If anyone doubts John Ramsey's sincerity in trying to find the killer of his beauty queen daughter JonBenet, take note: Now he's asking for President Donald Trump's help to solve the crime.
What does he think the president can do? Ramsey says he hopes Trump will push Colorado authorities to take a more proactive approach to solving JonBenet Ramsey's murder.
FOX News broke the story this weekend when they ran into Ramsey at CrimeCon and he had this to say, ""I told the DA that money should not be a restrictor here. I need to get Donald Trump on them. He'll stir things up one way or the other, but somehow we've got to get them to do that."
"If he got involved in the… Cracker Barrel (issue)," he added, "This is a whole lot of a bigger deal than the Cracker Barrel. Help us. So that's the bottom line."
As far as what he wants specifically from Trump, Ramsey believes it'll take investigative genetic genealogy to solve the case -- a new tool that uses genealogy databases to trace DNA to relatives and eventually single out the killer, and he wants the president to tell the police to use it in this case. That technology solved the Golden State Killer case, among others.
Per the Associated Press, "Genetic genealogy has increasingly been used to track down unidentified criminal suspects and help solve scores of cold cases in recent years, some of them more than a half-century old or involving other serial killers. It unmasked the Golden State Killer, Joseph DeAngelo, who pleaded guilty to 13 murders and 13 rape-related charges that spanned much of California between 1975 and 1986."
Ramsey was at CrimeCon to announce a petition asking Colorado lawmakers to align state law with the federal Homicide Victim’s Families’ Rights Act to request a cold-case review. He even offered to fundraise to pay for genealogy DNA testing himself.
There was male DNA found on JonBenet, including in her underwear and under her fingernails, which has never been matched to a source, although it has been used to rule out suspects. That DNA finally led Boulder police to announce in 2008 that the Ramseys were not suspects in their 6 year-old daughter's strangulation.
Ramsey has criticized the Boulder Police Department's handling of the investigation, which was most recently profiled in the Netflix series "Cold Case: Who Killed Jon Benet Ramsey?" The documentary outlined how the police allegedly quickly decided that Ramsey or his now-deceased wife Patsy were involved in their daughter's death.
For their part, Boulder Police Chief Steve Redfearn stated that the department is committed to following up on every lead and working with DNA experts until the case is solved. They took a step in that direction by announcing they were retesting some items from the basement crime scene and testing other pieces of evidence for the first time.
“It’s been a slow march, but they’re progressing,” JonBenet's older half-brother John Andrew Ramsey told the Denver Gazette. He added that he met with Boulder Police Chief Stephen Redfearn for a half-hour update on the case Thursday.
The Gazette noted that new testing was initiated by the recommendations of a Colorado Cold Case Review Team, outside experts who, starting in 2023, spent a year coming up with ideas to restart the JonBenet investigation.
The garrote fashioned at the scene and used to kill her could hold new clues, former defense attorney Hal Haddon said at the crime conference. “I have pressed hard for DNA analysis of the knots in this garrote, which our DNA experts say could be promising, because someone had to tie those, and they’re fairly sophisticated.”