Death of JonBenét Ramsey

 was an American child beauty queen who was killed in her family's home
in Boulder, Colorado. A lengthy handwritten ransom note was found in the house,
and JonBenét's father John found her body in the basement of their house about
eight hours after she had been reported missing. She sustained a broken skull
from a blow to the head and had been strangled; a garrote was found tied around
her neck. The autopsy report stated that the official cause of death was
"asphyxia by strangulation associated with craniocerebral trauma” Her death was
ruled a homicide. The case generated nationwide public and media interest, in
part because her mother Patsy Ramsey (herself a former beauty queen)
 The police initially suspected that the ransom note had been written by
JonBenét's mother, and that the note and appearance of the child's body had
been staged by her parents in order to cover up the crime. However, in 1998,
the District Attorney said that due to a new DNA analysis, none of the immediate
family members were under suspicion for the crime. Also in 1998, the police and
the DA both said that JonBenét's brother Burke, who was nine years old at the
time of her death, was not a suspect.
 n 2002, the DA's successor took over investigation of the case from the police
and primarily pursued an alternative theory that an intruder had committed the
killing. In 2003, trace DNA that was taken from the victim's clothes was found to
belong to an unknown male; this discovery induced the DA to send the Ramseys
a letter of apology in 2008, declaring the family "completely cleared. In February
2009, the Boulder police took the case back from the DA and reopened the
investigation.

 A longtime suspect in the 1996 murder of JonBenét Ramsey in Boulder, Colorado,

has allegedly confessed to “accidentally” killing the six-year-old in a series of
letters sent to a former high school classmate, according to the Daily Mail. Gary
Oliva, 54, is a convicted pedophile currently serving a 10-year sentence in
Colorado for possession of child pornography, but is up for parole in 2020.
 “I never loved anyone like I did JonBenét and yet I let her slip and her head
bashed in half and I watched her die,” Oliva wrote in a letter to his former
classmate, Michael Vail. “It was an accident. Please believe me. She was not like
the other kids.” In another letter to Vail, Oliva wrote, “JonBenét completely
changed me and removed all evil from me. Just one look at her beautiful face, her
glowing beautiful skin, and her divine God-body, I realized I was wrong to kill
other kids. Yet by accident she died and it was my fault.”
 Back in 1996, Oliva was a registered sex offender whose listed address was not far
from the Ramsey home, and he reportedly attended a candlelight vigil shortly
after JonBenét’s murder. But despite receiving several tips from Vail, Boulder
Police didn’t consider Oliva a suspect until 2000, when he was arrested on
unrelated charges and police found a photo of JonBenét, a poem he’d written
titled ‘Ode to JonBenét’, and a stun gun among his possessions. Several
investigators, including Lou Smit, a retired homicide detective hired by the
Boulder District Attorney, had theorized that a stun gun may have been used to
subdue JonBenét the night of the murder.
 Boulder Police investigators lost interest in Oliva when new DNA testing methods
failed to match his DNA to the crime scene evidence, but the department has
since acknowledged that the crime scene was mishandled.