CRIME: Who Killed JonBenét?

0:00Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love crimes of Reddit. A new crime house original with Sabrina, Diana, Roge, and Alexis Linklenter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swab. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a Reddit 2am that starts with, you have to see this. But Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow crimes of Reddit on Apple podcasts and Spotify, or subscribe at crimes of Reddit pod on YouTube. This is Crime House. It was still dark on the morning of December 26, 1996, when Patsy Ramsey came down the staircase of her family's home in Boulder, Colorado.

1:02She was have a sleep and heading for the coffee pot until she noticed something sitting on one of the lower steps. It was a stack of handwritten pages, and as Patsy stood there reading them, the fog lifted fast. It was a ransom note. Someone was claiming they'd kidnapped her six-year-old daughter, John Bene, and they wanted $118,000 to give her back. Patsy ran upstairs to John Bene's room, praying it was a joke, but the bed was empty. So she and her husband John did the one thing the note told them not to do, they called the police. For the next several hours, everyone in that house waited for a kidnapper to call, but that call never came. As it turns out, John Bene had never left the house at all. That afternoon, her father found her body in the basement. Nearly 30 years later, we still don't know who killed her, and the strangest part of

2:05this whole case, just about everyone is certain they do. It's just that nobody can agree on the answer. From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations and murderous doctors, these aren't just theories, they're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is conspiracy theories, cults and crimes, a crime house original, powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I'll explore the real people of the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. These cases are wild, and I want to hear what you think. At the end of each episode, leave a comment wherever you listen, be sure to rate, review, and follow so we can continue building this community together. And if you want even more, subscribe to Crime House Plus and get every episode of this

3:10show and the rest of the Crime House lineup, add free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month to join go to Crime House Plus dot com. Or if you listen on Apple podcasts, tap try free at the top of the conspiracy theories cults and crimes show page. And I want to warn you, today's case is a hard one to listen to. It includes discussions of murder and assault of a child. So please listen with care. In this episode, I'm getting into one of the most famous unsolved murders in American history, the killing of six-year-old John Bene Ramsey. It's a case that's captivated the public for decades with all of its heartbreaking and baffling elements, the wealthy family, a child beauty queen, a bizarre ransom note, and a crime scene inside a picture perfect home. The investigation was so botched and the theories so abundant that people split into camps almost immediately.

4:10Her mother, her father, her brother, a stranger who slipped in through a basement window, everybody picked aside and once they did, it was hard to change their minds. So today I want to try something a little different. I'm not going to guide you to any one answer. Instead, I want to walk you through what actually happened in order and be honest about how little of it we can say for sure. Because the thing that makes this case so maddening is also the thing that makes it so human. All that and more coming up. If you're the type of person who wants data, not assumptions, pre-new vows' whole body scan gives you a deep understanding of your health. Screen for over 500 conditions, including many cancers, autoimmune disorders, neurodegenerative diseases, and more. Add blood panels to test over 80 biomarkers. And you've got information about your body you may never have had before.

5:13Book your scan at pre-newvo.com. That's P-R-E-N-U-V-O.com. Yamavab Resort and Casino at San Manuel is bringing hip hop and R&B legends to the stage. Experience the Queen of Neo Soul, Erica Badu, September 28. Catch Rock n' Roll Hall of Famers, Wu Tang, Clan October 1. Don't miss multi-grammy award-winning Nelly October 15. Tickets on sale now at Yamavab theater.com. Only at Yamavab now celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. To understand what went wrong that December morning, we have to start at the very beginning, with who this family was before any of us knew their name. John and Patsy Ramsey met in Atlanta, Georgia in 1979. John was in his mid-30s, quiet and serious, already divorced and raising three kids from his first marriage.

6:14He was also building a career in the early days of the computer business, the kind of thing that was about to make him very rich. Patsy Pa was a decade younger and pretty much his opposite. She was warm, funny, and impossible to miss in a room. She'd grown up in West Virginia, studied journalism in college, and back home she was famous for one thing above all. In 1977, she was crowned Miss West Virginia and went on to compete for Miss America. She didn't take the national title, but the pageant world had shaped her and she carried it for the rest of her life. The two of them fell for each other fast and got married in 1980 when Patsy was 23 and John was 36. Over night, she went from a recent college grad to wife and stepmother. She helped raise John's three children and pitched in as his company as it grew. By every account, they made a great team. And then John's career took off.

7:16In 1991, the family left Atlanta for Boulder, Colorado, where the company he now ran, access graphics was based. It sold computer systems, and it got huge. By 1996, it was bought by the defense giant Lockheed Martin and was pulling in more than a billion dollars in sales a year, with John as its president. By then, John and Patsy had two kids of their own, a son, Burke, born in 1987, and a daughter, John Bene, born in 1990. If you're wondering about that unusual name, it's a blend of her father's first and middle names, John Bennett. The family settled into a big house on 15th Street, and Patsy threw herself into decorating it, room by room. They were known around town for their parties and their charity work, and they had secured their space in Boulder's social scene. Some of their closest friends were another couple named Fleet and Priscilla White, whose

8:17kids played with the Ramsey kids often. But the thing that made Patsy the happiest was sharing her favorite pastime with her daughter, Pagins. When John Bene was still very little, Patsy started entering her in children's pageants. The dresses, the rehearsals, the lights, the trophies, and John Bene was a natural. She racked up titles, including America's Royal Miss, Little Miss Charlevoix and Little Miss Colorado. There were singing lessons, dance classes, and custom-made costumes. Meanwhile, Patsy coached her on how to walk a stage and win over the judges. Now, people have argued for years about what those Pagins meant. Some said John Bene genuinely loved the attention. A former nanny said the whole thing sometimes scared John Bene and that she didn't always want to go out on stage. But for Patsy, those years were some of the happiest of her life. And she actually deserved that happiness because the family had already been through

9:21a lot. In early 1992, John's oldest daughter from his first marriage, 22-year-old Elizabeth, was killed in a car crash. Then in 1993, Patsy got her own devastating news. At 36, she was diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. The prognosis was frightening and she went through punishing rounds of chemotherapy and surgery, but she fought it and against the odds, the cancer went into remission and stayed there. So by Christmas of 1996, the Ramses had every reason to feel grateful. John's company was booming, Patsy was healthy, and their kids seemed happy. From the outside, they looked like a family that had taken its hits and come out stronger because of it. John Bene was in kindergarten that year at a Boulder Elementary School. She was outgoing and full of energy, and by every account, she lit up when people were watching.

10:22On Christmas morning of 1996, the thing she wanted most in the world was the bike Santa left under the tree, and she spent that afternoon riding it. On Christmas night, the family had dinner at their friends, the white's place just a few minutes away. It was an ordinary, happy holiday evening. By around 9 or 10 o'clock, the Ramses drove home. John Bene had fallen asleep on the way, so she was carried in and put to bed. The next morning, the whole family was supposed to fly out on a trip. First Michigan to see John's older kids, then on to a holiday cruise. They expected to wake up the next morning to an early alarm and a flight to catch. That's not how the day went. Nancy was the first one up. A little before 6am, she came down the back stairs of their home, still half asleep. And that's when she found those handwritten notes on the lower steps. They ran nearly three pages, and they said John Bene had been kidnapped.

11:25Whoever wrote it demanded $118,000 for her safe return and warned the Ramses not to call the police. Nancy ran to John Bene's room and found the bed empty. She woke John and at 5.52 in the morning, they called 911 and reported their daughter, kidnapped. The first officer got there within minutes, and John handed over the note. Right away, something about it felt off to those investigators. Real Ramses notes tend to be short and to the point. This one went on for nearly three handwritten pages. By some accounts, one of the longest ransom notes investigators had ever seen. It was rambling and almost theatrical. It claimed the kidnappers were part of a, quote, small foreign faction. They insisted John Bene was safe for now and laid out detailed step-by-step instructions for gathering the cash. It also threatened John Bene's life if they ended up calling the police.

12:27Finally, it signed off with a strange flourish. Victory, SBTC. Four initials no one has ever explained. So that day, everyone sat by the phone anxiously waiting for it to ring. As the morning wore on, the house filled up with people. The Ramses called friends, including fleet and Priscilla White and their minister. Officers came and went. Police kept John Bene's bedroom off limits, but the rest of the house? Not really. People sat on the furniture, made coffee and comforted each other for hours. And every one of those ordinary human gestures was quietly erasing any evidence the house might have held. Around 8am, a Boulder detective named Linda aren't arrived. She was good with people in crisis, but she'd never let a kidnapping before. And honestly, that wasn't unusual for Boulder. It was a quiet college town that saw only a handful of murders in a typical year, so

13:30very few people on the force had homicide experience to draw on. This case would test all of them at once. And looking back, the response that morning broke just about every rule in the book. John and Patsy were never separated, so no one could quietly compare their accounts of the night. The house was never sealed off as a crime scene, and nobody did a careful top to bottom search of it. Everyone's attention stayed locked on that phone. By early afternoon, the Ramses were still in limbo. No call, no demand, nothing. Finally, around 1pm, Detective Arge decided she couldn't just keep sitting there, so she asked John, along with his friend Fleet White, to walk through the house and see if anything looked out of place. Which when you think about it is so bizarre. Roughly 7 hours into the investigation, the home still hadn't been properly searched, and now a detective was sending the father to do it.

14:31Regardless, the two men started in the basement, and that's when they saw something, a small window that was broken, with a suitcase sitting underneath it. Then John pulled open the door to a little storage room nearby, and that's when everyone heard the screams. He said, I'm going to tell you what you're going to do right now. You're going to hand me that gun, and I'm going to kill you. I'm going to murder you and death, and you're going to watch. What causes ordinary people to do unthinkable things? They found video of him killing women. He buried these 11 women and kept going out there. He made a road going out there. Story stranger and darker than fiction. You're going to escape from some guy who had me seen of an basement. Survivors who refused a break. I was studying his face because I was thinking if I get out of it, I'm going to get you someday. From serial killers to catfishers, the minds of madness podcast covers unthinkable crimes,

15:37and the unbreakable people who survived them. Listen to new episodes every week, wherever you get your podcasts. 911, there's been some murder. Around 1pm on December 26, 1996, John Ramsey was told by police to search his own house again for his daughter. When he and his friend Fleet White went to check the basement, they found something no parent should ever have to see. After hearing the screams, Fleet ran to John's side. He was hunched over a small figure on the floor of the storage room. It was John Bene. She was partly wrapped in a blanket. Her wrists were bound. There was tape over her mouth and a cord had been pulled tight around her neck. It was fastened to a broken paintbrush handle so it could be twisted tighter and used as a grot. Whether it was shock or pure instinct, John pulled the tape off of her mouth, lifted her

16:41off the floor and carried her upstairs, where he layed John Bene down in the living room. For a moment, the whole house froze. Then Patsy threw herself over the body and their minister gathered everyone around to say the Lord's Prayer. As a human moment, that was unbearable. As a crime scene, it was a catastrophe. The single most important room in that house had been overlooked for hours. And then John Bene was moved before the forensic investigators saw where she'd been left. Detective Arnt later described watching John carry his daughter up those stairs and feeling something turn over in her gut. She couldn't fully explain it and she chose her words carefully for years to come, but she came away believing she just looked into the face of the person who did this. She had no proof. It was just a feeling in a hallway on the worst morning of a family's life.

17:42But that instinct that the answer was somewhere inside this house would shape everything that came next. On December 27, the day after John Bene died, the medical examiner performed the autopsy. The official cause of death was asphyxiation by strangulation associated with the head trauma. All to say the autopsy didn't settle much and that man investigators kept circling back to the evidence that felt more solid. The things inside the house itself. Three pieces in particular stood out. The first was the ransom note. It turned out it had been written on a pad of paper from inside the Ramsey home and investigators kept asking the same question. Why would an intruder who just committed this crime sit down and compose pages of demands on the family's own note pad in their house while they were asleep upstairs? The second was the price tag. That demand for $118,000 was oddly specific.

18:46It wasn't a round figure like you'd expect a stranger to pull out a thin air and it happened to be almost exactly the amount of a recent work bonus John had received. Investigators reportedly even found a check stub for close to that amount inside the home. So who exactly would know to ask for that much? The third was the garot. The paintbrush handle appeared to have come from inside the home. Whoever did this hadn't brought a weapon, they'd built one on the spot out of what was lying around. For the Boulder detectives, all three pieces pointed in the same direction. Inward at the family. Which raised the biggest question the note left behind. Who actually wrote it? When experts compared it against handwriting samples, they were able to rule John out as the author. But Pat C was a different story. The experts were split. No one could prove she wrote it, but no one could conclusively rule her out either.

19:48It was the single most scrutinized document in the entire case, and after years of analysis, it's still unresolved. But the Ramzis could see exactly where all of this was heading. So within days, they hired attorneys. They gave fingerprints and DNA samples, but they largely stopped sitting down for police interviews. By the way, hiring a lawyer is absolutely not a sign of guilt. Plenty of innocent people do it, and the Ramzis always said they felt themselves being railroaded as suspects. Meanwhile, in their view, no one was seriously hunting for an intruder. But to the police and some members of the public, it looked like a wealthy family circling the wagons. It didn't help that John Bene's murder happened during a slow stretch of the holiday news cycle. The family was rich and photogenic, and John Bene wasn't just a murdered child. She was a child who'd been photographed and filmed over and over on a pageant stage.

20:50So those images went everywhere. Footage of a six-year-old in stage makeup and elaborate costumes ran on a loop. People played on national TV and made the covers of supermarket tabloids. In a lot of ways, this case helped build the modern true crime machine, the round-the-clock speculation, the talking heads, the armchair detectives convinced they'd cracked it from the couch. And a lot of that public discomfort about the pageant footage curdled into anger. The anger got aimed squarely at John Bene's mother, and, disturbingly, sometimes at John Bene herself. The question people kept asking was some version of, what kind of family puts a little girl on a stage like that? And for a lot of people, that question became a shortcut to a verdict long before anyone had any facts. The Ramsey's tried to push back. On January 1, 1997, less than a week after the murder, John and Patsy sat down for an

21:52interview on CNN and pleaded for help finding the killer. Patsy looked into the camera and warned other parents in Boulder that there was, quote, a killer on the loose. To some viewers, that was a shattered mother doing everything she could. To others, it was a performance by a polished former pageant queen. And a lot of people found it suspicious that the family would go on national television, but wouldn't sit down for a formal police interview. But it wasn't just the public that was split. By early 1997, the authorities couldn't agree either. The Boulder detectives were leaning hard toward the Ramseys and wanted to move toward charges. But the District Attorney's Office wasn't sold. They thought there was a real chance an intruder had done this, and they didn't want to go after a wealthy, prominent family without an airtight case. So the two sides landed in a standoff. And it was a serious one because even if detectives made an arrest, the DA could just

22:53decline to file the charges. That fundamental disagreement, this early, is a big part of why the case stalled for years to come. And as the two sides dug in, the investigation started to turn on itself. Detective Linda Arnt took a beating in the press over how the scene was handled that first morning. And by May 1997, Boulder police pulled her off the case. The detective who took over was named Steve Thomas, and he shared her gut feeling that the answer was inside the family. He just aimed it more precisely. Little bit about Thomas, he'd come up through narcotics, and this was essentially his first homicide, which his critics never let him forget. Still, he built a theory centered on Patsy. In his telling, laid on Christmas night under enormous stress, something went terribly wrong between mother and daughter, and John Bene was fatally hurt. Then he believed the family staged the kidnapping to cover it up, writing the note, building

23:58the grot, selling the story of an intruder. Not everyone bought it, and the loudest skeptic was a detective the District Attorney's office had specifically brought in to help. A veteran named Lou Smith. Even like Thomas, Smith had decades of homicide experience, and he reached the exact opposite conclusion. He believed an intruder did this, someone who got into the house, possibly through that broken basement window, and attacked John Bene. He pointed to unidentified male DNA found on her body. He pointed to the window and the suitcase. He pointed to marks on her skin that he thought came from a stun gun. So now there were two seasoned investigators working the same murder, each one certain the other was dead wrong. Thomas thought Smith was chasing a phantom intruder. Smith thought the department had locked onto the family with tunnel vision and was letting a dangerous killer walk free.

25:00The two camps could barely stand to be in the same room, and out of everyone involved, Smith was one of the only investigators who treated the Ramses like victims instead of suspects. Around this same time, investigators finally turned to someone they'd mostly left alone, Burke, John Bene's big brother. He'd been nine years old on the night of the murder, and police had kept their distance. Partly to protect a child, partly because the stage scene seemed too elaborate to be the work of a kid. But in 1998, they sat a 11-year-old Burke down with a psychologist, and parts of his memory from that morning didn't quite square with what his parents had told police, especially the question of whether he'd actually been asleep through all of it. It was a loose thread. It didn't lead anywhere conclusive at the time, because by then, the case was heading toward a different direction. In 1998, the District Attorney Alex Hunter can be in a grand jury to weigh possible charges,

26:05but a grand jury is a strange, secret thing. Ordinary citizens swore into silence, hearing evidence the public never sees. There, they decide only whether there's enough to charge someone, not whether they're actually guilty. And while they deliberated, the investigation lost both of its central figures. In August 1998, Steve Thomas resigned with a scorching letter accusing the DA's office of obstructing the case. That same fall, Lou Smith resigned, too, with the mirror image complaint, warning that a dangerous killer was still out there, and the authorities were wasting their energy on the Ramzis. Two lead detectives. Opposite theories both convinced the system had failed John Bene. Then in October 1999, after more than a year, the grand jury reached a decision. They voted to indict John and Patsy Ramsey, not for murder, but on charges of child abuse,

27:05resulting in death and accessory to a crime. And then, the District Attorney refused to sign it. Alex Hunter announced publicly that he didn't think he could prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt, so he wouldn't be filing any charges. What he didn't announce and would almost no one outside that room knew was that the grand jury had actually voted to charge the parents. That vote was sealed. For years, the public was left to assume the grand jury had simply come up empty and that the Ramzis had basically been cleared. The family let that impression stand. They left Boulder, moved back toward Atlanta, and tried to build some kind of life out of the wreckage. And the case went cold. Then, out of nowhere, an email from a man on the other side of the planet who claimed he was the one who killed John Bene Ramsey.

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29:13In 2002, Patsy Ramsey's cancer came back after nearly nine years of her mission. She fought it a second time the way she'd fought it before, but on June 24, 2006, she died at her father's home in Georgia. She was 49 years old and she was buried beside John Bene. She'd spent the last decade of her life as both a grieving mother and a suspect in her own daughter's murder, accused, investigated, and never charged, and she died without ever seeing the case resolved. Then just weeks after Patsy's death, the case cracked wide open, or at least it looked like it did. Back in 2002, a man using the name Daxis had started emailing a University of Colorado professor named Michael Tracy, who'd made documentaries about the case. Over four years, the messages grew darker and more specific until the writer flatly claimed

30:13he'd been there when John Bene died and that her death had been an accident. Tracy was skeptical at first. People confessed to famous crimes for all sorts of reasons, but the difference was the writer seemed to know things he shouldn't have. And after four years of this, the messages rattled Tracy enough that he finally took them to the authorities. In August 2006, investigators traced those emails to a 41-year-old American named John Mark Carr, who was then working as a schoolteacher in Bangkok, Thailand. They arrested him. And almost immediately, in front of a crowd of reporters, he confessed. He said he'd been with John Bene when she died and that it was an accident. For about two weeks, it looked like the case of the decade had finally been solved. Carr was flown back to Colorado under a swarm of cameras and his face ran on front pages around the world. After ten years of dead ends, people desperately wanted this to be the answer.

31:18It wasn't. Carr's DNA didn't match the evidence from the scene. His own family said he'd been with them out of state that Christmas when it happened. And the details of his confession didn't hold up against the known facts. On August 28, 2006, prosecutors dropped the case against him. He turned out to be a false confessor. A man so fixated on this murder that he talked his way into the center of it. And for a couple of weeks, the whole world played along. When Carr collapsed as a suspect, investigators were right back where they started, except now with one more reminder of how badly people wanted an answer. But there was still that one piece of evidence the entire case kept tripping over, the DNA. For years, there had been an unidentified male DNA profile connected to John Bene's clothing that didn't match anyone in her family.

32:19And in 2008, the district attorney at the time, Mary Lacey, had the clothing tested again. This time, they used a newer method called Touch DNA. Basically, the microscopic traces of cells are personally behind just by handling something. The lab reported finding male DNA in two more spots. To Lacey, that was the answer. In July 2008, she wrote the Ramsey's a remarkable letter, formally clearing the family, and stating that the evidence pointed to an unknown male killer. She even apologized to them directly, writing, quote, I am deeply sorry. It made headlines all over the world. After 12 years of suspicion, the Ramsey's had been officially exonerated. But it wasn't that simple. Later reporting by Colorado journalists working from the lab's own notes found that the so-called unknown male DNA wasn't a single profile at all.

33:22It was a tiny, mixed sample, genetic material from more than one person. The kind of trace that could have come from innocent contact long before the murder. One outside expert noted that DNA like that could have landed on the clothing weeks, months, even years earlier. They were back to square one again. And then in 2013, a secret that had been buried for over a decade finally surfaced. That year, a bolder journalist went to court and got the sealed 1999 Grand Jury documents unsealed. And for the first time, the public learned the truth. The Grand Jury hadn't cleared the Ramsey's at all. It had voted to indict them, the parents, on that charge of child abuse resulting in death. The district attorney had simply refused to bring the case to trial because he didn't think he could win it. For 14 years, people believed a Grand Jury had looked at the evidence and found nothing.

34:25The reality was almost the opposite. And the narrative shifted once more. Three years after that, in 2016, the 20th anniversary of the murder brought a wave of new documentaries. The biggest was a CBS special that revived a theory the original investigation had mostly set aside. The John Bene's brother, Burke, had struck her and that the parents had staged the scene to protect their surviving child. Okay, I want to be careful and fair here because Burke Ramsey is a living person who has never been charged with anything. The CBS team pointed to Marks on John Bene's body. They argued could have come from a toy and to an enhanced version of the 911 call they claimed captured a third voice in the background. But when the FBI and the Secret Service examined that same 911 tape back in the 90s, they reported hearing nothing usable on it. Burke, who was 29 when the special aired, sued for defamation.

35:28And the cases tied to that program were eventually settled out of court. So the Burke theory is exactly that. A theory never tested in a courtroom, never matched to a single piece of physical evidence. Which brings us back to the intruder theory. Because plenty of people took a hard look there too. Over the years, investigators and armchair detectives floated one suspect after another. There was a family acquaintance who'd played Santa Claus at the Ramsey's Christmas parties. There was a pageant photographer who'd taken many of John Bene's photos. And maybe most chilling of all, there was a drifter and convicted sex offender named Gary Oliva, who was living not far from the Ramsey home in 1996. And he reportedly kept a kind of shrine to John Bene. To this day, some people close to the case, including John Ramsey himself, believe Oliva belongs near the top of the list, though to be clear he's never been charged in her death.

36:32But Oliva was just one name among hundreds. Before he died, Lou Smith put together a list of possible intruders that John Ramsey says ran to roughly 700 names. And here's the thing every single one of those people have in common. The Santa, the photographer, Gary Oliva, John Patsy and Burke, none of their DNA matches that unidentified male profile from the crime scene. It's maddening, decades of suspects and theories and confessions, and the one piece of physical evidence has never been tied to anyone. But this case is not as cold as you'd expect. In 2024, a Netflix series called Cold Case, who killed John Bene Ramsey, brought a fresh wave of attention and real pressure back onto Boulder authorities. And behind the scenes, something quieter has been happening inside the police department. Boulder has new leadership now, and they've put fresh eyes on the case, convening a cold

37:37case review and retesting old evidence with tools that didn't exist in 1996. John Ramsey, now in his 80s, has become the public face of that push. He's been lobbying investigators to use forensic genetic genealogy, the family tree DNA technique that's cracked other notorious cold cases. He also wants them to test items that were never fully analyzed, including the grot itself. As he put it recently, quote, using DNA makes this case solvable. End quote. And as of this year, Boulder police say new interviews and newly tested evidence have actually moved the investigation forward. After more than 21,000 tips and visits to 19 states, they're saying for the first time in a very long time that they feel close. So tell me on socials if there's a case like this that sticks with you.

38:38What story keeps you up at night and got you interested in true crime? Maybe they'll be an answer to this one by the 30th anniversary of John Bonne's murder, which is actually coming up this December. But until that day comes, I keep landing in the same place. For nearly 30 years, people have been so certain. Certain about the mother or the father or the brother or some stranger who slipped in through a window were all so certain that it's easy to forget how little anyone actually knows for sure. What we do know is small. And it's kind of hard to sit with. There's an unidentified man's DNA that's never matched a single soul. There's a strange rambling note no one can definitively trace. There's a crime scene that was contaminated over the first few hours. And there's a six-year-old who never got to grow up. John Bonne Ramsey is not a mystery or a headline.

39:38He's a kid who got a bike for Christmas and spent her last good afternoon writing it. She deserves an ending to her story. And she deserves to finally rest in peace. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is conspiracy theories, cults and crimes. Come back next time. We'll decode the episode together and hear another story about the real people at the center of the world's most notorious, cults, conspiracies and criminal acts. Conspiracy theories, cults and crimes is a crime house original powered by paved studios. Here at Crime House we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crime House on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow conspiracy theories, cults and crimes wherever you get your podcasts.

40:39Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your conspiracy theories, cults and crimes, listening experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get every episode ad-free. We'll be back on Monday. Conspiracy theories, cults and crimes is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson, and is a crime house original powered by paved studios. This episode was brought to life by the conspiracy theories, cults and crimes team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Przotsky, Laurie Maranelli, Sarah Camp, Mara Delarosa, Claire Swartzlander and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening. The moment a body is found, the clock starts ticking. 48 hours. That's how long detectives have before the trail begins to go cold. From A&E and Crime House, this is the official podcast from the famous True Crime series

41:43The First 48. Step inside the critical window, the interrogations, the dead ends and the breakthroughs that crack a case wide open. On Carter Roy, each week I revisit a landmark homicide investigation with a depth you know and immersive long form storytelling built for your ears. Real detectives, real cases, real stakes. This is the first 48. New episodes every Thursday. Listen to and follow the first 48 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you listen to podcasts. High listeners, it's Vanessa. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love crimes of Reddit. A new crime house original with Sabrina Deanna Roge and Alexis Linklenter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts

42:44completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swab. Is the feeling of sending your group chat a Reddit 2am that starts with You Have to See This? Except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at crimes of Reddit pod on YouTube.