JonBenet Ramsey's dad suggests daughter’s killer motivated by money in resurfaced interview
A never-before-aired interview with JonBenet Ramsey's parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, and the late Barbara Walters has resurfaced following the release of a new documentary about the 6-year-old pageant star's 1996 murder.
JonBenet was found dead in the basement of her family's Boulder, Colorado, home the day after Christmas 28 years ago, and the case remains unsolved to this day, despite ongoing public interest and a recent push from John Ramsey to re-test crime scene evidence for DNA using new technology.
"The ransom note has an odd figure — $118,000. That was a bonus that you had received," Walters, then a host of ABC's "20/20," says in the interview, which was conducted in 2000 but never aired, according to ABC.
"Well, that was one of the theories that I came up with, that it was close to the net amount I'd received that year as a bonus," John Ramsey told Walters. "One-eighteen means something to the killer. We know that. We believe that. Whether it's tied to my bonus or something only the killer knows, we don't know."
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When Walters asked Patsy Ramsey, who died six years after the interview in 2006, whether she knew the amount of her husband's bonus, she responded, "Not at the time, no."
The interview resurfaced after the November premiere of the Netflix documentary, "Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey."
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John Ramsey, 80, most recently told Fox News Digital in September that he felt optimistic about new leadership at the Boulder Police Department (BPD), which officially named a new police chief on Sept. 6.
Chief Stephen Redfearn, who served as the interim chief for HPD starting in January, is the fifth police chief at BPD to take on the JonBenet Ramsey case since 1996.
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Ramsey told Fox News Digital he would like BPD to turn over evidence in his daughter's nearly 30-year-old murder case to the FBI, "at a minimum," so that federal officials can test and retest evidence for possible external DNA, including external male DNA that federal officials disclosed in 1997.
"We have an unidentified male DNA result from the testing they did in 1997, which … by today's standards, it was primitive," Ramsey explained. "But we have an unidentified male DNA sample, which was reported to the police in January 1997. They kept that a secret because it conflicted with their conclusion that we were guilty. How do we explain that away? Which they tried desperately to do."
Evidence that has never been tested for traces of DNA includes the garrote found around JonBenet's neck, a ransom note found in the Ramsey house on the morning of the murder, a suitcase found in the basement that authorities believe the killer used to escape out a window, an unknown flashlight found on the Ramsey family's kitchen counter the morning of the murder and unknown rope found in her brother Burke Ramsey's room that day, according to public records initially obtained by journalist Paula Woodward, as Fox News Digital previously reported.
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In 1999, a grand jury indicted both John and his wife, Patsy Ramsey, for child abuse resulting in JonBenet's death, but Alex Hunter, the district attorney at the time, refused to sign the indictment, citing a lack of evidence that would warrant criminal charges against the parents. Prosecutors eventually dropped their case against John and Patsy in 2006.
BPD said in a September statement that "Chief Redfearn has continued to have conversations with the Ramsey family, and there are no plans to change that."