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JonBenet Ramsey’s Dad Claims Male DNA on Suspected Murder Weapon Was Never Tested: ‘I Don’t Know Why’
John Ramsey’s daughter JonBenét Ramsey was found murdered after being strangled by a garrote, and the father of five revealed the male DNA found on the item years ago still hasn’t been tested.
“I don’t know why they didn’t test it in the beginning,” John, 80, said on the Monday, September 9, episode of the new series True Crime News. “To my knowledge, it still hasn’t been tested. If they’re testing it and just not telling me, that’s great, but I have no reason to believe that.”
JonBenét was six years old when she was reported missing on December 26, 1996, after her parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, woke up to a ransom note demanding $118,000 for their daughter’s safe return. Pasty — who died in 2006 following a battle with ovarian cancer — called the police and JonBenét’s body was later found in the home’s basement. An autopsy later determined that the pageant queen’s cause of death was strangulation. The high-profile murder of the child remains unsolved.
John told host Ana Garcia that there were at least seven items considered critical evidence that had never been tested. “We’ve had unidentified male DNA from January 1997, and this one prosecutor told me I’ve never, ever seen a police department try to explain away unidentified male DNA in a sexual assault case.”
John has spent years trying to get investigators to turn over the remaining DNA to the FBI or a genetic genealogy lab to determine if the killer can be identified through modern familial DNA databases — but exclusively told In Touch in June that he fears any remaining evidence has disappeared.
“For 27 years, we’ve been trying to get [police] to accept help,” John said at CrimeCon, adding that authorities have been “very reluctant to tell us anything.” He’s worried “the only logical reason they won’t commit to testing it anymore is because they lost it.”
At the time, he had spoken with the Boulder Police chief several weeks before but could not share an update on the case. He hoped that the police department would transfer the evidence of the case to the FBI in hopes that they would use the familial database to find the killer. “If we do that, then we’ve done the best that could be done and if we don’t come up with the evidence at least we tried,” he said.
John compared his daughter’s investigation to the Idaho College Murders, where four university students were found brutally murdered in their home in November 2022. He admitted he originally thought the case wouldn’t be solved since the murders took place in the small town of Moscow, Idaho, and similar to Boulder, the town lacked an experienced homicide squad.
“When the police chief got in front of a TV audience and said, ‘This is our case we’re going to manage it,’ and I said to myself, ‘This is not good,’” Ramsey said, which was met with laughs from the crowd. “He brought in everybody he could get his hands on; he had 40 FBI agents on site, he had state police. That department recognized they are not skilled at everything, and I’ve complimented them a lot.”
Bryan Kohberger — a PhD student at a nearby university — was arrested and charged with one count of burglary and four counts of first-degree murder. He was extradited from his home state of Pennsylvania and did not take a plea deal, appearing in court for the first time in January 2023. The case is ongoing and the trial is set to begin in June 2025.
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