Jonbenet Home Stands Empty Year After Her Killing There’s Still No Resolution For Many

It’s hard to tell which way the house looks sadder:

As it was a year ago, its twinkling lights and cheerful candy-cane decorations standing in eerie contrast to the barrier of yellow crime-scene tape.

Or the way it appears now: dark and empty on an otherwise festive street, as jarring as a missing tooth in a smile.

One year ago today, someone murdered JonBenet Ramsey in the upscale brick Tudor. The killer taped the child beauty queen’s mouth shut, tied her wrist, twisted a garrote hard around her neck and bashed in her skull.

The only thing uglier than the 6-year-old’s death is the fact that the murderer remains free.

“The truth is unacceptable, and it goes down hard,” said Mimi Wesson, a professor at the University of Colorado School of Law here. “A year later, we just don’t know” who killed JonBenet.

Until recently, the possibility that the case would remain unsolved loomed entirely too large.

The investigation seemed hopelessly bogged down, reportedly by infighting between the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office and the city police department.

The police drew scorn for their hours-long delay before securing the crime scene, and for their deference toward JonBenet’s socially prominent parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, who refused for four months to submit to a police interview, and who have since moved across the country.

But recently, there has been some activity surrounding the case, coinciding with the October shake-up of the police team investigating the killing.

The team, under its new leader, Cmdr. Mark Beckner, is reviewing all the evidence and is re-interviewing, among others, the family’s neighbors. One of those neighbors is Margaret Dillon, who lives behind the Ramseys’ home and who said police asked her whether anyone in the neighborhood owned a stun gun.

Family spokeswoman Rachelle Zimmer has said the Ramseys did not own such a gun.

But the police questions led to speculation that one of the electronic weapons, which briefly immobilize their targets, was used against JonBenet. Authorities declined to comment. But Wesson cautioned against jumping to that conclusion.

“If anyone, even in the most offhanded and speculative way, mentioned a stun gun, of course the police have to look into it” - or else face, from a defense attorney, accusations of sloppy work if a suspect is ever arrested and brought to trial, she said.

Beckner has vowed that the case will be solved, even if a county grand jury has to be convened to bring charges against a suspect.

At this point, no suspects have been named, although JonBenet’s parents remain under what Beckner termed “an umbrella of suspicion.” Police have looked into other possibilities, including the backgrounds of child molesters known to have lived in Boulder at the time of the killing. But Beckner would not say whether anyone else might share the umbrella with the Ramseys.

John and Patsy Ramsey, and their 10-year-old son, Burke, have returned to Atlanta, where they lived before moving to Boulder in 1991. In Boulder, John Ramsey had headed Access Graphics, a Lockheed subsidiary. Last month, Lockheed sold his firm to General Electric, effectively putting Ramsey out of a job, although he still does consulting work for Lockheed.

The family’s Boulder home remains unsold. With no occupants, it would seem to offer little to curiosity seekers.

But they still come in such numbers as to render the inhabitants of this comfortable neighborhood, a few blocks from the University of Colorado campus, noticeably more reticent than they were a year ago.

Sympathy for the family chilled quickly as videotapes of JonBenet’s various pageant performances were publicized. The tapes showed a young girl bedecked in sexy, sequined clothes, her hair streaked and poufed Barbie-style, her rouged lips curving in a practiced, sultry smile.

That distaste hardened into outrage and suspicion as John and Patsy Ramsey went on national television to warn of “a killer on the loose,” but refused for four months to talk to police about the case.

Earlier this month, police asked to interview the Ramseys and son Burke again, but the family has yet to respond.

“Any time there’s a homicide in a residence in the middle of the night, with no sign of a break-in - well, it doesn’t take a lot of lurid precedent to start people wondering about the people who lived in that house,” said Wesson.

By the same token, she added, it is standard procedure for lawyers to advise their clients against talking to police in such a case.

“People have a perfect right to draw certain conclusions which may or may not be right (about the parents’ behavior). … “But,” she warned, “I think we should be rather humble about the confidence we have in our conclusions.”

The Ramseys are well aware of people’s suspicions and have railed against them, in letters and in rare interviews with handpicked reporters.

The couple hired private investigators to follow leads and paid for full-page ads displaying the ransom note, even as police were requesting sample after sample of Patsy Ramsey’s handwriting. She eventually gave them five.