I tried to untie the cord that was around her arms and I couldn’t get the knot untied.” … I immediately knelt down over her, felt her cheek, took the tape off immediately off her mouth.
I found my daughter,” John Ramsey told Walters in 2000. He found JonBenét in the basement, a part of the home that police had neglected to search. passed and there still wasn’t a call, Arndt said “there was no acknowledgment” from either of JonBenét’s parents that “the deadline imposed by the author of the ransom note come and gone.”Īrndt suggested that John Ramsey look around the house for any signs that his daughter’s belongings were out of place. JonBenét’s parents anxiously waited for the supposed kidnapper’s call with just one detective there: Linda Arndt.īut when 10 a.m. There could’ve been fingerprints there.”Īfter several hours, the police began to leave the Ramsey home. There were some friends of Patsy’s that were helping her wipe up the kitchen. They were in the kitchen, they were in the living room. “People were streaming through that house.
“The police did a terrible, terrible job securing that scene … and if you don’t secure the scene, you don’t get good evidence,” said Diane Dimond, an investigative reporter who covered the case. However, with the Ramseys’ friends showing up for moral support, they also contaminated the scene by moving about the house. Police arrived shortly after the 911 call and began investigating the scene for clues about the kidnapper. “You’ve just been dealt a horrible, crushing blow.” “You lose all perception of time, of place,” added Patsy Ramsey in 2000. JonBenét Ramsey was killed in her family's Colorado home in 1996. In a 911 call just before 6 a.m., her mother Patsy Ramsey was inconsolable as she told the dispatcher that her daughter was missing and that she’d found a ransom note at the bottom of her stairs. JonBenét’s parents initially thought she had been kidnapped during the night. JonBenét is found dead in her parents' basement The child beauty queen had died sometime during the previous night but wasn’t found until hours later. Smit was called out of retirement to help the investigation three months after JonBenét was found dead in the basement of her parent’s Boulder, Colorado, home on the morning of Dec. “It was really important to him.”Īs part of their promise to keep the case alive, van der Woerd and Smit’s other granddaughter, Lexi Marra, created the podcast “The Victim’s Shoes,” where they discuss details of the case. “When he got sick with cancer … he knew that his time was limited and so, during that time, he just talked to others about not letting this case die,” said Cindy Marra, Smit’s daughter.
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Watch Who Killed JonBenet? on Lifetime Movie Club Fact Check However, none of these people have been charged. Outside of the Ramsey Family, the media has also reported on others deemed suspicious: from the convicted child sex offender (Gary Oliva) to the housekeeper (Linda Hoffman-Pugh) to the electrician (Michael Helgoth) to even the town Santa (Bill McReynolds). Phil Show, breaking his 20-year silence about the case but bringing no new evidence to the story.Ĭountless books, documentaries, and true crime shows have featured their own theories about JonBenét’s murder. In 2016, JonBenét’s brother Burke made a surprising appearance on The Dr. John claims he has lost his entire family fortune after being a multi-millionaire in the 1990s. Four years later, Pasty succumbed to ovarian cancer at the age of 49. After the case was dropped, the Ramsey family returned to Atlanta, Georgia, to escape the media glare and released the 2001 memoir The Death of Innocence. In December 1999, the Boulder grand jury voted to indict John and Patsy for their alleged role in their daughter’s murder however, Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter decided not to charge them, citing insufficient evidence.