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True Crime Blueprint - JonBenét: The Family, the Secrets, and the Case That Broke America · 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Hi, it's Joe and what you're about to hear is
• 0:03
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• 0:13
  Speaker 1: in the episode notes here, or you can just search
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: for True Crime Blueprint. I'll be releasing weekly episodes there,
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  Speaker 1: full deep dives, no ten minute restriction. So again, if
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: you like this new podcast, it's very important that you
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: search for and go to True Crime Blueprint and follow
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: subscribe to the new podcast. A six year old girl
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: goes missing from her bedroom on the morning after Christmas.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: Three hours later, her father finds her body in the
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: basement of their own house. One of the most prominent
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: families in their city becomes the most hated family in America,
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: and twenty nine years later, nobody has gone to prison
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: for it. This is True Crime Blueprint, Okay, So let
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: me set the scene here, because to really understand this case,
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: you have to understand who the Ramseys were before any
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: of this happened. And I think part of the story
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: gets completely lost because people jumped straight to the pageant
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: photos and the suspicion and the press conferences. There's a
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: whole life that existed before December twenty sixth, nineteen ninety six,
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: and it matters enormously. John Ramsey was born in Lincoln, Nebraska,
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: in December of nineteen forty three. He grew up in
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: the Midwest with a very structured, achievement oriented value system
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: that a lot of people from that part of the
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: country carry with them their whole lives. He eventually moved
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: to Michigan, attended Michigan State, got his bachelor's degree, then
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: his MBA. He served in the Navy after that. His
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: military experience instilled a particular sense of order and hierarchy
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: in him that would later find his management style as
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: a CEO, and it would later be misread by investigators
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: and the public as emotional coldness. His first marriage was
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: to a woman named Lucinda. They married in nineteen sixty
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: six and they had three children together, Elizabeth, Melinda, and
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: John Andrew. That marriage ended in nineteen seventy eight. And
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: here's something that gets genuinely underappreciated in most profiles of
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: John Ramsey. In January of nineteen ninety two, his eldest daughter,
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: Elizabeth was killed in a car accident at the age
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: of twenty two in Athens, Georgia. John Ramsey had already
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: lost a child before John Benay. He already knew what
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: it felt like to have his world collapse without warning.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: That piece of his psychological history is real and important,
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: because when investigators later described him as seeming too composed
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: after John Benney's death, they were evaluating a man who
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: had already been through devastating grief once before. That's not
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: an excuse for anything, it's just context that deserves to
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: be part of the picture. Now, enter Patsy. Patricia Ann
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: Paul was born nineteen fifty six in Parkersburg, West Virginia.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: She grew up in a household where ambition was encouraged,
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: an achievement was the clear expectation. Her mother fostered her
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: participation in beauty pageants from a young age, and Patsy
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: absorbed that mentality completely. In nineteen seventy seven, she won
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  Speaker 1: Miss West Virginia. And here's a detail that really tells
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: you who Patsy Ramsey was at her core. She reportedly
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: watched the previous year's competition and took detailed notes before
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: entering herself she studied it, she reverse engineered what winning
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: looked like, and then she went out and she won
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: the thing herself. That meticulous, analytical approach to achievement would
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: later define how she operated as a pageant mother to
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: John Benney. She got a journalism degree from West Virginia University,
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: moved to Atlan, and in that city social orbit, she
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: met John Ramsey, who was by then a successful businessman,
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: turning a garage based startup into something significant. They married
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty. Patsy was thirteen years younger than John.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: John's company, called Access Graphics, was eventually acquired by Lockheed
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: Martin and grew into a subsidiary that reached a billion
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: dollars in annual sales. John mentioned that milestone proudly in
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: the family's nineteen ninety six Christmas card, because that's exactly
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: what a CEO running a billion dollar company in nineteen
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: ninety six would do. That's peak nineties executive culture right there.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: Merry Christmas. Here are the photos of the kids. Also,
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: bt dubs, I run a multi billion dollar company. God bless.
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: Now those aren't exactly the words that he used, but
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: I'm taking a liberty there. The family moved to Boulder,
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: Colorado in nineteen ninety one, following John's professional success. They
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: settled into a seven thousand square foot Tudor style home.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: They were prominent members of Saint John's Episcopal Church. They
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: hosted elaborate parties and were visible at the top of
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: Boulder's social circle. By every surface measurement, they were living
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: exactly that life that the American professional culture told them
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: that they were supposed to build. There was, however, something
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: heavy underneath all of that carefully constructed success. In nineteen
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  Speaker 1: ninety three, Patsy was diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer.
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: Stage four that's not a diagnosis that you strategize around.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: That's a diagnosis that fundamentally re orders a person's relationship
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  Speaker 1: with time, with their children, with a very concept of
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: the future. She went through aggressive chemotherapy, she went into remission,
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: and surviving something that was expected to probably kill you
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: leaves its own psychological residue. It can intensify your focus
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  Speaker 1: on legacy, on appearance, on the things you can control
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  Speaker 1: when your body has proven itself to be unreliable. A
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: lot of people who have analyzed Patsy Ramsey's behavior later,
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: especially her intense involvement in John Beney's pageant career. Have
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: pointed to that cancer diagnosis as a turning point and
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: how she processed the concept of time and what mattered
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  Speaker 1: most in the time that she had John Beney. Patricia
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  Speaker 1: Ramsey was born on August sixth, nineteen ninety in Atlanta, Georgia.
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  Speaker 1: By the time the family settled in Bolder, she was
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  Speaker 1: a toddler, and she grew up in a city that
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: was culturally speaking, pretty far removed from the pageant world.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: Her mother came from Bolder in the mid nineteen nineties,
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: had a very specific personality. It was academic, outdoorsy, liberal,
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: and fairly low key about overt displays of wealth. The
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: richest person at any given Bolder social event was probably
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: wearing a fleece vest and talking about a hiking trail
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: they'd recently discovered. Status existed, but it tended to express
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: itself through experiences and ideas rather than formal appearance. That
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: was the environment John Benay grew up in. And then
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: there were the Ramseys, with their Southern influenced traditions, their
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: formal entertaining style, and their participation in a pageants subculture
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: that was well established in Georgia, Texas, and Tennessee, but
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: landed somewhat oddly in Bolder. John Benay competed in child
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  Speaker 1: beauty pageants. She held titles including Little Miss Colorado and
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: National Tiny Miss Beauty. Patsy coached her, dressed her in
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  Speaker 1: elaborate costumes, arranged her hair and stage makeup. In the
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: pageant community, there was standard practice. In the context of Boulder,
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: it felt foreign and a little uncomfortable to a lot
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: of people who encountered it. And here's where I want
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: to be careful, because there's a significant amount of judgment
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  Speaker 1: that gets loaded onto the ramseys based entirely on those
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: pageant photos. Was child pageantry the right choice? People genuinely
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: disagree on that. It's a legitimate conversation. Was it evidence
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: of abuse or neglect? The evidence doesn't support that conclusion.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: John Benay, by the accounts of people that actually knew
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: her in daily life, was a cheerful, energetic, funny kid.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: She liked to dance, She liked to perform. Whether that
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: enthusiasm was entirely her own or partly shaped by her
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  Speaker 1: mother's ambitions is something we can't definitively separate. But treating
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: her parents' participation in pageant culture as proof of deeper
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: dysfunction or violent secrets is a logical leap that the
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: facts simply do not support. What is true is that
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: the images from those pageants, a six year old and
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: heavy makeup and sequin costumes styled to look much older
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  Speaker 1: became the defining visual shorthand for this entire case in
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  Speaker 1: the media, and those images shaped the national conversation in
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  Speaker 1: ways that had almost nothing to do with justice and
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: almost everything to do with American cultural discous comfort with
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: a very specific kind of parenting. You have to understand
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: the environment this happened and to fully understand how the
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: public and the police responded to it. By nineteen ninety six,
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: violent crime in the US had been falling for several
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: years running. Boulder specifically was doing well on every single metric.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: Serious crimes on the University of Colorado campus were down
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: nearly twenty percent that year. Burglary rates were dropping city wide.
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: People in Boulder felt genuinely reasonably safe. There's a particular
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: confidence that comes with a low crime rate, combined with
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: the university town sense of its own thoughtfulness. Boulder had
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: that nobody in that community was operating with their guard
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: fully up because statistically they didn't need to be. This
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  Speaker 1: matters because it explained some of what happened with the
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: initial police response. The Bolder police departments in nineteen ninety
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: six had years of experience handling drug offenses, property crimes,
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: and the occasional assault. They had no meaningful experience handling
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: anything like what landed on their desks on December twenty sixth,
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  Speaker 1: and that inexperience would cost the investigation dearly. Within the
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: first few hours. The Ramses spent Christmas Day nineteen ninety
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: six making the social rounds. They visited friends, including the
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: family of Fleet White, who would become a significant figure
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: later in the story. They got home late. John Benay
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: had apparently fallen asleep in the car on the way home,
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: and John, all right, what do you think. It's a
• 10:32
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