Morgan Wright — Reinvestigating JonBenét Ramsey From First Principles | Part 1

Morgan Wright is the founder and CEO of the National Center for Open and Unsolved Cases, a nonprofit that takes on cold cases and works them toward resolution rather than commentary. He is a former detective who went on to teach interview and interrogation, and he now trains more than thirty volunteer case analysts in structured investigative methods. He returns to Heroes Behind the Badge for the case he has spent the longest on.

Boulder, Colorado, December 26, 1996. A 911 call before six in the morning reporting a kidnapping and a ransom note. Six hours later a six-year-old girl is found dead in a basement room of her own house. Thirty years and a shelf of books later, the JonBenét Ramsey case remains open. Wright's approach is deliberately narrow: he refuses to argue about suspects until he has answered a prior question. Was there an intruder in that house, or was there not?

Part 1 covers ground most listeners will not have heard. In 1999 a grand jury indicted both John and Patsy Ramsey on two counts each. District Attorney Alex Hunter declined to sign, and it took fourteen years and a series of Freedom of Information Act suits before the public learned the indictments existed. Wright walks through the morning itself, the ransom note found on the spiral staircase, and the decision he considers more consequential than any forensic test that followed: leaving the family inside an uncontrolled crime scene. He then tests the intruder hypothesis against NOAA weather records, Locard's exchange principle, the measured dimensions of the basement window well, and a cobweb that was never disturbed.

What makes this different from most true crime is the discipline behind it. Wright works from a documented archive and is careful throughout to separate what is established from what is contested, and both from what can never be known. It is a working investigator's method applied in public.

Part 2 takes up the ransom note that, by Wright's analysis, could not have been read in the light available that morning, the $118,000 figure that matched a bonus, and what the autopsy says about where JonBenét actually died.

Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Learn more at https://citizensbehindthebadge.org.

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(76)

Dave Hinners — The Arrests, the Trial, and What It Cost | Part 2

Dave Hinners was a Wichita patrol officer, not quite three years on the job, when he became the first officer to speak with the lone survivor of the December 2000 Wichita Massacre. Today he is the exe...

8 Okt 26min

Dave Hinners — First Officer at the Wichita Massacre | Part 1

Dave Hinners was not quite three years into his career with the Wichita Police Department in December 2000. Today he is the executive director of the United States Deputy Sheriff's Association. In thi...

6 Okt 26min

Bill Bratton — Sweet Alice, the Bronx, and What the Job Costs | Part 2

Bill Bratton led six police departments over fifty years, including the NYPD twice and the LAPD from 2002 to 2009. In the second half of this conversation, the policy arguments give way to the people ...

24 Sep 33min

Bill Bratton — Broken Windows, Stop-and-Frisk, and the Defund Years | Part 1

Bill Bratton is the only person ever to have led both the New York City Police Department and the Los Angeles Police Department. He joined the Boston Police Department in 1970 at twenty-three, badge 1...

22 Sep 41min

Barry Black — Building the Case Against Timothy McVeigh | Part 2

Barry Black retired from the FBI after thirty-one years as a master bomb technician and master instructor. On April 19, 1995, he was one of only two FBI bomb technicians in the state of Oklahoma. Part...

10 Sep 29min

Barry Black — The FBI Bomb Technician at the Oklahoma City Bombing | Part 1

Barry Black spent thirty-one years in the FBI. He joined wanting white collar work, having changed his major and his university to get an accounting degree because that was what the Bureau was hiring....

8 Sep 26min

Frank Pegueros — Answering D.A.R.E.'s Critics, and What the Job Costs | Part 2

Part 1 covered what D.A.R.E. teaches now. This half is about the people who teach it, and about the criticism the program has carried for forty years.Frank Pegueros — retired LAPD captain, President a...

27 Aug 36min

Frank Pegueros — What the D.A.R.E. Program Actually Teaches Now | Part 1

Francisco "Frank" Pegueros spent 26 years with the Los Angeles Police Department, retiring as a captain, and has spent the 30 years since as President and CEO of D.A.R.E. America. He has now been with...

25 Aug 35min