Boulder police will apply new technology in JonBenet investigation

February 02, 2009 08:07 AM

The Associated Press

BOULDER, Colo. — Police have once again taken over the investigation into the unsolved slaying of JonBenet Ramsey, saying they will apply new technology and expertise to the 12-year-old case. “Some cases never get solved, but some do,” Police Chief Mark Beckner said Monday. “And you can’t give up.”

The move came six years after police turned the probe over to the district attorney amid public criticism of how officers had handled the highly publicized case. Beckner said he and newly elected District Attorney Stan Garnett agreed that police should lead the investigation again.

JonBenet, a 6-year-old beauty pageant contestant, was found bludgeoned and strangled in the basement of her millionaire parents’ Boulder home in December 1996.

Garnett’s predecessor, Mary Lacy, last year publicly exonerated JonBenet’s family in the slaying, saying that male DNA found on JonBenet’s clothes almost certainly came from her killer and that the killer was an outsider.

It was not immediately clear whether Monday’s announcement affects Lacy’s decision to exonerate the JonBenet’s family. Lacy did not run for re-election because of term limits.

Beckner told the Camera newspaper in Boulder he has invited a team of veteran investigators from state and federal agencies to join an advisory task force to “explore all possible theories about what happened the night JonBenet was killed.”

The new task force will meet in the next few weeks to review the evidence in the case and identify additional testing that might be done. Beckner said he wants to go into the first meeting with no preconceived notions.

“We are open to all possibilities,” he said.

In a letter to John Ramsey, JonBenet’s father, last summer, Lacy said that she was sorry for the years of suspicion he, his son, and his late wife, Patsy, had endured. Patsy Ramsey died in 2004 after a long battle with cancer.