To the best of our knowledge, there is no real evidence in this case that points in any direction other than straight into the faces of John and poor Patsy Ramsey. Liable for the wrongful death of their own baby girl. The verdict is not handed down by a court, but by a TV audience. An audience made up of staff from Boulder TV stations, guests at the local hotel, and other, quote, invite-only attendees. This, in a case where no one has been charged with anything. Geraldo and his squadron of producers, with no due process to the family, give us a final verdict.

57:25This is where the JonBenet Ramsey case is really being decided, not in a court of law, but on TV, in the so-called news, in the court of public opinion. And by the time this spectacle airs, that court has all but made up its mind. The question is not how the Ramseys became suspects. The question is how millions of people became dead certain they were guilty. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

57:58This started out as a simple but tragic murder of a child beauty queen, but then questions arose, curiosity arose, and suddenly the media descended on Boulder. We are told now that as many as 300 media representatives may be here right now following this story. To understand how it comes to a mock trial on daytime TV, we must look at the exact moment this story lands. It is the dead stretch between Christmas and New Year's in 1996. The news is quiet as a church mouse. The cable channels are young and hungry, the 24-hour cycle still figuring out how to fill a week when nothing is happening. And into that massive silence drops a story that has everything.

58:42Cops and kidnappers, a beautiful little girl, a bizarre ransom note, a black body bag wheeled out in front of Christmas lights, and to top it all off, millionaire parents who love child beauty pageants. It is Christmas all over again for lovers of murder mystery, beach reads, and ratings. JonBenet's murder arrives barely a year after the O.J. Simpson trial into an America that just spent months litigating that murder from its couch and is ready to do it all over again. The shadow of O.J. falls on the investigators, too. Boulder PD Detective Steve Thomas followed the O.J. Simpson trial and remembered how Simpson's attorneys ripped apart the LAPD's case by attacking their work.

59:29He watched the Simpson case collapse under its own mistakes and feared the same thing might happen in the Ramsey case. He wanted to be careful not to be the next office earned on live television. Here is the strange part. The Ramseys are not celebrities. John runs a very successful company, but no one outside Boulder knows their names. There is no famous face, no star power, nothing that should turn one local homicide into a national obsession. What there is instead is timing and a little girl who photographs like a movie star. Most murdered children leave behind a snapshot or two. This one left behind hours of tape, pageants, parades, recitals, home video, a short life spent performing for a camera.

1:00:20John Bidet, over here! So when the networks need pictures and videos to fill those empty holiday hours, the supply never runs out. and the same few seconds of a small girl in pageant makeup run again and again and again. That's 24 hours around the clock, coast to coast, we never close, open seven days a week. On the 2nd of January, 1997, a Denver station airs pageant video of JonBenet and the networks run it within the hour. There she is at a pageant weeks before her death. There she is in a spangled showgirl style costume, six years old, under stage lights with her hair bleached and her lips painted.

1:01:06I want to be a catboy sweetheart. To a country that has never heard of Boulder, these videos become JonBenet Ramsey. Not a precious kindergartner who likes to jump into leaf piles, but an image of big hair, makeup, and that practiced little wave. In the world the Ramseys came from, the Georgia pageant circuit, none of this is unusual. In some parts of the South, dressing a daughter up and putting her on stage is just a Saturday. Patsy had been Miss West Virginia herself, but to the rest of America, the sequins, the mascara, the hairspray come across as something eerie and disturbing. Major publications start describing JonBenet as moving on stage in a way that's adult, seductive, precocious, and wrong.

1:02:02In the pageant world, it is just choreography that a coach taught a child. No one bats an eye. But on national news broadcasts, stripped of that context, JonBenet's performances read as evidence of something far more sinister inside that home. While the country stares at the pageant videos, the case is leaking. Inside the Boulder PD, detectives are growing certain the family is the answer. and information to that end keeps surfacing in the newspapers. A reporter at the Rocky Mountain News, Charlie Brennan, becomes a regular destination for material coming out of the investigation. And some of the leaks are not accidental at all.

1:02:47Part of it is a police strategy to apply pressure through the press in the hope that a guilty parent cornered in public will finally crack. Sweat out, John and Patsy. But it doesn't start that way for the Ramseys. On New Year's Day 1997, six days after their daughter is found dead, and before they have sat for a single formal police interview, John and Patsy go on CNN. Patsy's voice cracks. There is a killer on the loose. I don't know who it is. I don't know if it's a he or a she. that if I were a resident of Boulder, I would tell my friends to keep...

1:03:37Keep your babies close to you. There's someone out there. Keep your babies close. From a grieving mother, it is a warning. To a lot of the country, it sounds like something else. a woman talking to the media before she talks to the police. And the town does not want the warning either. Two days after the Ramsey's first CNN interview, the mayor of Boulder steps up to a microphone. People in Boulder have no need to fear that there is someone wandering the streets of Boulder, has been portrayed by some people, particularly in talk radio, looking for young children to attack. Boulder is safe. It's always been a safe community.

1:04:24It continues to be a safe community. The city says, in effect, there is no stranger out there, which leaves the public only one place to look back inside that house. A friend of Patsy's, a photographer named Judith Phillips, who had shot the family's portraits, goes to the mayor's office in person to ask for protection for the Ramseys. She is told plainly there is no murderer out there. Across town, a mother whose little girl heard Patsy's warning on television cannot get her child to sleep in her own room for months. And around the Ramseys, something stranger is happening. Their circle goes quiet.

1:05:06Friends start getting calls from inside that circle with the same instruction. Do not talk to reporters. Do not talk to the police. Most of them comply. The photographer who went to the mayor does not. Judith Phillips opens her door to reporters, and she sits down with detectives twice. And for that, she is cut off, dropped by the people she thought were family, told she has betrayed them. And every silence the family leaves, the tabloids are happy to fill. The leaks are not always true, and the most damaging ones are the simplest. In March of 1997, Charlie Brennan's paper runs a story sourced to police saying, There were no footprints in the snow around the Ramsey home the morning after JonBenet's murder.

1:05:56If no one left footprints, the reasoning goes, then no intruder came or went, and the family must have done it. It travels everywhere at light speed. It sounds airtight. Here is what does not spread quickly with that story. The sergeant who walked the property that freezing morning noted a light dusting of snow on the grass, but the sidewalks and the driveway where a person would actually walk were dry, bare concrete. There was nothing there to hold a footprint in the first place. One source, one phrase, and a false fact that outlives the correction by decades. Then there is the plane. In the days after the family flies to their former home, Georgia, to bury their daughter, a story takes hold, that John Ramsey, cold and composed, piloted his own plane to the funeral.

1:06:51Here's how Paula Woodward, an investigative reporter out of Colorado, describes the shock of this story to Netflix. I remember saying to my husband, what kind of person is he? How could he do this when he's got to be so distraught over the terrible way his daughter died and the fact that she was murdered? How could he fly his plane to Atlanta? The tricky part here, a piece of it is true. John Ramsey is a licensed pilot. The family does own a small private plane, a twin engine kept at an airport outside Boulder. This is the plane they had planned to take on their second Christmas trip to Michigan, so the detail feels plausible.

1:07:34But it's not true. John Ramsey did not fly to his daughter's funeral. He later said he was too shaken to even consider it. His company, Lockheed Martin, loaned the family a corporate jet and its own two pilots for the trip to Georgia. The story painted an image of a father calmly flying himself across the country to bury his little girl. But it never happened. Years later, Brennan himself would look back on the story. When I reported that John Ramsey had piloted his own plane back to Atlanta for the funeral, that was inaccurate. It came from a source that I thoroughly trusted and had given me other solid information.

1:08:17That information was wrong. My source was wrong in that case. And that was a mistake. But the picture sticks because it fits the story the public has already been sold. And then the media seizes on the handwriting. Report after report tells the country Patsy Ramsey wrote the ransom note that the experts have tied her hand to that page. Sources say the ransom note written by the alleged kidnapper is considered a key piece of evidence. Handwriting experts have ruled out John Ramsey and others close to the family. They have not excluded Patsy Ramsey, who has submitted several samples. The reality, however, is not quite so clean.

1:09:02Reese Witherspoon here, checking into my favorite hotel in Paris. Bonjour. Bonjour. I'm traveling with my Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card, so I earn rewards wherever I book travel. Five times points with hotels, four times with airlines, three times on restaurants and other travel, and one point on other purchases. Phew, that was a lot. I need to lie down. Is the room ready? Visit wellsfargo.com slash autographjourney. Terms apply. Hey, Chicagoland. The Wayfair store is in your neighborhood at Edens Plaza in Wilmette. Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals, and even open the refrigerators.

1:09:40Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget. Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for? Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Wayfair, every style, every home. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation hands the ransom note to its examiner, Chet Ubowski, who studies it for the better part of a year and puts Patsy Ramsey through five separate handwriting tests. And his finding is not the one the leaks describe. He can find no evidence Patsy disguised her writing.

1:10:22He sees some shared letter formations and weighed against the number and consistency of the differences. he writes that he is unable to identify Patsy Ramsey as the author of that ransom note. Quote, could not be ruled out, end quote, is as far as anyone will responsibly go. But in the papers, magazines, and on TV, it becomes the handwriting matches. One man does go further. A Vassar College professor named Donald Foster, who analyzes text for a living, publicly announces that Patsy is the author. What the audience never hears is that this same professor had earlier written Patsy a private letter declaring her innocent, or that he had once used his methods to name an anonymous internet commenter as the killer, a person who turned out to be a middle-aged housewife in North Carolina with zero connection to this case.

1:11:21His credibility does not survive even mild scrutiny, yet the headline lives on. Then the pageant footage and the rumors braid together into something uglier, that JonBenet had been sexually abused and that the answer lay somewhere inside her own family. Investigators lean into it. Twice, police bring in a boulder-raised former Miss America, Marilyn Van Derber, a woman who had spent years telling the world that a polished, admired, wealthy family can hide a monstrous secret because hers had. Her own story is real and it is harrowing. You don't talk about it in families. Siblings don't talk to siblings.

1:12:07No, Jean Benet had tape over her mouth. That is the strongest message we have. You will never speak of it. Bringing Marilyn into the Ramsey investigation is not evidence it is insinuation by resemblance and on the actual evidence that insinuation collapses john benet's pediatrician and the doctors who reviewed her history none of them find physical or historical proof that this child had been abused before the night she died the damage from the abuse story is hard to measure it recasts a murdered six-year-old as a victim of her own family on the strength of costumes and speculation, and that colors everything the public sees.

1:12:52The accusation runs at the top of the hour. The correction, when it comes at all, is a line buried at the bottom of a story no one reads to the end. The Ramseys refuse to let this story be told without them. They fight back in public, on camera. Through 1997 and the years that follow, they give interviews, they sit for documentaries, They hire a Washington media consultant to manage the press. And in the spring of 1997, about four months after the murder, John and Patsy finally sit for formal police interviews. Then they walk straight out to a bank of microphones to announce that they've done so.

1:13:32Patsy looks into the cameras. I'm appalled that anyone would think that John or I would be involved in such a hideous, heinous crime. But let me assure you that I did not kill John Benet. I did not have anything to do with it. I loved that child with my whole of my heart and soul. But every public appearance becomes a new piece of evidence in a trial no one declared. America does not watch to be reassured. It watches to judge. The tone, the tears, the pauses. On CNN, viewers freeze the moment a reporter asks whether the Ramseys are certain their daughter was taken by an outsider. And Patsy shakes her head no.

1:14:27While John says yes. Every frame is parsed. Every silence is read. Our family is a loving family. It's a gentle family. A father insists, unprompted, that his family is gentle. And analysts spend years asking why he needed to say that at all. This is what the media coverage runs on now. Not new evidence, but the same handful of clips replayed, re-read, until a shaken head, a glance, or an unlucky phrase hardens into proof of guilt. By November of 1997, a Gallup poll finds 88 % of Americans with an opinion about who killed JonBenet point to one or both of her parents. This verdict is built almost entirely on 11 months' worth of leaked and distorted information, not on anything a court of law would ever admit.

1:15:21Which is how the country arrives, that November, at a talk show studio and mock jury. Nearly 30 years later, the man who built that spectacle, Geraldo Rivera, would apologize to John Ramsey in a conversation on NewsNation. I deeply apologize to you for what you and your family have suffered. When I say I am sorry, I don't apologize for my reporting. I believe that at least half the reporters and half the nation believe that the shadow of suspicion, half the Boulder Police Department, for those who have retired because of this case, believe it. But I don't know what happened. I just want you to know that I lament contributing to the hurt that you have endured.

1:16:14No one deserves to go through what you went through. Well, thank you. Off camera, the investigation is breaking apart. The Boulder PD and the district attorney are barely speaking, and each side shapes the story its own way for reporters. One of the officers who worked the case, former Boulder PD officer Gretchen Smith, later described the internal rot to a CBS documentary team. The JonBenet case destroyed morale completely. Really? There was no morale. The district attorney's office and some of administration did not want to hear that an affluent member of the community was guilty of a crime like this.

1:16:56They didn't want to hear that. I don't think they wanted to solve this crime. And if they had to go down a different path that might not have been the truth, I think they were willing to do that. Another friend of the Ramseys breaks the silence in their social circle. Fleet White, one of the Ramseys' closest friends, was beside John when the body was found. Fleet would later describe how his family's life changed after the murder. On Christmas Day, 1996, John and Patsy Ramsey and their children, Burke and JonBenet, were dinner guests at our home. The next day, we were present at the Ramsey home.

1:17:32When JonBenet's body was found, Priscilla and I and our children instantly became witnesses in the Boulder Police investigation of JonBenet's death. In August of 1998, Fleet and his wife Priscilla criticized the investigation in an open letter to the people of Colorado. Here's part of it. After JonBenet Ramsey was killed in Boulder nearly 20 months ago, her parents immediately hired prominent criminal defense attorneys with close professional, political, and personal ties to prosecutors, the Denver and Boulder legal and judicial communities, state legislators, and high-ranking members of the Colorado government, including Governor Roy Romer.

1:18:13The investigation of her death has since been characterized by confusion and delays. The district attorney and the Ramsey attorneys have simultaneously rebuked the police for focusing their investigation on the Ramseys, when in fact police were simply following evidence. During the course of the investigation, the district attorney has used inexplicable methods, including the recruitment of magazine writers and tabloids to leak information concerning the case and to needle witnesses, suspects, and police detectives. He has provided evidence to Ramsey defense attorneys at their request, but denied reasonable requests by witnesses for their own statements to police.

1:18:53He has thoroughly alienated police detectives and key witnesses whose cooperation is vital to the investigation and prosecution. His public statements regarding the investigation have been erratic, evasive, and misleading. We must be mindful, however, of the first cause of the investigation's failure, the refusal of John and Patsy Ramsey to cooperate fully and genuinely with those officially charged with the responsibility of investigating the death of their daughter, John Benet, end quote. The people who knew the Ramseys best are splitting up into camps. On the record, off the record, And America gobbles up every word of both.

1:19:37Week after week, the supermarket racks turn JonBenet into a symbol and the Ramseys into characters. The cold father, the ambitious mother, the perfect family with something rotten underneath. Rumor becomes packaging, speculation becomes a headline. And by the time anyone asks what has actually been proven, millions of people have already accepted the accusation as fact. And here is the piece of evidence that should have stopped all of this. On JonBenet's body, under her fingernails, and inside her underwear, there is DNA from an unknown man. It's not Jon's. It's not Patsy's, not Burke's. It belongs to a stranger left physically on the murdered child.

1:20:22The Colorado Bureau of Investigation confirms it in a lab report within about three weeks of the killing in January 1997, the single strongest piece of evidence pointing away from the Ramsey family. There is no press conference for this revelation. No leaks about the unidentified male DNA. Boulder police sit on the finding. Roughly six months go by before the district attorney's office is even told what the lab found. The public waits far longer. The fact that could have broken the case was filed in a drawer. until 2003, when the DNA is uncovered and given to the FBI for testing. It does not match anyone in the FBI's criminal database, and to this day remains a mystery.

1:21:10In 2016, nearly 20 years after the murder, the media machine turns on John and Patsy's surviving child, Burke. Burke was nine years old when his sister was killed. The Ramseys say he was asleep the entire night just down the hall. CBS airs a primetime special built around the theory that Burke killed his sister with paid experts and a staged reenactment. Burke Ramsey sues the network. Well, the Boulder Daily Camera reports the brother of JonBenet Ramsey has reached a settlement with CBS. Burke Ramsey sued CBS after a television series the network aired suggested he killed his six-year-old sister in Boulder.

1:21:51No court ever finds that Burke did anything. The detectives and the prosecutors who actually worked this case never charged Burke, but the theory is now in prime time, 20 years later. In this story, no one's ever really cleared. They're only re-accused on a later night for a new audience. This is the cost of a trial by television, by the news media. The footprints that were never there. The plane he never flew, the handwriting that never matched, the alleged history of abuse that was never proven. Each one is corrected quietly, if at all, and long after the smear has done its dirty work. Underneath the entire narrative lies the DNA of a man no one can name.

1:22:36That DNA sits in a drawer because it does not fit the story the country has already chosen to believe, the one it's been led to. Before a single charge is ever filed, in the only court that seems to matter, the Ramseys have long ago been found guilty. But while the whole country is staring inside that house, one veteran detective is about to walk into this case all but certain the parents did it and walk out believing the exact opposite. Tomorrow, we'll hear his side of the story and the compelling picture he paints on MK Confidential.

1:23:18November 22nd, 1963 in Dallas, Texas, the day JFK is assassinated. It had rained overnight, but by mid-morning, the sky is clear and the day is warm. Look at the photographs of the crowd waiting for the president's motorcade and you will see it. No raincoats, no galoshes, not a single open umbrella because it is a beautiful day. Except, that is, for one man. In all of Dealey Plaza, in all of Dallas, there is exactly one man standing under an open black umbrella. And he is standing on the grass at the precise spot where seconds later, President Kennedy's body will jolt forward and back as the bullets find him.

1:24:05For years, that man is a gift to conspiracy theorists. Investigators call him the Umbrella Man. One theory holds that the umbrella itself is a weapon, that its shaft conceals a dart gun fired into JFK's throat. Some come to believe the umbrella man is the real assassin, because what possible innocent reason could a man have to stand under an umbrella on a cloudless day exactly where all the shots killed President John F. Kennedy? And then in 1978, someone finally just asks him. The umbrella man comes forward and testifies before Congress with his umbrella. And his explanation is so strange, so wacky, it can only be true.

1:24:51The umbrella was a protest, not against JFK, but against his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, and his father's appeasement of Hitler and the Nazis in the lead up to World War II. I just knew that it was a sore spot for the Kennedys. The umbrella that the Prime Minister of England came back with got to be a symbol with the, in some manner, with the British people. By association, it got transferred to the Kennedy family. The black umbrella is a visual insult, a reference to the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who carried one everywhere. That's the secret. A grieving nation's darkest riddle.

1:25:32And the answer is a man making an obscure political protest with an umbrella. The investigator, Josiah Thompson, who chased that mystery for years, drew one lesson from it. If you have any fact which you think is really sinister, right, is really obviously a fact which can only point to some sinister underpinnings, hey, forget it, man, because you can never on your own think up all the non-sinister, perfectly valid explanations for that fact. A cautionary tale. That is the warning of the Umbrella Man. The strangest fact in a case is not always what it seems. And the murder of JonBenet Ramsey is full of strange facts.

1:26:25A ransom note on the family's own paper. A mother who talks to the cameras before the police. A father composed when he should be falling apart. In the spring of 1997, one man walks into this case and refuses to trust his eyes. He wants the evidence, and only the evidence, to tell the story. His name is Lou Smit. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

1:26:59Lou Smit is not a defense lawyer. He is not a Ramsey friend. He is a career homicide detective out of Colorado Springs. More than 200 murders worked, a clearance rate nearly 90%. Lou is a deeply religious and methodical man whom they call the Sherlock of the Rockies. His reputation is built on cases like Heather Dawn Church, a 13-year-old girl who vanished from her home in 1991. The case sat cold for years until Smith went back through the file and lifted a single fingerprint off a window screen that everyone before him had missed. That print put her killer away. Lou is a finder of things other people failed to see.

1:27:45In March of 1997, three months after JonBenet's murder, Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter brings Smith onto the JonBenet Ramsey task force. The case is already going sideways, and the police and prosecutors are at each other's throats. Lou Smith had retired just the previous year to spend time with his wife, Barb, who was battling cancer. Now he's back on the force and in a different city away from his family and investigating another family affected by cancer. Smith starts on the Ramsey case exactly where the police did, with the parents. He knows the stats. He knows a child found dead inside a home usually means someone who lived there is responsible.

1:28:30He arrives expecting to help prove that the family did it. Then Smith sits down with a file, and he works the way he always works, by a principle he learned decades before, the transfer theory. Whenever a person commits a crime, they leave something of themselves at the scene and carry something from the scene away with them. Find what was brought in and what was taken out, and the evidence will tell you who was there. So Lou Smith stops asking who had a motive and instead asks a colder question. What does the physical evidence on its own actually say? And the longer he looks, the more he believes a new story.

1:29:16It starts in the basement with a window. Low in the basement wall, on the south side of the Ramsey house, there is a window found wide open on the morning of December 26th. The crime lab photographs it that way hours before John Ramsey ever finds John Benet's body. Beneath it, inside, on the white painted wall, a black scuff mark. and on the floor directly below a hard-sided Samsonite suitcase stood upright on its end in a spot where no one in the family says it belongs. Inside the suitcase, a pink duvet, a Barbie doll, and one of JonBenet's Dr. Seuss books. The Boulder detectives tell Smith that the window is nothing.

1:30:04No one could have come through there. There's a metal grate over the outside window well. So Smith studies the grade himself. And in the crime lab photos from that morning, he finds leaves and vegetation disturbed underneath it. And dirt brushed clean off the frame of the open window. To all appearances, it looks like someone has passed through there, or at least has tried. Then Lou does the thing that becomes his signature. A retired detective in his 60s lowers himself into that window well and squeezes through that basement window on video to prove a grown man can do it. Now, this is where I think the killer actually got in at some point.

1:30:51The grade has to be picked up and put down. John Ramsey had broken that window himself the summer before when he was locked out of the house and he believed it had been fixed. To Smith, the open pane is the point of entry. The scuff on the wall is where a body scraped through, and the suitcase is not clutter, it is a step, something the killer stood on to climb back out. Lou comes to believe the intruder may have meant to carry JonBenet out of the house inside that suitcase and found it too big to force up through the window. Near her body in the basement, there is white foam packing debris and brown leaves, the same material that lines the bottom of that window well.

1:31:37Smit believes the killer brought that into the house and left behind two traces, a partial boot print from a brand NoRamsey owns, and an unidentified palm print on the door of the little room where JonBenet was found. But Lou keeps building. He looks at the house itself. JonBenet's bedroom is on the second floor. Her parents sleep one flight up in a converted attic suite at the very top of the house. Investigators run sound tests and find that a voice in JonBenet's room is barely audible from the master bedroom. Smit looks around the home and thinks, This is a big, chopped up, four-level house in a college neighborhood with foot traffic at all hours and an alarm system the family had switched off months before.

1:32:28This is not a sealed fortress. It is a place a patient stranger could move through in the dark for hours, unseen and unheard. He studies how JonBenet was bound, a garrotte built from white cord and the broken handle of one of Patsy's paintbrushes tied with slipknotes that only tighten as the victim pulls against them. To Smith, that is not the panicked improvisation of a parent covering up an accident. It is the equipment. It is intent. And the Ramseys owned none of the raw materials. No parachute cord, no roll of duct tape. Police searched the house, the cars, the office, even the airplane hanger, and found none of it.

1:33:14Whoever built that garage and taped the little girl's mouth shut, but he brought his tools in and carried most of them back out. Then there are the marks. Lou Smit is the first person on the case to take them seriously. On JonBenet's body, there are two sets of small red marks, a pair on her back and a pair on the right side of her face. Smit measures the gap and matches it to the twin metal contacts of a specific weapon, an air taser, a stun gun. What I'd like to show you is what I think is one of the most important clues left behind by the guilty. Stun gun. There's marks on JonBenet. Those are marks on her back.

1:34:07Those are marks on her face. And there's the same distance of heart, slightly rectangular and shake. Somebody made those marks. In Smith's reconstruction of JonBenet's murder, the stun gun is used twice. Once upstairs, pressed to the child's jaw and throat while she sleeps, enough to stun her silent so she can be carried down without a sound. And once more in the basement, on her back, as she struggles. A forensic pathologist reviews the comparison and calls the stun gun evidence compelling. Unless some other evidence is presented to me, the most likely explanation for those injuries that they were caused by a stun gun.

1:34:52That hands Lou the answer to a detail that never fit any other version of the night. The scream. A neighbor, Melody Stanton, asleep across the street from the Ramseys with her window open, 150 feet away, reports hearing a child scream around 2 a.m. that morning. A scream the Ramsey family inside the house say they never heard. If it came from the basement, they might not have. Beneath all of it, beneath the broken window and the stuffed suitcase and the pairs of red marks, sits the evidence Lou Smith calls the key to this entire case, and that is the DNA. The Colorado lab finds a small partial profile of male DNA drawn from a bloodstain in JonBenet's underwear.

1:35:45It belongs to no one in the family nor to any suspect ever tested. This sample, however, is too small and too degraded for the lab to identify the fluid or the tissue behind it. Whether the DNA came from spit or sweat or shed skin, no one has ever been able to say. It is male. It is not from the Ramsey family. And past that, a blank. During the autopsy, a Boulder PD detective runs an ultraviolet light over the body and thinks he sees traces of semen. But it turns out to be a smear of blood. No semen is ever found on JonBenet. The autopsy indicates that the sexual assault is consistent with penetration by a finger or an object.

1:36:35Broken blood vessels in JonBenet's vagina show she was penetrated that night, and a microscopic fleck of wood is found inside of her, most likely from the splintered paintbrush used to build the garage. The unknown male DNA is not only found on JonBenet's underwear, the same profile is found as touch DNA from skin cells inside the waistband of her long johns. To a detective raised on the idea that every killer leaves a piece of himself behind, one stray speck might be a fluke. But the same stranger's DNA twice on a murdered child is a person who was there. Reese Witherspoon here, checking into my favorite hotel in Paris.

1:37:21Bonjour. Bonjour. I'm traveling with my Wells Fargo autograph journey card, so I earn rewards wherever I book travel. Five times points with hotels, four times with airlines, three times on restaurants and other travel, and one point on other purchases. Phew, that was a lot. I need to lie down. Is the room ready? Visit wellsfargo.com slash autograph journey. Terms apply. Hey, Chicagoland. The Wayfair store is in your neighborhood at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals, and even open the refrigerators. Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget.

1:38:03Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for? Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Wayfair, every style, every home. smith argues one more point and it is the shakiest part of his case that a predator who would do this would not do it once that somewhere there is a pattern other home invasions other children and that boulder is not the safe sealed community its officials keep insisting it is and there is one case that haunts that argument more than any other it happens in september of 1997, nine months after John Bonet is killed, less than two miles from the Ramsey home.

1:38:52Late one night, a masked man breaks into a house and sexually assaults a 12-year-old girl in her own bed. He has slipped past the alarm system and past the family dog, and by the family's account, he did not force his way in that night at all. He appears to have gotten inside earlier while the house was empty and then hidden there waiting until the family came home, locked the doors, and fell asleep. He is stopped only when the girl's mother comes down the hall after hearing whispers in the dark. He escapes out the bedroom window and vanishes into the night. He is never caught. That 12-year-old girl was a student at the very same local dance studio as JonBenet.

1:39:38Two little girls from one small dance school two miles apart. One strangled in her basement on Christmas night. The other, nine months later, attacked in her own bed by a masked man who had hidden inside her home and then vanished back into the neighborhood. To John Ramsey and to the detectives who came to believe him, that is not a coincidence. It's a pattern. Possibly the very same man. Lou never stops making the argument. There is evidence of an intruder. I say this over and over and over again. Nobody wants to listen. And as a result of that, there's a very good chance that tragedy could again strike this family.

1:40:23That is the case for the intruder as Lou Smith built it. Now here is what stands against it. Start with the window and the spider web. To reach that basement window, an intruder first has to lift the metal grate over the outside well. And a spider web runs across that grate, its strands anchored from the metal down to the bricks of the wall, or at least that's how it appears. The original web is never photographed, and whether it connects the grate itself to the house is a point of contention. The officers who inspect it find the web whole. That spells trouble for the intruder theory. If the spider web is intact and connects the metal to the house, it suggests the grate above the window well was never lifted at all.

1:41:16It is the single hardest fact against Lou Smith's window theory. But Smith reads that same grate the opposite way. Now this is where I think the killer actually got in at some point. And there is a gas reel here and then there's a south door to the house. Right behind this gas grill is a grate. And you put the grate up, you're looking straight down into the window. There's three windows there. The center one was the one that was open. And you're going to see foliage, that green foliage under the leading edge of that grate. Don't grow that way. The grate has to be picked up and put down. Smith says the grate is not bolted down, and he is sure that a patient hand can ease it up and set it back without snapping a strand.

1:42:07During one walkthrough of the house, Smith eases the grate open without breaking a fresh web that is grown between the grate and the house. Even Detective Steve Thomas notes that Smith was able to navigate the grate without breaking the web, while detectives who try lifting the grate break several web strands. So the web does not settle the question. It only sharpens it. There's one more possible explanation for the web, an industrious spider. Detective Michael Everett from Boulder PD consults two spider experts, Dr. Brent Opel of Virginia Tech and Dr. Robert Bennett of the British Columbia Ministry of Forests.

1:42:51Both identify the web as a funnel web, a kind of web that a spider spins and repairs for as long as it's alive. The night JonBenet died, the temperature in Boulder dropped to around 6 degrees. By the next afternoon, it was back up into the low 50s. The open window faces southwest into the afternoon sun. While the funnel weaver spider hibernates through a Colorado winter, Bennett says the Ramsey window well had perfect conditions for a hibernating spider to wake up and repair its web and re -spin it that day or the next. However, it's unclear precisely what time of day officers first observed the fully intact spider web and whether there would have been enough time for the spider to spin it fresh.

1:43:42Like all the other evidence in this case, even the spiderweb points two ways at once. Then we get to the stun gun. The cold case team in the 2016 CBS documentary tests this part of the theory by using a stun gun on a volunteer. The marks it leaves behind do not match those on JonBenet. And the effect is the opposite of silence. Taser, taser. if this were done to this kid you would have a scream from this kid that goes through the entire building everybody in that house would have heard it so the stun gun like the window stays contested but the marks are still there on dead john benet's skin and no version in which the parents did it has ever fully explained them.

1:44:39Then the DNA, where the counter is technical and it is fair. This is a tiny amount of touch DNA, and skilled scientists caution that trace DNA like this can travel. It could be carried to the scene by a factory worker who handled the underwear or transferred from one service to another. It is not on its own a name. The DNA profile has been run against a great many people over the years, and it's never matched a single one of them. John Ramsey will spend the rest of his life saying those three letters are the answer. That the identity of the man who killed his daughter is sitting in an evidence locker, waiting for science to catch up to him.

1:45:25The police find no definitive connection between the 1997 home invasion in Boulder and the murder of John Bonet. No forensic thread that ties the same hand to both crimes. One Boulder PD officer bluntly sums up the department's stance on the Ramsey murder. This was one of a kind. Lou never manages to prove the link. Smith's intruder theory has two more potential holes, and they are not small. First, it has to explain the ransom note, three pages long written on a pad from inside the house, demanding a ransom that almost exactly matches John Ramsey's annual bonus. It has to explain why a stranger who broke in to steal a child would then sit down in that dark house and compose three theatrical pages instead of simply carrying her out the door.

1:46:19And it is not only the ransom note. Remember the garage. Its handle is a piece of Patsy's own paintbrushes taken from her art kit in the basement. The pad, the pen, the paintbrush. The killer builds this crime in part out of the family's own belongings. A stranger organized enough to arrive with a stun gun, duct tape, and cord, who then fashions the murder weapon from a mother's paintbrush and writes his ransom demand on the household notepad, is a genuinely odd figure. To the bolder detectives, it is the strangest, the damnedest thing about the whole intruder theory, an outsider who behaves at the decisive moment exactly like someone who already lives there.

1:47:06Lou has an answer. He believes the original plan of a kidnapping for ransom went wrong in the basement. In Lou's mind, the murderer entered the house through the open basement window while the family was out at Christmas dinner. He wrote the ransom note on the family notepad, then hid inside the house. Once the family was asleep, the killer crept into JonBenet's room and used a stun gun to incapacitate her. He then carried her down to the basement, fashioned a garrotte with Patsy's paintbrush handle, and sexually assaulted JonBenet with his fingers. I believe he brought her down to the farthest, deepest part of that basement and did very brutal things to her.

1:47:50Lou believes the killer used the garrote both as a tool of erotic asphyxiation or strangulation fantasy and actual deadly strangulation. Lou believes that JonBenet came to at some point and started to fight back. That the attacker then panicked and hit her over the head, possibly with a flashlight. or an aluminum baseball bat, both found in the Ramsey house. The killer then believed that JonBenet was dead and fled out the basement window. As for the oddly specific ransom amount, Lou explains that$118 ,000 would have yielded exactly 1 million Mexican pesos at that time. If the intruder were planning to run to the border, 1 million pesos sounds like a nice round number to help with an escape.

1:48:41by 1998 the john benet ramsey case is no longer just a murder investigation it has devolved into two camps at war the boulder pd believes the answer lies inside the ramsey house lou smith and the district attorney's office are convinced it came in from the outside the police and prosecutors barely trust each other early on the two sides fought over how to handle JonBenet's body, the police wanting to hold it back from burial as leverage to force the parents into an interview, and the DA's office shaming police for ransoming a dead child. It is a small, ugly fight over a child's body. It is also the first crack in a divide that will run through everything to come and swallow this entire case.

1:49:30And within a few weeks of each other, that war produces two major casualties, two detectives with opposite conclusions, both quitting the case in protest. In August of 1998, Steve Thomas, the lead detective who believes Patsy killed JonBenet, resigns with a public letter blasting the DA for refusing to charge the Ramsey family. And in September of 1998, Lou Smit resigns for the exact opposite reason. He writes to the district attorney that he cannot, in good conscience, be part of the persecution of innocent people. Smith does not walk away from the case itself, however. He keeps working it for free for the rest of his life.

1:50:15I don't know if I could solve it without the help of the police department, and I'm sure I'm not going to get that. But I know that God had a plan. I'm part of it, and I'm just going to continue to work in it as long as he needs it. Lou hauls around his boxes of photographs and his slide deck of the window and the marks and the DNA from meeting to meeting, right up until his death in 2010. Friends later say he took this case to his grave. Lou's adult children carry the torch forward and continue to investigate to this day. Back in 1998, the investigation stalled. because the people the detectives most needed to talk to stopped talking.

1:50:59John and Patsy Ramsey, on their lawyer's advice, will not sit for open police interviews at this point. Friends who are around the house that Christmas, they've lawyered up as well. A grand jury is the one tool that can break this wall. It can subpoena witnesses, force testimony under oath, and demand evidence the police cannot otherwise get. It can lock down memories in testimony before they fade, including the account of Ramsey's young son, Burke. In March of 1998, the Boulder PD formally asks District Attorney Alex Hunter to take this case to a grand jury, and the PD announces it in a press release.

1:51:43Quote, quote, while there is still some investigation left to be done, both Chief Kobe and Commander Beckner believe the investigation has progressed to the point at which the authority of a grand jury is necessary in order to complete the investigation, end quote. For months, D.A. Hunter resists. In his meetings with the police, he calls a grand jury a political solution, not a way to solve the case. In public, his office calls the idea premature. But now the police are demanding it in public and Hunter is out of good options. So he gives in. And in September 1998, Alex Hunter convenes a grand jury.

1:52:25He brings in an outside specialist, former federal prosecutor Michael Caine, to run it. And he hands the biggest question in the case, whether anyone can be charged in JonBenet's death to a group of ordinary Boulder citizens sworn to lifelong secrecy. They hear from former FBI profiler John Douglas, whom the Ramseys hired to investigate this case, who believes that an intruder killed JonBenet. I've sat down across a table from some of the country's greatest liars in the world, really, and I can sense it. And things just did not fit. The crime scene data just doesn't fit. But when I'm looking at this man, Mr.

1:53:11Ramsey, if you did it, you are one hell of a liar. You are one hell of a liar if you did it. And you're putting on a great production here. But I just don't believe in my heart he did this. And not just in my heart, from the analysis of the scene. They hear from Lou Smit, too. Smit brings the grand jury the case of his life. More than 600 slides built one photograph at a time. The open window, the disturbed grate, the suitcase, the marks on the child's skin, the DNA, all of it. And at the end of it, the question that has hung over the Ramsey family for two years is finally going to get an answer.

1:53:56Will John and Patsy be charged with the murder of their daughter or not? That grand jury will sift through evidence for more than a year. But it turns out that what the grand jury decides and what the public is told are two wildly different things. We'll open that door and everything behind it tomorrow on MK Confidential.

1:54:24It is October 13th, 1999, a lovely fall Wednesday in Boulder, Colorado. 13 months of testimony in the grand jury proceeding looking into the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. More than 30 ,000 pieces of evidence, dozens of witnesses, all of which culminates in one man walking up to a bank of microphones. District Attorney Alex Hunter steps up onto the outdoor platform. Reporters are huddled and the cameras are already rolling. Alex Hunter has a single page of paper in hand. The grand jurors have done their work extraordinarily well, bringing to bear all of their legal powers, life experiences, and shrewdness.

1:55:10Yet I must report to you that I and my prosecution task force believe we do not have sufficient evidence to warrant the filing of charges against anyone who has been investigated at this time. Thank you very much. And that's it. No charges, no indictment, no arrest. The reporters filed their stories that night with a single headline, the grand jury found nothing. Except the grand jury did not find nothing. What no one in that room knows is that those grand jurors voted to indict John and Patsy Ramsey. They signed true bills, the formal charges a grand jury returns when it believes there is enough evidence to proceed.

1:56:03Not for murder, but for child abuse resulting in death and for accessory to first-degree murder for helping to hide whoever killed John Benet. Alex Hunter declined to sign and file those true bills. How it works is a grand jury indicts on probable cause, the lowest bar in the law. A prosecutor then has to decide whether this case can be proved at trial beyond a reasonable doubt, the highest bar there is. Hunter decided he could not clear that distance. So he sealed the true bills away, walked to the microphone, and told the world he had nothing. The district attorney will keep that secret for 14 years.

1:56:46The case will outlast Alex Hunter. It will outlast the detectives who fought over it. It will even outlast one of the two parents living under its shadow. But this case was never really closed. It was only sealed. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential, with our final episode in the investigation into the death of JonBenet Ramsey. you

1:57:15For the Ramseys, Alex Hunter's decision not to press charges does not bring freedom. It's a strange kind of life sentence. They're never arrested, never tried, never convicted. They live as prime suspects. They walk through airports, grocery stores, church parking lots, carrying an accusation no jury will ever test and no court can lift. The accusation costs them more than their peace. John Ramsey once ran a billion-dollar company. But as John himself told Barbara Walters, this case has ruined the family financially. Before John Benet's death, you were reportedly worth millions of dollars. But that money seems to have gone.

1:58:00I was told by a very experienced FBI person that most victims of violent crime end up broke. It's very expensive to deal with, the justice system. You make bad decisions. You sell your home, you move, you quit your job, you change job. In defending themselves, the Ramseys enlist a small army of lawyers, investigators, publicists, handwriting experts, and a former FBI profiler. A fortune once estimated north of$7 million shrinks toward one. They sell the house on 15th Street, the house where JonBenet was murdered, and never spend another night in it after the Christmas of 1996. They're not spending this money to win a case.

1:58:45They are spending it to prove a negative, that they did not murder their own child. While the family fights the accusation in public, Detective Lou Smith works the case in private, chasing his intruder theory. The lone man, he is certain, is out there somewhere. And Lou is not the only one chasing the lone wolves. Every few years, new names surface, the possible break everyone's been waiting for. In March of 1997, Boulder police get a call from the state of North Carolina about a drifter named John Brewer Eustace. He's charged with the rape and kidnap of a two-year-old girl in Charlotte. He pried open a basement apartment's window screen, snatched the child from a bedroom, and took her out the window.

1:59:32Eustace is also the suspect in the murders of three other young girls across the country. When police go into Eustace's house, there's a shrine to John Benet. So Boulder detectives travel halfway across the country to Charlotte and review the evidence themselves. Could Eustace have been in Colorado in December? Unfortunately, Eustace has a rock-solid alibi for that night. He worked in a factory and he had clocked in, covering the time period in which JonBenet had died. There is Gary Oliva, a convicted pedophile who the morning after JonBenet's murder calls an old high school friend sobbing into the phone, saying, I just heard a little girl.

2:00:14He's written a series of letters, including ones where he has admitted taking the life of JonBenet Ramsey. He's in custody right now. But he sent these letters. And the question is, is this for real? In December of 2000, police arrest Gary on drug charges. And he's found carrying a photograph of JonBenet, a stun gun, and a poem he has written to her. Living on the streets, Gary often visited a local church, which fed homeless people, and is located less than 10 houses away from the Ramsey home. Police run his DNA against the unknown male fluids on JonBenet's body and on her clothes and no match.

2:00:58There is Randy Simons, the photographer who took JonBenet's pageant portraits. Shortly after JonBenet's death, multiple beauty pageant mothers report to police that Randy called them up hysterical, saying, I did not kill JonBenet. I did not kill JonBenet. No one was saying he did. A year later, Randy was walking down the street naked and the police were called. During his arrest, he blurts out to police unprompted, I did not kill JonBenet. A red flag again, but no match on the DNA. There is Michael Helgoth, a Boulder area man who works near the Ramsey home and has a history of violence and sexual abuse.

2:01:39Just weeks after JonBenet's killing, Helgoth turns up dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, right as word spreads that the DA is closing in on a suspect. Among his possessions, a stun gun and a pair of high-tech boots, the same brand as a print left on the concrete near where JonBenet was found. But his DNA, too, does not match. behind those four names is a parade of thousands more boulder pd follow up on more than 21 000 tips letters emails traveling across 19 states talking to more than 1 000 people possibly connected to this crime and then in the summer of 2006 comes the biggest thunderbolt of them all it does not come from Boulder or the old list of suspects.

2:02:30It comes from the other side of the world, 8 ,500 miles away, Thailand. It comes to Boulder through an inbox. Starting in 2002, a stranger calling himself Daxus begins emailing University of Colorado professor Michael Tracy. Tracy has spent years making documentaries about JonBenet's murder, and now this stranger, Daxus, wants to talk. Daxas begins to inundate the Colorado professor with emails, hundreds of them. At first, the emails read like the outpourings of an obsessive JonBenet fan. But over the months that follow, they curdle into something far more revolting. Slowly, Daxas starts to say that he killed JonBenet.

2:03:16In one email, he writes, are you asking me why I killed JonBenet? I don't see it that way. Her and I were engaging in a romantic and very sexual interaction. It went bad and it was my fault. Daxus gives specifics on the Ramsey staircase, describes the basement, the blanket, and the exact room where JonBenet was killed. He messages about a check stub for 118 ,000 he saw on Jon Ramsey's desk. Daxus claims to be under federal investigation for, quote, child murder and child molestation in four states. Michael Tracy is skeptical. By this point, so much information has been casually released by the police, is out in news specials and magazines or just leaked onto the Internet, and people confess to notorious crimes all the time for attention.

2:04:08So the Colorado professor tests Daxus. I said, how come I don't know you're just pulling this from the Internet and feeding me what is out there already. And he said, ask John Ramsey what Jean-Mané's nickname was for Nedra, her grandmother, and it will be this. So I emailed John. What was the nickname? It comes back, Neddy. It was right, it was correct. Because John searched, there was nowhere that that nickname was known in the public domain. Michael discusses Daxus with Boulder detective Lou Smith. as well. I would share some of the emails with Lou Smith. And I said, look, you know, I've got this from this guy.

2:04:51I have no idea where this guy is, where he is. He could be next door. I have no idea. And I would say to Lou, just tell me it's a nutcase and we can end it. And Lou said, no can do, Michael. Got to keep at it. The emails with Daxas go on for four years. He's a ghost. His emails untraceable. During all of this, the woman at the center of this case is running out of time. Patsy Ramsey has been fighting ovarian cancer since 1993. It went into remission in 1995, then came back in 2002. And this time the cancer is resistant to treatment and slowly overwhelms Patsy. In 2006, it reaches her brain. The matter is hopeless.

2:05:36So John makes a tough decision. At the doctor's urging, he stops Patsy's treatment, but cannot bring himself to tell her. The cancer had migrated to her brain, so she was not her normal self. So she didn't know that we'd given up. She would ask me, when's my next treatment? And I knew in my heart there was no next treatment. That was hard. This is exactly when Daxus begins asking to speak to Patsy. He starts asking Michael Tracy to connect him with Patsy so he can apologize for killing her daughter. The Colorado professor stalls and stalls. And then the ding of another incoming Daxus email turns this into something else entirely.

2:06:26Tracy reads Daxus's message. I'll be in the house before you give me that contact information, won't I? Tracy takes that as a threat. He takes everything he has to the new Boulder District Attorney, Mary Lacey, and the investigation goes wide. Her office, Homeland Security, ICE, every set of eyes they have. Then Daxus raises the stakes even further. He asks Tracy, do you want to hear my voice? Tracy says, sure. It was quick to finally talk. I must admit, I was a bit surprised when you sent the phone number, you know? Yeah. Why did you do that, by the way? What would you have... I don't know. I've lost it in my senses.

2:07:1111 hours. That's how much tape Michael Tracy records of Daxus over the calls that follow. And Michael's not the only one listening. By now, various intelligence agencies are on the line, too. On these tapes, Daxus finally tells the story of what he says he did to JonBenet. Sort of. He dances around the story, but there is one word he will not say. at what point did you decide you had to tell me that you killed her i never have said that i have but it's heavily implied isn't it i know and i can't say that i just can't say that word kill he won't say kill because in his mind this is not a murder what daxas describes in a soft almost tender voice is a love story he recasts the killing of a six-year-old little girl as some private, intimate ritual, an erotic game, with what he insists on calling a special necklace, a game of pressure and release, of taking JonBenet to the edge of consciousness and back.

2:08:18He savors the telling of it. I just kind of knelt down in the forever, and I said, JonBenet, I want to make another necklace for you. And it had some interesting knots in it. So I slowly apply the crusher on her neck with that second necklace. And I just say, yes, sweetheart, go into the sweet dream. At that point, her little body started to involve and twitch a little bit. And then, in his telling, the game goes too far. I was just in the droves of ecstasy with her. And then all of a sudden, my gaze just was suddenly broken. And I was just like, oh my God. Jean Benet, are you okay?

2:09:13And I knew she wasn't okay because I knew that she wasn't breathing. And I just was terrified. I said, oh God, I'm going to have to finish this. I know what I'm going to have to do because I can't take the chance that she could still be alive. What he describes next is a man making sure, cold, deliberate steps to guarantee a little girl could not still be alive. He tells it like a man who is still in love with the memory of it. I don't know if I gathered everything up. I don't know if I watched something behind. But I had to go back to that window. That's where I came in. That's where I have to go out.

2:09:57I whitted the grate. I got out of the grate. And I was just like, oh, God, I left my little girl in that horrible state. She's in that little piney room. And worse than that, she's dead. And God, what have I done? So Boulder has a man confessing in detail to the murder that has haunted this town for a decade. There is just one problem. Nobody has any idea who he is or even what continent he's on, nor whether one word of this is true. and Dax's knows it. I'm Interpol's biggest nightmare because I know I have to evade. The law enforcement will run into the biggest brick wall when they try to trace this phone number.

2:10:42It leads to no body. I am not a fool. So how do you catch a man who is nowhere? Well, the DA's office thinks they have found one weakness, his obsession. In all those emails, all those calls, Daxus is desperate to talk to Patsy. So the investigators make a cold calculation. Let's milk that. John and Patsy agree to a call with Daxus. Police set up a phone at Patsy's bedside. They tap the line, the one Daxus has been so intent on calling, and then they wait. Patsy is in bed. She's not in good shape. She's quickly dying, the cancer taking her. Yet she is prepared to talk to the man who says he strangled her only daughter, just to keep him on the line long enough for police to trace him.

2:11:36A dying mother waits by the phone, ready to hear her child's killer apologize. He never calls. Reese Witherspoon here, checking into my favorite hotel in Paris. Bonjour. Bonjour. I'm traveling with my Wells Fargo autograph journey card, so I earn rewards wherever I book travel. Five times points with hotels, four times with airlines, three times on restaurants and other travel, and one point on other purchases. Phew, that was a lot. I need to lie down. Is the room ready? Visit wellsfargo.com slash autograph journey. Terms apply. Hey, Chicagoland. The Wayfair store is in your neighborhood at Edens Plaza and Wilmette.

2:12:20Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals, and even open the refrigerators. Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget. Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for? Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Wayfair, every style, every home. June 24th, 2006. It is a warm, hazy Saturday outside Atlanta. That day at her father's home in Roswell, Georgia, with John at her side, Patsy Ramsey dies. She was 49 years old.

2:13:02Patsy dies in the very same limbo she'd been living in since 1996, accused, uncharged, and with no answers. She is buried in Georgia beside the daughter she was accused of killing. Later that summer, Colorado Professor Michael Tracy calls Daxus. Daxus, this is my Tracy. Hi, Michael. There's some really bad news. Patsy died. I can never hear her say that she broke his name. Patsy's death does something else. It cracks a door open. Daxus learns Tracy has the last photograph ever taken of JonBenet alive. And he wants it. He emails and asks Tracy to scan it and send it over. An investigator sees the opening.

2:13:52Don't scan it, he tells Tracy. Offer him the original. Offer to mail it to him. And Daxus, this man who has bragged for years that he is untraceable, bites. He agrees to pick up the photo at a UPS box in Bangkok, Thailand. Thai authorities put the UPS store under surveillance and wait. Daxas, still talking to Tracy, can't help himself. He mentions a mountain bike he just bought, describes it, says he's going to ride it to work at a school. So one day in the summer of 2006, 10 years after JonBenet was killed, a man rides up on that exact bike, walks into the UPS store, and collects his package.

2:14:38They have him on camera. And for about one week, Thai police follow him. He's identified as John Mark Carr, 41 years old, American, and it gets worse. Because in Bangkok, John Mark Carr is teaching at an elementary school with rooms full of small children. Thai police move in. It's a case that had run cold for a decade. In a bizarre twist, while he was being paraded before cameras, Carr actually responded to reporters' questions. In front of the cameras in Bangkok, Carr does not deny it. I love Rabiné and you die accidentally. Are you a kitchen man? No. What happened? Were you playing with her?

2:15:28What happened?

2:15:33Her death was an accident. Investigators start delving into who this man actually is and what they find is disturbing. In 2001, in Petaluma, California, working as a teacher again, John Mark Carr is arrested and charged with possession of child pornography. He's heading for trial, and he runs, flees the country. And everywhere he lands, Asia, Europe, Latin America, he finds the very same job, teaching young children. John Mark Carr, 41 years old, was arrested for the murder of JonBenet Ramsey yesterday morning at approximately 6 a.m. in Bangkok, Thailand. He began his employment as a second grade teacher in the international school system in Bangkok on Tuesday morning of this week.

2:16:32In off-camera comments recorded by the AP, Carr restated his claim that JonBenet's death was an accident. And it's very important for me that everyone knows that I love her very much and that her death was unintentional and it was an accident. The whole media machine roars back to life. Carr is deported from Thailand and flown to Boulder in the front cabin of a commercial jet served shrimp and champagne. A picture of the tabloids splash across every front page. Forty cameras camp out in John Ramsey's front yard. To a watching world for 12 days, this is the man who killed JonBenet Ramsey. It feels impossibly like it might finally be over.

2:17:17There's only one thing left to check. The DNA. They compare John Mark Carr's DNA to the unknown male profile, The sample from under JonBenet's fingernails, from her clothing, it does not match. The man who says he was with JonBenet Ramsey when she was killed in 1996 will not be charged in the case. The Boulder County District Attorney says no charges will be filed against John Mark Carr. Boulder County DA Mary Lacey released a statement, and it had long been known that there was some DNA thought to be the killers in JonBenet's underclothes. Lacey says they took a DNA sample from Carr and it didn't match that DNA.

2:17:59The DNA isn't close. John Mark Carr, who confessed for hours, was never actually inside the Ramsey home. The confession was a fantasy. The biggest break in the history of this case collapses in a matter of days. To put a bow on it, investigators went looking for where John Mark Carr was in December of 1996. and the answer comes from his own family. He was in Alabama with them that Christmas. There is no record that John Mark Carr ever set one foot in Colorado before 2006. In 2008, Boulder District Attorney Mary Lacey sends John Benet's clothing to a private lab for a newer, more sensitive kind of analysis called TouchDNA.

2:18:48It looks for tiny traces of DNA left behind when someone touches something. Even a small number of skin cells can sometimes be enough. The lab pulls a male profile off the waistband of the long johns JonBenet was wearing in two separate spots, and it matches the unknown male DNA already found in her underwear. One unidentified male profile detected in three different locations on two garments. To Lacey, this is no stray speck of contamination. This is the residue of the hands that hurt JonBenet. She makes a decision no Boulder prosecutor has made in 12 years. Two years after Patsy Ramsey dies, Lacey clears the Ramsey family.

2:19:36Publicly, completely, and in writing. Lacey does something else unheard of for a prosecutor. She writes the Ramseys a letter and she apologizes. She writes that the office does not consider John Patsy or Burke Ramsey to be under any suspicion in the commission of this crime. And then this quote, to the extent that we may have contributed in any way to the public perception that you might have been involved in this crime. I am deeply sorry. Of course, that doesn't settle anything in this case, because not everyone believes the DNA means what Mary Lacey says it means. And one of the loudest skeptics is a man named James Kolar, a former investigator who worked the JonBenet case files and comes away certain the answer was inside the house all along.

2:20:27Here he is in October 2013. I think it's extremely unlikely that an intruder was involved in this situation. situation. And what's frustrating for me is that the DNA evidence continues to be proffered as proof that an intruder was involved. There are six unidentified samples of DNA, trace amounts. There were three people in the home that evening. I think investigators needed to look at all three of them. Kolar means the three people in the house that night, John Patsy, and the only child left, Burke. And in 2013, the grand jury secret Alex Hunter carried out of that 1999 press conference finally breaks open.

2:21:15A daily camera reporter named Charlie Brennan sues the Boulder DA's office for the sealed grand jury records and wins. and the public learns for the first time what Hunter has known all along, that the grand jury had voted to indict the Ramseys. Alex Hunter could have announced that afternoon that the grand jury has elected not to indict anybody. He could have said the grand jury indicted somebody, but we're not going to prosecute it. He didn't say either of those things. A number of years down the road, two sources of mine told me, you can't report this, but they indicted both John and Patsy Ramsey.

2:22:02So I set out to contact grand jurors directly. And multiple grand jurors confirmed for me, that's what happened. Here is what the documents did not do. They did not accuse Burke Ramsey by name. Accessory is a charge that only makes sense if there is a principle. Someone the accessory is protecting. And the indictments left that person unnamed, but the ambiguity left room for others to fill in the blank. And a legacy TV network does precisely that. On the 20th anniversary of the murder in 2016, CBS News puts the theory into primetime that a nine-year-old Burke Ramsey struck his sister, JonBenet, and that his parents staged everything else.

2:22:51A little boy who was never charged with anything, now 29 years old, is put on trial again on television for a brand new audience. And for the first time in 20 years, Burke Ramsey answers for himself. Weeks after the CBS special airs, he sits down with Dr. Phil on national television, now a grown man, quiet, uneasy in the chair. Facing questions about a night he was a nine-year-old boy, asleep down the hall from his sister. Do you remember the last time you saw John Bonet alive? I want to say it was in the car on the way back from the Whites. Do you remember waking up that morning? Yep. The first thing I remember is my mom, first thing in my room, looking for John Bonet.

2:23:40The next thing I remember is a police officer coming to my room and shining a flashlight. Did you hit your sister over the head with a baseball bat or a flashlight? Absolutely not. Burke sues CBS for$750 million. The lawsuit ends the way almost everything in this case ends. Quietly, behind closed doors, in a sealed settlement, with no finding of fact on either side. The record in the end holds three official judgments that pull in opposite directions. A grand jury that voted to indict the parents as accessories and a prosecutor who buried that vote. A district attorney who years later cleared the whole family by name in writing on the strength of the DNA.

2:24:29and a sealed set of indictments pried loose later still, whose unanswered language would be used to point suspicion toward the only other person known to be in that house, a little boy. Three official acts, three different directions, no answers, nothing. An indictment is not a conviction because a grand jury hears only one side. Mary Lacey's letter purported to clear the family, but it never named the killer. And Alex Hunter's decision not to charge explained nothing and exonerated no one. Nearly 30 years after JonBenet's murder, the only thing left to hope for is an answer from the actual evidence.

2:25:17That is where Jon Ramsey has put his energy in the years since Patsy's death. He is chasing the DNA and a new technology that did not exist when his daughter was killed. Genetic genealogy changes what a single unknown DNA profile can do. The old method needed the suspect's DNA to be sitting already in a database. The new method does not. It looks for any genetic link in a DNA database to this person. then works the family tree of that person generation by generation toward a name of a possible suspect. This is the method that finally put a name to the Golden State Killer decades after his crime stopped.

2:26:04And in November of 2022, when four University of Idaho students are murdered in their beds, it is genetic genealogy that identifies the suspect, Brian Kohlberger, in a matter of weeks, thanks to touch DNA on the knife sheath the killer left behind. John Ramsey wants the same science used on his daughter's case. But the obstacle is not the science. It's jurisdiction. The evidence belongs, you see, to the Boulder PD. And only the Boulder PD can decide to test it. So John takes his fight to the governor of Colorado. When John sat down with me in December 2022, this is one of the primary things he wanted to discuss.

2:26:48And 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. If 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. 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. They certainly don't have it at the state level.

2:27:28And, of course, not even ridiculous to think they have it at the police level. So they've 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. John talks about specific items still sitting in evidence, five, six, maybe seven pieces from the crime scene that were sent years ago to an outside lab and, he says, came back untested, returned to a shelf. Among them, he says, is the garage, the murder weapon itself with knots he believes have never been untied and swabbed for the skin cells of the hands that tied them.

2:28:15Nearly 30 years on, the object used to strangle his daughter may still hold an answer that existing testing has not produced. In December of 2025, there is movement. In their annual update on the case, the Boulder police say they have done something close to what John Ramsey has been asking for. New interviews, new evidence collected, and old evidence retested this time with the newest DNA technology available. Officials will not say what that evidence is or where it points. The Boulder chief of police, Steve Redfern, says only that the department will keep working with DNA experts around the country until this tragic case is solved.

2:28:59My direction to our department has been clear. Leave no stone unturned. Our detectives have conducted several new interviews, as well as re-interviewed individuals based on tips that we've received. We've also collected new evidence and tested and retested other pieces of evidence to generate new leads. Nearly 30 years in, this is the closest thing to forward motion this case has produced in a very long time. Still, no name, no arrest, no answers. But for the first time in a while, the sense that someone is finally looking again. 30 years on, the public interest in the case of JonBenet Ramsey remains high.

2:29:42JonBenet is about to become a prestige streaming drama, The Murder of JonBenet Ramsey, an eight-part Netflix series starring Melissa McCarthy as Patsy and Clive Owen as Jon. The story retold once more for an audience that was not alive when she died. But a television series is not going to solve this. Nothing is going to solve this, except perhaps those tiny, imperceptible specks of human cells sitting in a Colorado evidence room. In sealed bags and paper envelopes, in a property room in Boulder, the answer is most likely already there, on a length of cord, on the waistband of a child's long johns, in the profile of an unknown male that has waited, patient and silent, to be discovered since the day after Christmas 1996.

2:30:38The science to read it has finally arrived. The question remaining is whether anyone will let it speak. I'm Megan Kelly. Tune in next week as we unpack another mystery on MK Confidential.

2:30:56Hey, Chicagoland. The Wayfair store is in your neighborhood at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals, and even open the refrigerators. Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget. Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for? Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Wayfair, every style, every home Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co-founder of Angie. One thing I've learned is that you buy a house, but you make it a home.

2:31:32For decades, Angie's helped millions of homeowners hire skilled pros for the projects that matter. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find a pro for your project at Angie.com