[MUSIC]
Not every story
has a nice tidy
ending.
Not every case is solved, and not every
criminal is brought to justice.
In the case of JonBenét Ramsey, who was
murdered when she was age just six,
nobody has ever been convicted of this
crime.
She was found dead in her home the day
after Christmas in 1996, in
the usually peaceful university town of
Boulder, Colorado.
Her parents, Patsy and John Ramsey, were,
for a while, suspects.
Patsy has now died.
Her father, John, is still alive.
She has a brother, Burke, who is probably
not involved in the case.
So this is how the case went.
On December the 26th, 5:45 a.m.,
her mother, Patsy, called the police and
they arrived a few minutes later.
The Ramseys also called various friends,
who also came to the house.
What Patsy had found was a ransom note,
saying that her daughter, JonBenét, had
been kidnapped.
Well, if it's a kidnapping, then the crime
scene is
likely to be the girl's bedroom and any
entrances and passageways.
The house was searched several times and a
body was finally found at 1 p.m.
The body, remarkably, was found by the
father.
Examination of the body showed a fractured
skull
due to the impact of a blunt object.
In addition, she had been subject to
ligature strangulation.
That is, a rope had been put around her
neck
and tightened, and that rope had come from
Patsy's painting equipment.
It's not clear which of these two events
had killed her.
Opinions appear to differ on whether she
had been sexually assaulted.
In addition, her hands were loosely tied,
not tightly
tied to prevent any movement, but very
loosely tied.
And her mouth had been covered with duct
tape.
Now there's something odd about the duct
tape, because if someone is alive and you
slap duct tape over their mouth, they're
going to
keep moving their mouth under the duct
tape.
But when the duct tape was removed from
JonBenét's mouth,
there was a perfect lip print, which you
wouldn't get from
a moving mouth, which indicates that
JonBenét was either unconscious
or dead when the duct tape was put on her
mouth.
Now, here's the house.
It's a big house,
JonBenét's bedroom is up on the second
floor.
The ransom note was found on the first
floor in the kitchen.
The body was found in a far room, down in
the basement.
Now, let's look at the ransom note.
Now, there are many aspects to this case
and it's very controversial,
but let's focus on the ransom note.
There are many strange things about the
ransom note.
The first one is that it's written on the
Ramsey's own paper with one of their own
pens,
so this is a kidnapper who didn't bring
his own stationery with him.
There was a first draft of the note which
had been discarded.
In addition, the ransom note is extremely
long, running to three pages.
Typically, ransom notes are really short,
giving just the basics.
The ransom note was hand-written.
Now in any crime in a family, other
members of the family are always a
suspect.
So handwriting analysis was used, and that
indicated that the note hadn't been
written
by John, and it was unlikely to have been
written by Patsy, but not impossible.
Now, here is the note.
Says, "Mr. Ramsey, Listen Carefully!
We are a group of individuals that
represent a small foreign faction.
We do respect your business but not the
country that it serves.
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."
Now the way people write can be analyzed,
and from the way people write, you can
learn something about them.
For instance, look at this word here,
"foreign".
Very few people would consider themselves
to be foreign,
typically you always consider other people
to be foreign.
So, is this a note written by an American
trying to pretend to be a foreigner?
Now look at this.
"Business" is spelt wrongly, as is
"possession".
But as we go through the rest of the note,
you'll
see that these are the only spelling
mistakes in the note.
Was someone trying to pretend that they
couldn't write English properly, but after
they got past the first paragraph, forgot
to put in more spelling mistakes?
Let's go on.
"You will withdraw $118,000 from your
account.
$100,000 will be in $100 bills and the
remaining $18,000 in $20 bills.
Make sure that you bring an adequate size
attaché 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 a.m.
tomorrow to instruct you on delivery.
The delivery will be exhausting so I
advise you to be rested."
You can see this is a very caring
kidnapper.
"If we monitor you getting the money early,
we might call you early to arrange
an earlier delivery of the money and
hence an early delivery pick-up of your
daughter."
Well, there's odd things in this
paragraph, too.
For instance, that $118,000 happens to
be the size of John's bonus that year.
It's odd that they should ask for such a
specific sum and not, given the
fact that John Ramsey was a wealthy man,
not just put down a million dollars.
This is the final part.
"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, F.B.I., 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.
Don't try to grow a brain John.
You're 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!
Victory!
S.B.T.C." Probably one of the most
melodramatic ransom notes of all time.
This is something that struck me, "law
enforcement countermeasures".
If they were foreigners, they would have
probably written "police".
Here's another oddity, "Use that good
southern common sense of yours".
Yet, John Ramsey was born in Nebraska.
And this is curious.
If you look back to the beginning of the
letter, it starts out "Mr. Ramsey".
How come, by the end of the letter, they're
now on first name terms?
One oddity that has caused a lot of
speculation on
the internet is this signing of the letter
"S.B.T.C.", and if you go
online, you can find all sorts of
speculation about what
"S.B.T.C." stands for, from the very
religious "Saved by the Cross" through to
"Santa Barbara Tennis Club".
What we can conclude is that this is a
very, very strange ransom note,
and was probably written by somebody
merely
to divert attention from searching for the
body that was in the house.
So who did it?
Well, one possibility is an intruder.
So if there's an intruder in the house,
he should have left traces in the other
rooms
and the hallways, because every contact
leaves a trace.
The problem is that the house as a whole
was not recognized as a crime
scene and the Ramsey family and their
friends were present in the house.
So, any traces left by any intruder
would have been obliterated by all these
visitors.
Now, there was a broken window leading
into the basement.
But it turns out that had actually been
broken by
John Ramsey some time before when he
locked himself out.
We also have this evidence of the tape on
her mouth.
Well, the tape on her mouth, an intruder
might
have put that there to quieten her, to
silence her.
But as we've said, she was probably
already
dead or unconscious when it was put there.
Now what about DNA evidence?
Well, if she was subjected to ligature
strangulation, we
should be able to get DNA off the
ligature, that
rope that was used to strangle her, or we
should have been able to get DNA off her
clothes.
Well, a certain amount of DNA was obtained
from her underwear,
and this, for a while, was regarded as the
key to the case.
Now, a man called Mark Karr had been in
communication with a
journalism professor at the University of
Colorado called Michael Tracey.
And he'd been sending emails to Michael
Tracey, one of
which included the statement, "I was with
JonBenét when she died."
Now, Mark Karr, by 2006, was in Bangkok.
When Michael Tracey informed the Colorado
authorities of these emails,
they very quickly got Mr. Karr deported
from Bangkok back to Colorado,
and when he got to Colorado, a sample of
his DNA was taken.
Now, this whole process had been done in a
media spotlight with great
fanfare, presumably because the
authorities in Colorado
were convinced they now had the
perpetrator.
Unfortunately, this is not how to conduct
business, because when Mark Karr's DNA was
compared to the DNA sample from the
underwear, all charges against him were
dropped.
So we saw in the case of Richard III
an excellent example of how to manage the
media.
We see in the case of Mark Karr
an excellent example of how to mis-manage
the media.
So this case is unsolved.
And one reason for lack of progress
is because
of mistakes made by the police in the
early days.
They failed to recognize the whole crime
scene,
so all sorts of people had access to the
house
from the morning that JonBenét was known
to be missing.
They failed to secure the crime scene,
and they failed to search the crime scene.
The body was not found by a police
officer, it
was found the girl's father, brought
upstairs to the girl's mother.
So any traces by family members could be
resulting from
the search, and therefore could not be
used in evidence.
So, who killed JonBenét Ramsey?
Perhaps we will never know.
[BLANK_AUDIO]

