Was child beauty queen JonBenet murdered by brother?
Documentary claims parents then covered up for boy, nine
CHILD beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, whose murder shocked the world 20 years ago, was killed by her brother before their parents covered up what he’d done, experts now believe.
A team of criminologists used modern forensic techniques on the original evidence, casting doubt on the theory that the six-year-old was sexually assaulted, beaten and strangled by an intruder.
Their analysis is said to show that JonBenet – dubbed Little Miss Sunshine – was killed by her nine-year-old brother Burke in a flash of temper.
The US investigation for the CBS documentary The Case Of: JonBenet Ramsey, which involved former Scotland Yard criminal behaviour analyst Laura Richards, concluded he probably fatally struck his sister with a torch when she took some pineapple from his bowl.
JonBenet’s body was found in the cellar of her family home in Boulder, Colorado, in December 1996.
Her mother, Patsy Ramsey, called the emergency 911 number on Boxing Day to report finding a note left by kidnappers demanding a ransom for $118,000.
But doubt was cast on the ransom motive when JonBenet’s body was found in the cellar. She had been beaten and strangled.
She was covered by a white blanket, with a nylon cord around her neck, her wrists bound above her head and her mouth covered by duct tape. The documentary team enhanced a formerly unintelligible three-way conversation between the Ramseys and Burke at the end of the emergency services call after Mrs Ramsey thought she had hung up.
It was claimed that during six seconds of audio Mr Ramsey can be heard saying: ‘We’re not speaking to you.’ Mrs Ramsey then allegedly asks: ‘What did you do? Help me, Jesus.’ The couple said Burke was asleep at the time, but in the recording he can allegedly be heard asking: ‘What did you find?’
Mrs Ramsey was also heard to say: ‘OK, we’ve called the police, now what?’ The 911 call itself was said to be suspicious, according to experts including retired FBI profiler Jim Clemente. Mrs Ramsey used ‘odd’ language, saying, ‘We have a kidnapping’, and tried to hang up quickly at the end.
Kim Archuletta, the 911 operator, said the call sounded rehearsed and she remained on the line to listen because she had ‘a bad feeling about this’.
The lengthy ransom note found inside the house was also reexamined by forensic linguist James Fitzgerald, who said it was staged and had deliberate spelling errors.
The documentary experts even claim several lines in it were taken from action films such as Dirty Harry and Speed.
In the three-page note, the ‘kidnappers’ identified themselves as a group representing ‘a small foreign faction’.
They asked for $118,000 for the safe return of JonBenet, even though her body was in the cellar – an amount almost exactly the same as a bonus that her father John recently earned.
Burke insists his sister was killed by an intruder, but the experts agreed that no one else was in the house. In 2008, two years after Mrs Ramsey died from cancer, the district attorney told the family they had been exonerated by the discovery of DNA traces from an unidentified man on JonBenet’s pyjamas.
But the experts said the DNA had no forensic value and no sexual assault had taken place.
In in his first-ever interview this month, Burke denied his parents covered up the killing to protect him, telling the Dr Phil show: ‘I know that’s not what happened. I know people think I did it, that my parents did it.’
When Dr Phil asked if he killed his sister, he answered categorically: ‘No. You won’t find any evidence, because I didn’t do it.
Mr Ramsey, who has remarried, has denied any involvement.
‘You won’t find any evidence’