ON Boxing Day 1996, investigative journalist Paula Woodward received a call that would change her life.
A six-year-old girl in the US town of Boulder, Colorado, just 30 miles from the TV station Paula worked for, had been found dead in the most brutal and sinister of circumstances.
It began as a suspected kidnapping case, after JonBenét Ramsey’s mother woke and found a three-page ransom note in the kitchen of the family’s mansion – and no sign of her child.
The note, addressed to the girl’s father, said she’d been taken, and demanded $118,000 in exchange for her safe return.
If the family failed to follow instructions, the kidnappers threatened to behead her.
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However, around seven hours later, it turned into a murder investigation, after the body of the little girl was discovered by her father in the basement cellar of their home, with a rope around her neck.
“There were never murders in Boulder, so it was instantly unusual and compelling that this had happened in a small, quiet town,” remembers Paula.
“Once you started on the JonBenét Ramsey case, you didn’t get off easily. It hooked you in.”
Twenty-six years on, little JonBenét’s killer has never been brought to justice, but Paula, now 67, has refused to give up on what has become one of America’s highest-profile cold cases – and there is now fresh hope that it may finally be solved.
Late last year, Boulder Police Department announced a case review was being launched, with a team of professional investigative, analytical and forensic experts re-examining evidence using new techniques in a bid to finally catch JonBenét’s killer.
In the days following the murder, horrific details began to emerge.
JonBenét had been strangled with a garrotte fashioned from white rope and a broken paintbrush handle taken from the house.
Her wrists were tied and black duct tape covered her mouth, while her favourite Barbie nightgown lay on the concrete floor nearby.
There was a fracture to her skull, and the cause of death was given as asphyxiation and blunt trauma to the head, while she also had bruises and abrasions on her shoulders, legs and feet.
According to an autopsy, she was the apparent victim of sexual abuse – DNA samples were found on her underwear and long johns, which tests have shown don’t match her parents or family friends, and instead belong to an unidentified male.
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Despite this, at the time, police still suspected members of the Ramsey family.
The only people thought to be in the house the night she died were her father John, then 53, a wealthy entrepreneur, her mother Patsy, 39, a former beauty queen, and her nine-year-old brother Burke.
With no concrete leads or suspects, the public hunger for details was fed with rumour and misinformation which, Paula alleges, came directly from leaks within Boulder Police Department, which was small and had no homicide unit.
Public fascination was further fuelled because JonBenét had been a frequent contestant in child beauty pageants.
Within days of her murder, front pages and news bulletins were full of photos of her in full make-up, her blonde hair curled, posing for the camera.
Paula, who at the time of the murder had been a senior investigative TV reporter for many years and had high-level contacts within police departments across Colorado, says she quickly realised the police in charge of the investigation were making mistakes.
An initial, unyielding search of the house by police was at best superficial.
And before JonBenét’s body was discovered in the basement, numerous friends and neighbours had been allowed into the house to support the family, trampling through what should have been treated as a crime scene and potentially contaminating evidence.
When JonBenét was finally found, distraught John picked his daughter up and removed her from the basement cellar where she’d been tortured and murdered, once again disturbing forensic evidence.
“Boulder police immediately started making mistakes. When word came in from the house that her body had been found, one officer said to another: ‘I knew it, the parents did it,’” says Paula.
“That is astounding – investigators are supposed to follow the evidence which leads them to a suspect, rather than decide on a suspect and then look for evidence to support that, which was happening there.”
Both the Denver Police Department and the FBI offered to help with the case, but Boulder Police Department declined.
Local officers tried to build a case against the family for several years. One outlandish theory was that Patsy killed JonBenét because she wet the bed.
Another was that Burke murdered his sister because she stole some pineapple he was eating and then his parents attempted to cover it up.
There was no evidence JonBenét had ever been abused by anyone in her family. In fact, experts and witnesses said they had only ever been loving and caring.
In 1997, famous homicide detective Lou Smit came out of retirement and was hired as a special investigator by Boulder district attorney’s office, which is responsible for prosecuting crimes in the area.
The more he investigated, the more he began to doubt the accusations made against the Ramsey family.
Instead, he became convinced JonBenét had been murdered by an intruder who had entered the house and lain in wait in a nearby bedroom, before slipping into JonBenét’s room while everyone was sleeping.
He'd then carried her into the basement, where he abused and murdered her. The house was so vast that an intruder who had studied the layout could easily have hidden in a spare room.
Four months after the murder, Paula became one of the only reporters at the time to interview bereaved parents John and Patsy. “They were obviously still shattered from their daughter’s death – you could see it in their eyes,” she recalls.
Paula, who has published two books on the case, also interviewed Lou Smit who, she says, was treated like a pariah by some in the police department because he disagreed with their lines of inquiry.
In September 1998, he resigned from the case, saying: “They [Boulder police] have been going in the wrong direction and have been since day one of the investigation. Instead of letting the case tell them where to go, they have elected to follow a theory and let their theory direct them rather than allowing the evidence to direct them.”
Writing in his letter of resignation, he stated: “The case tells me there is substantial credible evidence of an intruder and lack of evidence that the parents are involved.”
However, despite resigning, Lou continued to investigate and developed a database of suspects – his struggle to uncover the truth was to become the subject of a book, Lou And JonBenét: A Legendary Lawman’s Quest To Solve A Child Beauty Queen’s Murder, published last month by former Colorado sheriff John Wesley Anderson, one of the police officers who helped investigate the crime.
Sadly, in June 2006, Patsy Ramsey died of ovarian cancer aged 49, without ever finding out who killed her daughter.
Just two months later, an American school teacher, John Mark Karr, was arrested in Thailand after he claimed he was JonBenét’s killer, but DNA ruled him out.
Over the years, other suspects were identified, investigated and discounted.
In 2016, several documentaries aired to commemorate the 20th anniversary of JonBenét’s death.
In one, broadcast on the CBS network, a panel of experts concluded that her brother Burke, who has stayed out of the public eye and is now 36, was the murderer.
A $750million lawsuit for defamation was launched, and Burke won an undisclosed out-of-court settlement.
In a rare interview in 2016, he said: “I know people think that I did it, that my parents did it. I know that we were suspects.”
Boulder Police Department claims that its detectives have investigated leads from more than 21,000 tips, letters and emails, and have travelled to 19 American states to interview or speak with more than 1,000 individuals potentially connected to the crime during the past 26 years.
But will a cold case review finally unlock the secret to this infamous murder?
Many are doubtful.
In December last year, an internal Boulder Police Department audit found that cases had not been investigated fully.
One of the five officers disciplined following the review was Commander Thomas Trujillo, a former head detective on the case.
In a Fox documentary aired in the US last year, John Ramsey – now 79, remarried and living in Michigan – described his daughter as “a basket of energy” and recalled: “She was very extroverted and loved to perform.
“She loved to put on little plays at home with her friends.
“She was intuitive and very mature for her age.
“The pain of losing her is intense, but I’m grateful I had her in my life for six years.”
In May last year, an online petition named Justice for JonBenét was launched, and is calling for the case to be moved from Boulder Police to an independent agency.
Meanwhile, campaigners continue to pressure Boulder Police Department to do more DNA testing on evidence from the original crime scene in an attempt to uncover more samples that can then be tested against genealogy databases.
Although this technique may prove to be time-consuming, it has been successful in solving several cold cases.
A team of citizen sleuths, which includes ex-cops and experts, and is also headed by Lou Smit’s daughter Cindy Marra, is working its way through the detective’s list of suspects, which he bequeathed to his family and former colleagues before he died of colon cancer in 2010.
Cindy’s grown-up daughters, Lexi and Jessa, are also involved, and hosted the 2020 three-part podcast The Victim’s Shoes, which used their grandfather’s taped memos and JonBenét case notes to establish the evidence of the case and further debunk the accusations against the Ramsey family.
One of the main aims is to encourage Boulder Police Department to retest any stored physical exhibits for more DNA.
Writing in an email to Fabulous, Cindy said: “There’s a lot of physical evidence being held by Boulder Police Department.
“Some of it was sent in for testing, but some was not.
“Either way, it has not been tested, to our knowledge, since 2007.
“All of the physical evidence needs to be reviewed and sent to a cutting-edge lab, which has refined the process of extracting even minute quantities of DNA.
“Then, a genealogy expert could use this to search databases for possible suspects.”
There is hope that with renewed impetus from the cold case review – and the relentless efforts of Cindy’s team – answers will eventually emerge.
For Paula, however, her greatest and most steadfast hope is that, amid the accusations, misinformation and rumours that surround this infamous and disturbing case, the little girl who was so tragically murdered will be remembered – and that the killer is caught at last.
“I think JonBenét has been lost in this process. I don’t know if she has a voice any more, and that’s very sad,” she says.
“The key will be the DNA evidence.
“I think there’s a good chance that the case will finally be solved if the right tests are done – JonBenét deserves some justice.”
