Who Killed JonBenet (Part 3): The Grand Jury

In Part 2, we examined the alleged ransom note in the JonBenet Ramsey case. I concluded, considering the enigmatic note on its own, that it leads me to believe it was written by an at least close-to-middle-aged male intruder, familiar with John Ramsey's business, resentful of his affluence, and possibly of foreign birth, with English being his second language.

I admittedly came to this preliminary conclusion despite a plethora of additional evidence strongly suggesting otherwise. Be that as it may, what I want to focus on in this next post, however, is not some other single piece of evidence in this baffling case, but rather on what took place back in 1999, when 12 people were officially tasked by the Boulder District Attorney's office with reviewing the entirety of available evidence at the time and recommending whether to criminally indict anyone in regard to the death of JonBenet Ramsey.

Over the course of a year, this grand jury, comprised of a dozen ordinary citizens, studied in secret session the evidence presented to them and finally submitted their findings to the District Attorney. What exactly were these findings and related recommendations, and what became of them?

I place particular importance on this aspect of the JonBenet Ramsey case because this group of eight men and four women had access to a massive amount of evidence related to the circumstances surrounding JonBenet's death, and sufficient time to consider it in depth and detail. Indeed, they were reportedly made privy to evidence that those of us in the general public have never seen nor even known about, though they admittedly never had the latest — though, for many, still inconclusive — DNA evidence back then. Nonetheless, all this provided these jurors with a unique perspective on the complex facts comprising the case, one which I believe merits our attention and serious consideration right alongside the actual evidence itself.

It is often jokingly stated in legal circles that a grand jury, by its very nature and relatively low burden of proof required, "will indict a ham sandwich" if asked to by the District Attorney. Having said that, the grand jury in the Ramsey case did indeed ultimately recommend indicting both John and Patsy Ramsey in connection with their daughter's death.

The specific wording and charges of this indictment were remarkable because the jurors did not recommend that either Patsy or John be indicted for killing their daughter, JonBenet, either accidentally or intentionally. Instead, they very curiously recommended the parents be indicted as "accessories to a crime," and charged with felonious child abuse, i.e., unreasonably, knowingly, and recklessly placing 6-year-old JonBenet in harm's way in a clearly dangerous situation which tragically resulted in her death. Fascinating.

Here is the exact wording of the recently released grand jury's recommended indictment of both John and Patsy Ramsey, which concluded that they each "unlawfully, knowingly, recklessly and feloniously permit[ted] a child to be unreasonably placed in a situation which posed a threat of injury to the child's life or health, resulting in her death." Moreover, and even more mysteriously, they found that John and Patsy "did render assistance to a person, with intent to hinder, delay and prevent discovery, detection, apprehension, prosecution, conviction and punishment of such person for the commission of a crime, knowing the person being assisted has committed and was suspected of the crime of murder in the 1st degree and child abuse resulting in death." In other words, the jurors seem to have suggested that someone other than John or Patsy Ramsey intentionally abused and, with malice and forethought, murdered JonBenet.

This extraordinary statement begs the crucial question: Who then could have committed the heinous crime to which the Ramseys were mere "accessories" according to the grand jury? Who was this (unidentified) killer to whom John and Patsy Ramsey purportedly "rendered assistance?" And why on earth would these seemingly loving parents render such assistance to someone whom they knew had cruelly abused, tortured, and executed their only daughter? Mind-boggling! Either this grand jury was totally incompetent, confused, and/or grossly misled by the prosecution, or they heard certain testimony behind closed doors that compellingly convinced them of the peripheral (rather than direct) involvement of John and Patsy in JonBenet's murder and deliberately aiding and abetting their own daughter's killer!

There are, it seems to me, two fundamental approaches to reckoning with these confounding findings on the part of the grand jury: either reject them out of hand or accept them, fully or partially. Then Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter took what appears to have been the latter tack, rejecting these recommendations on grounds that they were not sufficiently well-founded and would not lead to a conviction in a court of law, where such criminal charges require proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Therefore, he very controversially decided not to file any formal charges against the Ramsey's at all. Nonetheless, in retrospect, we must take into consideration these strange recommendations rendered by this grand jury and their possible significance.

For instance, if neither John nor Patsy Ramsey was responsible for directly causing their daughter's death, who did? It seems there are only a few realistic possibilities, the most likely, some would say, being that the grand jurors could have been referring to Burke as being the killer, a controversial theory proposed by a recent CBS program about the case.

Law and Crime Essential Reads

Is "Affluenza" Just a Creative Way to Justify Being Mean?

The Falsification of Police Murders as Suicides Is Troubling

Yet Burke and both his parents have been officially exonerated (see Part 1), based mainly on the most recent DNA evidence. So, if not Burke, and not John or Patsy, the implication is that the jurors concluded there was some third, thus far unnamed party involved: either a guest or intruder, who killed JonBenet and whose evil deed was then, for some bizarre reason, knowingly covered up by the Ramseys. Some perpetrator to whom John and Patsy granted willing access to their daughter, someone who subsequently sexually abused, tortured, and murdered her.

This would have to have been a person (or persons) whom they already knew, trusted, and felt comfortable leaving alone with little JonBenet. Yet, according to the "official" timeline for Christmas night, 1996, the Ramsey family reportedly attended a Christmas party, returning home around 9 or 9:30 p.m. that night, at which time JonBenet was supposedly promptly carried to her room and put to bed. Could she have had a very special surprise visitor waiting there for her later that Christmas evening, perhaps one previously invited by her parents? Someone she knew, adored, and trusted? And might that surprise visitor have been none other than Santa Claus? Or, in this case, an evil Santa? (See, for example, my previous post.)

One of the suspects investigated and cleared early on by authorities in JonBenet's death was family friend and neighbor Bill McReynolds, a man who had evidently been hired by Patsy to play Santa Claus at the Ramsey family's Christmas parties in both 1995 and 1996 (and possibly 1994, too). McReynolds, who was said to have had a "special" emotional connection to JonBenet, had apparently been in the Ramsey home frequently before and interacted with JonBenét during the holidays and just prior to her death.

JonBenet may personally have even given her favorite "Santa" a guided tour of her sprawling home in 1995, a year before being found dead in that same home. A little more than two decades earlier, in 1974, spookily or maybe synchronistically, on the exact same day JonBenet was found dead in her basement decades later, December 26, the day after Christmas, McReynolds' own 9-year-old daughter had evidently been abducted along with her friend and reportedly witnessed the sexual molestation of her fellow victim during the abduction. Apparently, not unlike in the JonBenet Ramsey case, no one was ever arrested for that perverse crime.

According to CNN, an original prosecutor on the Ramsey case claimed that Bill McReynolds had given JonBenet a greeting card, later found in the trash bin of the Ramsey home right after her death, with the cryptic message: "You will receive a special gift after Christmas." They further reported that McReynolds' wife, Janet, who, with her husband also attended the 1996 Christmas party at the Ramsey mansion dressed as "Mrs. Claus," had, two decades prior to JonBenet's death, written a play, which briefly made it to the off-Broadway stage in NYC, in which a teenaged girl was molested and murdered in her own home's basement. Suspicious. Very suspicious. However, the McReynolds were officially cleared (again, via DNA analysis, which is certainly not infallible) of any involvement in the crime, with these startling aforementioned "facts" deemed purely coincidental by both themselves and, presumably, the Boulder police department. Mr. McReynolds died in 2002 of a heart attack at the age of 72, six years after the death of JonBenet.

Though the McReynolds' were both ruled out as suspects early on, as were the Ramseys some years later, as a forensic psychologist, I find it difficult to dismiss such potentially meaningful "coincidences" in a notorious cold case such as this. Indeed, despite their apparently good friendship, Bill McReynolds was cited by John Ramsey himself during a taped interview after JonBenet's gruesome death as being suspect in his own mind. Patsy Ramsey reportedly strongly suspected Mrs. McReynolds of being involved at some point. What did they know? It strikes me that the McReynolds, but certainly Bill McReynolds himself, had the necessary knowledge of the Ramsey family, their home, dynamics and habits, and, in all likelihood, of John's business, his financial status, lifestyle, and possibly even the rough amount of John's Christmas bonus that year ($118,000.00) as conspicuously found in the ransom note. (See Part 2.) Bill allegedly had an unusually close and trusting relationship with JonBenet, and easy access to both her and her brother, Burke.

Could Bill "Santa Claus" McReynolds have been a closet pedophile? Was this ever investigated or evaluated? We do not know. Pedophiles are highly skilled at finding ways to gain access to attractive children, and cultivating a close and trusting affectionate relationship with the intended victim in hopes that this will prevent him or her from reporting inappropriate sexual behavior to other adults. Such inappropriate secretive sexual behavior can include undressing the child, masturbating, touching, fondling, performing fellatio or cunnilingus, or penetrating the child's vagina, anus or mouth with fingers, penis or, notably perhaps, in this case, foreign objects (e.g., wooden paintbrush handles).

Clearly, whatever the perpetrator's identity, some combination of pedophilia and sexual sadism could be reasonably inferred from the grotesque state in which JonBenet's body was found, assuming that this was not purposely staged by Patsy and John to disguise what truly happened, as some still contend. Based on my own forensic experience in working with pedophiles, I believe it would be more likely for the perpetrator in this case, probably male, to have acted alone rather than in collaboration with a spouse or partner. But there are always exceptions.

What we do know is that both Bill and Janet themselves had presumably been traumatized by the abduction of their own daughter and her sexually tinged traumatization more than 20 years prior to JonBenet's abduction, molestation, and death. Moreover, both he, as a retired journalism professor, and his wife, an award-winning playwright, clearly had the creativity, literary skills, knowledge, and background needed to construct the so-called ransom note (see Part 2), either together or individually, including the ability to make it sound as though it was written by someone else, in part through the deliberate and deceptive inclusion of misspellings and grammatical errors. But why would someone do it? What would possibly motivate people like Bill or Janet McReynolds, for example, to kidnap and kill JonBenet Ramsey?

Given the lavish lifestyle and financial success of John Ramsey, it would not be unusual for people around him and his family to feel some degree of envy or resentment. But perhaps more pertinently here, it is well-known to psychologists that victims of trauma often traumatize others, as, for example, in the tendency of abused children or adolescents to abuse other kids or adults abused as children to abuse — sexually, physically or emotionally — their own children, spouses or significant others.

Some of this is learned behavior since this is what was modeled to them at home by parents, siblings, family friends, and others. But another less obvious — and commonly unconscious — aspect of this abusive behavior toward others by trauma victims is related to repressed feelings of rage and resentment regarding what was unfairly done to them by others, and an unrelenting need for revenge or retaliation against the perpetrators specifically or perceived stand-ins for the original perpetrator, or against society in general, and, sometimes, against God for allowing this traumatic experience to have happened to them.

Might the McReynolds together or Bill or Janet separately have harbored such toxic resentment, directing it at John Ramsey and his family? If this was in fact not an accidental death at the hands of John, Patsy, or Burke, as some insist, but rather murder in the first degree, with malice and premeditation, as the grand jury evidently suggested, whomever deliberately committed such an evil deed was likely motivated, at least partly, by anger, rage, embitterment or resentment, and a cruel and sadistic desire to inflict immense suffering upon the Ramsey family and perhaps upon John Ramsey in particular.

The presence of pedophilic urges and fantasies could, of course, also have strongly motivated beautiful JonBenet's molestation and conceivably led to her sadistic torture and murder. Whoever committed it, the crime appears to me to bear the signature of a sadistic pedophile. Or it may have been deliberately staged to leave this impression.

To be clear, neither Bill, now deceased, nor Janet McReynolds was ever charged in this case, having been excluded as suspects by the Boulder police shortly after the crime. But, based on these observations, if this case were to be actively reopened, and the fairly extensive pool of formerly cleared suspects reconsidered, it would make sense in my view to revisit the possibility that either Bill or Janet McReynolds, or both in collaboration, could have conceivably been directly involved in JonBenet's abduction, torture, molestation, and murder that terrible Christmas night.

But if it was — and this is pure speculation — both or one of the McReynolds to which the grand jury vaguely referred as the perpetrator(s) responsible for the "murder in the 1st degree" of JonBenet, why would John and Patsy go out of their way, risking arrest and criminal charges, making themselves the prime suspects, taking all the heat, in order to protect or render assistance to such person(s) "with intent to hinder, delay and prevent discovery, detection, apprehension, prosecution, conviction and punishment" of their own darling daughter's deranged killer(s)? This seems absurd, and, therefore, ridiculous.

One possible explanation, if this is indeed what took place, is that the Ramseys (or their lawyers) feared being charged (and possibly convicted) as accessories or accomplices to the crime (which is exactly what the grand jury recommended) based on their own detrimental actions (John has said publicly that he feels "guilty" for not "protecting" his daughter), and hence, felt compelled to cover up for either or both Bill or Janet McReynolds — not necessarily by writing the ransom note or staging the crime scene, but simply by withholding crucial information from police investigators regarding their suspicions.

Or perhaps the Ramseys felt that, with poor JonBenet already dead, they did not want to see their friend, Bill, who was already in poor health, die in prison. (This is the same scenario some cite to suggest that John and Patsy were protecting their son, Burke; though it is one thing to hypothetically cover up their daughter's death at the hands of her 9-year-old brother to protect him, and quite another to do so for an adult friend or acquaintance.)

Another, admittedly even more far-fetched explanation could be that either Bill or Janet McReynolds, if responsible, "had something" on the Ramseys, were in possession of some potentially damaging information about John and/or Patsy, and, in this sense, "blackmailed" them into silence. And there may be many others.

Yet, at this late date, we may never know. Unless, of course, the investigators still working this cold case are willing to critically reevaluate the various questionable criteria used at that time to rule out potential suspects — e.g., weak alibis, inconclusive handwriting analysis, dubious DNA evidence, etc. — and take a fresh and unbiased look at the totality of the evidence as it stands right now and its implications regarding the deeply disturbing possibility that JonBenet's murderer may not have been an immediate member of the Ramsey family, as most still believe, nor some mysterious random intruder(s), but rather a close and trusted friend and confidant.