The JonBenét Conspiracies: The Intruder Theory — Ep. 4 | MK Confidential

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1:13Look 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. For 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.

2:03Some 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 kill 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. The 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.

2:50The 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, and 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, is really obviously a fact which can only point to some sinister underpinnings.

3:42Hey, 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. A 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.

4:33I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

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5:37Go to supersure.com slash Megan paid for by supersure insurance agency, LLC, a licensed insurance agency. Lou Smith 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.

6:23That print put her killer away. Lou is a finder of things other people failed to see. In 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.

7:07He knows the stats. He knows a child found dead inside a home usually means someone who lived there is responsible. He 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.

7:51What does the physical evidence on its own actually say? And the longer he looks, the more he believes a new story. It 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.

8:44Seuss books. The Boulder detectives tell Smith that the window is nothing. No one could have come through there. There's a metal grate over the outside window well. So Smith studies the grate 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.

9:32Now, this is where I think the killer actually got in at some point. The grate 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 John Benet out of the house inside that suitcase and found it too big to force up through the window.

10:13Near 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. Smith 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.

11:00Smit 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. This 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.

11:43It 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. Whoever built that garage and taped the little girl's mouth shut, he brought his tools in and carried most of them back out. And 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.

12:32what I'd like to show you is what I think is one of the most important clues left behind by the killer stun gun there's marks on John Benet those are marks on her back those are marks on her face and there's the same distance of heart slightly rectangular and shaped 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.

13:28Unless some other evidence is presented to me, the most likely explanation for those injuries that they were caused by a stun gun. That 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.

14:19The Colorado lab finds a small partial profile of male DNA drawn from a bloodstain in JonBenet's underwear. It 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.

15:08No semen is ever found on JonBenet. The autopsy indicates that the sexual assault is consistent with penetration by a finger or an object. Broken 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.

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17:24Because building healthier communities starts by giving people access to the care and services they need to live healthier lives. Learn more at unitedhealthgroup.com slash commitment. 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 Bonnet is killed, less than two miles from the Ramsey home.

18:10Late 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.

18:57Two 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.

19:41That 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.

20:34It 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 grill 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.

21:25During one walkthrough of the house, Smit eases the grate open without breaking a fresh web that has grown between the grate and the house. Even Detective Steve Thomas notes that Smit 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.

22:09Both 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 spiderweb, and whether there would have been enough time for the spider to spin it fresh.

23:01Like 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 JonBenet's skin, and no version in which the parents did it has ever fully explained them.

23:58Then 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.

24:44The police find no definitive connection between the 1997 home invasion in Boulder and the murder of John Benet. 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.

25:37And it is not only the ransom note. Remember the garrote. 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.

26:25Lou 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.

27:09Lou believes the killer used the garrotte 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.

28:00By 1998, the JonBenet 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.

28:48And 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 Smith resigns for the exact opposite reason. He writes 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.

29:34I 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, and 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.

30:18John 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.