The JonBenét Conspiracies: The Family Theory — Ep. 2 | MK Confidential

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0:37Adventure with confidence. Visit Progressive.com and see how easy it is to protect your favorite way to get away. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Not available in D.C. Prices vary based on how you buy. It is the day after Christmas 1996, and a veteran FBI agent named Ron Walker stands inside a crime scene that does not add up. Walker works out of the Bureau's Denver field office, one of the only federal agents to set foot inside the Ramsey home the day JonBenet's body 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.

1:20The 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.

2:09At 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. when you sign your insurance policy for some brokers that's the finish line handshake commission done then you may not hear from them again until it's time for renewal but your business runs all year and so do the gaps and the risk which is why i want to tell you about super sure if your company has more than 25 employees whether you're the owner cfo or hr manager it can be too complex to just buy a policy online.

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3:48Agent 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.

4:36Walker'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.

5:20As 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.

6:02Both 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.

6:31Someone 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.

7:22To 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.

8:04Don'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.

8:52And 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 note agree on one thing. Whoever 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.

9:43Douglas 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. So 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.

10:30Of 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. And 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.

11:13It 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. We wouldn't be celebrating America 250 if it wasn't for a strong foundation set by the framers. Hamilton built America's financial foundation on the principle of sound, stable money, a principle later embodied by the gold standard. However, we abandoned that discipline in 1971 and have seen inflation erode the dollar's value ever since.

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13:39When 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. It 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.

14:27We'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. To 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.

15:13On 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. The natural question is why? The Ramseys' former FBI man, John Douglas, reads it differently. He sees the Ramseys' behavior as exactly how wealthy, well-connected families behave inside a legal catastrophe. They involve lawyers, they distance themselves, and they proceed with caution.

15:57These 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. John 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.

16:43Weeping 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. And yet JonBenet's stomach contains fresh, partly digested pineapple.

17:36anybody who did do it. So we all got to start working together from 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 JonBenet wets the bed that night, a chronic problem in the months before her death. And 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.

18:26The 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. She 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.

19:07She 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. And 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.

19:53Her 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. What, tell me exactly, step by step, how you envisioned that I... I wasn't there, that you were in the home. You 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 thing.

20:34I put together what you think happened that night. Well, I think there was a toileting issue that night that has been dismissed and underplayed. Let me explain. A bedwetting or a toileting issue. A cause 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. I'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.

21:26Well, 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. John 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.

22:19Reporters 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. Some 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.

23:08The 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. The 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.

23:50Join me tomorrow right here on MK Confidential.

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