Court Documents Released in JonBenet Ramsey Case

 



In a shocking new development in the JonBenet Ramsey case, just-uncovered court documents reveal that a 1999 grand jury wanted to indict the late tot’s parents John and Patsy on charges linked to child abuse resulting in death, and being accessories to a crime three years after their 6-year-old daughter was bludgeoned and strangled in the basement of her family's house on Christmas Day.

The parents, the grand jury said, “did … permit a child to be unreasonably placed in a situation which posed a threat of injury to the child’s life or health which resulted in the death of JonBenet Ramsey. But prosecutors reportedly refused to go forward on the case, according to the Boulder Daily Camera newspaper.

Former Boulder County District Attorney Alex Hunter declined to sign the indictment, believing he could not prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt, the Daily Camera reported.

"I and my prosecution task force believe we do not have sufficient evidence to warrant the filing of charges against anyone who has been investigated at this time," Hunter told reporters in October 1999.

"Child abuse resulting in death" is a Class II felony punishable by up to 48 years in prison, according to the Daily Camera.

"We didn't know who did what," a juror told the Daily Camera on the condition of anonymity. "But we feel the adults in the house may have done something that they certainly could have prevented, or they could have helped her, and they didn't."

Hunter, who left his post in 2008 after 28 years as district attorney, declined to discuss the grand jury's decision, according to the Daily Camera. But in a 2001 interview with NBC News, Hunter said he had no regrets about his decision not to charge anyone.

"I have enough people that I respect that have said to me, 'You know, you made a tough call, you made a call the public didn't like. But you were true to the law, you were a good prosecutor, and that's plenty for me.'"

Lin Wood, John Ramsey's attorney, backed up Hunter's decision in a statement to NBC News.

"The DNA tests performed after the time of the Boulder grand jury not only prove the Ramseys to be innocent and the grand jury wrong, they also make D.A. Alex Hunter a hero who wisely avoided the miscarriage of justice," Wood said.

Patsy Ramsey died of ovarian cancer in 2006. The couple and their older son, Burke Ramsey, were exonerated in the case in July 2008, even though they were never formally charged in connection with JonBenet's death.

"To the extent that we may have contributed in any way to the public perception that you might have been involved in this crime, I am deeply sorry," former Boulder County District Attorney Marcy Lacy wrote in a letter to John Ramsey in 2008. "No innocent person should have to endure such an extensive trial in the court of public opinion."

A former lead investigator in the still-unsolved JonBenet Ramsey murder case has come out with a book explaining his theory that there never was an intruder. James Kolar claims in his book, "Foreign Faction: Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet?" that the evidence raised questions about the intruder theory that eventually led to JonBenet's family being cleared.
"I was kind of discouraged they didn't want to pursue things I thought should be looked at," Kolar said. "I was kind of discouraged the work I had done was not being received well," Kolar said.

The title of Kolar's book correlates with the ransom note found in the Ramsey's home which claimed to be written by a "small foreign faction." Kolar says he'd been hoping the case would have been solved by now and that his book could have been written from that vantage point. The former detective had access to 60,000 pages of evidence, including crime-scene video and photos, interviews with individuals related to the case and forensic reports.

Among the contradicting evidence Kolar points out in his book are fully intact cobwebs stretching over the window the intruder allegedly entered, more DNA evidence found at the crime scene including DNA on the garrote cord used to strangle the young girl. In his book, Kolar also writes about a child's toy that was found that may have been responsible for some of the abrasions on JonBenet's body, rather than a stun gun which had been considered a possible source of the injuries to her back, according to The Daily Beast.

"By the time I parted company with the D.A.'s office, I was convinced that there was no significant possibility that an intruder had been involved in the death of JonBenet," Kolar writes in his book.