DNA evidence that was gathered under JonBenét Ramsey’s fingernails and from her underwear did not match her parents or other people close to the family, according to newly uncovered documents.
Despite the apparent lack of proof, police in Colorado for years continued insinuating that the parents of the murdered child pageant queen were “under an umbrella of suspicion,” according to a new book on Lou Smit, the late Colorado investigator who tried to solved JonBenét’s murder until his death in 2010.
“Lou and JonBenét: A Legendary Lawman’s Quest to Solve a Child Beauty Queen’s Murder,” by John Anderson, is set to be published on Feb. 28.
JonBenét Ramsey was six years old when she was reported missing by her mother, Patsy Ramsey, from the family’s home in Boulder on the morning of Dec. 26, 1996.
Hours later, the girl’s father, John Ramsey found her body in the basement. An autopsy revealed she had been strangled and suffered a blow to the head.
John and then-wife Patsy’s initial reluctance to cooperate with the police, as well as evidence including a bizarre ransom note in Patsy’s handwriting found at the scene, drew the attention of both the investigators and the media.
It was not until 2008 that JonBenét’s dad John and mom Patsy – who died of cancer two years earlier — were formally cleared as suspects, after DNA from an unknown person was discovered on the girl’s pajama pants.
“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, a former sheriff, writes in his new book about the unsolved murder that has captivated the nation.
The crucial Jan. 1997 DNA report came from Smit’s personal files. The document states that evidence found under JonBenét’s fingernails and on her underwear did not match members of her family, family friends who came by the house after her disappearance, nor the Ramsey’s housekeeper and her husband, reported Fox News Digital.
During the time he spent investigating the killing, the detective floated the theory that JonBenét was murdered by an unknown intruder — but the Boulder Police Department continued pursuing the idea that the girls’ parents had something to do with her slaying.
Frustrated with the course of the investigation, Smit quit after 19 months.
“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 in 1998.
The DNA test results were sent from Colorado’s Bureau of Investigation to lead detective Thomas Trujillo on Jan. 15, 1997.
Anderson writes in his book, citing Smit’s notes, that the laboratory report was not shared with the county prosecutor for several months.
In Dec. 2022, Trujillo was temporarily suspended and then transferred to night patrol duty for failing to investigate cases between 2019 and 2022.
John Ramsey, JonBenét’s father, told Fox News Digital Thursday that he did not learn of the DNA results for a long time.
“It didn’t fit [the investigators’] conclusion that one of us was the killer,” he said. “They did eventually notify the district attorney about six months later.”
In an Interview with The US Sun in December, Ramsey said Trujillo, then then-lead investigator on the case, dismissed the possibility of an intruder as “crap” — and refused to see a “treasure trove” of evidence gathered by a group of retired cops.
Ramsey praised Smit’s efforts to solve his daughter’s murder while blasting the Boulder police for their “incompetence.”
“I just assumed the police knew what they were doing,” Ramsey said of the early days of the investigation, recalling that the inexperienced officers had to borrow a book from the sheriff about “how to deal with kidnappings.”
In October, Ramsey appealed to Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, asking him to compel the Boulder Police Department to hand over any DNA evidence to a genealogy lab in the hope of identifying JonBenét’s killer.
“The murder of my daughter can never be undone,” Ramsey wrote in a letter to Polis. “There will never be peace or closure. But there can and should be justice.”
