Law enforcement opened a new investigation into the 26-year-old murder of JonBenét Ramsey, and her father had some harsh words for the Boulder Police over how they have handled the case.
The Boulder Police Department released an update on the ongoing investigation on Wednesday. They noted that investigators have received 21,000 tips and interviewed over 1,000 people over the years.
The department announced that the Colorado Cold Case Review Team would be investigating the homicide in 2023, and that private DNA labs would be looped in.
John Ramsey said he was not contacted by the police or the district attorney’s office about the renewed investigation and criticized the Boulder Police Department over the update.
“It’s like what they put out before, we’re doing everything we can, we’re trying really hard,” Ramsey told 9News.
The department noted that the available DNA evidence was “extremely small” and could be destroyed in its entirety if tested, and wouldn’t be analyzed until a “proven technology” could reliably test the limited forensic samples.
“Why aren’t those being tested? They should be. Right now. Waiting for the next generation of DNA technology is silly,” Ramsey remarked.
“Why in the world you wouldn’t test them now, given that the technology has advanced dramatically in 25 years, I don’t understand that.”
Six-year-old beauty pageant queen JonBenét Ramsey was found slain in her family’s Boulder, Colorado home on December 26, 1996.
She had been missing for seven hours and her parents found a ransom note in their home, before her body was found in their basement.
The child’s skull was crushed and she had been strangled to death, yet police fixated on her parents as their prime suspects for years.
They posited that her mother Patsy Ramsey had beat and strangled her over a bed wetting incident, then with the help of her husband John Ramsey, had staged the scene in the basement and wrote a ransom note to cover the murder.
A Colorado jury indicted the Ramsey’s in 1999 on “two counts each of child abuse” which they claimed ultimately resulted in her death, but the district attorney refused to prosecute over insufficient evidence.
The Ramsey’s weren’t cleared of suspicion until 2008, when DNA evidence advancements revealed that the trace evidence collected from JonBenét’s undergarments did not match any of her family members, and belonged to an unidentified male suspect.
The case was reopened in October 2010, but no new information was discovered. Patsy Ramsey died of ovarian cancer in 2006, without ever learning who killed her young daughter.
John Ramsey was asked if he believed the case would ever be solved.
“Not if it stays in the hands of the Boulder Police, no, I don’t, I really don’t,” he stated.