Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: The Ransom Note and Non-Kidnapping Murder of JonBenet Ramsey

Episode Date: January 19, 2025

A final look at items brought up in the recent Netflix documentary about JonBenet Ramsey and her death. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack talk about the crime scene with Joe breaking down the mistakes that were made and how they have nothing to do with technology. Also, a question that has never been answered regarding the "ransom" note. What type of "kidnapper" kills the person and leaves a "ransom" note? Who would pay a "ransom" for the "safe return" of a loved one when the "loved one" is already dead and in the house?      Transcribe Highlights00:00.41 Introduction 02:00.28 No excuses for evidence mistakes 04:54.75 Never Ask Father of missing 6-year-old search the house 10:06.27 The physical things seen in strangling 14:34.80 Why leave the body AND ransom note 19:53.52 Why ask for $118,000? 24:28.50 The reason for the ransom note is dead 29:07.64 JonBenet was beaten, skull was fractured 32:10.35 ConclusionSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Moore. It's really easy, Dave, for someone like me, after all of these years, you know, to pick up stones and start throwing them at the people that worked this case all these many years ago. And, you know, I think that many times in the world that we live in, it's so dominated by technology that we find ourselves in right now. People will default to, they'll say, well, they didn't have access to the technology that we have as far as crime solving goes. Technology has nothing to do with this.

I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Back. This is, I started working in forensics back in the 80s, Dave. The same principles still hold true, that held true back during that time period. There's certain things that we do at a base level where you have an expectation of security of the scene because you don't want to lose anything that's a scene and you don't want to introduce or add something to the scene that should not have been there. Hey, Joe, I am so thankful that we have the opportunity to dig into this story one last time. We're talking about the JonBenet Ramsey case. Now, we did talk about it during the Christmas holiday and the Netflix documentary and what came out in that.

But there were a couple of things that we missed that i really wanted to cover and i'm just so thankful that you agreed to do this joe because right at the start i was really concerned about the scene of the crime and what was done to it my thought first thought was why are there people in the house besides the police that was just number one right out of the gate on the earliest coverage of this story. Because in everything all of us know, you need to get everybody out so you can just, we're going to be able to investigate properly, starting at square one. You've got all these people in the house making food and everything else and wiping up tablecloth. I mean, it's ridiculous what happened. And I'm not even a cop, but the fact that police allowed that to take place, shame on them, shame on everybody involved. That should have never happened.

But then it has. And the first thing you do, because you've got people milling around, you need to give them something to do. Well, why don't y'all take a good look around the house? Yeah, just go looking. And John Ramsey goes straight to a place you would not normally get to in that house. You have to go downstairs and through, you know, to this area they refer to as a wine cellar. But it wasn't a wine cellar. It was just a, you know, a downstairs area. And they and he goes straight to her body. Now, if you go.

Yeah, we have to keep in mind that there's like another area adjacent to it that they call, I think they call the train room. Yeah, the train room. Yeah. And that's where he actually, and you know, Dave, they. I'm so glad you said that, Joe. I forgot about the train room. Yeah.

And that plays into it, you know, which we'll get to marks that are found in her body. But, you know, when this Del Paso, former El Paso County investigator that keep in mind, this person is different than the Boulder police department. This individual said, well, it's a lack of experience on the Boulder police departments, you know, uh, part because they, they didn't know how to, how to handle this thing, but you've got this, this one investigator that is handling the case. And she, you know, she famously went on air and made all of these assertions about the case and went on and on. And she's in charge at the scene. You were talking about John Ramsey. She looks at him as if I need to get this guy out of my hair or whatever reason she said this, you and your friend go search the rest of the house.

And, you know, for me, when I hear somebody say that, you know, it's like that commercial about, you know, the little elderly women talk about where she says, I unfriend you like that. They're talking about the Facebook thing. And the one lady says, that's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. And you're absolutely right. You do not ask the father of a missing six-year-old while you're sitting in the house as a police

officer to have them go search the house. No, that's not what you do. If you don't have enough resources, there's other post-certified police officers in this county that you can reach out to. Hey, we need help. Send help now. And we need to be able to canvas the area. We need to be able to secure the scene. You're going to rely on a dad and his friend to go search the house. And as you mentioned, you know, when they make their way down into the basement of this home, this labyrinth that you have to go through, you know, that's when, you know, John actually finds Jean Benet down in that area. And by the by, as a result of him finding her, what does he do?

Well, it's what you would, I think that most reasonable people would think what a father would do. He picks his child up, removes her from this scene. Now, if that had been, say, a police officer, they may have walked over, checked for a pulse. They see that she's cyanotic or blue. She might be cool to the touch. Guess what they're not going to do with body. This is no longer a rescue. This is no longer trying to do compressions on her chest.

This is leaving her in place. And it's at that moment in time, if it had not already gone off the rails, this is where the whole thing kind of, you know, really begins to take a turn for the worst, worst possible case scenario here. Because now you've got dad entering into this environment. Maybe in a reactive moment, he grabs his daughter. His daughter's remains. He thinks there's a chance that she can be saved. And, of course, she's beyond that at this point in time. But because for whatever reason, this detective directs him to do this,

yeah, granted, he found the body along with his buddy, found the body, but more harm was done than certainly good, Dave. Well, Joe, all I'm thinking, okay, is you sent him to go look for the child in his mind's eye. If there was already a cover up and they already staged the body in the basement to make it look as if she had been murdered, sending John Ramsey or anybody else non-pol'm going to go straight and I'm fixing this. Because now, whatever they had staged before that had to remain static, I can get rid of all the evidence right now. I'm going to rip off the duct tape. I'm going to undo this garret around her neck. I mean, evidence is all gone. Every bit of it is totally wiped from the crime scene.

Now, they have to try to piece it back together to find out how was she strangled. We got the rope. Well, what was it? It was nylon. There had been. Yeah, it's a woven nylon rope. Yeah. And it was tied into a knot in a certain way.

But then there was actually a stick. Something used from Patsy Ramsey's hobby kit was used to turn it, and it broke. Yeah, it's a garrote. Yeah. Some people say garrote, garrote. And it's used as this weapon, and it is a weapon. Garrotes are known as weapons. That's how they're defined.

Did you know, and here's an interesting little aside, did you know that the garroting or garroting of individuals for a time, I think it may have been in France, I can't remember where specifically, that this was an execution method? Do you know that? No. Do you know how they used to do it? would take an individual, and you can see wood carvings of these. They're out there, lithographs or whatever they're called, I can't remember, where the individual is seated in a chair and bound, like their hands are bound behind them. It's a straight back chair in like a courtyard where the public execution would take place. And they would put a garrote around the neck of the individual and turn

it from the back like this and slowly kill the person. In public view, it's an agonizing way to die because with every turn of that thing, you are exerting more and more pressure. You begin to see the tongue bulge, the eyes bulge. you are exerting more and more pressure. You know, you begin to see the tongue bulge, the eyes bulge. They become cyanotic, all these things. You know, years ago, I worked a series as kind of a, I hate to say this, diminishing the lives of individuals who were killed, but it was like a short series of serial killings.

It was like six victims to this guy's count. And he was killing prostitutes and he used to corrode after he had drugged them. And he had multiple places where he would reset the garrotte and realign it. And his was made out of wire, by the way. And he would take it and he would turn it and they would get to the point of losing consciousness. He'd release it and then he'd reinitiate the thing. So make no mistake when you see this is not like just grabbing a cord. Okay. This is not like just grabbing a cord where you're going to wrap it around a piece of

rope or a coat hanger or a weapon, as we say, a weapon of convenience. This is thought out. This is something that was used in order to elicit terror upon the victim. I have no doubt in my mind this was a sadistic killing. And the thing that's fascinating about this, Dave, is that, you know, John Ramsey said in his statement that, if I remember correctly, and I think not statement, this was in the interview, when he saw this thing, it was tied so tight he couldn't unbind it. And this is what is referred to as a very complex knot. That's why they believed that whoever fixed this thing had experience with tying knots and complex knots. That has always been one of the things that has rung through. And when you see her autopsy pictures, you case given the complexity of this knot i hope that

retrospectively due care was taken with this thing because you know what it can offer up. It can offer up DNA. Because for every turn and twist of that knot, if the individual is not gloved, they're touching multiple surfaces on this thing as it's being constructed. And the paintbrush stick thing is, that goes without saying, obviously. But just the surfaces of that knot. And when you think about the complexity of it, that would require this thing to be manipulated to a great degree. So I'm wondering if Duke care was taken with that ligature itself. When I was hearing them talk about the ligature and the garrote, I remember John Wayne

Gacy doing the same thing, using it to turn and torture. That was the first one I'd actually heard of. And then seeing this one, all I could think of is this is something that required time and preparation. So with the time and preparation that went into, if it was somebody who just snuck in in the middle of the night and was able to do this, you realize that they have to know the building enough to know where they can access the house in the middle of the night. They have to be able to find themselves walking around the house without waking anybody up through this maze of places. Then they have to be able to get her out of her bed, take her downstairs and kill her. And then they've come into the house and killed her in the middle of the night and then bothered to leave a ransom note.

Why would they leave a ransom note, Joe, if they've killed her and left her behind? If you're going to leave a ransom note, there would have to be the child would have to be gone for it to mean anything. And since the child is already dead and left behind, why leave? Why would anybody leave a ransom note? You have no ransom. Yeah. And, you know, the only thing I could really think of, brother, was the fact that somebody was trying to put somebody off scent, if you will.

Yeah. You know, to try to misdirect. If the body wasn't in the house, I if you will. Yeah. You know, to try to misdirect. If the body wasn't in the house, I could see that. Yeah. Well, to try to, yeah, to try to sell people on the fact that she's elsewhere. But why would you leave the body behind? That's what I don't, I don't, I don't understand that. And, you know, to point three relative to this reporter's assessment,

you know, she had alluded to the fact that this detective, Bob Whitson, you know, he had said that he asked for handwriting from both John and Patsy and which, you know, he received back in, you know, in from two notebook pads. And you could see those on the documentary. They showed they demonstrated those pads. I'd never seen those before. So I'm with her on this, you know, which was, you know, keep keep in mind, this is this is prior to the days of texting, you know, or prior to the days of people sitting down. I mean, I still like, Lord knows, my precious wife, she can't live without an actual calendar.

She has physically has a calendar. She writes everything in each day. And so, but, you know, that's the way things have, you know, were always done. You had a notebook that you would write and enter things into. And so that's where they get, um, that would be referred to again. I think we just mentioned this in, in one of our, uh, actually, um, one of our recent episodes. Uh, but you know, this is where it plays into getting an exemplar of writing. So you have a real, you have a real-time exemplar or an example of what an individual's writing looks like in the course of day-to-day life here. It's not a dictated exemplar where you ask someone, you dictate to them what is written in a ransom note note and you dictate to them and say, write this

statement down. This is a real life exemplar of how they normally write. So the idea is that you take and compare what you see in the notebook to what you have in this ransom note. And are there any similarities, you know, relative to this? But when I've always been fascinated by the fact that they believe that the notebook that the note was written in is, was property of the Rams, of the Ramses, and that it was physically there. And it was actually discovered, I believe, to have probably what's referred to as kind of a pressure connection where, and if any of you guys know this, if you say, for instance, you've seen it in movies, it's an old movie trope where somebody will write a note and they'll rip the sheet out. And then you can take a pencil, you know, and scratch over the

surface of it. And all of a sudden hidden writing, writing begins to appear. Um, you can actually see the pressure through the page. That means that somebody is leaning forward, pressing down with the writing device and they're, they create, you know, these little creases in a note. And so that note would be taken away. And Dave, this note is so, my God, it's so extensive because, you know, I don't know about for you, but, you know, you always think about, you know, I have a bomb. I will kill everybody here, provide this money and drop it off at this address. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about something that's highly complex. You know, they're establishing who we are.

We're part of a foreign faction. Oh, my gosh. Foreign faction. Yeah. God, in Boulder, Colorado? I'm not saying that foreigners are not. Targeting this guy. It's a university town, but I'm just saying.

Still. Out of all the people in the world, you know, you're going to show up. And yeah, I mean, people have said that, you know, John, you know, John's a very wealthy man. He's involved in software. You know, I'm assuming that, you know, he's come across. But, you know, there's very specific details. I think the thing that really, you know, caught people's eye, Dave, and I guess we're number three or number four here, you know,

in this reveal for her, for this reporter is the $118,000. You know, why? It's an odd number, isn't it? Yeah, well, that is an odd number, isn't it? Yeah, that is an odd number. Why aren't you going to ask for a quarter of a million dollars? You're talking about a dude that's a multimillionaire. Yeah. All right. Why $118,000?

Why not a round figure like $200,000, quarter of a mil? Why not $500,000? Why not a million? You know, if you're going to, dude, if you're going to run the risk, because kidnapping is a federal offense and you will get life imprisonment for it, dude, if you're going to run the risk, because kidnapping is a federal offense, and you will get life imprisonment for it. Dude, if you're going to roll the bones here, man, go all in. Why not $118,000 specifically? That was his bonus that year. Yeah, exactly.

Who knows that information? There's something about the note I want to share with you. Yeah. I looked this up at the time because I was curious as to when was Patsy Ramsey born. And the reason is in the early 70s, Patricia Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. The SLA. And they kidnapped her, they held her, and eventually after a long enough period of time, she had started to go along with them. She was on camera robbing a bank,

has the gun in her hand, and they said she's full on participating in the robbery. It was a big deal in the early 70s, mid 70s. Oh yeah, it was. Well, for Patsy Ramsey being born in 1956, she's going to be 18 to 20 years old when the whole Patricia thing's going on, Patricia Hearst deal. So when I saw the note, victory, SBTC, SLA, Symb why is she right? Oh, not she. But why is the kidnapper specifically writing to John and not both of them? The Ramseys are a couple. This is their child.

She's singling out John because in my mind's eye, she's writing him and she's dead and gone now. And I know that there are people who believe that whatever. I don't buy the note, Joe. The ransom note is too long, too specific. $118,000. That was his bonus that year, which, my goodness, I've never seen a bonus 10% of that in my life. And who has specific knowledge of how much? Now, I got to tell you, John Ramsey does not strike me as somebody that would go out to a bar and sit there and say, hey, everybody drinks on me. I got one hundred eighteen thousand dollar bonus this year.

Yeah. You know what I'm saying? He seems like the kind he's a business guy. Yeah. All right. He seems like the kind of person he's going to know more than he's revealing. And he's certainly not going to tell you, you know, I mean, you know, revealing how much money you got for bonuses right up there with revealing your, your bathroom habits. It's just certain things that you don't talk about. You know, and who would have access to that information? Well, obviously, those that are within his very inner circle.

And they hadn't been in Boulder a long, long time. Who in their inner circle of friends would he have felt comfortable enough with sharing the fact that he got $118,000 bonus? Well, you step out of that circle and you begin to think, well, who might know at work? Well, somebody's got to cut the check, right? So who at work would know that he got $118,000 bonus. And listen, there's jealous people at work. Lord knows you've encountered them, I've encountered, and they wish you ill will. Would somebody be willing to go to that length to do this kind of horrible thing to this little kid because of the fact that he got $118,000.

Is that his money, the motivation? Because if money is the motivation, why are you going to leave the kidnapped subject in the house? Because there was never any intention to collect money. Because the child is left behind dead. Dead. The reason you would pay the ransom is so your child is returned to you alive,

but you've left the child dead in the house. There's no reason for... You really think they're going to just run down to the bank and get $118,000 out and give it to you without checking the house, without looking around the house? But on top of that, Joe, think about this. Who writes down, this is actually in the note a lot of people don't catch on.

Make sure that you bring an adequate size attache to the bank. When you get home, you will put the money in a brown paper bag. Well, what? Bring it. Who actually thinks like that to write that down in a note? Bring something big enough to put the money in. It's like this is so overly specific that you had the time to write this out. If you're in a hurry, you came to kidnap a child and you just accidentally killed her. Now you're leaving her behind. Why are you bothering with the note?

The longer you're there, the more chances you have to be caught. The ransom, the reason for you getting money is dead. Get out of the house now. Why are you leaving a note? Yeah, I don't understand. How much space can $118,000 take up if you're getting it in denominations of $100 bills? Yeah. I can't imagine it's going to be, you know, it's not like you're walking, you know, walking down the street like Scrooge McDuck and you've got gold coins falling out of your wheelbarrow, your gold wheelbarrow. It's not like that. It's just the whole thing, you know, kind of, you know, stinks to high heaven. Yeah. But when you, you know, when you consider all of that.

I will call you between 8 a.m When you consider all of that. Joe. I will call you between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. tomorrow. The delivery will be exhausting. I advise you to get rest. Be rested, John. I mean, Joe, really. It says that in this note. The delivery will be exhausting, so I advise you to be rested.

The whole thing just reeks, and it's so long and so convoluted. This makes no sense. Yeah, and who has the, again, I use the term intestinal fortitude, because you have to have nervous steel. Let's just, let's just say, all right, for grins and giggles that we are a malevolent individual that shows up at this house. Okay. and you have the intestinal fortitude to take a notepad that allegedly belonged in the house and sit down where people sit down to consume breakfast, I guess, maybe in that location, and you sit there and you take the time, you know, did this person show up with their own pen or did they borrow this as well? And they sit there and construct this note and then we'll take it off and we're going to take it and put it here on the tread of the staircase.

Immediately, you know, on the other side of the wall here. That requires nerves of steel because I don't care how big a house is. If there's something going on within a house at night, I'll give you, for instance, my wife hears everything. I mean, she does. And I don't wake up for thunder, you know? Yeah. Wow.

Did you hear that storm last night, hun? Nope. No, I didn't. Oh my God. I was up all night. I started to wake you up. Why didn't you? I couldn't. You were asleep. I couldn't get you up. Why didn't you? I couldn't.

You were asleep. I couldn't get you to wake up. You know what I'm saying? You know, I guess, you know, you could say, well, yeah, they're isolated in the house. They're better than the masters upstairs. They're not going to hear this. But it would take nerves of steel to sit down there and write this note and then deposit this thing on the staircase um which for me is is quite quite interesting um and just and you know maybe

we beat this dead horse i don't know but it's just the fact that the length of the thing um and the specificity of it and then this kind of drawn out narrative, you know, that runs through it. Wait a minute, you're a Southern good sense. Come on. I know. I mean, what does that even mean? I don't understand. Why did somebody put that in there?

I know. It's bizarre. I mean, now I guess you could say they are aware that he has recently relocated to Colorado and they're trying to hone in on that specific detail of his life. Maybe it's an indication that they know about him. They know where he comes from. Okay. Maybe it's alluding to that. I have no idea. But for me, this individual that wrote this, first off, had to have nerves of steel. And then secondly, they also have to have pretty substantial constitution as well, because they're going to get downstairs, assuming that the same person that wrote the note had something to do with Jean Benet's death, which, of course, I believe that, you're going

to torture, and yes, I will use that term, torture and murder by not only strangling this child, but beating her to the point where her skull fractures, Dave. And that's another point that the author of this article from BuzzFeed, you know, made a point of. That, you know, that it was at that point in time that they realized. Because, you know, for the longest time, they just said that she had been strangled. No one ever said anything about this insult. I didn't know about it until I saw the show. Yeah said that she had been strangled. No one ever said anything about this insult. I didn't know about it until I saw the show. Yeah, that she had sustained.

Well, yeah, I knew it. It was famously brought about in the infamous CBS show, because they did these demonstrations. Dr. Werner Spitz, who – and we did we remember we actually did a uh in memoriam uh uh of uh episode of body bags when you know because verner spitz died him and him and cyril died pretty close to one another we and i talked about it verner spitz, he's one of the godfathers. He preceded Dr. Weck. So he's even in an older generation. And, you know, he wrote the definitive text on forensics, on forensic pathology.

And, you know, they talked about the utilization of potentially, I think that their conclusion was a flashlight or a cylindrical like object in order to generate this kind of, and what was really ghastly about that show is that they were attempting to say that Jean Benet's brother had something to do with this. And I think probably the most repugnant part of that program was the fact that they brought in a nine-year-old child. Oh, I know. To do the demonstration where they had a mocked up skull and they, and you can go online and see it. And it was, it was really in poor taste as far as I'm concerned. This is nothing I would ever want to involve myself in where you've got this little boy, an actor, I guess, that's raining down blows on this facsimile of a skull that actually is in gel so that it mimics tissue.

And he's driving this thing down onto, you know, onto the, the, you know, the pretend body here. It seems like something you would see on hard copy in the late eighties, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It was in really poor taste. Um, very poor taste. I can't, you know, I can't imagine, you know, being a parent and watching this thing.

Um, and you know, what's, what they're, they're angling toward this idea that the nine-year-old brother did this. And, of course, they, you know, CBS wound up paying the piper for that. And, you know, I often thought that this is just my musing here. I really thought that maybe CVS was going all in on this idea that the family had something to do with this. And so they thought, yeah, we're going to run the risk of getting sued. If they sue us, we're not going to settle, which they wound up doing. We're not going to settle and we're going to wind up having depositions. And that's really the way I had looked at this early on.

Of course, they wound up settling, you know, this particular case. And it was just the number was eye-popping, you know, just absolutely eye-popping. And I don't know what they eventually settled for. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.