On the morning of Dec. 26, 1996, John and Patsy Ramsey woke up to find their 6-year-old daughter, JonBenét Ramsey, missing from her bedroom.
Shortly after, they found a handwritten ransom note asking for exactly $118,000 — the amount of John’s bonus that year — on the kitchen stairs.
The alleged kidnapper demanded the huge sum in exchange for JonBenét’s safe return. John was ordered to pay the ransom amount in cash and wait for a call between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. that day.
Police later learned that the letter had been written from a notepad found in the Ramsey home.
The next episode of ABC News’s 20/20, airing at 9/8c on Friday, Dec. 13, features a never-before-seen clip of the late legendary newswoman, Barbara Walters, interviewing the Ramseys about the now-infamous ransom note the couple found in their home when their young daughter was murdered.
The Ramsey Family.
Courtesy of Netflix
“The ransom note asked for an odd figure — $118,000,” Walters says in the clip. “That was a bonus that you had received.”
John responds by saying, “Well, that was one of the theories that I came up with, that it was close to the net amount I’d received that year as a bonus.”
He theorizes that “$118,000 means something to the killer, we know that. We believe that. Whether that’s tied to my bonus or something else, we don’t know. Only the killer knows.”
Turning to Patsy, Walters asks her if she knew that her husband “got this kind of a bonus?”
“Not at the time, no,” Patsy replies.
The episode goes in-depth on the sensational case, detailing how John and Patsy quickly became suspects in the murder of JonBenét, who died from strangulation and a blow to the skull after being sexually assaulted.
Their son, Burke, who was 9 at the time of his sister’s murder, also fell under suspicion at the time.
The episode shows how the family was finally cleared in 2008 — and it examines whether there is hope that the case will ever be solved, especially in light of new questions raised about the investigation in the Netflix docuseries Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey?, which began streaming on Monday, Nov. 25.
The three-part docuseries goes in-depth into what John considers to be mistakes made by authorities when investigating JonBenét’s murder amid an international media circus.
John says he would like cutting-edge labs that use genetic genealogy and other advanced DNA technology to crack the cold case by examining seven items from the crime scene. Those items, he says, have never been tested or were examined with outdated methods.
“Of the items sent to labs in the beginning, six or seven of them were returned untested,” he claimed in November 2024. “We don’t know why they were not tested, but they were not tested. The garrote used to strangle JonBenét and a number of items just were sent back.”
On Nov. 26, 2024, the Boulder Police Department posted a statement on X (formerly Twitter) contesting “the assertion that there is viable evidence and leads we are not pursuing,” including DNA testing.
The 20/20 episode airs at 9/8c on Friday, Dec. 13, on ABC.
