Police officials saw the prosecutors’ office as overly sympathetic to the Ramseys. The district attorney’s office charged the police with withholding important pieces of evidence. Meanwhile, tensions escalated between the police and the county prosecutor’s office, as each department accused the other of bungling the case. The parents also placed a newspaper ad offering a $100,000 reward for information about the killer. Mark Beckner notoriously declared the Ramseys to be under an “umbrella of suspicion.” The Ramseys’ attorneys responded by issuing a letter accusing investigators of a lack of objectivity. In April 1997, just before the interrogations, Cmdr.
There was an hourlong break between John’s and Patsy’s interviews, which may have given them time to coordinate their stories. The police agreed to the terms, and the couple was interviewed on April 30. These lawyers advised them not to submit to formal, videotaped police interviews until the police agreed to show the Ramseys copies of the statement they had made to police the day of the murder. Navy base in the Philippines where John Ramsey was stationed in the 1960s.The Ramseys hired criminal-defense lawyers to represent them four days after the murder, even though they had not been named as suspects. The amount demanded matched John Ramsey’s 1995 bonus-and the note ended with “Victory SBTC,” which police say refers to the Subic Bay Training Center, the defunct U.S.
Subsequent analysis of handwriting samples ruled out John as the author, but proved inconclusive in Patsy’s case.Īn intimate knowledge of the Ramsey family. A search of the house produced the legal pad on which it seemed to have been written, as well as a draft of the note. Investigators initially dismissed the ransom note as a fake and asserted that it contained intentional misspellings.