The Latest JonBenet Book Should Have Been the First: WE HAVE YOUR DAUGHTER

The new book on the JonBenet Ramsey case by Paula Woodward.  This is the one the public has needed all along.

By all rights I shouldn’t be writing this blog post about the new JonBenet Ramsey case book yet.  I shouldn’t be sitting here putting this up on the Internet because at this moment I’m only halfway through the book and nowhere near finished reading it, though not for lack of trying since I can’t put it down.

Be that as it may, it’s got me so steamed that I can’t resist writing what I’ve found in the first half of it already.  Everybody who’s ever wondered about this case has got to read this particular book.

The book is WE HAVE YOUR DAUGHTER by Paula Woodward.  Paula is a Colorado investigative journalist who was involved with covering this case from the very beginning.  She regularly talked to the late Patsy Ramsey.  She had access to the JonBenet Ramsey “murder book” kept by the police about the investigation.  She knows the players personally, the police, the politicians in Colorado, the Ramsey family and friends.  She’s also one fantastic and refreshingly thorough reporter.

I’ve been watching several of the new specials on the JonBenet case the past couple of weeks and one thing that has been bothering me is the never-ending concentration so many of them have on one of the cellar windows, the broken one, that may have given an intruder access to the Ramsey house.  This was the window to the room where a suitcase was found.  For some reason I always thought the suitcase was found in the same cellar room as JonBenet’s body.

Not so.  It was in a storage room on the other side of the cellar.  JonBenet was found in a different room.  Woodward’s book comes complete with diagrams of every floor of the house.

About the house…the whole reason I’ve been bugged lately about that cellar window the media never stops harping about is that the Ramseys lived in a 15-room house.  Surely, I had started to think right before this new book was delivered, there must have been more ways for some creep to enter that 15-room edifice beyond that one window in the cellar.

Take a look.  Here’s the oft-photographed front entrance to the house:

Ramsey house, front entrance.

And here is the rarely photographed back:

What a difference a another view makes!

Just look at this photo!  Look at all those windows, so low to the ground.  Did you know the house had 100 windows?  That there were eight possible points of entry? That many of the windows and doors weren’t locked?  That the burglar alarm wasn’t one because the Ramseys, foolishly, didn’t bother to use it?   That neighbors, and one of the friends who came to the house on the morning the child’s body was found, saw a door that was ajar?  That JonBenet, and her brother Burke, both had second-floor bedrooms with doors leading to outdoor balconies?  That the parents also had a room with a balcony and a door on the third floor?

Paula Woodward brings out all of these points, plus a whole lot more.  JonBenet was injured with a blunt object.  Did you know that there was a dark-colored baseball bat, found outside on the property after the murder, that didn’t belong to anyone in the Ramsey family?  Woodward includes a black-and-white police picture of it.  It is a very disturbing sight.  Was this the object used to kill that little girl?  Wouldn’t it have made perfect sense, if it was, for whoever did it to have tossed the bat outside of the house afterwards?  I read about the bat, and the rest of this stuff, on Friday, then tossed and turned the entire night.  Why wasn’t all of this this publicized?

The police.  That’s why.

Here’s where I started to really get furious.  Woodward found that a lot of the “information” released to the public about the case was, deliberately, bogus.  The Boulder PD had “decided” the Ramseys “did it” and wouldn’t let go of this pet theory.  They were telling the public outright lies to make the Ramseys look as hideous as possible.  Patsy Ramsey’s appearances on television – made, Woodward reveals, while Patsy was operating under heavy-duty medical sedation – had already made her look bizarre, but the powers that be in Boulder were making things far worse.  They said they hadn’t interviewed the family, when they had.  They said Patsy wouldn’t give them DNA samples, when she had.  They insinuated there was something suspicious in the death of John Ramsey’s daughter from a previous marriage.  That daughter had been killed in a car accident involving a truck.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten with the book for the moment.  I’ll write more  once I’ve finished reading the rest of this well-done book.  However, this story, at last, is finally in the hands of a writer who is capable of exploding one Ramsey myth after another, and it’s about time.  The more that get stripped away, the clearer the picture seems to look.

Brava, Ms. Woodward!  Let’s hope it helps lead to a resolution!