Boulder – A convicted child molester who built a shrine and prayed to JonBenét Ramsey, calling her his “savioress,” claims police arrest him for trivial parole violations because he was once a suspect in her murder.
A man whom John Ramsey fired and then described as a suspect in his book about his daughter’s 1996 murder says strangers still call and e-mail to confront him.
A decade after 6-year-old JonBenét was discovered with a garrote around her neck in the basement of her parent’s Boulder mansion, a crime that has never been solved, people once implicated in her death say the case haunts them.
One former suspect – Bill McReynolds, who played Santa Claus for a party in the Ramsey home shortly before the girl’s death – went to his grave seven years after her death still hounded by the media.
Revelations about new suspects in JonBenét’s case have generated a level of intensity bordering on hysteria.
When John Mark Karr was arrested this summer in connection with JonBenét’s murder after making statements that implicated him, it instantly became international news.
Though he was later released and proved to be only a bizarre footnote in the JonBenét saga, Karr remained a popular guest on national TV programs months after he was released from jail.
Investigators say they have pursued every credible tip about possible suspects in the case – including JonBenét’s parents, John and Patsy Ramsey. Yet 10 years after the murder, no one currently is considered a suspect, Boulder County prosecutor Mary Lacy said Wednesday.
In an interview with CNN’s “Larry King Live” on Wednesday, John Ramsey said accusations against him and his wife, who died June 24 of of ovarian cancer, didn’t hurt too badly because someone had already hurt them as deeply as possible by killing JonBenét.
But when their son, Burke Ramsey, who was 9 when his sister was killed, was accused, it went too far, John Ramsey said. The Ramseys filed and later settled lawsuits against news organizations and tabloids that reported Burke as a suspect.
“It was absolute madness,” John Ramsey told King.
“The Ramseys have been thoroughly investigated and there is no evidence to support that they committed the crime,” Lacy said.
Tips about possible suspects stacked up when Patsy Ramsey died and as the 10th anniversary of the girl’s death approached, Lacy said.
Her office will hire detectives on an hourly basis to pursue investigative leads, she said.
“We get tips that Hillary Clinton committed the murder, and certainly we are not going to investigate those,” Lacy said.
But for some people publicly identified as suspects in the past, the blot on their reputations is difficult to erase.
Tracked long after crime
Convicted sex offender Gary Oliva said he understands why police initially considered him a suspect in JonBenét’s murder. What baffles him is why officers still doggedly track his whereabouts after he was cleared through DNA tests, he said in a recent interview at the Boulder County Detention Facility.
Oliva acknowledged that he molested a 6-year-old girl in Oregon in 1992. He served sentences for that crime and for strangling, but not killing, his mother with a telephone cord, he said.
And he admitted he became obsessed with JonBenét in the months after her death sometime on Christmas night 1996.
Frequently homeless, the drifter acknowledges psychological problems. He said in the months after JonBenét’s death, the tiny beauty queen revealed herself to him in dreams and visions.
“I want people to know how JonBenét saved my life because of what happened to her,” Oliva said. “I claim JonBenét to be my lordess and savioress.”
Oliva began downloading “glamour” photos of JonBenét from the Internet and pinning them in collages on the walls of his apartment in March 1997. He sketched pen-and-ink drawings of her and he cut out pictures of her face and taped them to Monopoly money.
“I never lusted over the pictures,” he said. “I would look at the pictures and cry.”
He became a suspect in JonBenét’s murder after Boulder police heard about the shrine. Detectives also noted his child-molestation conviction and the fact that he picked up his mail at a Catholic church a few blocks from the Ramsey home, Oliva said.
Boulder police detectives took a saliva swab from him to do DNA tests, and grilled him for four hours. FBI agents had him give writing samples.
No official ever told Oliva he had been cleared, he said. He didn’t know until a writer from a tabloid newspaper interviewed him, he said.
That didn’t seem to stop the special attention from police in Oregon and Boulder. Oliva has repeatedly served jail sentences for what he calls “extremely minor violations” such as drinking or failing to have a permanent home while on parole.
“That’s ridiculous,” Lacy said of Oliva’s complaints. “We don’t try to pin other crimes on people when we’re investigating them for a crime.”
Lacy said she won’t completely remove anyone from a list of persons of interest until someone is charged with the murder.
“There’s a murderer who hasn’t been caught and that’s a huge public safety issue,” she said.
Named in Ramseys’ book
Some suspects were publicly named by the Ramsey family or legal experts they hired. One was Jeff Merrick, who was described as a suspect in a book by John and Patsy Ramsey.
“I was flabbergasted I had been named. I was fingered for a horrendous crime,” said Merrick, a former employee of John Ramsey’s at Access Graphics. “It had a tremendous impact on my life.”
Merrick said John Ramsey three times asked authorities to investigate him, apparently on a theory that Merrick was a disgruntled former employee seeking revenge.
But Merrick said that he was laid off by Access Graphics, which has since changed its name, only because he was a whistle-blower and he received a settlement from Ramsey’s company. By the time of JonBenét’s murder, he had a higher-paying job at another company, he said.
“There was no reason at all that I would be motivated to kill his daughter,” Merrick said. “I was a very, very unlikely suspect. Maybe (John Ramsey) wanted to take revenge.”
Lin Wood, John Ramsey’s attorney, did not return phone calls.
Merrick said he found it odd that the Ramseys would so freely throw his name around as a suspect, knowing how devastating the accusations against them had been.
“My wife was subjected to a lot of this stuff,” he said. “The media was tough on us. The police delved into my past as deeply as anyone.”
He said his wife’s boss saw Merrick’s name in an article and asked her: “Do you think there’s a 1 percent chance he did it?”
Staff writer Kirk Mitchell can be reached at 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com.
