It’s quite clear Burke Ramsey suffers from not only some underlying disorder, but emotional and psychological trauma. If you’re truly suggesting that a nine-year-old pulled off the crime of the decade and managed to elude prosecutors for 20 years,
then we should immediately cease discussing JonBenet Ramsey and move on to discussing criminal prosecution and the Criminal Justice system in America because it’s f-cked. Thank God we live in a nation where being weird or creepy or awkward isn’t definitively synonymous with guilty. Or at least it shouldn’t be.
Since one of the top tweets regarding Burke Ramsey and the Dr. Phil interview on Twitter was mine, I figured why not write about it?
I was a senior in high school when JonBenet Ramsey was murdered. And for my Sociology class, the teacher gave us high-profile news stories to write a so-called senior thesis on. Seeing as how I was a runner-up in our County Miss Fairest of the Fair pageant that year, my teacher thought the JonBenet Ramsey story would be a perfect case for me. We didn’t really use internet in 1996-97, kids — as it hadn’t taken off then and was still new. I remember buying the paper every day for weeks and watching CNN to gather all the information I could on the case. I’d like to blame that and Mrs. Emma Hall as the start of my love for true crime, but the truth is I’d been reading crime books other kids might find creepy since junior high. And I was already a Dateline addict. So it was a perfect assignment. (Well played, Mrs. Hall.)
The main thing I remember from that paper that seems to get lost over time, but always stuck out to me back then — was the open basement window and the suitcase beneath. Knowing that the pen and paper from the so-called ransom note came from inside the house, never made sense to me that an intruder would sit down and take the time to write a 2.5 page ransom note, but it also never made sense to me that if her family were involved in the murder, they would “stage” a ransom note by filling two and a half pages of legal pad that was already theirs with nothing but regurgitated lines from kidnapping movies. Particularly when all they had to do was get rid of her body and they wouldn’t need a fake kidnapping in the first place. It always seemed more a realistic possibility that someone who had access to the house took the paper to write the “ransom note” and brought it back with them.
The logical conclusion to me is that someone either intended to sneak JonBenet out of the house — either in the suitcase or just out of the window — realized that they couldn’t get her out, panicked, and finished strangling her in the basement. I thought that then, I think that now.
And I’ve been following it ever since.
Touch DNA excluded Patsy, John and Burke Ramsey over a decade later. Had that technology been available at the time, things might have been different. Perhaps he would have turned out normal and not “creepy” — having to live in isolation, hid away from the media and the world who think you killed your sister when you were nine years old. However, I think it’s quite clear that he suffers from something outside of the trauma related to her death, as he seemed to have difficulty displaying emotions even when he was a child. I don’t know any more than most of you, but one thing I do know is that whoever killed JonBenet Ramsey — it wasn’t her brother. And he’s as much of a victim in this as anybody could possibly be. I wholeheartedly believe that.
It’s time to leave him alone, world. Just stop.
Please.
candimathis 