JonBenét Ramsey’s father, John Ramsey, still believes there’s a chance her murder will be solved nearly three decades later after a DNA breakthrough.
“We are encouraged that the police will finally use the FBI’s skills and resources to help solve our case,” John, 81, told The U.S. Sun on Thursday, December 26, which marked the 28th anniversary of JonBenét’s death.
John plans to have a sit-down with new chief of Boulder Police Stephen Redfearn about the case. They specifically will discuss recruiting the FBI to help and using new DNA testing to narrow down their suspect list.
“Suppose they now use cutting-edge DNA labs to develop a DNA profile in the proper format for familial genealogy research,” John noted. “In that case, we have pretty good odds of finding the killer’s identity.”
John and Redfearn are expected to meet in January to address assistance from advanced forensic experts, according to Today. DNA profiling involving genealogy work has proved successful in the past with high-profile cases such as that of the Golden State Killer.
The renewed interest in JonBenét’s case comes after Netflix released their three-part docuseries Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey. JonBenét was found dead at age 6 in 1996 in the basement of her house hours after she had been reported missing. Her official cause of death was asphyxia by strangulation associated with craniocerebral trauma, and her death was ruled a homicide.
Over the years, the Boulder police looked into many suspects and theories, including her brother, Burke Ramsey, and JonBenét’s parents, Patsy and John. A grand jury voted to indict the pair in 1999, but the indictment was never signed by the Boulder district attorney due to a lack of evidence. The couple were exonerated in 2008 and continued to advocate for JonBenét’s murderer to be found. (Patsy died of ovarian cancer in 2006.)
“What we are advocating for — and have been doing so for the last year or so, aggressively, is we know there’s five or six items that were taken from the crime scene. They were sent into a lab for DNA sampling and were not sampled,” John told the camera in the three-part doc. “We want those items sampled. We want what has been sampled to be retested. Then use the public genealogy database to look for — not only a match — but a similar relative. That’s been used very successfully in the last few years by police departments to find the killer of very old cold cases.”
A spokesperson for the Boulder PD told Us Weekly in a November statement that they are “aggressively investigating the case and pursuing all avenues.” Meanwhile, a source connected to the authorities shared with Us that there have been “new sets of eyes” on the case in an attempt to find “anything that could have been overlooked.”
“No one is off the table. This case is still wide open,” the insider noted. “We are after the truth, whatever that is. We are going to leave no stone unturned. The kindest thing we can do for the Ramseys is to solve this.”
