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  The Polly Klaas case is one example of a seemingly random, violent murder. Though her murder had been planned, it had involved no cover-up, staging or elaborate and extensive planning.

  On October 1, 1993, Richard Allen Davis, who had been paroled from prison only three months before, broke into the Klaas home through a window. Twelve-year-old Polly was having a slumber party that night with some friends at her small home in Petaluma, California, near San Francisco. Davis had been seen loitering around the home that day. His plan was short term, organized and involved only those present in the home. He entered the house and, while Polly’s mother was asleep in a nearby room, tied up Polly’s friends and took Polly out of her home while holding a knife against her neck.

  Davis had an extensive criminal history of kidnapping and violence against females. On December 4, 1993, he confessed to kidnapping and killing Polly Klaas and led law enforcement officials to her body. He was convicted of kidnapping, first-degree murder and committing a lewd act.

  According to California Supreme Court transcripts, a clinical therapist and psychologist testified that Davis had antisocial disorder and sexual sadism. A psychiatrist who testified had diagnosed Davis with avoidance personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder and schizoid personality disorder. Basically, they said, Davis enjoyed hurting others and inflicting both physical and emotional pain. He was also a very organized offender. Richard Allen Davis was sentenced to death and, in January 2013, was denied all but one of his appeals by the California Supreme Court. He currently remains on California’s death row.

  Such depravity was also portrayed in the kidnapping of a child in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. The eleven-year-old girl was on her way to school in June 1991 near her home when she was grabbed, thrown into a vehicle and stun gunned. For eighteen years, her abductor, Phillip Garrido, and his wife, Nancy, kept the girl prisoner in an extensive rundown backyard compound.

  From the moment the girl was captured, Garrido began raping her. She had two daughters while in captivity, both fathered by Garrido. With his wife’s help, Garrido kept their three prisoners locked away in a life of unimagined hell.

  Garrido was a registered sex offender who had been convicted of rape and was on parole. During the eighteen years following the kidnapping, parole officers visited his house sixty times and saw the young woman and eventually her daughters, but did not investigate.

  Garrido’s prisoners were finally rescued following his attempt to get a permit to sell a “book” that was actually a four-page essay he’d written about religion and sexuality. Two employees at the University of California, Berkeley events office grew suspicious of Garrido and the girls who had stopped by their office with him and reported their suspicions to police. Garrido was forced to bring his “children” in for a parole check that resulted in his three victims being rescued in August 2009. Garrido was sentenced to more than 400 years in prison. His wife got more than 30 years.

  There was shock and horror when neighbors rescued three young women in Cleveland in May 2013. The three had disappeared in kidnappings that occurred between 2002 and 2004, when they were fourteen, sixteen and twenty years old. Each had accepted a ride from a part-time school bus driver, Ariel Castro, when he kidnapped them. They were found in his local neighborhood home. One of them had a six-year-old child fathered by Castro. One of the girls knew the kidnapper’s daughter. It was unclear whether Castro had known the other two girls before he took them. The three women were kept mostly in the basement of Castro’s rambling two-story house. There was confusion in the neighborhood about the kidnapper because he had seemed, as one neighbor told reporters, to be just like the rest of them. But Castro had beaten, starved and sexually assaulted his captives at various times. He was not one of them.

  In July 2013, Ariel Castro pleaded guilty to kidnapping and sexual assault in order to avoid the death penalty. He was sentenced to life in prison, plus 1,000 years. Part of his plea agreement included signing over the deed to the house where he had kept the three girls. The house was torn down in August 2013. Castro committed suicide by hanging himself in prison the next month.

  In 2005 in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Joseph Edward Duncan III kidnapped an eight-year-old girl and her nine-year-old brother from their home. He had targeted the family without knowing them. Duncan first killed the two young children’s older brother and mother and their mother’s fiancé. He then kidnapped and sexually traumatized the two and finally killed the boy in front of his sister.

  The little girl was rescued after being spotted with her abductor seven weeks later at a local restaurant.

  Duncan was a convicted sex offender who later confessed to other killings. The majority of his victims were children. He had spent most of his life in prison. In 2008, he received three death penalties. He told the jury in one of the death penalty sentencing stages of his trial, “You people really don’t have any clue yet of the true heinousness of what I’ve done … My intention was to kidnap and rape and kill until I was killed, preferring death easily over capture.”

  On October 5, 2012, ten-year-old Jessica Ridgeway of Westminster, Colorado, was kidnapped on her way to school. Parts of her body were identified just days later on October 10 in an open space area near her home. Her body had been dismembered and mutilated. Seventeen-year-old Austin Sigg, who was interested in mortuary science and enrolled in a nearby junior college, was arrested on October 23 after he confessed to his mother and she called the police. Experts and research indicate that it is unusual for someone of Sigg’s age to so violently destroy a body. Sigg pleaded guilty to fifteen counts, including first-degree murder and sexual assault of Jessica and an attack on a female jogger in May 2012. That woman had been able to fight Sigg off after he tried to disable her with a rag saturated with a chemical over her mouth. “Evil is apparently real. It was present in our community on October 5, 2012,” the judge said when he sentenced Sigg after the teenager had pleaded guilty. Sigg got life in prison, plus an additional eighty-six years to be served consecutively.

  On October 28, 2013, in Aurora, Colorado, a white, blonde male broke or cut the screen off an eight-year-old girl’s first-floor bedroom window, opened it, grabbed her and pulled her outside. She screamed, and her father ran out of the house to find she had escaped from the man. He saw the man’s car drive away. The next day, then Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates was quoted in The Denver Post as saying, “We think there’s a predator out there.” Police believed this had been an attempted “stranger” kidnapping. They charged a twenty-six-year-old man for the attempted kidnapping on November 1, 2013. By then, John Stanley Snorsky was already in jail on theft charges. He pleaded guilty to first-degree burglary and second-degree kidnapping in September 2014, when he was sentenced to thirty years in prison as part of a plea agreement.

  No one will know the mindset of JonBenét Ramsey’s killer until that person is caught, and maybe not even then. “Why?” is the question most easily asked and agonized over. It is also the most difficult to answer.

  One of the questions still unanswered is how JonBenét’s killer became so familiar with the Ramsey home. This question contributed to the widespread belief that her family had been involved in her murder. Yet in the case of Elizabeth Smart, her kidnapper came back to her family’s large home to kidnap her several months after being hired to work there for part of one day.

  Early in the Ramsey murder investigation, investigators surmised that JonBenét’s killer had been someone who knew the house well, knew the Ramsey family’s plans and possibly had a key to the Ramsey home in their possession. At first, such reasoning pointed to family members as likely suspects, but soon other intruder possibilities were suggested.

  The Ramseys were careless about their home security. They’d given out keys to friends and to people working on their lengthy home renovations. One key, hidden outside in front of their house, turned up missing. An intruder without a key also could have entered through an unlocked window or door. The family never set their s
ecurity alarm.

  Part of the intruder theory includes the belief that the killer had been in the home not once but several times and therefore had little fear of being caught. It’s also possible that the killer had browsed through the family’s belongings, including John’s pay stubs or tax returns showing information about his $118,000-plus bonus.

  The Ramsey family also spent their summers in Michigan and often traveled to visit friends in Georgia and other states. The intruder could have wandered the home during one of these family trips earlier in 1996. It’s interesting to note that such an intruder could also have known about the unusual set-up with the house’s doorbell and its phone. As the Ramseys had told friends and neighbors, the doorbell was connected to the telephone, so if you rang the doorbell and heard the telephone inside keep ringing, you knew no one was home.

  Questions about missing items that had apparently been used to torture and kill JonBenét also led to suggestions by experts that the killer would have brought with him his own personal “crime kit” with the tools he needed and taken most of them back out of the house with him. Law enforcement investigators use the term “crime kit” when referring to the survival pack of tools and weapons that a criminal might bring along in order to limit the possibility that anything is left to chance.

  Patsy Ramsey kept her day planner in the kitchen and also jotted reminders down elsewhere in her home, so it’s possible an intruder would have known of the family’s plans to be out of their home on the evening of Christmas 1996. He could have taken the notepad and the paintbrush used for the garrote shortly before Christmas Day, writing on the notepad and fashioning the garrote at his leisure outside of the home. While Patsy was organized in her daily planning for her family, she was casual about keeping her house organized. She wouldn’t have missed the paintbrush and may have assumed she’d misplaced the tablet, according to John Ramsey.

  If an intruder did indeed kill JonBenét, he would have been called an “organized offender” by law enforcement officials because of his elaborate planning. He was able to either lie in wait for the family to return the evening of December 25, or enter after they were asleep because of his familiarity with their home. He was also apparently able to cope with the unexpected.

  If JonBenét Ramsey’s killer had been a true psychopath, he could have walked among the Ramseys and their friends undetected. According to experts, psychopaths copy others in their everyday behavior by watching them closely. They also view themselves as being smarter than most, especially law enforcement.

  It’s possible that while JonBenét’s killer ultimately wanted her, he also gained enormous satisfaction from his meticulous planning to either kidnap or torture and murder her.

  The murder of JonBenét Ramsey was a unique crime, out of the norm for even the most experienced homicide detectives. There are no valid national statistics on the use of garrotes in child murders.

  POSSIBLE SUSPECTS

  On February 13, 1997, Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter held a news conference during which he addressed the killer directly. “I want to say something to the person or persons that committed this crime,” he said. “You have stripped us of any mercy that we might have had in the beginning of this investigation.

  “The list of suspects narrows,” he also warned. “Soon there will be no one on the list but you. We will see that justice is served in this case, and that you pay for what you did.”

  Hunter’s statements were made on the advice of behavioral advisors who had conceived that such a challenge might cause the killer to react in some public way. Right after the news conference, Patsy called Hunter to thank him for his perseverance and message to the killer. That phone call confounded Hunter and his advisors. As Hunter said privately, “The message was designed [for] and directed at Patsy.”

  On February 14, 1997, one day after Hunter’s direct statement to the killer, twenty-six-year-old Michael Helgoth committed suicide at his home, according to a Boulder County Sheriff’s report. Helgoth worked for his aunt and uncle in a salvage yard in Boulder and lived with them. He was estranged from his mother and father. In Helgoth’s bedroom, detectives found a pair of Hi-Tec shoes similar in size to the footprint that had been left in the basement where JonBenét’s body was found. Helgoth also had a stun gun and a 9mm pistol.

  Helgoth’s hands were swabbed for gunshot residue (GSR), but the sheriff’s office never tested the gunshot residue swabs to see if the deceased man had fired the weapon used to kill him, because Helgoth’s death was considered a suicide. According to experts, a GSR test cannot determine whether someone fired a gun, only that the person was in the vicinity when the weapon was fired.

  The on-call Boulder Police Department detective when Michael Helgoth’s suicide was reported was a sex crimes investigator, not a trained homicide investigator.

  Serious questions were raised by some of the Ramsey investigators about whether Helgoth had actually killed himself. They said photos from the investigation showed Helgoth would have been in an awkward position to shoot himself in the chest.

  Michael Helgoth’s Hi-Tec boots found after his suicide. Courtesy Ramsey Defense attorneys.

  Boulder Police Department officials tested Helgoth for DNA and said it didn’t match the foreign DNA found on JonBenét Ramsey’s body.

  One man, forty-one-year-old teacher John Mark Karr, confessed to the slaying of JonBenét Ramsey in August 2006, nearly ten years after the murder, saying to the media: “I was with JonBenét when she died.” Karr’s criminal history included jumping bail in California on a 2001 child pornography charge. Following his “confession,” he was arrested in Thailand and transported back to Boulder. He had e-mailed about the case for four years to a University of Colorado professor. But Karr’s DNA didn’t match the DNA found on JonBenét’s body, and several investigators who talked with him said he did not know basic and key information about the murder scene. Charges were dropped, and Karr willingly appeared on several talk shows at the time. While he has not been further pursued by law enforcement, Karr continues to correspond with some who are searching for answers in the murder of JonBenét Ramsey and continues to reveal more information related to the case.

  Another man who was investigated because his wife had been fired from Access Graphics told me he was retested for DNA in 2011 by Boulder Police Department investigators. Detective Lou Smit had come up with the theory about this man being a possible suspect because of the signature on the ransom note. That signature, “S. B. T. C” matched the initials of the first names of three of this possible suspect’s family members. But his DNA did not match the forensic evidence found on JonBenét’s body, according to Boulder police. For this reason, his name is not being used in this book.

  Another person briefly considered as a possible suspect was Chris Wolf. His ex-girlfriend turned him in to authorities, saying he disappeared the evening of December 25, 1996, came back early in the morning, washed the clothes he was wearing, took a long shower and then was fixated on the Ramsey case. She said he was capable of violent behavior. His handwriting was reportedly more similar to the ransom note than the handwriting of any of the others who had been tested. John and Patsy named Wolf as a possible suspect in their first book, leading Wolf to sue the Ramseys for libel in the defamation case eventually dismissed before trial by Federal Judge Julie Carnes in Georgia.

  Wolf’s DNA did not match the DNA found at the scene, according to Boulder Police Department officials. His ex-girlfriend, according to one detective, was obsessed with the idea that he had killed JonBenét. Ten years after the murder, she hired her own handwriting expert and a publicity firm to hold a news conference, saying her ex-boyfriend’s handwriting had many characteristics that matched the writing in the ransom note.

  The photographer who took some professional photographs of JonBenét was also suspected and tested for DNA comparisons. He was arrested in the fall of 1998 for walking nude down the main street of a small town in eastern Colorado. When apprehended,
he told law enforcement, “I didn’t kill JonBenét.” He was also not a DNA match.

  These are just a few of the people whom the Boulder Police Department and the Ramsey defense team have investigated. According to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, 165 people in Boulder County in 1996 and 1997 were registered as sexual offenders.

  CHAPTER 27

  DNA

  Front cover of CBI DNA Report

  CHRONOLOGY

  January 1997—Colorado Bureau of Investigation releases some preliminary DNA information to the Boulder Police Department.

  February 1997—BPD officials send DNA for testing to Cellmark Diagnostics in Maryland.

  May 1997—Cellmark Diagnostics DNA test results reveal “no surprises” as they are similar to the CBI results.

  July 2008—Boulder District Attorney Mary Lacy clears the Ramsey family based on advanced DNA “touch” testing from the Bode Technological Group.

  February 2015—Former Boulder Police Chief Beckner does his first extensive interview related to the Ramsey murder investigation on the Reddit website.

  IT’S THIS SIMPLE ABOUT THE DNA in the JonBenét Ramsey murder case:

  In a new and advanced “touch DNA” test conducted in 2008 on JonBenét’s clothing, two new areas of DNA were found on two spots on the inside of the waistband of her long johns. The waistband represented a previously untested area. The newly discovered DNA matched the 1997 DNA collected from her panties. The 2008 test had been conducted on the request of Boulder District Attorney Mary Lacy.