JonBenét Ramsey: The FULL MK Confidential Series

Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly show and today's Sunday mega episode.

“Today we're starting something new, bringing you our MK confidential five part series in full each week.”

Today all five episodes of our deep dive into the John Bene Ramsey case covering every angle. You can find new episodes of MK confidential every night this summer at 9 p.m. East urn on our podcast feeds and our YouTube channel YouTube.com/MeganCalley. Enjoy and we'll see you Monday. In Colorado it has all the makings of a classic murder mystery. Arance and note a dead body strained twists and turns. For nearly 30 years the murder of John Bene Ramsey has haunted America. Not just because she was a beautiful six-year-old girl. Not just because she was found dead inside her own home the day after Christmas.

But because almost every piece of this case seems to point in two directions at once. Was there an intruder or was the fan in fob? I did not kill my daughter John Bene.

“What parents would ever strangle their own child?”

Over the next five episodes we will go back to the beginning of the John Bene Ramsey case. And we'll be back every day for the next eight weeks with many more cases.

This is true crime like you've never heard it before. This is MK confidential.

There have been suspects, confessions, theories, explosive accusations and more TV documentaries on John Bene Ramsey than we can count. But underneath all of that noise is the story of a six-year-old girl whose death became a national obsession. To much of America, John Bene first appeared not as a child but as a pageant image. Big hair, makeup, sequined costumes, a practice smile beneath the stage lights. Her mother Patsy had been a pageant queen herself, Miss West Virginia, and John Bene was following in her footsteps.

After her death, the video is played over and over on a loop. John Bene waving from a parade float. John Bene singing in a sparkling outfit. Those images fascinated the country and in some ways distorted the case right from the start because the pageant girl, America saw on TV was only one version of this little girl.

She was also a kindergartener, a daughter, a little sister, a six-year-old kid who played with friends and loved to perform. She just had this effervescent personality, just like Patsy. I mean, just Tata here I am, you know. That Christmas, she asked her father for one more turn on her brand new bike. She wanted to keep writing her bike and as well we'll do a later.

And of course there wasn't a later. Within days of her killing, John Bene was no longer simply a murdered child. She'd become a symbol, the child beauty queen, the little girl in makeup, the face on every supermarket tabloid and television screen in America. And while the country argued over her parents

“and her pageants and her family's private life, the most important fact remained unchanged,”

someone had killed her. "Someone killed this six-year-old child. We know that." This is the story of a murdered child and the family, the police, the lawyers and community forever changed by what happened inside that house. She did main shopping in this world. I'm Megan Kelly and this is MK Confidential. It's the day after Christmas, December 26th, 1996. It is a clear chilly morning in Boulder, Colorado,

less than four degrees outside. Candy Cain's line, the winding walkway to the Ramsey House at 755-15th Street. It's a large brick, tutor-style home in a well-to-do neighborhood, elegantly decorated for Christmas. John Ramsey is up before dawn, puttering around. You talked about that morning with CNN. We were planning to get up early and fly to Michigan to meet my older kids for like a second. Christmas.

Our normal routine like that if we're going to go somewhere is let the kids stay in bed. And then when we're ready to go, we get about and then we go. They might stay in their pajamas in the car. The Ramsey's private plane is prepped for the trip to Michigan loaded with presence.

John's a tech entrepreneur and CEO worth $7 million. His company access graphics just cleared

He hesitated at first due to their 13 year age gap, but he eventually asked the beauty queen

“out for a date and the rest is history. Patsy was a former pageant queen, crowned Miss, West Virginia in”

1977. Their six-year-old daughter, John Bene, seems to be following in Patsy's footsteps. And is already active in child beauty Patsy's. John had been married before Patsy. He was divorced and brought three kids into their marriage. When John Bene was born, she had four siblings, two older sisters, Beth and Melinda, and an older brother, John Andrew, all from John's first marriage. Patsy gave birth to John Bene's older brother, Burke, in 1987.

Burke is nine years old at Christmas time, just one month shy of the big double-digit birthday. That night before bed, Burke asks his dad to help put together one of his new toys, John sits with him and the two build it together. The Ramsey family had already endured extraordinary loss. John's eldest daughter, Beth, died in a car accident a few years earlier. I spoke with John about this. 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 side. It was over. More of that conversation as we moved deeper into this case. Shortly after Beth's accident, Patsy received a life-threatening diagnosis. She spoke with Barbara Walters about it on ABC back in 2000. I'm a cancer survivor of stage four cancer. John has lost a child in an automobile accident that completely changes your outlook. When you

are standing on the brink of death with a terminal illness, your priorities suddenly line up

“in a row. And you know exactly what the important things are in life. John elaborated on that when we spoke.”

Patsy didn't say it, but I know she was trying to pack a lot of mother-daughter time into what she may be felt was a limited lifetime. Patsy underwent a grueling course of experimental chemotherapy. At a time when few women successfully fought off ovarian cancer, she beat the odds and went into remission. By Christmas of 1996, the Ramses see themselves as fortunate, healthy again financially secure, surrounded by family, and preparing for another Christmas celebration in Michigan.

That is the life they believed that they were waking up to. Like downstairs on a narrow back staircase near the kitchen, three sheets of lined, white, legal paper are waiting. Patsy spoke with CNN a week after the murder. It was quite early in the morning and I had gotten dressed, and it was on my way to the kitchen and

make some coffee. And we have that 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. It was just very early in the morning. And I started to read it and it was addressed to John. Here's how John told it to me. You know, I was getting ready to get dressed and she screamed. I could tell from the screen. I was

something was very, very wrong. And I ran down and she had this grandson note and um, you know, it was just a unbelievable thing. The ransom note is incredibly long, one of the longest in the history of kidnapping. Mr. Ramsey, listen carefully with an exclamation point. We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction. We respect your business. Business is misspelled, but not the country that it serves. At this time we have your daughter

in our possession, also misspelled. She is safe and unharmed, and if you want her to see 1997,

“you must follow our instructions to the letter. Patsy's reaction was one of sheer panic.”

I can't remember exactly with the first few lines said that somewhere it said we have your daughter

and it clicked, you know, your daughter. And I just bounded back up the steps and threw her door open.

$100,000 will be in $100 bills and the remaining $18,000 in $20 bills.

“Make sure that you bring an adequate size attached shade to the bank. When you get home,”

you will put the money in a brown paper bag. I will call you between 8 and 10 AM 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 an earlier pickup of your daughter. 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 to anyone about your situation, such as police,

“FBI, etc., will result in your daughter being beheaded. If we catch you talking to a stray dog,”

she dies. If you alert bank authorities, 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 outsmart 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. That was the worst moment. It was suddenly realizing that someone had your daughter, your child, and it's taken her and she was gone.

“And we didn't know where she was and it was dark. It was cold outside.”

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. The note is signed, victory with an exclamation point and then the letters SBTC. Just don't pass it at. Call a police call 911. At 552 AM, Patsy calls 911 from the Ramsey Home landline.

John's heart sank. You have this instinctive, just horrible feeling. You're stomach that wears my child. After hanging up with 911, Patsy calls two couples who are close to the family and ask them to come over. I called our friends that we had had dinner with not before. And just didn't, you know, I just ominous missing, you know, can you come over or help, you know, and then I called another couple of close friend of ours and they came right over.

Within minutes of the 911 call, the first Boulder PD officer pulls up in front of the Ramsey's.

Officer Rick French shuts off his engine in the pre-dawn dark. John and Patsy meet him at the front door and tell him what's happening. They show him the ransom note which now lays on the wooden floor outside the kitchen. Their son Burke is still sleeping upstairs. Officer French later describes Patsy as visibly shaken and frantic while John seems calm and under control. 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. Officer French conducts a quick search of the house looking for a possible exit route the kidnapper might have used. In the basement, he comes to a door secured with a makeshift latch. He stops in front of the door and studies it. He stops, but does not open it. He will later defend that decision by saying he did not think it was a way

out of the home. Police ask John and Patsy if John Bene could have just run away from home, but John is adamant she's six years old, it is dark and it's freezing cold outside. No, she did not just run away. John and Patsy are thinking we need to close the roads. We need to deploy roadblocks, close the airport, but they assume the police know what they're doing.

The women take the nearly hysterical Patsy into the sunroom, victim advocates arrive at the house

“as well, bringing bagels and coffee. They all try to help the Ramsey's washing dishes, cleaning”

countertops, anything to help pass the time while waiting for the kidnappers promised phone call. John talked about this moment with Barbara Walters back in 2000. People were making coast in the kitchen and yes, a kidnapping is a crime scene, but we were so focused on getting John Mene back. That was the task. An officer orders the home phone line to be tapped and traced. Sergeant Robert Witzen pulls up to the Ramsey house. He parks and quickly reads the ransom note.

He thinks about the unusual nature of a child being held for ransom. The first, he's heard of this

in 22 years on the force. He calls in the FBI. John takes Burke to a nearby friend's house. He phones a banker friend who raises his credit limit to $118,000, the exact amount of the ransom and they wait hours go by but no word from the kidnappers. If you're with your child and you're at a department store or grocery store and you look around and the child's gone,

“it's terrible feeling. I think all parents have experienced that and that was feeling”

we had and how it went on for one of the afternoon. From the road, the Ramsey's is kind of a deceiving house. Outside it doesn't look that big but inside it's huge. The house sprawls across more than 6,500 square feet with multiple floors, additions, staircases, narrow hallways and rooms that do not connect in any obvious way. John and Patsy had converted the top floor into their master suite. John Bene's bedroom is one level below near Burke's room and almost across the house

from her parents. A sound in the middle of the night would be nearly impossible to hear. Soon more police arrive including detectives and a forensic team, they dust the house for fingerprints and search for other clues but find no obvious signs of a struggle and no clear crime scene.

A phone calls made and police put a canine unit with a tracking dog on standby. The dog is never

called to the house. Sergeant Robert Whitson goes upstairs and looks in John Bene's bedroom. It appears largely undisturbed. Her clothes and toys are there, the bed is not made and is clearly bent slept in but no John Bene. He shuts her door, has officers seal it with yellow and black crime scene tape and tells John Ramsey nobody goes in there. The police do not corden off the rest of the house. Below all the bedrooms lies the main living level, the kitchen,

dining areas, and the backspiral staircase the family uses every day. And then there's the basement, a maze of storage rooms, utility spaces and passages. Burke keeps an electric train set in the basement in what's known as the train room. Nearby is a small windowless storage room the family calls the wine celler even though no wine is kept there. This is the room officer French passed in his early morning search without opening the door. Officers ask for handwriting samples from John

and Patsy to compare to the ransom note. John provides two note pads, one with his writing one with Patsy's. The Boulder PD handwriting expert detective Jeff Kifkart find something immediately interesting. Behind the obvious sample of Patsy's handwriting, one page of the no pad contains a partial phrase, Mr. and Mrs. followed by a black vertical line. To kithkart, this line looks very much like

the beginnings of an R and like this page is the first draft of the ransom note. Suddenly it seems

the ransom note was written inside the Ramsey home using the family's very own scribble pad. The ransom note had promised that the kidnapper or kidnappers would call between 8 and 10 a.m. 8 a.m. rolls around, 8 30 John paces the floor, 9 a.m. comes and goes. The mood in the house becomes increasingly tense. 10 a.m. and still nothing. Patsy sits with her friends in the sunroom.

“At one point I said, well, what are we doing here? You know, what, what's the plan of action?”

You're so frustrating because you do, I mean, you want the whole world to stop right there so that you can go find this baby. It's now early afternoon. The forensics team and other officers

house to control seven civilians, John and Patsy for family friends, and the Ramsey's pastor,

“the Reverend Roll Hoverstock of St. John's Episcopal Church. These people have been in and all over”

the house. You've got bagels everywhere, orange juice, coffee, people preparing food and drinks throughout the day cleaning up the place. John paces around the living room and Patsy sits virtually motionless in a chair. Orange calls for police backup to help control the scene, but no one arrives. She expressed her frustration to ABC in 1999. Both times I was told everybody's in a meeting, they got your message and that was it. Around 1 p.m. in an effort to keep John occupied

Art pulls him and one of his friends aside. She tells them to conduct a top-to-bottom search of

“the house to see if anything is a miss. We went to the basement, which to me was a logical place to”

start. Third floor you couldn't get into the third floor from outside. So we went to the basement

and went into what we called the train room where the kids had a train set up and there was an open window and a suitcase propped 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. The only other room in that basement was this we called it a wine cellar but there was no cool cellar. One door going into it no interest is from the outside and I opened the door and of course

immediately found John the name. John beneath body lies in a pile covered with a white blanket. There's duct tape over her mouth. I knew instantly. Yesterday what I found. I found my daughter. John pulls the tape off and throws it aside. His friend bolts up the stairs yelling for someone to call 911. John tries to loosen the bindings on John Bene's wrists but they're tied too tightly. So I just picked her up and carried her screaming access, screaming to upstairs to take her to help.

Detective Art hears John's scream from the basement and runs to meet him at the top of the stairs. She quickly tells him to put John Bene's body down. Then she moves it next to the Christmas tree. And he asks if she was dead. Then I said yes she's dead. John stays close to John Bene repeating the phrase "my little angel, my little angel. The Ramsey's pastor sees John Bene's body and begins praying aloud. Patsy heard John scream from the basement and her friends held her back

and said what? What is it? And Barbara, my friend, grabbed me and said no, just stay right here. I could say what? What is it? What is it? And we walked into the living room and she was there and

“Tons it, she's passy throws her body over John Bene's. I remember walking in and seeing her lying”

there in front of the Christmas tree. I knelt down over her and just laid my body on her body and my cheek against her cheek and it was cold and Father Raw was there and he started saying glass trites, I'm believe. And I just kept saying no, no, you know, ask God. Detective Art asks John to call 911 and then calls it herself. She declares a code black. In other words, a murder. The ambulance arrives about 15 minutes later. Law enforcement and the

forensics team rush back to the Ramsey House, though moving the body twice, presents a unique challenge for evidence collection. Officers hurried to clear the scene so John and Patsy relocate to a

friend's house in South Boulder. We're eyes shut out of the house pretty quickly and we never

sleigh and a double row of candy canes deputy coroners brought the body of six year old John

“Bene Ramsey from her upscale home. So an inside this house had made a 911 call saying that”

little John Bene had been kidnapped. Well, when police got here, they went inside the house and the short time later, they found the little girl's body. The Boulder County coroner arrives at the Ramsey home around 8 p.m. on December 26th. His examination is short, lasting about 10 minutes, but several things become clear right away. According to the autopsy, whoever killed John Bene took white, olefin cord and tied her wrists together. The person used the same cord to make what's commonly

known as a garot or a ligature to strangle John Bene. A garot is a brutally simple mechanism. It uses a cord around the neck and some kind of handle to twist that cord tighter. The more it's twisted, the more pressure it puts on the neck cutting off air and blood flow. It's similar to

“a turnicate, but with a deadly purpose. Police say the knot on this garot was tied by someone”

who understood how a garot is made and the fact that her hair and her gold cross necklace are tangled in it suggests that John Bene was alive when it happened. John Bene also has very distinct red marks below her throat that match the shape of her own fingers. It looks like she tried to claw on the cord wrapped around her neck as it choked the very life out of her. The cord is wrapped around John Bene's neck so tightly that it has caught a deep furrow into the

skin. It was so deeply embedded in her skin that it's seen. The cord is nodded and attached to a broken stick at the back of John Bene's neck. That broken stick was part of a paintbrush handle, from Patsy's art supplies stored in the basement near the room where John Bene's body was found. The coroner performs John Bene's full autopsy the following morning at 8.15am. He lists two causes of death, either strangulation or a blow to the head. He can't determine which happened

first but either would have killed her. There are also microscopic fibers of the paintbrush handle

from the Gerott found in John Bene's vagina as well as signs of injury to the interior tissue. This leads investigators to believe John Bene was sexually assaulted with the paintbrush handle. The tiny blood vessels inside John Bene's eyelids had burst and investigators find surprisingly little bleeding from the massive wound to her head. There's an 8 inch crack in her skull attributed to blunt force trauma. Putting those two facts together some experts believe the strangulation

happened first, meaning that by the time she was struck in the head her heart may have already stopped or was barely pumping. Boulder Police find two items that they think might be involved in the head injury, a baseball bat, found outside the Ramsey's house, and a maglite flashlight, found in the kitchen. But there is no physical evidence on either one, no useful fingerprints, no DNA, nothing. It's two weeks after the murder, and Boulder Chief of Police Tom Kobi holds

a town hall to answer reporter's questions about the ongoing investigation.

John Bene's death was the first murder reported in Boulder for 1996, and it happened with just

five days left in the year. That lack of homicide experience matters as there have been major mistakes that the crime scene mistakes that cannot be undone. Did police search the house after the 911 call, but before the body was found? Did a preliminary search of the house? And remember, this is a very big house. Did they look in the room where the John Ramsey said the girl's body was, or did they not? It doesn't appear that they got down. That room was down,

a part of the basement that doesn't appear that they got to. But one person has zero doubt in her mind about who the killer is, Boulder Detective Linda Arnt. And John Ling down, opposite me, and

“his face was just interest from mine. And we had a nonverbal exchange that I will never forget.”

As we looked at each other, I remember, and I wore shoulder holster. Talking my gun right next to me and consciously counting out got 18 bullets,

You were afraid because you that the killer was still in the house.

Oh, no, absolutely. Absolutely.

“And she's not the only one. Join me tomorrow for the next chapter in our story”

on MK Confidential. It is the day after Christmas, 1996, and a veteran FBI agent named Ron Walker stands inside a crime scene that does not add up. Walker works out of the Bureau's Denver Field Office, one of the only federal agents to set foot inside the Ramsey home the day John Benay's body is found. Standing inside the house on 15th Street with the Christmas trees still up and John Benay's body

lying at the foot of it, he considers the events of that morning. The ransom note, a stolen child, the 911 call, the long wait for the kidnappers call, the father who walks straight down to a basement room and comes back up screaming, his dead child in his arms. The main floor is empty, but agent Walker can hear the mother sobbing at the rear of the Ramsey house. He keeps walking the rooms. To a man who has worked cases like this many times before, the setup feels very familiar.

Virtually every stage murder case that I have seen, the perpetrator manipulates the arrival of friends or other family members who are then put in a situation where they actually discover the body or they are with the perpetrator as the body is discovered. At 552 that morning, this was a kidnapping. By 105 in the afternoon, it is something else entirely. There is no kidnapper. There is no call. There is a murdered six-year-old girl in the basement of an upscale home

and only a handful of people who are inside the house all night. The question is no longer who

“took John Beney out of the house on Christmas night. The question is, who was already inside?”

I'm Megan Kelly and this is MK Confidential. Agent Ron Walker brings the FBI's playbook with him and the playbook is old and blunt. When a child is killed inside her own home, investigators start with the people who are in the home and work outward. It's not insensitivity, it's math. FBI data going back decades suggests that the younger a child is when murdered,

the more likely that a family member is involved. From almost the first hours, the eyes of the

Boulder Police Department turned toward John and Patti Ramsey. The trouble with that playbook is that a statistic is a starting point, not a finish line. Investigators can lock onto a suspect early and let the theories start bending the evidence to fit instead of the other way around.

“Walker's Denver Bureau offers Boulder its full weight, its labs, its profiles,”

its experience with exactly this kind of murder. But Boulder Police, a department that sees roughly one homicide per year, passes on the help. The most complicated child-killing in America will be worked almost entirely by a department with virtually no experience solving homicides, not by federal investigators. Two detectives hand me their business cards and one says narcotics officer and the other says auto theft and I bury my head to my hands because I knew at

that point we were in a bad spot. Inside the Ramsey House, the family theory does not stay a hypothesis for long. As words spread among the officers that John Benese's body has been found in the basement, one cop says the quiet part out loud. Investigative reporter Paula Woodward has ears in the room. She later tells Netflix what it is she heard. There was a group of police investigators that had gathered at the Boulder Police Department that morning. When the word came in that

gentleman's body had been found, a person inside that meeting told me that one investigator hissed in kind of an undertone and a whisper to another one I knew it. They killed their daughter. Internally John and Patio considered suspects. Both of them, yes, are considered to have probably been involved in the death of their daughter. Probability. Yes. The Boulder PD detective who carries that conviction most strongly is a man named Steve Thomas.

Thomas came up through narcotics. He has never worked a homicide in his life and now he's leading

speak for John Benese. But she can't speak for herself. Over the next 18 months detective

“Thomas builds the most complete case ever assembled against the Ramsey family. Steve Thomas”

starts with the ransom note on the Ramsey's own note pad and the possible practice line found inside the notebook belonging to Patsey. But he comes to believe the note pad was concealing much more than that. Thomas concludes there wasn't earlier draft, a first attempt written

on pages that worked torn out and carried away but never recovered. Two runs at a ransom note

inside the victim's own house on the family's own paper. To Thomas that note becomes the single strongest piece of evidence in the entire case and he thinks it points squarely at the woman of the house. Patsey Ramsey. The ransom note is perplexing. Three pages written with a black felt tip pen telling John to listen carefully and claiming to represent a small foreign faction. "At this time we have your daughter in our possession. She is safe and unharmed and if you want

“her to see 1997 you must follow our instructions to the letter. Speaking to anyone about your”

situation such as police, FBI, etc. will result in your daughter being beheaded. Don't try

to grow a brain, John. Use that good southern common sense of yours. It never uses the little

girl's name. It even pauses in the middle of a kidnapping to compliment the father's company saying we respect your business. The Ramsey's hire retired FBI profiler John Douglas to investigate the case. He reads the same note and comes to the opposite conclusion. Douglas hears a mind steeped in action movies. The note is filled with paraphrases from dirty hairy, speed and ransom. Mel Gibson's child kidnapping movie which was in theaters just a month before John Benese death.

“Douglas says that's a lot of very similar material to be merely coincidental and it's”

difficult to imagine patty sitting alone in the kitchen writing out a fake ransom note after she's killed her own daughter and coming up with multiple action movie phrases. The profiler raises an unsettling possibility that the note may have been written before John Benese ever died. Both readings of the note agree on one thing. Whoever wrote those three theatrical pages did it slowly, calmly, comfortably, and they did it inside that house. Then there's the number.

The ransom demand is a hundred and eighteen thousand dollars, not a round figure, not a kidnapper's clean million, and it lands within a few hundred dollars of the bonus John Ramsey received from his company the year before. Douglas sees this number as a real clue and tells NBC that patty did not know John's bonus amount. Who has this knowledge? The wife didn't have the knowledge. She doesn't know anything about that. This is money that's electronically placed in his

401k at the end of the year. So to me, it's kind of like the manifesto in the unibarner. It begins to tell me more about the person who's responsible. This person has a very unique intimate knowledge about his financial workings. Whoever wrote it knew the Ramsey's, personally, observed John professionally, or saw this number on a piece of paper inside the home. Of course, someone inside the house is not the same thing as a parent. A housekeeper could have

seen that figure a visitor, a former employee, John Ramsey suspected a creepy guy who had been in the house playing Santa Claus. It could be anyone who spent real time in the home. And as many as 20 keys to that home are unaccounted for in other people's hands. One detective who has yet to join the case will later offer a very different explanation for that oddly specific sum, but for now the connection to John's bonus dominates the discussion about the 118 grand.

And then there's the phone. The note promises a call between 8 and 10 in the morning. It never

comes, not by 10, not by 1, not ever. A kidnapping in which the kidnapper never makes contact, in which there's been no kidnapping. To bolder detective Steve Thomas that silence is not a

it. When John Ramsey searches the house that afternoon on December 26th, detective Thomas

“he's a man who does not search so much as travel straight down to the basement, straight to the one”

room that matters. The quiet phone line does not deepen the kidnapping in the detective's eyes. It ends part of the mystery altogether. Two images hardened early in the minds of the police, as John Van A's body lies lifeless by the Christmas tree. Responding officers see Patsy on the floor, collecting crucifix, whaling. John, a few feet away, composed, controlled and not going to her. To detectives a husband's steadiness at the worst moment of his life

starts to read as something colder. We're not soap opera actors. I mean I suppose if I was an actor,

I could act really angry, but I'm not. That's who I am. It's what you see. And I'm angry. This is angry for me. Within days on the advice of a close family friend and former

“prosecutor named Michael Bynum, the Ramsey's retain lawyers, root their words through those lawyers,”

and begin to negotiate over a formal interview with police that will drag on for months. To the investigators and soon to the country, that looks like the behavior of people with something to hide. The Ramsey's attorneys wanted all the questions. They said they wouldn't go in for an interview with the police, because they didn't know what the police were going to ask. On New Year's Day, 1997, a week after the murder, the Ramsey's sit for a television interview,

this long before sitting down with police. Detectives Thomas sees this as the start of a pattern, a family that answers reporters who have agreed in advance not to ask about the murder, while evading and delaying the harder questions from cops. The natural question is why.

“The Ramsey's former FBI man John Douglas reads it differently. He sees the Ramsey's”

behavior as exactly how wealthy well-connected families behave inside a legal catastrophe. They involve lawyers. They distance themselves, and they proceed with caution. These are the same instincts the Lindberg family showed in 1932 when their 20-month-old baby boy was kidnapped and killed. Many suspected the boys famed pilot father Charles Lindberg after his baby Charlie disappeared, because Charles seemed cold and aloof, but Lindberg believed he functioned

best in a crisis by staying controlled. John Ramsey's very similar. The veteran navy pilot, self-made executive, would already endured the loss of one beloved daughter and the despair that followed. The distress that looks wrong on camera looks wrong because there's no version of grief over a murdered child that a parent performs correctly. Weeping reads as staged, composure reads as guilt. The camera can fix either way. The day they're called to the Ramsey

House detectives notice a bowl of fresh-cut pineapple on the breakfast table upstairs with a spoon resting in it. The prince on that bowl belonged to Patsy Ramsey and to nine-year-old Burke, not to John Beney. "I didn't put the bowl there, I'm okay, I did not put the bowl there, I would not do that." And yet, John Beney's stomach contains fresh, partly digested pineapple. The detectives pull that thread hard. The whites, who hosted Christmas dinner the night before,

served cracked crab, no pineapple. The Ramsey say their daughter fell asleep in the car

and went straight to bed and never ate again. Yet the fruit is in her body, cut fresh.

A forensic examiner named Warner Spitz, known for his work on the JFK autopsy, studies how far the pineapple traveled through John Beney's system. He fixes John Beney's time of death at, around or before, one in the morning. Detective Steve Thomas turns that into a single question that he cannot make fit into the family's account. When and where, to John Beney eat the pineapple, to Thomas the math is plain. A bowl with the mother's fingerprints and the same fresh-cut

fruit inside the child. A stranger would have had to break in, feed a six-year-old a bedtime snack, and then wait two hours for it to digest before killing her. When the detectives show Burke a photo of the bowl he knows it on site, it belongs in the house. It was not carried in by a stranger.

it go. By the summer of 1997, Steve Thomas has interpreted the facts and built the theory of the

“whole night, John Beney died and he believes every word of it. If I told you right now that we have”

praise evidence, it appears to link you to the death of John Beney. I don't get my flying flip half-mind to pick it up. Go back to the damn drawing board. I didn't do it. John Beney didn't do it, and we didn't have a clue of anybody who did do it. So we all started working together from here this day forward to try to find out who that is. A 40th birthday bearing down on Patsy, the exhaustion of Christmas, a couple of glasses of wine and a small ordinary fight over a dress

between a mother who liked to dress as her daughter's twin and a little girl who did not want to match.

Thomas believes that John Beney was the bed that night, a chronic problem in the months before her death, and then sometime before one in the morning and exhausted, frazzled mother comes apart in her little girl's bathroom. One of the doctors, the detectives consult, tells them the toilet training problems are a textbook trigger for exactly this kind of parental rage. The way Thomas pictures it, Patsy slams her daughter against something hard like the edge of the tub, delivering a blow that

fractures her skull. The child goes still, and Patsy, Thomas believes thinks that in that instant, her daughter is already dead. What Thomas describes next is not a murder plan, it is sheer panic, a mother who could call for help, and instead decides to hide what she's done. She carries the body down to the basement, goes back upstairs for her notepad and a felt tip pen, and writes a kidnapping into existence, discarding one draft, then another, before the three pages are done. She builds

a garot from a broken paintbrush in her own art kit, just a few feet away from John Beney's body.

She ties her small wrists loosely in front, a binding that would never hold a living child,

a gesture meant only to appear like restraint. She wraps her daughter in a blanket and leaves a favorite pink night gown beside her. Patsy then lays a strip of tape across her mouth and beneath it later, officers find a perfect set of lip prints, no sign of a struggle, no sign the child fought the tape. And when Patsy Ramsey opens the door to the first officer at nearly six in the morning, she is in the same clothes she wore the night before. Her hair done, her makeup fresh,

to detective Thomas this detail settles it. She had never been to bed. The lawman said as much when he squared off against John and Patsy on Larry King in 2000. My theory is that Patsy in a violent confrontation with her daughter, accidentally killed her. No, not accidental, I hypothesized in the sense that it lacked motive. What tell me exactly step by step how you envision. It wasn't there

“I see you were in the home. You must have conjured something in your head for you to come out and call”

me a murder of my child. Now I want to hear one. Yeah, I put together what you think happened that night. Well, I think there was a toileting issue that night that has been dismissed and underplayed. Oh, explain. A bed wedding or a toileting issue, uh, caused Rap Patsy to get mad at her daughter. Absolutely. Thomas does not believe John Ramsey killed his daughter. He finds nothing to put John in that bathroom. Our child wet her bed and we slaughtered her. That is so preposterous.

You weren't there, John. You can't I was there. I know Patsy. I were there for 20 years. I know that she loved that child more than anything in the world. The detective hypothesizes that John reads the ransom note in his wife's hand. Understands what he sees and makes a choice not to expose her, but to stand in front of her with lawyers and to hold the line. Well, will you repass you that almost none of it makes sense? Right. None of the evils that I'm doing. Why did that? Why did

“the intruder do the evils he for? God knows and the truth is going to prevail. John and Patsy”

also strongly dispute any notion that nine-year-old Burke was involved in his sister's death in any way. John told me this explicitly. This was a violent, vicious, sexually assault case.

people jump to that kind of conclusion. Within days of John Benese murder, satellite trucks start

“lining the block outside the Ramsey House on 15th Street. Reporters stand on the frozen lawns of”

the neighbors. News producers are pulling home video and pageant tape. The footage of a darling little girl in makeup and sequence, smiling beneath stage lights about to run on a loop from coast to coast. Inside police headquarters confidential reports are starting to slip out to reporters. Some of it wrong, some of it have true, all of it moving faster than the investigation itself. But what about the broken window and the suitcase beneath it? What about the ransom note and the unidentified

mail DNA found on John Benese underwear? These conflicting data points do not fit neatly on a magazine

cover. Nor do they play well in a 32nd TV spot. The local and national media are about to hand

“America a version of this story with every contradiction sanded away. A version with a verdict that's”

clean and easier for some to handle than the possibility that killers roam loose and kill innocent children in their homes at night. The parents did it. You may have heard this version before. A sweeping narrative that tries to tie up all the loose ends with a pretty bow, but in reality leaves many mysteries dangling. Tomorrow we will step through that narrative piece by piece through

the eyes of the people who told it and sought plastered on magazine racks nationwide.

Join me tomorrow right here on MK confidential. It's November 1997, a makeshift television studio in Boulder, Colorado,

“dressed up as a courtroom, a bench, a witness stand, a jury box, and a studio audience. But”

it is not a courthouse, it is a daytime talk show hosted by Haraldo Rivera. And over several days he puts the parents of a murdered six-year-old little girl on trial, live on national television. No one has been arrested, no one's been charged. There is no real defense, no judge, no law. The defendants, John and Patsy Ramsey, are not even in the room. And at the end of it, Haraldo's jury returns a verdict. We the jury find John Bennett Ramsey liable for the wrongful death

of John Bene Ramsey. The most to Patsy? We the jury find Patsy Ramsey liable for the wrongful death of John Bene Ramsey. To the best of our knowledge there is no real evidence in this case that points in any direction other than straight into the faces of John and Patsy Ramsey. liable for the wrongful death of their own baby girl. The verdict is not handed down by a court, but by a TV audience an audience made up of staff from Boulder TV stations, guests at the local hotel

and other quote invite only attendees. This in a case where no one has been charged with anything. Haraldo and his squadron of producers with no due process to the family give us a final verdict. This is where the John Bene Ramsey case is really being decided, not in a court of law, but on TV in the so-called news in the court of public opinion. And by the time this spectacle airs, that court has all but made up its mind. The question is not how the Ramsey's

became suspects, the question is how millions of people became dead certain they were guilty. I'm Megan Kelly and this is MK confidential. This started out as a simple but tragic murder of a child beauty queen, but then questions arose, curiosity arose, and suddenly the media descended on Boulder. We are told now that as many as 300 media representatives may be here right now following the story.

To understand how it comes to a mock trial on daytime TV, we must look at the exact moment this story lands. It is the dead stretch between Christmas and New Year's in 1996. The news is quiet as a church mouse. The cable channels are young and hungry. The 24 hour cycle is still figuring out how to fill a week when nothing is happening. And into that massive silence drops a story that has everything. Cops and kidnappers, a beautiful little girl, a bizarre ransom note, a black body bag

child beauty pageants. It is Christmas all over again for lovers of murder mystery,

“beach reads, and ratings. Jombine's murder arrives barely a year after the OJ Simpson trial”

into an America that just spent months litigating that murder from its couch and is ready to do it all over again. The shadow of OJ falls on the investigators too. Boulder PD Detective Steve Thomas followed the OJ Simpson trial and remembered how Simpson's attorneys ripped apart the LAPD's case by attacking their work. He watched the Simpson case collapse under its own mistakes and feared the same thing might happen in the Ramsey case. He wanted to be careful not to be the next office

earned on live television. Here is the strange part. The Ramsey's are not celebrities. John runs a very successful company but no one outside bolder knows their names. There is no

“famous face, no star power, nothing that should turn one local homicide into a national obsession.”

What there is instead is timing and a little girl who photographs like a movie star. Most murdered children leave behind a snapshot or two. This one left behind hours of tape, patchens, parades, recitals, home video, a short life spent performing for a camera. Jombine over here. So when the networks need pictures and videos to fill those empty holiday

hours, the supply never runs out. And the same few seconds of a small girl in pageant makeup

run again and again and again. That's 24 hours around the clock, coast to coast we never close open seven days a week. On the second of January 1997, a Denver station airs

“pageant video of Jombine and the networks run it within the hour. There she is at a pageant”

weeks before her death. There she is in a spangled showgirl style costume six years old understage lights with her hair bleached and her lips painted to a country that has never heard of boulder. These videos become Jombine Ramsey. Not a precious kindergarten or who likes to jump in the leaf piles, but an image of big hair, makeup, and that practiced little wave. In the world the Ramsey's came from the Georgia Pagent Circuit, none of this is unusual.

In some parts of the south dressing a daughter up and putting her on stage is just a Saturday. Patsy had been miswestered Virginia herself, but to the rest of America, the sequins, the mascara, the hairspray, come across as something eerie and disturbing. Major publications start describing Jombine as moving on stage in a way that's adult, seductive, precocious, and wrong. In the Pagent world it is just choreography

that a coach taught a child. No one bats an eye, but on national news broadcasts stripped of that context, Jombine's performances read as evidence of something far more sinister inside that home. While the country stares at the Pagent videos the case is leaking. Inside the boulder PD detectives are growing certain the family is the answer and information to that end keeps surfacing in the newspapers. A reporter at the Rocky Mountain News Charlie Brennan

becomes a regular destination for material coming out of the investigation, and some of the leaks are not accidental at all. Part of it is a police strategy to apply pressure through the press

in the hope that a guilty parent cornered in public will finally crack, sweat out John and

Patsy, but it doesn't start that way for the Ramses. On New Year's Day 1997, six days after their daughter is found dead, and before they have sat for a single formal police interview, John and Patsy go on CNN, Patsy's voice cracks. "There is a killer on the list. I don't know who it is. I don't know if it's a he or a she. But if I were a resident of boulder, I will tell my friends to keep your babies close to you.

There's that one out there." Keep your babies close. From a grieving mother, it is a warning to a lot of the country it sounds like something else. A woman talking to the media

the Ramses first CNN interview, the mayor of boulder steps up to a microphone. People in boulder

“have no need to fear that there is someone wandering the streets of boulder has been portrayed”

by some people, particularly in talk radio, looking for young children to attack. Boulder is safe.

It's always been a safe community. It continues to be a safe community. The city says in effect,

there is no stranger out there, which leaves the public only one place to look back inside that house. A friend of patsies, a photographer named Judith Phillips, who had shot the family's portraits, goes to the mayor's office in person to ask for protection for the Ramses. She is told plainly, there is no murderer out there. Across town, a mother whose little girl heard patsies warning on television cannot get her child to sleep in her own room for months. And around the Ramses,

something stranger is happening. Their circle goes quiet. Friends start getting calls from inside that circle, with the same instruction, do not talk to reporters, do not talk to the police, most of them comply. The photographer who went to the mayor does not. Judith Phillips opens her door to reporters, and she sits down with detectives twice. And for that, she is cut off, dropped by the people she thought were family. Told she has betrayed them, and every silence the family leaves,

the tabloids are happy to fill. The leaks are not always true, and the most damaging ones are

the simplest. In March of 1997, Charlie Brennan's paper runs a story sourced to police saying, there were no footprints in the snow around the Ramses home the morning after John Benese murder. If no one left footprints the reasoning goes, then no intruder came or went, and the family must have done it. It travels everywhere at light speed, it sounds airtight. Here is what does not spread quickly with that story. The sergeant, who walked the property that freezing morning, noted a

light dusting of snow on the grass, but the sidewalks on the driveway where a person would actually walk or dry, bare concrete. There was nothing there to hold a footprint in the first place. One source, one phrase, and a false fact that outlives the correction by decades. Then there is the plane. In the days after the family flies to their former home, Georgia, to bury their daughter, a story takes hold, that John Ramsey, cold and composed, piloted his own plane

to the funeral. Here's how Paula Woodward and investigative reporter out of Colorado describes the shock of this story to Netflix. I remember saying to my husband, what kind of person is he? How could he do this when he's got to be so distraught over the terrible way his

“daughter died and the fact that she was murdered? How could he fly his plane to Atlanta?”

The tricky part here, a piece of it, is true. John Ramsey is a licensed pilot. The family does own a small private plane, a twin engine, kept at an airport outside Boulder. This is the plane they had planned to take on their second Christmas trip to Michigan, so the detail feels plausible. But it's not true. John Ramsey did not fly to his daughter's funeral. He later said he was too shaken to even consider it. His company, Lockheed Martin, loaned the family a corporate jet

and its own two pilots for the trip to Georgia. The story painted an image of a father

calmly flying himself across the country to bury his little girl, but it never happened.

Years later, Brendan himself would look back on the story. When I reported that John Ramsey had piloted his own plane back to Atlanta for the funeral, that was inaccurate. It came from a source that I thoroughly trusted and had given me other solid information. That information was wrong. My source was wrong in that case, and that was in the stake. But the picture sticks, because it fits the story the public has already been sold.

And then the media seizes on the handwriting. Report after report tells the country, Patsy Ramsey wrote the ransom note that the experts have tied her hand to that page.

“Sources say the ransom note written by the alleged kidnapper is considered a key piece of evidence.”

Handwriting experts have ruled out John Ramsey and others close to the family. They have not excluded Patsy Ramsey who has submitted several samples. The reality, however, is not quite so clean.

Chet Yubowski, who studies it for the better part of a year, and puts Patsy Ramsey through

“five separate handwriting tests. And his finding is not the one the leaks describe.”

He can find no evidence Patsy disguised her writing. He sees some shared letter formations and weighed against the number and consistency of the differences. He writes that he is unable to identify Patsy Ramsey as the author of that ransom note. "Could not be ruled out," and "is as far as anyone will responsibly go?" But in the papers, magazines and on TV, it becomes the handwriting matches.

One man does go further. A vassar college professor named Donald Foster, who analyzes text for a living, publicly announces that Patsy is the author.

What the audience never hears is that this same professor had earlier written Patsy E. private letter

declaring her innocent, or that he had once used his methods to name an anonymous internet commenter as the killer. A person who turned out to be a middle-aged housewife in North Carolina with zero connection to this case. His credibility does not survive, even mild scrutiny, yet the headline lives on. Then the pageant footage and the rumors braid together into something earlier. That John Bene had been sexually abused, and that the answer lay somewhere inside her own family.

Investigators lean into it. Twice, police bring in a bolder raised former Miss America, Marilyn Van Durber, a woman who had spent years telling the world that a polished,

“admired wealthy family can hide a monstrous secret, because hers had. Her own story is real,”

and it is harrowing. You don't talk about it in families. Siblings don't talk to siblings. No,

John Bene had tape over her mouth. That is the strongest message we have. You will never speak of it.

Bringing Marilyn into the Ramsey investigation is not evidence. It is insinuation by resemblance. And on the actual evidence that insinuation collapses, John Bene's pediatrician and the doctors who reviewed her history, none of them. Find physical or historical proof that this child had been abused before the night she died. The damage from the abuse story is hard to measure. It recasts a murdered six-year-old as a victim

of her own family on the strength of costumes and speculation, and that colors everything the

“public sees. The accusation runs at the top of the hour. The correction when it comes at all”

is aligned buried at the bottom of a story, no one reads to the end. The Ramsey's refused to let this story be told without them. They fight back in public on camera. Through 1997 and the years that follow, they give interviews. They sit for documentaries. They hire a Washington Media Consultant to manage the press. And in the spring of 1997, about four months after the murder, John and Patsy

finally sit for formal police interviews. Then they walk straight out to a bank of microphones

to announce that they've done so. Patsy looks into the cameras. I'm appalled that anyone would think that John or I would be involved in such a hideous crime, but let me assure you that I did not kill Zombine. I did not have anything to do with it. I loved that child with my whole of my heart and soul. But every public appearance becomes a new piece of evidence in a trial no one declared. America does not watch to be reassured. It watches to judge. The tone, the tears, the pauses.

And CNN viewers freeze the moment a reporter asks whether the Ramsey's are certain their daughter was taken by an outsider. And Patsy shakes her head no. While John says yes, every frame is parsed, every silence is read. Art family is a loving family. It's a gentle family. A father insists unprompted that his family is gentle and analysts spend years asking why he needed to say that at all. This is what the media

coverage runs on now, not new evidence, but the same handful of clips replayed, re-read until a shaken head, a glance, or an unlucky phrase, "artens into proof of guilt." By November of 1997,

point to one or both of her parents. This verdict is built almost entirely on 11 months worth

of leaked and distorted information, not on anything a court of law would ever admit. Which is how the country arrives. That November, at a talk show studio and mock jury. Nearly 30 years later, the man who built that spectacle, or Aldo Rivera, would apologize to John Ramsey in a conversation on News Nation. I deeply apologize to you for what you and your family have

“suffered when I say I am sorry. I don't apologize for my reporting. I believe that at least half”

the reporters and half the nation believe that the shadow of suspicion, I have the bolder police department for those who have retired because of this case, believe it. But I don't know what happened.

I just want you to know that I lament contributing to the hurt that you have endured. No one

deserves to go through what you went through. John Ramsey. Off camera, the investigation is breaking apart. The bolder PD and the district attorney are barely speaking, and each side shapes the story its own way for reporters. One of the officers who worked the case, former bolder PD officer Gretchen Smith, later described the internal rot to a CBS documentary team. The John Beney case, destroyed morale completely. There was no morale. The district attorney's office and some of

administration did not want to hear that an affluent member of the community was guilty of a crime like this. They didn't want to hear that. I don't think they wanted to solve this crime. And if they

“had to go down a different path that might not have been the truth, I think they were willing to”

do that. Another friend of the Ramsey's breaks the silence in their social circle. Fleet White, one of the Ramsey's closest friends, was Beside John when the body was found. Fleet would later describe how his family's life changed after the murder. On Christmas day, 1996, the John and Patsy Ramsey and their children broken John Beney were dinner guests at our home. The next day, we were present at the Ramsey home,

when John Beney's body was found. Personna and our children instantly became witnesses in the Boulder Police Investigation of John Beney's death. In August of 1998, Fleet and his wife Priscilla criticized the investigation in an open letter to the people of Colorado. Here's part of it, quote. After John Beney Ramsey was killed in Boulder nearly 20 months ago, her parents immediately hired prominent criminal defense attorneys with close,

professional, political, and personal ties to prosecutors, the Denver and Boulder Legal and Traditional Communities, state legislators, and high-raking members of the Colorado Government including Governor Roy Romer. The investigation of her death has since been characterized by confusion and delays. The District Attorney and the Ramsey attorneys have simultaneously rebuked the police for focusing their investigation on the Ramsey's when in fact police were

simply following evidence. During the course of the investigation, the District Attorney has used inexplicable methods including the recruitment of magazine writers and tabloids to leak information, concerning the case and to needle witnesses, suspects, and police detectives. He has provided evidence to Ramsey defense attorneys at their request, but denied reasonable requests by witnesses

“for their own statements to police. He has thoroughly alienated police detectives and key witnesses,”

whose cooperation is vital to the investigation and prosecution. His public statements regarding the investigation have been erratic, evasive, and misleading. We must be mindful, however,

of the first cause of the investigation's failure. The refusal of John and Patsy Ramsey

to cooperate fully and genuinely with those officially charged with the responsibility of investigating the death of their daughter, John Bene, and quote. The people who knew the Ramsey's best are splitting up into camps. On the record, off the record, and America gobbles up every word of both. We, after week, the supermarket racks turn John Bene into a symbol and the Ramsey's indie characters, the cold father, the ambitious mother, the perfect family with something rotten

underneath. Rumor becomes packaging, speculation becomes a headline. And by the time anyone asks, what has actually been proven, millions of people have already accepted the accusation as fact. And here is the piece of evidence that should have stopped all of this.

It's not John's, it's not Patsy's not Berks. It belongs to a stranger, left physically on the murder

“child. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation confirms it in a lab report, within about three weeks”

of the killing in January 1997, the single strongest piece of evidence pointing away from the Ramsey family. There is no press conference for this revelation. No leaks about the unidentified male DNA. Older police sit on the finding. Roughly six months go by before the district attorney's office is even told what the lab found. The public waits far longer. The fact that could have broken the case was filed in a drawer until 2003, when the DNA is uncovered and given to the FBI for testing,

it does not match anyone in the FBI's criminal database and to this day remains a mystery. In 2016, nearly 20 years after the murder, the media machine turns on John and Patsy's

“surviving child, Berk. Berk was nine years old when his sister was killed.”

The Ramsey say he was asleep the entire night just down the hall. CBS airs a prime time special built around the theory that Berk killed his sister with paid experts and a staged reenactment. Berk Ramsey sues the network. While the Boulder Daily Camer reports the brother of John Manay Ramsey has reached a settlement with CBS. Berk Ramsey sued CBS after a television series. The network aired suggested he killed his six-year-old sister in Boulder. No court

ever finds that Berk did anything. The detectives and the prosecutors who actually worked this case

never charged Berk, but the theory is now in prime time, 20 years later. In this story,

“no one's ever really cleared. They're only re-accused on a later night for a new audience.”

This is the cost of a trial by television by the news media. The footprints that were never there, the planning ever flew the handwriting that never matched the alleged history of abuse that was never proven. Each one is corrected quietly, if at all, and long after the smear has done its dirty work. Underneath the entire narrative lies the DNA of a man, no one can name. That DNA sits in a drawer because it does not fit the story the country has already chosen to believe

the one it's been led to. Before a single charge is ever filed, in the only court that seems to matter, the Ramses have long ago and found guilty. But while the whole country is staring inside that house, one veteran detective is about to walk into this case, all but certain the parents did it and walk out believing the exact opposite. Tomorrow we'll hear his side of the story and the compelling picture he paints on MK confidential. November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas, the day

JFK is assassinated. It had rained overnight, but by mid-morning the sky is clear and the day is warm. Look at the photographs of the crowd waiting for the president's motorcade and you will see it. No raincoats, no galoshes, not a single open umbrella because it is a beautiful day. Except that is, or one man. In all of Delhi Plaza, in all of Dallas, there is exactly one man standing under an open black umbrella. And he is standing on the grass at the precise spot where

seconds later President Kennedy's body will jolt forward and back as the bullets find him. For years that man is a gift to conspiracy theorists, investigators call him the umbrella man. One theory holds that the umbrella itself is a weapon that its shaft conceals a dart gun fired into JFK's throat. Some come to believe the umbrella man is the real assassin because what possible innocent reason could a man have to stand under an umbrella on a cloudless day

exactly where all the shots killed President John F. Kennedy. And then in 1978, someone finally

just asks him. The umbrella man comes forward and testifies before Congress with his umbrella. And his explanation is so strange, so wacky, it can only be true. The umbrella was a protest, not against JFK, but against his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, and his father's appeasement of Hitler and the Nazis in the lead up to World War II.

being in came back with got to be a symbol with the some matter with the British people by association that got transferred to the Kennedy family. The Black umbrella is a visual insult a reference to the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who carried one everywhere.

That's the secret. A grieving nation's darkest riddle, and the answer is a man making an obscure

political protest with Anne umbrella. The investigator, Josiah Thompson, who chased that mystery for

“years through one lesson from it. If you have any fact, would you think is really sinister?”

Is really, obviously, a fact which can only point to some sinister underpinnings, hey, forget it, man, because you can never on your own, think up all the non-synasturically valid explanations for that fact. A cautionary tale. That is the warning of the umbrella, man. The strangest fact, in a case, is not always what it seems. And the murder of John Vene Ramsey,

is full of strange facts. A ransom note, on the family's own paper, a mother who

talks to the cameras before the police, a father, composed when he should be falling apart. In the spring of 1997, one man walks into this case and refuses to trust his eyes.

“He wants the evidence and only the evidence to tell the story. His name is loosemit.”

I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK confidential. Lusmit is not a defense lawyer. He is not a Ramsey friend. He is a career homicide detective out of Colorado Springs. More than 200 murders worked, a clearance rate nearly 90%. Lus is a deeply religious and methodical man who may call the Sherlock of the Rockies. His reputation is built on cases like Heather Dawn Church, a 13-year-old girl who vanished from

her home in 1991. The case sat cold for years, until Smith went back through the file and lifted a single fingerprint off a window screen that everyone before him had missed.

“That print put her killer away. Lus is a finder of things other people failed to see.”

In March of 1997, three months after John Bonay's murder, Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter brings Smith onto the John Bonay Ramsey Task Force. The case is already going sideways, and the police and prosecutors are at each other's throats. Lusmit had retired just the previous year to spend time with his wife Barb, who was battling cancer. Now he's back on the force, and in a different city away from his family,

and investigating another family affected by cancer. Smith starts on the Ramsey case exactly where the police did with the parents. He knows the stats. He knows a child found dead inside a home usually means someone who lived there is responsible. He arrives expecting to help

prove that the family did it. Then Smith sits down with the file, and he works the way he always

works by a principal he learned decades before. The transfer theory. Whenever a person commits a crime, they leave something of themselves at the scene, and carry something from the scene away with them. Find what was brought in, and what was taken out, and the evidence will tell you who was there. So Lusmit stops asking who had a motive, and instead asks a colder question. What does the physical evidence on its own actually say? And the longer he looks, the more he believes

a new story. It starts in the basement with a window. Low in the basement wall, on the south side of the Ramsey house, there is a window found wide open on the morning of December 26th. The crime lab photographs it at way hours before John Ramsey ever finds John Bene's body. Beneath it, inside, on the white painted wall, a black scuff mark. And on the floor directly below, a hard-sided Samsonite suitcase stood upright on its end, in a spot where no one in the family says it belongs.

Inside, the suitcase, a pink duvet, a Barbie doll, and one of John Bene's doctor's coups. The bolder detectives tell Smit that the window is nothing. No one could have come through there,

And in the crime lab photos from that morning, he finds leaves and vegetation disturbed underneath it, and dirt brushed clean off the frame of the open window. To all appearances, it looks like someone has passed through there or at least has tried. Then Lou does the thing that becomes his signature. A retired detective in his '60s, lowers himself into that window well, and squeezes through that basement window on video to prove

“a grown man can do it. Now this is where I think the killer actually got in at some point.”

The great has to be picked up and put down. John Ramsey had broken that window himself the summer before when he was locked out of the house, and he believed it had been fixed. To Smit, the open pain is the point of entry. The scuff on the wall is where a body scraped through, and the suitcase is not clutter, it is a step, something the killer stood on to climb back out. Lou comes to believe the intruder may have meant to carry John Beney out of the house inside

that suitcase, and found it too big to force up through the window. Near her body in the basement, there is white foam packing debris and brown leaves, the same material that lines the bottom of that window well. Smit believes the killer brought that into the house and left behind two

“traces, a partial boot print from a brand No Ramsey owns, and an unidentified pom-print on the door”

of the little room where John Beney was found. But Lou keeps building. He looks at the house itself.

John Beney's bedroom is on the second floor, her parents sleep one flight up in a converted

attic suite at the very top of the house. Investigators run sound tests and find that a voice in John Beney's room is barely audible from the master bedroom. Smit looks around the home and things, this is a big chopped up four-level house in a college neighborhood with foot traffic at all hours and an alarm system the family had switched off months before. This is not a sealed fortress, it is a place a patient stranger could move through in the dark for hours, unseen, and unheard.

He studies how John Beney was bound, a garot built from white cord and the broken handle of one of Patsy's paint brushes tied with slip knots that only tighten as the victim pulls against them. To smit that is not the panicked improvisation of a parent, covering up an accident, it is the equipment it is intent and the Ramsey's own none of the raw materials, no parachute cord, no roll of duct tape, police searched the house, the cars the office, even the airplane

hanger and found none of it. Whoever built that garot and taped the little girl's mouth shut, he brought his tools in and carried most of them back out. Then there are the marks.

Lou Smith is the first person on the case to take them seriously. On John Beney's body there are

two sets of small red marks, a pair on her back and a pair on the right side of her face. Smith measures the gap and matches it to the twin metal contacts of a specific weapon,

“an air taser, a stun gun. What I like to show you is, but I think is one of the most”

important clues that will be hidden by the guilt. Stun gun. There's marks on John Beney. Those are marks on her back. Those are marks on her face. And there are the same distance of heart, slightly rectangular and shake. Something made those marks. In Smith's reconstruction of John Beney's murder, the stun gun is used twice. Once upstairs, pressed to the child's jaw and throat while she sleeps, enough to stun her

silent so she can be carried down without a sound. And once more in the basement on her back as she struggles. A forensic pathologist reviews the comparison and calls the stun gun evidence compelling. Unless some other evidence is presented to me the most likely explanation for those injuries that they were caused by a stun gun. That hands blew the answer to a detail

that never fit any other version of the night. The scream. A neighbor, Melody Stanton,

asleep across the street from the Ramsey's with her window open, 150 feet away, reports hearing a child scream around 2am that morning. A scream the Ramsey family inside the house

Beneath all of it beneath the broken window and the stuffed suitcase and the pairs of red marks

“sits the evidence loosemit calls the key to this entire case and that is the DNA.”

The Colorado lab finds a small partial profile of mail DNA drawn from a blood stain in Japanese underwear. It belongs to no one in the family nor to any suspect ever tested. This sample however is too small and too degraded for the lab to identify the fluid or the tissue behind it. Whether the DNA came from spit or sweat or shed skin, no one has ever been able to say. It is mail. It is not from the Ramsey family. And pass that a blank. During the autopsy,

a Boulder PD detective runs an ultraviolet light over the body and thinks he sees traces of semen. But it turns out to be a smear of blood. No semen is ever found on jambine. The autopsy indicates that the sexual assault is consistent with penetration by a finger or an object.

“Broken blood vessels in jambine's vagina show she was penetrated that night.”

And a microscopic flick of wood is found inside of her. Most likely from the splintured paint brush used to build the garot. The unknown mail DNA is not only found on jambine's underwear, the same profile is found as touch DNA from skin cells inside the waistband of her long johns. To a detective raised on the idea that every killer leaves a piece of himself behind, one stray speck might be a fluke. But the same strangers DNA twice on a murdered child is a

person who was there. Smith argues one more point. And it is the shaky as part of his case. That a predator who would do this would not do it once. That somewhere there is a pattern, other home invasions, other children, and that boulder is not the safe sealed community. It's officials keep insisting it is. And there is one case that haunts that argument more than any other. It happens in September of 1997, nine months after jambine is killed,

less than two miles from the Ramsey home. Late one night a masked man breaks into a house and sexually assaults a 12-year-old girl in her own bed. He has slipped past the alarm system and passed the family dog and by the family's account he did not force his way in that night at all. He appears to have gotten inside earlier while the house was empty and then hidden there, waiting until the family came home locked the doors and fell asleep. He has stopped only when the girl's

mother comes down the hall after hearing whispers in the dark. He escapes out the bedroom window

and vanishes into the night. He is never caught. That 12-year-old girl was a student at the very

same local dance studio as jambine. Two little girls from one small dance school, two miles apart. One strangled inner basement on Christmas night, the other nine months later, attacked in her own bed by a masked man who had hidden inside her home and then vanished back into the neighborhood. To John Ramsey, and to the detectives who came to believe him, that is not a coincidence, it's a pattern, possibly the very same man.

Lou never stops making the argument. There is evidence of an intruder. I say this over and over and over again. Nobody wants to listen and has a result of that. There's a very good chance that tragedy could again strike this family. That is the case for the intruder as Lou Smith built it. Now here is what stands against it. Start with the window and the spider web. To reach that basement window and intruder first has to lift the metal grate over the outside well.

And a spider web runs across that grate. It's strands anchored from the metal down to the

“bricks of the wall or at least that's how it appears. The original web is never photographed and”

whether it connects the grate itself to the house is a point of contention. The officers who inspect it find the web hole. That spells trouble for the intruder theory. If the spider web is intact and connects the metal to the house, it suggests the grate above the window well

was never lifted at all. It is the single hardest fact against Lou Smith's window theory.

got in at some point and there is a gas grill here and then there's a soft door to the house.

“Right behind this gas grill is a great and you put it straight up. You're looking straight down”

into the window. Restri windows there. The Sarah one was the one that was open and you're going to see foliage that green foliage under the leading edge and that's great. Don't grow that way. The grate has to be picked up and put down. Smith says the grate is not bolted down and he is sure that a patient hand can ease it up and set it back without snapping a strand. During one walk through of the house, Smith eases the grate open without breaking a fresh web that is grown between

the grate and the house. Even detective Steve Thomas notes that Smith was able to navigate the grate without breaking the web. While detectives who try lifting the grate break several

“web strands. So the web does not settle the question it only sharpens it. There's one more possible”

explanation for the web and industrious spider. Detective Michael Everett from Boulder PD consults two spider experts. Dr. Brent Opel of Virginia Tech and Dr. Robert Bennett of the British Columbia Ministry of Forests. Both identify the web as a funnel web, a kind of web that a spider spins and repairs, for as long as it's alive. The night John Bene died at the temperature in Boulder, dropped to around six degrees. By the next afternoon it was back up into the low 50s.

The open window faces south west into the afternoon sun. While the funnel weaver spider hybrnates through a Colorado winter, Bennett says the Ramsey window well had perfect conditions for a

“hybrnating spider to wake up and repair its web and respin it that day or the next.”

However, its unclear precisely what time of day officers first observed the fully intact spider web

and whether there would have been enough time for the spider to spin it fresh. Like all the other evidence in this case, even the spider web points two ways at once. Then we get to the stun gun. The cold case team in the 2016 CBS documentary tests this part of the theory by using a stun gun on a volunteer. The marks it leaves behind do not match those on John Beney. And the effect is the opposite of silence. Taser Taser. If this were done to this kid, you would have a screen from

this kid that goes through the entire building. Everybody in that house would have heard it. So the stun gun, like the window, stays contested. But the marks are still there on dead John Beney's skin and no version in which the parents did it as ever fully explained them. Then the DNA where the counter is technical and it is fair. This is a tiny amount of touch DNA and skilled scientists caution that traced DNA like this can travel. It could be

carried to the scene by a factory worker who handled the underwear or transferred from one service to another. It is not on its own a name. The DNA profile has been run against a great many people

over the years and it's never matched a single one of them. John Ramsey will spend the rest of his

life saying those three letters are the answer. That the identity of the man who killed his daughter is sitting in an evidence locker waiting for science to catch up to him. The police find no definitive connection between the 1997 home invasion and boulder and the murder of John Beney, no forensic thread that ties the same hand to both crimes. One boulder PD officer bluntly sums up the department's stance on the Ramsey murder. This was one of a kind blue never manages to prove the link.

Smith's intruder theory has two more potential holes and they are not small.

First it has to explain the ransom note. Three pages long written on a pad from inside the house

demanding a ransom that almost exactly matches John Ramsey's annual bonus. It has to explain why a stranger who broke into steel a child would then sit down in that dark house and compose three theatrical pages instead of simply carrying her out the door and it is not only the ransom

art kit in the basement. The pad, the pen, the paintbrush, the killer builds this crime in part

“out of the family's own belongings. A stranger organized enough to arrive with a stun gun,”

duct tape and cord who then fashions the murder weapon from a mother's paintbrush and writes his ransom demand on the household note pad is a genuinely odd figure. To the boulder detectives it is the strangest, the damnedest thing about the whole intruder theory and outsider who behaves at the decisive moment exactly like someone who already lives there. Blue has an answer. He believes the original plan of a kidnapping for ransom went wrong in the basement. In lose mine the murderer

answered the house through the open basement window while the family was out at Christmas dinner. He wrote the ransom note on the family note pad then hid inside the house. Once the family was asleep the killer crept into Japanese room and uses stun gun to incapacitate her. He then carried her down to the basement, fashioned a garot with patty's paintbrush handle and sexually assaulted

“Japanese with his fingers. I believe he brought her down to the father's deepest part of that basement”

and did very brutal things to her. Blue believes the killer used the garot both as a tool of erotic asphyxiation or strangulation fantasy and actual deadly strangulation. Blue believes the jambine came to at some point and started to fight back that the attacker then panicked and hit her over the head possibly with a flashlight or an aluminum baseball bat both found in the Ramsey house. The killer then believed the jambine was dead

and fled out the basement window. As for the oddly specific ransom amount, blue explains that

$118,000 would have yielded exactly 1 million Mexican pesos at that time. If the intruder were planning

to run to the border, 1 million pesos sounds like a nice round number to help with an escape.

“By 1998 the jambine Ramsey case is no longer just a murder investigation. It has devolved”

into two camps at war. The boulder PD believes the answer lies inside the Ramsey house. Blue Smith and the district attorney's office are convinced it came in from the outside. The police and prosecutors barely trust each other. Early on the two sides fought over how to handle jambine's body. The police wanted to hold it back from burial as leverage to force the parents into an interview and the DA's office shaming police for ransoming a dead child.

It is a small, ugly fight over a child's body. It is also the first crack and a divide

that will run through everything to come and swallow this entire case. And within a few weeks of each other, that war produces two major casualties, two detectives with opposite conclusions, both quitting the case in protest. In August of 1998 Steve Thomas, the lead detective who believes Patsy, killed jambine, resigns with a public letter blasting the DA for refusing to charge the Ramsey family. And then September of 1998, Blue Smith resigns for the exact opposite reason. He writes the

district attorney that he cannot in good conscience be part of the persecution of innocent people. Smith does not walk away from the case itself, however. He keeps working it for free for the rest of his life. I could solve it without the help of the police department, and I'm sure I'm not going to get that. But I know that God had a plan. And for I part of it, and I'm just going to continue to work in it. Blue Halls around his boxes of photographs and his slide deck of the window and the marks

and the DNA from meeting to meeting. Right up until his death in 2010, friends later say he took this case to his grave. Blue's adult children carry the torch forward and continue to investigate to this day. Back in 1998, the investigation stalled, because the people, the detective's most needed to talk to stopped talking. John and Patsy Ramsey on their lawyer's advice will not sit for open police interviews at this point. Friends who are around the house that Christmas,

they've loared up as well. A grand jury is the one tool that can break this wall. It can subpoena witnesses, forced testimony under oath, and demand evidence the police cannot otherwise get.

young son, Burke. In March of 1998, the Boulder PD formally asks District Attorney Alex Hunter to take this

“case to a grand jury, and the PD announces it in a press release, quote, "While there is still some”

investigation left to be done, both Chief Kobe and Commander Beckner believe the investigation has progressed to the point at which the authority of a grand jury is necessary in order to complete the investigation." For months, D.A. Hunter resists. In his meetings with the police, he calls a grand jury a political solution, not a way to solve the case. In public, his office calls the idea premature, but now the police are demanding it. In public, and Hunter is out of good options.

So, he gives in, and in September 1998, Alex Hunter convenes a grand jury. He brings in an outside specialist, former federal prosecutor Michael Caine to run it, and he hands the biggest question in the case, whether anyone can be charged in John Bene's death to a group of ordinary

“boulders citizens, sworn to lifelong secrecy. They hear from former FBI profiler John Douglas,”

whom the Ramses hired to investigate this case, who believes that an intruder killed John Bene. I've sat down across a table from some of the country's greatest liars in the world, really, and I consensit, and things just did not fit the crime scene data just doesn't fit. When I'm looking at this man, Mr. Ramsay, if you did it, you are one hell of a wire. You are one hell of a wire. If you did it, and you're putting on a great production here, but I just don't believe

and my heart, he did this and not just in my heart from what, from the analysis of the, of the scene. They hear from loose met, too. Smith brings the grand jury the case of his life, more than 600 slides it built one photograph at a time, the open window, the disturbed great, the suitcase, the marks on the child's skin, the DNA, all of it, and at the end of it,

the question that has hung over the Ramsay family for two years is finally going to get an answer.

“Will John and Patsy be charged with the murder of their daughter or not?”

That grand jury will sift through evidence for more than a year, but it turns out that what the grand jury decides and what the public is told are too wild but you different things. Will open that door, and everything behind it, tomorrow on MK confidential. It is October 13, 1999, a lovely fall Wednesday in Boulder, Colorado. 13 months of testimony in the grand jury proceeding looking into the murder of John Bene Ramsey,

more than 30,000 pieces of evidence, dozens of witnesses, all of which culminates in one man, walking up to a bank of microphones. District Attorney Alex Hunter steps up onto the outdoor platform, reporters are huddled and the cameras are already rolling. Alex Hunter has a single page of paper in hand. The grand jurors have done their work extraordinarily well,

bringing to bear all of their legal powers, life experiences, and trudeness. Yet I must report to you that I and my prosecution task force believe we do not have sufficient evidence to warrant the filing of charges against anyone who has been investigated at this time. Thank you very much. And that's it. No charges, no indictment, no arrest. The reporters filed their stories that

night with a single headline, the grand jury found nothing. Except the grand jury did not find nothing. What no one in that room knows is that those grand jurors voted to indict John Ann Patsy Ramsey. They signed true bills, the formal charges a grand jury returns when it believes there is enough evidence to proceed.

Not for murder, but for child abuse resulting in death and for accessory to first

to remurter for helping to hide, whoever killed John Bene. Alex Hunter declined to sign and filed those true bills. How it works as a grand jury indicts on probable cause, the lowest bar in the law,

The highest bar there is. Hunter decided he could not clear that distance. So he sealed the true bills away, walked to the microphone, and told the world he had nothing.

“The district attorney will keep that secret for 14 years. The case will outlast Alex Hunter.”

It will outlast the detectives who fought over it. It will even outlast one of the two parents

living under its shadow. But this case was never really closed. It was only sealed.

I'm Megan Kelly and this is MK confidential with our final episode in the investigation into the death of John Bene Ramsey. For the Ramsey's Alex Hunter's decision not to press charges, does not bring freedom. It's a strange kind of life sentence. They're never arrested, never tried, never convicted. They live as prime suspects. They walk through airports, grocery stores, church parking lots,

carrying an accusation, no jury will ever test, and no court can lift. The accusation costs them more than their peace. John Ramsey,

“once ran a billion dollar company. But as John himself told Barbara Walters,”

"This case has ruined the family financially."

Before John Bene's death, you were reportedly worth millions of dollars. But that money seems to have gone. I was told by a very experienced FBI person that most victims of violent crime end up broke. It's very expensive to deal with the justice system. You make bad decisions. You sell your home. You move. You quit your job. You changed your job.

In defending themselves, the Ramsey's enlist a small army of lawyers, investigators, publicists, and writing experts, and a former FBI profiler. A fortune once estimated north of $7 million, shrinks toward one.

“They sell the house on 15th Street. The house where John Bene was murdered.”

And never spend another night in it, after the Christmas of 1996.

They're not spending this money to win a case. They are spending it to prove a negative that they did not murder their own child. While the family fights, the accusation in public, detective Lu Smith, works the case in private, chasing his intruder theory. The lone man, he is certain, is out there somewhere. And Lu is not the only one chasing the lone wolves. Every few years, new name's surface.

The possible break everyone's been waiting for. In March of 1997, Boulder Police get a call from the state of North Carolina about a drifter named John Brewer, Eustice. He's charged with the rape and kidnapped of a two-year-old girl in Charlotte. He pride open abasement apartments window screen, snatched the child from a bedroom, and took her out the window. Eustice is also the suspect in the murders of three other young girls

across the country. When police go into Eustice's house, there's a shrine to John Bene. So Boulder detectives travel halfway across the country to Charlotte and review the evidence themselves. Could Eustice have been in Colorado in December? Unfortunately, Eustice has a rock-solid alibi for that night. He worked in a factory, and he had clocked in, covering the time period in which John Bene had died.

There is Gary Aliva, a convicted pedophile who the morning after John Bene's murder calls an old high school friend, sobbing into the phone, saying, "I just heard a little girl." He's written a series of letters, including ones where he has admitted taking the life of John Bene Ramsey. He's in custody right now, but he sent these letters and the question is, is this for real? In December of 2000, police arrest Gary on drug charges,

and he's found carrying a photograph of John Bene, a stun gun, and a poem he has written to her. Living on the streets, Gary often visited a local church, which fed homeless people, and has located less than 10 houses away from the Ramsey home. Police run his DNA against the unknown male fluids on John Bene's body, and on her clothes, and no match. There is Randy Simons, the photographer who took John Bene's pageant portraits.

Shortly after John Bene's death, multiple beauty pageant mothers report to police that Randy called them up hysterical saying, "I did not kill John Bene, I did not kill John Bene." No one was saying he did. A year later, Randy was walking on the street naked, and the police were called. During his arrest, he blurt's out to police unprompted. I did not kill John Bene.

area man who works near the Ramsey home, and has a history of violence and sexual abuse.

“Just weeks after John Bene's killing, Helgoth turns up dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

Right as word spreads, that the DNA is closing in on a suspect. Among his possessions, a stungun, and a pair of high-tech boots. The same brand as a print left on the concrete, near where John Bene was found. But his DNA, too, does not match. Behind those four names is a parade of thousands more. Boulder PD follow up on more than 21,000 tips, letters, emails, traveling across 19 states,

talking to more than 1,000 people, possibly connected to this crime. And then in the summer of 2006, comes the biggest thunderbolt of them all. It does not come from Boulder, or the old list of suspects, it comes from the other side of the

“world, 80,500 miles away, Thailand. It comes to Boulder through an inbox. Starting in 2002,”

a stranger calling himself "Daxis" begins emailing University of Colorado Professor Michael Tracy. Tracy has been years making documentaries about John Bene's murder, and now this stranger, "Daxis" wants to talk. "Daxis" begins to inundate the Colorado Professor with emails,

hundreds of them. At first, the emails read like the outpourings of an obsessive

John Bene fan. But over the months that followed they curdled into something far more revolting. Slowly, "Daxis" starts to say that he killed John Bene. In one email he writes, "Are you asking me why I killed John Bene? I don't see it that way. Her and I were engaging in a romantic and very sexual interaction. It went bad, and it was my fault." "Daxis" gives specifics on the Ramsey staircase, describes the basement, the blanket,

and the exact room where John Bene was killed. He messages about a check stub for 118,000 he saw on John Ramsey's desk. "Daxis" claims to be "under federal investigation" for, quote,

"child of murder and child molestation" in four states. Michael Tracy is skeptical. By this

point, so much information has been casually released by the police is out in new specials and magazines or just leaked onto the internet, and people confessed to notorious crimes all the time for attention. So the Colorado Professor tests, "Daxis." "I said, "How am I, don't know you just pull this from the internet?" "Feeding me what is out there already." And he said, "Ask John Ramsey. What John Bene's nickname

“was for Nedra, a grandmother, and it will be this." So I emailed John. What was the nickname?”

"It comes back." "Neddy." It was right. It was correct. Because John and search, there was no word that that nickname was known in the public domain. Michael discusses "Daxis" with bold and detective Lu Smith as well. "I would share some of the emails with Lu Smith." Now, I said a lot, you know, I've got this from this guy. I have no idea what this guy is. Where he is? He could be next door? I have no idea. And I would say to Lu, just tell me he's in

not case. And we can end it. I'll lose it. Can no can do Michael? Go keep on it." The emails with "Daxis" go on for four years. He's a ghost. His emails untraceable. During all of this, the woman at the center of this case is running out of time. Patsy Ramsey has been fighting Ovarian cancer since 1993. It went into remission in 1995, then came back in 2002. And this time the cancer is resistant to treatment and slowly overwhelms

Patsy. In 2006, it reaches her brain. The matter is hopeless. So John makes a tough decision. At the doctor's urging, he stops Patsy's treatment, but cannot bring himself to tell her. The cancer migrated to her brain so she was not her normal self. So she didn't know that we'd given up. She would ask, "When's my next treatment?" And I knew in my heart there was no next treatment. That was hard. This is exactly when Daxis begins asking to speak to Patsy.

He starts asking Michael Traci to connect him with Patsy, so he can apologize for killing her daughter. The Colorado Professor Stalls and Stalls, and then the Dane of another incoming Daxis email turns this into something else entirely. Traci reads Daxis' message.

Traci takes that as a threat. He takes everything he has to the new Boulder District Attorney, Mary Lacey,

and the investigation goes wide. Her office, Homeland Security, ICE, every set of eyes they have. Then Daxis raises the stakes even further. He asks Traci, "Do you want to hear my voice?" Traci says, "Sure."

“11 hours. That's how much tape Michael Traci records of Daxis over the calls that follow.”

And Michael's not the only one listening. By now various intelligence agencies are on the line, too. On these tapes, Daxis finally tells the story of what he says he did to John Beney. Sort of. He dances around the story, but there is one word he will not say.

What point do you decide you have to tell me that you killed him? I never have something I have.

But you say it's definitely implied, isn't it? I know what I can't say that. I can't say that word, killed. He won't say "kill" because in his mind, this is not a murder. What Daxis describes in a soft, almost tender voice is a love story. He recasts the killing of a six-year-old little girl

“as some private, intimate ritual, an erotic game with what he insists on calling a special necklace.”

A game of pressure and release of taking John Beney to the edge of consciousness and back, he savers the telling of it. I just kind of knelt down me forever and I said, "John Beney, I want to make

a nether necklace for you and it had some interesting knots in it." So I slowly apply the

pressure on her neck with that thick necklace. I don't even say yes, we heart go into the sweet dream. At that point, her little body started to involve and twitch a little bit. And then in his telling, the game goes too far. I was just in the droves of ecstasy with her. And then all of a sudden my gaze just was suddenly broken and I was just like, "Oh my God."

“He's on Beney, he's okay. And I knew she wasn't okay because I knew that she was a breathing”

and I just went terrified. But oh God, I'm going to have to finish this. I know what I'm going to have to do because I can't take the chance that she could still be alive. What he describes next is a man making sure, cold, deliberate steps to guarantee a little girl could not still be alive. He tells it like a man who is still in love with the memory of it. I don't know if I got her to everything now, but so enough I would have shown him behind,

but I had to go back to that window. That's where I came in. That's where I have to go out. I whiffed the great. I got out of the great and I was just like, "Oh God, I left my little girl in that horrible fate." She's in that little prime, you were in worse than that she's dead. Go ahead, what have I had there on? So Boulder has a man confessing in detail to the murder that has haunted this town for a decade. There is just one problem. Nobody has any idea

who he is or even what continent he's on nor whether one word of this is true and Daxis knows it. Hi, Interpol, because nightmare because I know after EVA, who law enforcement will run into the biggest brick wall when they try to trace this phone number, it leads to no body. I am not a fool. So how do you catch a man who is nowhere? Well, the DA's office thinks they have found one weakness

his obsession. In all those emails, all those calls, Daxis is desperate to talk to Patsy. So the investigators make a cold calculation. Let's milk that. John and Patsy agree to a call with Daxis. Police set up a phone at Patsy's bedside. They tap the line. The one Daxis has been so intent on calling and then they wait. Patsy isn't bed, she's not in good shape. She's quickly dying, the cancer taking her.

Yet she is prepared to talk to the man who says he strangled her only daughter.

waits by the phone, ready to hear her child's killer apologize. He never calls.

“June 24th 2006, it is a warm, hazy Saturday outside Atlanta. That day at her father's home in”

Roswell, Georgia, with John at her side, Patsy Ramsey dies. She was 49 years old. Patsy dies in the very same limbo she'd been living in since 1996, accused, uncharged, and with no answers. She is buried in Georgia beside the daughter she was accused of killing. Later that summer, Colorado Professor Michael Tracy calls Daxis. Daxis, this is my Tracy.

According Michael, this is me about news. Tasty died. I can never hear her say that she percussed me.

Patsy's death does something else. It cracks a door open.

“Daxis learns Tracy has the last photograph ever taken of John Beney alive, and he wants it.”

He emails and asks Tracy to scan it and send it over. An investigator sees the opening. Don't scan it, he tells Tracy, offer him the original, offered a mail it to him. And Daxis, this man who has bragged for years that he is untraceable, bites. He agrees to pick up the photo at a UPS box in Bangkok, Thailand. Tia authorities put the UPS store under surveillance and wait.

Daxis still talking to Tracy, can't help himself. He mentions a mountain bike he just bought, describes it, says he's going to ride it to work at a school. So one day in the summer of 2006, 10 years after John Beney was killed, a man rides up on that exact bike, walks into the UPS store, and collects his package. They have him on camera, and for about one week, type police follow him. He's identified as John Mark Carr, 41 years old, American, and he gets worse.

Because in Bangkok, John Mark Carr is teaching at an elementary school with rooms full of small children. Tai police move in. It's a case that had run cold for a decade, and a bizarre twist while he was being paraded before cameras. Carr actually responded to reporters' questions. In front of the cameras in Bangkok, Carr does not deny it.

Investigators start delving into who this man actually is, and what they find is disturbing. In 2001 in Petaluma, California, working as a teacher, again, John Mark Carr is arrested, charged with possession of child pornography. He's heading for trial, and he runs, flees the country, and everywhere he lands Asia, Europe, Latin America, he finds the very same job, teaching young children. John Mark Carr, 41 years old, was arrested for the murder of

John Bene Ramsey. Yesterday morning at approximately 6am in Bangkok, Thailand. He began his

employment as a second-grade teacher in the international school system in Bangkok on Tuesday morning

of this week. In off-camera comments recorded by the AP, Carr recated his claim that John Bene's death

“was an accident. "I think it's very important for me that everyone that's not loved for”

very much, and that her death was unintentional and it was an accident." The whole media machine roars back to life. Carr is deported from Thailand and flown to Boulder in the front cabin of a commercial jet, served shrimp and champagne. A picture of the tabloids splash across every front page, 40 cameras camp out in John Ramsey's front yard. To a watching world for 12 days, this is the man who killed John Bene Ramsey. It feels impossibly like it might

finally be over. There's only one thing left to check. The DNA. They compare John Mark Carr's DNA to the unknown male profile, the sample from under John Bene's fingernails from her clothing. It does not match. The man who says he was with John Bene Ramsey when she was killed in 1996

against John Mark Carr. Boulder County DA Mary Lacy released a statement and it'd been long been

“known that there was some DNA that thought to be the killers in John Bene's underclose.”

Lacy says they took a DNA sample from car and it didn't match that DNA. The DNA is in close.

John Mark Carr, who confessed for hours, was never actually inside the Ramsey home.

The confession was a fantasy. The biggest break in the history of this case collapses in a matter of days. To put a bow on it, investigators went looking for where John Mark Carr was in December of 1996 and the answer comes from his own family. He was in Alabama with them, back Christmas. There is no record that John Mark Carr ever set one foot in Colorado before 2006. In 2008, Boulder District Attorney Mary Lacy sends John Bene's clothing to a private lab

for a newer, more sensitive kind of analysis called Touch DNA. It looks for tiny traces of DNA

left behind when someone touches something. Even a small number of skin cells can sometimes be enough.

The lab pulls a male profile off the waistband of the long johns. John Bene was wearing in two separate spots and it matches the unknown male DNA already found in her underwear. One unidentified male profile detected in three different locations on two garments. To Lacy, this is no stray speck of contamination. This is the residue of the hands that hurt John Bene. She makes a decision no Boulder Prosecutor has made in 12 years. Two years after Patsy Ramsey

dies, Lacy clears the Ramsey family, publicly, completely and in writing. Lacy does something else unheard of for a prosecutor. She writes the Ramsey's a letter and she apologizes. She writes that the office does not consider John Patsy or Burke Ramsey to be under any suspicion in the commission of this crime and then this "to the extent that we may have contributed in any way to the public perception that you might have been involved in this

crime, I am deeply sorry." Of course, that doesn't settle anything in this case. Because not everyone believes the DNA means what Mary Lacy says it means. One of the loudest skeptics is a man named James Colar, a former investigator who worked the John Bene case files and comes away certain the answer was inside the house all the long.

“Here he is in October 2013. I think it's extremely unlikely that an intruder was involved in this”

situation. It was frustrating for me is that the DNA evidence continues to be proffered as proof that an intruder was involved. There are six unidentified samples of DNA trace amounts. There were three people in the home that evening. I think investigators needed to look at all three of them. Colar means the three people in the house that night, John Patsy and the only child left, Burke. And in 2013 the grand jury secret, Alex Hunter carried out of

that 1999 press conference finally breaks open. A daily camera reporter named Charlie Brennan

sues the Boulder DA's office for the sealed grand jury records and wins. And the public learns for the first time what Hunter has known all along that the grand jury had voted to indict the Ramses. Alex Hunter could have announced that afternoon that the grand jury has elected not to indict anybody. He could have said the grand jury indicted somebody but were not going to prosecute him. He didn't say either of those things. A number of years down the road two sources

of mine told me you can't report this but they indicted both John and Patsy Ramsy. So I set out to contact grandiors directly and multiple grandiors confirmed for me.

“That's what happened. Here is what the documents did not do. They did not accuse Burke Ramsey by”

name. Accessory is a charge that only makes sense if there is a principle. Someone the accessory is protecting and the indictments left that person unnamed but the ambiguity left room for others to fill in the blank. And a legacy TV network does precisely that. On the 20th anniversary of the

struck his sister John Beney and that his parents staged everything else. A little boy who was never

charged with anything. Now 29 years old is put on trial again on television for a brand new audience. And for the first time in 20 years Burke Ramsey answers for himself. Weeks after the CBS special airs he sits down with Dr. Phil on national television now a grown man quiet uneasy in the chair facing questions about a night he was a nine-year-old boy

“asleep down the hall from his sister. Do you remember the last time you saw John Beney alive?”

I want to say it was in the car and the way back from the whites. Do you remember waking up that warning? He yep the first thing I remember is my mom first thing in my room looking for John Beney and the next thing I remember is a police officer coming to my room and shining a flashlight. Did you hit your sister over the head with a baseball bat or a flashlight? Absolutely not.

Burke sues CBS for $750 million. The lawsuit ends the way almost everything in this case ends

quietly behind closed doors in a sealed settlement with no finding a fact on either side. The record in the end holds three official judgments that poll in opposite directions are grand jury that voted to indict the parents as accessories and a prosecutor who buried that vote. A district attorney who years later cleared the whole family by name in writing on the strength of the DNA and a sealed set of indictments prior loose later still

whose unanswered language would be used to point suspicion toward the only other person known to be in that house. A little boy. Three official acts, three different directions, no answers. Nothing. An indictment is not a conviction because a grand jury here is only one side.

Mary Lacy's letter purported to clear the family but it never named the killer.

An Alex Hunter's decision not to charge explained nothing and exonerated no one.

“Nearly 30 years after John Beney's murder, the only thing left to hope for”

is an answer from the actual evidence. That is where John Ramsey has put his energy in the years since Patsy's death. He is chasing the DNA and a new technology that did not exist when his daughter was killed. Genetic genealogy changes what a single unknown DNA profile can do. The old method needed the suspects DNA to be sitting already in a database. The new method does not. It looks for any genetic link in a DNA database to this person.

Then works the family tree of that person, generation by generation, toward a name of a possible suspect. This is the method that finally put a name to the Golden State killer decades after his crime stopped and in November of 2022 when four

“University of Idaho students are murdered in their beds, it is genetic genealogy that identifies”

the suspect, Brian Colberger, in a matter of weeks, thanks to Touch DNA on the knife sheath, the killer left behind. John Ramsey wants the same science used on his daughter's case, but the obstacle is not the science. It's jurisdiction. The evidence belongs you see to the Boulder PD and only the Boulder PD can decide to test it. So John takes his fight to the governor of Colorado. When John sat down with me in December 2022, this is one of the primary things he wanted

to discuss. 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 water to really cut against 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. If they're the ones who 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 at 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've told us that we've got to get this DNA testing done by one of these water to very cutting-edge labs outside and then use this new approach of genealogy tracing.

the crime scene that were sent years ago to an outside lab and he says came back untested,

“returned to a shelf. Among them he says, "Is the garot?" The murder weapon itself,”

with knots he believes have never been untied and swabbed for the skin cells of the hands that

tied them. Nearly 30 years on, the object used to strangle his daughter may still hold an answer that existing testing has not produced. In December of 2025, there is movement. In their annual update on the case, the Boulder Police say they have done something close to

“what John Ramsey has been asking for, new interviews, new evidence collected, and old evidence”

retested this time with the newest DNA technology available. Officials will not say what that evidence is or where it points. The Boulder Chief of Police, Steve Redfern, says, "Only that the department will keep working with DNA experts around the country until this tragic case is solved." My direction to our department has been clear.

“Leave no stone unturn. Her detectives have conducted several new interviews”

as well as re-interviewed individuals based on tips that we've received. We've also collected new evidence, and tested, and retested other pieces of evidence to generate new leads. Nearly 30 years in, this is the closest thing to forward motion this case is produced in a very long

time. Still, no name, no rest, no answers. But for the first time in a while, the sense that

someone is finally looking again. 30 years on, the public interest in the case of John Bene Ramsey remains high. John Bene is about to become a prestige, streaming drama, a murder of John Bene Ramsey, an eight-part Netflix series starring Melissa McCarthy as Patsy and Clive Owen as John. The story retold once more for an audience that was not alive when she died, but a television series is not going to solve this.

Nothing is going to solve this, except perhaps those tiny, imperceptible specs of human cells sitting in a Colorado evidence room. In sealed bags and paper envelopes in a

property room in Boulder, the answer is most likely already there on a length of cord on the

waste band of a child's long johns in the profile of an unknown male that has waited, patient and silent to be discovered since the day after Christmas 1996. The science to read it has finally arrived, the question remaining is whether anyone will let it speak. I'm Megan Kelly, tune in next week as we unpack another mystery, an MK confidential.