JonBenet Ramsey’s father received bombshell letter naming his daughter’s killer after Netflix documentary
In the wake of the explosive Netflix documentary about the decades-old case, JonBenet Ramsey’s father John has received a letter from a woman claiming her ex-husband is his daughter’s killer.
John Ramsey said he immediately followed up on the tip, but is yet to hear back from the mystery sender, he told the Daily Mail.
‘Based on all this publicity, recently I got a letter from a lady saying, ‘My ex-husband’s the killer, and I’ve kept this inside for as long as I can – please, please call me,’ said Ramsey on Tuesday, nine days before the 28th anniversary of the killing.
‘We reached out to her, but she didn’t answer the phone, so I don’t know. We’ve shared at this point with a private investigator.’
Six-year-old JonBenet, whose beauty pageant photos would become almost instantly recognizable internationally, was found brutally beaten and sexually assaulted on December 26, 1996 in the basement of her family’s sprawling home in tony Boulder, Colorado.
Ramsey’s late wife, Patsy, had called 911 that morning to report finding a ransom note and her daughter missing; police responded quickly but the child’s body wasn’t found until hours later during a search led by John himself.
Suspicion quickly focused on the family, which soon established a strained relationship with Boulder Police Department.
A Netflix documentary released last month, Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey, addresses how misinformation about the case was spread widely by law enforcement and the media.
Six-year-old JonBenet, whose beauty pageant photos would become almost instantly recognizable internationally, was found brutally beaten and sexually assaulted on December 26, 1996
JonBenet’s father John (above with her mother, Patsy, who died in 2006), said he received the letter after the Netflix documentary aired
John Ramsey has for years been demanding answers from the Boulder Police Department, pushing in particular for the use of advanced DNA techniques and genealogical databases.
He is encouraged by the success in other cold cases, such as the 2018 unmasking of the Golden State Killer.
John, his late wife Patsy – who died in 2006 at the age of 49 – and their son, Burke, who was nine years old and home at the time of the killing, were largely convicted in the court of public opinion, despite the Boulder DA officially clearing them and apologizing in 2008.
Ramsey told DailyMail.com that any hope of new leads was welcome after almost 30 years of battling misconceptions and trying to prove his family’s innocence.
Solving the case, he said, is ‘not going to change my life at this point – I just turned 81 – but it’ll change my children’s lives, my grandchildren’s lives.
‘They need to have this cloud removed, clarified, and an answer. That’s why we’re pushing so hard to get an answer.’
Despite the possibility of a new suspect raised by the ex-wife’s recent letter, Ramsey said, he remains skeptical – as his hopes have been dashed in the past.
One man, featured prominently in the Netflix docuseries, seemed more than a slam dunk as a culprit when he confessed in lengthy phone conversations to a university professor.
John Mark Karr was even extradited from Thailand to Colorado but DNA ultimately did not match – and his family insisted he’d been in Georgia when JonBenet was murdered.
Other false confessions have cropped up over the years, as well, including in the early days after the murder – when a man claiming he’d been hired to kill JonBenet called the Ramseys’ pastor to confess and later had discussions with John, too.
This man, who gave the alias ‘David Cooper,’ first called the Ramseys’ pastor and ‘said he was JonBenet’s killer and wanted to turn himself in but wanted to talk to me first,’ Ramsey told DailyMail.com.
JonBenet’s body was found in the basement of the family home in Boulder, Colorado
The explosive new Netflix documentary paints a picture of unpursued leads and police misconduct
‘I called him and talked to him for a while … and I was asking him questions,’ he said. ‘I was looking for information that maybe he had that nobody else would have [from] reading the newspapers or watching television.
He said the man seemed to mention items from the house that ‘were not in the news that I know of’ so he thought the caller might be credible.
He informed police, who – instead of investigating or reaching out – ‘were not interested in following up at all: Well, he wants to turn himself in? We’ll be here. Great.’
When he had another phone conversation with the self-confessed killer, however, ‘he said, ‘Well, I want to bring my family with me, and it’s going to cost me $3,000 for airline tickets,and I don’t have any money. Can you send me the money?’
‘And I was going to do it, because I figured, Well, who knows, it’s worth a shot,’ Ramsey said. And I mentioned it before I did; I told our attorneys what was going on. They said, ‘Oh no, wait, hold on – do not send him money. This doesn’t smell right.’
‘And so I didn’t, and our investigators came back [and said], ‘Well, he’s a truck driver out of Louisiana, and he’s just trying to scam you out of some money. Forget it.’
‘So that’s where it ended.’
Ramsey has been highly visible throughout the intervening decades and says that media-friendly tactic has been ‘to keep pressure on police, like, Hey, we’re not going away. You’ve got to get your act together and do what you can do, what it’s possible to do, or we’re going to keep pounding on you.’
There has been significant department turnover since JonBenet’s murder; including several different police chiefs, with Chief Stephen Redfearn permanently taking up the position in September after serving as interim chief since January.
One of the original JonBenet lead detectives, who went on to head the Investigations Unit before getting disciplined and reassigned to patrol in 2022, also retired earlier this year, Ramsey noted.
John Ramsey, now 81, says solving the case won’t ‘change his life’ but he is hopeful for a solution after all these years
The mystery of JonBenet’s death continues to haunt the town where she died
Coupling that with advancements in DNA testing and the resurge of interest in the case, Ramsey said he did remain hopeful that the case could be solved – and he felt a new type of energy injected into the effort by the Netflix docuseries, which remained in the platform’s top 10 most viewed programs for weeks after its premiere.
‘Bureaucrats, politicians, are impacted by public pressure bigtime, and we sense that that’s happening,’ he said.
Boulder Police Department released its annual update into the JonBenet investigation one month early ‘due to the increased attention on this investigation.’
‘The killing of JonBenet was an unspeakable crime and this tragedy has never left our hearts,’ BPD Chief Steve Redfearn said in a statement the department posted on X in November.
‘We are committed to following up on every lead and we are continuing to work with DNA experts and our law enforcement partners around the country until this tragic case is solved.’
Insisting the case would ‘always be a priority,’ it continued: ‘The assertion that there is viable evidence and leads we are not pursuing – to include DNA testing – is completely false.’
