PEOPLE True Crimes: Cases That Shocked America

By PEOPLE

Fresh twists on notorious trials are the focus of True Crime Stories: Cases That Shocked America, a special edition of PEOPLE magazine.


A companion to the new Investigation Discovery network series People Magazine Investigates, this edition explores crimes that have remained a mystery for years, the 1996 murder of toddler pageant contestant JonBenet Ramsey, the disappearance of little Lisa Irwin from her Kansas home in 2011, and reports on the latest efforts to solve them. Also featured are the reasons behind new murder trials awaiting Robert Durst, the millionaire profiled on the HBO mini-series The Jinx, and Adnan Syed, the subject of the podcast Serial. ItÍs a new look at more than 25 crimes, and the people who have overcome unthinkable tragedies to help their communities in the name of lost loved ones.

• Language: English
• Publisher: People
• Release date: Nov 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781683305149

Book preview

20-YEAR MURDER MYSTERY

WHO KILLED JONBENET?

Inside the ongoing investigation of the little girl’s horrific death—and the search for her killer

LIFE CUT SHORT Fond of dancing and singing, JonBenét had a natural ebullience, a neighbor told People after the child was murdered.

Several minutes before 6 a.m. on Dec. 26, 1996, as the night holiday crew staffing Boulder’s emergency communications center was changing shifts, a dispatcher pushed the blinking light of a call button to hear the frantic voice of Patsy Ramsey: We have a kidnapping. Hurry, please. There’s a note left and our daughter’s gone. She’s 6 years old. She’s blonde. She’s 6 years old.

It was a 911 call that launched one of the nation’s most bizarre and enduring murder mysteries. JonBenét’s beaten and strangled body was found later that day in the basement of the family’s 6,800-sq.-ft. Tudor brick mansion, duct tape covering her mouth, a garrote tied tightly around her neck. Since then, there have been more than 140 suspects investigated (including JonBenét’s parents, Patsy and John Ramsey), more than 1,400 pieces of evidence reviewed, more than 50,000 pages of investigation documents generated, and still the case remains unsolved. After a four-hour CBS series focusing on the case aired in September and her long-silent brother Burke, now 29, finally opened up to Dr. Phil in a September interview, fascination with the case continues to build. As the 20th anniversary of JonBenét’s death nears, People examined the evidence, suspects—and enduring questions in this case, still an open investigation. Our goal, says Boulder police department spokeswoman Shannon Cordingly, continues to be an arrest.

Was there really an intruder?

A broken basement window, an unidentified footprint in the room where JonBenét’s body was found and trace male DNA evidence that couldn’t be linked to anyone in the family led investigator Lou Smit to surmise there had been an intruder in the Ramsey home. But Smit, who had been called out of retirement by the Boulder district attorney’s office three months after the murder because of his extensive 30-year experience investigating homicides, found himself at odds with the Boulder police, who pointed to dust and an undisturbed spiderweb around the window as evidence that no one had broken in. The intruder theory doesn’t make sense on the basis of the physical evidence, says Steven E. Pitt, a forensic psychiatrist hired by Boulder authorities. It just doesn’t add up. Eighteen months after joining the investigation, a frustrated Smit resigned, still insistent there was credible evidence of an intruder and a lack of evidence the parents are involved.

Did someone in the Ramsey family write the ransom note?

Written on a pad found inside the Ramseys’ home with a black Sharpie that also belonged to the family, the ransom note was the biggest oddity in the whole case, says Scott Robinson, a defense attorney and media pundit who has studied the investigation.

John Douglas, a former head of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit hired by the Ramseys to examine the case, theorized the note was written before the murder by an inexperienced, young perpetrator who borrowed lines from the movies Ransom (she dies) and Speed (Don’t try to grow a brain).

But police found that fingerprints on the note came from authorities who handled the document—and Patsy Ramsey. And Michael Baden, a board-certified forensic pathologist who consulted with both former district attorney Alex Hunter and Ramsey supporter Smit regarding the JonBenét case, says, The whole ransom note is, in my experience of 60 years, not a usual ransom note. I don’t think it was written by an outside stranger.

Were Patsy and John cleared as suspects?

Trace DNA samples of genetic material came from JonBenét’s fingernails, the crotch of her underwear, the waistband of her leggings, the wrist bindings and the garrote—made by the killer from a length of cord and the handle of one of Patsy’s paintbrushes broken in half. On July 9, 2008, Boulder district attorney Mary Lacy announced that the investigative teams had utilized a new methodology called touch DNA, where forensic scientists scrape a surface that has no observable indication of DNA in order to recover unseen genetic material. Lacy revealed they had tested the leggings JonBenét had worn over her underwear the night she was murdered and that an unknown male profile previously identified from the inside crotch area of the underwear matched the DNA recovered from the long johns.

The finding led Lacy to apologize in a letter to the Ramsey family. We intend in the future to treat you as victims of the crime, with the sympathy due you because of the horrific loss you suffered, she wrote.

But in his book Foreign Faction, the former lead investigator for the D.A.’s office A. James Kolar said there were additional traces of male DNA found on the cord and the paintbrush that Lacy didn’t mention. In fact, he said, there were six separate DNA samples belonging to unknown individuals that were found by the test. Trace amounts of DNA can get on places and clothing from all different, nonsuspicious means, says forensic pathologist Baden. There is no forensic evidence to show that this is a stranger murder. Forensic psychiatrist Pitt says, Lacy’s public exoneration of the Ramseys was a big slap in the face to Chief Beckner and the core group of detectives who had been working on the case for years. Former Boulder police chief Mark Beckner agreed in his 2015 online interview: Exonerating anyone based on a small piece of evidence that has not yet been proved to even be connected to the crime is absurd.

How was JonBenét’s brother Burke involved in the investigation?

Just 9 years old when his sister was slain, Burke was asleep on the second floor of the Ramsey home through the whole ordeal, his parents insisted. Police questioned Burke the day JonBenét was found, and in January 1997 he was interviewed by a child psychologist. A year later, in an interview monitored by the Ramseys’ attorney and a staffer from the D.A.’s office, Burke also talked to a Broomfield police officer. In 2010 police again approached Burke, giving him a card with a number to call if he wanted to discuss the case—he never used it. He has never been named a suspect.

In September 2016 Burke told television’s Dr. Phil McGraw that he did not kill JonBenét and that his parents had not covered it up: I know that’s not what happened. . . . Look at the evidence. Or lack thereof.

Outside of the family, who have been the main suspects in the case?

The mother of one of JonBenét’s friends recalled JonBenét being excited about a secret visit Santa had promised to make to her after Christmas Day, wrote Kolar in Foreign Faction. That led some in the D.A.’s office to believe a visit had been prearranged by Bill McReynolds, a man who sometimes worked as Santa Claus in the area and had been at JonBenét’s house two days before she died. Though unsettling coincidences—McReynolds’s daughter had been abducted 22 years before JonBenét’s death, and his wife wrote a play about a child molested in her basement and then murdered—were explored, DNA tests cleared McReynolds before his death in 2002.

Volunteer investigators have also kept the name of Michael Helgoth in the news as a suspect. Helgoth, a 26-year-old who reportedly worked in a salvage yard and committed suicide in 1997, allegedly wore Hi-Tec boots similar to those of a print found in the Ramsey basement.

A source with knowledge of the investigation tells People that the Boulder police department