Nearly 12 years after their daughter's death, new DNA evidence has cleared John and Patsy Ramsey.
Six-year-old JonBenet was found dead in her family's Boulder home on December 26, 1996. She had been reported missing early in the morning and was later found by her father in the family's basement. She had been strangled, beaten and sexually assaulted. Her mother said she later found a ransom note demanding $118,000 for JonBenet.
Early on in the case, the Boulder Police Department said the immediate family was "under an umbrella of suspicion," although they were never named as suspects. Despite repeated claims of innocence, the family could never escape the tabloids and rumors.
The new technology that cleared the Ramseys is called "touch DNA," and its method of sampling is called "scraping."
Basically, forensic scientists "scrape" places where there are no apparent stains of signs of DNA. Scientists used this method on JonBenet's long johns and found DNA that matched the profile found on her underwear.
Former Colorado Springs homicide detective Lou Smit was hired in 1997 by the Boulder District Attorney to assist in the investigation, although he resigned in 1998 frustrated with the investigation's apparent focus on JonBenet's parents.
Here is his response to the new DNA evidence: "No, it has not been a surprise to me. I always felt that the DNA would finally come to the surface and point at an intruder. We have known that there has been foreign DNA there for a long time, but now that this additional test confirms it, it shows there is foreign DNA and that it points strongly at an intruder," Smit said.
Colorado Springs private investigators John San Agustin and Ollie Gray have also been working on the case for nearly a decade.
"Back in 1999, Ollie Gray and myself were hired by the family to work pro bono, basically evaluating the evidence and trying to determine who killed their daughter, and so for the past nine years we have been working diligently," San Agustin said.
He said for the past decade he and Gray have known the Ramseys were innocent.
"Two weeks after the murder of JonBenet, in January 1997, a report revealed that none of the DNA that was found in the panties, or under JonBenet's fingernails matched anyone in the family," San Agustin said. "So they knew that all along, but for the past 10 or 11 years people in this country have believed that the Ramseys were responsible for murdering their little girl."
Both Investigator San Agustin and Gray said John and Patsy were targeted by the Boulder Police Department and the media.
"I think they had a tendency to preconceive who did what, when, where and why, and then they tried to prove it and could not," Gray said.
He said they have always believed there was an intruder because he said the evidence pointed in that direction.
"You take that grate that led into the basement, someone opened it and closed it, so you had evidence of the grate, marks on the wall, a hand print on a window adjacent to the one where the entry was made, footprints on a suitcase under the window," Gray said.
The two said they are confident a killer or killers will be identified in the near future. San Agustin said Patsy Ramsey went to her grave with the hopes her family would one day be exonerated.
"What Patsy would have said was 'John, Ollie, Lou I told you so. I told you we had nothing to do with it,'" San Agustin said.
(Click here to read the text of the Boulder DA's letter to John Ramsey.)
Neither investigator had talked with John Ramsey as of Wednesday afternoon, but here is what he had to say during an earlier interview: "The most important thing is that we now have very solid evidence, and that has always been the hope, at least in the recent past, that that would lead us to the killer eventually," John Ramsey said.
Now, the Boulder District Attorney's Office will run the new DNA profile through a national database in the hopes a match will turn up.
