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CBN.com – Scott Ross interviewed Patsy and John Ramsey in 2000. Read how faith helped the family through their daughter’s death and Patsy’s terminal ovarian cancer.
SCOTT ROSS: There are hundreds if not thousands of children killed in America and throughout the world every year. Often, unfortunately, by family members. Why did this story have so much life? It won’t go away! Even when it started, there was momentum to this thing.
PATSY RAMSEY: That is something we don’t know. And I think because of the magnitude of this we have to believe as Christians that God is using this.
JOHN RAMSEY: See what we believe, this is our hope, that for some reason JonBenet’s name is known around the world.
SCOTT: It’s a unique name.
JOHN: Well, but there are thousands of children murdered in this country every year. But you can’t name one of them.
SCOTT: No.JOHN: You can’t. So for some reason God is going to make this work for good. Our job, Patsy and I, is to stay tuned and be sure we are listening because there is something significant that is going to happen out of this -- that is our belief.
SCOTT: When you say God, people watching this on all parts of the world -- we are on in hundreds of nations -- what kind of God is it a loving, gracious, merciful, tender, compassionate God?
PATSY: It is a God who says I promised you life, I did not promise you life without tribulation, but have good cheer because I have overcome the world.
SCOTT: Did you have this belief before this happened?
PATSY: Yes, we did.
JOHN: It was tested pretty severely when we lost our oldest daughter, Beth, for me. The first words out of my mouth when I hung up the phone, my brother called me and said, "Beth is dead", a car accident. It was the middle of the afternoon on a Friday.
SCOTT: How old was she?
JOHN: She was 22 and I hung up the phone and said there is no God there cannot be a God.
SCOTT: How long was this before JonBenet’s death?
PATSY & JOHN: 4 years, 4 years.
SCOTT: And then subsequent to Beth’s death you were struggling with this, you had cancer.
PATSY: Stage 4 cancer. The only difference in John and Patsy Ramsey from our good ole buddy Job in the Bible is that we have television in the 20 and 21st century. The whole world knows about this.
SCOTT: One poll -- this in only one -- I don’t know how much stock I put in polls, and this is a tough thing to live with, says eighty-eight percent of people polled believe you guys did it.
PATSY: I’m surprised it’s not 100%. All they’ve heard for 3 years is the parents are responsible, the parents are responsible. They’ve been brainwashed, so how would they believe anything else?
JOHN: Yeah, it’s hurtful, certainly. We lost our child and we’ve had thousands come forward to extend sympathy, compassion, apologies. In 3 years we’ve had hundreds of people come up and say in airport terminals, the street, the shopping mall and say aren’t you JonBenet’s father, or call me Mr. Benet … everyone has been compassionate, caring, sympathetic. Not one has come up and been cruel.
SCOTT: That’s the antithesis of what we’re hearing in the press … you’re the bad guys.
JOHN: We’re overwhelmed by people’s goodness.
SCOTT: Everyone has their opinion, and even for me, I have to go through my own internal process to come to a place I could be objective and talk to you and not be taken in by deception, that you're lying to me, that you're pulling it off. There is one side of this is, that you're not just lying to me you are sitting before God. You are saying you believe in God. When I read this book I’m going whoa, there is another level of accountability here.
JOHN: It is the only level of accountability that matters.
SCOTT: This is not an accusation, but I’m going to say it to you? I was reading through this and I said there is one other couple in the New Testament that I remembered who lied and their names are Ananias and Sapphira.
JOHN: I’m not that good of a Bible student - I don’t know them.
SCOTT: Well, they lied to Peter -- the apostle Peter -- and they fell dead, and he said to them, you did not just lie to me, you lied to the Holy Spirit.
JOHN: We are very, very comfortable being accountable to the God of the Universe.
SCOTT: Because someday you have to stand before Him.
JOHN: Absolutely.
SCOTT: There are elements of this have not been answered, obviously, specific evidence, like the broken window in the basement.
JOHN: DNA, palm prints, fibers, footprints. Fortunately there is a lot of good evidence to a trained eye that gives us hope that justice will be done on this earth.
SCOTT: Is it still being investigated or is everything so much ...
JOHN: We don’t know. We have ongoing investigation that we put together.
SCOTT: You’re paying for that?
JOHN: We’re paying for that. We don’t know what the police have done. They never told us anything from the very beginning.
SCOTT: If I could remember correctly John, you have your own theory that there was a psychopath possibly involved, a man ...
JOHN: These are not based on my opinions, they’re based on talking to world class experts, people who investigated hundreds and hundreds of homicides. We believe this was a pedophile, a male, that had access to a stun gun or owned a stun gun. We firmly believe that this was used in this crime. They were in Boulder, Colorado in December, 1996, and since this crime they have been fascinated with it and obsessed with it -- they followed all the media all the papers. SBTC -- that was on the ransom note -- the letters SBTC means something to this person and the number 118,000.00, which was the ransom amount.
SCOTT: Why that amount? It comes back to the bonus check.
JOHN: It means something to the killer, this wasn’t just a random number. So you take that set, that finite set of six characteristics and we’re not looking for a needle in a haystack.
SCOTT: The way it’s been reported from the outset, did you see things that were coming, did you see this momentum building towards Jon and Patsy Ramsey being the killers?
PATSY: Not initially. Initially we were devastated. We were incoherent. We were so distraught and devastated at the loss of our child. So it was few days before we really began to understand what was happening.
JOHN: There are a couple of things that I think caused this. A couple of flaws in logic. One is that a child murdered – it’s the parents. That is not true.
If you look at children who have been abused or murdered and it’s the parents involved -- in virtually every one of those cases there is a long history of prior abuse. The teachers know about it, the social services know about it, the police have had calls on this family before. There is not one thing in our background to demonstrate that. So you can’t categorically say a child is murdered -- therefore it’s the parents. If there is a long history of abuse or trouble in that family then perhaps the parents need to be looked at seriously.
The second thing that I think went wrong is that the media, their role to be skeptical. They are skeptical of the government. They are hugely skeptical of politicians and the government, but the police are the government too, and we need to be skeptical of the police. The media were not. They took leaks and innuendoes and biases right out of the police departments’ mouths. Instead of being skeptical and say, "Wait a minute, you have never investigated a homicide before, Mr. Detective?" and they hadn’t. Why should we assume you are right on this. But they ran with it because it was a juicy story.
SCOTT: Did you cooperate with them, right from the beginning?
JOHN: We tried desperately. Here is the situation. First of all, we are devastated, we can’t hardly lift a fork to our mouth to eat, so we are not making these calculating tough decisions. We had friends around that saw some very serious things going wrong with the police approach to this. They took actions to protect us and advise us and we listened to them. Their advice was to stay away from the police, they are out to get you, they are out to put you in the electric chair. We said no, we want to find the killer to our daughter, we are innocent. So we had this conflict obviously of what we wanted to do. And the people who knew what was going on were telling us. It turns out that they were 100% correct.
Within the last 6 months you had the two lead detectives, Thomas and Arntz on national television one saying, "I knew it was John who was the killer, and the other said I knew it was Patsy was the killer from the very beginning." That is what we are dealing with. .
SCOTT: John you have been accused of molesting your daughter.
JOHN: That was extremely hurtful to me.
SCOTT: You were a sexual deviate you would go these porn places? What about that?
JOHN: They are lies, that is all I could say. First of all, I loved my daughters. I had 3 wonderful daughters. I would give my life for them. But I wish the killer would have taken me that night instead of JonBenet. To accuse me of doing anything but protecting my daughter as any father would, any good father would, it isn’t warranted. I happened to be watching television when this fellow from the National Enquirer was being quoted, "We saw John Ramsey going into a porn shop a week after his daughter was murdered. We have that as a fact". That is a fraudulent lie, unless they call the 7-11 store a porn shop. Which is how a tabloid justifies their statements.
SCOTT: Those were proven to be lies? There’s no record of your going to buy porn films or rent them?
JOHN: I would stake my life on that.
SCOTT: Has anyone from the press who ever published any false information at any time ever come back to you, called you, written you a letter, sent you an e-mail and said, "We were wrong, we were sorry, we misspoke", etc.?
JOHN: No.
PATSY: None
JOHN: Well, perhaps, yeah. Yeah, I did get a call from a tabloid reporter who said, "I’m sorry for what has been done to you by us." I’ve gotten several letters from people that were in the media profession. I got a letter from an editor who wrote, "I’m ashamed of what my business has done to you.
SCOTT: The accusations against you, Patsy, your bed wetting daughter, you would go into a rage -- are you a woman with a temper?
PATSY: No, I’m not.
SCOTT: Is there any record anywhere that you have abused your children physically?
PATSY: Absolutely not.
SCOTT: So where did that come from?
PATSY: Just another one of those innuendoes to make a story.
JOHN: I tell you what, that probably came from the police. The police theory was that we had a wonderful Christmas dinner, came home, went to bed, sometime during the night JonBenet wet her bed, Patsy flew into a rage, bashed her in the head and said, "uh-oh, should not have done that." She went on to stage a kidnapping, strangled her to stage it, and wrote a three-page ransom note, woke me up the next morning, woke me up and say "Honey, I killed one of the children but you have to keep that quiet." That’s the police theory.
PATSY: There were no wet sheets, there is no evidence in that at all.
JOHN: It doesn’t pass the test of logic, of common sense, it’s foolish.
SCOTT: If you had done this then you went back to bed?
JOHN: Yeah, went back to bed.
PATSY: That’s their theory, I guess.
SCOTT: Is there anything in JonBenet’s medical history to indicate that she was molested or violated or anything like that all.
PATSY: Absolutely not.
JOHN: Our pediatrician went on national television and said I’ve seen this child a dozen times a year since she was a baby and I have never seen anything that would lead me to believe she was sexually molested. Quite to the contrary, what I saw was a child that was loved dearly by her parents.
SCOTT: Are you still under the umbrella of suspicion Patsy? Are you walking around with that over year head?
PATSY: I guess so, until they put the umbrella down we are still under it.
SCOTT: How are you living that day by day?
PATSY: I am living just fine. I am not ...
SCOTT: What do you mean you live just fine -- you can’t say that. You know that’s a soundbite. Someone will take that and say "I live just fine".
PATSY: People say, how can you do this, how can you do this. I have 13 year old son, I have two wonderful parents, we have new grandbaby, I have a wonderful husband, wonderful friends and I have a God that knows the truth. I have nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to be remorseful over, except that I miss my child every day, every minute of the day.
SCOTT: Were you ever suspicious that your husband did it, and visa versa John that she did it.
PATSY: Never.
SCOTT: Did it ever cross your mind that said, " Patsy shut the door it’s you and I and God looking.
PATSY: Never
JOHN: No.
SCOTT: Never? Never doubted for a second.
JOHN: No.
SCOTT: Are you telling me that those thoughts never came to your mind. I mean men walk around saying, "I think my wife may have committed adultery because a number of people said ...
JOHN: JonBenet was brutally murdered. She was strangled. The blow to her head would have brought down a 300-pound man. Patsy loved JonBenet as much as I did. That is insane. It’s just insane.
PATSY: You should hear this man at 2:30 – 3:00 in morning get up. There is no question, you are not there at those hours, I am.
Read part two of the Ramsey interview.
UPDATE: Patsy Ramsey lost her battle with cancer in June of 2006.
We are asking The 700 Club viewers and CBN.com users to join us in praying for the Lord to reign down justice and righteousness in this case and reveal the truth.
Scott Ross welcomes your feedback.
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