John Ramsey is defending his late wife Patsy after she was criticized by many in the public for putting their young daughter JonBenét in beauty pageants.
JonBenét, 6, was found dead in her parents’ basement the day after Christmas in 1996. She died from strangulation and a blow to the skull. She also showed signs of a sexual assault.
John and Patsy also found inside their home a threatening hand-written ransom note presumably left behind by the killer, who has yet to be identified nearly 30 years later. However, the ripples of shock spread from Boulder, Colo., across the nation and the parents quickly became suspects. (Nobody in the Ramsey family has ever been charged in connection with JonBenét’s killing.)
John believes that there was such an interest in the case from the beginning partly because of JonBenét’s status as a successful child beauty pageant queen.
He believes the public attention came with critics who believed Patsy, who once competed in the Miss America pageant, was “living vicariously through her daughter” — an idea he says is “totally wrong.”
“JonBenét loved doing that stuff,” Ramsey exclusively tells PEOPLE, referencing the beauty pageants in which the girl had become a frequent and successful participant.
“Patsy had just recovered from stage four ovarian cancer and was grateful for every minute she’d been given to be alive,” he says. “And I think she was trying to pack a lot of stuff into her mother-daughter relationship, knowing that she might not live.”
He adds that JonBenét was “very extroverted” and that the mother and daughter had fun going through the experience of the pageants together.
“We used to say, ‘Man, JonBenét’s got to lose some of these pageants, because she needs to understand you don’t always win in life,’” John recalls.
He says that Patsy, who died in 2006, encouraged her kids, including JonBenét, to participate in as many extracurricular activities as possible.
“JonBenét had taken violin lessons, she’d taken piano lessons,” John tells PEOPLE. “She was signed up to take rock-climbing lessons in January that next year. Let them try anything they want. Soccer. Zero into something they really like and they really did it.”
The infamous unsolved case is coming back into the spotlight in an upcoming three-part docuseries, Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey?, premiering Monday, Nov. 25 on Netflix.
A statement from the network previously shared with PEOPLE states the docuseries “investigates the mishandling of the case by law enforcement and the media, ultimately revealing the relatively simple steps that can be taken to finally solve perhaps the most infamous cold case of all time.”
