On the morning of Dec. Patsy Ramsey had gone to put the coffee on, but instead found pieces of paper lying at the bottom of the staircase in their Boulder, Colo.
Ramsey, Listen carefully! At a. He recalled feeling "this horrible in-your-gut trauma," comparing it to when a child wanders out of her parent's sight for a minute at the mall. Only he never saw his child alive again. John recalled in the series ripping off a piece of duct tape that was covering his daughter's mouth and carrying her directly upstairs, where officers checked for a pulse and swiftly informed him that she was dead.
She had been strangled with a cord used as a garrote, according to the autopsy report, and her skull was fractured from blunt head trauma. Microscopic fibers from a wooden paintbrush handle found on her body indicated she had been sexually assaulted with the item, retired Boulder Police Detective Bob Whitson , one of the first investigators on the scene that day, recalled in the series. John and Patsy, who died of ovarian cancer in when she was 49, were never arrested or charged in connection with their daughter's death, but they remained under a cloud of suspicion for years.
Which, in Patsy's case, was for the rest of her life. In the Netflix series, directed by Joe Berlinger , John details the ways the cops—and subsequently the media and the court of public opinion—seized on him and his wife as villains and never let go of that theory.
DNA testing over the years has so far only resulted in clearing several persons of interest who were questioned in connection with the case. You have to go deeper, you have to sort the DNA we have today and make more sense of it. John said in the series that "the whole purpose of engaging with the media was to put pressure on the police," he explained.
