The Boulder PD have been feeling “immense pressure” to solve JonBenét Ramsey‘s murder.
Before Netflix’s Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey premiered on Monday, November 25, a source connected to the authorities in Boulder, Colorado, exclusively told Us Weekly about the 28-year investigation into Ramsey’s death.
“It’s embarrassing that we haven’t been able to solve this yet, and [Police Chief Stephen] Redfearn wants this solved,” the insider involved with the case shared. “He wants that feather in his cap. He wants to take away this stigma that we are corrupt or incompetent, and solving this case would be the best way to publicly show it.”
There have been “new sets of eyes” on the case in an attempt to find “anything that could have been overlooked.”
“No one is off the table. This case is still wide open,” the source continued. “We are after the truth, whatever that is. We are going to leave no stone unturned. The kindest thing we can do for the Ramseys is to solve this.”
JonBenét died at age 6 in 1996 after her parents, Patsy and John Ramsey, found a ransom note demanding money in exchange for her return. Hours later, JonBenét’s body was found in the basement of their home and a series of missteps by the authorities led to a contaminated crime scene and no proper leads.
Patsy and John were initially suspected of involvement, with a grand jury voting to indict the pair in 1999. The indictment was never signed by the Boulder district attorney, however, due to a lack of evidence. Both parents were exonerated in 2008 when DNA testing helped investigators determine that the DNA found on JonBenét’s body was from an unrelated male.
“DNA might be the key, or maybe it’s something else. This case can be solved,” the police source told Us. “There’s someone who knows something, and we want to find them. We’re going to leave no stone unturned. Someone is looking at this case every day, and we’re going to solve it.”
John, who participated in Netflix’s Cold Case, advocated for the authorities to retest the evidence, saying, “We know there’s five or six items that were taken from the crime scene. They were sent into a lab for DNA sampling and were not sampled. We want those items sampled. We want what has been sampled to be retested.”
He continued: “Then use the public genealogy database to look for — not only a match — but a similar relative. That’s been used very successfully in the last few years by police departments to find the killer of very old cold cases.”
In the months after JonBenét’s murder, Steve Thomas was the lead detective on the case. He resigned from the Boulder PD in 1998 and later Thomas Trujillo took the investigation over. Trujillo stepped back from the case in 2022 and then-Police Chief Maris Herold appointed a task force before she resigned earlier this year and Redfearn took over her job.
As JonBenét’s case has been passed down to different DA successors and detectives at the Boulder PD, her family has questioned the lack of answers. A spokesperson for the Boulder PD told Us in a statement earlier this month that they are “aggressively investigating the case and pursuing all avenues.”
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