Jon Benet Ramsey Murder Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Jon Benet Ramsey Murder - Essay Example She was a little girl who died tragically at the hands of someone who treated her with disrespect and violence. The story of the investigation is clouded by the shadows of media that formed and shaped public’s knowledge and opinions, leading to more tragedy and sorrow that for quite some time, just never seemed to end. JonBenet Ramsey was six years old when in 1996 she went missing from her boulder Colorado home, only to be found eight hours after she was reported missing in the basement of her family. This tiny little girl became a cause, finding celebrity after death as her family was scrutinized, vilified, and sympathized with depending on the mood of the media that swarmed the investigation of her death. The child had been bludgeoned and strangled. The speculations about who killed her were first focused on her mother, her father, and her brother; although in 2008 they were all vindicated through DNA evidence (Pelisek). The story of the crime begins with JonBenet’s mother, Patricia, finding three yellow pieces of paper from which the first page informed her â€Å"Mr. Ramsey†¦we have your daughter† (Smith 3). The rest of the information included a request for $118,000, the same amount of a recent bonus that JonBenet’s father John had received and that they should not call the police. A threat was made against the child to encourage their cooperation with the kidnappers, that JonBenet would be beheaded if they failed to comply. The first thing that Patricia did was to call the police, at 5:52am December 26, and report her daughter as missing (Smith 4). The Boulder Police responded immediately, and the FBI followed quickly behind them, kidnapping being a federal offense and under the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In 1995, the FBI had reported only a handful of kidnapping cases, but 22,000 homicides, so the investigation of a kidnapping was not a routine activity, even for the FBI (Smith 4). The Ramseys br ought three people into the home as the authorities did their best to work the case. They called their minister, the family doctor, and a friend who was a lawyer. These three people arrived before the Boulder Police had arrived (Smith 5). During the time that the FBI was setting up for the encounter that John Ramsey would have with the kidnappers, the Boulder Police began to tour the home, finding the security system still on and with no tampering being evident. The perpetrator either knew the system intimately, or had the skills to circumvent the system (Smith 6). John Ramsey refused to let the police search the home without a warrant, but this may be more to do with the influence of his attorney friend, Fleet White, who may have for legal reasons been insisting that all be done with legal structures. The police suggested that Mr. Ramsey search his own house, and this is when he found his daughter, covered with a blanket, duct tape on her neck and mouth, and with a nylon cord aroun d her neck which had a stick twisted in it to use as a garrote. The child’s head had been bashed in and there were clear signs that she had been sexually abused because of blood and bruising that was evident. On the 27th of December, the police asked the Ramseys to all give investigative samples in order to rule them out as suspects in the murder. Hair, nails, and fingerprints were all gathered in order to keep as reference towards any of the evidence that the authorities could discover. Samples of handwriting were taken in order to compare