Case Summary: The Jonbenet Ramsey Case

In this paper I will go over the case of a six year old girl from Boulder Colorado, her name is JonBenet Ramsey. This case swept the nation in 1996 when she was found dead in the wine cellar of her Colorado home. JonBenet was the daughter of Jon Ramsey and Patsy Ramsey she lived her childhood traveling across the nation doing beauty pageants. On December 26, 1996 JonBenet parents called the police after they had found a lengthy ransom note stating that they wanted 118,000 dollars and to not contact the authorities or JonBenet would be killed. Eight hours after the note was found JonBenet was found murdered in the basement of the home, with trauma to the head and a cord wrapped around her neck. The autopsy revealed JonBenet had died from asphyxia

138). The reason this step is so important to getting a confession is because the more a person issues a denial the less likely it is that they will later confess to the acquisition. The key to handling a denial is knowing when a denial might be coming. You can sometimes tell when a denial is coming by nonverbal gestures from the person you are interrogating, an innocent person will not give you too many gestures before a denial because they are truthful and feel angered by your acquisition. While a guilty person will feel the need to be polite and wait for their turn to talk giving such gestures as leaning forward in their chair or maybe putting their hands on the table while the interrogator is still talking these are your clues that a denial might occur and you immediately try and shut it down. In the situation with the Ramsey’s I ignored weak denials by John during the direct positive confrontation just simply ignoring them. Once I got to the theme this is where I really paid attention to the nonverbal and verbal cues. While I was developing my theme John began to lean forward in his chair I knew he was politely waiting for his turn to deny

Objections are different from denials because when a suspects are to make an objection they are going on the offensive. “In offering this objection, the guilty suspect hopes that the investigator will argue the point and thus allow the suspect to reduce anxiety by engaging in verbal comments” (Inbau, 2015, p. 149). Instead of arguing the point with the guilty suspect you want to encourage the voicing of the objection because this can allow you to gain vital information, also you want to combine this objection with your theme. When I got to this step with John Ramsey he began to tell me he would never kill his daughter or anyone. I then said “good that’s what I wanted to hear, I know you didn’t do this on purpose I don’t see you as the type of guy when in the right mind set would do something like this. When people get mad they do things they wouldn’t have done otherwise. You were just upset with the favoritism your daughter receives from your wife. When she did something bad that you could punish her for you did so but went a little too far with it and ended up striking her in the head and killing her. Once you realized what you had done and that it was an accident you tried to cover it up making it look like an intruder came into your house sexually assaulted your daughter and then killed