The family of JonBenét Ramsey believe there are seven key pieces of evidence that could solve the decades-long mystery of her murder.
The child beauty queen was found brutally killed her family’s Boulder, Colorado, home on December 26, 1996.
Her stricken parents had initially reported her missing after they discovered a rambling ransom note and their daughter gone.
Her father, John Ramsey, later found the six-year-old girl battered and strangled to death in their basement. Thanks to a bombshell new Netflix series on the murder, interest in the case – and the TV show’s focus on a pedophile who confessed to the murder – has been renewed.
Her killer has eluded police ever since, but her grieving dad, who is now in his eighties, still holds out hope that advanced DNA testing on several items found at the crime scene could hold the key to tracking them down.
‘Finding the killer isn’t going to change my life at this point,’ he told CBS. ‘But it will change the lives of my children and grandchildren. This cloud needs to be removed from out family’s head.’
John, his late wife Patsy – who died in 2006 at the age of 49 – and their son, Burke, who was nine years old and home at the time of the killing, were largely convicted in the court of public opinion following JonBenét’s death, despite the Boulder DA officially clearing them and apologizing in 2008.
John is confident that DNA left at the scene from an unidentified male will lead to the identification of a suspect. Here, DailyMail.com breaks down the evidence which could be used for testing.
John Ramsey, father of JonBenét Ramsey, believes there are seven key pieces of evidence which could solve the decades-long mystery of her murder
The child beauty queen was found brutally killed her family’s Boulder, Colorado home on December 26, 1996
Ransom Note
Patsy’s first clue that something was amiss came when she awoke early after Christmas Day was a note left on her stairs.
The message had been scrawled using her personal stationery and demanded $118,000 for the safe return of her daughter.
‘Listen carefully! We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction,’ the note read.
‘We do respect your bussiness sic but not the country that it serves. At this time we have your daughter in our posession sic.
‘She is safe and unharmed and if you want her to see 1997, you must follow our instructions to the letter.’
The note, addressed to JonBenét’s father, continued on at length and warned him not to contact police.
A handwriting expert later claimed to have spotted similarities between Patsy’s cursive and the script found in the note, however it could not be conclusively proven.
This ransom note was found by JonBenét’s mom, Patsy, shortly before her daughter was discovered dead in the basement
Garotte
An autopsy report concluded that JonBenét’s cause of death was ‘asphyxia by strangulation associated with craniocerebral trauma’, meaning she was strangled and hit in the head.
The killer of the Young Miss Colorado left her on a heap of clothes with an eight-inch fracture to her skull and a fragmented paint brush stuck into her neck by garrote.
The crude device had been constructed by hand and was found at the scene with entwined with pieces of JonBenét’s hair entwined.
Male DNA was also found on the object, but John says this has never been tested.
‘I don’t know why they didn’t test it in the beginning,’ her told True Crime News.
‘To my knowledge it still hasn’t been tested. If they’re testing it and just not telling me, that’s great, but I have no reason to believe that.’
In the latest Netflix documentary, Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey?, the convicted pedophile Gary Oliva was featured heavily as a potential suspect.
Oliva, who recently went missing from the halfway home he was ordered to reside, had long confessed to ‘accidentally’ killed 6-year-old JonBenét.
However, he was cleared as a potential suspect, given that his DNA did not match that found at the scene.
The docuseries questions whether Oliva should still be on cops’ list of potential killers given that the DNA evidence was unreliable at the time.
Oliva had sexually assaulted a neighbor in Oregon and ended up in Boulder homeless at the time JonBenét was killed, using an address just 10 blocks from her home.
John would like the garotte used to kill his daughter retested for DNA evidence
JonBenét’s broken body was discovered by her father swaddled in a white blanket in the basement of her home
Blanket
JonBenét’s broken body was discovered by her father swaddled in a white blanket in the basement of her home.
The little girl had a piece of duct tape on her mouth, which John removed and threw on top of the blanket before he carried his daughter upstairs.
