WHO KILLED JONBENET RAMSEY?

ALMOST 25 YEARS LATER, THE MYSTERY OF WHO KILLED THE CHILD BEAUTY QUEEN ENDURES

- Jennie Noonan

More than two decades after the murder of child pageant star JonBenét Ramsey, the well-known details of the case are as haunting as ever. Just before 6 am on the day after Christmas in 1996, a dispatcher answered a call at Boulder, Colorado’s emergency communications center to hear the frantic voice of Patsy Ramsey. “We have a kidnapping. Hurry, please. There’s a note left and our daughter’s gone. She’s 6 years old. She’s blonde. She’s 6 years old.”

Patsy relayed in the call that she and her husband John Ramsey had woken up to find a bizarre three-page note near the bottom of the stairs, later determined to have been written on Patsy’s notepad with a pen that comes from the house. The letter was purportedly written by a “foreign faction” and asked for the oddly precise sum of $118,000 in ransom money for the return of JonBenét.

Roughly eight hours later, John discovered his daughter’s beaten and strangled body in the basement of the family’s Tudor brick mansion and carried her up the stairs. “I knew instantly what I found. I found my daughter,” he said in a 2000 interview with Barbara Walters. “She was lying on a white blanket. The blanket was wrapped around her. Her hands were tied above her head. She had tape over her mouth … I immediately knelt down over her, felt her cheek, took the tape off immediately off her mouth. I tried to untie the cord that was around her arms and I couldn’t get the knot untied.”