JonBenet’s family cleared of murder
Prosecutors have finally cleared her father, brother, and deceased mother in the girl’s slaying, almost 12 years after her death.
Speaking yesterday, her aunt Pam Paugh said: “We still don’t have our killer yet. That’s our final goal, and that’s the goal that we’re still striving toward, and we won’t stop until we get there. She went to her maker knowing that she had a clear conscience and a full heart.”
Paugh is the sister of JonBenet’s mother, Patsy Ramsey.
Armed with a few invisible skin cells, prosecutors are now certain they have the DNA profile of the man who killed JonBenet Ramsey but finding the man is another matter.
Investigators hoping to solve the crime will have to locate a match in a growing DNA database that has more than five million offenders’ profiles.
“If this person has no criminal record and has never been DNA-typed in another case, this murderer is going to be on our streets,” said Larry Pozner, a Denver attorney and past president of the National Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers.
The evidence against an unknown “third party” came on Wednesday.
Prosecutors announced that new tests pointed to a mystery attacker and cleared JonBenet’s parents and older brother Burke.
It was a vindication for the Ramsey family, but the girl’s mother, Patsy, had not lived to see it as she died of cancer in 2006.
John Ramsey found his daughter’s strangled and bludgeoned body in the basement of the family’s home in Boulder on December 26, 1996. Patsy Ramsey said she found a ransom note demanding $118,000 (€75,000) for her daughter.
For years afterwards, tabloids and crime shows targeted the couple, and the then-district attorney, Alex Hunter, said in 1997 the parents were under an “umbrella of suspicion.” Reports also cast suspicion on JonBenet’s brother, who was nine at the time.
“It has been too many years for this family to have suffered the injustice of being falsely accused of a crime they did not commit,” said L Lin Wood, lawyer for John Ramsey.
Early in the investigation, police found male DNA in a drop of blood on JonBenet’s underwear and determined it was not from anyone in her family.
Investigators were unable to say who it came from and whether that person was the killer.
In 2003, the Ramseys got a major boost when a federal judge handling a defamation lawsuit involving the couple said the evidence was more consistent with a theory that an intruder killed JonBenet.
Three years later, the case seemed to veer into absurdity when John Mark Karr, an American teacher in Thailand, offered a bizarre confession.
He was whisked to Colorado but was released after prosecutors concluded he couldn’t have killed her, and once again there was no prime suspect.
Then, late last year, prosecutors gave underwear JonBenet was wearing to the Bode Technology Group in Washington, which looked for “touch DNA,” or skin cells left behind.
The lab has only been using this technology for about three years.
The lab found previously undiscovered genetic material on the sides of the underwear, where an attacker would have grasped to pull it down, authorities said. The DNA matched the genetic material found earlier.
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