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. Perhaps 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. Some 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. "I just knew that it was a source spot for the Kennedy's, the umbrella that the prime minister
being in came back with got to be a symbol with some matter with British people by association it 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 Ann Ambrella. The investigator, Josiah Thompson, who chased that mystery for years, threw one lesson from it. "If you have any fact, which you think is really sinister, is really obviously a fact which
can only point to some sinister underpinning, hey, forget it man, because you can never
on your own, think up all the nonsense that you're perfectly 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 Bené Ramsey is full of strange facts. A random 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 Lu Smith. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK confidential. When you sign your insurance policy for some brokers, that's the finish line.
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in one place. Super sure.com/Megan, paid for by super sure insurance agency LLC, a licensed insurance agency. Lucmit 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%, Lou 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...
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. Lou is a finder of things other people failed to see. In March of 1997, three months after John Benay's murder, Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter brings Smith onto the John Benay Ramsey task force. The case is already going sideways and the police and prosecutors are at each other's
throats. Lou Smith 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. The 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 principle
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 Lou Smith 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 Dr. Sus books. The bolder detectives tell Smith that the window is nothing. No one could have come through there, there's a metal grate over the outside window well. So Smith studies the great himself 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 Smith 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 Bene 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.
Smith 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 palm print on the door of the little room where John Bene was found. But Lou keeps building, it looks at the house itself.
John Bene'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 Bene's room is barely audible from the master bedroom. Smith looks around the home and thinks 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 ha...
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 Bene was bound, a garot, built from white cord and the broken handle of one of Patsy's paintbrushes tied with slip knots that only tighten as the victim pulls against them. To Smith 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.
Louis Smith is the first person on the case to take them seriously.
On John Bene'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. It measures the gap and matches it to the twin metal contacts of a specific weapon and an air taser, a stun gun.
“What I'd like to show you is, but I think is one of the most important clues, let”
be heard by the girl, stun gun. There's marks on John Bene, those are marks on her back, those are marks on her face. And there's the same distance of heart, slightly ripped angular and shake, something made those marks. In Smith's reconstruction of John Bene'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 loo 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 Ramses with her window open a 150 feet away, reports hearing a child's scream around 2am that morning. A scream the Ramses family inside the house, say they never heard, if it came from the basement, they might not have.
Beneet 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 male DNA, drawn from a bloodstain 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 male, it is not from the Ramses 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 John Beneet. The autopsy indicates that the sexual assault is consistent with penetration by a finger or an object. Broken blood vessels in John Beneet's vagina show she was penetrated that night and a microscopic flick of wood is found inside of her, most likely from the splintured paintbrush used
to build the garot. The unknown male DNA is not only found on John Beneet's underwear, but the same profile is found as touch DNA from skin cells inside the waistband of her long Johns. She would detective raised on the idea that every killer leaves a piece of himself behind one's stray speck might be a fluke, but the same strangers DNA twice on a murdered child
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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 John Beney is killed, less than two miles from the Ramsey home. Despite 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 John Beney. 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 as 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, its 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.
But Smith reads that same grate the opposite way. Now this is where I think the killer actually got in at some point and there is a gas real here and then there's a soft door to the house. Right behind his gas grill is a grate and you put the grate 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 walkthrough 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.
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 fifties, the open window faces south west into the afternoon sun, while the funnel weaver spider hibernates through a Colorado winter,
Bennett says the Ramsey window well had perfect conditions for a hibernating spider to wake up and repair its web and re-spin 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 Bene and the effect is the opposite of silence. If this were done to this kid, you would have a screen from this kid that goes through the hand 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 trace 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 Bene, 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. Just to test 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 note. Remember the garot.
Its handle is a piece of patty's own paintbrushes taken from her 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 bolder 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. And lose mine the murderer and to 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 John Bene's room and used his stun gun
To incapacitate her.
He then carried her down to the basement, fashioned a garot with patty's paintbrush handle
and sexually assaulted John Bene with his fingers.
“I believe he brought her down to the farthest 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 that John Bene 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
that both found in the Ramsey house. The killer then believed the John Bene was dead and fled out the basement window. As for the oddly specific ransom amount, Blue explains that $118,000 would have yielded
exactly one million Mexican pesos at that time.
“If the intruder were planning to run to the border, one million pesos sounds like a nice”
round number to help with an escape. By 1998 the John Bene 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 John Bene's body. The police wanting 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 John Bene, resigns with a public letter blasting the DA for refusing to charge the Ramsey family.
In 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 don't know if I could solve it without the help of a police department and I'm sure I'm not going to get that, but I know that God had a plan, and I part of it, and I'm just going to continue to work in it. I want to say that. 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 detectives, most, needed to talk to, stopped talking. John and Patsy Ramsey, on their lawyers' advice, will not sit for open police interviews at this point. Friends who are around the house that Christmas, they've loyered 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.
It can lock down memories in testimony before they fade, including the account of Ramsey's 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, DA 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 Cain 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 Bou...
They hear from former FBI profiler John Douglas, whom the Ramsey's 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. Ramsey, if you did it, you are one hell of a liar, you are one hell of a liar,”
if you did it, and you're putting on a great production here, but I just don't believe in my heart. He did this, and not just in my heart, from what, from the analysis of the scene.
“They hear from loose met, too. Smith brings the grand jury the case of his life.”
More than 600 slides have 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 Ramsey 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 Competential.
