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Jonbenet Ramsey
A special team of investigators examined the 911 call, the ransom note and the cause of death.
It has been nearly 20 years since 6-year-old JonBenét Ramsey was found murdered in her Boulder, Colo., home, and now a new team of investigators is attempting to shine light on the case that captured the nation.
Sunday night was the first episode of a two-part special, The Case of: JonBenet Ramsey, on CBS.
During the thorough re-examination, retired FBI profiler Jim Clemente and former Scotland Yard criminal behavior expert Laura Richards worked with other law enforcement specialists to determine just what happened during Christmas 1996.
Multiple bombshells from the case previously not publicly investigated were dropped during part one of the special, including voices in the background of the 911 call, who may have actually written the ransom note and how exactly the child was murdered.
Here are some of the biggest shockers, so far:
The 911 call:
Clemente and Richards worked with an audio expert in order to decipher what was said on the emergency phone call after Patsy Ramsey believed the line was disconnected following her report that JonBenét had been kidnapped for ransom. The investigators heard what sounded like three different voices talking in the background on the other end.
Clemente, Richards and the audio engineer said they heard what sounded like JonBenet's father, John, saying, "We're not speaking to you." Then, likely Patsy, asking, "What did you do?," followed by "Help me, Jesus." It may also have been "Help me, Jesus" twice in a row. Finally, what sounded like the voice of a child — which the investigators claimed must have been JonBenet's then-9-year-old brother, Burke — asking, "What did you find?"
Investigators also spoke to Kimberly Archuleta, the Boulder 911 operator who took the call, who also claimed she had never been interviewed by either the media or police about the case. Archuleta told Clemente and Richards she always felt the phone called "seemed rehearsed," and she made it a point to stay on the line as long as possible that day because she heard what sounded like someone saying "We've called the police, now what?"
The ransom note:
The team of investigators re-examining the cold case also concentrated on the ransom letter that the alleged perpetrator of the crime left in the family's million-dollar home. It was determined, with the aid of forensic linguistics expert James Fitzgerald, that the note was likely written by a female as it had multiple "maternal" characteristics.
The note also had several references to movies in it, with experts noting that the Ramsey home was full of framed movie posters. The experts also said the note tried too hard to seem as though it was written by someone who was not a native English speaker. Fitzgerald, however, said in his opinion that English was the first language of whoever wrote the note.
Finally, the length of the note had investigators baffled. Running an experiment, it took them all more than 20 minutes to write the three-page note as neatly as the actual piece of evidence was penned. They pointed out that was a long time for a perpetrator to be inside the home, especially for a note that really only needed four sentences.
Cause of death:
To determine what killed JonBenét — a blow to the head by a blunt object or strangulation by rope — Clemente and Richards enlisted the help of famed criminologist Werner Spitz, who, among his numerous cases, worked the JFK assassination in 1963. Spitz concluded that JonBenét died of blunt force trauma after she was struck over the head with what he believes was a large Maglite flashlight, like the one photographed by police inside the Ramsey home.
Spitz said there was no blood on the flashlight because the blow to the head did not break the skin. He also said a child could wield the heavy flashlight with another force to inflict the skull-shattering wound JonBenét suffered, which, he insisted, killed her.
In a somewhat uncomfortable moment, the team of investigators asked a boy, around the same age as JonBenét's brother would have been when she was killed, to hit a mannequin — which had been made to JonBenét's measurements and had similar hair and a skin-like layer — over the head with a Maglite flashlight. The resulting blow from the experiment caused practically the exact same wound suffered by JonBenét.
Part two of the series airs Monday night.
