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Jonbenet Ramsey murder story
Jonbenet Ramsey murder story
Analysis of jonbenet ramsey crime evidence
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WHO KILLED JON BENET RAMSEY?
The brutal murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey on Christmas night in 1996 shocked America to its core. Just as the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and murder seven decades earlier had seared the nation’s consciousness, this murder – of a beautiful and talented child in a wealthy Boulder, Colorado home --renewed every parent’s worst nightmare. It has been nearly three years since this violent crime occurred and no one has been brought to justice.
At 6:48 p.m., Dec. 23, 1996, a 911 call was placed from the Ramsey home to the Boulder Police Department. The call was terminated before a police dispatcher could speak to the caller. Six minutes later the police called the Ramsey home, but got a voice-mail message, so a police officer was dispatched to the house. No police report was filed, so one must presume the officer was told that the call was in error, and was satisfied with the explanation. At the time of that call, the Ramsey’s were having their annual Christmas party, complete with a Santa who passed out presents to neighborhood children. With so many people in attendance, anyone could have inadvertently dialed 911 – but in retrospect, self-styled experts on the case conclude too easily that JonBenet made the call.
Two days later, all four Ramseys went to the home of Fleet White, Jr., and Priscilla White for Christmas dinner. Ramsey and White, a retired oil executive, were best friends. The White’s 6-year-old daughter was JonBenet’s best friend. Both families were prominent in Boulder.
At the time of that Christmas dinner, things were beginning to look up for the Ramseys. For all their wealth, they’d had their share of misfortune. Patsy had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1994, and for a time had been bald because of chemotherapy. In January 1992, John Ramsey’s daughter, Elizabeth Ramsey (from a previous marriage) was killed in a car wreck. So, as the Ramseys sat down to dinner at Fleet White’s house on Christmas, they were privileged in many ways, but had also known their share of adversity. The Ramseys arrived home about 10 o’ clock that night and her father put JonBenet to bed.
Shortly after 5:45 am on the morning of December 26, 1996, Patsy phoned the Boulder police in a panic about a ransom note she says she found on a staircase leading to the kitchen. T...
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Date: 12 December 1996
[21 July 200]
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[20 July 2000]
The case begins with a report of a house fire in a Virginia suburb. When firefighters arrived and extinguished the flames, they made a horrible discovery. All four members of the house were dead. 41-year-old Blaine Hodges, 37-year old Teresa Hodges his wife, and their two young daughters, 11-year-old Winter and Anah who was just 3 years old. Investigators arrived and interpreted the burn pattern. They also discovered the presence of an accelerant. They determined that the cause of the family’s death was not an accidental house fire. This immediately shifted the focus from an accident to something more sinister.
On the morning of July 4, 1954, Marilyn Sheppard was violently beaten in her home in Bay Village, Ohio, on the shore of Lake Erie. She was four months pregnant and had been felled by 35 vicious blows (Quade). Right away Sam Sheppard was accused of being the victim to do this. Sheppard had told investigators that he had been asleep downstairs and was awakened by his wife’s screams. Sheppard said when he went upstairs and entered the room he was knocked unconscious by the intruder. He denied any involvement and described his battle with the killer he described as “bushy-haired” (Linder). After a police investigation, Dr. Sam Sheppard was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. With the hectic media covering it, they were quick in decision that it was him that committed the murder. This was an unfair trial, ruined a man’s life, and gave him no time for a career.
The eighth law that can cause a crime to be viewed as a capital crime is “the person murders an individual under six years of age.” (Pilgrim 06) Prolonged media attention reflecting cases on capital crimes committed by women, causes cases to have extreme bias, and causes the judge or jury to neglect the actual case. This is mirrored by the circumstances of the case involving the 2008 disappearance and murder of Caylee Anthony the suspected killer which was the child’s own mother, Casey Marie Anthony. Casey Anthony, the mother of then three-year old daughter Caylee Anthony, was believed to have murdered her daughter in order to avoid parental responsibilities. Although an overwhelming amount of evidence backing up claims and beliefs that Casey Anthony was in fact the perpetrator of the murder, including forensic data connecting decomposition remains of the child to Anthony’s car during the time of the child’s disappearance, and FBI attained data comprising of Google search terms including methods involved in the murder of Caylee from a comp...
In Corsicana, Texas Cameron Willingham and his family’s home was burned down the twenty-third of December is 1991. According to the report Cameron was asleep when the fire started and survived the accident with only a few injuries, as for his children they were not so lucky, they lost their lives to the tragic accident. At the time of the accident Cameron’s wife was buying presents for their children for Christmas. According to a witness and her Daughter Diane and Buffie from a few houses down went outside and saw Cameron screaming, “My babies are burning up!” Diane and Cameron tried countless attempts to rescue the girls from their room until the fire department could get there. According to the New Yorker “The house, in short, had been deliberately transformed onto a death trap.” According to the reports on December twenty-fourth and twenty-seventh of 1991 the fire was declared arson and they later decided to conduct a criminal investigation. Cameron was questioned by the investigators on December 31st and was then later arrested on January 8th of 1992 for the death his three daughters.
Child abuse is an extremely sensitive subject to many people. But to many people from McMartin Preschool, it is something that will stick with them forever. According to The World Book Encyclopedia, child abuse is “a term that generally refers to mistreatment of a child by a parent of another adult” (Zigler). It could also be “limited to life-threatening physical violence, including severe beating, burns, and strangulation” (Zigler). The horrific McMartin Preschool Trial was crazy and disgusting, leaving children scarred, parents angry, and the accused wronged.
Sue Grafton once stated: “Except for cases that clearly involve a homicidal maniac, the police like to believe murders are committed by those we know and love, and most of the time they're right.” This is clearly the thought the Boulder Colorado police conceived in the case of little beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey. As many have observed from the onslaught of media coverage, the day after Christmas 1996, six year old Jon Benet Ramsey was found buried under a white blanket, bound, beaten, and strangled to death in the wine cellar of their Boulder home. With such a strikingly rare and glamorous story of a six year old beauty queen dead, who was a part of a “perfect American upper-middle class family”, combined with a lack of a lead and ever mounting suspicion piling up against the parents it was no surprise to find that it was fuel to the media and soon stories sold and became a matter of competition between the press. So, like wildfire, this heart-breaking story spread, stretching across the nation, shattering the souls of the world. News broadcasts, magazine and newspaper articles, and television specials all shaped and molded peoples perceptions of this beautiful child’s murder, especially her parents, John and Pasty Ramsey’s involvement or lack there of. The police and FBI’s merciless quest to connect Jon Benet’s murder to her parents, seemed to cause the them to overlook important evidence, or at the very least dismiss suspicious findings that would otherwise send red flags to investigators. There are many contributors as to why this case remains unsolved including lack of investigative expertise, failure to protect valuable evidence, and focusing too much on the parents as suspects but, ultimately, the over involvement of...
These murder cases stayed unsolved for decades, and their resolution may give some sense of closure to the long-suffering families of the victims. But these triumphs are largely symbolic. By congratulating ourselves too much for them, we risk neglecting the challenges of the present.
to the fact that the Ramseys knew people on the inside in every position which was
Davies, K. (2008). The Murder Book: Examining Homicide. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc.
Scott Peterson was an educated man from California Polytechnic State University where he graduated with a B.A. in Agricultural Business. He was married to his wife Laci Peterson who was also pregnant with their unborn son. In December of 2002 Laci Peterson went missing in the Modesto, California area where she shared a home with Scott. Once the investigation of Scott’s missing wife started authorities began to suspect Scott as a suspect in her disappearance. In April of 2003 a fetus and a female torso that was missing hands, feet, and a head were found on the shoreline of San Francisco Bay. The San Francisco Bay area was where Scott was boating the day of Laci’s disappearance. The body was later identified as Laci Peterson and the fetus as Laci and Scott’s unborn son. Scott was also arrested in the month of April shortly after the discovery of Laci and their son’s body and was later sentenced to the death penalty. Over the course of this paper I will cover the whole event of the disappearance of Laci Peterson, relating it to a sociological theory, the impact the event had on our society and how the media had influence over this national event.
On June 9th 1959 near Clinton, Ontario 14-year-old Steven Truscott gave his classmate 12-year-old Lynne Harper a ride on his bike from their school down to Highway 8 (Ontario Justice Education Network Timeline of Events for the Steven Truscott Case). This sole event would be the one to change his life forever. The next day Lynne’s body was discovered near Lawson’s bush (close to the area in which he dropped her off) where she had been strangled, sexually assaulted and subsequently killed. That day Constable Hobbs conducted lengthy seven-hour interview on young Steven Truscott in which he asked him a number
The murder of JonBenet Ramsey was very shocking and caused a huge investigation that is yet unsolved. Family was one of the things that contributed to JonBenet’s murder. JonBenet Ramsey is a very special six-year-old girl with a successful family. She was a little pageant girl with blond curly hair and blue eyes; she was a very well known competitor since she had won many pageants (SV;SV) (Schneider). Her mother, Patsy Ramsey, was a former beauty queen; her father, John Ramsey, was a millionaire businessman (SV; SV) (Bardsley, and Bellamy).
On August 20th, 1989 Lyle and Erik Menendez killed their parents inside their Beverly Hills home with fifteen shot gun blasts after years of alleged “sexual, psychological, and corporal abuse” (Berns 25). According to the author of “Murder as Therapy”, “The defense has done a marvelous job of assisting the brothers in playing up their victim roles” (Goldman 1). Because there was so much evidence piled up against the brothers, the defense team was forced to play to the jurors’ emotions if they wanted a chance at an acquittal. Prosecutor Pamela Bozanich was forced to concede that “Jose and Kitty obviously had terrific flaws-most people do in the course of reminding jurors that the case was about murder, not child abuse” (Adler 103). Bozanich “cast the details of abuse as cool, calculated lies” (Smolowe 48)...
Maryclaire Dale’s article “Kindergarten kidnapper tells girl, ‘I’m not a monster’”, appears in the Bucks County Courier Times and it tells the people of Bucks County how a woman kidnapped a kindergartener from school. In Philadelphia during January of 2013, a girl was taken from her kindergarten classroom and “sexually tortured during a bizarre overnight ordeal.” The girl was an 8-year-old and she had been abducted by “former day care worker Christina Regusters”, who was 22 years old. Christina was sentenced to 40 years to life. The judge called the crime, “a horror show” because the 8-year-old girl was found “shivering under playground equipment” half naked. Christina took full responsibility for what happened and as she was charged with “kidnapping, sexual assault and other charges”
On December 26, 1996, JonBenet Ramsey was found sexually abused and murdered in her parents’ home. Ramsey lived in Boulder, Colorado and was a six-year-old beauty pageant queen. The media showed video clips of JonBenet practicing for her pageants and the video clips disturbed many of the viewers. The videos showed her dancing around and blowing kisses while being dolled up in fancy makeup and revealing clothes. This image of a six-year-old shocked many viewers that had no idea what the pageant world was even about. “New York Times columnist Frank Rich called the repeated airing of the JonBenet beauty pageant clips "borderline kiddie porn” (“Child Beauty Pageants”). Some may believe that beauty pageants do benefit children, but in reality, the