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JonBenet Investigator Talks Exclusively to Fox 31 News

Last Edited: Monday, 13 Nov 2006, 9:47 PM MST
Created: Monday, 13 Nov 2006, 9:29 PM MST

DENVER --
The tenth anniversary of the murder of JonBenet Ramsey is rapidly approaching. The whirlwind surrounding the arrest and release of John Mark Karr shows it's a mystery that continues to capture the nation’s attention.

Fox 31 News and Investigative Reporter Julie Hayden have received new information as one of the investigators talks for the first time about her experiences with the case.

Holly Smith recently wrote a book about her 20 years with the Boulder County Sexual Abuse team. She left out the chapter about the Ramsey case, but is now revealing her part of the investigation exclusively to us.

A Memory Forever Engrained

Holly Smith remembers walking up the steps to the Ramsey home: the big candy canes more jarring than festive considering the circumstances. The house was lavishly decorated.

Smith recalls, "It was big and it was meandering and it was schmanzy fancy."

It was the third day of the investigation into the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. Smith was head of the Boulder County Sexual Abuse team and has been called into the investigation, as she says, "to consult about some of the dynamics and some of the things people suspected might be going on with this case."

She started, as always, with a visit to the child’s bedroom.

"That's a really important piece of getting a real feel for a family," Smith explains.

With portfolio pictures galore and closets full of JonBenet’s elaborate pageant outfits, Smith says she had a hard time getting a fell for who the little girl really was, even in her bedroom.

She recalls, "I just had a sense the type of decor in her bedroom was not really a child's decor."

One poignant find that she does recall was a red satin box with what looked like JonBenet’s secret stash of candy.

She found something else in the room, however, which raised an immediate red flag. Smith says most of the panties in JonBenet’s dresser drawers had been soiled with fecal material.

"There is this dynamic of children that have been sexually abused sometimes soiling themselves or urinating in their beds to keep someone who is hurting them at bay," explains Smith.

JonBenet also had a history of bedwetting. While Smith points out there could be innocent explanations, this was the kind of information that raised questions.

"It's very different for every child, but when you have a child that's had this problem and it's pretty chronic for that child, and in addition you know some sort of physical evidence or trauma or an allegation, you put all those little pieces together and it just goes in your head," she says.

Smith adds, "There was an indication of trauma in the vaginal area."

The coroner's autopsy discovered evidence investigators say indicates JonBenet suffered vaginal trauma the night she was murdered. However the autopsy report also describes evidence of possible prior vaginal trauma. Experts disagree about the significance of that.

It could indicate previous injury or infection, a sign of abuse, or nothing at all.

Arapahoe County Coroner Dr. Michael Doberson says you would need more information before you could come to any conclusion. That was part of Smith's job. But then she was abruptly pulled off the investigation and told police were handling everything.

"There was a lot of territoriality around the case,” she says.

Smith says she also saw things in the Ramsey investigation that she's seen in other cases, like the factor that money played in it.

"No one is exempt but people with money are able to keep themselves more cushioned,” she says.

She says she also saw a reluctance to even consider the issue of child sex abuse.

Says Smith, "It’s just not a place where you know it's so abhorrent to people that they can't even do it, they can't even wrap their heads around it but it's more common than we think. The sexual violation of children has been around for a long time."

Smith believes all of them involved with the case lost their way.

She concludes, "In all the hyper-personalization around this case, everybody wanting a piece of it, everybody wanting to be the hero understandably and wanting to find out what happened to this little girl, our purpose really got lost. We lost sight of this child."

In her writing, Smith describes seeing a picture of a smiling JonBenet, taken Christmas morning and tells how distressing it was to realize the child would die what she called a hideous death that very day.

A lawyer for the Ramsey family did not return our phone calls. But the Ramseys have always denied that JonBenet suffered any kind of prior abuse and point out her pediatrician never saw anything indicating abuse, either.

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