JonBenet Ramsey’s father talks about how losing his children is a ‘challenge’ to his faith
EXCLUSIVE – John Ramsey, JonBenet Ramsey’s father, says losing his two daughters over a four-year period in the 1990s was “challenging” and eventually strengthened his faith.
Ramsey made comments about faith while thinking about the 6-year-old JonBenet’s murder 28 years ago, when he found her dead in the basement of their home in Boulder, Colorado, the day after Christmas 1996.
“I don’t know anything worse for a person than losing a child. I’ve had a few things I’ve been through: a divorce, I’ve lost my job, I’ve lost my life savings,” Ramsey told Fox News Digital. “But losing a child was incredibly much, much more painful and a much greater loss to what life is for a parent.”
He went through that loss twice – once in 1992, when his eldest daughter Beth was killed in a car accident, and again in 1996, when JonBenet died.
JonBenet Ramsey, left, and her father, John, right. (Netflix)
“When I lost my daughter Beth four years before we lost JonBenet, it just brought me to my knees. I was just devastated. … I wasn’t prepared for it at all,” Ramsey recalled. “And it also made me question my faith. How could a loving God allow this to happen to an innocent child? But then, over the next few years, a lot of soul-searching, reflection, and talking with friends helped me process that part of the loss , which was … potentially the loss of my faith.”
After Beth’s death, Ramsey began to think about whether there was “life beyond what we see and experience here on Earth.” He described finding faith as a multi-year process.
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John and Patsy Ramsey, parents of JonBenet Ramsey, meet the local media in Colorado after four months of silence in Boulder, Colo., on May 1, 1997. (Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)
“And when I lost JonBenet, it was solid,” he said of his faith. “Faith is something that’s in your heart. I’m a left-brained person by nature, I guess. I was an engineer and that’s how I was trained. And you’re always looking for evidence and facts. And so it’s not abnormal to fall back into, ‘Wait a minute, I’m not sure I believe.’ … But if you’ve got your faith close to your heart and you’ve struggled with the whys and what ifs … then that’s pretty solid.”
Ramsey said he believes both of his daughters are in heaven, though he personally can’t imagine what that looks like.
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The JonBenet Ramsey murder case remained unsolved for more than two decades. (Ramsey family material)
For years after her death, his family didn’t celebrate Christmas, but they decided cutting off the holiday celebration wasn’t fair to her older brother Burke, who was 9 at the time of her death.
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“It was just too hard. We didn’t have a Christmas tree. We didn’t decorate the house and we just went through it. And we just said, ‘Well, that’s not fair to our youngest son, Burke,’ who was a 9-year-old boy at the time , so we tried to do things to get his life back to normal as best we could for probably three years — we just said, ‘OK, so we have to do this for Burke’s sake,’ and he just slipped back into that celebration.”
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JonBenet’s murder is not solved despite the police initially having a list of suspects they were considering, including the Ramseys themselves. The Ramseys were cleared of wrongdoing in 2008.
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Police also arrested a suspect named John Mark Karr in Thailand in 2006 after he confessed to killing JonBenet, but prosecutors dropped charges against Karr because his DNA did not match that of found at the crime scene.
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Ramsey wants police to retest certain evidence for traces of DNA, including the male’s foreign DNA that federal officials discovered in 1997, and to test other items for the first time using modern genetic genealogy testing labs, which have advanced significantly in the past decade. Numerous decades-old cold cases have been solved in recent years thanks to DNA testing.
John Ramsey is still searching for answers 28 years after his daughter’s murder. (Netflix)
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There are more than 20 significant pieces of evidence in the JonBenet murder case that have never been tested.
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While it’s unclear if officials will be able to find or identify any suspects in the case by partnering with an independent lab that has access to private databases, Ramsey hopes it’s the next step for him in his quest for justice for his daughter, whether it yields results or not.
He previously told Fox News Digital that he plans to meet with Boulder Police Department in January to discuss DNA testing options.
