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Post by Joanna on Apr 17, 2016 15:12:40 GMT -5
Has the JonBenét Ramsey Murder Case Been Solved?Her murder rocked the nation. On the day after Christmas, 1996, the brutally beaten, strangled body of 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey was discovered in the basement of her family’s picture-perfect home in Boulder, Colo. For the next two decades, police failed to find the killer, or killers, and the case – which CBS plans to revisit in a docu-series this fall – is still America’s greatest unsolved mystery.
Until now. After 20 years of exhaustive research, private investigator Ollie Gray, who was initially hired by the Ramsey family but continued the investigation on his own along with a dogged team of detectives, exclusively tells In Touch that he has finally solved the case that has baffled the nation. He says Michael Helgoth, a deeply troubled 26-year-old whose family owned a junkyard on the outskirts of Boulder, did it – but had help. “Based on what we know now, I believe Helgoth and his accomplices committed the crime. There’s no doubt about it,” says Gray, who takes In Touch inside his extensive case file. The most shocking new evidence? “There was a tape recording made by Helgoth,” Helgoth’s former employee John Kenady exclusively tells In Touch. “And in it, he said he killed JonBenét”
Kenady found out about the confession recently. “A family member told my friend about the tape, which was removed from Mike’s house after he died [in 1997],” reveals Kenady. “But apparently it was overlooked by police and returned to Mike’s family. I’m told someone close to him may still have the tape.”
The details of the murder are horrific. Gray and his fellow detectives, including the late Lou Smit, a legendary homicide cop, uncovered clues indicating that Helgoth and two to three accomplices went to the Ramsey home intending to kidnap JonBenét and found the little girl asleep under her Beauty and the Beast bed sheets and pink comforter. They shocked her with a stun gun, bound her wrists tightly with cord, gagged her with duct tape and brought her to the dingy, windowless basement room, where they used an expertly tied garrote to strangle her so tightly her hair ripped out, and at some point also bludgeoned her with a blunt object. “To someone with a twisted mind, she may have looked like a really good target,” former Denver private investigator Pete Peterson has said.
That description fits Helgoth. Kenady calls him a “sicko” who enjoyed torturing and killing junkyard kittens, owned a stun gun and was depressed about money. “In late November [1996], Helgoth had told me that he and a partner were going to make a great deal – and they each would bring in around $50,000 and $60,000,” says Kenady. He adds that around Christmas, “I will never forget that we were walking toward his house and he said, ‘I wonder what it would be like to crack a human skull.’ I was amazed. I thought that was a very odd thing to say.”
It was a very telling thing. “I read in the papers about a ransom note found at the Ramsey’s home demanding $118,000 – close to the amount that Helgoth told me he and his partner would make,” says Kenady, who also claims that Helgoth didn’t show up for work the day after Christmas – and was acting very withdrawn in the following weeks. “Then that JonBenét received a crack in her skull. I felt obligated to call the police.” Kenady – who has a questionable past himself after being sentenced to three years supervised probation in 1979 for sexual assault on a child – phoned the Boulder police department nearly 20 times. “No one would call me back,” he says.
They had their hands full. Police in the upscale community who responded to a frantic 911 call from JonBenét’s mom, Patsy, at dawn on Dec. 26 – in which she reported that her daughter was missing and she’d found a ransom note – mishandled the case from the start. The house was not treated as a crime scene, statements were not immediately taken from Patsy and her husband, John, and, most critically, police allowed John and a friend to search the premises. Eight hours later, it was the little girl’s father who found her body and carried her upstairs to the living room. “The crime scene wasn’t handled properly, [and] as a result, some evidence was compromised,” former police chief Mark Beckner revealed years later.
Michael Helgoth It got worse from there. JonBenét’s death was the only reported homicide in Boulder in 1996, and detectives, who had never worked a murder case before, soon found themselves overwhelmed. When shocking photos of the blonde, green-eyed kindergartner, her painted face and provocative gaze belying her tender age, emerged – along with since-disputed reports that she’d been sexually assaulted – the case became a national obsession. Police quickly focused on her parents. Patsy, a former beauty queen herself, and John, a prominent businessman, were later declared by police chief Beckner to be “under an umbrella of suspicion.” This, says Gray, caused them to ignore crucial information that should have been a priority lead,” Gray tells In Touch. “But I got the distinct feeling that the Boulder police had absolutely no interest in anything that took them away from the theory that John and Patsy Ramsey killed their daughter.”
Despite the focus on John and Patsy, authorities believed they didn’t have enough proof to arrest them. Under intense national scrutiny to crack the case, then-district attorney Alex Hunter enlisted Smit, who had solved more than 200 homicides, to come out of retirement. But the case took a turn when the veteran detective soon determined that the Ramseys had been incorrectly targeted, citing evidence that the assailant had come from outside the house. (The Ramseys were officially cleared by authorities two years after Patsy’s 2006 death from ovarian cancer.) On Feb. 13, 1997, Hunter announced publicly that they were close to catching the vicious killer, and played a psychological game by addressing the unknown killer. “The list of suspects narrows,” he said. “Soon, there will be no one on the list but you.”
Two days later, Helgoth was found dead of a gunshot wound in his home – and many saw it as a sign of his guilt. Helgoth’s DNA was tested years later, but it didn’t match the DNA that was found under JonBenét’s fingernails and on her underpants and pajamas, so police concluded he hadn’t done it. However, the DNA is not as crucial a clue as it was made out to be. Internationally recognized forensic expert Henry Lee said that the DNA on JonBenét could have come from many sources, including the factory in which her clothes were made. “Just because Helgoth’s DNA didn’t match doesn’t eliminate him as one fo the killers,” says an insider close to the investigation. “It could simply mean he didn’t touch her body, or that an accomplice could have played a role.”
One of Helgoth’s accomplices murdered him, says Kenady. Helgoth’s death was ruled a suicide, but the facts don’t add up. “The gun was fund on Helgoth’s right side, but the bullet hole goes across his body from left to right. It doesn’t make sense why someone would commit suicide in that manner,” says Gray. Adds Kenady: “He was murdered to keep his mouth shut.”
With JonBenét’s killer finally unmasked, according to Gray, it’s time to find out who else was involved. “If they could just find out who killed Helgoth,” says Gray, “it could lead police to his accomplices in her murder.” Source: Larry Haley, In Touch Magazine, April 25, 2016, issue.
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Post by jason on Apr 17, 2016 18:23:01 GMT -5
This is a load of horse hockey. The detective who came up with this dingbat theory started out working for the Ramseys, so in the beginning, he looked everywhere but at the people who were paying him. If he expects anyone to believe that not one, but three, men somehow got into the house in the middle of the night, went upstairs and took the kid out of her bed and went down to the basement and killed her, while still taking the time to write the "War and Peace" of ransom notes, he is off his freaking rocker!
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Post by pat on Apr 18, 2016 14:45:49 GMT -5
This is a load of horse hockey. The detective who came up with this dingbat theory started out working for the Ramseys, so in the beginning, he looked everywhere but at the people who were paying him. If he expects anyone to believe that not one, but three, men somehow got into the house in the middle of the night, went upstairs and took the kid out of her bed and went down to the basement and killed her, while still taking the time to write the "War and Peace" of ransom notes, he is off his freaking rocker!
I don't believe this story either because it doesn't make any sense. If their intention was to kidnap and hold her for ransom, why would they take her to the basement and kill her?
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Post by catherine on Apr 18, 2016 23:59:47 GMT -5
I don't believe for a second that three men could break into house and the police couldn't find any evidence of a break-in. If they went there intending to kidnap the girl for ransom, they would have already had a ransom note, they wouldn't have had to rummage through the house to find paper and then write a 2 1/2-page ransom when there were three other people in the house that could have come downstairs at any minute.
Burke did it. Why else has he always refused to give an interview and why has John Ramsey taken such steps to protect him?
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Post by kitty on Apr 19, 2016 14:24:53 GMT -5
Does anyone know if Kenady took a polygraph test?
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Post by aprillynn93 on Apr 20, 2016 11:55:38 GMT -5
I agree with what everyone else has commented here.
This story doesn't make any sense at all. So...Gray is basing all of this on what this Kenady said, who is hardly a credible witness, and a tape that may not even exist??? No way! Unless he is the worst PI in the history of PIs, which is entirely possible. 20 years of "exhaustive research" and this is what he comes up with? Unbelievable.
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Post by Kate on Apr 24, 2016 1:05:39 GMT -5
I don't understand parents who allow their young daughters to dress like strippers and take part in beauty contests. There are a lot of perverts out there and when a child dresses like JonBenet did, it sends the wrong message. Not that I believe it was a pervert that killed her, I still say that it was Burke.
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Post by tur4tle on Apr 24, 2016 17:00:28 GMT -5
I don't understand parents who allow their young daughters to dress like strippers and take part in beauty contests. There are a lot of perverts out there and when a child dresses like JonBenet did, it sends the wrong message. Not that I believe it was a pervert that killed her, I still say that it was Burke. I can't understand why people would say this does not make sense. After reading many murder mysteries, and the real killer being discovered, it makes perfect sense to me, that the Michael guy did it. distorted people can ask for ransom money and murder despite receiving it or not. It has happened many times. With the twisted mind of the Michael guy ( I keep forgetting his last name), it does not surprise me the way it actually happened.
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Post by jason on Apr 25, 2016 14:18:56 GMT -5
I can't understand why people would say this does not make sense. After reading many murder mysteries, and the real killer being discovered, it makes perfect sense to me, that the Michael guy did it. distorted people can ask for ransom money and murder despite receiving it or not. It has happened many times. With the twisted mind of the Michael guy ( I keep forgetting his last name), it does not surprise me the way it actually happened. How does it make sense that three adult males managed to get into a locked house that they'd probably never been inside before, in the middle of the night, and neither the police nor anyone else could find any signs of a break-in? Michael Helgoth may not have been the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, but according to the Kenady guy, there were two other men with him and at least one of them would have had sense enough to realize that you don't break into a house to kidnap someone without a plan. I still say that the entire scene was staged to cover up Burke's crime.
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Post by Graveyardbride on May 14, 2016 6:59:44 GMT -5
Burke and JonBenét Boulder Reporter Doubts Gray’s Theory
BOULDER, Colo. – JonBenét Ramsey became a household name when the strangled body of the 6-year-old beauty queen was found inside her home the day after Christmas nearly 20 years ago. The 1996 case was never solved and today, it remains a topic of conversation for conspirators, who think the police should take a second look at the facts.
Daily Camera reporter Charlie Brennan was interviewed by Today for its “Where Are They Now” series and said. “This is the most heinous crime that has occurred in the Boulder area for the 30 plus years that I’ve lived around here,” Brennan, who continues to cover the case for his paper, sued the Boulder district attorney’s office in 2013 for records showing revealing a grand jury had voted to indict John and Patsy Ramsey on a charge of felony child abuse resulting in death.
Ollie Gray, a private investigator initially hired by the Ramseys, continues to work the case to this day without pay. It is his contention that Michael Helgoth, who committed suicide in 1997, and two accomplices, killed JonBenét. (See article above.)
However, Brennan doesn’t agree with Gray’s theory. “When the indictments of John and Patsy Ramsey were revealed, it was shown that they had both been indicted as accessories to first degree murder,” he said. “However, neither of them had been indicted, so the question becomes who? And the only other person in the house that night that we know of was Burke Ramsey.” JonBenét’s brother is now 29-years-old and reported to be working in the technology field. [Emphasis added.]
The Boulder Police Department declined to be interviewed but issued a statement to NBC News indicating that two detectives are assigned to the case and that they “receive information on a regular basis that is evaluated.” The city’s district attorney also declined to be interviewed.
Patsy Ramsey died in 2006. Last year, John Ramsey spoke to Barbara Walters for her Discovery Channel special, American Scandals, saying, “At this point, it’s never totally in the past, you never get over the loss of a child, you move on,” he said.
Source: Eun Kyung Kim, Today News, May 6, 2016.
Note: Photo above shows Burke was significantly larger than his sister.
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Post by kitty on May 14, 2016 22:43:04 GMT -5
I've always thought that Burke did it. Now that I see how much bigger he was, I'm even more convinced that he killed her.
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Post by Kate on May 27, 2016 0:08:51 GMT -5
When people started posting about this case in our old groups, I started reading everything I could find about it and I've always thought that Burke was the killer. Even if there was unknown DNA found at the scene, if the parents were covering up for Burke, John could have gone out and gotten something that he knew a lot of people had touched and contaminated the scene.
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Post by kitty on Aug 29, 2016 2:29:41 GMT -5
I saw something on TV that Burke Ramsey was breaking his silence and would be interviewed by Dr. Phil on September 20th.
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Post by aprillynn93 on Aug 29, 2016 10:50:48 GMT -5
I saw something on TV that Burke Ramsey was breaking his silence and would be interviewed by Dr. Phil on September 20th. I heard that too. You know though that he is not going to implicate himself. I doubt any new, groundbreaking evidence will come out of the interview. Still I think it may be interesting to watch is demeanor.
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Post by kitty on Aug 30, 2016 3:47:31 GMT -5
I made a mistake about the Burke interview. It's on September 12th, not September 20th.
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