Steven Pitt, the psychiatrist who worked on the JonBenet Ramsey case, was shot and killed on Thursday night.
Phoenix Police Department Sgt. Vince Lewis told Fox 10 that 59-year-old Pitt was shot outside an office at 5:30 p.m. local time.
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The outlet reports witnesses near the scene heard a loud argument outside the office, followed by gun shots. Pitt was pronounced dead at the scene when the emergency responders arrived.
Police are still searching for the suspect, whom the witnesses described as a bald white male wearing a dark-colored hat.
Pitt was involved in a number of famous cases, the most well-known being Ramsey’s. The six-year-old child beauty queen was killed in her home in Boulder, Colorado in December 1996. The investigation initially suspected Ramsey’s parents as the culprits, but not enough evidence was found to pursue an indictment. The case, where Pitt worked as a consultant to the prosecution and police investigators, remains unsolved to this day.
He later went on to be an adviser for the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office following the Columbine School Shooting in 1999, where two students killed 12 students and one teacher while injuring another 21 before committing suicide.
Then in 2006 while living in Arizona, Pitt worked on the Baseline Killer case, and helped capture serial killer Mark Goudeau as part of the Phoenix police task force.
Goudeau’s crime spree went from 2005-06, where he killed nine people, sexually assaulted 15 and kidnapped 11 victims.
He was finally arrested in September 2006 for attacking two sisters as the walked home from Phoenix city park a year prior. Matching DNA evidence linked to the other crimes and was sentence to 438 years in prison for the sexual assault charges alone. In 2011 he was sentenced to death for the nine murder charges, and is currently on death row.
Ramsey’s brother, Burke Ramsey, was involved in a defamation lawsuit in 2017 when he suid Dr. Werner Spitz for claiming he was the one who killed his sister as well as CBS for airing a true crime special where he was accused as a potential suspect.
CBS attempted to have its lawsuit thrown out in January, but a judge ruled for it to proceed.
