My name is Alex Hatra and I have a friend who is in the middle of the club.
And it's been a very long time. I'm a very close friend who has been working with me for several years.
“We are a family member and my friend was the one who said, "Look, there are some portal.”
I don't need to worry about it. I'm a friend of mine. I'm a family member. I have a family member and I have a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel. The last week in the summer. I have a family member, but the chances of having a family member are very close. 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 House.
The day John Bane's body is found. Standing inside the house on 15th Street with the Christmas trees still up and John Bane'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 kidnapper's 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. Today 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 Bane out of the house on Christmas night. The question is, who was already inside?”
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Go to SuperShirt.com/Megan, pay for by SuperShirt Insurance Agency LLC, a licensed insurance agency. 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 a 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 turn 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 on to a suspect early and let the theory 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 ...
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 word spreads among the officers that John Bene'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 John Bene'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. To it, they killed their daughter.
“Internally John and Patsy are 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 one of the most scrutinized child murders in America.
Someone needs to stand up and speak for John Bene. 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 Patsy. 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, Patsy 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 hired 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 Bernace death. Douglas says that's a lot of very similar material to be merely coincidental and it's difficult to imagine Patsy 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 Bernace 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 $18,000, not a round figure, not a kidnapter'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 Patsy did not know John's bonus amount.
Well, 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 401(k) at the end of the year.
To me, it's kind of like the manifesto in the unibarner that begins to tell m...
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 of 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 mystery, he surmises no one's calling because no one was ever going to call and someone in that house knows it.
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“What's the foundation of your savings? Is it gold? Is gold even in there? Or is it something that could be shaken disrupted devalued?”
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The first time I've ever heard of a hotel in the hotel, I've heard of a hotel in the last week.
“When John Ramsey searches the house that afternoon on December 26th, Detective Thomas”
is 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 Bene's body lies lifeless by the Christmas tree. Responding officers see Patsy on the floor, cludding a 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 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.
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.
“Detective 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 Lindbergh family showed in 1932 when their 20-month-old baby boy was kidnapped and killed.
“Many suspected the boy's famed pilot father, Charles Lindbergh, after his baby Charlie disappeared, because Charles seemed cold and aloof.”
But Lindbergh believed he functioned best in a crisis by staying controlled. John Ramsey's very similar.
A 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 vix either way.
“The day they're called to the Ramsey House detective's notice, a bowl of fresh-cut pineapple on the breakfast table upstairs with a spoon resting in it.”
The prints on that bowl belong to Patsy Ramsey and to nine-year-old Burke, not to John Bene. And yet John Bene's stomach contains fresh, partly digested pineapple. If I told you right now that we have precedents, it appears to link you to the death of John Bene. I don't give a fine flip-half line to pick it up. Come back to the damn drawing board. I didn't do it. John Ramsey 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 now did it.
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 Bene 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 that 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 things 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. She 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 Bene'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.
But the lawman said as much when he squared off against John and Patsy, a 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 lack motive.
You must have conjured something in your head for you to come out and call me...
Together, what do you think happened that night? Well, I think there was a toileting issue that night that has been dismissed and underplayed. I'd bed wedding or a toileting issue caused her 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 and I were there for 20 years.
I know that she loved that child more than anything in the world. The detective hypothesis 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 agree Patsy that almost none of it makes sense? Right, it falls the guy doing. Why did that? Why did the intruder do this?
Evil, evil person.
“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. Not something that a nine-year-old could even possibly do. So, it's really disgusting that people jump to that kind of occlusion. Within days of John Bernays 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 and 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 male DNA found on John Bernays underwear. These conflicting data points do not fit neatly on a magazine cover.
Nor do they play well in a 30-second 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.
