By Scott Ross

CBN.com -

SCOTT ROSS: There are hundreds if not thousands of children killed in America and throughout the world every year. Often, unfortunately, by family members. Why did this story have so much life? It won’t go away! Even when it started, there was momentum to this thing.

PATSY RAMSEY: That is something we don’t know. And I think because of the magnitude of this we have to believe as Christians that God is using this.

JOHN RAMSEY: See what we believe, this is our hope, that for some reason JonBenét’s name is known around the world.

SCOTT: It’s a unique name.

JOHN: Well, but there are thousand of children murdered in this country ever year. But you can’t name one of them.

SCOTT: No.

JOHN: You can’t. So for some reason God is going to make this work for good. Our job, Patsy and I, is to stay tuned and be sure we are listening because there is something significant that is going to happen out of this -- that is our belief.

SCOTT: When you say God, people watching this on all parts of the world -- we are on in hundreds of nations -- what kind of God is it a loving, gracious, merciful, tender, compassionate God?

PATSY: It is a God who says I promised you life, I did not promise you life without tribulation, but have good cheer because I have overcome the world.

SCOTT: Did you have this belief before this happened?

PATSY: Yes, we did.

JOHN: It was tested pretty severely when we lost our oldest daughter, Beth, for me. The first words out of my mouth when I hung up the phone, my brother called me and said, "Beth is dead", a car accident. It was the middle of the afternoon on a Friday.

SCOTT: How old was she?

JOHN: She was 22 and I hung up the phone and said there is no God there cannot be a God.

SCOTT: How long was this before JonBenet’s death?

PATSY & JOHN: 4 years, 4 ½ years.

SCOTT: And then subsequent to Beth’s death you were struggling with this, you had cancer.

PATSY: Stage 4 cancer. The only difference in John and Patsy Ramsey from our good ole buddy Job in the Bible is that we have television in the 20 and 21st century. The whole world knows about this.

SCOTT: One poll -- this in only one -- I don’t know how much stock I put in polls, and this is a tough thing to live with, says eighty-eight percent of people polled believe you guys did it.

PATSY: I’m surprised it’s not 100%. All they’ve heard for 3 ½ years is the parents are responsible, the parents are responsible. They’ve been brainwashed, so how would they believe anything else?

JOHN: Yeah, it’s hurtful, certainly. We lost our child and we’ve had thousands come forward to extend sympathy, compassion, apologies. In 3 ½ years we’ve had hundreds of people come up and say in airport terminals, the street, the shopping mall and say aren’t you JonBenet’s father, or call me Mr. Benet … everyone has been compassionate, caring, sympathetic. Not one has come up and been cruel.

SCOTT: That’s the antithesis of what we’re hearing in the press … you’re the bad guys.

JOHN: We’re overwhelmed by people’s goodness.

SCOTT: Everyone has their opinion, and even for me, I have to go through my own internal process to come to a place I could be objective and talk to you and not be taken in by deception, that your lying to me, that your pulling it off. There is one side of this is, that your not just lying to me you are sitting before God. You are saying you believe in God. When I read this book I’m going whoa, there is another level of accountability here.

JOHN: It is the only level of accountability that matters.

SCOTT: This is not an accusation, but I’m going to say it to you? I was reading through this and I said there is one other couple in the New Testament that I remembered who lied and their names are Ananias and Sapphira.

JOHN: I’m not that good of a Bible student - I don’t know them.

SCOTT: Well, they lied to Peter -- the apostle Peter -- and they fell dead, and he said to them, you did not just lie to me, you lied to the Holy Spirit.

JOHN: We are very, very comfortable being accountable to the God of the Universe.

SCOTT: Because someday you have to stand before Him.

JOHN: Absolutely.

SCOTT: There are elements of this have not been answered, obviously, specific evidence, like the broken window in the basement.

JOHN: DNA, palm prints, fibers, footprints. Fortunately there is a lot of good evidence to a trained eye that gives us hope that justice will be done on this earth.

SCOTT: Is it still being investigated or is everything so much ...

JOHN: We don’t know. We have ongoing investigation that we put together.

SCOTT: You’re paying for that?

JOHN: We’re paying for that. We don’t know what the police have done. They never told us anything from the very beginning.

SCOTT: If I could remember correctly John, you have your own theory that there was a psychopath possibly involved, a man ...

JOHN: These are not based on my opinions, they’re based on talking to world class experts, people who investigated hundreds and hundreds of homicides. We believe this was a pedophile, a male, that had access to a stun gun or owned a stun gun. We firmly believe that this was used in this crime. They were in Boulder, Colorado in December, 1996, and since this crime they have been fascinated with it and obsessed with it -- they followed all the media all the papers. SBTC -- that was on the ransom note -- the letters SBTC means something to this person and the number 118,000.00, which was the ransom amount.

SCOTT: Why that amount? It comes back to the bonus check.

JOHN: It means something to the killer, this wasn’t just a random number. So you take that set, that finite set of six characteristics and we’re not looking for a needle in a haystack.

SCOTT: The way it’s been reported from the outset, did you see things that were coming, did you see this momentum building towards Jon and Patsy Ramsey being the killers?

PATSY: Not initially. Initially we were devastated. We were incoherent. We were so distraught and devastated at the loss of our child. So it was few days before we really began to understand what was happening.

JOHN: There are a couple of things that I think caused this. A couple of flaws in logic. One is that a child murdered – it’s the parents. That is not true.

If you look at children who have been abused or murdered and it’s the parents involved -- in virtually every one of those cases there is a long history of prior abuse. The teachers know about it, the social services know about it, the police have had calls on this family before. There is not one thing in our background to demonstrate that. So you can’t categorically say a child is murdered -- therefore it’s the parents. If there is a long history of abuse or trouble in that family then perhaps the parents need to be looked at seriously.

The second thing that I think went wrong is that the media, their role to be skeptical. They are skeptical of the government. They are hugely skeptical of politicians and the government, but the police are the government too, and we need to be skeptical of the police. The media were not. They took leaks and innuendoes and biases right out of the police departments’ mouths. Instead of being skeptical and say, "Wait a minute, you have never investigated a homicide before, Mr. Detective?" and they hadn’t. Why should we assume you are right on this. But they ran with it because it was a juicy story.

SCOTT: Did you cooperate with them, right from the beginning?

JOHN: We tried desperately. Here is the situation. First of all, we are devastated, we can’t hardly lift a fork to our mouth to eat, so we are not making these calculating tough decisions. We had friends around that saw some very serious things going wrong with the police approach to this. They took actions to protect us and advise us and we listened to them. Their advice was to stay away from the police, they are out to get you, they are out to put you in the electric chair. We said no, we want to find the killer to our daughter, we are innocent. So we had this conflict obviously of what we wanted to do. And the people who knew what was going on were telling us. It turns out that they were 100% correct.

Within the last 6 months you had the two lead detectives, Thomas and Arntz on national television one saying, "I knew it was John who was the killer, and the other said I knew it was Patsy was the killer from the very beginning." That is what we are dealing with. .

SCOTT: John you have been accused of molesting your daughter.

JOHN: That was extremely hurtful to me.

SCOTT: You were a sexual deviate you would go these porn places? What about that?

JOHN: They are lies, that is all I could say. First of all, I loved my daughters. I had 3 wonderful daughters. I would give my life for them. But I wish the killer would have taken me that night instead of JonBenet. To accuse me of doing anything but protecting my daughter as any father would, any good father would, it isn’t warranted. I happened to be watching television when this fellow from the National Enquirer was being quoted, "We saw John Ramsey going into a porn shop a week after his daughter was murdered. We have that as a fact". That is a fraudulent lie, unless they call the 7-11 store a porn shop. Which is how a tabloid justifies their statements.

SCOTT: Those were proven to be lies? There’s no record of your going to buy porn films or rent them?

JOHN: I would stake my life on that.

SCOTT: Has anyone from the press who ever published any false information at any time ever come back to you, called you, written you a letter, sent you an e-mail and said, "We were wrong, we were sorry, we misspoke", etc.?

JOHN: No.

PATSY: None

JOHN: Well, perhaps, yeah. Yeah, I did get a call from a tabloid reporter who said, "I’m sorry for what has been done to you by us." I’ve gotten several letters from people that were in the media profession. I got a letter from an editor who wrote, "I’m ashamed of what my business has done to you.

SCOTT: The accusations against you, Patsy, your bed wetting daughter, you would go into a rage -- are you a woman with a temper?

PATSY: No, I’m not.

SCOTT: Is there any record anywhere that you have abused your children physically?

PATSY: Absolutely not.

SCOTT: So where did that come from?

PATSY: Just another one of those innuendoes to make a story.

JOHN: I tell you what, that probably came from the police. The police theory was that we had a wonderful Christmas dinner, came home, went to bed, sometime during the night JonBenet wet her bed, Patsy flew into a rage, bashed her in the head and said, "uh-oh, should not have done that." She went on to stage a kidnapping, strangled her to stage it, and wrote a three-page ransom note, woke me up the next morning, woke me up and say "Honey, I killed one of the children but you have to keep that quiet." That’s the police theory.

PATSY: There were no wet sheets, there is no evidence in that at all.

JOHN: It doesn’t pass the test of logic, of common sense, it’s foolish.

SCOTT: If you had done this then you went back to bed?

JOHN: Yeah, went back to bed.

PATSY: That’s their theory, I guess.

SCOTT: Is there anything in JonBenet’s medical history to indicate that she was molested or violated or anything like that all.

PATSY: Absolutely not.

JOHN: Our pediatrician went on national television and said I’ve seen this child a dozen times a year since she was a baby and I have never seen anything that would lead me to believe she was sexually molested. Quite to the contrary, what I saw was a child that was loved dearly by her parents.

SCOTT: Are you still under the umbrella of suspicion Patsy? Are you walking around with that over year head?

PATSY: I guess so, until they put the umbrella down we are still under it.

SCOTT: How are you living that day by day?

PATSY: I am living just fine. I am not ...

SCOTT: What do you mean you live just fine -- you can’t say that. You know that’s a soundbite. Someone will take that and say "I live just fine".

PATSY: People say, how can you do this, how can you do this. I have 13 year old son, I have two wonderful parents, we have new grandbaby, I have a wonderful husband, wonderful friends and I have a God that knows the truth. I have nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to be remorseful over, except that I miss my child every day, every minute of the day.

SCOTT: Were you ever suspicious that your husband did it, and visa versa John that she did it.

PATSY: Never.

SCOTT: Did it ever cross your mind that said, " Patsy shut the door it’s you and I and God looking.

PATSY: Never

JOHN: No.

SCOTT: Never? Never doubted for a second.

JOHN: No.

SCOTT: Are you telling me that those thoughts never came to your mind. I mean men walk around saying, "I think my wife may have committed adultery because a number of people said ...

JOHN: JonBenet was brutally murdered. She was strangled. The blow to her head would have brought down a 300-pound man. Patsy loved JonBenet as much as I did. That is insane. It’s just insane.

PATSY: You should hear this man at 2:30 – 3:00 in morning get up. There is no question, you are not there at those hours, I am.

The JonBenet Ramsey Case ... Open or Shut? (Part 2)

By Scott Ross
Scott Ross interviews John and Patsy Ramsey.

CBN.com -
SCOTT: What is the worst part of this, Patsy, having your daughter murdered or being accused of her murder?

PATSY: Oh for heavens sake, having my daughter murdered, is there any question?

JOHN: By far it's not having JonBenet with us.

SCOTT: I don't know if it's a real question or a rhetorical question. Patsy, you were in your 4th stage of ovarian cancer. How long was it before JonBenet's death?

PATSY: It was diagnosed in 92, July of 92.

SCOTT: Okay. Ninety-six percent of people who come to that stage of cancer die. You lived. Now if I understand correctly, you believe you were supernaturally healed by God.

PATSY: Yes, I do.

SCOTT: Is there documentation to go along with that?

PATSY: Yes there is. As a matter of fact I just received a letter from my original oncologist here in Atlanta. He unequivocally believes, knowing where I was and where I am now, there was divine intervention. That was in writing.

SCOTT: So God with foresight with forethought, heals Patsy Ramsey so she could murder her daughter?

PATSY: Our God does not work that way. I believe that our God sees things that we don't see and understands things that we do not understand. What man has meant for evil, He will use the good. He has saved me for some reason. I remember praying on my knees when I had cancer, "God why did you give me two children when you are going to take me away from them and not be able to raise them?"

SCOTT: Did you understand God was a healing God?

PATSY: I did not know about that. I have read it for years, and years, and years about Jesus healing the lepers and all kinds of healing taking place but I really didn't understand it.

SCOTT: It was more of an historical fact.

PATSY: Right, it wasn't real. But our rector in Colorado really explained to me that Christ died on the cross for our salvation. That the trip to the cross, when he was carrying and walking to Calvary and taking the lashing -- that was borne for our healing. It says right in the Bible, "By his stripes, I am healed."

SCOTT: So your rector told you. Episcopal rector.

PATSY: Yes. We had a healing service, anointing of holy oil, laying on of hands, this was on a Tuesday afternoon and at that time I had just been back from a session of chemotherapy from the National Cancer Institute. It was my second treatment. On Thursday of that week I took a CT scan and there was no sign of the disease.

SCOTT: How many days from the time you were prayed for and the time you took the test?

PATSY: Two. From that day forward there was never any sign of the disease.

SCOTT: How many years has it been?

PATSY: It will be eight years from diagnosis.

SCOTT: You're clean.

PATSY: Yes, I am. I am healed. Divinely healed by God and chemo.

SCOTT: How is your son Burke? How old is your son?

PATSY: He is 13 ½.

SCOTT: How is he doing?

PATSY: Well he is a typical 13-year-old.

JOHN: We worry about Burke longer term. We had him spend time with a child specialist. Kids have ways to bury this and it's black and white and they put it aside. Where it is going to affect Burke probably more so is when he is 40 years old and that's when we worry about it, long term.

SCOTT: When he is what?

JOHN: Forty. When he's older.

PATSY: Perhaps when he has a family of his own or when he has a child of his own or when he is able to put together what could have happened. Why was he not taken and she was? All of those questions.

SCOTT: Did he ever accuse you, did he ever distance from you?

PATSY: Oh, no never.

SCOTT: I don't trust Mom and Dad anymore -- they are murderers?

PATSY: No.

JOHN: We were a loving family. We loved our children. We were a typical American family. The other thing that has happened to us that ought to be an offense to the average, typical American family is that we have been accused of all of these horrible things. We love our children. We would do anything for them, as would most American families, and yet the media has assaulted us and in effect the American family.

SCOTT: Are you bitter, angry, cynical?

PATSY: On days it's yes, yes, yes. Just like normal, you have a good day or a bad, you have a good hour, a bad hour. We were at the beach on vacation and I see all these little families running around playing, little blondes, cute little beach clothes and having fun and frolicking, you know, and I'm bitter because that was taken away from us. I should be enjoying my children -- both of them. You know, that is hard.

SCOTT: Are you able to laugh, is there humor, is there joy in your life?

PATSY: There is a difference between happiness and joy. We have moments of joy. Will I ever be truly happy again, probably not. Not until I'm with all those -- my grandmothers, my great aunts, my grandfathers and my JonBenet -- then I will be truly happy again. Then I will be with the God of the universe, who knows truth and who knows justice. But will I ever be truly happy again, probably not.

SCOTT: How are you living that day by day?

PATSY: I am living just fine. I am not …

SCOTT: What do you mean you live just fine? You can't say that. You know that's a soundbite. Someone will take that and say "I live just fine?"

PATSY: People say, how can you do this, how can you do this? I have a 13-year-old son, I have two wonderful parents, we have a new grandbaby, I have a wonderful husband, wonderful friends and I have a God that knows the truth. I have nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to be remorseful over except that I miss my child everyday, every minute of the day.

SCOTT: Did JonBenet understand anything about God?

PATSY: Very much!

JOHN: She was … (starts to cry) … amazing.

PATSY: She was a participant in the Episcopal church, were I learned about the healing. That was called Cathechesis of the Good Shepherd. And it was a learning environment like the Montesorri style of learning, it was for preschoolers. JonBenet took it when she was about 5 or 6 years old. It was an environment where they learned about the Last Supper. They had a little mustard seed where they would learn about faith. They had a little corner of the room where they learned about baptism and christening, and JonBenet's christening gown was a part of that display. They learned about David and they learned about the Apostles. They polished the silver chalice, and they learned about the colors of Advent and Lent and all of that.

They learned about prayer, and they would have a prayer time in a prayer circle. I have this vivid recollection, this picture in my mind of JonBenet, blowing out this candle. She is kneeling in front of the pint-size altar, blowing out her candle and watching the smoke rise. She would tell me that that is her prayer going up to heaven. She was very spiritual.

SCOTT: Looking at JonBenet, the little girl in that outfit parading there seems to be an exploitation of a child?

PATSY: It wasn't. It was absolutely not. It was something that she and I enjoyed doing together not unlike hundreds of mothers and daughters across this country that do it every weekend of the world. I was driving this weekend to a friend's house and pulled up at a stoplight and in the car next to me were all these pageant clothes hanging there, and I knew where this mother and child had been this afternoon. This wasn't a novelty.

JOHN: We had a very simple approach to our children, we wanted them to try different things and be very good at one thing whatever it was. So we let our kids do a lot of different things. JonBenet took violin lessons, she was going to take rock climbing lessons, she took piano lessons, she took French, she took acting lessons. JonBenet was a performer. If there was a microphone it was in her hand and she was singing and dancing or doing something that was just her genes.

SCOTT: The latest little deal to come out, it hit the press a few days ago, was the fact that you have now gone to a psychic?

JOHN: Not true.

SCOTT: Well … I have the article right here …

JOHN: Read it in the paper has to be true! Let me dispel your image of that.

SCOTT: There it is. You put out a $100,000 reward to find this guy, and it's on your website.

JOHN: Our investigators control the web site. They put that picture on there. We did not contact a psychic as has been reported. The sketch that appeared on the web site that our investigators use was provided by Dorthy Allison on a television program a year or so ago. Our objective is to keep this alive in the public's mind, in hopes that the one lead that we are waiting for will come through.

SCOTT: So you allowed it to be used?

JOHN: We don't control the web site. The information that was put on there was put on there by our investigators, what they think is appropriate.

SCOTT: The reason why I raise the question because you claim to be Christians and you know, or I hope you know or have been taught, biblically, God doesn't look with whole lot of kindness on psychics or their practices.

PATSY & JOHN: Right. I know.

SCOTT: It's considered to be witchcraft ...

PATSY: Demonic.

SCOTT: And demonic. Now that might not make a lot of psychics happy, but I'm sorry, get over it. But that is what you have been accused of now and there is a distortion again?

PATSY: People look constantly for things to accuse the Ramseys about. This is just another one. Suffice to say -- the investigators, this was their doing -- they had the sketch.

JOHN: One of the reasons we are here today is to keep the pot stirred up.

SCOTT: You want to keep the pot stirred up?

JOHN: Absolutely.

SCOTT: Don't you want to go in a cave and hide out?

JOHN: Are you kidding, there are times we want to do that, but we want to find the killer. We are going to get one phone call that is going to lead us to the killer. This is not going to come now from clever detective work, it is going to come from the public. Someone out there knows who did this --they are going to call. We want to let them know where to call. We want to let them know we are still interested. When we get that call we got him.

SCOTT: There's a killer on the loose out there.

JOHN: Absolutely.

PATSY: Every time the phone rings I think this is the call.

JOHN: But if not in our lifetime, ultimately that creature would have to stand before the God of the universe and be accountable. That is the only justice that really counts. And we take comfort in that.

SCOTT: What mistake, if any, would you take responsibility for over the course of this investigation that you look back and say, "Whoa, we should never have done that."

PATSY: I think that is really hard to say right now because it is still underway. Every day, every hour we are in a position to make a decision as best we can along the way for 3 ½ years we tried to make the best decisions, you know, each time we had to make a decision.

JOHN: It has been very difficult for us to keep silent while all these accusations were being leveled at us, every day, every hour, for 3 years, but we were trying to respect the justice system. There was an active investigation going on. We wanted the police to not be hampered by a media circus. It turns out they fueled a lot of it themselves. When the grand jury was over we felt like we were able to speak out then.

SCOTT: Sometimes don't you want to grab someone and say, "What I am telling you it's true. I am not lying. I didn't kill anybody!"

PATSY: You can't do that, but that's what you want to do. You want to stand up and say, "Listen to me." But we found out a long time ago that you can't. It doesn't do any good.

JOHN: You can not convince a cynic of anything. America is getting to be kind of -- at least the media system is a pretty cynical operation.

SCOTT: The bottom line, below the bottom line, people will ask me, "O.K., you've come out of this, confidentially, what do you think? There is also a side not only as a journalist, but being an ordained minister in the church, to say to other pastors, if they ask me, "Would you recommend to let these people come to my church?"

JOHN: Let me ask you this? What if we were murderers? Would we be denied access to a church? I hope not.

PATSY: That's the people who need to be there. Aren't we "preaching to the choir" as they say.

SCOTT: Well, they still say that.

JOHN: That is a problem we Christians have in our churches.

PATSY: We need to welcome everyone.

JOHN: We think it's a club we belong to because we are all good and we are better than most. Jesus addressed the worst of the worst in his society.

SCOTT: And you're still sitting here living and breathing and there's a future and a hope?

PATSY: What's the alternative? Our hope is in Jesus Christ. God promised us that this life will not be without trouble. We have had our fair share of trouble and then some. But, we are just passing through here aren't we? Isn't that what we have been learning?

JOHN: If we believed this life was all there was and when its over, its over, it's a sick, cruel joke and I don't want any part of it.

SCOTT: For people who watch this who pray -- who believe in prayer as you now do -- how would you ask people to pray for you throughout the world?

JOHN: I would ask people to pray that God puts such remorse in the killer's heart that he will come forward and confess.

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NOTE: When the Ramseys chose to write a major book with a Christian publisher, they moved their story and the tragic murder of their daughter into the worldview we cover. We felt it was vital for someone to ask them the hard spiritual questions and boldly address the unresolved questions about the murder of JonBenét.

We are asking television viewers and Internet users of CBN.Com and The 700 Club to join us in praying for the Lord to reign down justice and righteousness in this open case and reveal the killer and the truth regarding the case.