The Megyn Kelly Show - 20221213_revisiting-the-jonbenet-ramsey-murder-case-and-how
Aired: 2022-12-13
Duration: 01:35:58


=== The Mystery of John's Death (08:11) ===

[00:00:35]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:01:02]  Despite decades of intense media attention, police investigations, and over 20,000 tips in this case, we still don't know the person or persons responsible for her death.
[00:01:15]  But there are several new developments in the case, and John is here to walk us through what they are and whether he believes they could lead to finding his daughter's killer after all these years.
[00:01:26]  First, a reminder of how this story began: it was Christmas night, 1996, Boulder, Colorado.
[00:01:34]  The Ramsey home was decorated with holiday wreaths tied with bows.
[00:01:38]  John and his now late wife, Patsy Ramsey, had put six-year-old John Benet to bed after returning home from a Christmas dinner with friends.
[00:01:46]  When Patsy woke up early the next morning and went downstairs, she found a ransom note at the bottom of the steps.
[00:01:54]  It read in part: We have your daughter in our possession.
[00:01:58]  Patsy ran to John Benet's room.
[00:02:00]  She would later tell authorities, but she was nowhere to be found.
[00:02:04]  Patsy called 911.
[00:02:05]  Her voice was hysterical, begging for police to come as soon as possible.
[00:02:10]  At the end of the call, you can hear Patsy praying and pleading, Help me, Jesus, help me.
[00:02:16]  There's a ransom note here.
[00:02:17]  It's a ransom now.
[00:02:19]  It says FBTC.
[00:02:21]  Victory.
[00:02:26]  Please.
[00:02:27]  Okay, what's your name?
[00:02:28]  Are you Patsy Ramsey?
[00:02:29]  I'm the rubber.
[00:02:30]  Oh my God.
[00:02:32]  Please.
[00:02:33]  I'm okay.
[00:02:33]  I'm coming on the phone.
[00:02:34]  Okay.
[00:02:35]  Do you know how long she's been gone?
[00:02:37]  Oh, I don't.
[00:02:38]  Please, we just got out.
[00:02:39]  Is she right here?
[00:02:40]  Oh, my God, please.
[00:02:42]  Okay, come on.
[00:02:43]  I am, honey.
[00:02:44]  Please, take a deep breath, please.
[00:02:46]  Hurry, hurry.
[00:02:47]  Patsy, Patsy, Patsy, Patsy.
[00:02:58]  You couldn't hear it as well there, but she is on there saying, Help me, Jesus, help me, Jesus.
[00:03:03]  Oh, hours later, their little girl's body was found in the basement of their home.
[00:03:09]  Not by police, but by John, who was sent around by the detective who was there saying, Go look for any belongings of hers that may be out of place.
[00:03:17]  And he found his own child.
[00:03:20]  John Benet had been strangled and left for dead on a concrete floor.
[00:03:25]  Police focused their investigation almost solely on John and Patsy, believing there was no way an intruder was responsible.
[00:03:33]  Why?
[00:03:33]  That's one of the big questions here.
[00:03:35]  Why did they believe that?
[00:03:36]  Because there's a lot of evidence suggesting the opposite.
[00:03:39]  They believe the parents did it.
[00:03:40]  Case pretty much closed in their eyes.
[00:03:43]  It would take years before DNA evidence would clear them in 2008.
[00:03:49]  But Patsy would never live to see that day.
[00:03:52]  She died of ovarian cancer two years earlier, 10 years after the death of her little six-year-old.
[00:03:58]  Oh, so tragic.
[00:04:00]  To this day, John's hope is that this case will be solved.
[00:04:05]  And that hope remains in the hands of the same police department that pointed the finger at him wrongly.
[00:04:12]  John Ramsey is here today.
[00:04:14]  John, thank you so much for being with us.
[00:04:17]  Well, it's my pleasure.
[00:04:18]  Thank you for having me on.
[00:04:20]  Oh, I've been following you for so many years, following the case and seeing so many of your interviews.
[00:04:24]  And you've handled it with such dignity.
[00:04:26]  I appreciate the fact that here we are 25 years later and you're still, still trying to keep interest on the case and try to call attention to what you need, you think, to solve it.
[00:04:37]  And there's breaking news, I should say, about the detectives involved in your case.
[00:04:42]  That's extraordinary.
[00:04:44]  The very guy who interviewed you and Patsy, who you've been kind of complaining about, like he didn't follow up on Leeds, he didn't do this.
[00:04:50]  He didn't do that.
[00:04:51]  There's news about him today.
[00:04:53]  I assume you've heard what's happened to him.
[00:04:56]  Yes.
[00:04:57]  Yeah, it was a big step forward, I think, in this case, because he was a roadblock.
[00:05:07]  When he was assigned into this case 25, 26 years ago, he was at that time an auto theft investigator.
[00:05:15]  And now he's put on the investigation of murder of a child.
[00:05:20]  And I've never criticized the Boulder police for not knowing what they're doing or not having any experience.
[00:05:27]  They didn't even have a homicide department.
[00:05:29]  But I have criticized them over the years for the reason that they would not accept help from those who offered it.
[00:05:36]  And lots of help was offered.
[00:05:39]  Right in the beginning, the Denver police offered to put two experienced homicide detectives on Boulder's staff at Denver's expense for as long as they needed them.
[00:05:48]  Boulder said, no, we don't need that.
[00:05:50]  We've got this under control.
[00:05:52]  That's been going on for 26 years.
[00:05:55]  And they've just kind of had it.
[00:05:57]  It's time to do something different, put some people in charge that know what they're doing and be willing to put their ego and arrogance aside and accept help.
[00:06:08]  Yeah.
[00:06:10]  The detective's name was Tom Trujillo.
[00:06:12]  He was one of the lead investigators in John Benet's case.
[00:06:15]  He just received an involuntary transfer to another division where he's going to be working the midnight shift, not a promotion, in addition to a three-day suspension.
[00:06:26]  And they've basically said that he and another were not, they were not investigating, appropriately investigating several cases.
[00:06:34]  They said John Benet's case was not one of them.
[00:06:37]  These are the cases that he's being accused of half-assing it on were not homicide cases, but he is being accused of not doing his job and not following through on leads and so on and other significant investigations.
[00:06:53]  Do you feel validated at all by that?
[00:06:57]  Well, in a way, yes.
[00:07:03]  We've known that he's been a problem and not really capable of thinking out of the box.
[00:07:08]  And more importantly, his arrogance, I guess, ego prevented anybody from coming in to help.
[00:07:20]  You know, our system, the way it's set up is kind of crazy, but there's 18,000 police jurisdictions in this country.
[00:07:26]  Each one's a little island of authority.
[00:07:28]  And if crime happens on that island, it's up to the local police to deal with it.
[00:07:35]  With the exception of a few things like bank robberies, nobody can come in and help them unless they're invited.
[00:07:41]  And that's a real Crazy system because there was tons of qualified help that could have come in, wanted to come in, but unless they were invited and asked to come in to help, they can't.
[00:07:56]  And it's been a huge frustration.
[00:08:01]  And that's really what I'm very critical of the police department on that issue.
[00:08:07]  Of course.
[00:08:07]  Because you see, the bigger cities tend to have a higher homicide rate and thus more experienced homicide detectives and people who know how to preserve a crime scene and preserve evidence.
[00:08:17]  And that's the problem.
[00:08:19]  That was one of the major problems right from the get-go with this, which let's take a step back now and talk and set up the crime so that people have a better feeling for what they did and didn't do and why you really kind of want this case wrested from them right now.
[00:08:35]  I mean, it's been 26 years.
[00:08:36]  It's kind of time.
[00:08:37]  You know, there should be a statute of limitations for the police.
[00:08:39]  If they haven't solved it, they should be able to be compelled to give the evidence to the family or to somebody else who might be able to have a go at it.
[00:08:46]  But we'll get to that.

=== Signs of a Struggle Inside (15:03) ===

[00:08:47]  So let's go back.
[00:08:48]  Let's go back to December 26, 1996.
[00:08:52]  You were living in Boulder, Colorado with Patsy, your wife, with little John Benet, who was six.
[00:08:57]  You had a son too, Burke at the time, who was 10.
[00:09:00]  And things are going well for you.
[00:09:02]  You were a successful business executive.
[00:09:05]  Was Patsy a stay-at-home wife?
[00:09:07]  Yes.
[00:09:08]  Yes, she was.
[00:09:09]  She's very devoted to the children.
[00:09:11]  Okay, very devoted mom.
[00:09:12]  We've seen the videos of her.
[00:09:15]  She seemed like a very loving mother.
[00:09:17]  And you just celebrated Christmas Day.
[00:09:19]  Was there anything out of the ordinary on that day, Christmas Day?
[00:09:24]  No, it was a very normal day.
[00:09:26]  We had gotten up early, of course, and had made a breakfast.
[00:09:32]  And then all day long, kids were in and out of the house with their friends coming and going and playing with new toys.
[00:09:39]  Very normal, very normal Christmas day for us.
[00:09:44]  So you went out over to a friend's house to eat Christmas evening dinner, dinner on the 25th with the kids?
[00:09:51]  Yes.
[00:09:52]  Okay.
[00:09:53]  You go over there.
[00:09:55]  Yeah, go ahead.
[00:09:56]  Well, I say the friends we visited have kids our age, our kids' age.
[00:10:01]  And so they were buddies and it was a logical place to have a family get together.
[00:10:07]  So what time did you get home from that dinner?
[00:10:11]  Well, I think if I recall, it was about 9:30.
[00:10:16]  John Benet had fallen asleep on the way home, and it was only maybe six blocks, but she was tired.
[00:10:22]  She'd been up all day and having fun and playing.
[00:10:26]  And so I carried her upstairs and put her on her bed.
[00:10:29]  And then Patsy came up and got her ready for bed and tucked her in.
[00:10:34]  So Patsy put on John Benet's pajamas that night.
[00:10:38]  And this would later become an issue, what she was wearing.
[00:10:41]  What did Patsy put John Benet in?
[00:10:45]  I don't remember, quite frankly.
[00:10:50]  I'd have to look at the pictures, but it was just nightclothes.
[00:10:55]  But my understanding, the reason I ask you, John, is that I've been reading up in the case that there was an allegation that Patsy said she put her in a red outfit, like red PJs.
[00:11:03]  And when she was found, she was in white.
[00:11:07]  Is that familiar to you?
[00:11:08]  Yeah, my.
[00:11:09]  Yeah.
[00:11:10]  Well, I didn't know, but I don't know about the red nightgown.
[00:11:14]  I hadn't never heard that.
[00:11:15]  But when I found her, she had on like a black and white pants and top.
[00:11:24]  Okay.
[00:11:25]  So Patsy puts her in bed.
[00:11:26]  So probably by 10 o'clock, John Benet was in her bed.
[00:11:31]  Oh, yeah.
[00:11:32]  Yeah.
[00:11:33]  And what time did you guys go to bed in Burke too?
[00:11:38]  It'd been shortly after that, probably 10.30, I guess.
[00:11:41]  Yeah.
[00:11:43]  And your son, too.
[00:11:46]  Yes.
[00:11:47]  Yeah.
[00:11:47]  He went to bed immediately when we got.
[00:11:49]  Yeah, he's also a little guy.
[00:11:51]  He's not like you have a teenager at that point who likes to stay up late.
[00:11:54]  Oh, he was nine years old and worn out from Christmas Day as well.
[00:11:59]  Okay.
[00:11:59]  So everybody goes to bed by 10:30.
[00:12:02]  And you like in our house, before we go to sleep, we lock all the doors, make sure the security's on, you know, all that stuff.
[00:12:09]  Did you have any of that on your house?
[00:12:12]  We had an alarm system that was in the house when we bought it.
[00:12:17]  And it was the type that at that time, the theory was you scare everybody out of the house, including the intruder.
[00:12:26]  It was just this horrible, loud noise.
[00:12:30]  And so we didn't use it.
[00:12:31]  It went off once.
[00:12:33]  John Bidet, about dinner time, I don't know, six months or eight months before, was playing.
[00:12:40]  We didn't know it, but she was punching the buttons on the alarm system.
[00:12:44]  And this horrible sound came up.
[00:12:46]  And I ran into where the control box was.
[00:12:50]  And I remember John Bedet looking at me like, and said, this makes my ears loud.
[00:12:56]  So we've all been there.
[00:12:58]  Those security systems can be, they can definitely be more annoying than, you know, they ought to be off.
[00:13:03]  They tend to go off when you don't want them to.
[00:13:05]  In this case, this would have given you a heart attack if it wasn't.
[00:13:08]  So what about what else was there?
[00:13:09]  Did you were there locks on the doors or the windows?
[00:13:11]  What was the security system?
[00:13:13]  Well, it was an old house built in 1927.
[00:13:19]  It, yes, there were locks on the doors and just typical window locks, but I didn't check them that night.
[00:13:29]  And that's to my deep regret.
[00:13:33]  We were tired and, you know, we always assumed Boulder was kind of a, you know, Ozzy and Harriet, flowers coming up, quiet, safe place.
[00:13:46]  And so you get complacent.
[00:13:48]  And we, and I regretfully admit we are complacent.
[00:13:52]  No, I know it.
[00:13:52]  I know it.
[00:13:53]  I mean, I grew up in upstate New York.
[00:13:54]  We never locked our doors ever.
[00:13:56]  We'd go away for vacation for a week and not even lock the door.
[00:13:59]  And there was never an incident.
[00:14:02]  It's, you know, I've told people, I said, you know, just be aware there are bad people everywhere.
[00:14:09]  Not just because you live in a nice neighborhood or don't live in South LA that you're safe, but don't be paranoid, but just be aware of that.
[00:14:17]  And your home should be your sanctuary.
[00:14:20]  And that's a huge regret on my part to become complacent.
[00:14:28]  Do you know if you had locked just the doors?
[00:14:30]  Of course, you say you didn't check the windows, but had you locked the doors?
[00:14:35]  Well, I thought I did.
[00:14:36]  Yeah.
[00:14:40]  There was a door found open that morning, not by me, but by the police.
[00:14:48]  It shouldn't have been opened.
[00:14:50]  It's possible the kids were playing and went through it and didn't close it.
[00:14:53]  I doubt it because that was kind of in a sub-basement area.
[00:14:57]  They wouldn't have been going down there.
[00:14:59]  But I think the killer was in the house when we got home.
[00:15:03]  And it he waited until we were in bed and took John Monet from her room.
[00:15:17]  It's a chilling thought.
[00:15:18]  It's a chilling thought just to have him lying in wait there for murder.
[00:15:24]  Can I ask you to just before we leave the subject of security?
[00:15:28]  Was there a dog?
[00:15:29]  Was there any other layers?
[00:15:31]  John Monet had a little dog.
[00:15:36]  His name was Jock.
[00:15:38]  And we had taken over the neighbors before we went out to dinner because we were going to leave town the next morning and have a second Christmas with my older children.
[00:15:47]  And then we had a reservation for the family on the Disney big red boat.
[00:15:53]  And that was our, you know, take place, you know, right after Christmas.
[00:15:58]  So we were, we, we took the dog and took him to our neighbors and they were going to take care of him until we got home.
[00:16:06]  Right.
[00:16:07]  That's, oh, gosh, I'm sorry.
[00:16:10]  Like all these things you'd like to have back.
[00:16:11]  And who knows whether they would have made a difference.
[00:16:13]  But yeah, the dog.
[00:16:14]  I mean, they basically say as many layers as you can put between a potential bad guy and those you love, the better.
[00:16:22]  Yes.
[00:16:24]  You know, you're most vulnerable at night when you're asleep for sure.
[00:16:29]  And it's just prudent to pay attention to that, regardless of where you live.
[00:16:39]  How far away were your children's bedrooms from your bedroom?
[00:16:44]  Well, they were, it was an old house.
[00:16:46]  There were basement, ground floor, second floor, and the second floor, which were the kids were.
[00:16:52]  And then the upstairs attic, we converted it to a master bedroom.
[00:16:55]  So in terms of distance, I don't know, 30 feet, maybe something like that, 40 feet, but also on a different level.
[00:17:10]  Did you sleep with the doors closed to your bedrooms?
[00:17:12]  Like, do you believe if you would, if, if no, they were, they were open.
[00:17:16]  So do you believe if she had yelled, you would have heard it?
[00:17:21]  I think so.
[00:17:21]  Yeah, I really do.
[00:17:27]  I think with virtual certainty, we're sure a stun gun was used, perhaps when she was asleep in her bed.
[00:17:39]  Don't know that for a fact, but yeah, I think if she'd have screamed or there'd been noise, we would have heard it, I think.
[00:17:51]  There were marks on her face and I think her neck too that suggested a stun gun had been used on her.
[00:17:56]  John, forgive me, because I don't know the answer to this, but what would a stun gun do to a person when used?
[00:18:03]  I mean, would it incapacitate you for a time?
[00:18:07]  What would it do?
[00:18:08]  Well, apparently it does.
[00:18:10]  I don't know.
[00:18:11]  But we had it looked at.
[00:18:17]  Police discounted that idea.
[00:18:20]  And we had it looked at by a doctor who specializes in that kind of stuff somehow.
[00:18:26]  And he said with 99% certainty, those are stun gun marks.
[00:18:33]  But I think because we didn't hear anything, you would think at least if this creature had come in and started to take Jamini from her bed, she would have screamed and we would certainly have heard that.
[00:18:48]  Yeah.
[00:18:48]  And even if he covered her mouth, you'd hear something, some sort of signs of a struggle.
[00:18:53]  But if the stun gun were used, and of course I know that you found her with duct tape on her mouth, that could have kept her quiet.
[00:19:00]  All right, so let's back up.
[00:19:02]  So you, so Patsy comes downstairs early.
[00:19:05]  They say it was 5.52 a.m. was that 911 call.
[00:19:08]  So it was early in the morning.
[00:19:09]  You say you were taking a trip.
[00:19:11]  And was that your first sign that something was wrong?
[00:19:14]  She finds this ransom note at the bottom of the stairs.
[00:19:17]  And then what?
[00:19:18]  Does she come find you or what happens next?
[00:19:20]  Well, she screamed.
[00:19:21]  And it was, you know, I was getting ready to get dressed and she screamed.
[00:19:27]  I could tell from the scream it was something was very, very wrong.
[00:19:32]  And I ran down and she had this ransom note.
[00:19:36]  And it was just an unbelievable thing.
[00:19:45]  And we went, or I did, I think I did it.
[00:19:48]  Looked, make sure Brooke was okay because his bedroom was on kind of the other end of the house.
[00:19:54]  And he was still in bed and appeared to be asleep.
[00:19:57]  So he knew he was safe.
[00:20:01]  And so I, you know, I took the note and I mean, she Patsy explained, said, hey, this is a ransom note, John.
[00:20:11]  He's gone.
[00:20:11]  I checked her room.
[00:20:12]  And so I tried to grasp what was in the ransom note.
[00:20:18]  It was three pages.
[00:20:20]  And just told Patsy to call the police, call the police, call 911.
[00:20:27]  And of course, funny thing, we were criticized for that because the ransom note told us not to do that.
[00:20:32]  Well, that's silly.
[00:20:33]  Of course we did.
[00:20:34]  Of course.
[00:20:35]  Of course.
[00:20:36]  You're going to call the police and you don't follow the directions of a kidnapper to not call law enforcement.
[00:20:43]  So Patsy called immediately.
[00:20:46]  She was standing by the phone at that time.
[00:20:48]  And I was still trying to comprehend what the note said and what was going on.
[00:20:55]  I'll get to the note in one second.
[00:20:56]  I think it's worth reading so that the audience can understand how bizarre it was.
[00:21:00]  Before we do that, I want to play the longer Patsy 911 call because to this day, even though you've been totally exonerated, people say, oh, the parents did it.
[00:21:09]  You know how it is.
[00:21:09]  Oh, yeah.
[00:21:10]  And I mean, thank you.
[00:21:12]  Even after the killer's arrested and convicted, of course.
[00:21:16]  DNA has exonerated you.
[00:21:18]  So it's like, okay.
[00:21:19]  But I, as a mother, you hear Patsy Ramsey in this 911 call and you can hear the sheer panic in her voice.
[00:21:29]  And especially if you listen to the longer version, which I'll play here, it's sound by two.
[00:21:43]  Explain to me what's fine on, okay?
[00:21:46]  There's a note left in our daughter's gone.
[00:21:48]  A note was left in your daughter's gun.
[00:21:50]  How old is your daughter?
[00:21:51]  Six years old.
[00:21:53]  She's gone.
[00:21:54]  Six years old.
[00:21:57]  How long ago was it?
[00:21:59]  I don't know.
[00:21:59]  I took film the note.
[00:22:01]  And my daughter's kids are saying who checked her.
[00:22:04]  What?
[00:22:04]  Is it San Huge?
[00:22:06]  I don't know.
[00:22:08]  There's a ransom note here.
[00:22:09]  It's a ransom note.
[00:22:11]  It says FBTC.
[00:22:13]  Victory.
[00:22:18]  Please.
[00:22:19]  Okay, what's your name?
[00:22:20]  Are you Patsy Ramsey?
[00:22:21]  I'm the rubber.
[00:22:22]  Oh, my God.
[00:22:24]  Please.
[00:22:25]  Okay, I'm getting an octopus over, okay?
[00:22:27]  Do you know how long she's been gone?
[00:22:29]  No, I don't.
[00:22:30]  Please, we just got out.
[00:22:31]  Is she right here?
[00:22:33]  Oh, my God, please.
[00:22:34]  Okay, this is her buddy.
[00:22:36]  I am, honey.
[00:22:36]  Please take a deep breath, please.
[00:22:38]  Hurry, hurry.
[00:22:39]  Patsy, Patsy, Patsy, Patsy.
[00:22:50]  That's where she says, help me, Jesus.
[00:22:52]  She's in a sheer panic.
[00:22:54]  You were there.
[00:22:56]  All she knew at that point was John Bennett was missing because she wasn't in her bed.
[00:23:00]  And you can feel, you must have been feeling the same, John, just the slow reveal of, wait, a ransom note.
[00:23:07]  And wait, she's actually not in her room.
[00:23:10]  What on earth is going on here?
[00:23:14]  Well, we didn't know.
[00:23:15]  We knew she, according to, we believed what the note said that she they have our daughter and we were not to call the police.
[00:23:26]  And if we did, she would be beheaded.
[00:23:31]  And it was dark.
[00:23:33]  It was cold out.
[00:23:34]  It was a horrible feeling.
[00:23:36]  I told people it's like when if you're with your child and you're at a department store or grocery store and you look around and the child's gone, you have this instinctive, just horrible feeling in your stomach that, you know, where's my child?

=== A Terrifying Delivery Message (04:37) ===

[00:23:50]  And it's a terrible feeling.
[00:23:53]  And I think all parents have experienced that from time to time when their little ones gone out of sight.
[00:24:00]  You don't know where they are.
[00:24:02]  And that was the feeling we had.
[00:24:04]  And it went on for till, I don't know, one in the afternoon.
[00:24:10]  Right.
[00:24:11]  And then an even worse feeling came.
[00:24:14]  We've all had that.
[00:24:15]  We've all had that.
[00:24:15]  And the moment of relief when you find your child well is overwhelming.
[00:24:20]  And you kept waiting, kept waiting for that to happen.
[00:24:24]  And you can hear Patsy, you know, waiting for it with the 911 operator and doing the only thing you can do at that point, which is pray to Jesus.
[00:24:31]  Just pray, pray, pray, pray.
[00:24:32]  It's not as you think it is.
[00:24:34]  The note, the note is one of the most important and bizarre things of this whole case.
[00:24:39]  The handwritten note, which for our listening audience, we've put on the screen and you can see it on YouTube.
[00:24:46]  It's handwritten.
[00:24:48]  It's three pages long, as you point out.
[00:24:50]  And I'm going to read it just so the audience understands what you guys read.
[00:24:55]  It was addressed to you, you, John Ramsey, right, dear Mr. Ramsey.
[00:25:01]  And then it reads as follows.
[00:25:03]  Listen carefully, exclamation point.
[00:25:05]  We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction.
[00:25:11]  We do respect your business, spelled wrong, but not the country it serves.
[00:25:16]  At this time, we have your daughter in our possession, spelled wrong.
[00:25:20]  She is safe and unharmed.
[00:25:21]  And if you want to see her, if you want her to see 1997, you must follow our instructions to the letter.
[00:25:27]  You will withdraw $118,000 from your account.
[00:25:31]  $100,000 will be in $100 bills, the remaining $18,000 in $20 bills.
[00:25:36]  Make sure that you bring an adequate size attaché to the bank.
[00:25:40]  When you get home, you will put the money in a brown paper bag.
[00:25:43]  I will call you between 8 and 10 a.m. tomorrow to instruct you on delivery.
[00:25:48]  The delivery will be exhausting.
[00:25:51]  So I advise you to be rested.
[00:25:53]  If we monitor you getting the money early, we might call you early to arrange an earlier delivery of the money and hence a earlier delivery pickup of your daughter.
[00:26:03]  Another grammatical error.
[00:26:05]  Any deviation of my instructions will result in the immediate execution of your daughter.
[00:26:10]  You will also be denied her remains for proper burial.
[00:26:13]  The two gentlemen watching over your daughter do not particularly like you.
[00:26:17]  So I advise you not to provoke them.
[00:26:19]  Speaking to anyone about your situation, such as police, FBI, et cetera, will result in your daughter being beheaded.
[00:26:26]  If we catch you talking to a stray dog, she dies.
[00:26:29]  If you alert bank authorities, she dies.
[00:26:30]  If the money is in any way marked or tampered with, she dies.
[00:26:33]  You will be scanned for electronic devices.
[00:26:35]  And if any are found, she dies.
[00:26:37]  You can try to deceive us, but be warned that we are familiar with law enforcement countermeasures and tactics.
[00:26:43]  You stand a 99% chance of killing your daughter if you try to outsmart towards us.
[00:26:51]  Follow our instructions and you stand a 100% chance of getting her back.
[00:26:55]  You and your family are under constant scrutiny as well as the authorities.
[00:27:00]  Don't try to grow up brain, John.
[00:27:02]  You are not the only fat cat around.
[00:27:05]  So don't think that killing will be difficult.
[00:27:07]  Don't underestimate us, John.
[00:27:10]  Use that good southern common sense of yours.
[00:27:13]  It is up to you now, John.
[00:27:15]  Victory, exclamation point, S-B-T-C.
[00:27:21]  Absolutely bizarre.
[00:27:24]  When you read that, other than the obvious, was there anything, you know, I've had a chance to read it and reread it.
[00:27:30]  What jumped out at you?
[00:27:31]  Well, there's several things that you wonder what did that mean to the killer.
[00:27:38]  One was the amount of the ransom money request, 118,000.
[00:27:43]  Why not a million?
[00:27:44]  Why not, you know, 100,000?
[00:27:48]  Why 118?
[00:27:49]  That has some had some significance to the killer.
[00:27:54]  And then the other, of course, was the beheading.
[00:27:59]  concept.
[00:28:00]  You know, that's that's very un you don't think about that as a as a as a punishment or a penalty, but yet that's a very common thing nowadays.
[00:28:14]  We read about some of the terrorists and stuff that goes on.
[00:28:18]  So you wonder, well, are they, is it really a terrorist group or terrorist individuals?
[00:28:23]  And that's a common threat they can make.

=== Handwriting Analysis Confusion (02:30) ===

[00:28:27]  And then, of course, the final thing was SBTC.
[00:28:30]  What does that mean?
[00:28:31]  Victory.
[00:28:32]  That's sign-off.
[00:28:33]  So those are kind of the three elements in my mind that this didn't make sense.
[00:28:39]  And the $118,000 was happened to be my annual bonus that year.
[00:28:49]  And I was paid in January of 1996.
[00:28:55]  And that is somewhat of a logical where that number came from.
[00:29:02]  They would have had to known that.
[00:29:05]  But the rest of it just didn't make sense.
[00:29:08]  It was a bizarre note.
[00:29:09]  I mean, I've been told too that in a way it's a gift because I've been told by handwriting experts that with that long of a sample, three pages, if we had the handwriting of the killer, it'd be very easy to conclusively say this person wrote this note.
[00:29:28]  It's a big sample of their handwriting.
[00:29:30]  What did the handwriting analyst say could be gleaned about the writing?
[00:29:34]  Could they tell anything about age, gender, psychological state, any of that?
[00:29:41]  Well, we didn't get that from the handwriting people.
[00:29:43]  Typically, they just told us what their findings were, and they rank their findings on a scale of one to five.
[00:29:53]  One is absolutely this person wrote it when they're doing comparison.
[00:29:57]  A five is absolutely no way.
[00:30:00]  And I was a one.
[00:30:02]  They said, absolutely, you did not write it.
[00:30:04]  Patsy was a four and a half.
[00:30:06]  And you say, well, why four and a half?
[00:30:08]  And I was told that there's, depending on who you're taught to write, what generation, there are certain things that are kind of common, but they're not significant and they're not a lot of them.
[00:30:23]  So the police were told, hey, you guys better look somewhere else because we don't see that either parent wrote the note.
[00:30:34]  Wait, but wait, wait, back up because I thought you said one means you wrote it.
[00:30:38]  Five means no way.
[00:30:40]  But is it just the, and that you, they, then you just said that you were a one, suggesting.
[00:30:44]  Oh, no, I was five.
[00:30:45]  Sorry.
[00:30:46]  Okay.
[00:30:47]  You were a five.
[00:30:49]  And Patsy was a four and a half.
[00:30:50]  Okay.
[00:30:50]  So you were both on exactly the scale of you didn't write it or there's virtually no chance that you wrote it.
[00:30:57]  Right.

=== The Stone Becomes Cornerstone Note (04:22) ===

[00:30:58]  Yes.
[00:30:58]  Okay.
[00:30:58]  Got it.
[00:31:00]  So what about what about since then, the psychologist, the psychiatrist, I'm sure you've had people like that, FBI profilers who have read it.
[00:31:07]  And were they able to glean any sort of a profile from it?
[00:31:11]  Yeah, John Douglas, who started the whole FBI profiling program and is pretty much considered the top of the heap as far as that skill set and accomplishments.
[00:31:24]  We spent a couple of three days with him early on because our attorneys asked him to to spend some time with us and um.
[00:31:34]  But his conclusion was and prediction is, it's a young person fascinated by movies, you know, probably in his 20s, maybe early 30s um, and he said, this was not about John Bonet, this was directed at you to hurt you, John.
[00:31:51]  Uh, somebody is either extremely angry with you or extremely jealous of you, And this was done to hurt you.
[00:32:01]  And I thought, well, I couldn't possibly know anybody that I've made angry to that degree.
[00:32:07]  And he said, you may not even know who they are.
[00:32:11]  They've either observed you in the newspaper or, you know, whatever, and develop this either anger, angry, anger or jealousy at me.
[00:32:23]  That was John's conclusion.
[00:32:24]  And I think he's right.
[00:32:28]  Now, Lou Smith, who was the legendary detective from Colorado out of retirement, and was put on this case by the district attorney early on.
[00:32:38]  And Lou felt it was a kidnapping gone wrong.
[00:32:42]  And I always thought, well, those are two opposite theories.
[00:32:47]  And Lou is a legendary detective in Colorado.
[00:32:51]  And somebody pointed out to me recently that, well, that could be those two are not incompatible, those two theories.
[00:32:57]  I thought, well, you're right.
[00:32:59]  They're not.
[00:32:59]  Yeah.
[00:33:00]  No.
[00:33:01]  Somebody who wanted to hurt you went in there to kidnap your child.
[00:33:04]  Right.
[00:33:04]  Right.
[00:33:05]  And that thought hadn't occurred to me in a good while because I thought, well, here you got two top experts saying, two, giving me two different theories, but they're compatible.
[00:33:17]  Yeah, they're compatible.
[00:33:19]  But what about, I mean, the thing about just random intruder coming in that doesn't make sense if you look at the note is how do they know?
[00:33:26]  You are from Atlanta originally, no?
[00:33:28]  Like you are from the South.
[00:33:30]  The 118,000, how would they know your bonus?
[00:33:33]  I mean, it has to be somebody who, and I realize there's a chance they just randomly picked the number that was your bonus, but it seems like a small chance.
[00:33:39]  Seems much more likely if somebody worked at your company or had reason to know that that was your number.
[00:33:45]  Well, two ways I guess they could have known that.
[00:33:49]  They worked in our company.
[00:33:50]  That amount was on my paycheck stub since the previous January as a deferred compensation bonus.
[00:34:02]  So those, you know, we weren't real careful with that kind of stuff in our house.
[00:34:06]  We could have been tucked in a drawer or somebody that knew that from some connection inside of our company.
[00:34:18]  To me, that's the logical explanation.
[00:34:24]  The only other explanation I heard was Psalm 118 is right in the middle of the middle of the Bible.
[00:34:32]  It references the stone.
[00:34:34]  Stone becomes the cornerstone is one of the passages.
[00:34:38]  And could that be the SPTC?
[00:34:41]  And that's possible as well.
[00:34:44]  One of the suspects that we are interested in signed his high school yearbook, Stone Becomes Cornerstone.
[00:34:53]  So it's a very bizarre note.
[00:35:00]  What did they say, John?
[00:35:01]  What did they say about, and I want to know, like, did they go and speak to everybody at your company?
[00:35:06]  Did they, I mean, that'd be like the first place I would start as a detective, right?
[00:35:10]  Like somebody knows what he made.
[00:35:12]  Somebody doesn't like him.
[00:35:13]  They've made that clear.
[00:35:14]  They know where his roots are.
[00:35:16]  They know you're from the South.
[00:35:17]  So let's talk to everybody from the company.

=== Misspellings Reveal Suspect Roots (03:02) ===

[00:35:20]  Well, that kind of stuff just wasn't done.
[00:35:23]  They should have done a neighborhood survey that morning, gone around the houses to the neighborhood.
[00:35:27]  And if you see anything unusual, what have you, you know, they didn't do any of that.
[00:35:31]  So they basically, in fact, the detective, the only detective so-called that was there that morning concluded that I was the killer because, quote, she saw it in my eyes.
[00:35:45]  And that became the conclusion before they had even looked at evidence or investigated anything.
[00:35:52]  This is Linda Arnt.
[00:35:54]  Yeah.
[00:35:55]  And just we were just dealing with incompetence.
[00:36:01]  Well, in Linda's case, not just incompetence, but maybe a desire to cover up her incompetence because she, isn't she the one who said, search the house after seven hours of sitting there?
[00:36:12]  And she, she didn't search the house.
[00:36:14]  The foot patrolman who got there per the 911 call earlier, he didn't search the house adequately.
[00:36:19]  She didn't do it.
[00:36:20]  And that's the reason you, you were put in the position of finding your own little girl.
[00:36:25]  Well, that's exactly right.
[00:36:26]  In fact, to show you what kind of environment she was working in, the chief of police said, we didn't treat this as a crime scene because it was a kidnapping.
[00:36:35]  And you shake your head and think, where do these people come from?
[00:36:42]  Horrifying.
[00:36:43]  Just because at that point, they didn't know that it was a homicide.
[00:36:46]  You've got a six-year-old girl who's been taken from her bed in the middle of the night.
[00:36:49]  That's five-alarm fire.
[00:36:51]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:36:52]  That's not a crime.
[00:36:53]  I don't know what it is.
[00:36:56]  That was the quote.
[00:36:57]  Because I could give you a dozen quotes that were just astounding from the police department over the years.
[00:37:03]  But that was really the first one.
[00:37:04]  It was just unbelievable.
[00:37:10]  What about the misspellings and the improper grammar and the use of the word attaché, which is not really a thing we say in America?
[00:37:20]  It can mean either diplomatic assistant or it can mean bag in the way they're using it here.
[00:37:25]  But it's a bizarre, they said, or a small foreign faction.
[00:37:29]  Just for people who think, you know, forgive me again for raising your son.
[00:37:32]  He too was ruled out, as I understand it by the DNA in 2008.
[00:37:35]  But this is not the writing of a nine-year-old.
[00:37:38]  We're a small foreign faction.
[00:37:39]  Like people, you got to use your head.
[00:37:42]  But anyway, these misspellings and the improper grammar throughout tells us something.
[00:37:47]  It could be used intentionally, but this doesn't sound like a very well-educated person.
[00:37:54]  No, I got a letter.
[00:37:56]  We had a lot of people trying to help, and I got a letter from a teacher of, she taught English to non-English speaking people.
[00:38:07]  And she said, the misspellings in this are typical of a Hispanic person migrating to English based on her experience teaching them to read and write English and speak English.

=== Lockheed Martin Connection Revealed (02:52) ===

[00:38:23]  And I thought was pretty interesting and possibly could explain that.
[00:38:28]  And, you know, we were a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin and or at that time, just Lockheed.
[00:38:36]  You know, I take that.
[00:38:36]  See, well, anyway, Lockheed Martin bought Lockheed some time in there, but we had to, they required us to put a sign on the front of our building, which is downtown Boulder, a Lockheed Martin Corporation.
[00:38:49]  And at the time, I thought that's like waving a red flag in front of a bull.
[00:38:54]  Boulder's an ultra-liberal place.
[00:38:59]  And to put a, I'm sure their minds, a manufacturer of weapons sign in downtown Boulder was just inviting trouble.
[00:39:13]  It made me nervous, frankly, to do that at the time.
[00:39:16]  Right.
[00:39:16]  And they referenced your company.
[00:39:19]  We do respect your business, spelled wrong, spelled B-U-S-S-I, a double-S, S-S-I-N-E-S-S, but not the country that it serves.
[00:39:28]  So interesting.
[00:39:29]  They clearly are referencing something about what you do.
[00:39:35]  Yeah, that was bizarre as well.
[00:39:38]  And I start, you know, of course, trying to think who this possibly could have been.
[00:39:43]  And I wondered at times whether this was a kind of an amateur terrorist group or person that fantasized some things.
[00:39:54]  And I'm sure you've got to consider everything.
[00:39:58]  I mean, the guy, you know, the Unibomber, he used to write about himself as we and suggest it was some sort of international thing.
[00:40:07]  Like he wanted to make himself sound bigger and more important than just an I.
[00:40:11]  And this guy slips into the first person later in the ransom note.
[00:40:15]  But yeah, there's, it wouldn't be unusual for an individual to try to make themselves sound bigger or more nefarious in this way.
[00:40:22]  Yeah, very true.
[00:40:23]  Now, you know, I really do subscribe to John Douglas's theory that this was somebody that wanted to hurt me.
[00:40:31]  And that's, that's a tough burden to carry.
[00:40:36]  But frankly, John said, you may not even know him.
[00:40:39]  You know, we'd been in the paper a few weeks before, having hit for us a significant sales goal.
[00:40:46]  And our marketing people wanted to put it in the paper.
[00:40:49]  And I sort of had this gut feeling that that's not really a good idea.
[00:40:53]  But I wanted our people to be proud of their company.
[00:40:56]  And so we did it.
[00:41:00]  And that could have targeted me because I was at a picture of being quotes and stuff in the paper.
[00:41:09]  That could have been a.
[00:41:11]  You never know how you're affecting a sick mind who's going to transfer.

=== DNA Evidence on Stairway (12:18) ===

[00:41:16]  Who knows?
[00:41:17]  Yeah, that's the problem.
[00:41:19]  We had people, you know, we hired two detectives to work this early on because we knew the police weren't capable of it.
[00:41:28]  And in fact, we tried very hard in early days to get the case moved somewhere else to another jurisdiction.
[00:41:33]  They could have put it in the sheriff's department's office, which is a competent organization, it was at the time, and had dual authority over it.
[00:41:40]  We could have very easily had a sheriff's officer come to our home that morning instead of the city police department.
[00:41:48]  And that was a tragic first mistake, I guess, that that's luck of the draw that that's what happened.
[00:41:57]  So, you know, it just wasn't ever properly handled.
[00:42:08]  And to this day, is still not properly handled.
[00:42:10]  Well, and the theory that it's someone who didn't like you, because of course the other theory is that it's some pedophile, right?
[00:42:16]  That's what a lot of people are.
[00:42:17]  Well, those are the two conflicting, and I thought at the time, conflicting theories between John Douglas and Lou Smith.
[00:42:26]  Well, I thought we were talking about someone who knew you versus random intruder, but random intruder doesn't necessarily mean pedophile there to get the little girl, right?
[00:42:36]  Because that's one of the questions in the case about whether she was the victim of somebody who was a pedophile or whether it was somebody who just hurt her, right?
[00:42:46]  Because it was unclear.
[00:42:48]  Forgive me for the details, John, but it was unclear whether she was sexually penetrated by a man.
[00:42:56]  Well, first of all, this was not a random intruder.
[00:43:01]  This is somebody who had watched us, knew what our patterns were, knew we were going to be out that evening, left the note on the back stairway, which is the stairway we always used, which would not have been obvious to somebody that just came into the house.
[00:43:18]  We had a front stairway, but we never used that.
[00:43:22]  And so, why did they leave the ransomware on the back stairway?
[00:43:25]  How do they know that's where we would be coming down in the morning?
[00:43:32]  So it would have, I mean, there's some elements where somebody could have come into our home.
[00:43:38]  It was not a hard home to break into, I regret to say, and really understood where things were.
[00:43:47]  Or they could have been in the house for hours before we got home.
[00:43:52]  Are we sure that the person that says sexual gratification was a goal of the killer?
[00:43:58]  I don't know.
[00:43:59]  I think, you know, there's another case seven months later that happened in the neighborhood.
[00:44:05]  Yes, I know about Amy.
[00:44:07]  And I want to talk to you about Amy.
[00:44:09]  Forgive me for interrupting you because I want to go down this line, but I want to give us the proper time.
[00:44:13]  And I got to squeeze in a quick commercial break.
[00:44:15]  So let me pause you right there, John Ramsey, and we'll come right back.
[00:44:18]  So much more to discuss.
[00:44:19]  It's an honor to have you here.
[00:44:20]  I know it's not easy to discuss even 26 years later.
[00:44:23]  Even just losing any loved one is tough to discuss and certainly under these circumstances, even harder.
[00:44:32]  A couple things we're going to discuss when John comes back on in a minute.
[00:44:36]  And that is on the ransom note, do the police believe it was written before or after the murder?
[00:44:42]  That's one of the big questions because I know the police had said originally, not even a serial killer would have the steadiness to write a note like this after a murder.
[00:44:50]  So what do they think?
[00:44:51]  And by the way, a draft of this had been found.
[00:44:53]  He had started, the killer had started on a legal pad that was found in the Ramsey house by saying, dear Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey, and then started over addressing it just to Mr. Ramsey.
[00:45:04]  And then you heard what followed.
[00:45:05]  So there are a lot of questions still about this note and what can be gleaned from it.
[00:45:09]  Before we get to all that, I'm going to play you Patsy Ramsey's describing of the ransom note in a 1997 interview with CNN.
[00:45:19]  I didn't, I couldn't read the whole thing.
[00:45:24]  I just gotten up.
[00:45:26]  We were on our, it was the day after Christmas and we were going to go visiting.
[00:45:31]  And it was quite early in the morning and I'd gotten dressed and was on my way to the kitchen to make some coffee.
[00:45:43]  And we have a back staircase from the bedroom areas.
[00:45:48]  And I always come down that staircase and I'm usually the first one down.
[00:45:56]  And the note was lying across the three pages across the run of one of the stair treads.
[00:46:08]  And it was kind of dimly lit because it was very early in the morning.
[00:46:16]  And I started to read it and it was addressed to John.
[00:46:21]  It said, Mr. Ramsey.
[00:46:26]  And it said, we have your daughter.
[00:46:33]  And I, you know, it just was, it just wasn't registering.
[00:46:38]  And I may have gotten through another sentence like, I can't, we have your daughter.
[00:46:47]  And I, I don't know if I got any further than that.
[00:46:51]  And that's when she called 911.
[00:46:55]  The whole thing is just, I mean, what, what was on the note?
[00:46:59]  Were there fingerprints?
[00:47:01]  Was there touch DNA of any kind?
[00:47:03]  John Ramsey's been saying, even if you didn't find fingerprints, there might have been DNA.
[00:47:08]  Even if the person had worn gloves, there might have been DNA on that letter.
[00:47:13]  Has it been tested?
[00:47:14]  If not, why not?
[00:47:15]  Apparently there are several crime scene items that have not been tested for DNA, even in 2022, when touch DNA is out there.
[00:47:22]  DNA has evolved so much.
[00:47:24]  We're going to discuss all of that with John, plus the neighbor, Amy, a young girl who was sexually assaulted by a man in her bedroom in the middle of the night, just months after John Benet.
[00:47:34]  Wait until you hear what the police did in that case.
[00:47:40]  So, John, on the subject of the ransom note, before we leave that, there had been a draft addressed to both of you.
[00:47:46]  Then the final was just you.
[00:47:48]  It was written on a legal pad found in your home.
[00:47:51]  And that's the question, whether was it, were there any fingerprints?
[00:47:55]  Has it been tested for DNA?
[00:47:57]  Do you know where it came from in the house?
[00:47:58]  And was that area tested for fingerprints, et cetera, at the time?
[00:48:03]  I don't know.
[00:48:05]  I think my feeling was that the forensics people that came in did a pretty good job in finding a palm print that was unidentified until track to anybody footprints that don't match any shoes of ours in the house, things like that.
[00:48:25]  But whether this stuff was ever tested or not, I don't know.
[00:48:28]  We know there's five or six, maybe seven items that were originally taken from the crime scene, sent to an outside lab for testing along with others.
[00:48:39]  And five or six of those items were not tested.
[00:48:41]  They were returned to the police.
[00:48:44]  I don't know why.
[00:48:45]  Either the police didn't want to pay for it because back then it was expensive to do DNA testing.
[00:48:50]  But we know there's five or six items that have never been tested.
[00:48:54]  And so what else wasn't?
[00:48:55]  I do know that the forensic people spent about, the detectives spent a couple hours in the house and then told the DA, well, we're finished.
[00:49:03]  And he said, you can't be finished.
[00:49:05]  Get back in there.
[00:49:08]  So they took a very cursory look at it and then were ordered back in by the DA.
[00:49:14]  A forensics investigator experienced one told me they'll spend three days on a murder site looking for evidence, not two hours.
[00:49:26]  So.
[00:49:27]  Well, God only knows what was compromised.
[00:49:29]  And I know Linda Arndt, the detective, also didn't secure the scene.
[00:49:33]  She let your friends come over and come into the house.
[00:49:36]  She sent you to look around as we discussed.
[00:49:38]  And then after you found John Benet, as I understand it, she actually moved John Benet's body again from one spot to closer by the Christmas tree, which just should never be done when you're dealing with a homicide victim.
[00:49:51]  Right.
[00:49:51]  No, I, yeah, she just was way in over her head.
[00:49:56]  And, you know, I was criticized for disturbing the crime scene when I found John Benet by picking her up and holding her.
[00:50:05]  And what parent wouldn't do that?
[00:50:07]  It's just insane to be to that kind of level of misunderstanding of a parent's love for a child.
[00:50:17]  No, it's not possible not to pick up your child and hold her.
[00:50:20]  And at that point, you didn't know whether she was gone.
[00:50:25]  Can we spend a minute on that?
[00:50:26]  Because we talked about how Linda said, okay, search the house.
[00:50:29]  It's one o'clock now in the afternoon.
[00:50:31]  No one's called, you know, no kidnapper.
[00:50:33]  And I understand the note said, well, I'll call tomorrow.
[00:50:35]  So it was unclear whether they meant the 26th or the 27th.
[00:50:39]  I mean, you're sitting there and you're waiting and nothing's happening.
[00:50:41]  And now it's one o'clock in the afternoon.
[00:50:43]  She says, go look around the house.
[00:50:45]  And the people who want to say, oh, you know, look at John.
[00:50:49]  One of the things they say is, oh, he went right to the room.
[00:50:52]  He went to the basement and he went right to, there's a storage room off the basement where she was found.
[00:50:56]  Is that true?
[00:50:57]  Like, what did you do after Linda said, go search the house?
[00:51:01]  Well, a friend of mine that was there to help console us, we, she said for both of us to go search the house.
[00:51:13]  And so we went to the basement, which to me was a logical place to start.
[00:51:17]  Third floor, you couldn't get into the third floor from outside.
[00:51:21]  So we went to the basement and went into what we called the train room where the kids had a train set up.
[00:51:28]  And there was an open window and a suitcase propped up under the window as if it were to be a step.
[00:51:36]  And I told my friend, I said, that suitcase should not be there.
[00:51:40]  That's way out of place.
[00:51:41]  We wouldn't have put it there.
[00:51:43]  And so we then went into the only other room in that basement was this.
[00:51:52]  We called it a wine cellar, but it was an old coal cellar, dark, one door going into it, no entrances from the outside.
[00:52:02]  And I opened the door and, of course, immediately found John Minet.
[00:52:06]  And, you know, I don't, we heard Lindar say on the media or on an interview that, well, I told him to go from top to bottom and he started out in the bottom.
[00:52:17]  Why did he do that?
[00:52:20]  This just was logical to me.
[00:52:22]  But yeah, it do you remember that moment?
[00:52:30]  I mean, do you remember, was it, did it switch from concern to panic?
[00:52:34]  You know, do you remember emotionally what that moment was?
[00:52:37]  It was a switch from panic and it was a relief.
[00:52:42]  Thank God I found my child.
[00:52:45]  And that was the immediate feeling that I'd found her.
[00:52:51]  She's safe.
[00:52:53]  And but it fairly quickly concluded that she wasn't all right.
[00:53:02]  And so I just picked her up and carried her screaming, actually, I was screaming to upstairs to take her to help.
[00:53:14]  I mean, I don't know, it was just an instinctive reaction, I guess.
[00:53:17]  But and we laid her down on the floor of the living room in front of the Christmas tree.
[00:53:24]  And Linda Art had looked for her pulse and looked up at me and said, no, she's she's gone.

=== Faith Tested by Accusation (02:32) ===

[00:53:34]  And I guess it was that moment when she saw in my eyes that I was a killer.
[00:53:41]  So we were ushered out of the house pretty quickly.
[00:53:47]  And we never went back in that home.
[00:53:51]  That was the last time we were in that home.
[00:53:54]  John, can I ask you?
[00:53:55]  Because I know that one of the things that John Vinay was wearing was her cross, her cross necklace.
[00:54:02]  And according to what I read, and we heard Patsy praying to Jesus, you know, to help her, help her.
[00:54:09]  And I wondered if you were a family of faith and if, you know, what this did to that, right?
[00:54:16]  If you were able to carry that on.
[00:54:18]  Well, that's a good question.
[00:54:20]  And I really had to face that issue when my oldest daughter was killed in a car accident about four years before.
[00:54:28]  And the first words that came out of my mouth were, there is no God.
[00:54:31]  There is no God.
[00:54:33]  How could a loving God let this happen to a beautiful young child?
[00:54:37]  She was 20, 21.
[00:54:40]  But it really forced me to think about my faith.
[00:54:44]  And I spent, I had a friend came alongside of me and said, I'm going to help you study the Bible.
[00:54:48]  And he was a real mentor to me in that struggle to understand why this would happen.
[00:54:59]  You know, I was a Christian.
[00:55:02]  I had joined the club.
[00:55:03]  You know, if you're in the club, you shouldn't be subject to harm or tragedy.
[00:55:09]  And of course, that's not at all what the Bible says.
[00:55:11]  going to get uh persecuted but i struggled with that for really for three or four years uh you know is there an afterlife uh will i see beth my oldest daughter again uh and i was it was tough for three or four years uh and but i'd kind of wrestled that down to yeah there's there is more to life than just what we see here and um and so when we lost john bonet I didn't have to,
[00:55:40]  I didn't have to go through that struggle.
[00:55:42]  You know, I'd already been through why did God let this happen?
[00:55:49]  So it was, it was, my faith was not challenged when John Bonet was killed only because I'd gone through that challenge when I lost my oldest daughter.
[00:55:59]  Then you go through the added pain of being not outright accused by the authorities, but pretty close.

=== Discounting Ridiculous Claims (15:20) ===

[00:56:06]  I mean, the DA earlier before Mary Lacey, the DA said they didn't do it.
[00:56:11]  The DNA rules them out.
[00:56:14]  Four months after John Benet died, the DA Alex Hunter said Patsy and John are the focus.
[00:56:19]  They're the focus.
[00:56:20]  Opened up a grand jury proceeding.
[00:56:23]  And the grand jury came back and said, don't see anything that you're going to be able to pursue as a, you know, beyond a reasonable doubt.
[00:56:29]  The DA ultimately had to admit that.
[00:56:32]  But I mean, you're going through being accused.
[00:56:35]  And then on top of all that, John, you've got the media coverage, right?
[00:56:38]  Which basically tried to make John Benet and Patsy into this bizarre daughter-mother team.
[00:56:46]  You know, she was exploited.
[00:56:48]  She was sexualized.
[00:56:49]  The beauty pageant videos on endless loop, on endless loop.
[00:56:55]  So talk about that for a bit and what that was like for you.
[00:56:57]  Well, you know, the media, of course, jumped on it, but they were being fed information that was misleading, wrong.
[00:57:06]  And we were told by Mary Lacey several years after she got into her position as the new DA, she said that was the police strategy that was defined to them by someone, whether it's the FBI or some wacko psychologist, put intense pressure on the family.
[00:57:22]  We know it's one of the two.
[00:57:24]  They're in the house, either the father killed her or the mother did.
[00:57:28]  One of them will confess eventually if we put enough pressure on them.
[00:57:33]  And Mary Lacey, the DA, said that was their strategy to solve the case.
[00:57:36]  And so they released a lot of information, misleading information, incorrect information to the media.
[00:57:42]  And of course, the media ran with it.
[00:57:46]  And we were quickly convicted in the court of public opinion.
[00:57:53]  We didn't know that's exactly what was happening, but it was confirmed by the DA.
[00:57:58]  And the problem for the police was they did a great job of convicting us in the court of public opinion with the assistance of the media, but they couldn't charge us.
[00:58:07]  We would have, it had been a bloodbath for them in a court because the evidence was quite contradictory to that as they got into looking at the evidence because they'd made their conclusion, believe it on the day or the day after of John Benet's murder, and then went about, let's find the evidence to prove it.
[00:58:27]  Well, the evidence they were finding was contradictory to that conclusion.
[00:58:33]  And that became a problem for them because the media and the public was screaming, hey, we arrest them, charge them.
[00:58:42]  And they couldn't.
[00:58:44]  Well, and meanwhile, in the interviews, you held firm.
[00:58:48]  I mean, Patsy, they got all up in her grill.
[00:58:52]  And when I watch her, because I've spent a lot of time with this guy, his name is Phil Houston.
[00:58:56]  He invented the CIA's deception detection technique that they still used when he was there 25 years.
[00:59:02]  All sorts of ways you can tell somebody's lying.
[00:59:04]  And they're pretty foolproof if you know how to apply them.
[00:59:08]  And one of the things is just sort of no BS.
[00:59:11]  You don't do convincing behavior.
[00:59:13]  You're just hardcore.
[00:59:14]  No, no, you know, stop.
[00:59:16]  Like, I mean, I'm sure if I showed him the Patsy Ramsey tapes with the cops, he'd be like, why did they waste so much time with her?
[00:59:24]  Right.
[00:59:25]  Like, it was pretty obvious.
[00:59:26]  And I'll just show some to the audience, a clip.
[00:59:28]  This is from 1998, two years later, police interview with Patsy.
[00:59:32]  They're telling her falsely that they have trace evidence linking her or you to the murder.
[00:59:38]  I would be suggesting if I had that, how would you react?
[00:59:42]  Here it is, Sophie.
[00:59:44]  If I told you right now that we have trace evidence that appears to link you to the death of John Benet, what would you tell me?
[00:59:55]  That's totally impossible.
[00:59:58]  Totally impossible.
[00:59:59]  You're a retest.
[01:00:01]  You'll retest.
[01:00:02]  How is it impossible?
[01:00:03]  I did not kill my child.
[01:00:06]  I didn't have a thing to do with it.
[01:00:12]  And I'm not talking, you know, somebody's guess or some rumor or some story.
[01:00:17]  I don't care what you're talking about.
[01:00:20]  I'm talking about scientific evidence.
[01:00:22]  I don't give a flying flip how scientific it is.
[01:00:26]  Go back to the damn drawing board.
[01:00:29]  I didn't do it.
[01:00:30]  John Ramsey didn't do it.
[01:00:32]  And we didn't have a clue of anybody who did do it.
[01:00:36]  My life has been hell from that day forward.
[01:00:41]  And I want nothing more than to find out who was responsible for this.
[01:00:47]  Okay?
[01:00:47]  I mean, I want to work with you, not against you.
[01:00:51]  Okay?
[01:00:52]  This child was the most precious thing in my life.
[01:00:56]  And I can't stand the thought thinking somebody's out here walking on the street.
[01:01:03]  God knows who might do it again.
[01:01:04]  It's another child.
[01:01:06]  You know, quit screwing around asking me about things that are ridiculous.
[01:01:11]  I'm the person that did this.
[01:01:14]  Wow.
[01:01:15]  The frustration.
[01:01:17]  It's palpable because it's like, as she points out, he could be hurting other children.
[01:01:23]  All right.
[01:01:24]  Yes.
[01:01:25]  And probably did.
[01:01:26]  There's a high probability, I'm told, that that creature kind of creature doesn't just stop with one.
[01:01:34]  Maybe has done it before.
[01:01:38]  This is right around the time where Lou Smith walked out, the detective, the retired detective, who they brought in because they couldn't solve the case.
[01:01:47]  And he solved every single case he ever worked on except for this one.
[01:01:49]  They brought him in, take fresh eyes.
[01:01:52]  What do you think?
[01:01:53]  And Lou took his fresh eyes at every, looked at everything and said, they didn't do it.
[01:01:58]  This is not, Patsy and Ramsey are, that's the wrong tree to bark up.
[01:02:02]  And they didn't listen to him to the point where he quit.
[01:02:07]  He called this a travesty and said they were trying to railroad you.
[01:02:11]  It's crazy, John, that that wasn't the end of the story.
[01:02:13]  It would take another 10 years for Mary Lacey to get that DNA test and say, just stop, stop with the obsessive focus on the Ramseys.
[01:02:22]  No, that's true.
[01:02:24]  Lou told me, you know, after he resigned, and we were able to talk to him freely, that he'd looked at the case for several months and all the evidence and said, no, police are going the wrong direction.
[01:02:39]  So he said he went to their war room where they were strategizing this assault, frankly, and said, you know, you guys have looked at this case longer than I have, but, you know, I've looked at it and have you ever thought maybe you're going the wrong direction.
[01:02:52]  And he said it was like pouring a bucket of water on the participants.
[01:02:56]  They wouldn't talk to him after that.
[01:02:58]  They banned him from their war room and just wouldn't listen.
[01:03:02]  And that's what he said.
[01:03:04]  I'm not going to be part of persecuting an innocent person and resigned and continued to work on the case for the rest of his life, which I was very grateful for.
[01:03:14]  And he was an amazing fellow.
[01:03:18]  Well, on, I think it was a 60 Minutes Australia piece I watched.
[01:03:24]  They had old tapes of him.
[01:03:26]  And he went to the crime scene to your old house and he went to that window that was broken in your basement.
[01:03:34]  Because one of the theories was nobody got in through that window.
[01:03:37]  That was a window you had broken not long before because you had locked yourself out of the house and you were trying to get in.
[01:03:42]  And that's true.
[01:03:42]  Yeah.
[01:03:43]  So people were saying, no, somebody said only a midget could get through, little person could get through that window.
[01:03:49]  That wasn't it.
[01:03:50]  This is back on.
[01:03:51]  It had to be one of the mother or the father.
[01:03:53]  And he goes right through it.
[01:03:56]  The video shows him going right through it.
[01:03:58]  Was that something, by the way, I meant to ask you, did you go through it when you had locked yourself out?
[01:04:02]  Had you gone through that window to get in?
[01:04:04]  Yes.
[01:04:05]  I had locked myself out one, I don't know, one day and nobody was home.
[01:04:12]  And so that was the way I got into the house so I could unlock the door.
[01:04:16]  I didn't have a key.
[01:04:18]  You know, the person that said, no, that, no, it's impossible for someone to get through that window was the detective investigating the case.
[01:04:26]  It was purely misleading, purely false information, but it biased everybody, the public, the media towards us once more.
[01:04:34]  That was the whole strategy.
[01:04:38]  And that was confirmed by the district attorney to us.
[01:04:41]  That was her whole strategy.
[01:04:42]  And she also said their only evidence that they would present, and it's really not evidence, that led them to think that we were guilty was we did not act right that morning.
[01:04:55]  And that's the allegation was that Patsy was distraught, but that you didn't cry.
[01:05:01]  And one of the cops on the scene said, I never saw them console each other.
[01:05:06]  And in my presence, I never saw them hold one another.
[01:05:09]  Yeah.
[01:05:09]  Well, look, they've watched too much crime scenes movie or TV, I think.
[01:05:17]  When I lost my first daughter, Beth, I got a phone call from my brother and he said, John, Beth is gone.
[01:05:24]  She's killed.
[01:05:26]  And there's nothing I could do.
[01:05:27]  I couldn't get her to the best doctors.
[01:05:29]  I couldn't rush to her side.
[01:05:31]  It was over.
[01:05:33]  That morning with John Minet, it wasn't over yet.
[01:05:37]  I could get her back if I kept my wits about me and focused on getting her back to whatever I could possibly do.
[01:05:45]  I didn't, I was focused on getting her back and I felt I could get her back.
[01:05:52]  I'd arranged for the ransom money to be available almost immediately.
[01:05:59]  One of the, again, this Linda Arwin, I think, wrote in her report that John was observed casually going through the mail that morning.
[01:06:08]  There was a mail drop and the mail came through the house or the front door.
[01:06:13]  And I was going through it.
[01:06:14]  I was looking for another possible communication from the kidnapper.
[01:06:17]  The police should have been doing that.
[01:06:19]  I was not casually going through the mail, but that was her interpretation of that.
[01:06:24]  Again, biased perspective by someone who has never been in that situation to evaluate whether somebody's acting right or not.
[01:06:37]  So that was my focus.
[01:06:38]  You know, Patsy was rough.
[01:06:41]  She was in bad shape.
[01:06:42]  She had a bowl in front of her in case she threw up.
[01:06:46]  But I was focused 100% on whatever I could do to get John Monet back.
[01:06:50]  That was my job.
[01:06:53]  Can we talk about two things?
[01:06:55]  We've touched on the Mary Lacey exoneration of 2008 based on DNA.
[01:06:59]  DNA came along.
[01:07:00]  Thank God they did get some DNA and preserve it back in 96.
[01:07:04]  DNA has come leaps and bounds since then, and it had to some extent by 2008.
[01:07:08]  So she said, we've tested it, and we've identified the perpetrator as one, possibly two, unidentified males.
[01:07:17]  So nothing, no hit in the database, but they could tell it was a male and they could tell it was one, possibly two.
[01:07:24]  And that's when she said it's not the Ramsays.
[01:07:26]  Can I just say for the record, did that include Burke?
[01:07:30]  Yeah, it did.
[01:07:31]  And Burke was exonerated early on.
[01:07:34]  He had to be interviewed by the child psychologist that were associated with the police department.
[01:07:40]  They said, absolutely no way, Burke was not involved.
[01:07:44]  He was a nine-year-old, 60-pound child.
[01:07:48]  Because CBS would do a piece really pointing the finger at Burke in 2016, and he sued over it.
[01:07:55]  And they settled.
[01:07:56]  I don't know what they settled for, but in later years, armchair detective wannabes have decided maybe it was him.
[01:08:05]  Maybe it was the nine-year-old.
[01:08:07]  But the Mary Lacey conclusion was it was not Burke.
[01:08:12]  Right.
[01:08:12]  And that was a conclusion that even the police came to very early on.
[01:08:16]  And they ruled out that possibility.
[01:08:18]  Yeah.
[01:08:19]  In fact, they offered to support us in this suit against CBS if we needed their help.
[01:08:25]  Wow.
[01:08:26]  To discount that ridiculous accusation.
[01:08:30]  So he went on Dr. Phil not long after that.
[01:08:34]  And then it just stirred up more.
[01:08:35]  You know, people were like, he wasn't acting right.
[01:08:37]  I'm going to play a soundbite.
[01:08:38]  I'd love to get your thoughts.
[01:08:40]  I really don't know.
[01:08:41]  I don't know how people sort of fly into the case.
[01:08:43]  You've been living it in the worst way for 26 years.
[01:08:46]  So put this in perspective for us.
[01:08:48]  This is Burke on Dr. Phil in 2016.
[01:08:52]  A police officer comes in your room, which I assume is the first time in your entire life that a police officer is coming in with a flashlight, looking around, and you still just stay in bed.
[01:09:04]  To be fair, I didn't know as a police officer is just kind of...
[01:09:07]  But somebody comes in your room with a flashlight and you never get up and say, what is going on here?
[01:09:14]  I guess I kind of like to avoid conflict or I don't know.
[01:09:20]  I guess I just felt safer there.
[01:09:24]  Were you curious?
[01:09:25]  I'm not the worry type.
[01:09:27]  I'm not the, I guess part of me doesn't want to know what's going on.
[01:09:31]  Critics would say you weren't curious because you already knew.
[01:09:35]  He didn't have to get up and go check because he knew exactly what had happened.
[01:09:38]  I was scared, I think.
[01:09:39]  I mean, I didn't know if there's some bad guy downstairs.
[01:09:43]  My dad was chasing off with a gun or, you know, I had no idea.
[01:09:48]  Let's clear this up once and for all.
[01:09:52]  Did you do anything to harm your sister, John Bonet?
[01:09:57]  No.
[01:09:58]  Did you murder your sister, John Bonet?
[01:10:02]  No.
[01:10:04]  And just for the listening audience, Burke's answers are all said through what looks like a smile, which is one of the things his critics would react to.
[01:10:12]  Go ahead, John.
[01:10:12]  Your thoughts on it.
[01:10:13]  Well, Burke smiles all the time.
[01:10:15]  When he talks, he just naturally smiles.
[01:10:19]  And those are just laughable criticisms.
[01:10:23]  This was a violent, vicious, sexually assault case, not something that a nine-year-old could even possibly do.
[01:10:33]  So that's just, it's really disgusting that people jump to that kind of a conclusion.
[01:10:42]  Let's move on because one of the other storylines, as we touched on a minute ago, was the pageants and whether a pedophile was, you know, she captured the attention of a pedophile.
[01:10:56]  And they do say that some of these pageants can be very attractive to pedophiles in the same way that, you know, most pedophiles, like if you want to find a pedophile, you don't go to like an AARP meeting.
[01:11:07]  You know, they wind up, they volunteer for the Boy Scouts.
[01:11:10]  And it's sad, but it's true.
[01:11:13]  They go where children are.
[01:11:16]  So that was, forget the blame, right?
[01:11:18]  I'm not interested in that storyline, but it is possible that this person was a pedophile and had seen John Bonet at one of these pageants where she was.

=== Similar MO to Other Crimes (15:43) ===

[01:11:26]  a darling.
[01:11:26]  I mean, she was winning them.
[01:11:27]  She was absolutely beautiful in every way.
[01:11:30]  So what do you make of that theory if we're thinking of the possible intruder?
[01:11:34]  Maybe they also knew you, but a possible intruder pedophile.
[01:11:38]  It's possible.
[01:11:41]  Patsy had been diagnosed with stage four cancer a couple of years before this happened.
[01:11:46]  And she went through some pretty rough chemotherapy treatments and was declared remission.
[01:11:52]  And she didn't say it, but I know she was trying to pack a lot of mother-daughter time into what she maybe felt was a limited lifetime.
[01:12:03]  And I didn't really care for these little pageants.
[01:12:06]  I mean, I'm a father and I had preferred my daughters wear Burkers until they were about 30.
[01:12:12]  But that wasn't my choice.
[01:12:14]  And I thought, well, this is just a wonderful mother-daughter time for Patsy and John Bonet.
[01:12:21]  They didn't, excuse me, they didn't take it seriously.
[01:12:25]  Yeah, so we got to win.
[01:12:26]  We got to win.
[01:12:27]  In fact, Patsy and I joked, it'd be good if she lost a few of these pageants because she needs to understand you'd always win in life.
[01:12:33]  But she was, she just, John Bonet loved doing it.
[01:12:36]  It was fun.
[01:12:36]  She was an extreme extrovert.
[01:12:39]  And, you know, people accused us or accused Patsy of, you know, dragging John Bonet to these pageants for her own satisfaction.
[01:12:47]  That wasn't true at all.
[01:12:49]  It was just something John Bonet enjoyed doing.
[01:12:51]  And Patsy wanted her to try a lot of different things, which she did.
[01:12:55]  But I always thought the people at these little pageants were just moms and grandmoms.
[01:13:00]  And that's quite, there was one indication, of course, we learned later that, yeah, there's some, there was at least one guy there that wasn't there for his daughter based on some questioning that came out and some comments.
[01:13:17]  But it's possible.
[01:13:19]  And but I still fall back to, I think, John Douglas's theory and Lou's, Lou Smith's.
[01:13:29]  It might have targeted who John Bonet is, and she was my daughter.
[01:13:34]  And she was obviously, I'm told, and I never read the autopsy.
[01:13:39]  I just couldn't bring myself to do that.
[01:13:41]  But I, of course, hear through the news that she was sexually assaulted and that that wouldn't have been necessary to hurt me as much as to satisfy this creature's desires.
[01:14:04]  So this is why, forgive me, and if you don't want to go here, we don't have to, but this is why when I was reading the autopsy report, and we don't have to get into details, but the one thing they said, it was unclear to me whether they had semen, whether that was one of the DNAs that they were able to retrieve.
[01:14:19]  And there was a suggestion that maybe there was some sort of, you know, they hurt her in some way sexually that didn't involve, you know, a male body part.
[01:14:27]  And that, that's kind of interesting if you think about this being a person whose goal was just to hurt you.
[01:14:34]  Like maybe it wasn't a pedophile, but maybe it was somebody who was just trying to hurt her as opposed to sexualize her or do anything sexual with her.
[01:14:44]  Yeah, that's possible.
[01:14:47]  And there was no semen found.
[01:14:50]  But Not dissimilar to this situation, a case similar break-in that happened a few months later in the same neighborhood.
[01:15:01]  With Amy.
[01:15:02]  Yes.
[01:15:02]  Okay.
[01:15:03]  So let's talk about that.
[01:15:05]  There are many people who Lou Smith had been taking a hard look at, you know, the honest investigator who quit before he died, unfortunately, in 2010.
[01:15:17]  And he gave the list of suspects to his daughter, which is how we know who he's looking at.
[01:15:21]  And the daughter's a hero.
[01:15:22]  She's running around getting these people's DNA without them knowing him.
[01:15:25]  It's like kind of amazing, this piece of the story.
[01:15:28]  It's so, I'm so grateful for that group.
[01:15:31]  Before we get to Lou and his daughter and what that would happen there, there's this, there's this neighbor and that we're calling and the papers are calling the daughter Amy.
[01:15:41]  Her parents don't want her outed.
[01:15:42]  Understandable as a sexual assault victim.
[01:15:44]  But Amy, I think, was very young too, nine or 12, right around there.
[01:15:49]  I don't, you know, I didn't know a whole lot about that case.
[01:15:52]  I knew that it happened, but I think she, they were, she and John Bonet were in a dance class together.
[01:15:59]  And I think she was a year older than John Bonet, maybe.
[01:16:01]  Oh, I know.
[01:16:02]  Actually, my producers are telling me she's 12.
[01:16:04]  So she's a little, she's a young girl and she's at home.
[01:16:07]  This is months after John Benet was killed.
[01:16:11]  Amy is in the same neighborhood and she had a man wake her up dressed in black in the middle of the night who tried to muzzle her so that she couldn't scream and sexually assaulted her.
[01:16:26]  And by the grace of God, her mother heard something.
[01:16:31]  By the grace of God, truly, the mother heard something and heard muffled voices coming from her 12-year-old daughter's room in a way that sounded very unsafe.
[01:16:39]  The mother grabbed pepper spray and went into the room.
[01:16:43]  I mean, it's an extraordinary story.
[01:16:46]  And the guy jumped out the second floor window and ran.
[01:16:50]  I mean, it's a miracle.
[01:16:52]  Thank God that unfortunately the daughter was molested, but she was not killed.
[01:16:57]  And they went to the Boulder cops and said, we think this might have had something to do with John Benet.
[01:17:05]  Like it's too close in time.
[01:17:07]  And, you know, here's our evidence.
[01:17:10]  And the dad is on record as saying the Boulder cops could not have cared less, were not interested in pursuing any link between the two cases.
[01:17:19]  And they really felt like it was because they were just focused on you two.
[01:17:23]  Right.
[01:17:24]  That's what I've learned.
[01:17:26]  When I first heard about this, I thought, well, that's a very similar MO for the criminal as it was in our case.
[01:17:37]  He was in the house when they came home that night.
[01:17:41]  They went to bed.
[01:17:42]  And then at three in the morning, he entered the little girl's room.
[01:17:46]  And I thought, well, that's, man, that's so similar to what I think happened in our case.
[01:17:54]  And Chief Bechner, who's the police chief, chief of police, was asked, is there a connection?
[01:18:01]  He said, oh, no, these cases aren't the same because the second little girl wasn't murdered.
[01:18:05]  And it was one more of the unbelievable statements that came out of the police department.
[01:18:10]  Of course, it's similar.
[01:18:12]  And thankfully, she wasn't murdered.
[01:18:15]  But I had heard that the father was quoted as saying on a scale of one to 10 in terms of police performance, I'll give him a minus five.
[01:18:25]  So he was very unhappy with them as well, but only because they just kind of blew off the case and went on.
[01:18:34]  There's a real danger when the police get tunnel vision.
[01:18:36]  They're really, I mean, every defense attorney who's ever represented a murder defendant argues they had tunnel vision on my guy.
[01:18:41]  My guy didn't do it.
[01:18:43]  They had tunnel vision on him.
[01:18:44]  But in some cases, it really is true.
[01:18:47]  And it can result in the wrong person being arrested and put on trial.
[01:18:50]  not in your case, but you were heading down that lane.
[01:18:53]  Oh, absolutely.
[01:18:54]  And we weren't worried about this.
[01:18:57]  I mean, it was, it was distressing, but our attorney said, look, the system's broken.
[01:19:01]  The police don't know what they're doing.
[01:19:04]  We cannot promise you you won't be charged with the murder.
[01:19:07]  We'll promise you one thing with 100% money-back guarantee.
[01:19:10]  We will destroy him in court.
[01:19:12]  So don't worry about that.
[01:19:14]  But it's not going to be fun, but do not worry about being convicted.
[01:19:20]  We'll kill him because we knew what the evidence was and what they were trying to do.
[01:19:24]  We had one experienced district attorney tell us, look, I have never, ever seen police try to explain away unidentified male DNA in a sexual assault case.
[01:19:37]  Never.
[01:19:37]  That's the key piece of evidence.
[01:19:39]  And yet that's what the Polish police tried to do is that was a real problem for them.
[01:19:43]  We had this unidentified male DNA.
[01:19:46]  Yes.
[01:19:47]  That's a massive problem.
[01:19:48]  And it's the reason you've never been charged.
[01:19:50]  And it's the reason Mary Lisa says it wasn't you guys.
[01:19:54]  On the subject of DNA, I read that the coroner did not examine the body until seven hours after she was discovered and that the coroner only spent 10 minutes at the crime scene.
[01:20:10]  That's a crazy amount of time.
[01:20:13]  That's, I mean, seven hours is a long delay.
[01:20:15]  And I wonder, John, whether they, have you ever been told whether they were able to determine the time of death?
[01:20:22]  I've never been told.
[01:20:24]  No, I don't know.
[01:20:26]  Do you have any reason to believe there's any chance she was alive in the morning, you know, before, like I didn't go there, but when the first cop got there, you know, is there any chance she was alive?
[01:20:37]  I don't think so.
[01:20:40]  She was strangled to death is my interpretation of what I've heard.
[01:20:48]  And then struck with an object that created a pretty good crack in her skull to be totally accurate.
[01:21:03]  So I don't think she could have possibly been alive that morning.
[01:21:09]  Okay.
[01:21:10]  But that's another area of DNA that absolutely should be examined because there was a murder weapon.
[01:21:18]  There was like a rope.
[01:21:20]  They call it a garot.
[01:21:21]  And it was tied to a little piece of wood.
[01:21:24]  And so that one of the questions I know, John, people are asking is, do they ever, one end of the rope had a knot and one had two knots or something like that.
[01:21:32]  But the question was, did they ever untie the knots and test in there for DNA?
[01:21:38]  To my knowledge, no.
[01:21:41]  They had sent a number of samples like that to Bodie Labs, which is outside DNA lab.
[01:21:48]  And for some reason, chose not to test or not to pay for the tests of five or six items, one of which was the groat.
[01:21:57]  And that's one of the things we're asking the governor to make happen is let's get those items tested.
[01:22:02]  Why weren't they tested?
[01:22:03]  Was it because it was too expensive?
[01:22:07]  They wanted to save money.
[01:22:08]  I don't know.
[01:22:10]  What do you think is in the box of things that have not been tested?
[01:22:15]  I don't know.
[01:22:18]  I don't know.
[01:22:19]  One journalist that has followed this case almost from the beginning has that information and I need to get that from her, but I don't know exactly what it is.
[01:22:29]  She said there's five or six items that have never been tested.
[01:22:33]  And the police keep referring back to, well, it's just a minute amount of DNA.
[01:22:39]  We don't want to ruin it.
[01:22:40]  Well, that just tells me they've either, well, they haven't tested the other items or they've lost them or misplaced them.
[01:22:46]  For some reason, they always stay away from these other five or six items that have never been tested or checked for DNA evidence.
[01:22:53]  And that's what we're asking to be done.
[01:22:55]  And their reluctance to even mention those items makes me think they've either misplaced them or lost them.
[01:23:03]  Oh, goodness.
[01:23:05]  I know, and you're on a push to have the governor remove this case from the Boulder PD and let these sophisticated DNA labs. have access to this as opposed to relying on the same cops and detectives that have blown it thus far.
[01:23:20]  There are really sophisticated DNA labs.
[01:23:22]  Do you have confidence that if they had access to this box, for lack of a better descriptor, they could make whatever progress is possible.
[01:23:31]  They could make it.
[01:23:32]  And that's really all we're asking the governor to do is push the case either out of the Boulder hands or require them to take this evidence to be tested by one of the one or two really cutting edge labs in this country and see what we get.
[01:23:52]  If we can get some more good DNA evidence, then you take that evidence and put it in the public database and see what you come up with.
[01:24:03]  This has been done in the last few years with remarkable success.
[01:24:08]  And really what got me took had me, I might take the gloves off with the police is we had spent some time with the regional FBI folks there in Denver and got a relationship where we said, look, this is what needs to happen.
[01:24:25]  And in fact, they're the ones that said, look, the government does not have the latest DNA technology.
[01:24:31]  We'll get it eventually, but we don't have it.
[01:24:33]  We don't have it at the FBI.
[01:24:34]  They certainly don't have it at the state level.
[01:24:36]  And of course, it's not even ridiculous to think they have it at the police level.
[01:24:41]  They told us that we've got to get this DNA testing done by one of these one or two very cutting edge labs outside and then use this new approach of genealogy tracing.
[01:24:55]  And it was a hope that would move this case along to conclusion.
[01:24:59]  They went to the Boulder police, said, we're here to help.
[01:25:02]  We'd like to make this happen.
[01:25:03]  We'd help you.
[01:25:04]  You can take all the credit.
[01:25:05]  And the Boulder police blew them off.
[01:25:07]  Said, no, we don't need your help.
[01:25:09]  And that was when that was the game's over as far as I'm concerned.
[01:25:12]  We got how long ago?
[01:25:15]  Oh, it's probably six months ago.
[01:25:18]  Just so people know, I have this woman on my show at NBC, Cece Moore is her name.
[01:25:22]  And I know you must have talked to her.
[01:25:25]  She's the one who was really at the center of this genealogy research.
[01:25:29]  And what they do is they take a piece of DNA.
[01:25:32]  And we already know that the DNA that they found on John Bennett has not, it did not produce a hit in the databases that are available, at least as of the last time they told us.
[01:25:41]  So the perpetrator had not gone into the system yet.
[01:25:45]  But they don't need that.
[01:25:47]  All they need is for somebody related to the perpetrator to be in the DNA system.
[01:25:54]  So if I were in the DNA system, let's say I wanted to do 23andMe, let's see what my ancestry is, whatever.
[01:26:00]  Then if my results got uploaded on this other website that Cece Moore uses that a lot of people who upload the DNA results use because you get more information from it.
[01:26:09]  It's not 23andMe, it's something related.
[01:26:11]  So let's say they're sitting there.
[01:26:13]  She can access them.
[01:26:14]  She may not, you know, she can see a lot of things on there.
[01:26:17]  And let's say I have a relative who commits a crime.
[01:26:20]  That relative's DNA was not going to pop up.
[01:26:23]  Like maybe they committed a crime, but the crime scene, they didn't see him because he hadn't been arrested yet.
[01:26:29]  But mine will.
[01:26:31]  And this is what CC Moore, she's like, all I can tell you is that Megan Kelly is related to this killer.
[01:26:36]  And so I'm going to build this big family tree around Megan Kelly.
[01:26:39]  I'm going to figure out who her grandfather, what great grandfather, look at her husband's side.
[01:26:43]  I'm going to look at, because all this stuff is publicly available.
[01:26:45]  Looks at their wedding announcements and birth announcements it's, it's crazy great detective work and she gets she gets her man I mean Cece more.
[01:26:53]  It's like they saw a case a week doing this and so if we could take a fresh look at the John Benet Dna from that perspective even if the guy's never gotten into the system from the last time they tested it, somebody might be in the system.
[01:27:07]  That could lead us to him.
[01:27:08]  That's right.

=== Federal Cold Case Unit Steps In (06:16) ===

[01:27:10]  The covet system that the FBI uses, the federal database of criminals or or arrested felons, is fairly small and the states can contribute or not to that database.
[01:27:23]  Uh, it takes nine markers out of 15 to be accepted in the database, but it's it's of people that are, have already been uh, found criminal um, or at least arrested for felonies, and it depends on the state what that rule is.
[01:27:41]  But it's not a very big database.
[01:27:43]  And what the the, the um public database of the like the 23and me both Jan and I submitted our 35 get our ancestry to that database.
[01:27:57]  They find a reasonably, you know, close match uh, or something at least is interest, of interest, and they do almost a backwards uh uh family tree.
[01:28:12]  And then they find hey, here's a relative that lived in Boulder in december uh 2020, 1996 and uh.
[01:28:21]  Then they start looking at that guy or that person and get his Dna and and these remarkable success uh, solutions to these old, old cases have been using that technique and most of these people were not on anybody's radar.
[01:28:37]  They weren't in the, the uh Covid, uh or the uh?
[01:28:41]  Uh federal database and um, in fact, the the Golden State killer, which was, I think, the first one found this way, was a yes, 40 year old case and he was retired cop, so he wasn't in in the criminal database exactly, but it's a relative what, and we're that's what we're asking the governor to make happen.
[01:29:02]  I don't care how it happens, that's what has to happen.
[01:29:05]  And now now, what he's saying, John is, well, he doesn't said anything, as I understand it, but the Bullard PD there are.
[01:29:10]  They're like, hey, we have great news.
[01:29:13]  We're now going to refer this case to the cold case unit, and the cold case unit, we believe, is going to do better than the other case unit.
[01:29:20]  Why, don't know I i've never heard of this cold case unit why they said we're going to refer to them next year.
[01:29:29]  Well, that could be 12 months from now, but I guess you say well, it's no big rush, it's been 26 years.
[01:29:33]  What's the hurry?
[01:29:35]  It's a huge frustration for us.
[01:29:38]  Uh, you believe that's just.
[01:29:39]  Is that just cover?
[01:29:40]  Is that a cya?
[01:29:41]  Yeah absolutely, that was put out before I even released the governor's letter, which I only released because he never responded.
[01:29:49]  I thought that was.
[01:29:50]  I would have at least expected to say yeah well, we'll take a look at it, or I received your letter.
[01:29:56]  Still hasn't responded.
[01:29:57]  No, nope with him and i'm not asking him to, you know, apologize to us uh, for the faulty performance of the Colorado justice system.
[01:30:12]  I don't, I don't want that.
[01:30:13]  I just want to do the right thing.
[01:30:14]  This is what can be done.
[01:30:16]  You need to do it?
[01:30:19]  Yeah well, we're definitely going to follow up with his office and find out what, what is his response, and we'll stay on it and we'll annoy him to the point where he's going to have to respond uh, because I know a lot of people in media who would be very happy to help me annoy him.
[01:30:30]  I would love that.
[01:30:32]  That's what it's going to take.
[01:30:32]  It's going to take, of course, intense public pressure to do the right thing.
[01:30:37]  That's all we're asking them to do, is None of them will do anything unless forced to by the public.
[01:30:43]  And the people of Colorado and the country are on your side.
[01:30:47]  They're not on the side of some law enforcement group that's trying to protect its own backside.
[01:30:52]  So I actually think we can make progress with this.
[01:30:55]  But first, I have to squeeze in a break.
[01:30:57]  All right.
[01:30:57]  So stand by, John.
[01:30:58]  A quick break.
[01:30:59]  I'll be right back to you after this.
[01:31:04]  Dylan Howard put together an extraordinary podcast called The Killing of John Benet Ramsey.
[01:31:09]  And it's a 12-part series in which he took a very deep dive into possible suspects in the case.
[01:31:14]  I recommend it to everybody.
[01:31:15]  And in part, based off of Lou Smith's work and the work of his daughter.
[01:31:20]  Having listened to all of that and cooperated with that, do you have a chief suspect?
[01:31:26]  You know, it's easy to say, well, that's the guy based on circumstantial evidence.
[01:31:32]  In fact, that happened fairly early on.
[01:31:34]  A person was brought to our attention by his girlfriend, former girlfriend, and had some pretty compelling data that would lead you to believe, hey, this is the guy.
[01:31:44]  In fact, I said that to our attorneys.
[01:31:45]  I said, whoa, this is the guy.
[01:31:47]  And they said, no, no, no, don't do a boulder police on us.
[01:31:50]  We can't jump to conclusions.
[01:31:51]  And it was a reminder that that's exactly what happened and that we got to be careful too.
[01:31:56]  And so there's been four or five people like that that have come up on the radar and our radar.
[01:32:02]  And but it's never been enough evident.
[01:32:08]  And, you know, private individuals can only do so much.
[01:32:11]  They need the authority of the government to really dig into stuff.
[01:32:16]  And so we can go so far in some of these investigations.
[01:32:19]  And so these people are still, in my mind, suspects of interest, people of interest, but they need to be investigated.
[01:32:29]  That's the point.
[01:32:30]  They need to be investigated.
[01:32:32]  One of the things Lou Smith suggested was that there was that window broken in the basement.
[01:32:37]  Saw there was a scuff mark below the window.
[01:32:39]  There was a suitcase there, which we talked about briefly that wasn't normally there.
[01:32:44]  And in it, they found a duvet, a Dr. Seuss book, and fibers of the outfit John Benet was wearing that night, indicating perhaps the murderer might have tried to kidnap her or remove her from the scene in the suitcase, but it was too big.
[01:33:01]  But that would explain quite a bit about the crime scene.
[01:33:04]  If only we had a talented investigator devoted to following up on these leads, the point is the governor must get involved.
[01:33:11]  The governor must remove this case from the Boulder PD.
[01:33:14]  They must get the fibers and the DNA that is available to a qualified lab and start working with the family instead of against them after all these years.
[01:33:22]  In the time we have left, how do you do it?

=== Finding Forgiveness and Peace (02:32) ===

[01:33:26]  Because I know you've said you've forgiven whoever did this to John Benet.
[01:33:31]  And John, it just seems, it just seems like a mountain too high.
[01:33:34]  I don't, how do you do that?
[01:33:36]  Well, I've dealt with forgiveness a lot over the few years after John Benet was killed.
[01:33:42]  And I've looked back at how I felt and progressed with that challenge.
[01:33:49]  Certainly in the first couple of years, there was no forgiveness.
[01:33:52]  In fact, I've told people, if you put this guy in the same room with me, and I know he's the killer, he won't come out alive.
[01:33:59]  And I would be able to do that with no remorse.
[01:34:03]  And that's not right, but that's how I felt.
[01:34:06]  And then I got to the point where I said, okay, well, forgiveness belongs to the victim.
[01:34:10]  And I'm really not the victim.
[01:34:12]  John Benet was a victim.
[01:34:13]  So only she can forgive.
[01:34:15]  And that's, of course, not possible.
[01:34:16]  And that kind of got me off the hook.
[01:34:18]  And then I finally realized forgiveness is really a gift you give yourself.
[01:34:22]  You release that anger and that desire for revenge.
[01:34:26]  Doesn't mean you feel sorry for the, in our case, the killer.
[01:34:31]  I still want him held to the justifiable, to the account, held to accountability to the extreme level of our justice system.
[01:34:40]  But i've released that anger and um.
[01:34:46]  It still crops up every now and then, but it's a benefit to myself to release that and in the form of forgiveness don't want him staying connected to god helps.
[01:35:00]  I know and i'm sure this time of year, even all these years later, is very tough on you.
[01:35:05]  I know you've remarried.
[01:35:06]  I'm so happy to hear that.
[01:35:08]  God bless you, John, and your family.
[01:35:11]  And I think there's a way of finding a Merry Christmas.
[01:35:17]  You know, I hope that you found that way.
[01:35:18]  And I'll be praying for you this year in particular.
[01:35:22]  We had a hard time with Christmas for several years before realized.
[01:35:26]  You got to remember what Christmas is for.
[01:35:28]  And that's reassuring in our case.
[01:35:33]  We know John Bonet is safe and we'll see her again.
[01:35:36]  Amen to that.
[01:35:38]  Take care.
[01:35:38]  Thank you so much for coming on and telling your story and we'll stay on it.
[01:35:42]  Thank you, Megan.
[01:35:42]  I really appreciate it.
[01:35:44]  Wow.
[01:35:44]  So keep them in your prayers and keep their family in your prayers.
[01:35:47]  That little girl's with her mama now.
[01:35:48]  For that, we can be thankful.
[01:35:53]  Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
[01:35:56]  No BS, no agenda, and no