It has been 23 years since the murder of JonBenét Ramsey in 1996, but interest in the case is still present thanks to the ongoing podcast series The Killing of JonBenet: The Final Suspects.
The latest episode dives into details surrounding alleged suspect Randy Simons. He was the photographer for JonBenét. and some suspect he may have been involved in her death according to Us Weekly.
Videos by PopCulture.com
Simons denies the allegations but according to Stephen Singular, who wrote the 1999 book Presumed Guilty, Simons was always on his list of possibilities. And a strange set of occurrences bolstered his thinking.
“[My wife, Joyce, and I] began talking with pageant mothers in the area who had been in on the child beauty pageant circuit with Patsy and JonBenét, and we heard a couple of things,” Singular said. “We were told that JonBenét’s primary personal and professional photographer was a man named Randy Simons, and Randy had been shooting her picture for a couple of years.”
“All of the beauty pageant mothers that we spoke with said exactly the same thing to us — that since the murder, Randy had been calling them up in the middle of the night, after midnight, hysterical screaming and crying, saying, ‘I did not kill JonBenét, I did not kill JonBenét,’” Singular continued. “They had never seen him behave this way before. They just sort of began telling us the same story, which we found very curious.”
All of this information aside, police in Boulder, Colorado, did question and dismissed Simons as a suspect based on DNA evidence. That said, much criticism has been weighed against the Boulder police since the start of the investigation, including their handling of the crime scene.
Simons is also a questionable figure, having been arrested in October 1998 for walking naked down the street in a residential neighborhood according to Us Weekly. He was also arrested in July 2019 for downloading child pornography, landing him in prison in Oregon.
former sheriff’s investigator John San Agustin appeared on the podcast, noting that the DNA match doesn’t account for who Simons may have known or was hanging around during the time of the murder.
“If we can show that he’s in that area and we can show that he had an affiliation or somebody that he was aligned with that ends up matching the DNA … he would still be charged with conspiracy to commit first-degree murder,” Agustin says in the podcast episode.
DNA already cleared Ramsey’s parents John and Patsy Ramsey of the murder, so the mystery over the demise of JonBenet has become a mystery many true crime hounds can’t drop. She was discovered the day after Christmas in 1996, dead in the basement of her family’s home. This sparked a media frenzy that technically has never officially ended.
