A soon-to-be-published book by a former sheriff-turned-author reveals that DNA evidence purportedly exonerating the family of murder victim JonBenet Ramsey was kept under wraps for years.
John W. Anderson, a former El Paso County sheriff, has written a book about the infamous 1996 murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey. The book also delves into the investigation by Lou Smit, the former Colorado Springs detective who came out of retirement in 1997 to investigate the brutal beating and strangulation death of the child beauty queen, only to quit 19 months later.
Smit, who took on the case at the request of the Boulder County DA’s office, believed that the real culprit in the case was likely an intruder. He reportedly resigned over frustration with the local Boulder Police Department’s insistence that JonBenet’s parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, could be suspects, according to Fox News.
“At this point in the investigation, ‘the case’ tells me that John and Patsy Ramsey did not kill their daughter, that a very dangerous killer is still out there and no one is actively looking for him,” Smit wrote in his resignation letter.
Following Smit’s death from cancer in 2010, his family made his case files available to an investigative group that calls itself the JonBenet Ramsey Smit Family Team.
In sifting through the documents, the group came across the DNA lab results sent from Colorado’s Bureau of Investigation that were sent to the lead detective, Thomas Trujillo, less than a month after Ramsey’s murder.
The DNA report stated that if the minor components of DNA obtained from the evidence in the case all came from a single individual, then JonBenet’s immediate family and other named suspects in the case could all be excluded as the source of the DNA.
Anderson, a member of the investigative group, claims in his book that Boulder police suppressed this evidence and says that, according to Smit’s notes, the lab’s findings were not shared with the county’s prosecuting office until many months later.
When members of the press requested copies of the lab findings, they were only given heavily redacted copies of the report, making this critical piece of information unavailable.
Despite the lab’s findings, however, the Boulder police continued to suggest for many years that JonBenet’s parents were under an “umbrella of suspicion” in her murder, Anderson asserts in his book.
John and Patsy Ramsey were considered the primary suspects in their daughter’s murder for more than a decade.
The police finally cleared the family publicly of any wrongdoing in connection with the case in 2008, but by then, the collateral damage was done; in the eyes of the tabloids and members of the public, suspicion lingered over the family.
Patsy Ramsey carried the weight of public suspicion to her grave, dying of ovarian cancer in 2006. In 2016, CBS aired a documentary accusing JonBenet’s older brother, Burke, of her murder. He eventually won a defamation suit against the network.
John Ramsey has also felt the burden of the accusations against him.
“The fact that I am no longer under suspicion [by police] will never bring back my life,” John Ramsey told The Daily Beast in 2019. “Once your reputation is tarnished, it stays tarnished.”
Not all experts agree with Smit’s interpretation of the DNA report.
Dr. Michael Bade, a well-known forensic pathologist and a former medical examiner in New York City, said the document contains no “smoking gun,” adding that there were many ways that foreign DNA could have gotten under JonBenet’s fingernails and on her clothes.
“The DNA may have had nothing to do with who the perpetrator was,” he said, according to Fox News.
JonBenet Ramsey’s murder case remains unsolved more than 26 years after her death.
Anderson’s book, Lou and JonBenet: A Legendary Lawman’s Quest to Solve a Child Beauty Queen’s Murder, will be available February 28 and is a publication of WildBlue Press.