JonBenet Ramsey’s father received bombshell letter naming his daughter’s killer after Netflix documentary

In the wake of the explosive Netflix documentary about the decades-old case, JonBenet Ramsey’s father John has received a letter from a woman who claims her ex-husband is his daughter’s killer.

John Ramsey said he immediately followed up on the tip but has yet to hear from the mystery sender, he told the Daily Mail.

“Based on all this publicity, I recently got a letter from a lady who said, ‘My ex-husband is the killer and I’ve been holding this in as long as I can – please call me,'” Ramsey said Tuesday. , nine days before the 28th anniversary of the murder.

‘We reached out to her but she didn’t pick up the phone so I don’t know. We have shared at this point with a private investigator.’

Six-year-old JonBenet, whose beauty pageant photos would become almost instantly recognizable internationally, was found brutally beaten and sexually assaulted on December 26, 1996, in the basement of her family’s sprawling home in tony Boulder, Colorado.

Ramsey’s late wife, Patsy, had called 911 that morning to report finding a ransom note and her daughter missing; The police responded quickly, but the child’s body was not found until hours later during a search led by John himself.

Suspicion quickly focused on the family, who soon established a strained relationship with the Boulder Police Department.

A Netflix documentary released last month, Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenet Ramseydeals with how misinformation about the case was widely spread by law enforcement and the media.

John Ramsey has for years demanded answers from the Boulder Police Department, pushing in particular for the use of advanced DNA techniques and genealogical databases.

He is encouraged by the success of other cold cases, such as the uncovering of the Golden State Killer in 2018.

John, his late wife Patsy – who died in 2006 at the age of 49 – and their son, Burke, who was nine years old and at home at the time of the murder, were largely convicted in the court of public opinion, despite Boulder The DA officially cleared them and apologized in 2008.

Ramsey told DailyMail.com that any hope of new leads was welcome after nearly 30 years of battling misunderstandings and trying to prove his family’s innocence.

Solving the case, he said, is not going to change my life at this point—I just turned 81—but it will change my children’s lives, my grandchildren’s lives.

‘They need this cloud cleared, clarified and an answer. That is why we are pushing so hard to get an answer.’

Despite the possibility of a new suspect raised by the ex-wife’s latest letter, Ramsey said he remains skeptical — as his hopes have been dashed in the past.

A man, with a prominent role in the Netflix docuseries, seemed more than a slam dunk as a sinner when he confessed in long phone conversations to a university professor.

John Mark Karr was even extradited from Thailand to Colorado, but the DNA ultimately didn’t match — and his family insisted he had been in Georgia when JonBenet was murdered.

Other false confessions have also emerged over the years, including in the early days after the murder – when a man who claimed he had been hired to kill JonBenet called the Ramseys’ priest to confess and later also had discussions with John .

This man, who gave the alias ‘David Cooper’, first called the Ramseys’ priest and ‘said he was JonBenet’s killer and wanted to give himself up but wanted to talk to me first,’ Ramsey told DailyMail.com.

“I called him and talked to him for a while … and I asked him questions,” he said. ‘I was looking for information that he might have that no one else would have (from) reading the papers or watching television.

He said the man seemed to mention items from the house that ‘weren’t in the news that I know of’ so he thought the caller might be credible.

He informed the police, who – rather than investigating or reaching out – ‘were not interested in following up at all: Well, he’s going to turn himself in? We are here. Great.’

But when he had another phone conversation with the self-confessed killer, he said: ‘Well, I want to bring my family and it’s going to cost me $3,000 for plane tickets and I have no money . Can you send me the money?’

“And I wanted to do it because I figured, who knows, it’s worth a shot,” Ramsey said. And I mentioned it before I did; I told our lawyers what was going on. They said, ‘Oh no, wait, wait – don’t send him money. This doesn’t smell right.’

‘And I didn’t, and our investigators came back (and said), ‘Well, he’s a truck driver from Louisiana and he’s just trying to scam you out of some money. Forget it.’

“So that ended it.”

Ramsey has been highly visible in the intervening decades, and says media-friendly tactics have been ‘to keep pressure on the police, like, hey, we’re not going away. You’ve got to pull yourself together and do what you can, what’s possible to do, or we’ll keep hammering you.’

There has been significant department turnover since JonBenet’s murder; including several different police chiefs, with Chief Stephen Redfearn taking up the position permanently in September after serving as interim chief since January.

One of the original JonBenet lead detectives, who went on to lead the investigative unit before being disciplined and reassigned to patrol in 2022, also retired earlier this year, Ramsey noted.

Along with advances in DNA testing and the growing interest in the case, Ramsey said he remained hopeful the case could be solved — and he felt a new kind of energy was being injected into the effort by the Netflix docuseries, which remained in the platform’s top 10 most watched programs in the weeks after the premiere.

“Bureaucrats, politicians, are swayed by public pressure bigtime, and we sense that happening,” he said.

The Boulder Police Department released its annual update on the JonBenet investigation a month early “due to the increased attention to this investigation.”

“The killing of JonBenet was an unspeakable crime, and this tragedy has never left our hearts,” BPD Chief Steve Redfearn said in a statement the department issued on Nov. X.

‘We are committed to following up on every lead, and we continue to work with DNA experts and our law enforcement partners around the country until this tragic case is solved.’

Pressing on the case would ‘always be a priority’, it continued: ‘The claim that there is viable evidence and leads we are not pursuing – to include DNA testing – is completely false.’