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I sit here thinking that she’d be 18 years old today.
More than a decade after 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was found murdered in the basement of her family’s Boulder home on Dec. 26, 1996, police are still in search of her killer.
But Boulder County District Attorney Mary Lacy announced today that new, more advanced DNA “touch” testing has officially cleared anyone in the tiny beauty queen’s family of having anything to do with her death.
DNA evidence found on the little girl’s long johns and underpants does not match any of her family members and does not match any sample held in national DNA databases.
In a letter handed to JonBenet’s father John, Lacy wrote, “We intend in the future to treat you as the victims of this crime, with the sympathy due you because of the horrific loss you have suffered.”
But this isn’t the first time the family has been “cleared” in the case.
In 2003, a U.S. District Court Judge Julie Carnes dismissed a lawsuit filed against John and his late wife Patsy, filed by a freelance journalist named Chris Wolf, who the pair named as a possible suspect in JonBenet’s death, in their book, The Death of Innocence.
In his suit, Wolf claimed that Patsy Ramsey had killed her daughter, but implicated him in the crime to shift blame away from her.
That meant, to win, Wolf had to prove Patsy Ramsey was involved in the child’s death.
The judge ruled she wasn’t, by throwing out the case.
The case went relatively quiet, until 2006 when an obsessed John Mark Karr confessed to killing the girl in a series of e-mails exchanged between him and a University of Colorado professor well-versed in the case.
Karr was later cleared of any involvement, after DNA evidence found on JonBenet’s underwear didn’t match a sample taken from Karr by investigators.
Even amid that investigation, the Ramsey family remained suspects.
Patsy Ramsey died of cancer in 2006, still a suspect in her daughter’s death - at least in the court of public opinion.
As I read articles on the new evidence today, comment threads were chock full of comments continuing to implicate John and Patsy Ramsey, one reading, “I believe that John and/or Patsy got away with murder, just like O.J. did.”
I think it’s ridiculous.
I believe John Ramsey likely bungled the case when – upon finding his daughter’s body - moved it from the basement crime scene to the kitchen of the family’s home.
But can anyone really blame him? I’m not sure every person would be of sound mind – upon discovering his or her child murdered – to refrain from touching or moving the child.
Now some people may say he did so on purpose to cover up involvement by him or someone close to him, but the bottom line remains that no one in that child’s family, left DNA evidence on her underpants or pajamas – articles of clothing her killer had to have touched while committing that horrific crime.
I sincerely hope that investigators can soon find the person who left that evidence on her body and put this case to rest.
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