JonBenét Ramsey's Dad John Ramsey Says DNA in 27-Year Cold Case Still Hasn’t Been Tested
JonBenét Ramsey’s father John Ramsey is still looking for answers 27 years after his daughter’s untimely death.
In fact, John alleges in a new TV series that police never tested DNA found on the weapon used to murder his then-6-year-old daughter in their Colorado home.
“I don't know why they didn't test it in the beginning,” Ramsey tells host Ana Garcia in a preview for the Sept. 9 episode of True Crime News. “To my knowledge it still hasn’t been tested. If they're testing it and just not telling me, that’s great, but I have no reason to believe that.”
E! News reached out to the Boulder Police Department for comment on John’s claims, but due to the fact that JonBenét’s case is an active and ongoing investigation, the department said it is unable to answer specific questions about actions taken or not taken.
JonBenét, the youngest child of John and Patsy Ramsey was found sexually assaulted, beaten and strangled with a garrote in her family’s home the day after Christmas in 1996 almost eight hours after Patsy—who died in 2006—had frantically called the police to report her daughter had been kidnapped.
The case, which garnered national attention at the time, has continued to live on in infamy and has been the subject of numerous TV specials trying to get to the bottom of what led to JonBenét’s death.
In fact, in 2016, JonBenét's brother Burke Ramsey broke his silence on the case, speaking to Dr. Phil McGraw, defending himself ahead of the CBS' two-part special The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey, which alleged that he could have been the one to kill his sister when he was 10 years old.
Burke further responded to the CBS show by filing a $150 million defamation lawsuit against one of its experts Dr. Werner Spitz, calling the forensic investigator a "publicity seeker" who "once again interjected himself into a high-profile case to make unsupported, false, and sensational statements and accusations."
In December 2016, Spitz filed a motion for the lawsuit to be dismissed with prejudice, according to documents obtained by E! News at the time, defending his Constitutional right to hypothesize and express his opinions about the case.
In the documents, Spitz’s lawyers wrote that “the First Amendment protects this speech on a matter of immense public concern" just as the many other "people [who] have offered various and contradictory hypotheses and theories about what happened."
The case was settled in 2019. Burke's lawyer spoke out shortly after the settlement was reached at the time, tweeting, “After handling many defamation cases for them over the past 20 years, hopefully this is my last defamation case for this fine family.”
But while the case has yet to be solved, officials in Boulder have made it clear they are still trying to bring justice to JonBenét. In a statement released ahead of the 25th anniversary of JonBenet's death in 2021, the Boulder PD said that with the major advancements in DNA testing, they had updated more than 750 samples using the latest technology and still hoped to get a match one day.
And as the unanswered questions have continued to linger, many who’ve investigated the tragedy have wondered whether the case will ever be solved.
"There's still a good chance we'll never know," journalist Elizabeth Vargas, who hosted A&E's 2019 special Hunting JonBenét's Killer: The Untold Story, previously told E! News. "I don't think it's possible one person did this. That's my own opinion, so that means two people, and that means at least two people out there know what happened."
She added, "It's incredible to me that those people have kept that secret, that people they probably told in their lives, because that's a hard secret to keep, that nobody has told. We have all sorts of cold cases that were solved decades later, and I think this could be one of them."
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