“I never loved anyone like I did JonBenet and yet I let her slip and her head bashed in half and I watched her die. It was an accident. Please believe me. She was not like the other kids.”
So writes Gary Oliva from prison in Colorado, where he is serving time for sexual exploitation of a child. The 54-year-old convict made the confession in letters to a former high-school friend, according to Britain’s Daily Mail, which published an extensive report last week.
JonBenet Ramsey was found in the basement of her Boulder, Colo., home on Dec. 26, 1996. She had a fractured skull and had been strangled. The 6-year-old beauty queen’s violent death rocked the community and became a tabloid sensation around the world. The case remains unsolved and an open investigation.
Oliva has a long criminal history. Nearly 30 years ago, while on probation for assaulting a 7-year-old girl in Oregon, he reportedly attempted to kill his mother at his parents’ Grants Pass home.
But the Boulder Police Department does not appear to take Oliva’s JonBenet Ramsey confession seriously. He has confessed to the crime before.
On January 10, shortly after the Daily Mail story published, the department issued a terse statement that it “is aware of Gary Oliva and has investigated his potential involvement in this case, including several previous confessions. ... There are no new updates in this investigation and the department will not comment further.”
DNA recovered at the scene of JonBenet’s death reportedly does not match Oliva’s.
Ramsey’s parents and brother long have been the subject of wild speculation about JonBenet’s death. A 1999 grand jury indicted John and Patsy Ramsey, JonBenet’s mother and father, for child abuse. The charges alleged, The Denver Post reported, “the parents permitted JonBenet to be placed in a dangerous situation that led to her death and it accused them of helping whoever killed the girl.”
But the Boulder district attorney refused to sign the indictment or prosecute the couple. In 2008, the district attorney’s office publicly exonerated the Ramseys and apologized. (Patsy Ramsey died in 2006 of cancer.)
JonBenet’s brother Burke recently settled a defamation lawsuit against CBS over a 2016 documentary that included a theory that Burke killed his sister. The suit claimed the network “perpetrated a fraud upon the public.”
-- Douglas Perry
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