It is October 13th, 1999, a lovely fall Wednesday in Boulder, Colorado, 13 mo...
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 shrewdness, 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 and 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 is a grand jury indict some probable cause, the lowest bar in the law, a prosecutor then has to decide whether this case can be proved to trial beyond a reasonable doubt 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. We wouldn't be celebrating America 250 if it wasn't for a strong foundation set by the framers. Hamilton built America's financial foundation on the principle of soundstable money,
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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 piece, John Ramsey, once ran a billion dollar company, but as John himself told Barbara Walters, this case has ruined the family financially.
Before John Bernays 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. 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. And 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 Bernays 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 Lou Smith, works the case in private, chasing his intruder theory, the lone man he is certain is out there somewhere.
And Lou 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. The police go into Eustice's house, there's a shrine to John Brewer. 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 Brewer had died.
There is Gary Aliva, a convicted pedophile who the morning after John Brewer 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 Brewer and 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 Brewer, 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 Brewer's body, and on
her clothes, and no match. There is Randy Simons, the photographer who took John Brewer's pageant portraits. Shortly after John Brewer's death, multiple beauty pageant mothers report to police that Randy called them up hysterical, saying, "I did not kill John Brewer, I did not kill John Brewer."
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 out to police unprompted, "I did not kill John Brewer."”
Our red flag, again, but no match on the DNA. There is Michael Helgoth, a bolder area man who works near the Ramsey home, and has a history of violence and sexual abuse. Just weeks after John Brewer's killing, Helgoth turns up dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Right as word spreads, that the DA 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 Brewer was found, but his DNA too does not match. Behind those four names is a parade of thousands more. Boulder PD followed 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, 8,500 miles away, Thailand. It comes to Boulder through an inbox.
During in 2002, a stranger calling himself "Daxis" begins emailing University of Colorado Professor Michael Tracy. Tracy has been years making documentaries about John Brewer'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 Brewer fan, but over the months that followed the curdle into something far more revolting. Slowly Daxis starts to say that he killed John Brewer. In one email he writes, "Are you asking me why I killed John Brewer?" 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 Brewer 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, 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 says, "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 Brewer'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 Sirst, there was nowhere that that nickname”
was known in the public domain. Michael discusses Daxis with Boulder Detective Lou Smith as well. "I would share some of the emails with Lou Smith." And I said, "Look, 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." Joe said to Lou, "Just tell me he's a nutcase, and we can end it. I'll lose it. God, no, I can do Michael, go to 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 and 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?"
Yes, 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 ding of another incoming Daxis email turns this into something else, entirely. Traci reads Daxis' message, "I'll be in the house before you give me that contact information, won't I?" 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."
“A 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. Don'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 fed John Beney. I want to make a nether necklace for you, and it had some interesting, not-finite.
I slowly apply the crash to her neck, with that thick necklace, and I just sa...
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 was suddenly broken, and I was just like, "Oh, my God." "You're on Beney, okay." And I knew she wasn't okay, because I knew that she was a breathing.
And I just went to the side, said, "Oh, God, I'm going to have to finish this. I know what I'm gonna 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 gathered everything up off so enough, I went on to my own, but I had to go back to that window.
“That's when I came in, that's where I have to go out."”
I withed the great, I got out of the great, and I was like, "Oh, God, I've left my little girl in that horrible fate." She's in that little prime, you were in worse than that she's dead, and got it 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 Daxxus knows it. "I'm interpoled because nightmare, because I know I have to evade."
The 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, Daxxus is desperate to talk to Patsy, so the investigators make a cool calculation. Let's milk that. John and Patsy agree to a call with Daxxus, police set up a phone at Patsy's bedside.
They tap the line, the one Daxxus 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, just to keep him on the line long enough for police to trace him." A dying mother waits by the phone, ready to hear her child's killer, apologize.
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in one place, go to super sure.com/magan, paid for by super sure insurance agency, LLC, a licensed insurance agency, 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, carrying Michael, just to me about news, Tatsy died.
"If I can never hear her say that she broke his name."
Patsy's death does something else, a 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, offer to 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, tie police follow him.
He's identified as John Mark Carr, 41 years old, American, and it gets worse. As in Bangkok, John Mark Carr is teaching at an elementary school, with rooms full of small children. Tie police, move in.
“It's a case that had run cold for a decade, and a bizarre twist while he was being”
perated before cameras. Carr actually responded to reporter's questions. In front of the cameras in Bangkok, Carr does not deny it. I love it all the day, and we don't even have to die accidently. I don't even have none!
No, I don't even have to die accidently. Her death was an accident. 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 in charge 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. Off-camera comments recorded by the AP, Carr recated his claim that John Bene's death 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. Forty 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 will not be charged in the case. The Boulder County District Attorney says no charges will be filed against John Mark Carr. Boulder County DA Mary Lacy released a statement and had been long been known that there was some DNA.
Thought to be the killers in John Bene's underclose. Lacy says they took a DNA sample from Carr and it didn't match that DNA. The DNA isn't 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 ...
for a newer, more sensitive kind of analysis called Touch DNA.
“It looks for tiny traces of DNA left behind when someone touches something.”
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, quote, "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. There's not everyone believes the DNA means what Mary Lacy says it means. One of the loudest skeptics is a man named James Kohlar, 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.”
One 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.
Kohlar 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 we're 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 Ramsy by name. Accessory is a charge that only makes sense if there is a principle. Come on 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 murder in 2016 CBS News puts the theory into prime time. That a nine year old Burke Ramsy 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 Ramsy 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 morning? Yep. The first thing I remember is my mom, first thing in my room, looking for a job in A, and
The next thing I remember is a police officer coming to my room and shining a...
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 pull in opposite directions, a 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 hears only one side.
Mary Lacy's letter purported to clear the family, but it never named the killer.
An Alexander's decision not to charge, explained nothing, and exonerated no one.
“Nearly 30 years after John Benese 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. The 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 to 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 that said, look, the government does not have the latest DNA technology. We'll get it eventually, but we don't have it. We don't have it 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 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. John talks about specific items still sitting in evidence, five, six, maybe seven pieces from 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 unturned. 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-jons, 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 on MK confidential.
