EXCLUSIVE: Unearthed documents from early in the JonBenet Ramsey murder investigation show DNA evidence recovered under her fingernails and clothes was not a match for members of the family and others close to the case just weeks after the crime.
But police for years continued to float the possibility that her parents were under “an umbrella of suspicion” in the gruesome slaying, a new book on late Colorado investigator Lou Smit, who worked the case, argues in its opening pages.
“Lou and JonBenet: A Legendary Lawman’s Quest to Solve a Child Beauty Queen’s Murder,” by John W. Anderson, a former El Paso County sheriff-turned-author, is scheduled for publication by WildBlue Press on Feb. 28.
“For the past quarter-century, the Boulder police have ignored the DNA evidence that exonerated the Ramseys and could be used to identify her killer,” Anderson argues in the book.
The documents were retrieved from Smit’s files, which his family shared with a team of investigators. Smit, a Colorado Springs detective, came out of retirement in 1997 at the request of the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office to look into the JonBenet case.
Excerpts of the January 1997 DNA results have circulated online, but Anderson, who shared it with Fox News Digital, said the team believes Smit’s might be the only unredacted copy in the possession of anyone outside law enforcement. Boulder authorities previously denied Fox News Digital’s request for the same document.
Smit had argued that the likeliest suspect would have been an intruder, and in 1998, he quit again, citing frustrations with the Boulder Police Department’s insistence that JonBenet’s parents could be suspects.
“At this point in the investigation, ‘the case’ tells me that John and Patsy Ramsey did not kill their daughter, that a very dangerous killer is still out there and no one is actively looking for him,” he wrote in a resignation letter 19 months after answering the DA’s call.