DENVER—JonBenet Ramsey’s parents were occasionally beset with guilt over how their daughter’s killing could have been prevented, the child beauty queen’s father says in an interview posted online Monday by The Daily Beast.
Six-year-old JonBenet was found strangled and bludgeoned in the basement of her family’s home in Boulder on Dec. 26, 1996. No one has been charged in her death.
“I kicked myself for not getting more sophisticated house security. We left it off that night because it would go off like a siren and catapult us out of bed,” John Ramsey told Lucinda Franks for an article posted on The Daily Beast, the news site backed by media mogul Barry Diller’s Internet company IAC.
JonBenet’s mother, Patsy Ramsey, who died in 2006 of cancer, wondered if the beauty contests she entered JonBenet in had attracted a pedophile, Ramsey told the publication.
Last July, the Boulder County district attorney cleared the Ramseys in the slaying and said new DNA tests pointed to an unknown outsider. Investigators hope to one day match crime scene DNA to a suspect in a growing national DNA registry.
Ramsey, 64, has been living in Charlevoix, Mich. He is pushing states to require anyone accused of a felony to give a DNA sample for the registry.
