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Post by natalie on Nov 5, 2015 14:48:16 GMT -5
Jon Benet's Dad Protected Son from Murder Accusation
Rachel Bertsche, November 3, 2015
In a new interview with Barbara Walters, John Ramsey, the father of JonBenet, talks about how he and his wife shielded their son, Burke, from the headlines when the boy was being publicly accused of murdering his sister.
JonBenet Ramsey, who would have been 25 this year, was just 6 when she was killed in her Boulder, Colo., home in 1996. She went missing on Christmas morning, and her parents found a ransom note, indicating she was kidnaped. A few hours later, her father found her dead in their basement. During the ensuing investigation, which played out publicly over the course of more than a decade, her parents got the majority of the attention from police and the media. But her brother, Burke, who was 9 at the time of JonBenet’s death, was also in the spotlight. For years, his name was in headlines and his photo was splashed on the covers of tabloids, along with accusations that he killed JonBenet. But the Ramseys always claimed that Burke slept through the entire gruesome incident, not waking up until after the police had arrived at their house.
None of JonBenet’s family members were ever charged, and in 2008, they were completely cleared and no longer considered suspects. The Boulder district attorney even apologized to the family. To date, no one has been charged with the little girl’s murder.
While John Ramsey and his wife, Patsy – who died of ovarian cancer in 2006 – have given a number of interviews over the years, Burke, who is now a 28-year-old computer software developer, has never spoken publicly.
In this Monday night’s interview on Barbara Walters Presents American Scandals, John says he and Patsy tried to keep Burke from learning that tabloids were accusing him of the violent crime. “We tried to shield him from that,” John said. “Friends would ask us, ‘What can we do to help?’ We said, ‘Next time you go in the supermarket, call the manager over when you see our child’s photo on the front cover, and ask him to remove it.’ A lot of them did that.”
But in a 2008 interview with the Daily Beast, John says his son did see at least one paper while he was at the supermarket with his mother. “The headlines from a tabloid screamed out that Burke had done it,” John told the website. “She dropped her produce and rushed Burke out, but the damage had been done.”
In that interview, John admitted that he and Patsy were especially protective of Burke after their family tragedy. “We worried. We didn’t know who was out there. Someone had killed our daughter. All we wanted to do was protect Burke and give him a normal childhood,” he said. “I don’t let anybody I don’t know get near him. If anything happened to him, I wouldn’t survive it.”
Fran Walfish, a Beverly Hills-based child and family psychotherapist, says it was appropriate of the Ramseys to be protective of their son, who was a minor at the time of JonBenet’s murder. “Of course they would be protective, particularly when you only have one child left,” Walfish tells Yahoo Parenting. “Any child would need therapy and would likely be plagued with nightmares and fears, clingy-ness, and separation anxiety. The parents would require psychotherapy as well, in order to allow the healthy separation process to occur for the surviving child. Come college age, Burke had to move away, and he had to do it in a way that was healthy and doesn’t facilitate more guilt or suffering.”
Heidi Horsley, a New York-based psychologist and grief expert, says that the accusations against their son likely made it even harder for the Ramseys to move forward. “When parents have had a child die, they are very afraid that another one will be taken from them. They sometimes become overprotective because in their reality, children die,” Horsley tells Yahoo Parenting. “If their son is being accused of something he didn’t do and being torn apart in the media, he could end up in jail, and they could lose him too, to some extent. It’s terrifying to think, ‘I’ve lost one child – will I lose another?’”
John has confirmed to both the Daily Beast and People that he, his wife, and Burke all got therapy after JonBenet’s death. In a 2012 interview, John described Burke as a “pretty quiet” 25-year-old. “He’s certainly matured,” John told People. “He’s got a 401(k) plan and an IRA, and he did it all on his own.”
Neither Walfish nor Horsley is surprised that Burke has never spoken publicly about his sister’s death. Walfish says the young boy probably had feelings of anger and guilt, along with sorrow, about his sister’s death and the accusations made against him. “He probably thought, ‘How dare they falsely accuse me?’ Anyone who has ever been falsely accused of anything – even as small as if your brother or sister did something and Mom and Dad accidentally blamed you – understands that feeling of anger – of, ‘I didn’t do it, and there’s nothing I can do to be heard because they don’t believe me.’ That must have been horrible,” Walfish says. “I think that boy must have also felt so much guilt, even though he was innocent and did nothing. He probably felt guilty about having normal natural ambivalent sibling rivalry feelings that all of us feel toward a younger sibling.”
Horsley says Burke probably feels misunderstood, as sibling loss is often not given proper attention in the media. “There is no doubt in my mind he has suffered tremendously. His sister was supposed to be in his life for 80 to 100 percent of his life,” she says. “But when kids lose a sibling, the message they get is, ‘Be strong for your parents.’ The focus is on parents, not on siblings, so a sibling’s loss is often unacknowledged and minimized and overlooked, but it’s just as hard for them.”
We may never know what Burke has gone through in the years since his sister died. “He probably doesn’t want to talk – and good for him,” says Walfish. “He’s an adult and it should be up to him.”
But Horsley says she commends John Ramsey, who has gotten remarried since Patsy’s death, for continuing to speak publicly about his loss. “This is him saying, ‘We have nothing to hide. I have no problems talking about it, because I didn’t do anything and my son didn’t do anything,’” she says. “Society has this idea that grief begins and ends somewhere. We are not tolerant of grieving going on too long. John Ramsey is not only grieving his family, but the future he thought he was going to have. He’s saying, ‘I’ve had so many losses, I have survived, I have gone on to find hope and you can, too.’ I commend him for being out there and telling his story over and over.”
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Post by natalie on Nov 5, 2015 14:53:33 GMT -5
I read a few comments on this article that state:
"The police investigation was messed up from the beginning. The crime scene was there, the entry was made by the suspect in the basement window, and the footprints outside of that window was the suspect. The investigators blew it big time. The suspect entered another child's house before the murder of JonBenet, few weeks back. The little girl danced at the same dance studio where JonBenet went to. The mother found the suspect hiding in the girls room and he escaped through the window. The mother called the cops but they didn't do anything. This is BS; the lead investigator passed that up in the investigation. the suspect died few years after the murder in fight or something like that if I can recall."
"Actually, the suspect had entered the other little girl's bedroom and had began sexually assaulting her, when the girl's mother heard her screams. It was obvious that whomever the suspect was, he had been watching the girl and her family for some amount of time to know, when the father wouldn't be there. Lou Smit, a retired police detective who had been initially hired by the Boulder DA's office, noticed in a crime scene photo that the dust ruffle on one of the beds in the guest bedroom was turned up. No one in the Boulder Police Dept could explain why the dust ruffle was turned up. The area under the bed had ever been examined for DNA or fibers. Smit believed that the killer entered the Ramsey home, while they were at Fleet and Priscilla White's Christmas party that evening. Smit believed that the killer hid under the bed in the guest room until the Ramsey's came home and went to bed. Smit pointed out that the window in the guest bedroom had full view of the street and the Ramsey's driveway.
However, there were two sets of shoe prints in the mold on the floor of the "wine cellar", where JonBenet's body was found. One was a Hi-Tec boot print. None of the Ramsey's owned Hi-Tec boots. The other shoe print did not match any of the Ramseys or anyone who had access to the Ramsey's house, which means there were at least two persons involved in her attempted abduction and murder.
Smit also noticed two areas on JonBenet that looked like a stun gun had been used to subdue her. For some reason, those areas had never been tested during the autopsy.
A possible suspect was Michael Helgoth. In November of 1996, Helgoth told a co-worker, John Kenady, that he and a buddy of his were each going to make around $50K-$60K in late December. The amount the 'kidnappers' asked for in the ransom note was John Kenady didn't think much of the fact that Helgoth never got the money from the mysterious deal he said that he and his friend were supposed to be getting in December, until Helgoth allegedly committed suicide. Michael Helgoth allegedly committed suicide the day after Boulder DA Alex Hunter gave a scathing televised speech about how they were soon going to have the name(s) of the killer(s). Among items found in Helgoth's apartment by police were Hi-Tec boots, a stun gun, rope, duct tape, and a hat with the letters SBTC on it. The ransom note in the Ramsey case was signed: SBTC. There are more odd things about Michael Helgoth. Although his DNA was not found at the Ramsey's or on JonBenet, police believe that Helgoth is a possible accomplice. For more about Helgoth, just Google his name."
"The autopsy found skin under Jon Benet’s finger nails. The skin most likely came from her scratching her assailant. DNA from the skin did not belong to any of the Ramsey family. This information alone should be enough to put doubt in any reasonable person’s mind that this murder was committed by a family member."
I don't know anything about a little girl that was visited by someone and this is the first I hear of this theory. I know we have discussed JBR before and everyone thought the brother is guilty, but now that we have new members, maybe someone knows about this intruder theory and can shed some light.
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Post by madeline on Nov 5, 2015 16:50:06 GMT -5
In one of our old groups, we had a poll for everyone to vote for the person they thought killed her and Burke got the most votes. I still say he did it.
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Post by nosygrandma on Nov 5, 2015 23:22:02 GMT -5
A 9 year old boy. What the hell is wrong with you? What is wrong with this world when asses like you accuse a nine year old child of a sexual assault and murder of their own sister? I swore I wasn't going to post on this thread but I did anyway. I didn't think people got dumber than on the Bundy thread but you're even stupider which is real hard to do. Don't worry about booting me off I'm gone. Good riddance to you all. I wish I could say more but I can't because I won't stop and I want to go be pissed now. Astrology...because he changed majors...smdh
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Post by jane on Nov 7, 2015 1:14:13 GMT -5
A 9 year old boy. What the hell is wrong with you? What is wrong with this world when asses like you accuse a nine year old child of a sexual assault and murder of their own sister? I swore I wasn't going to post on this thread but I did anyway. I didn't think people got dumber than on the Bundy thread but you're even stupider which is real hard to do. Don't worry about booting me off I'm gone. Good riddance to you all. I wish I could say more but I can't because I won't stop and I want to go be pissed now. Astrology...because he changed majors...smdh
I read and hear things all the time that I don't believe, or that I disagree with, but people have a right to believe whatever they want to believe. I might think that someone is uninformed, or even nuts, but that doesn't give me the right to force my beliefs on others and I have enough decency to not attack others because they don't think like I do. I don't know whether the boy killed this little girl or not because I haven't read a lot about the case, but the very first sentence of the original post reads: "In a new interview with Barbara Walters, John Ramsey, the father of JonBenet, talks about how he and his wife shielded their son, Burke, from the headlines when the boy was being publicly accused of murdering his sister." This indicates that a lot of people suspected that he killed his sister and his parents took measures to protect him.
As for Ted Bundy, I don't know all that much about him either and I don't know what caused him to kill. What I do know is that Lee (graveyardbride) and I were neighbors for years and she knew him personally and they wrote to each other when he was in prison and when she was away and I picked up her mail, there would always be letters from him. So, unless you also knew him personally, then I would say that she has a better insight into what may have turned him into a killer than you do.
You're always hinting that you're older than everyone else here. Well, I'm in my mid-70's, so I doubt that you're a whole lot older than I am.
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Post by Sam on Nov 7, 2015 2:32:23 GMT -5
In one of our old groups, we had a poll for everyone to vote for the person they thought killed her and Burke got the most votes. I still say he did it.
I remember when we voted on that and I remember someone - I think that it was Jason - posting something about the War and Peace ransom note that most hand-writing experts said was written by the mother. I don't think that she would have wrote that note and they would have tampered with the crime scene unless they were protecting someone and the only person that they could have been protecting was their son.
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Post by kitty on Nov 9, 2015 2:45:20 GMT -5
I thought from the very beginning that Burke killed her while they were playing some kind of game. She wasn't sexually assaulted, but after she was found, her parents made it look like she was and they wouldn't have done that for anyone but their son. Children younger than 9 have killed other children. I've read about at least two boys who were only 8 who killed other children.
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Post by natalie on Nov 10, 2015 18:35:24 GMT -5
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Post by Joanna on Nov 10, 2015 22:20:27 GMT -5
 John, Burke and Patsy (1997).
On Reddit, Beckner’s responses shed a lot of light on some of the more complex and questionable parts of the case. However, he later told the Boulder-based Daily Camera newspaper that he had misgivings about the online chat, calling it a “misunderstanding and naivete on my part.” Because Beckner’s comments have been deleted, it’s impossible to link to individual responses, but all his answers can be found in a cached version of the thread at extras.denverpost.com/jonbenetAMA.html
1. What happened physically to JonBenét?
Beckner: “We know from the evidence she was hit in the head very hard with an unknown object, possibly a flashlight or similar type item. The blow knocked her into unconsciousness, which could have led someone to believe she was dead. The strangulation came 45 minutes to two hours after the head strike, based on the swelling on the brain. While the head wound would have eventually killed her, the strangulation actually did kill her. The rest of the scene we believe was staged, including the vaginal trauma, to make it look like a kidnaping/assault gone bad.”
2. His personal theories on who did it.
Beckner: “I have avoided saying who I believe is responsible and let the facts speak for themselves. There are several viable theories.”
3. Patsy Ramsey’s infamous handwriting test.
Context: The day JonBenét was found dead, her mother Patsy claimed she found a 2½-page handwritten ransom note in their home, demanding $118,000 for JonBenét’s return. The police later determined the note was written on paper from a notebook in the Ramsey residence. The Ramseys underwent handwriting analysis to determine whether they could have written the note. John Ramsey’s sample seemed to show he didn’t write it, but Patsy Ramsey’s sample was labeled “inconclusive” and police at the time said they would pursue “unrehearsed” samples to examine. However, in the letter to John Ramsey, District Attorney Mary Lacy mentioned that she did not consider anyone in Ramsey’s immediate family to be under any suspicion in the commission of the crime.
Question: “When Patsy wrote out the sample ransom note for handwriting comparison, it is interesting that she wrote “$118,000 out fully in words (as if trying to be different from the note). Who writes out long numbers in words? Does this seem contrived to you?”
Beckner: “The handwriting experts noted several strange observations.”
4. The uniqueness of the 2½-page ransom note.
Beckner: “The FBI told us they’d never seen a 2½-page ransom note. No note has ever been written at the scene and then left at the scene with the dead victim at the scene, other than this case.”
5. Whether the crime scene was mishandled.
Context: The investigation was plagued with claims the crime scene at the Ramseys’ house was not preserved properly, and that unauthorized individuals were allowed to move about the crime scene while the investigation was in progress.
Beckner: “Yes, the crime scene was not handled properly and this later affected the investigation. [The Ramseys’] position in the community may have had something to do with decisions made that day, but I think the primary reason was a perfect storm-type scenario. It was the Christmas holiday and we were short staffed, we faced a situation as I said earlier that no one in the country had ever seen before or since, and there was confusion at the scene … As a result, some evidence was compromised. ... Yes, after that initial day, we felt pressure from the DA’s office not to push too hard on the Ramseys. This was a constant source of frustration and much could be written about this and the reasons for it.”
6. Whether the motive for the killing/assault was purely sexual.
Context: A 1999 grand jury report indicated there was reason to believe JonBenét was “sexually assaulted.” Details from an autopsy and comments from some experts, including one cited in a 1997 Vanity Fair article indicated the girl had abnormal genital injuries or conditions that could suggest sexual contact of some sort prior to the day of her death.
Beckner: “It just didn’t seem to fit the totality of the circumstances. Remember, she was hit on the head first, hard enough to render her unconscious. Then there was the staging of a kidnaping. Why do that if the motive is purely sexual?”
7. What he thought about the John Mark Karr confession.
Context: John Mark Karr was a father and teacher residing in Thailand who, in 2006, claimed he was sexually involved with JonBenét at the time of her death and that her killing was accidental. However, DNA tests confirmed he was not a match to DNA found in the girl’s underwear, and there was no reason to believe he was anywhere near the scene.
Beckner: “My gut reaction was that [District Attorney] Mary Lacy did not know the facts of the case and was making a big mistake. His confession, once they shared it with us, did not match the evidence at the scene. After she asked for our help in proving he did it, we knew in about 18 hours he was not the guy. We were able to confirm he was not even in Colorado at the time by just doing some routine checking and then obtained photos of him in Georgia at the time. The DNA test, which she thought would prove he did it, proved her wrong.”
8. How the case affected his career.
Beckner: “For me, it actually helped propel me to the chief’s position once Tom Koby left. It also gave me some credibility in the community based on a different approach I took with the media. I was more open and forthcoming with the media and I think that helped.”Source: Fox8 Cleveland, February 26, 2015. |
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Post by aprillynn93 on Nov 11, 2015 14:29:30 GMT -5
"Beckner: “We know from the evidence she was hit in the head very hard with an unknown object, possibly a flashlight or similar type item. The blow knocked her into unconsciousness, which could have led someone to believe she was dead. The strangulation came 45 minutes to two hours after the head strike, based on the swelling on the brain. While the head wound would have eventually killed her, the strangulation actually did kill her. The rest of the scene we believe was staged, including the vaginal trauma, to make it look like a kidnaping/assault gone bad.”
These people are very, very sick, and they still walk free. To be able to do that to your daughter after finding her body...just awful beyond words.
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Post by catherine on Nov 11, 2015 17:55:04 GMT -5
A 9 year old boy. What the hell is wrong with you? What is wrong with this world when asses like you accuse a nine year old child of a sexual assault and murder of their own sister? I swore I wasn't going to post on this thread but I did anyway. I didn't think people got dumber than on the Bundy thread but you're even stupider which is real hard to do. Don't worry about booting me off I'm gone. Good riddance to you all. I wish I could say more but I can't because I won't stop and I want to go be pissed now. Astrology...because he changed majors...smdh
I think that Lee had you in mind when she did the November 6, 2015 Thought for the Day: "Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto. – Stephen King"
Of course the little bastard killed his sister and it's obvious to anyone who reads your arrogant, sarcastic comments that you're a bitch with a limited vocabulary!
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Post by kitty on Nov 12, 2015 20:56:34 GMT -5
"Beckner: “We know from the evidence she was hit in the head very hard with an unknown object, possibly a flashlight or similar type item. The blow knocked her into unconsciousness, which could have led someone to believe she was dead. The strangulation came 45 minutes to two hours after the head strike, based on the swelling on the brain. While the head wound would have eventually killed her, the strangulation actually did kill her. The rest of the scene we believe was staged, including the vaginal trauma, to make it look like a kidnaping/assault gone bad.” These people are very, very sick, and they still walk free. To be able to do that to your daughter after finding her body...just awful beyond words.
Parents will do strange things to protect their children. What the parents did was sick, but it's Burke walking around free that bothers me.
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Post by pat on Nov 14, 2015 18:57:33 GMT -5
I've always thought that Burke did it. If he didn't do it, why were so many people accusing him and why does he still refuse to be interviewed about the murder of his sister?
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