2000-03-18: “Death of Innocence”
Written by John and Patsy Ramsey, March 18, 2000

DOI Page 203

"On Saturday, August 16, Patsy, Burke, and I attended an all-day picnic at Big Canoe, north of Atlanta, with our old friends and their children. This was an annual event we had missed during our years in Boulder. We returned home at dusk to find Pam and Nedra sitting in their car in our front driveway. Our house had been broken into, or at least it seemed so. Apparently the alarm had gone off at 4:30 in the afternoon, but Pam and Nedra didn't discover the problem until 8:30 that night when they had arrived at the house. What had happened to our security system?

DOI Page 204

After growing tired of waiting for the police, I entered the house, armed with a cast iron frying pan (the only weapon I could find), and went through every room. I admit I was frightened as I opened closets and stuck my head into the attic, but I was buoyed by the thought that if the intruder were JonBenet's killer, I would have an opportunity to finally face him myself.

I found a basement window unlatched, right over our newly installed telephone junction box.

Normally the phone company wants these boxes outside the house so they can get at them, but we had moved it inside so our phones couldn't be easily tapped. Was this window unlatched by someone for a later return to tap our phones? Or worse, to get into the house? We never knew. After several calls to our security monitoring service, which should have dispatched a call to the police at 4:30, they finally told us there was a note in our computer file that said not to call the police if an alarm was detected! Where did that come from? Again, we will probably never know."