AP- John and Patsy Ramsey in 2000
Continued series to be published until June 30
After Lou Smit had been working the case for some time he met with prosecutors and fellow investigators and confronted them with something startling.
“I hope I won’t offend anybody. Are we sure we’re looking at the right suspects?”
It was blasphemy. He said the room temperature dropped 20 degrees. Many officials were speechless.
Boulder authorities had made it crystal clear to international hordes of media swarming the college town for any tidbit of information about the case that one or more of the Ramseys killed JonBenét.
Smit said when he first heard details of the case it seemed like a rock solid case against one of JonBenét’s family members. Hand-writing experts had claimed that the so-called ransom letter.
One strong piece of evidence was that there was so much snow on the ground that an intruder couldn’t have made it inside the home without leaving footprints, particularly rimming the basement window where the intruder was supposed to have entered the home.
Boulder police believe that the Ramseys left false evidence on the inside of the window of a break-in.
But when Smit saw photographs of the Ramsey home taken on Dec. 26, 1996, the driveway was clear of snow and offered a path directly to the basement window in the back of the home.
Smit found corroborating evidence that an intruder did break into the basement window.
He said crime scene photographs showed that there were leaves and dust on the outside window ledges of all the other basement windows but not the one where an intruder entered the home.
On the inside of other basement windows were cobwebs, but not the window where the intruder entered.
Boulder police had concluded that the window was too small for a grown man to enter. Smit flashed pictures on his basement wall showing him crawling in through the window and than out again.
Smit investigated the backgrounds of the Ramseys. Even though he already knew a lot about the case that may have been the most publicized murder case in Colorado history, he was determined to look at it from a different vantage point.
He went through the Ramsey house looking at all the family photographs.
The public had a largely negative view of JonBenét’s heavy involvement in beauty pageants at such a young age. The belief was that Patsy was flying her around the country, obsessively forcing JonBenét to live out her dreams and expectations, depriving her of a normal childhood.
More darkly, the implication was that Patsy was so fixated on her daughter that if the girl acted out of line her response would be explosive, violent, Smit said.
But Smit had a different way of looking at that.