OPINION:
More than a quarter of a century ago, I moved to Boulder, Colorado, to investigate the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, a 6-year-old girl who was bludgeoned and strangled in her home on Christmas night in 1996. Twenty-six years later, with the case still open, the little girl’s father, John Ramsey, has resurfaced in the media. In recent interviews, he has lashed out against the Boulder police, ridiculing them as incompetent, a familiar pattern the Ramseys have engaged in since the police placed them under an “umbrella of suspicion.”
On her podcast, Megyn Kelly inaccurately stated that “the [1999] grand jury came back and said we don’t see anything you’re going to be able to pursue beyond a reasonable doubt, and the D.A. ultimately had to admit that.”
This statement is misleading because the grand jury actually returned a “true bill” for “child abuse resulting in death” against both Mr. Ramsey and his wife, Patsy. While prosecutors declined to file charges at the time, many of them believed the police theory that focused on the mother.
In another interview, “60 Minutes Australia” newscaster Sarah Abo incorrectly stated: “The local police had no homicide experience and weren’t well equipped for the investigation into JonBenet’s murder. None of the detectives were prepared to admit it.”
Mr. Ramsey responded, “This is a police department that mostly deals with traffic tickets and college kids setting couches on fire during spring break.” Ms. Abo then said, “It doesn’t make any sense, John, that more experienced detectives, officers with greater expertise, were not brought in to try and solve this murder.”
These statements are pure historical revisionism, demonstrating stunning journalistic recklessness and purposeful avoidance of the facts. While Ms. Kelly’s report misstates the grand jury result, Ms. Abo ignores the collective experience of the Boulder police detectives and the extensive law enforcement backgrounds they brought to the department before they worked there. Her reporting also omits that the police were aided by experienced agents, detectives and lawyers from the FBI, Colorado Bureau of Investigation and the Denver Police Department, alongside a multijurisdictional prosecutorial task force.
Instead of acknowledging this, the Ramseys have often focused on the first few hours when patrol officers responded to their 911 call. Mr. Ramsey complains that the officers did not find his daughter in the house sooner, but this was most likely the result of the police believing that a legitimate kidnapping had occurred and showing compassion to the family. Had the police played hardball sooner, some of the mistakes Mr. Ramsey complains about might not have occurred.
While the Ramseys have always insisted they were being unfairly targeted, their reluctance to communicate with police fueled their suspicion. They saw no apparent sign of a break-in, no footprints in the snow. Despite JonBenet’s being found in the basement of her home, the purported kidnapper left behind a lengthy, dramatic ransom note demanding $118,000, a sum that eerily matched Mr. Ramsey’s annual bonus. And while authorities were unable to conclusively match the handwriting to a suspect because it was intentionally disguised, the Secret Service matched the ink from the ransom note to a Sharpie pen in the Ramsey home. To be sure, nearly all of my law enforcement sources believed the handwriting resembled Mrs. Ramsey’s.
“60 Minutes” also does the public a disservice by promoting the interview inaccurately. Despite the segment’s alternate title being “The breakthrough new DNA evidence that could find JonBenet Ramsey’s killer,” there is no “new” evidence. The real story is that Mr. Ramsey wants Colorado authorities to turn over a minuscule sample of foreign DNA collected from the victim’s body so he can send it to a private company using new “genealogy DNA” testing.
While the show depicts this request as reasonable, it omits the fact that such testing could potentially destroy what’s left of the sample and the fact it has already been cross-referenced with more than 18 million other samples in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS).
As former Denver District Attorney Mitchell Morrissey, who served on the case, recently said: “Each DNA technology … has its limitations, and one of the limitations is, if it’s a mixed sample … you can’t do it — and that sample is about 50-50 … [but] the people up there are committed to working the case, they’re committed to keeping enough DNA that when the technique does come, it will help them, that they’ll be able to have it there and utilize it.”
Finally, and perhaps most concerning, several journalists often highlight an anomaly chapter of the 25-year investigation from 2008 when, in the wake of Mrs. Ramsey’s death, DA Mary Lacy emotionally cleared the Ramseys while failing to report that her successor, Stan Garnett, said her “exoneration letter was ill-advised and was of no legal consequence.” In 2016, the Boulder Daily Camera reported that the foreign DNA was most likely a composite of two or more different people, not a single individual, a fact that points to an “innocent transfer” and not an intruder.
Although I sympathize with the Ramsey family and respect their decision to continue their search for answers, I strongly disagree with their recollection of the facts and their negative characterization of Boulder law enforcement. While I feel Mr. Ramsey’s continued targeting of the Boulder Police Department ignores the hard work its officers have done, it is not surprising since he has experienced a personal tragedy. There is no excuse, however, for reporters who revise the historical record because they are too lazy to learn both sides of the story.
In an era in which law enforcement continues to be mischaracterized and unfairly vilified, these attacks only amplify unjustified doubt about the integrity of police work and the myth that officers and detectives commonly target innocent people. Such historical revisionism not only compromises the record of the JonBenet Ramsey case but also tarnishes the very institutions of justice our democracy is sworn to uphold.
• Jeffrey Scott Shapiro is a former prosecutor and senior official for the U.S. Agency for Global Media who now serves on the editorial board of The Washington Times. He has extensively covered the JonBenet Ramsey case since March 1997.
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