A year has passed since the arrest of John Mark Karr. Remember him? He’s the convicted child molester who confessed to the December 26, 1996 murder of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey. I spent 25 years working as a pioneering criminal profiler for the FBI and of all the homicide cases that I’ve been involved with, the JonBenet case has caused me the most headaches. That’s because, unlike many of my peers in law enforcement, I believe that John and Patsy Ramsey had absolutely nothing to do with the brutal death of their daughter.

I first became associated with the case two weeks after the murder. The Ramseys’ defense team called and asked me if I’d be interested in consulting on the case. Like the rest of the world, I believed that the parents were guilty and relished the opportunity to crack the case. I told the lead attorney: “You can buy my time, but you’re not going to buy my opinion.”

A few days later, I arrived at the Ramsey’s home in Boulder, Colo. Before long, I began interviewing everyone connected with the case, including JonBenet’s parents. After a career spent working on literally thousands of grisly homicide cases, it was only natural that they should be considered the prime suspects in the case. Yet after being advised of the coroners preliminary findings, conducting a crime scene assessment at the Ramsey residence, I concluded that the Ramsey’s were innocent of the murder. Why? For one simple reason: JonBenet’s murder was far too brutal and violent to have been perpetrated by her parents. When parents kill, it is extremely rare for the victim to be brutalized in the way JonBenet was. She was also sexually assaulted and, just before she took her last breath, her skull was crushed with a blow so powerful that, according the coroner it would have “dropped a two-hundred pound man.”

The crime reflected what we refer to as "overkill,” meaning the killer went far beyond what was necessary to kill this small child. I interpreted the extreme violence as personalized aggression from someone I believe who used the child for his displaced aggression, whether real or imagined in his mind, against the Ramsey family.

So who do I think did it? A year ago, when John Mark Karr first confessed to the crime, I was intrigued, to say the least. But it didn’t take long before I – and the rest of the world – realized that Karr was nothing more than a pathetic publicity-hungry child molester. Today, the one thing I do know is that John and Patsy (who died June 24, 2006) Ramsey are innocent. Few people may still not want to hear that, including a number of local and federal law enforcement investigators. One of parent’s greatest fears is to lose a child in a senseless crime. An even greater tragedy is to be falsely accused of murdering your child. Unfortunately, and sadly, this is what happened to the Ramsey family.

John Douglas
Former FBI agent and pioneer serial killer profiler
Author of Inside the Mind of BTK
www.johndouglasmindhunter.com