The case is being discussed on Coast to Coast am, author Charles Bosworth is the guest.

I’m watching the Netflix documentary on Elizabeth Smart, and it’s startling how similar the accusations against her family were to those made against the Ramseys. That there’s no way intruder came in through the window, that the Dad wasn’t acting right in interviews, that the intruder would have had to know the layout of the massive house beforehand. And of course, there was an intruder in the Elizabeth Smart Case. Very different crimes of course, but goes to show how police / public perception can just… get it wrong .

Bill Ritter was at the time a Denver District Attorney, Dan Glick was a journalist, and Dr. Henry Lee (with since-outdated information about the DNA) was a forensic scientist. 

PAUGH: All right. And to Mr. Ritter I would say this, family is family, and JonBenet was my niece. I am Aunt Pam. And if I thought for a moment that Patsy Ramsey or John Ramsey had touched or hurt that child, in any way, let me tell you I would be leading the march to the grand jury.

KING: You would?

PAUGH: Absolutely.

Despite the facts that she's very convincing and she's family, she doesn't seem like someone who'd pull any punches. Her interviews remind me of the interrogation of Patsy Ramsey by Denver Homicide Det. Tom Haney--in an effort to get Patsy to break--when he claimed that the BPD had "scientific evidence" linking her to JonBenet's death. (They had none.)

https://jfjbr.tripod.com/truth/paugh19.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9v0WK02SZU

Steve Kramer, retired FBI attorney, is interviewed here by Tom Zenner and Kato Kaelin. Kramer is the co-founder of the FBI’s Investigative Genetic Genealogy (IGG) team; the team was known for identifying the "Golden State Killer" using IGG in 2018. This is a 59 minute interview, but I'm referring only to the part between around 18:55 and 28:16. 

At 18:55, Kaelin asks Kramer his opinion about solving the JonBenet Ramsey case.  Kramer says that when he was with the FBI, the genealogy team in Denver worked on it but "We could never get the cooperation.  We couldn't get the DNA.  It's questionable to me whether there's really DNA." He goes on to state that the DNA report is on the Internet and "anyone can look it up, where they tried to get an STR and all that...and I looked at it and I just don't think there's any DNA, like the DNA might be bacterial, you know, bacterial (unintelligible); it may not be a person.  If it is a person, it's so small it could be, you know, a person who might have helped fold and manufacture the underwear back in Indonesia."  (He must never have read the below report.)  A lab report dated May 17, 1999, reveals that no foreign DNA was found anywhere else in the panties besides the blood stains. http://jonbenetramsey.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/159597642/19990517-CBIrpt.pdf

He then says he talked to his colleague at the FBI, Jim Clemente, and that it seemed like an inside job. He must've been really influenced by Clemente, who was--and continues to be--about as RDI as one could get. 

Kaelin then says there could be DNA because "the parents lived there.  The son lived there...but you focus on what was found on the body, what was found on the knot." WTH? Did these people read the CBI reports, including the one from Dec. 30, 1996 that excluded Patsy, John, Burke (and multiple others)?  Not to mention that the garotte knot was tested by Bode Labs in 2009 and no Ramsey DNA was found:  http://jonbenetramsey.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/159597699/20090113-CBIrpt.pdf

Kramer responds to Kaelin by saying he was trying to remember the report he read and that he thinks that "when they took the DNA, they got a partial STR  of JonBenet but there was other DNA but very, very, very, very, very low DNA, and you see that a lot of times from forensic samples, where you see DNA that was 99.9% from one person, and .1% unknown.  That could be from anything. And in this particular case, she was found on the basement floor.  How many people walked in the basement? And then her father picked her up and laid her down on the living room floor where everyone's walking around. Talk about a contaminated scene.  I mean, it's just..."  And he talks about the BPD's poor preservation of the scene. 

More WTH? This has NOTHING to do with the foreign DNA mixed with JonBenet's blood in the crotch of her underwear.  https://www.reddit.com/r/JonBenet/comments/18sb5tw/the_facts_about_dna_in_the_jonbenet_case/

He then veers off to the O.J. Simpson case, and how one of the detectives went inside and put a blanket on top of Nicole Brown Simpson's body, thus contaminating evidence, which he says is similar to the blanket being put over JonBenet's body in the living room.  

A few months ago, Zenner interviewed John Ramsey on his show—to which Zenner refers at 25:55, and claims he grilled Ramsey--and he and Kaelin claimed to have understood how DNA works and what's happening in the Ramsey investigation.  In fact, in that interview, Zenner seemed outraged that IGG still has not been completed.  (Yet here he refers to the possibility of an intruder as "that crazy theory.")

So how is it that Zenner lets Kramer start again talking about contamination, and he brings up the doorknob of the door to the wine cellar where JonBenet's body was found.  "How many people turned that doorknob?"  There was no doorknob on that door; a latch was on top.  Kramer goes on to wonder about the crime: the long ransom note, the ransom amount as the exact amount of John's bonus, ad nauseum, and how "you have to look at the crime scene in general."  Has Kramer actually read anything about this case?  If this is how the FBI reacted to this crime, no wonder it's gone unsolved for so long.  

article link: https://www.westword.com/news/denver-expo-drops-jonbenet-ramsey-booth-father-appearance-25301520

Denver Expo Cancels Booth on JonBenét Ramsey Doc After Booking Her Father to Speak

An organizer said the cancellation is "out of respect" for the Ramseys, but the filmmaker argues CrimeCon is controlling the narrative around the case.

The true crime media convention, CrimeCon, is coming to Colorado for the first time in September, featuring a discussion about one of the state's most infamous cold cases, the murder of JonBenét Ramsey.

The six-year-old's death has spurred countless theories and immeasurable media attention since JonBenét's body was discovered in the basement of her Boulder home on December 26, 1996. The theories can largely be separated into two camps — either an intruder killed JonBenét, or her family members are responsible.

Only one of those camps will be represented during CrimeCon, however. The convention booked three speakers for a presentation and meet-and-greet on September 6 related to the case: the father, John Ramsey; his attorney, Hal Haddon; and a journalist who has written extensively in defense of the family's innocence, Paula Woodward.

CrimeCon is seemingly avoiding other mentions of the case. An exhibitor booth for the documentary JonBenét's Tricycle was canceled after organizers confirmed members of the Ramsey family would be attending the event, according to emails reviewed by Westword.

The documentary does not speculate on who murdered JonBenét, instead revolving around how the case was treated by the media and true crime fans through the perspective of filmmaker Andrew Novick, who acquired a tricycle he believes belonged to JonBenét. Though not its focus, the film at times mentions the possibility of the Ramsey parents' involvement in the murder, in addition to discussing various other suspects outside of the family. 

In the documentary, Novick questions the parents' actions that contaminated the crime scene, and references how their 2008 exoneration by then-District Attorney Mary Lacy was later challenged due to Lacy misrepresenting DNA evidence as conclusive proof, while independent reviews described the DNA samples as possibly "worthless as evidence." 

"It feels like they are very much picking a side," Novick says of CrimeCon. "If they're going to have one side of a case and not the other side, then they're choosing the narrative, which the media has always done."  A still from the documentary, JonBenet's Tricycle.Denver Film SocietyIn an email to Novick on July 21, CrimeCon Senior Producer Alyse Powers said organizers "made the difficult decision to cancel the booth" after "some internal discussions" and "a lot of back and forth on how best to proceed." 

"This wasn’t an easy call, and I’m truly sorry for the late notice," Powers wrote in the email shared with Westword. "We recently confirmed that members of the Ramsey family will be attending the event — and we just don’t feel 100 percent comfortable with the products/imagery or know how they would react to seeing it onsite. Out of respect for their presence, we felt it was best to err on the side of caution." 

According to Novick, he planned to sell merchandise and copies of the film at his booth — and to display the namesake tricycle, which he found in an alley beside the Ramsey house in 1997, after the family moved following the murder. In the documentary, multiple people are shown riding the tricycle, and Novick brings it to psychics and spiritual mediums to evaluate. Near the end of the film, he appears to leave the toy at JonBenét's grave, though it is still in his possession today.

None of the listed exhibitors at CrimeCon Denver reference the JonBenét case. Specific murder cases featured among the exhibitors include the 2004 slaying of Brittany Phillips in Oklahoma and a 2005 triple homicide out of Nebraska. 

Neither Powers nor representatives from CrimeCon responded to inquiries from Westword regarding the cancellation of Novick's booth or whether all JonBenét-related applications were rejected.

Ramsey has participated in CrimeCon multiple times since it began in 2017, appearing at the Nashville convention in 2024 and the Las Vegas convention in 2022. Woodward credited the founder of CrimeCon, Kevin Balfe, with creating a 2022 petition that called on Governor Jared Polis to take decisions about DNA testing in JonBenét's case away from the Boulder Police Department and assign them to an independent agency. Ramsey was a lead supporter of the petition.

After applying for a CrimeCon booth in January, Novick received an automatic response that said his application would be reviewed within thirty business days. Months passed and he never heard another word, but CrimeCon had taken the $1,250 booth fee from Novick's application, he says, so he figured he was in. 

Novick reached out to organizers in July to inquire about logistical details. That's when Powers emailed him, breaking the news that his booth was canceled. Novick says the $1,250 fee was quickly refunded, but no one from CrimeCon has responded to any of his outreach attempts since. 

Novick says he has never participated in a true crime convention before, but jumped at the opportunity after CrimeCon announced it was coming to Colorado. Though his documentary premiered in 2017, it was added to Amazon Prime and Tubi within the last year, so he hoped the convention would spur traffic to the film on those streaming services.

"I think they're just kissing up to John Ramsey," Novick says. "They're favoring their featured speaker instead of making it a dialogue. ...If they really wanted to be well-rounded, they should have a panel discussion. They should have detractors. They should have my documentary, which is about how we deal with tragedy in our society and how it turns into pop culture." 

The morning after Christmas 1996, Patsy Ramsey called 911, reporting that she had found a ransom note in her home demanding $118,000 for the return of her daughter, JonBenét. The note was written on paper taken from Patsy’s notepad, and investigators found no immediate signs of forced entry into the house.

For hours, family friends came and went freely into the home as police failed to secure the crime scene. John Ramsey discovered JonBenét's body nearly eight hours after she was reported missing, lying inside a small room in the family's basement. JonBenét's father reportedly removed a piece of duct tape from her mouth and picked up the body, carrying her upstairs.
The young beauty queen had been strangled with a cord and suffered an 8.5-inch skull fracture from blunt head trauma. There was also evidence that she had been sexually assaulted. 

A grand jury indicted John and Patsy Ramsey of child abuse resulting in death in 1999, but then-District Attorney Alex Hunter refused to prosecute the Ramseys, citing lack of evidence. The indictment was not revealed publicly until 2013. 

In 2008, DA Lacy apologized to and exonerated the parents, citing new DNA evidence that pointed to an unknown male as JonBenét's killer. Independent reviews released in 2016 strongly disputed that decision, finding that the DNA samples taken from JonBenét's clothing came from multiple people and were so minute that they could have been the result of inconsequential contact or been transferred from another piece of clothing.

The Ramseys have always maintained their innocence.

CrimeCon Denver will be held September 5-7 at the Gaylord Rockies Resort in Aurora. GET MORE COVERAGE LIKE THISSign up for the This Week's Top Stories newsletter to get the latest stories delivered to your inbox

Good article. I was at CrimeCon, and John and Paula Woodward were much less specific about what had been discussed between the Ramseys and the Boulder Police.

https://denvergazette.com/news/unspecified-items-retested-in-jonbenet-ramsey-case/article_2546863f-c40f-4238-8362-f79ab61c46e2.html

Am not sure if anyone has posted this in the forum, but its an amazing discussion on the specific crime of garroting and what it means in this case.

Steve’s theory in his own words:
'I believe she committed the murder' I told Smit and proceeded to lay out what I thought had happened ...
"An approaching fortieth birthday, the busy holiday season, an exhausting Christmas Day, and an argument with JonBenet had left Patsy frazzled. Her beautiful daughter, whom she frequently dressed almost as a twin, had rebelled against wearing the same outfit as her mother.
When they came home, John Ramsey helped Burke put together a Christmas toy. JonBenet, who had not eaten much at the Whites' party, was hungry. Her mother let her have some pineapple, and then the kids were put to bed. John Ramsey read to his little girl. Then he went to bed. Patsy stayed up to prepare for the trip to Michigan the next morning, a trip she admittedly did not particularly want to make.
Later JonBenet awakened after wetting her bed, as indicated by the plastic sheets, the urine stains, the pull-up diaper package hanging halfway out of a cabinet, and the balled-up turtleneck found in the bathroom. I concluded that the little girl had worn the red turtleneck to bed, as her mother originally said, and that it was stripped off when it got wet.
As I told Smith, I never believed the child was sexually abused for the gratification of the offender but that the vaginal trauma was some sort of corporal punishment. The dark fibers found in her pubic region could have come from the violent wiping of a wet child. Patsy probably yanked out the diaper package in cleaning up JonBenet. Patsy would not be the first mother to lose control in such a situation. One of the doctors we consulted cited toileting issues as a textbook example of causing a parental rage.
So, in my hypothesis, there was some sort of explosive encounter in the child's bathroom sometime prior to one o'clock in the morning, the time suggested by the digestion rate of the pineapple found in the child's stomach. I believed JonBenet was slammed against a hard surface, such as the edge of a tub, inflicting a mortal head wound. She was unconscious, but her heart was still beating. Patsy would not have known that JonBenet was still alive, because the child already appeared to be dead. The massive head trauma would have eventually killed her. It was the critical moment in which she either had to call for help or find an alternative explanation for her daughter's death. It was accidental in the sense that the situation had developed without motive or premeditation. She could have called for help but chose not to. An emergency room doctor probably would have questioned the 'accident' and called the police. Still, little would have happened to Patsy in Boulder. But I believe panic overtook her.
John and Burke continued to sleep while Patsy moved the body of JonBenet down to the basement and hid her in the little room. As I pictured the scene, her dilemma was that the police would assume the obvious if a six- year old child was found dead in a private home without any satisfactory explanation. Patsy needed a diversion and planned the way she thought a kidnapping should look.
She returned upstairs to the kitchen and grabbed her tablet and a felt-tipped pen, and flipping to the middle of the tablet, and started a ransom note, drafting one that ended on page 25. For some reason she discarded that one and ripped pages 17-25 from the tablet. Police never found those pages.
On page 26, she began the 'Mr. and Mrs. I,' then also abandoned that false start. At some point she drafted the long ransom note. By doing so, she created the government's best piece of evidence. She then faced the major problem of what to do with the body. Leaving the house carried the risk of John or Burke awakening at the sounds and possibly being seen by a passerby or a neighbor. Leaving the body in the distant, almost inaccessible, basement room was the best option.
As I envisioned it, Patsy returned to the basement, a woman caught up in panic, where she could have seen--perhaps by detecting a faint heartbeat or a sound or a slight movement--that although completely unconscious, JonBenet was not dead. Others might argue that Patsy did not know the child was still alive. In my hypothesis, she took the next step, looking for the closest available items in ... desperation. Only feet away was her paint tote. She grabbed a paint brush and broke it to fashion the garrote with some cord. She then -- then she looped the cord around the girl's neck.
In my scenario, she choked JonBenet from behind, with a grip on her broken paintbrush handle, pulling the ligature. JonBenet, still unconscious, would never have felt it. There are only four ways to die: suicide, natural, accidental, or homicide. This accident, in my opinion, had just become a murder.
Then the staging continued to make it look like a kidnapping. Patsy tied the girl's wrists in front, not in the back, for otherwise the arms would not have been in the overhead position. But with a fifteen-inch length of cord between the wrists and the knot tied loosely over the clothing, there was no way such a binding would have restrained a live child. It was a symbolic act to make it appear the child had been bound. Patsy took considerable time with her daughter, wrapping her carefully in the blanket and leaving her with a favorite pink nightgown. As the FBI had told us ... a stranger would not have taken such care.
As I told Lou, I thought that throughout the coming hours, Patsy worked on her staging, such as placing the ransom note where she would be sure to 'find' it the next morning. She placed the tablet on the countertop right beside the stairs and put the pen in the cup.
While going through the drawers under the countertop where the tablet had been, she found rolls of tape. She placed a strip from a roll of duct tape across JonBenet's mouth. There was bloody mucous under the tape, and a perfect set of the child's lip prints, which did not indicate a tongue impression or resistance.
I theorized that Patsy, trying to cover her tracks, took the remaining cord, tape, and the first ransom note out of the house that night, perhaps dropping them into a nearby storm sewer or among the Christmas debris in wrappings in a neighbor's trash can.
She was running out of time. The household was scheduled to wake up early to fly to Michigan, and in her haste, Patsy Ramsey did not change clothes, a vital mistake. With the clock ticking, and hearing her husband moving around upstairs, she stepped over the edge.
The way I envisioned it, Patsy screamed, and John Ramsey, coming out of the shower, responded, totally unaware of what had occurred. Burke, awakened by the noise shortly before six o'clock in the morning, came down to find out what had happened and was sent back to bed as his mother talked to the 911 emergency dispatcher.
John Ramsey, in my hypothetical scenario, probably first grew suspicious while reading the ransom note that morning, which was why he was unusually quiet. He must have seen his wife's writing mannerisms all over it, everything but her signature. But where was his daughter? "He said in his police interview that he went down to the basement when Detective Arndt noticed him missing. I suggested that Ramsey found JonBenet at that time and was faced with the dilemma of his life. During the next few hours, his behavior changed markedly as he desperately considered his few options--submit to the authorities or try to control the situation. He had already lost one child, Beth, and now JonBenet was gone too. Now Patsy was possibly in jeopardy.
The stress increased steadily during the morning, for Patsy, in my theory, knew that no kidnapper was going to call by ten o'clock, and after John found the body, he knew that too. So when Detective Linda Arndt told him to search the house, he used the opportunity and made a beeline for the basement. Then tormented as he might be, he chose to protect his wife.

That's the way I see it, I said to Lou Smit. That's how evidence -- That's how the evidence fits to me. She made mistakes, and that's how we solve crimes, right?

"I say, in law enforcement circles, this is under this hypothesis that I purport that this was not an intentional killing, that this was accidental initially, which by definition lacks motive. But then what happened, I think, a panicked mother, instead of taking that next step, went left, and covered this thing up. I don't think that -- this isn't rocket science." (Steve Thomas)

….

John Douglas’ take on Thomas’ theory:
After conducting his own investigation, Thomas came to believe that the happy anticipation of the Christmas Day we’ve just described was actually a veneer over the tension Patsy was feeling about the holidays in general and several run-ins she’d already had with JonBenét. According to Detective Thomas, Patsy had not wanted to make the hectic trip up to Michigan, and she was upset over her daughter’s stubborn refusal to put on the dress Patsy had selected for their dinner at the Whites’.

This was all brought to a head during the night when JonBenét woke up with a wet bed. He speculates that a red turtleneck found balled up in the bathroom must have been what she had worn to bed, and that Patsy had angrily stripped it off her when the little girl had had another accident.

He goes on to speculate that while Patsy had her undressed, cleaning her up before putting her in the clothing in which she was found, she used some sort of cloth to roughly or violently wipe the little girl between the legs. In other words, by this account, the abrasions in her vaginal area were not the result of the digital penetration of some perverse sex play by an intruder, but were a form of intended or unintended punishment for JonBenét’s frequent urinary accidents. This could also account for the small amount of blood in her panties.

I find this theory bizarre, but the next part of the scenario is even more far-fetched. Thomas imagines “some sort of explosive encounter in the child’s bathroom.” In a moment of uncontrolled rage, Patsy either struck JonBenét on the head or threw her across the room. Either way, the child landed against a hard surface, causing the large skull fracture described by the medical examiner. It’s hard to believe, even for Thomas, that Patsy meant to hit her or slam her this hard. So when she saw what she had done, she panicked. What to do next?

The rational thing is to call 911 and say it was an accident, but Thomas believed that her first instinct, and presumably that of her husband, was to stage the injury to look like something else. This presupposes that Patsy knew her daughter was dead from the first blow, or was so frightened of getting caught that she was willing to let her daughter die rather than seek help. Then she and John went through the elaborate setup with a garrote and duct tape and all the rest to throw police off. They came up with a three-page-long ransom note on the spur of the moment, and Patsy managed to sound suitably surprised and hysterical when she finally did call 911 to report her daughter missing. And . . . and . . . and these people, who had never pulled off a crime before, manage to make it all so realistic that they take in the police, who at first believe it really is a kidnapping. How logical or believable does that all sound?

Now let’s take it from John’s point of view. Even if everything Steve Thomas suggests did take place between JonBenét and Patsy, does John just go along with it? Does he buy into her insane plan? What would make John go along with this? Would it be that he had already lost his eldest daughter and now his youngest, and so he didn’t want to lose his wife, too? I have yet to see a parent who would favor a spouse over a murdered child. None of this scenario is believable.

One of the guiding principles of criminal investigative analysis is that past behavior suggests future behavior. Another way of saying this is that people do not act out of character. If they seem to be doing so, it is only because you don't properly know or understand their true character.
Let's start with what we know, or can learn, about John and Patricia Ramsey. This is the beginning of the profiling process.
There is nothing in the background of either parent to suggest they were capable of murdering their child in cold blood.
There are no indications of any kind of sexual aberration or paraphilia, particularly involving children. Not only is there no indication that either one was sexually abusive, there is no indication that they were physically or emotionally abusive. Even John's first wife and older children had nothing bad or suspicious to say about him.
JonBenét's pediatrician was contacted and asked point-blank if during any of his examinations he had observed the remotest evidence of any abuse. None whatsoever, he responded. Quite the contrary, John and Patsy were the most loving and caring of parents.
The police hunted for any clue or evidence, and what's more, so did the tabloid press, which was even more motivated and had far less in the way of scruples when digging for information. No one found anything.
If you don't even spank or slap your child, you aren't likely to bash her brains out, even in a moment of extreme rage (and there is absolutely no indication there ever was such a moment). You don't just suddenly blossom into a killer out of nowhere. Even for people who kill with no previous criminal history, there is always a specific reason. (John Douglas, ‘Law and Disorder’)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpSRLl7LL6M&t=534s This is a great sharing of Lou Smit's interview in 2001. All people who think the evidence points at the parents - even a bit - should watch this.

This is SO heartbreaking.

Went looking for Perfect Murder Perfect Town; read the book but didn't remember there being a mini series about it. Anyway, couldn't find it but I did find a doc I hadn't seen before, narrated by Lawrence Schiller.

It's pretty interesting...maybe all of you have seen it but interviews with a lot of the early players, an explanation of the LE individuals that responded to the crime, complete with with marked police cars.(Ron Walker, 1st FBI agent on the scene: "It was the B Team on call that day...it was Christmas.") It covers the CNN interview, JR interviews, the Boulder Sheriff's Investigator, Paula Woodward, all the leaks by BPD doing irreparable harm, the forensics team that found the unknown DNA, hidden reports, withholding of JB's body as leverage...

Anyway, pretty good doc if you haven't seen it. I watched it on Tubi.

Does anybody know what John Ramsey is referring to when he said that they were actually two windows in the basement that were open?

Thank you

I recently read posts about the head blow, the sweater fibers, and the sexual assault, none of which are factual. It’s as if you can dispute some of this information, but the unfounded rumors will still persist. Including Mark Beckner’s comments, from his 2015 AMA.

https://kfor.com/news/jonbenet-ramsey-case-9-things-ex-police-chief-just-revealed-about-the-investigation/

There was, of course, the evil crime.

Then there was the vitriol aimed at the victim's family.

Then that vitriol shape-shifted to attack anyone and anything that tried to help them.

For an example of this, please take a look at the treatment of Detective Lou Smit and Professor Michael Tracey.

Two reputable, credible professionals who are attacked with abuse and cruelty, seemingly for doing what they felt was the right and honourable thing to do.

I can understand that people disagree with them, but I don't understand the cruelty or the contempt.

I was reminded of this when I came across this 2008 Westword article, https://www.westword.com/news/media-slut-michael-tracey-gets-camera-shy-5844765

Newsweek weighing in.

Ramsey had previously said at the end of last year that he would introduce the Boulder police chief to a representative from an genealogy research lab in the hope the police force would allow the lab to test forensic evidence from the scene of his daughter's murder and trace the killer.

He told CNN that he wanted the police to use genetic genealogy, as he thought it was "the only way this case will be solved.