American businessman with a successful life, married to former beauty queen Patricia Ann Paugh (born 12/29/1956 in Parkersburg, WV) with whom he had two kids, Burke (born 1/27/1987) and JonBenet (born 8/06/1990). He had two older kids from a prior marriage. The family lived in a 15-room Tudor style home in Boulder, Colorado.
John Ramsey and his wife became two of the most vilified suspects of infanticide of a decade when their daughter, JonBenet was brutally murdered on 12/26/1996. The child was a six-year-old model who had been winning beauty contests for the past year.
When Patsy checked the household on the morning after Christmas, she found that JonBenet was not in her room. She called the police at 5:52 A.M. MST, shouting “Send help!” and saying that her daughter was missing and that a 2½-page ransom note demanding $118,000 had been left by the kidnapper on the steps of the back stairs leading to the kitchen. The note read, “Dear Mr. Ramsey, We have your daughter…” It was printed in block letters and had neat margins. It also made reference to a Navy air base in the Philippines where John Ramsey had served. Four misspellings in the note appeared to be intentional.
The police arrived at 5:55 AM and made a brief search of the house. Two hours later, a detective arrived, and FBI agents came in at 10:30 AM. It was not until 1:00 PM that someone thought to look in the basement and John Ramsey discovered his daughter’s body. He removed the tape from her mouth and carried her upstairs. She laid on the floor beside the Christmas tree until 10:45 that night, when the coroner’s staff took the body to the police morgue. When John Ramsey found JonBenet at 1:05 PM, her body was completely set with rigor mortis, which indicates that she had died between 10:00 PM on December 25 and 6:00 AM on December 26.
Devastating errors were committed by the police immediately following the crime, so grievous that some critics said, “It was as if the police were attempting to do everything possible to handicap the prosecution.” They irrevocably disrupted the crime scene by allowing John Ramsey to pick up his daughter’s body and carry it upstairs to cover it with a blanket. DNA evidence was contaminated and as well, the Ramseys were not immediately and separately interviewed.
The case remained in the media for the following four years, with apparently no solid evidence to lead to the killer. John and Patsy were the focal point of investigations, both of them leading suspects of the police investigation. The ransom note was from paper belonging to the Ramseys and fiber found on the duct tape used to bind the child was consistent with that found on Patsy’s clothing. The small amounts of evidence were basically circumstantial and not enough to bring charges. Though the ransom note was similar to Patsy’s writing, it could not be definitively proven.
The case was tried by the media and the public with the Ramseys lynched and damned. Whether or not the case is ever solved, their lives have moved from one hell to another. Six months after the murder, Patsy, John and Burke moved to a home in the Atlanta area to try to mend their lives. On 10/13/1999 a Boulder grand jury wrapped up a 13-month inquiry during which it had examined 30,000 pages of testimony and evidence, bringing the $2 million investigation to an inconclusive finish. They were no further toward solving the murder than on that shocking day after Christmas three years before.
The Ramsey’s memoir, “The Death of Innocence,” went on sale 3/17/2000, the same day that they began a string of TV appearances objecting to their persecution in the media as being the killers of their daughter.
News media reported that John and Patsy Ramsey, parents of the slain 6-year-old JonBenet, settled a $35 million lawsuit against the Globe supermarket tabloid over November 1998 stories that suggested their son, Burke (now 14), molested and murdered his sister.
In late March 2001, they filed a $65 million libel and defamation lawsuit against former Boulder, Colo., police detective Steve Thomas, who accused the couple of having a role in their daughter’s death, reports the Associated Press. In June 2001, they filed a $70 million suit against Court TV for the 1999 program in which the show named their son Burke, 12, as a prime suspect in the murder of their daughter, calling the exploitation of the child ” reprehensible and unconscionable.”
On May 11, 2004, the father of murdered child JonBenét Ramsey announced his decision to enter politics. Ramsey is running for a seat in the Michigan House of Representatives. His wife Patsy is currently undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, with which she was first diagnosed in 1993. The couple moved to Michigan in the summer of 2003 and Patsy suffered a recurrence of the dreaded disease. With her husband at her side, she died from the cancer on June 24, 2006 in Atlanta at age 49.
Link to Wikipedia biography