Chapter 6 (continued)
THE PINEAPPLE
The Ramseys reported that JonBenét was asleep when the family returned from the Christmas meal at the Whites’ and that John Ramsey carried her inside and took her straight to bed. Yet, the autopsy report refers to an undigested substance found in JonBenét’s small intestine resembling pineapple. Here’s an excerpt from the report:
GI Tract: … The yellow to light green-tan apparent vegetable or fruit material which may represent fragments of pineapple.
Additionally, the crime scene photos show a bowl of pineapple chunks on the Ramseys’ kitchen counter with a spoon in the bowl. The bowl, spoon, and a tea glass reportedly contained varying combinations of the fingerprints of Patsy and Burke Ramsey.
Household members leaving fingerprints on family cutlery and dinnerware is hardly remarkable or indicative of anything sinister. Burke Ramsey claims no memory one way or the other of pineapple that night. However, Patsy Ramsey categorically denied any knowledge of how the bowl of pineapple happened to be on the counter and surmised that the kidnapper must have served JonBenét a snack during the attempted abduction.
Mary Poppins and David Copperfield Were in on It Together
If those claims about the pineapple are true and John and Patsy Ramsey put both children straight to bed upon arriving home from the Whites’, the same intruder who spent half an hour writing a ransom note before returning the pen and pad to their regular storage spots served JonBenét a snack from the refrigerator using the family’s cutlery and dinnerware while her parents and brother slept upstairs—and managed to do it without disturbing anyone in the house, without JonBenét raising any kind of alarm, and without leaving either the perpetrator’s or JonBenét’s fingerprints on the bowl or spoon. Then that same intruder murdered the child, stuffed her body in the basement, and slipped away into the night, never to be heard from again. What possible motive could an intruder have for such a series of events?
BURKE RAMSEY
Burke Ramsey had previously struck JonBenét in the face with a golf club. During an interview with police, Patsy Ramsey reported that the incident took place on the lawn of their vacation home in Charlevoix, Michigan. According to Patsy, while Burke was swinging a golf club to hit a wiffle ball, JonBenét came up behind him apparently without his knowledge, causing him to accidentally strike her with the club during his backswing.
There are questions about the timing in Patsy Ramsey’s telling, including a possible conflict between her alleged date of the incident and Burke’s age at the time, with her stating that Burke would have been between two and three years old. It is unclear to me how Burke could have hit JonBenét with the club at that age when JonBenét was three years, six months, and ten days younger than he. A family friend stated in the press that Patsy told her that Burke struck JonBenét with the golf club out of anger and placed the event approximately eighteen months before the murder. During an interview with Dr. Phil in 2016, Burke described the incident as an accident and denied ever intentionally harming his sister.
Burke Ramsey reportedly had a history of scatological issues. When crime scene technicians visited JonBenét’s bedroom after sealing it off on December 26, they found “feces smeared on a box of candy” she had received as a Christmas gift the day before. Previously, a housekeeper had reported finding feces in JonBenét’s bed and on the walls of the bathroom.
In the intruder scenario, that made JonBenét’s room a pretty busy place over the night of December 25 and the early morning of December 26. Since the candy could be pegged to the timeline on December 25, sometime in that period someone snuck into her room and smeared feces on her Christmas gift and someone likely entered her room and abducted her (though we don’t actually know that she didn’t leave the room of her own volition and encounter the killer elsewhere in the home).
I have found no information in the public record about DNA studies on the feces found on the candy. While it is not the optimal source for genetic studies, human DNA is found in fecal material, and a comparison of DNA from the candy box and the genetic material collected from JonBenét’s clothes and fingernails could be helpful.
But any way you slice it, a lot was going on in that room over Christmas night and the early morning of December 26.
FAMILY MEMBER VS. INTRUDER THEORY
While the initial suspicion fell on the family as a result of a lack of evidence of forced entry, law enforcement was aware that several windows had been left unlocked in the home. John Ramsey even admitted breaking a basement window weeks before when he had locked himself out of the house, stating that the broken glass remained unrepaired at the time of the murder. These possible points of ingress meant that the house was not secure, and an intruder could have theoretically entered without force.
The Investigative Pissing Contest
Fairly quickly after the child’s body was discovered, a schism began to develop between the Boulder district attorney’s office and the Boulder police. The police became convinced that JonBenét had been killed by a member of her immediate family. The DA’s office held tight to what came to be called the “intruder theory” and, in March of 1997, hired Lou Smit, a retired El Paso County and Colorado Springs homicide detective, to investigate the death of JonBenét Ramsey on their behalf.
Lou Smit conducted his own investigation of the crime and came to the conclusion that the DA’s version of events was the most probable—that JonBenét Ramsey had likely been killed by an intruder.
Smit believed the most likely scenario supported by the evidence was that an intruder entered the Ramsey home through the unlocked basement window while the family was at the Whites’ house for Christmas dinner. Using the time while the family was absent, the intruder wrote the ransom note. The intruder then lay in wait until the family was asleep, went into JonBenét’s bedroom, disabled her with a stun gun, and carried her to the basement, where he attempted to stuff her into a blue suitcase that belonged to the Ramseys. When the kidnapper was unable to fit the suitcase through the window, he became angry, killed JonBenét, and escaped through the same window.
Other forensic evidence collected during the investigation could have been interpreted to support the intruder theory. The end portion of the paintbrush that was used to fashion the garrote was never found on the Ramsey property. The rope used for the ligature and the wrist bindings was never linked to the Ramseys, nor was the duct tape found covering JonBenét’s mouth.
Black animal hair found on JonBenét’s hands did not match any hair found in the house. Animal hair thought to have come from a beaver was stuck to the adhesive of the duct tape removed from JonBenét’s mouth by her father, but no beaver hair was found inside the Ramsey home.
The Rocky Mountain News later reported that investigators determined that the footprint found near the body actually belonged to her brother, Burke, and that a palm print was left by her adult half sister, Melinda—and that both prints were unrelated to the unsolved murder. Burke played in the basement regularly, and Melinda was proven to be out of state at the time of the killing.
While no seminal fluid was found anywhere on her body, a splinter of wood alleged to be from the paintbrush handle that was used to fashion the garrote was supposedly found inside JonBenét’s vagina along with other evidence that she had been sexually assaulted. However, the nature and meaning of these findings have been widely debated.
Chapter 7
THE SUSPECTS
Robert Christian Wolf—Unlucky Taste in T-Shirts and Girlfriends
In their book, The Death of Innocence: The Untold Story of JonBenét’s Murder and How Its Exploitation Compromised the Pursuit of Truth, the Ramseys named Robert Christian Wolf as one of five possible suspects in their daughter’s death. Wolf subsequently sued the Ramseys for libel and slander and emotional distress from accusations they made against him in the book. A federal judge granted the Ramseys’ motion for summary judgment, and the case was closed.
Wolf, a freelance journalist, became a suspect when his girlfriend reported that he left home Christmas night and didn’t return until the next morning covered in mud. He owned a T-shirt from the Santa Barbara Tennis Club with the initials SBTC on the front (just as the ransom note had been signed). He had reportedly written one or more articles about John Ramsey’s company, Access Graphics, and supposedly held a grudge against its parent company, Lockheed Martin.
Bill McReynolds—Intruder Who Came Down the Chimney with a Bag Full of Coincidences
Bill McReynolds was an associate of the Ramsey family. He had regularly played Santa Claus at the Ramseys’ annual Christmas events, and he had what was described as a “special relationship” with JonBenét, who called him “Santa Bill.” Oddly, McReynolds’s daughter and her friend had been abducted twenty-two years to the day before JonBenét was murdered, and McReynolds’s wife had written a play about a child murdered in a basement. However, McReynolds was alibied by family members and cleared as a suspect.
Michael Landon Helgoth—Conspiracy Theories and Magic Bullets
Michael Helgoth worked in his family’s junkyard in Boulder, Colorado. He was twenty-six years old at the time of JonBenét’s murder. Helgoth supposedly told a friend and former employee, John Kenady, that he and an unnamed colleague had a scheme to each make between fifty and sixty thousand dollars right at Christmas. At one point, Helgoth reportedly told Kenady that he was curious about what it would feel like to crack someone’s skull. Kenady reported that Helgoth owned a pair of Hi-Tec boots. While a footprint from a Hi-Tec boot was found at the Ramsey crime scene, no information is available about a match or even a comparison between Helgoth’s boots and the crime scene footprint. (According to the Rocky Mountain News, the boot print was attributed to Burke Ramsey, who frequently played in the basement of his own home, so Helgoth’s ownership of Hi-Tec boots is probably irrelevant.)
Helgoth died of a gunshot wound in what was an apparent suicide on February 14, 1997. However, the gun was found on the right side of his body while the bullet apparently traveled from left to right. His friend and former employee, John Kenady, suspects Helgoth was murdered by his accomplices in the Ramsey killing. Kenady claims a tape recording exists of Helgoth confessing to the crime, but Kenady believes the tape is in the possession of Helgoth’s accomplices. Helgoth was dismissed as a suspect when his DNA did not match the DNA found on JonBenét’s underwear or under her fingernails.
John Mark Karr aka Alexis Valoran Reich – Kiddie Porn and False Confessions
John Mark Karr was a married schoolteacher in San Francisco, California, when he was accused of the murder of Georgia Lee Moses of Santa Rosa. When police searched Karr’s home, they found child pornography on his computer and arrested him. When authorities failed to bring a case against Karr, he moved to London, then to Bangkok, Thailand. In 2006, Karr sent emails to a documentary filmmaker claiming to have killed JonBenét Ramsey. The filmmaker, Michael Tracey, turned the emails over to the Boulder authorities, who had Karr returned to the US. However, Karr was cleared as a suspect when he was not a match to DNA found on JonBenét’s body.
Karr now lives at an undisclosed location as a transgender woman going by the name Alexis Valoran Reich.
Gary Oliva—Known Paranoid Schizophrenic Pedophile Obsessed with JonBenét
Gary Oliva was a thirty-eight-year-old trespasser who was arrested on December 12, 2020, on the University of Colorado campus. Inside Oliva’s backpack, police found a stun gun and a poem about JonBenét Ramsey. Oliva was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic and a convicted child sex offender who had tried to murder his mother by strangulation.
At the time of JonBenét’s murder, Oliva had been receiving services for the homeless at a church in Boulder located ten houses down from the Ramsey home. He was identified in video footage of the candlelight vigil held in Boulder on the one-year anniversary of JonBenét’s death. Oliva admitted to having an obsession with JonBenét, and police found a shrine to her in the place where he was living at the time of his arrest in 2020. Oliva claimed the stun gun in his backpack was a gift from a friend.
He was cleared by comparison of his handwriting to the ransom note and by comparison of his saliva with DNA samples found on JonBenét’s underwear.
To be continued…
While the entire book will be presented free of charge in these blog posts, for an easier reading experience, you can obtain the ebook version of all of Part 2 – Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey at no cost by clicking on the button below. You can also buy the entire anthology of Anthrax to Zodiac at Amazon.com.