JonBenet Ramsey murder: Ex-sheriff’s book reveals DNA didn’t match victim’s family members despite cops suspecting parents
BOULDER, COLORADO: After the police's account of six-year-old, JonBenet Ramsey's infamous 1996 murder raised questions about her parents who remained the prime suspects, more details have emerged in the case. The DNA evidence recovered under her fingernails and clothes did not match her family members, as evidenced by the recent admissions.
The information is included in a new book titled 'Lou and JonBenet: A Legendary Lawman's Quest to Solve a Child Beauty Queen's Murder' by former El Paso County sheriff and author John W. Anderson.
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Boulder police have ignored the DNA evidence
"For the past quarter-century, the Boulder police have ignored the DNA evidence that exonerated the Ramseys and could be used to identify her killer," Anderson argues in the book, Fox News reported.
The documents, the book cites the author collected were retrieved from Smit, a Colorado Springs detective, who came out of retirement in 1997 at the request of the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office to look into the JonBenet case. He, however, quit in 1998 citing frustrations Boulder Police Department’s insistence that JonBenet's parents could be suspects.
'A very dangerous killer is still out there'
"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," he wrote in a resignation letter 19 months after answering the DA's call, the outlet mentioned.
After Smit's death in 2010, his family shared thousands of his documents with a group that calls itself the JonBenet Ramsey Smit Family Team. They rediscovered the DNA lab results, sent from Colorado's Bureau of Investigation to lead Detective Thomas Trujillo on Jan. 15, 1997 – just weeks after the girl's death. "If the minor components from exhibits #7, 14L, and 14M were contributed by a single individual, then John Andrew Ramsey, Melinda Ramsey, John B. Ramsey, Patricia Ramsey, Burke Ramsey, Jeff Ramsey, John Fernie, Priscilla White, and Mervin Pugh would be excluded as a source of the DNA analyzed on those exhibits," the report reads.
Smit's copy of the DNA results may be the only in existence that are unredacted
Smit's copy of the DNA results may be the only in existence that are unredacted, with censored results having circulated online in the past, according to the outlet. The book is set to be published on February 28. The six-year-old was found dead in the basement of her family´s home in Boulder on December 26, 1996, bludgeoned and strangled, several hours after her mother called 911 to say her daughter was missing and a ransom note had been left behind.
Several theories have been floated since for potential suspects. Even though in 2006, 10 years after JonBenet's death, a 41-year-old schoolteacher named John Mark Karr confessed to killing the little beauty, however, lacking DNA evidence he was never charged.
Private investigator Ollie Gray claimed in 2016 that the child's killer was a local man, 26-year-old Michael Helgoth, whose family owned a junkyard on the outskirts of the city. Helgoth died of an apparent suicide two days later at his home.