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I've been living in the town of Leipzig. I've been living in the town of Leipzig. I've been living in the town of Leipzig. To the best of our knowledge there is no real evidence in this case. The points in any direction other than
straight into the faces of John and four Patsy Rams. 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. We wouldn't be celebrating America 250 if it wasn't for strong foundations set by the framers.
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“Or is it something that could be shaken, disrupted, devalued?”
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Text MK to the number 99898. Let's start it out as a simple but tragic murder of a child beauty queen. But then questions arose curiosity arose and suddenly the media descended on bolder. We are told now that as many as 300 media representatives lay bigger right now following the story. To understand how it comes to a mock trial on date time 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 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 wielded out in front of Christmas lights
and to top it all off millionaire parents who love child beauty pageants.
“It is Christmas all over again for lovers of murder mystery, beach reads and ratings.”
Jombanese 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. Bolder 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. Touched 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 a 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, patches, parades, recitals, home video, a short life spent reforming for a camera. John by day 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 2nd of January 1997, a Denver station airs pageant video of John Bene 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 John Bene Ramsey. Not a precious kindergartener who likes to jump into 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 Miss West Virginia herself, but to the rest of America, the sequence, the mascara, the hairspray, come across as something eerie and disturbing. Major publications at start describing John Bene as moving on stage in a way that's adult, seductive, precosious, and wrong. In the Pagent World, it is just choreography that a coach taught a child, no one bats an eye, but our national news broadcasts stripped of that context.
John Bene'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. And then, 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 li...
A woman talking to the media before she talks to the police, and the town does not want the warning either.
“Two days after 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 Patses, 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 or Patses 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 Bene's murder. If no one left footprints the reasoning goes, the 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, were 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, an 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 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.
“Source to 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.
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“The Colorado Bureau of Investigation hands the ransom note to its examiner, Chet Ubalski,”
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 the same professor had earlier written Patsy a 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 uglier. 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 the 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. And I'm appalled that anyone would think that John or I would be involved in such a hideous painous crime. But let me assure you that I did not kill John Beney.
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 red. Our family is a loving family, 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,”
artons into proof of guilt. By November of 1997, a Gallup poll finds 88% of Americans with an opinion about who killed John Beney, 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, Aralda 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 to 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 Boulder 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 Boulder 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 in a fluent 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 broke and 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. Priscilla and I 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. 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,...
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 Benay, 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.”
Week after week, the supermarket racks turn John Benay into a symbol and the Ramsey's indie characters, the cold father, the ambitious mother, the perfect family with something rotten underneath.
Here is the piece of evidence that should have stopped all of this. On John Benay's body, under her fingernails and inside her underwear, there is DNA from an unknown man. It's not John's, it's not Patsy's not Berks, it belongs to a stranger, left physically on the murdered 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. Bolder 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. Well, the Boulder Daily Camer reports the brother of John Manay Ramsey has reached a settlement with CBS. Berk Ramsey sues 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 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 reaccused 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 Ramsey's have long ago been 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.
