The JonBenét Conspiracies: The Ghost in the Evidence — Ep. 5 | MK Confidential

0:00Hi, I'm Gabby Windy with Long Winded, and I'm not gonna lie, I'm desperate. I'm desperate for your attention in any way possible, so listen to my podcast, won't ya? It has great insights, exceptional humor, and plenty of pop culture to fill your dark souls, and some even say it's a great way to fall asleep due to my soothing voice. And I don't take that personally. Fall asleep. A listen is a listen, even when you're sleeping. And a view is a view, even with your eyes closed. If you dare, and it doesn't take much gumption, enjoy. Listen to Long Winded wherever you get your podcasts. I like things my way, my coffee, my schedule, and my treatment.

0:45So I talked to my doctor about self-injecting with the Vivgard Hytrulo Pre-Filled Syringe, which contains FGAR-Tigamide-alpha and hyaluronidase QVFC. It's injected under your skin subcutaneously. It means I can inject in my space on my time. It's my treatment, my way. Visit VivGartMyWay.com. That's V-Y-V-G-A-R-T MyWay.com. And talk to your doctor about VivGart Hytrulo. Brought to you by Argenics. It 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 john benet 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.

1:44The grand jurors have done their work extraordinarily well, bringing to bear all of their legal powers, life experiences, and shrewdness. Yet 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.

2:43They signed true bills, the formal charges a grand jury returns when it believes there is enough evidence to proceed. Not 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.

3:29The district attorney will keep that secret for 14 years. The 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.

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4:45Learn how gold can fit into your portfolio by texting MK, my initials, to the number 989898. You will receive a free, no-obligation info kit. With an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau and countless five-star reviews, consider having Birch Gold help build your foundation with gold. Text MK to the number 989898. For 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 walked through airports, grocery stores, church parking lots, carrying an accusation no jury will ever test and no court can lift.

5:30The accusation cost them more than their piece. John Ramsey once ran a billion-dollar company. But as John himself told Barbara Walters, this case has ruined the family financially. Before John Bonet's death, you were reportedly worth millions of dollars. But that money seems to have gone. I was told by a very experienced FBI person that most victims of violent crime end up broke. 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.

6:20A 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. They 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.

7:01In 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. Eustace 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?

7:42Unfortunately, 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 John Benet 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. He'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.

8:30Living 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. There 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.

9:11During 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. Just 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.

10:00Boulder 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. It 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.

10:48Daxus 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. In 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. Daxas gives specifics on the Ramsey staircase, describes the basement, the blanket, and the exact room where JonBenet was killed.

11:28He messages about a check stub for 118 ,000 he saw on John 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. So 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.

12:17And it will be this. So I emailed John. What was the nickname? It comes back, Neddy. He was right. He was correct. Because Johnham searched. There was nowhere that that nickname was known in the public domain. Michael discusses Daxus with Boulder detective Lou Smit as well. I would share some of the emails with Lou Smit. And I said, look, you know, I've got this from this guy. I 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 he's a nutcase and we can end it. And Lou said, no can do, Michael. Got to keep at it. The emails with Daxus go on for four years.

12:58He'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. So 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?

13:49And 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. Tracy reads Daxus' 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.

14:34Her 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.

15:0111 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, Staxes 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 definitely 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.

15:45What Daxus 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, he savors the telling of it. I just kind of knelt down in forever, and I said, JonBenet, I want to make another necklace for you. And it had some interesting knots in it. So I slowly applied the crusher on her neck with that second necklace. And I just said, yes, sweetheart, go into the sweet dream.

16:36At that point, her little body started to involch 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. JonBenet, are you okay?

17:04and 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, were 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.

17:48I whiffed the grate. I got out of the grate. And I was just like, oh, God. I left my little girl in that horrible fate. 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 Daxus 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.

18:33It 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.

19:27A dying mother waits by the phone, ready to hear her child's killer apologize. He never calls. 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 SuperSure. 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. SuperSure is the super agency built for you, licensed in every state for your business insurance and employee benefits.

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20:45I'm desperate for your attention in any way possible, so listen to my podcast, won't you? It has great insights, exceptional humor, and plenty of pop culture to fill your dark souls. And some even say it's a great way to fall asleep due to my soothing voice. And I don't take that personally. Fall asleep. A listen is a listen, even when you're sleeping, and a view is a view, even with your eyes closed. If you dare, and it doesn't take much gumption, enjoy! Listen to Long-Winded wherever you get your podcasts. 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.

21:33She was 49 years old. Patsy 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 forgives me. 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.

22:25Don't scan it, he tells Tracy. Offer him the original. Offer to mail it to him. and Daxas, 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 John Bonet was killed, a man rides up on that exact bike, walks into the UPS store, and collects his package.

23:12They 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 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 Robin A. Died accidentally. Are you a Christian man? No. What happened? Were you playing with her?

24:02What happened?

24:06Her 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.

25:05In 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.

25:51There'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.

26:33The 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.

27:21It 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.

28:10Publicly, 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.

29:01Here he is in October 2013. I think it's extremely unlikely that an intruder was involved in this 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.