Murder of JonBenet Ramsey - Case Study Example

Prior to the discovery of the body, the Ramsey's found a ransom note in the basement from “a foreign faction” demanding $118,000.00 for the safe return of Jon Benet (“JonBenet Ramsey Would Have Turned 22 Years Old This Week; Murder Case Remains Unsolved”, 2012). This particular piece of information pertaining to the ransom amount was a red flag for the police at the time. The amount was the exact amount that John had just received as a bonus earlier in the year, this coincidence led to the speculation that somehow, the person involved in the crime knew the Ramsey's on a personal level (Stuart, 2012).

But without a follow up call on the ransom note, the Ramsey family decided that it would be in the best interest of all concerned to inform their family and friends of the situation while also preparing to follow the instructions for the ransom demand. The police began an intensive search for the child within hours only to have her father inform them that he had found the body of the child in the basement. The official cause of death is listed as asphyxiation due to craniocerebral trauma. But a more in-depth look at the autopsy records reveals that the child also suffered from a skull fracture and severe blunt trauma.

Evidence gathered at the crime scene included a garrote made from tweed and the broken handle of a paintbrush that is believed to have been used to penetrate the child's vagina. Although there was penetration, the police could not accurately declare if sexual assault was one of the horrors that the child suffered in the hands of her abductors (Montaldo, 2013). Although a majority of the evidence collected by the police indicated that a stranger had caused the death of JonBenet, there were still certain things that led the district attorney to question the abduction theory because of the way the child's body was recovered at home.

Somehow, the evidence that the DA was seeing did not add up to an abduction scenario. Rather, the sights of the police investigating the case, and the media for that matter, then centered on the possibility that one or both parents of JonBenet had caused her death. Although the authorities and media fed the public lines that led those outside of the case to believe that Patsy and John had possibly murdered their daughter in cold blood, the courts saw otherwise. Patsy, who died of cancer in 2006, and John were exonerated by the federal courts in May 2003 due to lack of strong evidence to support the parent murderer theory (Montaldo, 2013).

Their total exoneration came as new DNA evidence in the case was presented, proving that traces of DNA not belonging to family members was found on the preserved clothing of JonBenet (Gardner, 2010). With the discovery of new DNA evidence in the case, one can clearly see that, had the police not set upon a trial by publicity on the Ramsey's and concentrated instead on actual police investigation, they would have caught the actual perpetrator(s) in the case. During the course of the first investigation of the case, the police had conducted more than a few blunders that influenced the case and set upon creating a publicity machine using false leaked information to crucify the suffering parents instead.

First of all, because Boulder, Colorado was known back then as a relatively peaceful and safe place for its