Amanda Knox and John Ramsey - Megyn Kelly's "Double Feature" of Fascinating Interviews

the least.

“Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly, welcome to the Megan Kelly show and today's Sunday”

double feature. Today, I look back in the archives and to fascinating conversations with people who had moments in the spotlight when tragic crimes change their lives forever.

First up, Amanda Knox, she came on in November 2021 to talk through her entire story

in revealing interview that went through every detail. A lot of people still think that she was the one responsible for her roommate narrative that purchased death. You'll hear this interview and you'll be able to make up your own mind. You'll hear what I think too.

And then John Ramsey, John Benese, father, who came on in December 2022 to go through the horrors of that day in 1996 and some last hopeful updates in what has clearly become a cold case. Enjoy and we'll see you Monday. Joining me now is Amanda Knox.

“She's a writer, a new mother, and co-host of the podcast "Laborance" with her husband, Christopher”

Robinson.

Amanda is a household name, not just in our country, but worldwide, but not by choice.

She has spent the past six years trying to reclaim her life, her story, and her freedom. After she was wrongfully convicted of a murder, she did not commit in Italy in 2009. And she joins me now. Amanda, thank you for being back with me. We interviewed when I was on NBC and I'm so happy to see you doing so well and congratulations

on the birth of your daughter. Thank you so much, Megan. It's great to reconnect. So I've been like neck-deep in Amanda Knox in preparation for this interview, and of course I was in the media when this happened to you.

So I covered it, not in the way the British tabloids did, but I covered it as a new story. And as a young woman myself, I was skeptical of the claims being made about you. As a lover of Italy, I was not wanting to believe that they'd be doing this to an innocent American that there was any sort of anti-Americanism going on there, but for sure was a dynamic of play.

And as I sort of went back through your story through the Netflix documentary and your book and so on, then a bunch of interviews about you and involving you, I felt the trauma on your behalf. It was never ending. It wasn't like, "Oh my God, one year my life was so awful.

It went on and on and you're still trying to get out from under it in some ways." So let's just start at the beginning. I think a lot of people know generally, you know, as a chief of that girl, Foxy Knoxy, that's the newspaper's called her and what happened, or she was, she, did she murder somebody? What happened?

“I think that's how people think about your name, because they're living our own lives.”

So let's just talk about what happened. Because I think if you go through it, stage by stage, and talk about the evidence and what the prosecutor was releasing about you, the story tells itself, you're exoneration, you don't have to prove anything, it tells itself when you realize what was done to you. It was deeply wrong.

Okay, so let's do that, and then we'll talk about what you're doing today. So take us back to Amanda age 20, and you decide as I did when I was same age to study abroad as I did in Italy, it's like a dream come true. So you go over there, I'm sure excited for a semester of who knows what, and what was the year?

2007, so I was 20 years old, 2007, a language student, and really for the first time going

out into the world on my own, without my parents, right there next door, to be right by me and support me. So look at your solo Facebook, and I wait for the first time. So we're doing this on a serious XM live, Triumph 1111, but we also do a YouTube version of the show, and we have the picture of you, and you're so cute, and you're so young,

and you're so, you look so sweet with your little headband, and you know, it's like, God, only knew that with that girl, only knew it was about to come her way. So you go over there, and you hadn't exactly been a world traveler, or you know, all that experience and living independently, but you managed to find a place to live, to find your own roommate.

So it wasn't like where I went, I went to Syracuse, both at home, and abroad, and they kind of provided all that for you. You did it on your own. Yeah, yeah, I had a number of jobs to save up money, to be able to spend that year abroad. And when I arrived in Prusa, I knew that I was signed up for classes, but I had to get

my own visa. I had to find my own place to live. But fortunately, this is a small town where a lot of young people are moving through. So there were a lot of places to rent, and just outside of my university, there was a young

we hit things off.

So you know, it was actually an, I really ideal situation.

I was just a few steps away from my university in this beautiful little cottage that was overlooking the valley, and living alongside three other young women who are all students, two of whom were Italian, and one of whom was British. The Brit was a woman named Meredith Kercher, who you met on September 20th, 2007, and within 42 days, she would be dead, and your life would have changed forever, bringing you here

today. You found that roommate, and the other two gals, you found a boyfriend, Raphael, Solaceito. You'd been dating for just five days, which is a little bit fact. Yeah. Like when people, like, they've called us lovers, they've called us boyfriend and girlfriend.

“I think that at the time of, like, to be perfectly honest, we knew each other for five”

days. So we were at the very beginning of a, like, very sweet romantic, who knows what it was going to be, but it was only five days old. So it wasn't like, you know, we, the way that it was portrayed is that we were like, in Kahuts and some, like, deep, in, like, inextricable way, and really we were just getting

to know each other. Right. Later, it will be, like, part of a sex cult, the two of them together, it's like, well, I barely know the guy's last name. I mean, I'm not the sex cult with him.

And we're not, you know, plotting murders and so on in any event. Okay. So, that you, you found Meredith on September 20th, and November 1st, 2007, take us to that night. You, you were not at home that night in your apartment with you.

No, I was not. No.

“This is the day after Halloween, it was like a day off from school, basically, and”

we were, you know, I was hanging out with Rafael, that day, and Meredith, I knew, had gone, I had saw her in the morning. She had taken a shower to wipe off the Halloween makeup, did a little laundry, said, I'll see you later. And that was last, I saw her, I was around, like, late in the morning early afternoon.

And then I spent the day with Rafael, and I spent the night with Rafael, that, you know, as soon as I met this guy, and he was so sweet and charming, and we made plans to go to another town nearby called Gubio, in which we would, you know, spend the weekend and eat truffles. Like, that, that was the world I was in, and I was technically supposed to work that night.

I was doing some, like, basically all around work, like, handing out flyers or serving

drinks at this local bar, and my boss Patrick and Mumba called me that night and said that I, or sent me a text message and said that I didn't have to come in. So I stayed the night with Rafael and we made plans to leave the next day to go to Gubio. So you decided to swing by your apartment before going on your trip. And you, you, you walk in, and you, as you approached the apartment, you did notice something

was off. Take us through that walk through. Yeah. Absolutely. So coming back to my apartment, my, my thought process was I'm going to go change.

I'm going to grab some clothes, grab some things that I can take with me to Gubio. And so I went back to my place, and I noticed the first thing that was off was that the front door was wide open. And of course, like, this is a huge red flag. If you think about it, this isn't the middle of the summer.

It's early November. It's cold. Why is the front door wide open? Well, I thought that too, except there was one little trick to our front door, which

“is that it didn't actually stay closed unless you locked it with a key.”

So I thought maybe someone left in a hurry and forgot to close the door and lock it with a key and the wind blew it open. So there was a plausible explanation, but still it seemed off. I went into the house. I called out, "Hello, is anyone there?"

No one answered. So I went about my business to take a shower. Inside the main area where I was into my own bedroom, nothing seemed to miss.

The first next sign that something was a miss was when I went to my bathroom to take a

shower, I brushed my teeth. And as I was brushing my teeth, I noticed a few droplets of blood in the sink. And this is, again, I didn't automatically think at that moment a few drops in the sink of the door open that someone had been murdered. What I thought was, "Oh, this is a room full, or this is a house full of girls, maybe someone

had their period who knows what's going on." So I took a shower and I came out of the shower and then I noticed more blood of another splotch of blood on the bath mat. And again, I thought, that's odd, but it's not like a bathroom full of blood. It didn't look like a crime scene to me.

It looked like a few drops of blood again.

our hair using my Italian roommate's hair dryer, I noticed that there was feces left

in the sink, or I'm sorry, not in the toilet. And I thought that is odd, that is not something that my roommates would do. My especially my Italian roommates were very, very meticulous about cleanliness. So I could understand maybe menstrual issues, but leading feces in the toilet totally off. I got this weird, creepy feeling that someone was in the house with me and I immediately

left and reached started calling my roommates and reaching out to Rafael.

“Or asking Rafael, "What do you think, should I do I need to call this something off?”

I didn't notice that anything was taken from the house, but I feel like I need to know what's going on." At that point, I started calling my roommates, Meredith was not answering the phone. Neither was Laura. The only one of my roommates who did answer was Filomena.

And Filomena said, "Definitely come home. We need to check out to see if our house was broken into." So Rafael and I went back together to see what was going on. I was feeling creeped out. He was there to support me.

And we opened up the door to Filomena's room and found it ransacked. Linda was broken, the entire room amess. Meanwhile, Laura's room was totally untouched. We went and checked her room.

“And we went to check Meredith's room and found that her door was locked.”

And again, we thought this is really strange because the only time I've ever seen Meredith lock her door was when she was like changing or something and didn't want to be disturbed. So I thought is Meredith in there as she's not answering. Like we knocked on the door, didn't answer, Rafael even tried kicking down the door, didn't succeed.

We called the cops. Rafael called the cops to be more specific because at that point I didn't even know how to call the cops. He explained there was a break-in. And we stepped outside of the house to wait for the police to arrive.

Within minutes, to plainclose police officers arrived and said that they were there because they had discovered some cell phones in a nearby garden. And we thought, wait, you aren't here for the break-in call and they said no, we're here for these cell phones. They belong to Filomena Romanelli.

And I thought that's weird. I was just talking to Filomena on the phone. She's on her way. You can ask her about them when she gets here. Filomena arrives, the police who are investigating or they don't arrive yet.

So Filomena arrives, she says, those phones belong to Meredith. I let her borrow an SMS card from me, so they belong to Meredith, where is Meredith. And I say, well, her door is locked, and Filomena says, well, someone needs to break down the door. There was a conversation between her and the police officers arguing about whether or

not they were allowed to break down the door, but ultimately what happened is Filomena,

her boyfriend, their friends and the police, all sort of charged Meredith's door and broke it down while I was, well, me and Rafael, they were standing in the kitchen. And that is when they discovered the crime scene. And this is, I think this is a really important point.

“A lot of people have asked me, when did I think everything started going wrong?”

And of course, it's hard for me to be in the hearts and minds of the investigators and the prosecution and how they could think that I had something to do with this or not. A lot has been said about my behavior versus my roommates behaviors. And I think that there is a very important difference between my reaction and Filomena's reaction in the immediacy of discovering the crime scene.

That major difference is that Filomena saw inside Meredith's room and I did not.

I never saw the crime scene with my own eyes and Filomena did.

And so, of course, Filomena, seeing Meredith's body on the floor, blood everywhere, this horrible nightmare flipped out, started screaming, started crying, was hysterical, was inconsolable. Everyone was yelling and Italian, forcing us outside of the house and I barely understood what was going on.

I barely understood Italian at this time. I never saw into Meredith's room, I never saw the horror of that tragedy. And so I was pushed out of the house bewildered, but not horrified because I didn't know what was going on. And so, when the police and everyone talks about just outside of the crime scene, of course,

there's two roommates here to this girl who just died, one of them is flipping out and hysterical. The other one is just kind of standing there looking confused and getting a kiss from her boyfriend. Well, the big difference is not that one of them is innocent and one of them is guilty.

And so, I always struck me as a little ex.

It's like having lived in Italy as well for many months. I went over there a few times, as an exchange student. The Italians in general are bigger in their personalities and in their emotions and there's absolutely no social, I don't know, caution about showing your emotions or expressing your upset, your tears, none.

It's expected. Americans I would say are a little different in that way. I know you've got some German heritage, same for the Germans. So even if you had known to me that was never real, I don't know if that wasn't a real selling point in whether you had done anything or not, but I understand why you're sensitive

about it because now you've had a million headlines written about every move, every turn

of your head in the weeks and months after.

That's a fair point, Megan, because it's another fair point to say, what constitutes

“guilty versus innocent behavior in the immediacy of discovering a crime scene, and I think”

there's a lot of speculation about the turn of the head or the look or whether or not you would get a hug or whether or not you would cry. I think these are all excuses for people to retroactively justify their original opinion about you, but that isn't to say that there aren't actual behaviors that do indicate guilt. A really great example of this is the man who actually killed Meredith Church or Rudy

Gidey fled the country. I think that's a pretty like, I think one could argue that he wasn't just fleeing the country so that he could have a vacation in Germany, he was fleeing the country specifically because he had committed this horrible crime and was trying to get away with it. Well the other thing is, you could easily spend it the other way, if you had gotten hysterical

and were out there like, oh my god, you could easily say she's acting, she's overcompensating so that people think she's upset when she's not. There's no perfect way of handling it, and I've seen enough criminal cases to know, you

“really can't deduce that much from a person's emotional state when they call 911 when”

they first talk to investigators, but you're right, fleeing is so much evidence of guilt. They'll allow it in in a court of law as evidence of guilt many times. So there you are and that's where we see the video of you and Rafael, comforting each other in your kissing. Now that I know you don't even been dating five days, that actually makes more sense too.

I mean, you find a new hot Italian boyfriend, you're over there, it's like, you do spend a lot of time kissing, you're young, you're like a babe, you're there, you're scared, you're kissing people would use this against you as evidence of criminality. We now know it's nothing of a sort.

And then enter, we've got to introduce Giuliano, I always struggle with this last name, but

Giuliano, is it Mignani or Mignani? What is it? Mignini. Mignini. Okay, so we go with the true Italian, Mignini, MIG and I and I.

This is, I mean, he wanted you to be the villain of this movie. He wound up, he winds up being one of the villains of this movie. And this guy had a long history in Italy before he ever met Amanda Knox. He had investigated a serial murderer there who was dubbed the monster of Florence. And he had made some, I don't ten or twenty arrests, all of which were ultimately thrown

out. He was censured by the Italian courts. He had already been disciplined for, on ethical behaviors, before he met you. And he was actually on trial for abuse of office while trying me for a narrative smerter. Oh, my gosh.

It's not like it is here because people hear that and they think, well, no, if that happened to a lawyer or prosecutor here, he would be, he'd be benched, you know, he wouldn't be allowed to go back out there. That's not the way it worked there. And in fact, he's still doing well in his job in Italy.

But he settled on you very early. They brought you, I guess, back to the crime scene after you had left that morning. They made you search through a knife drawer to see if anything was missing. You started crying and the documentary about you on Netflix shows him reaching all these crazy conclusions, right?

Like because you cried when they made you search through the knife drawer in the home and which your friend had just been murdered, he deduced what he deduced that I was remembering the murder somehow. So again, like this is really like, it's a really important point and I'm glad that you brought this up because again, you talk about, you know, what footage is endlessly recycled

“that is meant to make me look guilty and what is forgotten?”

And of course, there were moments when I was feeling scared and crying. And even those were pitched in the, through the lens of me being a guilty person, for of me being involved.

the cutlery drawer to see if there was anything missing, that's when I had like this

first like wave of sudden horror at what Meredith had gone through, the full gravity of

it, the full like just pain of it and I was shocked and scared and it was sort of my equivalent to fill a main as shock at seeing the crime scene herself. Like that was my moment of like sudden realization and horror and I lost it, I was hysterical. But of course, by that point, I was not just a witness in the eyes, the prosecution.

“Another really important point about the difference between the Italian justice system”

and the American justice system is we think that prosecution, the prosecution and the Intertelectives work really closely here in the United States, well, they work even more closely in Italy where prosecutors actually are the head of the investigation in a case. And so they don't just take whatever evidence the detectives give them and decide whether or not a case should be brought to court, they are there from the beginning building their

case with the help of the detectives. And so when my prosecutor decided at the very beginning that I must know something that I'm not telling that he understood that or he looked at me through this lens of Amanda's not being fully forthcoming and whatever Amanda is experiencing must have something to do with her involvement with this crime.

The whole system that's so messed up, I mean, there's a reasonably separated out over here and that's one of them is the prosecutor's role is to seek justice. It's not to get a conviction, it's to seek justice no matter what that is. And so if the case as it goes along even at trial reveals to the prosecutor, here she has the wrong defendant, they have an ethical obligation to drop it to abandon the case because

they're there to get a just result, not to put somebody in prison and yet if you are the investigator, soup to nuts and then the guy who tries the case, they're setting you up to want to get her from day one. Once you've settled on somebody, the rest of your days are spent building your case against her and you really don't have much incentive to keep an open mind or think about overall justice. You just want to win and this guy's uncertainty.

And unconsciously, I mean, I think there's a lot of cognitive science research that shows that you could even think that you have the best intentions and yet still be doing what

ultimately results to unethical work and an injustice because of confirmation bias and because

of certain prejudices that you have in your own mind, tunnel vision is a very natural thing that we all get sometimes. But if you are in that position of authority who has the power to take

“away the freedom of a citizen, you should constantly be doing self auditing in order to make”

sure that you are following the evidence instead of building a case and finding the evidence that you want and ignoring the evidence that you don't want. To the contrary, this guy Menini is on the record talking about the accolades he was receiving in going after you and that's where I'm going to pick it up right after this quick break and later we'll get to the media and Hollywood and how Amanda's trying to reclaim her own story and her name.

So Amanda, the prosecutors putting you through these pieces and this is all within a matter of days before days after the murder. And I just before I leave the subject of this prosecutor, I want to read the audience. The quote, I was going to play you the sound bite from the documentary, but it's an Italian, so that's not much help with some titles to our listeners. This is what he said, quote, normally people say that nobody is a prophet in his own country, but that's not what I experienced.

Complete strangers would come up to me and ask to shake my hand. They would congratulate me. It gives me satisfaction because Peruja is my little homeland. He loved it. He was trading

“off of gunning for you. Yeah, and I think that the biggest sign of this, it wasn't just”

Juliana Minini, although he was head of the investigation. It seemed like the entire Italian

legal system ultimately in the end was banking on me being guilty in order to not admit fault.

And so also, if I'm going to empathize with someone like Juliana Minini, I have to admit that we all have ego and it's really hard to admit when we're wrong, especially when we've made a mistake in such a public way. I was arrested before any evidence was made available. Any forensic

me. They imprisoned me. They did a public press conference saying that the case was closed.

“And then, lo and behold, the evidence starts coming back indicating a totally separate figure”

who had nothing to do with me. His fingerprints, footprints in her blood, his DNA in Meredith spotty, a local known burglar named Rudy Gide, and they thought crap. They had imprisoned an innocent person. And this instead of admitting fault at the very beginning, they decided to pursue a case in which a convoluted case in which they were forcing these separate figures with very different pieces of evidence into the same equation. And the excuses for why it didn't add up.

Instead of saying crap, they should have said, "Few, thank God, we found out the truth before

we put this innocent girl and are boyfriend and jail." But they didn't. They went in different ways.

So over the course of the next few days, I guess it was about five days. What I read was the interrogated you for nearly 60 hours. And this is an important piece of it too. And I'm not going to say this doesn't happen in the United States, but we have a lot more strict rules on what you're, at least, supposed to be doing in an interrogation. So describe what the police were doing to you over those days. Yeah, so it's interesting because it's almost like my family, especially

my aunt and Germany, had a feeling that something was off. It didn't make sense to my family that I was spending hours and hours and hours answering the same questions over and over again in the police office. My mom, of course, thought, "There's a killer on the loose in Prusa, who almost killed my daughter. I want her to come home." My aunt and Germany is saying,

“"I'm going to come down there and get you. You need to go talk to the embassy. You're clearly”

not safe." But of course, the police were telling me, "No, Amanda. You're a very, very

important witness in this case. You were the first person to arrive at home and discover the crime

scene. You were the roommate who was closest to Meredith. You were too important to us and our investigation to leave." And I believed them. And so I believed them when, over the course of those interrogations, they told me that I didn't need a lawyer and that I was not a suspect and that, and I didn't know. And they lied to me. They told me that they knew who the murderer was. They had tapped my phone and I had no idea. They went through my phone and found my

my text message exchange between myself and Patrick Lamumba, my boss, and they interpreted that message that I sent him, which was a poorly translated Italian phrase, Chivet Yamulputarvi. I intended to say, "See you later." Whenever they interpreted that to me, I'll see you later tonight, this night, the night that the crime happened, and they interpreted that to mean that I had met with my boss, Patrick Lamumba, and that he had murdered Meredith. They lied to me

and told me that everything that I thought I remembered about that night was wrong, that Rafael said that I had not sent the night with him, and that I was so traumatized by what I had witnessed

“Patrick do, that I could no longer remember it. And they pushed me, slapped me, yelled at me,”

told me to remember the truth, remember what Patrick did to her, and very leading suggestive course of techniques. Like even just saying, "Well, did you hear Meredith's scream?" And I said, "I don't know." And they say, "Well, of course you would hear Meredith's scream." She's being murdered. And I said, "Okay, I guess I heard Meredith's scream." Like this was the conversation I was having, and this is what the police wrote up in their report and had me sign. And of course,

this was without an interpreter, this was without a lawyer, and this reaper, this in Italian, I was doing this in Italian. Oh my gosh, my gosh. I'm only now realizing this. I did read that they were sending in two different detectives or police officers pretty much every couple of hours so that they would be fresh and could keep coming at you, you got no breaks, you didn't get water, they kept you up overnight. This is how it's done. This is how false confessions are given.

And when you see a false confession, I mean, it's like nine times out of ten. It looks just like this. How does it happen? Just like this. You break down a person's willpower to the point where they'll say anything just to get out of the room, just for you to leave them alone. And they'll believe anything. Like I genuinely believe at a certain point that the only explanation for the police is behavior towards me was that I must have amnesia and I must have witnessed the murder.

take a breath to regain a sense of composure and realize what had just happened. And I recanted

immediately. But of course, at that point, the police had already gotten what they wanted, signed statements from me. And so they ignored me. They told me, don't worry about it. Your true memories will return. And the meantime, we're going to be taking you to a holding place for your own protection. Then you'll get to see your mom. Why would they? I mean, why would they be so focused on getting you to point the finger at your boss from Lashik, right? That was the restaurant.

That was the bar, yeah. Why? Like I could understand them trying to get you to say, I did it.

“But why were they so focused on you getting you to point the finger at him?”

You know, I don't think that they actually thought at the beginning that I did it.

I especially were looking at a sexual assault murder. These are almost always committed by men.

And I think that's something that is overlooked in this case, the way that it's been made so much of a girl on girl sexualized fantasy crime. Like when we're talking about the realities of violence against women, we're talking about male against female violence against women. And they I think what they believe at the beginning was that I genuinely knew something because they misread my behavior. They inaccurately interpreted my behavior to mean that I was not surprised

by Meredith's murder. And that I was that I knew something that I wasn't telling them. And so they pressured me into implicating someone because they believed that I knew who it was. And it was

“over the course of my interrogations that I think they settled upon Patrick who they didn't know”

from from Bob or John, like they had just seen of text message between me and a person named Patrick on my phone in their mind setting up an appointment. And they thought this is it. This is the guy Amanda let him in. Amanda knows what happened. We got to get her to admit it. So did they arrest him right away? They arrested him right away without checking his alibi, without doing anything despite the fact that I recanted. And they kept him in prison for two weeks,

even though numerous people came forward saying that they had been with him the entire night. Well, I mean it just shows there they had no appetite for the truth. And he question about him before we move on from him because I read that he recently said something like why hasn't she ever apologized to me or this is not that reason. It was like 2011. There was a quote from him saying

“she never reached out to me. Is that still true? And no and I did apologize to him in court. So I don't”

know what he means. I'm assuming that he's potentially talking about how his lawyer at a certain point reached out to me asking for money and wanting me to give to admit to this whole situation. His imprisonment being my fault. And my point was this was not my fault. I was forced into signing statements. And this is the police's fault. They should sue someone, but it shouldn't be Amanda Knox. Okay, so that's Patrick then he gets out because after a short amount of time he's able to prove

them he has an alibi and they're not going to be able to pin this on them. And so you're sitting, you go to jail. They, they, they, they not only arrest him, they arrest you and they arrest Raphael, but it was my charge is right, right. But no charges are actually filed against you and you sit there for a year before they actually charge you with murder. Yeah, so they sought, they sat me there for eight months before I was officially, um, indicted and charged with a crime. And that's another

one of those differences between the American system and the Italian system and this Italian system, they can hold you in custody for up to a year without charging you while you're under investigation. Wow, that's scary. So at, at what point do you say to them, you might want to consider this guy Rudy Gode, because he was not in your immediate friend circle, but he was kind of on the periphery. So it was a name you knew and when they were asking you, tell us everybody,

tell us everybody who could be who's been in the house, who you guys are friends with and so on. You had mentioned that name and he was a known criminal. I mean, he was somebody who had been known as a robber in the area. He was apparently, uh, into drugs. Um, he was on the police radar prior to all of this. So I would think that name would have been like, oh, he likes to rob people. Oh, and he'd also been, he'd also threatened people with knives prior to this. So you think that they

be like, up, red flag? Yes, let's follow that one up. When did you first mention his name and how

long did it take them to focus on him? Actually, it's interesting. I didn't mention his name because

introduced like Rudy, but I didn't remember his name. I remembered that he was a guy who played

basketball with the guys who lived below us. And I didn't know anything about his history. I'd never

really hung out with him. I only knew him from having encountered him that one time. And until, you know, I'd seen him around like he'd played in the basketball court near the university. But he wasn't like

“a friend of mine. In fact, and the very beginning, I had mentioned a character named, I think his”

name was shaky. I've been his nickname was shaky because I remember he was a sort of sketchy guy who liked to dance and hang out with Meredith and her friends, who once tried to like take sort of forcefully take me home with him. And I raised the police as attention to that person, but of course, he had nothing to do with the crime. And I remember the moment when Rudy Gade's name was finally made public. It was after they had already found his fingerprints and footprints in her or fingerprints

at the very least in her blood, in Meredith's blood at the crime scene. They were able to process those fingerprints identify him from having his, you know, long history of burglaries. And identify this person and track him down. And there's just like really interesting sort of moment of timing, where the police released Patrick Lamumba almost at the exact same time that they arrested Rudy Gade. So that they had someone sort of a switcheroo that they didn't have to once again admit

fault in a big way because here they are where they found the real guy. And I remember sitting there in my prison cell watching the news as this happened as Rudy Gade was being arrested in Germany. And I saw his face. I heard his name. And I thought, that guy, the basketball guy, like that's

the guy, like sure I've seen him before, but it never occurred to me that he would do this. Of course,

I didn't know about his history of criminality. And I had this like moment of like relief even when they found him because I thought, oh my gosh, this is going to be over soon. They found out

“who really did it. And that it wasn't over soon, of course. Boy, were you, were you wrong on that?”

Next time I'm going to ask Amanda about the lies. The prosecutor was openly telling about her. The active misleading they did with the press to try to get people to believe that it was Amanda at all of which fell completely apart. We're going to do that right after this quick break. And we'll come back with Amanda Knox. So Amanda, the prosecutor put out among other things. He and his team put out a picture of a bloody sink. And this sink was covered

in blood. I mean, it was a wash in red. And they basically were like, she's a liar. She came home.

She saw that. She didn't think anything was wrong. And it was a complete lie. Because the actual sink you saw, then there were pictures of that too, just had a couple of drops of blood. The picture they put out had been treated with some sort of a chemical that is supposed to show them if there's blood. And the substance itself is red. So it's all over the sink. This is my understanding. It was an active attempt to mislead. I mean, you could get disbarred for doing such a thing as a lawyer

here. But this is just one of the examples. And I know that there are others of the ways in which they try to unfairly portray you in the media. Yeah. And I, you know, I discuss this on librarians with about media selection bias. Because I think there's this ongoing perception that even if I'm innocent, I must, there must be something wrong with me or there must be, this wrongful conviction must be my fault because no reasonable person would act the way that

Amanda acted. And, you know, even as recently as Malcolm Gladwell's book talking to strangers where he analyzes the case. And he, you know, from the very get go is like, we know who did this crime. It's Rudy Gide, but he then goes on to say, well, the reason why Amanda was wrongly convicted

“was because she's ultimately an innocent person who acts guilty. And maybe that's why wrongful”

convictions happen. innocent people act guilty. And I, I just wanted to push back against that because, again, who first of all has agency in the equation? Who's the one who's doing the wrongful, like, like the wrongful convicting? Who's the one who is pursuing a case against an innocent person despite what the evidence is telling them? And who is presenting false pictures to the media in order to misrepresent the evidence against her in court? Right? Who is, who's decisions are

shaping these events? They certainly were not mine. And if anything, I was the one who had the least

the ways that they portrayed Meredith versus me, right? Like they acted like Meredith and I were

“two extreme opposites of the ideals of femininity. They turned this into a morality play about”

female sexuality and morality. They portrayed Meredith as this perfectly invisible ideal serious, studious, non-casual, like person who would never, ever, ever just go out with boys or have fun or do anything like that. She was a serious young woman who had a feed on Zato, a fiance, someone who we can all agree is a perfect victim. Well, of course, you don't have to be, you know,

a studious person who never goes out and has fun to be a victim of a horrible crime on the first

place. And Meredith was not someone who didn't just like Meredith did like to go and hang out and have fun with friends and go dancing and have like casual, you know, relationships. Like this, that was her as well. And on the flip side, there was the portrayal of me as, when in reality, I was actually quite similar to Meredith as someone who was uninhibited and lustful and at odds, like jealous of Meredith's purity and everything depraved that you could accuse a woman

of, particularly through her sexuality and using that as an excuse to say, well, if she's capable of all of the sex, she must also be capable of violence. Very much playing into the Madonna Horde dichotomy. It's um, how did they find out the number of sexual partners you had had? I, you've talked about it, but like, well, how did they know that? Yeah. After I was arrested, I was, um, in prison, I was very uncomfortably being, um, talked to by an official and the

prison who would bring me into a private room every day and interrogate me about my sex life. And one day, he accompanied me into the doctor's office where I was informed that I had tested

“positive for HIV. And me, thinking suddenly that I'm dying and my life is over,”

was told by the Viche Comandante that I should think about and write down all of the people that I had ever had sex with in order to determine who had given me HIV. So I went right back into my cell, started journaling, crying, thinking that I was dying, wrote down every single person I had ever had sex with in my entire life and what kind of protection we had used. And the very next day, the police raided myself and took every scrap of paper that I had ever written on. And

then a few days later, it was released to the press. Oh, it's disgusting. It's so disgusting. You, you've made, makes such a good point about Gladwell, who I love and who's, you know, he's on your side, but he's, he's got it a little wrong. You know, and I, in his defense, I get it because we didn't get to like the cartwheels. I'll ask you about the cartwheels because that's what people think about. But honestly, it wasn't, it wasn't your behavior. People may not really fully understand the

extent to which they have been manipulated by a dishonest prosecutor who is, he's like the Mike Nyfang of Italy. You know, he, Mike Nyfangs, the guy who tried to put those three Duke university kids in jail for an alleged rape that they did not commit. And he knew it was false,

“but he didn't care. That's, that's what I think, Mignini is. And people don't realize at home how”

he tried to manipulate them from, from the sink to he went out and said, a man and ox went home, and she bought bleach, and she bleached that entire bathroom. She scrubbed it. Now you look at the actual photos of post-demand an ox's visit to the bathroom. It's covered in blood. It's still got the feces in the toilet. Clearly, nobody has been there doing any cleaning. And he said, we've got

receipts. Well, they never released them. They're never were receipts showing you do that. But there's

never any follow-up. Nobody ever goes back to the prosecutor and says, where's the receipt? It's just did you win or lose and he lost and still whatever maintained a story. So we've been manipulated. The diary, the HIV positive, which was, thank God, untrue. That was a lie. And that that leads me to the disgusting, vile media, the disgusting, vile media that played along willingly. And I get it. I get it. Very salacious. So many elements to the story. You're so beautiful. I mean,

that was probably your biggest sin in attracting media coverage to this. You know, just you are. You're just you're beautiful. And that will sell papers. And thanks, Megan. Yeah. And then like you add in possible sex-fiend in like some weird sudden, I don't know what they thought you were doing and orgy where you slip people's throats. I mean, it was just none of it made any sense. And as soon

as Patrick fell apart as you're a third partner, you rough A.L.A.A. and Patrick, you're boss.

And they held her down because why? Because she wouldn't have sex with it. Like there was nothing.

“He was making it up, making it up as he went along. But the media portrayed you. I mean,”

there's one of the headlines was Satanic sex ritual. Satanic now. They called you as she devil. Certainly the narrative was that you were a whore. The Foxy Noxie thing came from an innocent thing on your own social media about as I understand it. You was a soccer player and how you were sliced a fox on the field. I can't even understand. I've been attacked by the media in vicious ways, but nothing compares to this. Yeah. Well, and it's interesting because I wasn't

in a place to even defend myself at that point. I was locked away and at the mercy of what the

police was releasing to the press. And I'm so glad that you brought up like the claim that I must

have cleaned up my DNA because I remember interviewing Mark Olshacker on Labyrinth. And he said, if Rafael and I could have somehow selectively cleaned up our DNA from that crime scene and left all of the other evidence there intact, we deserve a Nobel prize for chemistry. It's just, it's, but it's interesting because that was like if you imagine the sort of confirmation bias, the mental gymnastics that my prosecutor had to do to account for the fact that here's this

crime scene where there's Meredith's body, Meredith's DNA and Rudy Gide's DNA and Fingerprints and Footprints all over the space and nothing implicating me, Rafael. It's that has to be explained somehow. Well, in his mind, it was, I was somehow able to clean up all evidence, all traces of

“me and in order to implicate Rudy Gide. And I think the thing that like, I mentioned this in”

that episode of Labyrinth where I talk about Rudy Gide because for me, like, and maybe we'll get to this later. But like, for me, I cannot get over the fact that because the police and the prosecution did not want to admit from the get go that there was no evidence against me and dropped the charges and released me and Rafael A. from prison. Instead of doing that, they actually pursued a case that let Meredith's actual rapist and murder off the hook. Yeah. He was tried separately from me.

He was tried before me. The prosecution was not interested in having him be fully responsible for

his crimes. So then never charged him to be fully responsible for his crimes. He was discharged

with being a part of the murder and but never having actually plunged to the knife himself. And so in Rudy Gide points to that today and says, well, no one says, I killed her. Someone else killed her. It's like, well, the reason for that is because the police and prosecution were covering their butts. Yeah. And they allowed him, they allowed him the ability to make this argument. This crazy argument, notwithstanding all the proof. Oh, pointy to him and only him. Now there was a knife.

And this is at the heart of the case. The prosecutor claimed that it had both Meredith's DNA on the blade and Amanda's DNA on the handle. It's one of the reasons why the trial went south for Amanda. And it's also one of the reasons why I don't believe this was an inadvertent mistake by this prosecutor who really was out to get her. And so we pick it up next and we'll go back into the media when we come back from a quick break, don't go away. So on the subject of Rudy Gide,

one thing we missed is that he's recorded on tape and the prosecutor's had it. Talking to what he believed was a friend, but was actually an informant saying, he places himself at the crime scene that nice. He claims he slept with Meredith the night of the murder that he was using the bathroom. And that's when he heard Meredith screaming that he opened the door and saw an assailant fleeing. And Meredith was then dead. But he says on that tape, quote, Amanda was not there.

She had nothing to do with it. So this is him talking to a friend. He's like, he had no reason to say to that person that you weren't there, that you had nothing to do with it. But still this wasn't enough for the prosecutor. Your absence of DNA, not enough for him. Nothing, absolutely no proof other than you telling that weird story at the hands of these police that maybe Patrick did it and maybe you saw some piece of that. But there's one thing. There's the knife. They find

what they believe, they pronounced it's the murder weapon because they say it tested for DNA, it's got your DNA in the handle, Meredith DNA on the blade. This would lead to the stunning moment

“in the first trial, January 16th, 2009, where you stood up to hear the verdict, and you heard what?”

Guilty, quote, "Favorally." Oh, so this happens in large part because of the DNA events. And what do we now know about that? Well, gosh, there's so much to say about the knife that's

discovered that first of all, the result or the DNA trace that was linked to Meredith was so

small that it actually couldn't be reliably linked to anyone. And furthermore, it was tested in the context of 50 other samples of Meredith DNA. And so contamination couldn't be ruled out. But I think that like, for me, it's astonishing that it got that far in the first place because

“to believe that this knife was used in the crime, you have to believe a number of very,”

very strange things. The knife didn't match Meredith's stab wounds. And so you have to believe that whoever, if I killed Meredith with that knife, I would have half stabbed her with the knife, but not all the way. It was a knife that was not found at the crime scene. It was pulled at random from a kitchen drawer in Raphael's apartment, which was across town, meaning that this crime, the way that this knife could have taken part in this crime is if I was carrying that knife

with me between Raphael's apartment and my house. And the prosecution has always maintained that

this was not a premeditated crime. This was a crime that just happened spontaneously in this sort of drug-fueled orgy atmosphere. But if that's true, then you are logically saying that I'm just carrying around a large kitchen knife in my bag with me for what reason I don't know. And then brought it back to Raphael's apartment, cleaned it up and put it back into the drawer. Like this, I remember the moment when the Vijay Commandante, that same guy brought me into his office and said,

"How do you explain this knife?" And I remember being told it's Meredith DNA, her blood is on the knife, and I thought I have no idea how that happened. I felt like I was being framed honestly, because I couldn't explain that. But of course, it wasn't true. And when eventually independent

experts looked at that evidence, they threw out any sort of link to Meredith or Blood in the first

place. It did not as positive for blood. And actually, it was ruled that it was more likely potato starch from having been, having, for me, having used it to cook things. Well, yeah, apparently it was such a trace amount, and they had tried to amp it up and amp it up trying to get more and more and more through the same machine that it just processed

“50 other Meredith samples. And that's how they believe it was contaminated as found by the highest”

court in Italy, eventually that this evidence had been contaminated and could not be relied upon. But then there was the, the class of Meredith's bra, and that seven weeks after her murder, and the evidence was being processed. Finally, this prosecutor announces he's got Rafael. He's got his DNA on Meredith's bra class, which had been detached somehow. I mean, presumably during the struggle from her actual bra. And I don't, I mean, you tell me,

Amanda, I look at this and somebody, somebody put that there. What? How else did Rafael's DNA? We know Rafael did not commit this crime or have anything to do with it. How did his DNA get on Meredith's bra class if it wasn't police misconduct? Well, not just Rafael's DNA, also the DNA of two unknown males were also found on that bra class. And you know, all I could think of is that Rafael, I had been to my house, right? He had been to my room, he had been in the common area.

“I think they even found the other trace of DNA that they found of Rafael in my house”

was from a cigarette stub that was in like an ash tray in the kitchen. And so it's not that Rafael's DNA wasn't at the house. It just wasn't in the crime scene where Meredith had been murdered. And it wasn't until the police who were not very highly trained were going in and out of that room carrying pieces of evidence with them. Like by the time they actually discovered this bra class, it was long after not just the forensic police had gone through that house, but also the

regular police had gone through like turning over mattresses, throwing clothes around like ripping apart all the house looking for not DNA evidence, but other kinds of evidence. And it was over 40 days that they were for touching things and moving things around without gloves that they eventually then found the bra class under a rug somewhere at completely different in Meredith's room and said, oh, here's our link proving that Ruth that Rafael was there in the room that night. But of

course, there's no other trace of Rafael in that room. How could he have participated in sexual assault and murder and only left one trace along with two unknown males? Meanwhile, like there's a huge semen stain on the pillow found underneath Meredith's body that the prosecution decided not

We're looking at a sexual assault case. Meredith was raped before she was murdered and they

“refused to test it. And the only reason I think of why is because they weren't interested in”

pursuing a case against a male. They were interested in pursuing a case against me and I don't produce semen, so it wasn't relevant to them. Gosh, it's so scary, you know? The question I'm

asking myself right now is, did you just have a terrible defense lawyer in the first trial? Like why

why wouldn't all of this have been persuasive first time around? Well, that's a really good question because I don't think that I didn't have a good defense lawyer. I think my lawyers pursued a very, very staunch defense of in this case. But what was happening was, you know, one of the things that I remember my lawyer saying was zero plus zero plus zero plus zero plus zero still equals zero. There was this sense that the prosecution was throwing the kitchen sink at this case. And so

if the kitchen lake, there's all this stuff that is being thrown out into this case and debated and talked about something, there must be some substance to it. There must be, Amanda's guilt is in there somewhere, even if we can't really determine which piece of evidence is the thing that does it. There's so much that's being thrown in there that there must be something to it. And indeed,

this is what, and that got me convicted the second time. You know, after I was acquitted and the

DNA evidence in that case with the broadcast of the knife was thrown out, I was still tried for that same crime using the same kitchen sink approach where it's like, oh, Amanda confessed to the crime and all these witnesses say, maybe they saw her or maybe they didn't or how do you explain her DNA in the bathroom? Like there's, there was the sense of like this overwhelming, if the prosecution is so convinced, there must be something to it. And it wasn't like, I think it was

really, really hard for people to first of all put themselves in my shoes and imagine what it's like to be in an interrogation room and coerced into signing statements as a 20 year old, surrounded by adults speaking in a foreign language and without, you know, the assistance of a lawyer. But I think also they couldn't really understand how the case could have gone this far if there wasn't something to it. Especially back to our original point of the media, every headline

telling them how awful you are. You're just a terrible person, you're a freak, you're a devil, worshiper, you're, I mean, just stuff completely made up a massive manipulation was taking place by the media, of the media, by the prosecutor, of the people and people need to get smart, you know,

“they have to be their own advocates when it comes to information consumption. If you want to”

willingly jump in and believe the tabloid headlines, just know what you're being fed. You know, it's garbage in garbage out. It remains such to this day. So just the quick, without getting into the lengthy procedural stuff. I mean, so you were found guilty on nightmare. Then miraculously, it was reversed. Yay, that's what we wanted. You were, you got to fly home to Seattle. It was like, thank God, this horrible nightmare is over. I'm done, whatever. And then the, the innocence was

reversed. It was overturned. A new trial was ordered. And you were found guilty again. So there's

a second time being found guilty. And then thank God that guilty, that conviction was reversed again

by Italy's highest court this time for good. And the court cited errors and omissions by the prosecutor, sensational failures by the investigator and his helpers and contaminated evidence. I mean, ultimately, they saw what went on here and declared you not just not guilty, but you and Rafaeli innocent that you did not commit this crime, which is huge. I mean, in Italy's defense, that is something we don't do here. And you know, I'm sure a lot of people would like to see it.

“Absolutely. And it's something that the Supreme Court never does. That's why that clip at the very”

beginning when you showed me reacting to them. It was because that wasn't even something that I dreamed was possible. And of course, it's within their power. But it is such a rare thing for the Supreme Court to not just overturn a wrongful conviction, but to definitively equip someone. I'm really glad you, you talked about the media because I think that, you know, like you said to this day, we find criminal trials becoming politicized. And instead of the media, whole doing its job,

which is to hold authorities and power to account, to hold them to a higher standard to the truth,

why I got into journalism myself. The reason why I'm an independent journalist who, you know,

only has the reason I have a podcast is because I have subscribers who believe in my work. Like go to patreon.com/noxRobinson and you can do it. But like this is doing. I'm not, you know,

“like this is a world where you, you should, we all need to be a little more lead, media literate”

because the media is not doing what it's intended to do. It is selling a story. And it's going to sell the story that makes the most money, not the story that is the most truthful. And that's true in mainstream media and not just tabloids. That's what people may not realize. One of the things I liked about the documentary is it pulled clips of so-called respected news anchors saying a lot of this stuff. It wasn't just, you know, the star. It was in the mainstream, these caricaturizations

of you. And that leads me to the unfortunate moment that you had with Chris Cuomo, who continued the character assassination in a bizarre interview he did with you. We have the tape cut up. It didn't do well at the time. It was from 2013. I was in the prime time at Fox at the time. It has an aged well. It looks even worse in retrospect. And now it looks particularly bad knowing that he's been publicly accused of sexually harassing his former executive producer of being

such a bully to his female executive producer, a different woman that she was forced to leave the show. And now we have multiple allegations in the news today about him actively campaigning against the women who accused his brother Andrew Cuomo. CNN at this moment is reviewing his future at the company. But here he is interviewing you in 2013. Fresh off of all of this, watch. This is their theory that you went in there for some kind of freaky sexual activity that went wrong and your roommate

“wound up dying. Fair? That's what they say. That's what it is. Forget the headlines. That's the truth”

of the proposition, isn't it? Is there truth to that proposition? Were you into Deviant Sex in sensitive question? But hey, we got to get to what it is. This fuels the doubt. There's no evidence of that. But that's the theory. Knox is into some freaky sexual things. Do you have any type of experimental activities there? You're embarrassed to talk about? No. Yeah, that doesn't age well, does it? Yeah. At the time, it's interesting because at the time I was putting up with a lot of

that kind of thing from media. I've learned a lot since then. And a lot of times people have said to me, you know, I have to ask you these, quote, hard questions because it's what's good for you. You should have the chance to respond. This is, this is what's best for you. And Chris Cuomo, among other people, said this to me as a sort of justification for pursuing this line of questioning towards me and

“questioning me in a frankly humiliating way. And I believe him. And the thing that I've realized now”

as a journalist myself is that he didn't actually have to pursue that line of questioning. He could

of instead called out that theory in the first place because one, what my sexuality is ultimately

has nothing to do with the crime. There was no evidence that put me that placed me at the crime scene. So why is my sexuality being the thing that's on trial? And instead, I thought that this was an opportunity to point out that there is a whole lot of smoke that is deeply irresponsible and is the deeply irresponsible storytelling that gets in the way of justice. So, you know, when I think about the kinds of like the way that I interview people on Laverance, I know what the stories are about them.

That doesn't interest me. What interests me is the story that you can unearth that is true and just and puts the person who you're looking at gives them a sense of voice and ownership over their own story. The way that I was questioned in that interview was, again, putting me, making me have to respond to other people's stories about me instead of getting me the opportunity to tell my own story. Which he would have known with just a minor bit of homework had

actually no factual basis. There was nothing to it and there never had been and it would take you

about two minutes of a Google search to know that. I believe what he was trying to do was tune up a sexy moment of him pushing this beautiful smart, famous woman on her sex life and whether it's deviant in a way that he thought would get clicks or eyeballs or generate something good

It's maddening to watch that. It's not like having somebody who's actively on trial for their

life. They're accused of committing a murder. And you say, were you at the crime scene? Did you do

“that? Yes, of course, you have to do that. What he asked you wasn't necessary. It was intentionally”

salacious. He was, I don't know if he was trying to embarrass you, but he was trying to promote himself at your expense just like everyone before him had done to you so many times. Yep. And take in like presenting it to me as the opportunity to address it head on. I think was when I look back on it now, disingenuous because it's again, not asking me to talk about the way that I was wrongly portrayed and how my sexuality was used to vilify me. It was instead putting

me on the spot and asking me to sort of respond to what was presented as a kind of legitimate question

and a legitimate reason to suspect me. So any in a tone in a manner? I mean, the tone, right? Like

an insensitive question, but yeah, it's got to be like just the way you approach somebody who's been victimized the way you have. You've been victimized whether you want to call yourself a victim or not. You've been victimized. Raphaelie has two Meredith, obviously. He's not that way. You know, this is I remember when I interviewed Tara Reed, Joe Biden's accuser. She said she gave the interview to me because she wanted somebody who was quote trauma informed. And I don't know whether

Tara Reed was telling the truth about Joe Biden or not, but I understood she was making the allegations

“and how to treat somebody like that respectfully while asking about their story and sensitively, right?”

And being careful being ginger while still being a good reporter. And it's no wonder she had turned down CNN and G. No wonder why she had turned on Chris Wallace. I'm not surprised by that one either. I just feel like reporters that that was about him and too often they make it about themselves and their pocket books and they have no thought for the pain that they continue to inflict on innocent people like you. It goes on. You know, I wonder what you saw, what you thought when you

saw like the trial of Kyle written house and all the jumping the gun about him. You know, that's something I press there, right? The Kyle written house trial. I mean, I think I have a sort of unpopular opinion from, you know, I run in liberal circles and I do a lot of social justice, but I do think that like people really wanted Kyle written house to be a villain. And they weren't a lot of people weren't willing to take the evidence of the case seriously. And

instead, we're trying to convict him based upon like their interpretation of his character. And I

think it was radically, radically irresponsible of the prosecutor to charge him with murder in the first place.

Because, you know, why like this, this was not a murder case. If you don't like, you know, there's a interesting discussion to be had about like, okay, if you walk into really highly charged emotional space with uncontrolled and you walk into that space with a gun, are you provoking an attack? And I can see from the perspective of of his, you know, the people who were shot that like, yeah, if you see someone you hear shots around and you see a guy with a gun,

you might think, oh my gosh, I got to stop this shooter from shooting people. But that doesn't mean that Kyle written house did not have the right to defend himself if he was not shooting people. And if you don't like the way that the laws are written, then like if you don't like the self-defense law, then you can go to your legislature and say that you don't believe in self-defense. But like

“I think that with the Kyle written house case, there was so much focus on irrelevant information”

and character assassination instead of the specific actions that led up to this tragic moment, which isn't to say that like, I think that Kyle written house should be celebrated as a hero either, because you know, that's again playing him as a political football. He's a kid who made a mistake, but he doesn't deserve to spend the rest of his life in prison for it. Yeah, there are some similarities in the cases in that, you know, he didn't have quite as much

coverage as you did in his, his story didn't go on his lawn, but he had the president of the United States now president then can't it calling him a white supremacist? I mean, talk about poisoning the jury pool. And there is no evidence for that, you know, I mean, even I at the beginning, I'm like, oh, well, they said he was with the proud boys and he was making racist symbols. And we've actually taken a hard look at it on this show more than once, and there's just, that's not, that's

not what happened. He went into a bar where they were, they came over, they asked for a picture with Amy posed, and then they all did the okay sign, which Kyle written house, his lawyers presented to the judge and the prosecution had nothing to debunk it. He didn't even know what that was. He thought it was an okay sign, which it's been since the beginning of time. There was nothing, nothing on his social media. They scoured him. The anti-deformation league apparently didn't

investigation. The prosecutors looked at all of his cell phones. Oh, it's nothing. Didn't follow a white supremacist. Didn't know a white supremacist. It was a lie. And so people still confused

right? At some point, you have to say show me the evidence and we, and if they cannot, we as a responsible society have to move on. Absolutely. And also I would say that like whether or not he

knows that he was doing an okay sign or a white supremacist sign is ultimately irrelevant.

In the same way that like if I were a professional dominatrix at the time that narrative was murdered, it also would not have made a difference. It's irrelevant to the question of whether or not he's guilty of murder. That's right. So much more to go over with Amanda really enjoying this conversation. I hope you are too. I'm going to take a quick break. So I wanted to ask you on the subject because as you point out you travel on social justice circles and I know you've connected

with the Innocence Project, which is brilliant. That's perfect. That plus your job is a journalist. I love it. I love her. You're carving out for yourself. But one of the things I've been,

I've been hot on basically my whole career is what's happening to college men on college campuses.

And obviously now that you nor I want to see young women get sexually assaulted on college campuses. But I also don't want to see due process taken away from the young men who get accused.

“And that's what's happened, right? Obama did it. And now Joe Biden's trying to bring it back,”

Trump sort of righted the ship and Biden's trying to bring it back as deeply problematic. Democrats and Republicans need to pay attention because the way it was and the way Biden wants it to be, Mr. Biden wants it to be is, no right to counsel, no right to cross examination, no right to discovery. You get tried in front of a kangaroo court stacked with quote, victims rights advocates. And not like an independent body who might be open-minded to the fact

that you might not be accused. And if you lose as a young man, you're expelled, you're labeled the sex offender, good luck getting into another college, and it's near impossible to appeal. Your thoughts on it. Yeah, great. So I'm not actually familiar with what Biden is doing. Currently, but what I can say about this is, I remember at the very beginning of the Me Too

“Movement, which I do think was an incredibly important moment of like reckoning with the fact that”

this happens over and over and over again to young or to women in general, not even just young women. But a lot on college campuses is, I remember my friend Brian Banks, who tweeted, like, yes, you know, we need to be taking these accusations really seriously and doing what we can to prevent sexual assault from happening. But also, here I am a young man who is wrongly accused of sexual assault based solely on a young woman's accusation. And I want to prison and for that crime.

And that is unfair. Like do process still is incredibly important. And while we need to take sexual assault accusations extremely seriously, that does not mean that we don't take sexual assault accusations for the person who's being accused, not seriously. Like it, there is a difficult balancing act of not just fairness, but also safety that needs to be brought into consideration. And we can't pretend that if someone who is accused, that means that they're necessarily guilty, you are

living proof that when due process starts getting eroded in the name of something, right, prosecutorial, zeal, a desire by the prosecution to be loved by the community for having made an arrest. Or now, you know, it could be different things from pushing of other cultural agendas. It can be devastating, unfairly devastating on the person targeted and we just can't start throwing away lives in the name of causes. You know, there's a reason we want the justice

system to follow the procedures we put in place long, long ago. That's the only way we can count

“on it to work. Well, that's why I think that sexual education is so important, because like one”

of the reasons why these things happen, especially in college campuses, is because these are highly charged sexual environments with young people who don't have a ton of experience

sexually, who are pushing boundaries for the first time, exploring themselves and others.

And of course, they're going to be slip ups and mistakes on both sides in terms of communication, both physical and verbal. So I think that these are complex situations that require us to have sophisticated conversations about them instead of treating them as black and white narratives. Absolutely. Okay, a couple of random questions for you. Just following up on the information. I read that you wrote to the prosecutor. You wrote to him? So I can't speak a ton on this,

because I promised him I wouldn't, but yes, I am in communication with Juliana Minini. Wow. I tip my hat to you, Amanda. I don't know if I could do it. I mean, I see you because I see

and stirring up trouble again, he's trying to bring you back into it, pointing the finger at you, which we all know is nonsense. But you've been very generous. I don't know if I could find it in

me to be generous toward Minini. And yeah, the biggest thing for me has always been wanting to

understand why, why this happened to me and why these things happen. And I don't find like the more I sort of understand the way human minds work, the less impulse I have to, it's like the hate people or anything. And it's more I get a sense of like, okay, I understand why you think you did the right thing in that moment. But the next step beyond that is can we then arrive at a place of reconciling the truth that may be something that makes someone have to reevaluate themselves as a human

being. And that's tricky. I mean, that is the ultimate labyrinth. You believe that you are one thing and you turn out to be another. And someone tries to point that out to you. And I, you know, as someone who has been a victim of the criminal justice system and also an indirect victim of crime,

“like I understand that these things are complicated. And the the most important thing that we can”

do when someone is hurt when someone is harmed is to acknowledge that harm. But of course, that means that we have to reevaluate ourselves and our actions in light of new evidence. Let me know how that works out. Yeah. I will. Let's talk about Rudy. Let's talk about Rudy.

Rudy finally got a jail. He served 16 years. That was a reduction of sentence for him. He comes

out and and apparently spoke to the son. His message to Meredith's family was that he's so sorry for their loss. He says he's written a letter to her family that explains how sorry he is, quote, "for not doing enough to save her that night to save her." He says the court convicted me of being an accessory to murder, purely because my DNA was there. But the legal documents say others were there and that I did not inflict the fatal wounds. He's pointing the finger at you saying a

“man-to-knock's quote knows the truth. So your response to him is what?”

Well, it's a complicated one. I have a whole episode of Labyrinths called the Forgotten Killer, where I discuss him being released from prison and never having been found fully accountable for his crimes. And also for my name to be the name that is most associated with his crime.

Yes, yes, so true. So first of all, I have to point my gaze, my critical gaze,

on the tabloid media, who has decided to give a platform to a rapist and murder in order for him to continue to harm others by lying and allowing other people to take responsibility for his crime. So shame on the sun, shame on Nick Pisa, for the platforming and amplifying his lies, damaging my reputation, and honestly just putting the culture family through yet more loops of pain.

“Like this, that shame on them. But for Rudy Gide, I honestly have to say that I was almost”

rooting for him a little bit. Like, here's someone who spent 13 years in prison. I had hoped that he had rehabilitated in some kind of capacity. And while I could, you know, he has over the years ever since he was arrested, taken the opportunity of the prosecutions unfair gaze on me and used that exploited that opportunity in order to not be fully held accountable for his actions. I thought that if he had more time and distance from his crimes that he would have had a more mature

response. And instead, I believe that he's just continuing to do what he's done since the day he was arrested, which is to exploit the way that this case has been misrepresented and to try to continue to have me be taken, have me take the burden of his crimes onto my life so that he can continue on with his as if nothing's wrong. So glad you are out there speaking about it because you have a much bigger microphone than he does and people need to hear your message. Thank you. The the the

culture family, I understand you have reached out to them in various ways and various times over the years. It's a it's a delicate issue, right? Because as far as I know, they do still associate me with Meredith's death in some way or another. And that's not their fault in the sense that led to they were misled to. And it's a very, very difficult thing to look at objectively when it's

channels that I understand that there's this great potential for healing if we can connect and

“grieve about this incredible injustice and tragedy that links us forever. That said, I also don't”

want to put them on the spot. And I'm always hesitant to talk about this when people ask me

because I don't want to put them on the spot and make them feel like they have to respond to me. That is not the way that you achieve healing. So, you know, I want them to know that I'm there and ready whenever they are ready. I wonder if it's even harder for someone to get past their beliefs in a situation like this when the imprint that was made on them happened during their most vulnerable time of life. You know, when they were at their weakest hurting their worst,

that's when, you know, this prosecutor, the press misled them so severely, all the information pointing in the wrong direction. It's probably even harder to come back to stasis where you can take in truth and see, you know, separate the wheat from the chaff. When it, you know, the damage that was done to you was done in those circumstances. You know, that's actually a really fascinating theory because they call that like cognitive opening. And, you know, that's, that's something they

talk about with like the radicalization of people to terrorism where something bad happens to them. Some tragedy happens to a person like a sister or a daughter dies. And suddenly, you're my, like, you're sort of feeling of security and place and, and your foundations in, in the world are shook and you then latch on to a new ideology because it sort of gives you a new sense of purpose and stability. And I think you're, you're maybe right that in that moment of intense vulnerability,

they launched on to the ideology that the prosecution put forth to them, which is that I am an

“evil whore who is jealous of their daughter and murdered her for it. And it's like, the truth is”

right there. And I think once they come to terms with it, they'll somehow feel better. I bet it would be a nice moment for the two of you like to come together because you were her friend. I'm sure she cared for you. And you cared for her. And that, all that gets lost entirely, right? I mean, you, have you ever had the chance to grieve the loss of your friend? That's a really great question.

And I always appreciate it when someone tells me like, I'm sorry, your friend was lost because that's

something that not a lot of people say to me. Like, I'm sorry that your friend was murdered that way. And I do look forward to the day that I get to visit her grave. I just don't want to do that without the permission of her family. And so I'm, that's something that remains a deep desire and goal for me. Oh my goodness, it's so complicated. You know, I've been thinking about you a lot lately.

“And I, and I think it about everything you've been through. It's like, in a way, you were given a huge”

hefty gift of wisdom early in your life. You know, like you learned so much about police and law enforcement and, you know, the justice system, um, media about human nature. Yes. Yes, right, human nature and the importance of family, right, and the support and all that. It makes me want to ask you whether, like, if you could undo, not, of course, you would undo what happened in Meredith, but if you, if you could undo what happened to you, would you? You know, that is a

question that I never ask myself because none of us ever, ever, ever get to choose that. And instead,

I think my goal, um, with my, my life and also my, my work now with labyrinths is to look at how when we are at our most lost, how do we find our way out and what do we gain in the process? Because of course, there is the opportunity to lose so much, but there's also so much to gain in whatever struggle that you are going through. Post-traumatic growth is a real thing, just as much as post-traumatic stresses. And we all have the ability with a sort of mindfulness to examine whatever it is that

life throws at us and try to make the best out of it. Um, and I'm always, always, always fascinated by the stories of people who similarly find themselves in different situations of feeling lost or the existential crisis of their life isn't what they thought it was going to be and they found

it's great to see, you know, people, you get upset, what you lose a job or you don't get that house you really want it or whatever it is. Have you been convicted of murder? When you didn't do it

and sat in a foreign country thinking, I will never get out of here. I will never get married.

I will never have children. I will never be able to hug my family. Like that is next level stress. When you look back on it, you know, what do you, what would you say was the lowest moment? Was it

“when you heard guilty in Italian or was it a different time, like sitting back in the prison cell?”

Now, these scariest scariest moment was in that interrogation room when I was made to, I was, I started to doubt my own sanity. That was the scariest moment for me in this entire process. It was the one where I felt the most vulnerable and, um, and then years later, I still, I felt a ton of self-flame until someone finally presented me with the actual truth about course of interrogation techniques. I had no idea. Like the, I think the thing that makes innocent people

so vulnerable to wrongful conviction is the idea of being wrongly convicted is not on our radar. With, like, we'll, our minds will come up with any other explanation for why this bad thing is happening to us, including self-blame. And especially when the world is blaming you, it's very easily easy to believe the rest of the world that you're just, there's something wrong with you. And I'm really grateful to those who are dedicating all, like, their careers to studying this

and revealing the truth about these, these processes. And in the meantime, like, you know, I'm not want to compare tragedies because I can't tell you like, I interviewed a ton of women for labyrinths about infertility and how they had lived their whole lives knowing that they were going to be parents. They were going to be mothers. And suddenly they were faced with the realization that, oh, my gosh, I'm struggling with this. And oh, my gosh, and my ever,

“is it ever going to happen? And how you have to retell yourself who you are in light of these kinds”

of struggles is real. And is like some of those interviews that I had with those women are some of the most emotionally impactful interviews that I've ever had with people. I know you live some of that yourself. You did just have a baby girl. I mean, you just had her, right? Is she, oh, yeah,

like I still have, like, throw up on me a little bit. Oh, my gosh. First of all, you look amazing.

So she's felt, you wreak up, right? Her name is Eureka. I love him. And your husband does the podcast with you. Absolutely. Yes. So we are co-host co-producers. We do everything ourselves. We do not have like a team of people behind us. We are independent. We are ad-free. So if anyone wants to become a patron to support our work, that's how we do it. We do. Wow. All right. So I've got to ask like,

“what, it was it awkward or difficult to find, you know, love after all of this. I mean,”

all this stuff that's been said about you. And I, like, I, I would imagine there was enormous pressure on him. Like, oh, God, I don't know, you know, how to act or how to be? Well, you know what, Chris is an incredibly, there was the perfect person for me to meet because he's not a true crime guy. He didn't follow the case. When he started, when he became friends with me,

where friends at first, like, other people would come up to him and ask him, like, do you think

she did it or didn't she do it? And he was like, look, I'm not interested in that lens through which to view her. I'm interested in this person that I met, like a regular person and how we interact. And of course, eventually when we started dating officially and people noticed and started photoshopping knives into pictures of him and making claims about what kind of person he was to even associate with me, he did eventually do the Google search and read all the case, the case files and read my book

and do all the research so he could be informed. But that wasn't the lens through which he first viewed me. And it's been, you know, that's the ongoing struggle. Like, I am for better or for worse, for worse, defined by a crime that I had nothing to do with. I am defined by someone else's horrific actions. And as much as I try to put good work out into the world to this day, that is not what people know me for. And so that's sort of my ongoing struggle is trying to acknowledge my experience

and put my perspective to good work and not allow others to use my experience and exploit my story

feelings for him and difficulties he's faced because of the media storm and the unfair conviction.

“And I loved with the New York Times. I'll give a shout out to the New York Times what they said”

about you in doing the story. I think it was about the birth of your daughter, but they were saying a man in Knox's legal purgatory has ended. Her cultural purgatory has not and it needs to. I mean, you're not the only one who should be fighting for truth here. The people who put you in this position, which includes the media need to do their part and certainly not pile on and continue the abuse. But to say what we know is true, which is you had nothing to do with this crime. We know

who committed this crime. His name is Rudy Gidey. He's served a sentence that was rather close to a slap on the wrist. And what I pray for now is for people to realize that for you to have health

“and wellness and many more children, if that's what you want, telling your story and keep helping others.”

I feel like there's a reason you've been through this and I feel like we're all starting to see what it is. Oh, thank you so much, Megan. It's been such a such pleasure to talk to you. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Oh, thank you. I really admire you Amanda. I hope we talk again. Today on the program, we are speaking with John Ramsey, the father of Little John Bene Ramsey. John Bene's murder remains one of the most covered stories of the 20th and 21st centuries,

yet despite decades of intense media attention, police investigations, and over 20,000 tips in this case, we still don't know the person or person's responsible for her death. 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. First a reminder of how

this story began. It was Christmas night, 1996, Boulder, Colorado. The Ramsey home was decorated with holiday reads tied with bows. John and his now late wife, Patsy Ramsey, had put six-year-old John Bene to bed after returning home from a Christmas dinner with friends. When Patsy woke up early the next morning and went downstairs, she found a ransom note at the bottom of the steps. It read in part, we have your daughter in our possession. Patsy ran to John Bene's room. She would

later tell authorities, but she was nowhere to be found. Patsy called 911. Her voice was hysterical, begging for police to come as soon as possible. At the end of the call, you can hear Patsy, praying and pleading help me, Jesus, help me. We couldn't hear it as well there, but she is on their saying, "Help me, Jesus, help me, Jesus." Oh, hours later, their little girl's body was found in the basement of their home,

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 and he found his own child." John Bene had been strangled and left her dead on a concrete floor. Police focused their investigation almost solely on John and Patsy, believing there was no way an intruder was responsible. Why? That's one of the big questions here. Why did they believe

that? There's a lot of evidence suggesting the opposite. They believed the parents did it case pretty much closed in their eyes. It would take years before DNA evidence would clear them

in 2008, but Patsy would never live to see that day. She died of a very incancer,

two years earlier, ten years after the death of her little six-year-old. Oh, so tragic. To this day, John's hope is that this case will be solved and that hope remains in the hands of the same police department that pointed the finger at him wrongly. John Ramsey is here today, John. Thank you so much for being with us. Well, it's my pleasure. Thank you for having me alone.

and you've handled it with such dignity. 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. And there's breaking news. I should say about the detectives involved in your case. That's extraordinary. The very guy who interviewed you and Patsy, who you've been kind of complaining about, like he didn't follow up on leads. He didn't do this.

Didn't do that. There's news about him today. I assume you've heard what's happened to him.

“Yes. Yeah, it was a big step forward. I think in this case because he was a roadblock.”

When he was assigned to this case 25, 26 years ago, he was at that time a auto theft investigator

and now he's put on the investigation of a murder of a child. And I've never criticized the

bulller police for not knowing what they're doing or not having any experience. They didn't have a homicide department, but I have criticized the over the years and for the reason that they would not accept help from those who offered it. And lots of help was offered right in the beginning. The Denver police offer to put two experienced homicide detectives on Boulder staff at Denver's expense for as long as they needed them. Boulder said, "No, we don't need that. We've got this under control."

That's been going on for 26 years and we just kind of had it. 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 areas aside and accept help. Yeah. The detective's name was Tom Trujillo. He was one of the lead investigators in John Benese case. 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, and they've basically said that he and another were not, they were not investigating

appropriately investigating several cases. They said John Benese case was not one of them. These are the cases that he's being accused of, you know, half-assing it on. We're 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. Do you feel validated at all by that?”

Well, in a way, yes. We've known that he's been a problem and not really capable of thinking of the box and more importantly, his arrogance, I guess, and ego prevented anybody from coming in to help. You know, our system, the way it said that was kind of crazy. But, you know, there's 18,000 police jurisdictions in this country. Each one's a little island of authority, and if crime happens on that island, it's up to the local police to deal with it.

With the acceptance of a few things like bankruptcy, nobody can come in and help them unless they're invited. And that's a real crazy system because there's 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.

And as many huge frustration and that's really going to go very critical of the police

department on that issue. Of course, as 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. And that's the problem. 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

rested from them right now. I mean, it's been 26 years. It's kind of time. There should be a statute of limitations for the police. 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. But we'll get to that. Let's go back. Let's go back to December 26, 1996. You were living in Boulder, Colorado, with Patsy, your wife, with Little John Bene, who was sex, you had a son to burq at the time, who was 10.

“And things are going well for you. You were a successful business executive, was Patsy a stay-at-home wife?”

Yes, yes, she was. She's very different. She's taken care of the children. Okay, very devoted mom. We've seen the videos of her. She seemed like a very loving mother and you just celebrated Christmas

No, it was a very normal day. We had gotten up early, of course, and had made a breakfast and then

all day long kids were in the house with their friends coming and going and playing with new toys, very normal or a normal Christmas day for us. So, and you went out over to a friend's house to eat Christmas evening dinner, dinner on the 25th with the kids? Yes. Okay, so you go over there. You'll go ahead. Well, I say, the friends we visited have kids are age, our kids age, and so that they were buddies and it was a logical place to have a family

“yet together. So, what time did you get home from that dinner? Well, I think if I recall,”

it was about 930. John Beney had fallen asleep on the way home and it was only maybe six blocks, but she was tired. She didn't know up all day and hadn't fun and play and so I cared her upstairs and put her on her bed and then patchy came up and got her ready for bed and talked her in. So, Patsy put on John Beney's pajamas that night, and this would later become an issue what she was wearing. What did Patsy put John Beney in? I don't remember quite frankly, I'd have to look at

the pictures but it was just night clothes. But my understanding of the reason I asked 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 and when she was found, she was in white. Is that familiar to you?

Yeah, I didn't know but I don't know about the red, and I go ahead and never heard that,

but when I found her, she had a black and white pants and a top. Okay, so Patsy put your bed so probably by 10 o'clock, John Beney was in her bed.

“Oh yeah, yeah. And what time did you guys go to bed in Berk 2?”

You've been shortly after that probably 10 o'clock, I guess. Yeah. And you're son too. We went to bed at really when we got home. Yeah, he's also a little guy. He's not like you have a teenager at that point who likes to stay up a little 10 o'clock. Oh, he was nine years old. He got a bed worn out from Christmas Day as well. Okay, so everybody goes to bed by 10 30 and you like in our house before we go to sleep, we lock all the doors and make sure the

security is on. You know all that stuff. Did you have any of that on your house? We had a alarm system. It was in the house when we bought it and it was the type that at that time the theory was you scare everybody out of the house including the intruder. It was just horrible loud noise and we didn't use it. It went off once. John Beney, about dinner at time six months or eight months before was playing, we didn't know it but she was punching the

buttons on the alarm system and this horrible sound came up and I ran into where the control box was and I remember John Beney looking at me like and said this makes my ears loud. So, but we don't know those security systems can be they can definitely be more annoying than you know they they go off when you don't want to. In this case this would have given you our tag if it were off.

“So what about what else was there? Did you where there are locks on the doors or the windows?”

What was the security setup? It was an old house built in 1927. It yes there are locks on the doors and just typical window locks but I didn't check them

at night and that's to my deep regret. We retired and we always assumed bolder was kind of a

you know Ozzie and Harriet flowers coming up quiet, safe place and so you get complacent and regretfully admit we are complacent. No I know it. I know it. I mean I grew up in upstate New York. We never locked our doors ever. We go away from vacation for a week and not even locked the door and there's never an incident. It's you know I told people I said you just be aware there are bad people everywhere 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 and your home should be your sanctuary and and that's a huge regret on my part to become complacent.

but had you locked the doors? Well I thought I did. Yeah the there was a door found open morning not by me but by the police. It shouldn't have been open. It's possible. The kids were playing and went through and it didn't close it. I doubt it because that was kind of

“in a sub baseman area. They wouldn't have been going down there but I think the killer was in”

the house and we got home and it he waited until we were bed and to jump in any from her room. It's a chilling thought just to have him lying and wait there for murder. Can I ask you to just before we leave the subject of security was there a dog? Was there any any other layers? John and I had little dog his name was Jock 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 and then we had a reservation for the family

on the Disney big red boat and that was our you know take place you know right after Christmas so we were we took the dog and took into our neighbors and they were going to take care of him until we got home. Right that's oh gosh I'm certain like all these things you'd like to have back and who knows whether they would have made a difference but you know the dog they basically say as many layers as you can put between a potential bad guy and those you love the better.

Yes you're you're most vulnerable at night when you're asleep for sure and it's just prudent to pay attention to that regardless of where you live. How far away were your children's bedrooms from your bedroom? Well they were it was an old house there were basement ground floor

second floor and the second floor which were the kids were and then the upstairs attic we converted

to a master bedroom so in terms of distance I don't know 30 feet maybe something like that 40 feet but also on a different level. Did you sleep with the doors closed to your bedrooms like do you believe if you would if you know they were they were open. So do you believe if she had yelled you

“would have heard it? I think so yeah I really do and I think with virtual certain they were”

we're sure a stun gun was used perhaps when she was asleep in her bed. I don't know that for fact but but I think if she just screamed or there'd been noise we would have heard it I think. There were there were marks on her face and I think her neck too that suggested a stun gun had been used on her trying to forgive me because I don't know the answer to this but um what would a what would a stun gun do to a person when used I mean would it incapacitate you

for a you know for a time what would it do? Well apparently it does I don't know but um we had we had it looked at police discounted that idea and we had it looked at by a doctor who specializes in that kind of stuff somehow and he said with 99% certainly those are

“stun gun marks yeah but I think because we didn't hear anything we you know you would think”

at least if the creature had come in and and started to take down many from her bed she would scream and we would certainly have heard that. Yeah even if we covered her mouth you know you could you'd hear something some sort of signs of a struggle but if the stun gun were used and of course I know that you found her with duct tape on her mouth you could have kept her quiet. All right so let's back up so you so Patsy comes downstairs early and they say it was 552 a.m. was that 911 call so

as early in the morning you say you were taking a trip and was that your first sign that

something was wrong she finds this ransom note at the bottom of the stairs and then what does she come find you or what happens now? Well she screamed and it was you know I was getting ready to get dressed and she screamed and it could tell from the scream it was something was very very wrong

thing and we went her idea I think I did it look she makes your breakfast okay because his

bedroom was on kind of the other end of the house and he was still in bed and appeared to be asleep so he knew he was safe and so I you know it took the note and I mean she had a patchy experience that hey this is this is a ransom note and he's gone and checked her room and so I tried to grasp what was in the ransom note three pages and just told Patsy to call it police call the police call 911 and of course funny thing we were as criticized for that because the

ransom note told us not to do that well that's silly of course we did of course of course

you're not going to call the police and you don't follow the directions of a snap or to not call law enforcement yeah so that she calls immediately she was standing by the phone at that time and I was still trying to comprehend what the note said

“what was going on I'll get to the note one second I think it's worth reading so that the”

gun is gonna understand how bizarre it was 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

all the parents did it you know how you know how you know that I mean I just think even after the killer's arrested and convicted of course and DNA has exonerated you so it's like okay but I as a mother you hear Patsy Ramsey in this 911 call and you can hear the sheer panic in her voice and especially if you listen to the longer version which I'll play here it's on by two

you know what you're saying okay what you're saying are you gonna remember oh my god oh okay I'm saying enough to film okay do you know how long she's been gone oh my god please okay I am honey please take the piece that's going to carry her Hatsy Hatsy Hatsy Hatsy Hatsy oh that's where she says help me Jesus she's in a sheer panic you were there um she all

she knew what that point was jumping it was missing because she wasn't in her bed and you

“can feel you must have been feeling the same John just the slow reveal of wait a ransom note”

and wait she's actually not in her room what on earth is going on here well we didn't know we knew she according we believed what the note said that she that they have our daughter and we were not to call the police and if we did she would be beheaded and it was dark it was cold out it was a horrible feeling I tell people it's like when if you're with your child and you're a department store grocery store and you look around

the child's gone you have this instinctive just horrible feeling you're stomach that

“you know where's my child and it's terrible feeling all I think all parents have experienced that”

from time to time when their low ones gone out of sight they don't know where they are and that was feeling we had and you know it went on for till under one of the afternoon and then an even worse feeling came we've all had that we've all had that in the moment of relief when you find your child well is overwhelming and you kept waiting kept waiting for that for that to happen and you can hear a patsy waiting for it with the with the 911 operator and doing

the only thing you can do at that point which is pray to Jesus just pray pray pray pray it's not it's

whole case the handwritten note which for our listening audience we've put on the screen and it's

you can see it on YouTube it's handwritten it's three pages long as you point out and we're going to read it just so the audience understands what you guys read it was addressed to you you John Ramsey right dear Mr Ramsey and then it reads as follows listen carefully exclamation point we are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction we do respect your business spelled wrong but not the country it serves at this time we have your daughter in our possession spelled wrong

“she is safe and unharmed and if you want to see her if you want her to see 1997 you must follow our”

instructions to the letter you will withdraw $118,000 from your account one hundred thousand will be

in one hundred dollar bills the remaining 18,000 in twenty dollar bills make sure that you bring an adequate size attach a to the bank when you get home you will put the money in a brown paper bag I will call you between eight and ten a.m. tomorrow to instruct you on delivery the delivery will be exhausting so I advise you to be rested 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 pick up of your

daughter another grammatical error any deviation of my instructions will result in the immediate

“execution of your daughter you will also be denied her remains for proper burial the two gentlemen”

watching over your daughter do not particularly like you so I advise you not to provoke them speaking anyone about your situation such as police FBI et cetera will result in your daughter being beheaded if we catch you talking to a stray dog she dies if you will learn bank authority she dies if the money is in any way marked or tampered with she dies you will be scanned for electronic devices and if any are found she dies you can try to deceive us but be warned that we are

familiar with law enforcement countermeasures and tactics you stand a 99% chance of killing your daughter if you try to out smart towards us follow our instructions and you stand a 100% chance of

“getting her back you and your family are under constant scrutiny as well as the authorities don't”

try to grow a brain john you are not the only fat cat around so don't think that killing will be difficult don't underestimate us john use that good southern common sense of yours it is up to you now john victory exclamation point s b t c absolutely bizarre what when you read that other than the obvious was there anything in our chance to read it reread it what jumped out of you well there's several things that you want to what that mean to the killer one was the amount of

the ransom money request hundred eighteen thousand why not a million why not you know hundred thousand

what a why a hundred eighteen that has some had some significance to the killer and then the other course was the the the the the beheading concept you know that's that's very un you don't think about that as a as a punishment or a penalty be it that's very common thing nowadays we read about some of the terrorists and something was ha say even when are they is it really a terrorist group or terrorist individuals and that's common threat they can make and then of course the final thing

was s b t c what is that mean victory that's sign off so those are kind of the three elements in my mind that uh this didn't make sense and uh the hundred eighteen thousand was uh happened to be my annual bonus uh that year and I was paid in January of 1996 uh and that is somewhat of a logical where that number came from they would have had to know that but uh the rest of it just didn't make sense it was bizarre no I mean I've been told to the it in a way it's gift because he's I've

been told by handwriting experts that with that long of a uh sample three pages if we had the handwriting of the killer it'd be very easy to conclusively say this person wrote this note it's a big sample of their handwriting what did the handwriting say uh analysts say could be gleaned about

well we didn't get that from the handwriting people typically they they just tell us told us what

“what their findings were and they they ran right uh rank they're findings on a scale of one to five”

one is absolutely this person wrote it when they're doing comparison a five is absolutely no way and uh I was a one they they said absolutely you did not write it past years of four and a half and they say well I four and a half and then I was told that there's uh depending on whether you're taught to write uh what generation there are certain things that are kind of common but they're not significant and they're not a lot of them so the police for told hey you guys

better look somewhere else because we don't see uh that either parent wrote the note

we but we with back up because I thought you said one means you wrote it five means no way

“is it the and that you they then you just said that you were a one suggesting oh no I was five”

sorry yeah okay so you were both on exactly the scale of you didn't write it or there's a virtually no chance that you wrote it right yes okay got it um so what about what about since then this psychologist the psychiatrist I'm sure you've had people like that FBI profiles who have read it and were they able to glean any sort of a profile from it yeah John Douglas who started the

whole FBI profiling program uh and is pretty pretty much considered the top of the heap as far as

that skill set and and accomplishments we spent a couple three days with him earlier on our attorneys asked him to dispense some time with us and um but his conclusion was in prediction as it's a young person fascinated by movies you know probably in these 20s maybe early 30s and he said this was not about jumping a this was directed at you to hurt you John somebody is either extremely angry with you or extremely jealous of you and this was done to hurt

you and I thought like I couldn't possibly know anybody that I've made angry that to that degree and he said you may not even know they are they either observed you in newspaper or you know whatever and they developed this either anger angry anger or jealousy it made that was John's conclusion

“and I I think he's right now loose mad who is the legendary detective from Colorado out of retirement”

to put up to and was put on this case by the district attorney early on and uh lose felt it was a kidnapping going wrong and now he said well those are two opposite um theories and lose a legendary detective in Colorado and somebody put up to me recently that well that could be those two are are not in the paddles two theories that well you're right they they're not yeah so yeah that's somebody who wanted to hurt you when in there to kidnap your child right and that that thought

hadn't occurred to me in a good while because I thought we here you got two top experts saying two to give me two to their theories but they're they're they're compatible yeah they're compatible 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 they are you are from Atlanta originally now like you are from the south the the 118 thousand how would they know your bonus I mean it has to be

somebody who and I realized this is a chance they just randomly picked the number that was your bonus but it seems like a small chance somebody worked at your company or had reason to know that that was your number well the two ways I guess they could have known that you know they worked in our company that that amount was on my paycheck stub since the previous January as a as a deferred compensation bonus so those you know we weren't real careful with that kind of stuff

in our house we could have been tucked in a drawer or somebody that knew that from some connection inside of our company to me that's the logical explanation the only other explanation I heard was saw on one 18 is the right the middle of the middle of the Bible it references the stone

SPTC and it's as possible as well one of the suspects that we are interested in signed his

“high school yearbook stone becomes this car stone so whoa it has a very bizarre note and”

what did they say John what did they say about and I wanted to know like what did they go and

speak to everybody or company I did they I mean that that'd be like the first place I would start

as a detective right like somebody knows what he made somebody doesn't like him they've made that clear they know where his roots are they know you're from the south so let's talk to everybody from the company well that kind of stuff just wasn't done they should have done a neighborhood survey that morning gone around the houses to the neighborhood and you know if you see anything unusual what what do you know they didn't do any of that so they basically affect the detective the only

detective so called it was there that morning concluded that I was the killer because quote

“she saw it in my eyes and that became the conclusion before that even looked at evidence or”

investigator thing and this is Linda Art yeah and just we were just dealing with incompetence

and well in 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 and she she didn't search the house the foot patrolman who got there per the nine one call earlier he didn't search the house adequately she didn't do it and that's the reason you you were putting the position of finding your own little girl well that's exactly right in fact to show 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 and you just shake her head think where do these people come from horrifying I mean just because at that point they didn't know that it was a homicide you got a six year old girls been taken from her bed in the middle of the night that's a five alarm fire yeah exactly that's not a crime I don't know what it is but that was the quote but that is

because I have a I could give you a dozen quotes that were just astounding from the police department

over the years but that was really the first one of them just unbelievable what about the

the misspellings and the improper grammar and the use of the word attache which is not really a thing we say in America it can be either diplomatic assistant or it can mean bag in the way they're using it here but it's a bizarre they say that were a small foreign faction just for people who think you know forgive me again for raising your son he he too was ruled out as I understand by the DNA in 2008 but this is not the writing of a nine year old were a small foreign faction and

like people you got to use your head but anyway these misspellings and improper grammar throughout tells us something could be used intentionally but this doesn't sound like a very well-educated person no I got a letter we we a lot of people trying to help and I had a letter from a teacher of actually taught English to non and non-English speaking people and she said the misspellings in this are typical of a Hispanic person migrating to English based on her experience teaching them

to reading right English and speaking English and that was pretty interesting and possibly could explain that and you know we were a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin and or at that time just Lockheed you know I take that to 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 was downtown Boulder a Lockheed Martin corporation and at the time I thought that's like leaving a red flag

of a bull boulder's ultra liberal place and to put a I'm sure their minds a manufacturer of weapons sign in downtown Boulder was was just inviting trouble it made me nervous frankly to do that at the time right and they reference your company we we we do respect your business spelled wrong spelled B U S S I at W S S I N E S S but not the country that it serves so interesting they they clearly

“there remember remember remember everything something about what you do”

yeah that that was bizarre as well and he is if he and I start E I of course trying to

amateur terrorist group or person that fantasized some things and

you know we got to consider everything I mean the guy he you know the unibommer he's the right about himself as we and suggest it was some sort of international thing like he wanted

“to make himself sound bigger and more important than just an eye and this guy slips into the first”

person later in the ransom note but yeah there's it wouldn't be unusual for an individual to try to make themselves sound bigger or more nefarious and sway true now and you know I really do subscribe to John Douglas's theory that this is something that wanted to hurt me and that's that's a tough burden to carry but frankly John said you may not even know you know we did in the paper a few weeks before having hit a process of significant sales

goal and our Barkley people wanted to put it in the paper and I started to have this got feeling that that's not really a good idea but I wanted our people to be proud of their company and and so we did it and that could have targeted me because I was had a picture of being in quotes

of stuff in the paper that could have been a you never know how you're affecting a sick mind

who's going to transfer on to who knows yeah that's that's the problem we had people you know we we hired two detectives to to work this early on because we knew the police weren't capable of it and in fact we tried very hard early days to get the case move somewhere else to another jurisdiction they could put it in the cherished department office which is a competent organization it was at the time and had dual authority or we could have very easily had a cherished officer come to

our home that morning instead of the city police department and that that was a tragic first mistake

“I guess that that's or luck of the draw that that's what happened so you know it it”

it just wasn't ever properly handled and to this day is still not properly handled well and the theory that it's someone who didn't like you because of course the the other theory is that it's some pedophile right that's what a lot of people and I thought the time to conflicting theories between John Douglas and and Lewis Smith but I thought we were talking about someone who knew you versus random intruder but random intruder doesn't necessarily mean

pedophile there to get your little girl right is that that's one of the questions in the case about whether she was the victim of of somebody who was a pedophile or whether it was somebody who just hurt her right because it was unclear forgive me for the details John but it was unclear whether she was sexually penetrated by a man well I first of all this was not a random intruder this is somebody who had watched us has knew what our patterns were you know new we were going to be out

that evening um left the note on the back stairway which is the stairway we always used

which but would not have been obvious to some of this came into the house we had a front stairway but we never used that just and so why do they leave the ransoms on the back stairway how do they know that's where we would be coming down in the morning um so it would have I mean there's some elements where somebody could have come in our home it was not an hard home to break into them regret to say um and really understood where things were and or they they could have been

a house for hours before we at home we sure that are we sure that the person that sexual

“gratification was a goal of the killer I don't know I think you know there's another case seven months later”

that happened in the neighborhood and yes I know that Amy and I want to talk to you about Amy forgive me for interrupting you because I I want to go down this line but I want to give us the proper time and I gotta squeeze in a quick commercial break so we pause you right there John Ramsey and we'll come right back so much more to discuss it's an honor to have you here I know it's not easy to discuss even 26 years later um even just losing any love one is tough to discuss and certainly

under these circumstances even harder stand by John a couple things we're gonna discuss when John comes back on in a minute and that is on the ransom note do the police believe it was written before or after the murder that's one of the

steadiness to write a note like this after a murder so what do they think and by the way a draft of

“this had been found he had started the killer had started by an honor legal pad that was found”

in the Ramsey house by saying do your Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey and then started over addressing it just a Mr. Ramsey and then you heard what followed so there are a lot of questions still about this note and what can be gleaned from it uh 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 I didn't um we couldn't read the whole thing I I just gotten up we were on our it was the day after Christmas and we were going to

go visiting and it was quite early in the morning and I'd gotten dressed and it was on my way to

the kitchen to make some coffee and we have a back staircase from the bedroom areas and I always

“come down that staircase and then usually the first one down and the note was lying across”

the three pages across the run of one of the stair trips and it was kind of dimly lit because it was very early in the morning and I started to read it and it was addressed to John, Mr. Ramsey and it said we have your daughter and I you know it just was it just wasn't registering and I I may have gotten through another sentence like we have your daughter and I I don't know if I got any further than that and that's when she called 911 um the whole thing is just I mean

what what was on the note were there fingerprints was there touched DNA of any kind uh John Ramsey's been saying even if you didn't find fingerprints there might have been DNA even if the person had worn gloves there there might have been DNA on that letter has it been tested if not why not apparently there are several crime scene items that have not been tested for DNA even in 2022 when touch DNA is out there DNA is evolved so much 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 bene waiting to be here with the police did in that case so John on the subject of the the ransom note before we leave that there had been a draft addressed to both of you then the final was just you it was written on a legal pad found in your home um and that's the question whether was it were there any fingerprints has it been tested for DNA do you know

where it came from in the house and was that area tested for fingerprints et cetera at the time

“I don't know uh I think the my feeling was that the uh forensics people that came in did a pretty”

a job in finding uh a palm print that was that identified drum track to anybody uh footprints that don't match any shoes of ours in the house things like that but whether this stuff was ever tested or not I don't know 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 and five or six of those items were not tested they were returned to the police

I don't know why either the police didn't want to pay for it because back then it was expensive

to do DNA testing uh but we know there's five or six items that had never been tested

and so what else was I do know that the forensic people spent about with the detective spent a couple hours in the house and then told the DA what we're finished and he said you can't be finished I get back in there uh so they took a very cursory uh look at it and then we're ordered back in by the DA uh yeah a forensics uh investigator experienced when told me they'll spend three days on a murder site looking for evidence not two hours so it got only knows what was compromised and

I know Linda aren't the detective also didn't secure the scene she let your friends come over and come into the house she sent you to look around as we discussed and then after you found

by the Christmas tree which just should never be done when you're dealing with the homicide victim right

“no I yeah she just was way and overhead and um you know I was criticized for disturbing”

the crime scene when I found John Benay by picking her up and holier and what parent wouldn't do that it just insane to be to that kind of uh level of misunderstanding of a parent's looking for a child no that's it's not possible not to pick her up your child in a holder and and at that point you didn't know whether she was gone can we can we spend a minute on that because talked about how Linda said okay search the house it's one o'clock now in the afternoon

no one's called you know no kid never and I understand the the note said what I'll call tomorrow

so it was unclear whether they meant the 26th of the 27th um you're sitting there and you're waiting

“and nothing's happening and now it's one o'clock in the afternoon she says go look around the house”

and the the people who who want to say oh you know look at John one of the things they say is oh he went right to the room he went to the basement and he went right to there's a storage room off the basement where she was found is that true like what did what did you do after Linda said go search the house well we I a friend of mine that was there to help console us uh we she said for both of us to go uh search the house and so we went to the basement which to me was a logical place

to start third floor he couldn't get into the third floor from outside so we went to the basement and uh went into what we called the train room where the kids had a train set up and um there is an open window and a suitcase popped up under the window as if it were to be a step and I told my friend I said that suitcase should not be there that's way out of place we wouldn't have put it there and so we then I went into the um the only other room in that basement was this we called it

that wine cellar but it was an old cool cellar uh door going into it no uh interest is from the outside and I opened the door and of course immediately found John Beney and uh you know I don't we heard Linda aren't say on the media there are on an interview that well I told him to go from top to bottom and he started out in the bottom why do you do that

“that's just was logical to me but um yeah it you remember that moment I mean do you remember”

why said did it switch from concern to panic you know do you remember emotionally what was it a switch from from panic and and uh that feels a relief thank God if on my child and um that was the immediate uh feeling that I found her right she's safe and um but it's really quickly concluded that she wasn't all right and um so I just picked her up and right carrier screaming access screaming uh to upstairs to take her to help I mean I don't know

I just uh instinctive or action I guess but uh and we later down on the floor the uh living room front of the Christmas tree and uh Linda aren't and looked for a pulse and uh looked up at me and uh said no she's she's going and uh I guess it was that moment when she saw in my eyes that

that was the killer so um and then we're out of the house uh pretty quickly and um we never

went back in that home uh that was the last time we were in that home and I asked you because I know that one of the things that jump in it was wearing was her cross or cross necklace and um according to what I read and and we heard patsy brain to Jesus you know to help her help her and I wondered if you were a family of faith and if you know what this did to that right if you were able to carry that on well that's that's a good question uh and I really had to face that

issue when my oldest daughter was killed in car accident about four years before and the first words that came out of my mouth was there is no god there is no god how could how could a loving god let this happen to a beautiful young child she was twenty twenty one um but it

said I'm going to help you study the Bible and and uh he was a real uh mentor to me and that

“struggle to to understand why why this would happen you know I I was a Christian I had joined the”

club you know if you're in the club it you shouldn't be subject to to harm or tragedy and of course that's not at all what the Bible says you're going to get uh persecuted but I struggle 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 I was it was tough for three or four years uh and but I'd kind of wrestle that down to the other there's there's mortal life and just what we see here and um and so when we lost

John Beney uh I didn't have to I didn't have to go through that struggle you know I'd already been through why did God let this happen um uh so it was it was my face well faith was not challenged uh when John Beney was killed only because I'd gone through that challenge when I lost my

“oldest daughter then you then you go through the added pain of being not outright accused by the”

authorities but pretty close I mean the DA earlier before Mary Lacy the DA said they didn't do it the DNA rules them out um four months after John Beney died the DA Alex Hunter said Patsey and John are the focus they're the focus open the grand jury proceeding 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 the DA ultimately had to admit that but I mean you're going through

being accused and then on top of all that John you've got the media coverage right which basically tried to make John Beney and Patsey into this bizarre daughter mother team you know she was exploited she was sexualized the beauty pageant videos on endless loop on endless loop so talk

“about that for a bit and what that was like for you well you know the media of course jumped on it”

but they were being fed information that was misleading wrong and we were told by Mary Lacy several years after she got into her position as the do DA she said that was the police strategy that was defined to them by someone or there's FBI or some wacko psychologist put in the

pens pressure on the family we know it's one of the two they're in the house either the father

killer or the mother dead one of them will confess eventually if we put enough pressure on them and Mary Lacy the DA said that was their strategy to solve the case and so they released a lot of information misleading information incorrect information to the media and of course the media ran with it and we were quickly convicted in the court of public opinion we didn't know that's exactly what was happening but it was confirmed with the DA and the problem for the police was they did a

great job of conveying to you guys in the court of public opinion with the assistance of the media but they couldn't they couldn't charge us they we would have it a bit of 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 inclusion believe on the day or the day after of gentlemen as murder and then when about let's find the evidence to prove it well the evidence

they were finding was contradictory to that conclusion and that became a problem for them because you know the media and the public was you know screaming hey arrest them you know charge them and they they couldn't well and meanwhile in the interviews you you held firm I mean patsy they got all up in her grill and when I watch her because I I've spent a lot of time with this guy's name is Phil Houston he invented the CIA's deception detection technique

that they still use today because there's 25 years all sorts of ways you can tell somebody's lying and they're pretty foolproof if you know how to apply them and one of the things is just sort of no BS you don't you don't do convincing behavior you're just hardcore no no you know stop 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 right like it was pretty obvious and I'll just show

some to the audience a clip this is from 1998 to two years later please interview a patsy they're telling her falsely that they have trace evidence linking her or you to the murder I mean suggesting if I if I had that how would you react here it is up five if I told you right now that we have

there really has it how is it does we test I did that you know my child I didn't have

“a thing to do with it yeah and I'm not talking you know somebody's guest or some”

rumour some story I don't care what you're talking about talking about this I am too figure I don't give a flying flip how fine to pick it up go back to the Dana drawing board I didn't do it John Ramsey didn't do it and we didn't have a clue of anybody who didn't do it my life has been held from that day forward and I've went nothing more than to find out too this response school for them okay I mean I want to work with you not against you okay this child

was the most precious thing in my life and I just stand the thought thinking somebody's out here

walking on the street but I've never done it again there's no other child you know quit the

screw around left and me about things that are ridiculous what's finding the person it did this well the frustration it's palpable because it's like as she's points out he could be hurting other children all right yes and probably did there's a high probability I'm told that that creature kind of creature doesn't just stop with one maybe has done it before or the um this is right around the time where loose met walked out the detective the retired

detective who they brought in because they couldn't solve the case and he solved every single case he ever worked on except for this one they brought him in take fresh eyes what do you think and Luke took the for his fresh eyes at every it looked at everything and said they didn't do it this is not patsy and Ramsey are that's the wrong tree to bark up yep and they didn't listen to him to the point where he quit he called as a travesty

and said they were trying to railroad you it's crazy John that that wasn't the end of the story it would take another 10 years for Maryly see to get that DNA test and say just stop stop with the obsessive focus on the Ramsey's mm-hmm now that's true uh Luke told me you know after he resigned and we were able to talk to him freely that he looked at the case for several months and all the evidence and said no please you go in the wrong direction 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 they've ever thought maybe you're going the wrong direction and he said it was like pouring a bucket of water on the on the participants they wouldn't talk to him after that they banned him from their war room

“and this would listen and that's what he said I'm not going to be part of the persecuting”

and innocent person and resigned and continue to work on the case for the rest of his life

which I was very grateful for and he was an amazing fellow well on the on I think it was

a 60 minutes Australia piece I watched they had old tapes of him and he went to the crime scene to your old house and he went to that window that was broken in your basement because one of the theories was nobody got in through that window that that was a window you had broken not long before because you locked yourself out of the house and you were trying to get in that's true yeah so so people were saying no somebody said only a midget could get through a little person could

get through that window that wasn't it this is back on it had to be one of the mother of the father and he goes right through it he the video shows him going right through it was that's something by the way I meant to ask you did you go through it to when you would lock yourself out you gone through that window to get in yes I had so of course you could lock myself out one I don't know when day and nobody was home and so that was the way I got into the house so I

“could unlock the door I had a down key you know the person that said no that no it's”

impossible for somebody to get through that window was the detective investigated in the case it was purely misleading purely false information but it biased everybody in the public the media towards us once more that was the whole strategy hmm and so that was confirmed by the district attorney to us that was that was the whole strategy and she also said they're only evidence that they would present and it's really not evidence that led them to think that we were

Patsy was distraught but that you didn't cry and one of the cops on the scene said I never saw

them console each other and in my presence I never saw them hold one another yeah well look

“they watch too much crime scenes movie or tv I think when I lost my first daughter Beth”

I got a phone call from my brother and he said John Beth is gone she's killed and there's nothing I could do I couldn't get her to the best doctors I couldn't rest her aside it was over that morning with John and A it wasn't over yet I could get her back if I kept my wish about me and focused on getting her back to whatever I could possibly do I didn't I was focused on getting her back and I felt I could get her back and to raise for the ransom

money to be available almost immediately um one of the again this window and I think wrote a report that John was observed casually going through the mail that morning there's a mail drop and the mail came to the house for the front door and I was going through as looking for another community possible communication from the kidnapper the police should have been doing that I was not casually going through the mail but that was her interpretation of that

again biased perspective by someone who has never been in that situation to evaluate whether

someone's acting right or not so that was my focus you know Pat she was just rough she didn't bad shape she had a bowl in front of her in case she threw up but I was focused 100% on whatever I could do to get job on a back that was my job can we talk about two things we've touched on the Maryly see exoneration of 2008 based on DNA DNA came along thank God they did get some DNA and preserve it back in 96 DNA's come leaps and balance since then and it had to some extent

by 2008 so she said we've tested it and we've identified the perpetrator as one possibly two unidentified mails so nothing no hit in the database but they could tell it was a mail and they could tell it was one possibly two and that's when she said it's not the ramsies

“can I just say for the record does did that include Burke?”

Yeah it did and Burke was exonerated early on he had to be interviewed by the cell of psychologists that were associated with the police department they said absolutely no way Burke was not involved this he was a nine-year-old 60-pound child and because 60 because CBS would do a piece really pointing the finger at Burke in 2016 and he sued over it and they settled I don't know what they settled for but you know in later years you know

armchair detective wannabes have decided maybe it was him maybe it was the nine-year-old but the Mary Lacy conclusion was it was not Burke. Right and that was a conclusion that even the police came to very early on and they ruled out that possibility. Yep. In fact they off to support us in this suit against CBS if we needed their help. Wow. Just count that uh ridiculous accusation.

So he he went on Dr. Phil not long not long after that and then it just stirred up more you know people were like he wasn't acting right I'm gonna play a sound bite I love to get your thoughts uh I don't I really don't know uh I don't know how people sort of fly into the case you've been

“living it in the worst way for 26 years so put this in perspective for us this is Burke on Dr. Phil”

in 2016. The police officer comes in your which I assume is the first time in your entire life that a police officer is coming over with a flashlight looking around and you still just stay in bed to be fair I didn't know as a police officer is just kind of what somebody comes in your room

with a flashlight and you never get up and say what is going on here? I guess I kind of like to avoid

conflict or and I don't know I guess I just just don't say for there. Were you curious? I'm not the worry type I'm not the it's part of me doesn't want to know it's critics would say you weren't curious because you already knew he didn't have to get up and go check because you knew exactly what it happened. I was scared I think I mean I didn't know if there's some bad guy downstairs my dad was chasing off like gone or you know I had no idea.

Let's clear this up once and for all did you do anything to harm your sister job

are all said through what looks like a smile which is one of the things his critics would react to

go ahead John your thoughts on it. Well Berks smiles all the time when he talks he just naturally smiles and those are just laughable criticisms. This was a violent vicious sexually assault case not something that a nine-year-old could even possibly do. So it's just it's really disgusting that people jump to that kind of collision. Let's move on because one of the other story lines as we touched on a minute ago was the pageants and whether a pedophile was you know she captured

the attention of a pedophile 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 you know they wind up they volunteer for the Boy Scouts and they they you know it's sad but it's true they go they go where children are. So that was forget the blame right I'm not interested in that that's very like but it is possible that this person was a pedophile and it seemed John but John but a one of these pageants where she she was a darling I mean she was winning them she was absolutely beautiful in every way. So what do you

make of that theory if we're thinking of the possible intruder maybe they also knew you but a possible intruder pedophile? It's possible we Patsy had been diagnosed with stage four cancer a couple years before this happened and she was went through some pretty rough

“chemotherapy treatments and it was declared remission and she didn't say it but I know she was”

trying to pack a lot of mother daughter type into what she maybe felt was a limited lifetime and I didn't really care for these little patients I mean I'm a father and I had a preferred my daughters were a purpose teller about 30 but that what my choice that up and I thought well this is a this is a wonderful mother daughter time for for Patsy and John my name they didn't excuse me didn't take it seriously yes so we got a win we got a win in fact that's in a joke

it'd be good if she lost a few of these passions because she needs to understand you'd always win in

life and but she was she just patch jamanate love doing it it was fun she was an extreme extrovert and you know people accuse us or accuse Patsy you know dragging jamanate of these passions for her own satisfaction I wasn't true at all just something jamanate enjoyed doing and Patsy wanted her to try a lot of different things which she did but I always thought the people at these little passions were just moms and grandmoms 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 wouldn't wouldn't air for his daughter based on some questioning that came out in some some comments but it's possible and

“but I still fall back to uh I think John Douglas is theory and and uh loose loose mess um it might have”

targeted who jamanate is and she was my daughter and she was obviously I'm told and I never read

the autopsy I just couldn't break myself to do that but of course here through the news that she was sexually assaulted and um that that wouldn't have been necessary to hurt me uh as much as to satisfy this creatures uh desires 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 the details but the one thing they said it was unclear to me whether they had

seeming whether that was one of the DNAs that they were able to retrieve 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 and that that's kind of interesting if you think about this being a person whose goal was just to hurt you like maybe it wasn't a pedophile maybe it was somebody who was just trying to hurt her as opposed to sexualize her or or do anything sexual with her

yeah that's possible uh and there was no seam and found um but um not dissimilar to this situation in case similar break in it happened a few months later in the same neighborhood

Lucmit had been taking a hard look at you know the the honest investigator who quit um before he died unfortunately in 2010 and he gave a list of suspects it to his daughter which is how we know who's looking at and the daughters are here oh she's running around getting these people's DNA

without them knowing it's like kind of amazing this people's story but yes so I'm so grateful for that

group before we get to Lou and his daughter on 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 her parents don't want

“her out it understandable this is sexual assault victim but Amy I think was very young too nine”

or 12 right around there and I don't you know I didn't know a whole lot about that case I didn't happen but I think she she and John my day were in a dance class together and I think she was a year older than John my day baby oh you know actually my prisoners are done she's 12 so she's a little she's a young girl and she's at home this is months after John Bene was killed 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 and by the grace of God her mother heard something by the grace of God truly her mother heard something and heard muffled voices coming from her 12 year old daughter's room in a way that sounded very unsafe the mother grabbed pepper spray and went into the room I mean it's an extraordinary story and the guy

jumped out the second floor window and ran I mean it's a miracle thank God that unfortunately the

daughter was molested but she was not killed and they went to the bolder cops and said we think this might have had something to do with John Bene like it's too close in time and you know here's our evidence and the dad is on record is saying the bolder cops could not have cared less were not interested in pursuing any link between the two cases and they really felt like

“he was because they were just focused on YouTube right that's what I've learned when I first heard”

about this I thought that's a very similar ammo for the the criminal as it was in our case he was in the house where they came home that night they went to bed and then at three of the morning he entered the little girl's room and I thought that's and that's so similar to what I think rampant in our case and Chief Beckner who was the police chief chief police was asked is there a connection he said oh no these cases aren't the same because the second little girl wasn't murdered

and it was one more the unbelievable statements that came out of the police department of course it's similar and thankfully she wasn't murdered but at her that the father was quoted as saying on a scale of one to ten in terms of police performance I'll give him a minus five so he was very unhappy with them as well but only because they just kind of blew off the case and went on and I think the real danger when the police get tunnel vision they're real I mean every

defense attorney who's ever represented a murder defendant argues they had tunnel vision on my guy my guy didn't do it they did a tunnel vision on him but in some cases it really is true and it can result in the wrong person being arrested and put on a child thankfully not in your case but you were heading down that lane oh absolutely and we were we weren't worried about this I mean it was it was distressing but our attorney said look the systems broken the police don't

want to do and I we cannot promise you you won't be charged the murder we'll promise you one thing with a hundred percent money back guarantee we will destroy him in court so don't worry about that but it's not going to be fine but do not worry about being convicted we'll kill him because we we knew what the evidence was and what they're trying to do we have one 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 never that's the key piece of evidence and yet that's what”

the board of police tried to do is that was a real problem for me we had this unidentified male DNA yes that's a massive problem and it's the reason you've never been charged and the reason Mary she says it wasn't you guys on the subject of DNA I read that the coroner did not examine

at the crime scene that's a crazy amount of time that's I mean seven hours along delay and I

“wonder John whether they have you ever been told whether they were able to determine the time of death”

and there have been told no I don't know any reason to believe there's any chance she was alive in the

morning you know before I hate to go there like when the first cop got there you know is there any

chance she was alive I don't think so she was strangled to death as my interpretation of what I've heard and then struck with the objects that created a pretty good cracker skull took to be totally accurate so I don't think she could have possibly been alive that morning okay but that's another area of DNA that absolutely should be examined because there was a murder weapon there was like a rope they called a garot and it was tied to a little piece of wood and so that one of the

“questions I know John people are asking is do they ever they're one one of the one end of the”

rope had a nod and one had two nods or something but the question was did they ever untie the nods

and test in there for DNA to my knowledge know they had sent a number of samples like that to body labs which is a you know outside DNA lab 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 growth and that's one of things we're asking the governor to make happen is let's get those items tested why weren't they tested was it because it was too expensive and they wanted to save money I don't know what do you think

is in the box of things that have not been tested I don't know I don't know I don't know one journalist has followed this case almost at the beginning has that information and I need to get that firmer but I don't know exactly what it is she said there's five or six items that have been tested and the police keep referring back to well it's just my new amount of DNA we don't want to ruin it well that just tells me they be there well they haven't tested the other items

or they've lost them or misplaced them for some reason they always stay away from these other

“five or six items that have never been tested or checked for DNA evidence and that's what we're”

asking to be done and there are reluctance even mentioned those items makes me think they either misplaced them or lost them well goodness 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 is opposed relying on the same cops and detectives that have blown it thus far there are really sophisticated DNA labs that do you have confidence that if they had access to this box for

lack of a better descriptor they could they could make whatever progress is possible they could make it 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 if we can get some more good DNA evidence then you take that evidence and put it in the public database and see which come up with

yes this has been done in the last few years with remarkable success and really what got me happy in my mind 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 should look this is what needs to happen and if they're the ones that said look the government does not have the latest DNA technology we'll get it eventually but we don't have it we don't have it we don't have

it the FBI they certainly don't have it at the state level and of course not even ridiculous to think they have it at the police level they told us that we 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 and there's a hope that would move this case along to conclusion they went to the bull replaced and we're here to help we'd like to make this happen we'd help you you can take

what that was the game's over far as I'm concerned we got to start when was that how long ago

oh it's probably six months ago hmm they're just so people know I had this woman on my

“show and NBC cc more is her name and I know you you you must have talked to her she's the one who was”

really at the center of this genealogy research and what they do is they take a piece of DNA and we already know that the DNA that they found on jambine has not it did not produce a hit in the databases that are available at least as of the last time they told us so the perpetrator had not gone into the system yet but they don't need that all they need is for somebody related to the perpetrator to be in the DNA system so if I were in the DNA system let's say I wanted

to do 23 in me let's see what my ancestry is but ever then if my results got uploaded on this other website that cc more uses that that a lot of people who upload the DNA results use because you get more information from it it's not 23 me it's something related so let's say they're sitting

“there she can access them she may not you know she can see a lot of things on there and let's say”

I have a relative who commits a crime that relatives DNA was not going to pop up like the maybe they committed a crime but the crime scene they didn't see him because he didn't he hadn't been arrested yet but mine will and this is what cc more she's like all I can tell you is that Megan Kelly is related to this killer and so I'm going to build this big family tree around Megan Kelly I'm going to figure out who her grandfather what great grandfather look at her husband

side I'm going to look at because all this stuff is publicly available she looks through wedding announcements and birth announcements it's it's crazy great detective work and she gets she gets her man I mean cc more it's like they they saw the case a week doing this and so if we can take a

fresh look at the job in a DNA from that perspective even if the guys never got into the system

from the last time they tested it somebody might be in the system that could lead us to him that's right the covid system that the FBI uses the federal database of criminals or arrested felons is fairly small and the states can contribute or not to that database it takes nine markers out of 15 to be accepted in the database but it's it's of people that have already been found criminal or at least arrested for felonies and it depends on the state what that rule is but

it's not a very big database and what the the the public database of the like the 23 and me and way both jan and i submitted our $35 get our ancestry to that database they find a reasonably you know close match or something at least visit interest of interest and they do have almost a backwards family tree and then they find hey here's a relative that lived in bolder in December uh 2020 uh 1996 and now then they start looking at that guy or that person and get his DNA

and and these remarkable success uh solutions to these old all cases have been using that technique and most of these people were not on anybody's radar they were in the the covid or the here federal database and uh in fact the golden state killer which was I think the first one found this way it was a yes 40 year old case and he was retired cop so he wasn't and in the criminal database but he said it was and we're that's where asking the governor to make happen i don't

“care how it happens that's what has to happen and now what he's saying john is well he doesn't”

set anything as i understand it but the bullet of PD they're they're like hey we have great news 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 why don't i don't i've never heard of this cold case

unit why they said we're going to refer to them next year well that could be 12 months or now but i guess you say well it's still big where i've just been 26 years what's the hurry and it's a huge frustration for us uh and do you believe that's is it is that just cover is that a CYA yeah yeah absolutely that was put out before i even released the governor's letter which i only released because he never responded i thought that was i would have at least expected to say

well we'll take a look at it or i received your letter enough still hasn't responded no no and follow up with him you know i'm not asking him to you know apologize for the

thing this is what can be done you need to do it yes well we're going to have to follow up with

“his office and find out what what is his response uh 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 uh i don't know what it's going to take it's going to take of course i'm a pressure to do the right these politicians do is yeah they none of them will do anything unless forced to by the public and the people of Colorado and the country are on your side they're not on the side of some law enforcement group is trying to protect its own backside

so i actually think we can make progress with this uh the first i have to i have to squeeze in a

break all right stand by john you quick break i'll be right back to you uh after this john um Dylan Howard put together an extraordinary podcast called the killing of john bony ramsey

“and um it's a 12 part series in which he took a very deep dive into possible suspects in the case”

i recommend it to everybody and in part based off of loose myths work and the work of his daughter having listened to all of that incorporated with that do you have a chief suspect you know it's easy to uh say well that's the guy based on circumstantial evidence that that happened fairly early on of uh personal is brought to our attention by his girlfriend former girlfriend and had some pretty compelling data that would leisurely pay this this is the guy in fact i said that to our attorneys

and i said whoa this is the guy and they said none of them don't do a board of police honest we can't jump to conclusions and it was a reminder that that's exactly what happened and that we got to be careful too and um so there's been four or five people like that that have come up on the radar and

our radar uh and um but it's never been enough evident and you know private individuals don't

do so much they need authority the government to really dig into stuff uh and so we could only do so far some of these investigations and um so these people are still in my mind uh suspects of interest people of interest but you know that's the point one of the things one of the things Lou Smith suggested was that there was that window broken in the basement saw there was a scuff mark below the window there was a suitcase there which we talked about briefly that wasn't normally

there and in it they found a duvet a doctor's sues book and fibers of the outfit jump and a it 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 but that that would explain quite a bit about the crime scene if only we had a talented investigator devoted to following up on these leads the point is the governor must get involved the governor must remove this case from the boulder PD 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 and the time we have left um how do you do it because I know you said you've forgiven whoever did this to jambine and john it just seems it just seems like a mountain too high I don't how do you do that well I dealt with forgiveness a lot over the few years after johnmanie was killed and now and I've looked back at how I felt and progressed with

that challenge certainly in the first couple of years there was no forgiveness in fact I've told

people if you put this guy in the same room with me and I mean I know he's the killer he won't

“come out alive and I would be able to do that with no remorse and that's not right but that's how”

I felt and then I got to the point where I said okay well forgiveness belongs to the victim and I'm really not the victim johnmanie was a victim so only she can forgive and that's of course not possible and that kind of got me off the hook and then I finally realized forgiveness is really a gift to give yourself you release that anger and that desire for revenge doesn't mean you feel sorry for the in our case the killer I still want him held to the adjustable to the account

held to accountability to the extreme level of our justice system but I've released that anger and it still crops up every now and then but it's a benefit to myself to release that in the form of forgiveness don't want him held staying connected to God helps you know and I'm sure this time of year even all these years later is very tough on you I know you've remarried I'm

a merry Christmas you know I hope that you've found that way and I'll be I'll be praying for this

year in particular we we we had our time with Christmas for several years and far now you

“know realize you've got to remember what Christmas is for and that's that's reassuring in our”

case that we know johnmanie is safe and we'll see you again amen to that take care thank you so much

for coming on and telling your story and we'll stay on it thank you man I really appreciate it

“wow keep him in your prayers and keep their family and your prayers uh that little girl's with”

her mom and now but that we can be painful