On Christmas Night 1996, six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was murdered in her family’s home in Boulder, Colorado. A ransom note was found in the home, but it was hours before her father, John, found her body in the basement. She had been strangled with a garrote and her skull was fractured.
The media sensationalized the tragic death of the “child beauty queen” and public speculation and rumors ran rampant. What followed was one of the most notorious unsolved murder investigations in American history.
Boulder police fixated on JonBenet’s parents as suspects. Needing investigative help, the Boulder DA brought in legendary homicide detective Lou Smit. However, he was soon disenchanted with law enforcement’s obsession with the Ramsey family as the primary suspects, excluding other possibilities.
Smit resigned but continued to work on his own time, and at his own expense, committed to finding justice for JonBenet. He determined the Ramsey family was not involved in her death but died in 2010 before he could identify the killer.
Thousands of people attended his funeral service, including John Ramsey, and the detective’s lifelong friend and colleague, John Anderson. Along with a handful of retired detectives, Anderson and Smit’s family continue to pursue justice based on Smit’s work.
Now, for the first time in LOU AND JONBENET, Anderson tells the story of Smit’s investigation and why the Smit family team now believes that the killer can be identified.
Author Bio
Author John Wesley Anderson
John Wesley Anderson, MBA, is a former homicide detective turned author after retiring from a 30-year law enforcement career. He has won the Literary Award for Excellence from the Historic Preservation Alliance of Colorado Springs and the 2022 Golden Quill Award from the Friends of the Pikes Peak Library District. He is the author of seven fiction and regional non-fiction books and lives in Colorado.
Author John Wesley Anderson and Detective Lou Smit | 1997
Looking forward to reading this.
Please supply an email where I can forward information. I noticed something that everyone else missed.
Just read this. Excellent book & tribute to Lou Smit. I’m wondering why they haven’t checked the DNA found on JonBenet’s clothes against an ancestry database, as many cold cases have recently been solved by doing this. With so many places who haven’t entered DNA into CODIS, or who only entered convicted criminals DNA, an ancestry database search seems a good way to possibly get a lead on who killed that little girl. She & her family deserve justice.