Patsy Ramsey has died

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Patsy Ramsey, mother of slain 6-year-old JonBenet, died Saturday of ovarian cancer, her lawyer told CNN. She was 49.

She died about 3:30 a.m. at her father's house with her husband by her side, lawyer Lin Wood said. She was diagnosed with cancer in 1993 but was cancer-free for nine years until a relapse three years ago.

The unsolved killing of JonBenet in December 1996 put Patsy and John Ramsey, the girl's parents, in the spotlight.

A grand jury investigation into the death of the child beauty pageant winner ended without charges in 1999.

JonBenet's beaten and strangled body was found in the basement of the family home in Boulder, Colorado, the day after Christmas.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/06/24/ramsey.death/



Does anyone besides me think that she and her husband were involved with the child's death? I still can't shake that feeling, regardless of whether they were charged or not. I could be very wrong, of course, but something never sit well with me in the aftermath of JB's death.

And also think that they cops helped cover it up.

I hate to say it, but I never was able to get past my suspicion of Patsy.
I don't know if I have an opinion about the father (whether he was involved or had knowlege), but like you, it just never sat right with me.

-chef-

was that Patsy flipped out because JonBenet wet the bed one too many times.
There were a lot of strange characters in that case.
I think it's entirely possible that it may have been done by an intruder as well.

...any other child murder?

I never understood that.

I know, cause I was featured in Cyberscope that issue, and no, I am not Pope John Paul.

http://www.ultimatetaxi.com/in_the_news/newsweek.htm

Peace, Jon

Neither seems a reasonable option to me.

Rats! :thumbsdown:

But, of course, had there been one it would've just ignited a week-long media circus. :+

There are enough of them already to give diversion to the rats in the white house right now, I think!

And the fact that her life was ruined when she may very well have been 100% innocent bothers me a lot more than that she may have been culpable.

:hug:

Hope Mike is doing well and on his way to recovery

Trying to steal some time for myself is really, really hard.

To find out she was innocent, but suspected, would really bother you more than finding out that she was guilty and never held accountable?

Wow, thinking of what that poor little girl went through, and the fact that whoever was guilty has never been caught, has always bothered the hell out of me, way more than what the parents went through, regardless of their guilt or innocence. :shrug:

-chef-

I think that trying people in the media is dead wrong. I also continue to feel it's better to let 100 guilty people go free than to punish an innocent person. It doesn't make what the child went through any less repulsive but they say to never judge another person fortunate until you know the circumstances of their death.

Knowing the circumstances of her death tells me she didn't get away scott free.

Nice to see you, btw.

And please dont misunderstand..I was just really surprised at what you said.

If I found out that Patsy was 100% innocent, yes, I would feel bad, but since none of us know if she was innocent or guilty, I honestly can't say that the fact that she was suspected bothers me all that much. I just can't drum up the sympathy toward her that you seem to have, and I do admire you for being able to feel that for her. I guess maybe I have a hard time believing Patsy's life was ruined just by being suspected.

Whenever that story has come up in the news over the years, the real tug at my heart has been for a child whose life was ended that way.
If it had been my child, they could call me in for questioning all they want, and I would move heaven and earth to do whatever I could to find the real killer, and I don't think I would give a damn if my life was ruined in the court of public opinion.

You do make a good point about how we Americans do tend to, very often, form opinions about a person's guilt or innocence based on what we learn from the media. When that person finally goes to trial, the prevailing opinion does usually seem to influence a jury's decision, I agree. Patsy was never brought to trial, however, so I think its a moot point in this case.

Nice to see you too, btw. :)

-chef-

That so many tabloids treated her being suspect as a foregone conclusion and planting false stories to bolster their sales bothers me immensely.

Don't get me wrong. It would have been derelict for the DA not to consider the parents in this case. They, however, botched it badly with their media whoring behavior to the degree that they MADE cooperation with them by the Ramseys an impossibility. Any lawyer who allowed them to speak would have been one crappy lawyer.
Perhaps it may have been an overstatement to say her life was ruined but I imagine that having to avoid going out in public after her daughter was murdered and having to move away from a community of which she had been an active part were severely disruptive to say the least.

It's absolutely horrible that the child's life ended that way let alone ANY way. But either charge the parents or don't. Making a media circus out of it served no one let alone the child.

Grandstanding politicians (and DA's are politicians) ruin everything.

(Jon Benet's brother) was involved. I can't imagine one parent covering up for another in a child's death unless there was abuse or coercion, which didn't appear to be the case.

I can, without qualification, see parents covering up for another child.

correctly, the DNA didn't match. It's still unmatched to this day.

Having some experience with devastating sibling rivalry between a 9 year old boy and a 6 year old girl.

That and the garrotte.

involved in the death (one of them actually having done it, and the other knowing about it) and Burke having been either an inadvertent witness or a witness after the fact (the killer - one of his parents - having confessed to him they did it).

As a social worker, I dealt with a lot of child abuse cases, and know an abusive situation when I see one. JB was abused just simply by the way her mother dressed her up like an adult with makeup and sexy outfits, so in my mind, if she didn't kill JB (which I think she did, in a jealous rage, but I digress...), she was at the very least, an abusive parent.

TC

Dressing a young girl up to look like a woman is sick, and IMO indicates that parents who do that have inappropriate sexual bounderies themselves and put their child at risk. My suspiscion is that either daddy or brother were caught by mom abusing Jon-Benett and it was Jon-Benett who was "punished" for what was occuring. It's not uncomon for mothers of sexually abused children at the hands of the father to blame the child.

:cry:

for someone else they suspected of causing their daughter's death, possibly a close relative.

That's just speculation, though. I hope she found peace.

as a parent, I know that it would be extremely unlikely for
a parent to commit such an act.

Jon Benet was strangled with a garrot.

The media took rumors and printed them as fact, and
when the correct info came out, they didn't retract it.

As much as I dislike the idea of putting little
girls in beauty pagents and putting adult like makeup on
them, I don't see the evidence to support the parents
harming their child.

They may have put her in harms way inadvertantly,
as you can read in some of the histories of this case,
or this might have happened anyway.

Read more here:

http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/famous/ramsey/

for the first time (in all these years) she had the dna put into the fbi's data base. people really need to read more about this before they assume what the cable news talkers say is gospel. Many things were hinky in this case. Did you know that they had work done on their house shortly before the murder, ala Elizabeth Smart? Who really knows, but my money is on a poor investigation.

So being a parent doesn't make it impossible to harm your kids, unfortunately.

Regardless of my personal opinion about this case, I wouldn't have wished this on anyone. The disease is horrific.

dg

the facts are.. but it is a horrifying story.. which magazines capitalized on because of make-up on a kid was photoworthy and check-out counter $$$.

to reopen debate on these stories that they sensationalize and create. I mean really why is this is a top story on CNN. We may likely never know who killed JonBenet, but a woman has just died way too young from a horrible disease. A man has lost his wife, a son his mother. The speculation does no good. Please give the woman and her family the respect you would want.

I can just see news helicopters blowing up dust as they attempt to cover her grave

deserves peace.

I don't care one way or another. I was just posting of the woman's death, and making my own opinion that I felt somehow the parents and/or mother was in some way responsible for the child's death.

Other than that, I tried to stay away from the whole affair from start to finish completely.

I do think it is an interesting discussion, to be truthful, because it happened a long time ago, and most of us didn't have anyone to discuss it with on an intellectual level, since 1) DU wasn't around then; 2) many people here now weren't online in 1996; and 3) If we avoid talking about all the "bad" things like this in the world, we wouldn't have much to discuss, would we?

Regardless of the personal issue, I think talking about parents who glamorize their children in such a way that Patsy Ramsey did smacks of something other than good sense and love of a child. It stinks of exploitation, child porn, and downright debasement of those who parents and other adults are supposed to protect. On these qualities alone, this is an issue worth talking about, and to put this example into perspective of all others similar to it.

The fact that Patsy Ramsey has died makes no difference--the fact that she was part and parcel of one of the greatest murder bungling jobs in our history does make a difference. If we look back across time, there are many instances of horrific crimes, but most of them are notable because they have been solved in some fashion. The truly abhorrent ones are those that will never be solved, and the thought that there is a murderer out there somewhere who will never be caught makes it scary shit. We have long feared serial killers because they have killed so many and yet many have evaded capture and conviction--is this case any different? Somewhere there is someone who has gotten away with a child's death and a child's death with many grisly aspects.

This reminds me particularly of O.J. Simpson's case, because we knew, after the civil trial that both the DA's office and the police fucked that case up all the way, that he was completely guilty. Several members of the criminal jury came forward and told that there was a lot of evidence that they were never shown, and the civil trial was a more carefully thought out one. In this case, we have a guilty man who had enough money to stop the truth from ever reaching the public and it is one of those times when we realize that rich people lead different lives from the rest of us in respect to the law and to justice.

Regardless, I have and had no reason other than simple interest in posting the article as being newsworthy. If people aren't/weren't interested, they need not have responded. The "hide" feature is there for a reason.

cover it up is what made her get sick.

I mean, how perverted is it to name a little girl "JonBenet" because her father's name is "John Bennett?"

Redstone

I think that the poor police work allowed the guilty party to escape justice. My understanding was that the police in that community did not have a great deal of training or experience in dealing with the type of crime scene that the house actually was.

One very real possibility was that it was a person who lived in the house. That could include the father, the mother, and/or the brother. For any one of them to have done it, at least one other family member would likely have to "cover." If the brother killed her, both parents would have had to help cover it up.

However, far more likely is one parent. That means one needs to consider which parent would be more prone to cover for the murderer. All things considered, your theory makes the most sense.

tinged with fear...I'm good at reading people, and it didn't seem to me to be the fear of getting caught. Just fear of...something.

And I could see the controlling, domineering dark part of the father's black soul seeping through his mask...he's a monster. He controlled his wife like a master puppeteer. The truth will come out some day, I'd bet on it.

Redstone

about the same as I thought. It takes a certain family pathology to keep certain secrets. "Fear" was very likely in play in this family.

anything. A significant majority of battered women have been terrorized into actually believing that it's their fault.

That's what I think was at work there.

Redstone

Many years ago, the majority of my work was with families with violence. Spouses battering spouses, parents battering children. And physical violence does create strange mental processes in people. Often, those on the outside will question, "But HOW could she stay ...?"

I will also mention something -- and I'm not saying this did happen in this case -- but I have encountered numerous cases where a father molested a daughter, and the mother convinced herself it just wasn't real. Again, I am not saying this happened, but I thought it was a possibility that there was some extreme sickness in the family, one that people would go to great lengths to protect.

Redstone

the name.

I'm named after my father. Aside, from growing up with an ill father, my childhood was fairly normal.

prior to the daughter's death, I am fairly certain.

I did my damnest to avoid the never-ending media frenzy surrounding the Ramsey case but one can't help but point to this story along with OJ as to a point where the corporate media decided to manufacture "news" rather than investigate and report real events. This story fit a formula...rich, white girl, murder with possible sexual overtones...it was all the titilation along with a family that was full of its own skeltons in the closet. The case was never solved in the eyes of the law, but it sure was in the corporate media and they saw ratings and money as a reward. This game played again with Lewinski and then Chandra Levy (anyone remember Gary Condit) and Scott Peterson and the blonde babe who vanished in Aruba.

If anything, the corporate media ruined this case as the publicity made a fair trial impossible and tarnished both the investigation and a possible jury pool with its non-stop rush to judgement. And it all began to happen thanks to the deregulation of the media in '96 that put the hands of the fifth estate firmly in the hands of corporate profiteers who have distorted reality to a point where important cases like Enron or Abramoff or lying about launching a war for profit are given a back seat to "if it bleeds it leads".

I always felt they were being honest in their interviews.

Sometimes the obvious isn't the truth. I was accused of doing something years ago I didn't do, and, looking back on the day and the sequence of events, if I were a bystander I'D think I did it. That is if I were the type to judge one without a fair trial. And I'm not. And just for the record, the stakes of my "incident" were nowhere near the Ramsy's situation and there wasn't a trial. It involved a theft which I didn't do, and, as the years have passed, I suspect I was set up by some jealous girls.

I hate the trial by media. It's so wrong.

The ironic title is from Patsy's softball team named "Mothers Gone Bad".

Totally brilliant book. That's all I'm going to say.

Federal Judge Clears Ramseys: In May 2003, an Atlanta federal judge dismissed a civil lawsuit against John and Patsy Ramsey saying there was no evidence showing the parents killed JonBenet and abundant evidence that an intruder killed the child. The judge criticized the police and the FBI for creating a media campaign designed to make the family look guilty.

http://crime.about.com/od/unsolved/p/jonbenet_case.htm

heard about it, but after doing some research on it as well as becoming a criminal investigator, I think the original police investigation was horrible and that it was more than likely an intruder or someone the Ramsey's knew as an acquaintance. Regardless, the whole situation was tragic.

Patsy Ramsey herself addressed the speculation that her daughter's bed wetting sent her into a rage which provoked the young girl's killing. She said she had been diagnosed with stage-four ovarian cancer, and against the backdrop of that, bed-wetting does not even register.

I had a pretty open mind about this when the story broke. However, after listening to all the interviews and reading their book, I think they were just as much a victim of circumstance as all other parents who cannot be eliminated when tragedy befalls one of their own children.

It's always been mind boggling to me that JonBenet lay in the undiscovered storage room of the basement of the home the whole time the police were there. It was the botching of the investigation from the beginning that put the suspicion on the parents, and with the appointment of the new prosecutor in Boulder came the hope that the culprit would be found. It's just sad that Patsy Ramsey will not be here when that day arrives.

I am really disheartened at all the comments here by DU'ers who seem to have not really done any homework on the subject but casually condemn the parents just as the MSM did. The simple truth is since this tragedy we have seen reported other young female children abducted from their homes by perverts, in the middle of the night as their parents slept nearby, so it's obviously just as plausible this is what happened here as the parents being involved. We simply do not know.