A Colorado court on Friday released previously sealed grand-jury court documents, showing that in 1999 they voted indict the parents of murdered 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey on child abuse charges, which resulted in death as well as being accessories to a crime, CNN reported. The documents did not include specifics, as the almost two decade old murder case remains unsolved.
The four-page indictment outlines two counts against each of the slain young girl's parents, news reports said.
The grand jury wrote that John and Patsy Ramsey "did unlawfully, knowingly recklessly and feloniously, permit a child to be unreasonably placed in a situation which posed a threat of injury to the child't life or health, which result in the death of Jon Benet Ramsey." On the second count of an accessory to a crime, the grand jury wrote that each parent "did render assistance to a person [with the intent to prevent the arrest or prosecution, knowing they had committed and was suspected of the crime and murder in the first degree and child abuse resulting in death," as reported by NBC News.
JonBenet Ramsey, a former child beauty queen, was found dead in the basement of her Boulder, Colorado home on December 26, 1996, marking one of the most notorious, and publicized, unsolved murder mysteries in U.S. history. Police placed the Ramseys under and an "umbrella of suspicion" in the early stages of the investigation, but by 2008, the district attorney assigned to the case publicly exonerated them "based on testing of DNA found at the scene and suggested that an unknown intruder was the culprit," NBC News reported. Patricia Ramsey died of ovarian cancer in 2006. John Ramsey has since remarried.
Stan Garnett, the current district attorney, said that he will pen an op-ed to be published with Boulder's Daily Camera on Sunday.
Charlie Brennan, a Daily Camera staff reporter who has worked the case since Ramsey's murder penned a piece on Friday entitled "Why I Fought For The Ramey Indictment's Release."
In the article, Brennan wrote: "Journalism has been called the rough first draft of history. The first and subsequent drafts relating to the Ramsey grand jury, which I consider one of the most critical chapters of the Ramsey story, had it wrong. Now, the record stands corrected and completed. Two reporters stood outside JonBenet's home Dec. 26, 1996, at the time the coroner's staff brought the child's body out into the cold night and harsh light of an enduring public obsession. I was one of the two. Never did I suspect that 17 years later, the saga would still be unfolding."
