The father of JonBenét Ramsey has said he believes his daughter’s murder case can be solved if police accepted help from outside resources.
Speaking on Today earlier this morning, John Bennett Ramsey, 80, said he had appeared on the show to keep pressure on police to catch his daughter’s killer.
JonBenét was reported missing after her family found a ransom note demanding $118,000 for the child’s return inside their Boulder home on December 26, 1996.
The child’s body was later found by her father in the basement of the family’s upscale home, brutally beaten and strangled to death.
On Thursday morning, he said: ‘There’s been some horrible failures in that space for the last 25 years.
‘Hopefully there’s someone who knows something that would come forward, so we want to keep the case alive and in front of people.’
‘I believe it can be solved if the police accept help from outside their system, that’s been the flaw for 25 years.
‘For 25 years, the police department was contained, very poor leadership. Which is tragic, they had no experience.
‘The fellow investigating our case for 25 years was an auto theft investigator before he took the case over. It was a roadblock.’
Ramsey continued: ‘They wouldn’t accept help from the outside. We are hopeful now with the new police chief that he will exercise good leadership and accept help.
‘To my knowledge they have not worked with federal agencies, and there has been so much offered.
‘I won’t give up pressing the authorities to do their job until I see that they do their job. And that’s been the frustration for 25 years.’
Ramsey had appeared on the show ahead of a three-part Netflix documentary which is scheduled to release next week.
Director Joe Berlinger appeared on Today alongside Ramsey, saying: ‘This case can be solved. DNA technology was very different back then, the DNA was flawed.
‘Old items that were tested need to be retested. The one good DNA sample that we have is a mixture of Jonbenet’s DNA and a foreign male’s DNA.
‘There is now technology where those samples can be separated. I don’t understand this institutional intransigence to solving a case, [the police] need help.’
Putting his hand on John, he added: ‘This is the most brutalized man in American history, imagine losing your child in the way that child was lost.
‘Being blamed by the media in large part because the police fed false stories to the press, it was a wildfire of wrongful accusation.’
Ramsey added: ‘This cloud over our family’s name needs to be lifted. We’ve been maligned and our family reputation has been tarnished.
‘I’m going to do my best to clear that up for the sake of my children. Finding the killer is not going to change my life.
‘I’ve lost JonBenét, it’s not going to bring JonBenét back. I would like to close this chapter so we can be more at rest and at peace.
‘You don’t get over it. You’re different going forward, what we realized early on was we needed to be stronger now than ever for other children who are still living.
Detectives believe she was sexually assaulted and murdered the night before, on Christmas Day, through either a blow to the head or strangulation with a garotte.
Her death was ruled a homicide, but nobody was ever prosecuted.
The details of the crime and video footage of JonBenét from her beauty pageants propelled the case into one of the highest-profile mysteries in the US.
She’d been crowned Little Miss Colorado, Little Miss Charlevoix, Colorado State All-Star Kids Cover Girl, and National Tiny Miss Beauty.
The district attorney at the time of JonBenét’s death said her parents were under ‘an umbrella of suspicion’ early on.
Theorists have also questioned whether their son Burke, who was aged nine at the time of JonBenet’s death, killed his sister accidentally in a moment of rage, and his parents covered it up.
But tests in 2008 on newly discovered DNA on her clothing pointed to the involvement of an ‘unexplained third party’ in her slaying, and not her parents or Burke.
That led former district attorney Mary Lacy to clear the Ramseys of any involvement, two years after mom Patsy died of ovarian cancer in 2006, calling the couple ‘victims of this crime.’
Investigators had identified other suspects, and developed a theory about an intruder, or several intruders, entering the home and killed the pageant princess.
Among the suspects was convicted pedophile Gary Oliva, who allegedly confessed to the killing.
Others included the Ramsey’s housekeeper, as well as the man who portrayed Santa Claus at a holiday party the youngster attended.
Officials in 2006 announced that another suspect, John Mark Karr, had been arrested in Bangkok, Thailand.
He’d allegedly told an American investigator that he drugged JonBenét and sexually assaulted her before accidentally killing her.
But prosecutors dropped that probe after DNA tests failed to link him to the crime scene.
Police and officials in Boulder in December 2021 said they’d processed 1,500 pieces of evidence and analyzed nearly 1,000 DNA samples in their hunt for the killer.
Detectives have digitized all the samples of handwriting, fingerprints, and shoe prints collected over the years, and regularly check for DNA matches in the hopes of solving the case.
But dad John has questioned whether they’re doing their jobs properly. In May 2022 he called for an outside agency to take responsibility for DNA testing in the case.
The new series brings together archive footage of JonBenét walking gleefully around the family home and the frantic recording of mom Patsy’s 911 call declaring that her ‘daughter’s gone.’
The show focuses on errors by the police, including the failure to secure the house and the potential removal of evidence.
It features an interview with Burke, who describes the Ramseys as ‘just a regular family’ before the fateful Christmas.
The trailer shows John recalling how the ‘unbelievable’ tragedy played out. It also features a soundbite of an individual involved in the case, saying: ‘We’ve been ruling people out for the wrong reasons.’
‘Everybody should be back on the table. You have to go deeper,’ says the person.
The show also probes whether Patsy, herself a former beauty queen, made JonBenet a target for predators by encouraging her to dress up for her beauty contests.
She was buried in Marietta, Georgia, beside her mother, and her half-sister Elizabeth Ramsey, who died in a car crash in 1992.
Berlinger says the series takes aim at those who ‘played armchair detective for three decades, often callously pointing a finger at the very people who suffered such an unthinkable loss.’