Warning: This article contains discussion of child abuse which some readers may find distressing.
The father of JonBenét Ramsey, a six-year-old girl who was murdered 28 years ago, believes new testing will solve the case.
On December 26, 1996, JonBenét was found beaten and sexually assaulted in the basement of her own home in Boulder, Colorado.
Her mom, Patsy Ramsey, had called the police that morning to report her daughter missing from her bedroom. She had also discovered a ransom note, demanding $118,000 for her safe return.
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Tragically, the little girl's body was found hours later in the basement of the family home. She had suffered blunt force trauma and had been strangled with a garrote, which is a type of rope weapon.
Local police initially suspected JonBenét's parents and even their son, Burke, who was just nine at the time, of being involved in the crime; however, the Ramsey family were all later cleared. And in 2008, an old DNA sample from the scene identified the presence of an 'unknown male'.
Almost 30 years later, John Ramsey, now 81, has spoken about new testing that could help solve the case.
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He appeared at CrimeCon alongside attorney Hal Haddon, who has represented the family for decades.
"I have pressed hard for DNA analysis of the knots in this garrote, which our DNA experts say could be quite promising, because someone had to tie those – and they’re fairly sophisticated," said Haddon. "Someone had to use their fingers and likely got their DNA in these knots. They’ve never done that [testing], and I questioned them on that every time that we’ve met.
"The handle on this garrote... is wooden, and that wooden handle has never been tested for DNA, even though splinters from that handle were found on and inside the body of JonBenet."
Haddon went on to call the ransom note left by the killer 'elaborate', as he added to Ramsey: "Someone had obviously been in your home or had cased it thoroughly.
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"Someone spent an extraordinary amount of time writing a ransom note which quoted extensively from murder movies which were contemporary in the day – movies like Dirty Harry."
Last year, Ramsey revealed that there had been two breakthroughs in the case, as the family had been pushing for forensic genealogy to be used on DNA taken from the crime scene.
Although Haddon said it would be 'highly unlikely’ the case could be solved without genealogical testing, Ramsey was more optimistic.
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He said: "I believe there’s a 70 per cent chance we get an answer. We may not, but the odds are very high that we can.
"This new technology that’s been employed finding these old killers, old cold cases, is a dramatic improvement over the last testing that was done in our case, which was eight or 10 years ago."
However, he added that with the prospect of a new investigative team and technology, he was 'more hopeful than I’ve ever been'.
If you’ve been affected by any of these issues or want to speak to someone in confidence regarding the welfare of a child, the Childhelp USA National Child Abuse Hotline (1-800-4-A-CHILD (1-800-422-4453) operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and receives calls from throughout the United States, Canada, US Virgin Islands, Guam and Puerto Rico.
Lucy Devine