Trigger Warning: This post talks about brutal violence and sexual assault against minors.
This is for entertainment purposes only. I’m a fan and mostly a believer in tarot cards, but there is a reason the justice system doesn’t convict or acquit people based on “psychically divined” evidence! Even setting aside healthy skepticism and presuming there is truly some divine guidance at play, either through some universal spirit or through focusing the power of one’s own intuition (I believe both!), the message taken from the cards is reliant on each reader’s own interpretation of them, and mistakes can happen. Please see my introductory blog for more of my thoughts on tarot cards and my methods.
At the time of JonBenét’s murder, I was a student at the University of Colorado and lived in my sorority house that happened to be on the same street as, and just two blocks down from, the Ramsey’s family home. I was unlikely to have been in town the night of her murder, but the proximity of her home to mine made the tragedy somehow both more surreal and real to me, and heavier. And like many, many others, at the time and occasionally since, I lost my mind to working through the clues and the frustration of it remaining unsolved.
I don’t think there are many (if any) who would be here who aren’t already familiar with the details of this case, so I’m going to skip over summarizing them. But I will candidly admit that I came to my tarot table with a pre-formed opinion on “who” and did have to actively protect against confirmation bias skewing the cards’ message. And in the end, I did largely validate the core of my existing gut instinct, but also came up with multiple complexities to the story that I hadn’t considered. And the full story is wild, dark, sordid, and… viable- even if probably improbable to be at least entirely true. But it would make almost all of the evidence, loose ends, and family behaviors fit together better than any other theory I’ve heard, to my mind anyway.
I am going to weave together what the cards told me and the known/believed facts of the case, per the internet, to form a complete narrative of what I think went down that night, operating on a blind, and wildly unsafe assumption, that both sources of my information can be trusted. I, of course, do not know the full history of the Ramsey family, and there may be information publicly out there that can refute any or all of what I am about to convey that I just didn’t dig deep enough to find. So I will simply incorporate what the cards shared about their dynamics with my amateur google-derived knowledge and, again, leave wide open the very strong possibility that I’ve gotten anywhere from ‘something’ to ‘almost everything’ wrong.
The answers are all complicated and the tragic trajectory of JonBenét’s life was indirectly put in motion well before December 26, 1996. However, even I find the first part of the below tale a bit dubious, so bear with me until we arrive at that night, where my confidence in its accuracy rebounds.
In my introduction post to my tarot readings, I recalled a moment when I was trying to get the cards to definitively point their fingers at one of two male figures, and this moment was while reading for this case. Specifically, I was trying to get them to name either John or Burke as the answer to one particular question. I was trying to use their ages as their distinguishing feature, but continued to pull cards that suggested someone in between the two in years. I gave up and made a frustrated best guess as to which one in order to move on, but still felt uneasy about it. Two days after this attempt, I watched a YouTube video of Ramsey family interviews and learned, somehow for the first time, of the older half-brother. I then learned he was at one point questioned as a potential suspect, but ultimately cleared for having a pretty solid alibi. However, while watching him speak and before having dug into his potential involvement, I felt on a base level that something was off about him and that he emitted an almost “lightness of being” when discussing JonBenét’s death. So he didn’t sit right with me for that reason, but it wasn’t until the next day that I thought “oh…. ” and ran back to my cards.
The half-brother’s name is John Andrew, but I am going to continue to refer to him as the “half-brother” for the simple reason that his name is so similar to his father’s that it would get confusing. Incidentally, it does not escape me that the father gave two of his children a very similar variation of his own name. I do suspect both parents as having a degree of narcissism, but that’s my, not the cards’ or a professionally qualified, opinion.
The half-brother is not JonBenét’s murderer, so far as the cards told me, but he is, all the same, a key influential figure in why her death came about and in the strange family behavior following it.
The half-brother was John’s son from his first marriage and per the cards, he did not adjust well to his parents splitting up or to his father building a new family. He loved his father, but out of loyalty to his mom, he resented someone taking her place. And out of selfishness, he resented having to share his father’s love and attention with his two new siblings. It’s not that he didn’t have love for his children, but John was not a particularly nurturing or attentive father and he held them to strict exacting standards. He was hyper-focused on his career so there wasn’t a lot of spare attention to go around in the first place, and the expression of his affection was contingent on their meeting his expectations and representing their family well. The half-brother also resented the dilution of his father’s wealth with three more people in the family. And as he grew older and his awareness of it expanded, so did his sense of entitlement to it.
The resentment was poison to an already dark/troubled mind and, consciously or not, he wanted to punish his father and his new family. His initial plan centered on Patsy. Patsy was a still attractive but aging beauty queen, still more than a decade younger than her husband. She was currently trying to live out her lingering pageant fantasies, and validate her projected sense of self-worth, through JonBenét, but her insecurities were festering. The half-brother sought an intimate relationship with her as a means of devaluing her and her marriage to his father, though I’m not sure if he ever intended for the father to actually find out or if it was simply for a sense of twisted personal gratification. Patsy, for her part, did not give into his advances, but she also did not discourage him. Instead, she enjoyed the flattery of a younger (now a late teenage) male’s desire, and, implicitly (probably), let him believe that she may at some point succumb to him. I don’t believe she ever actually would have, she just didn’t want to cut off the drug that kind of attention can be for a frail ego.
However, at some point, the half-brother lost patience and turned his intentions to the other choices within that family to inflict his pain on. He considered both JonBenét and Burke, but ultimately chose Burke. (I gave the cards SO many chances to say otherwise, but they were adamant on this point- it was Burke and only Burke.) Burke was in some ways an ideal victim. He played second fiddle to JonBenét in the affection and attention of their parents, so was primed to be vulnerable to someone finally making him feel special and who put him “first”. He also had/has his own mental challenges that increased his vulnerability to a predator, especially one he should have been able to trust. I believe, based on interviews, that Burke falls somewhere on the autism spectrum, but, again, I am not a mental health professional so my “diagnosis” should mean little to nothing. The cards suggest he has a rigid way of thinking, but they are even less capable than I am of diagnosing someone beyond this. However, they do suggest strong jealousy was in play, and with or without a psychology degree, I think that’s a pretty reasonable assumption based on what is known of the family.
Per the cards, the half-brother’s advances towards Patsy were driven purely by underlying vindictiveness, not true desire. His feelings for his half-siblings were more complicated and did tap into an even darker side of himself. In some ways, he put JonBenét on a pedestal, but he did also discover he had a stronger natural preference for males. And he also recognized inherently that he’d be able to maintain a higher degree of control over Burke by exploiting his mental challenges. This control was something he got attached to and found emotionally and physically gratifying.
Burke had an understandably complicated response to his abuse. He valued being made to feel special and because of this, formed an attachment to the half-brother that he would have called “love”. But the physical acts damaged his psyche since he inherently knew, as all kids do, on some level they weren’t right, regardless of what he was being told and what he wanted to believe. As it often does, the damage began to manifest in behaviors the family didn’t understand and/or know what to attribute them to. And as one also often does, he continued the cycle of abuse by doing to JonBenét what their half-brother was doing to him, although I believe to a lesser degree. I believe it would have been more akin to forcing her to “play doctor” for the sake of his toxified curiosity and the lashing out of his own newly given demons, than satisfying actual urges of his own.
At some point, Patsy started to form her suspicions of the half-brother, but assumed if correct, that he was assaulting her daughter. Through that point, Patsy’s ego had thrived off of believing the half-brother was attracted to her so her ugly base reaction was jealousy and resentment. Instead of triggering a protective response, it did her deep insecurities. And on some level, it felt to her a betrayal that she had worked so hard to turn JonBenét into the beauty queen (only) she wanted her to be, only for JonBenét to then “steal” the desire of the male she wanted to genuinely want her, and heretofore thought did. But she also didn’t know her suspicion to be fact, so the only thing she did when it arose was willfully cling to denial. She did at one point find a blanket with the half-brother’s semen on it that she felt was evidence of his abuse and held onto it. She didn’t have a clear plan and wasn’t ready to act on one anyway, but was slowly coming to terms with what she suspected was happening and instinctually stashed it away in case she ultimately gathered enough strength to confront the issue. She was already thoroughly exhausted generally speaking- mentally, emotionally, and physically- from trying to run the family and make her pageant dreams come true, so didn’t have much more to give, especially without support, beyond financial, from her husband, who was, as ever, more career fixated. She was running on fumes, with the remaining vapors being both derived from and used toward her desperate desire to keep up her and her family’s sacred image.
Then comes the night of December 26th…. The Ramsey’s returned home from a dinner party in the late-ish evening and they each got up to whatever they did for however long they did, but I don’t believe anyone actually was put to bed as was claimed, and the kids were left to play as they wanted to. At some point in the evening, Burke was given a bowl of pineapple in milk, a favorite snack of his. JonBenét was pestering him in general and ignoring his requests to leave him alone- basically engaging in completely normal behavior for a six-year-old toward a sibling. But he is not a “normal” sibling and was less equipped to tolerate well any breaches of his “rigid” boundaries- which may have already been taxed by the evening’s earlier social engagement. But she then grabbed a piece of his pineapple for herself, and this “theft” was a step too far for him to contain his rising anger/stress. So he grabbed a flashlight within reach and smashed her over the head with it. This was a mindless and impulsive act, without true intention to seriously wound, let alone kill, her. However, due to his poor emotional regulation and lack of impulse control, he hit her hard enough to crack her skull and knock her unconscious. He tried to poke and prod her in an attempt to prove she was still alive, and his failure to elicit movement from her sent him into full-blown panic mode. This led to an overwhelming meltdown that amplified the nightmare the parents were soon to find out they were now in and be one more problem for them to contend with.
The parents were genuinely horrified to find their daughter in such a state, but even faced with this trauma, they jointly recognized three things. The first was that their daughter was unlikely to survive the head trauma anyway and was certainly not going to survive it being the same as she was before. On a subconscious level, for the two rather narcissistic parents, having a suddenly-less-than-perfect daughter, let alone one with severe irreversible brain damage (as they feared), was the worst possibility. And they convinced themselves that it would be for JonBenét as well. The second was that their son’s future was also now in jeopardy. There were dual concerns towards Burke, with the obvious being over potential legal consequences that he may face, but the bigger being over his emotional well-being and ability to cope with the knowledge that he had killed or seriously maimed his sister- evidence of which was currently in full-display by his meltdown. The third was that their family image was on the line. Revealing how troubled their son was, and potentially having him involuntarily removed from the family home, would be damaging to their reputation and subject them to public scorn/judgment. On the other hand, pinning it on an outsider would instead solicit public compassion and sympathy, which they could make the most of.
Patsy also knew fairly confidently by now what John did not, that if JonBenét was examined by medical personnel, as could be reasonably surmised, they were likely to discover signs of abuse. And though she at that point thought the perpetrator was the half-brother, she was afraid that they would accuse Burke, particularly if they knew he was the one to injure her so severely. It is possible that she may have started to think there was some degree of possibility that he was guilty of this too. But authorities pinning it on him was both another significant risk to his future prospects and, again, another potential hit against her all-too-important family image.
So Patsy talked John into making some dark choices. Her mind detached from her emotions and was calculating things faster than his was and he went along with things as much out of shock as out of alignment, though that too- he was not an innocent puppet here, just not the main mastermind. They calmed Burke with the reassurance that JonBenét would be just fine by morning and they sent him to bed convinced he hadn’t inflicted permanent damage. They determined that their future prospects were now overall best served by JonBenét’s death, but knew that the cause of it needed to be something other than a blow to the head to reinforce the lie that Burke wasn’t to blame for it. And that the other cause needed to be super obvious to eliminate any doubt. So John fastened the garrote that Patsy then used to strangle her daughter and finish the murder that her son had unintentionally started. Besides being a strong visual clue for how she was killed, the garrote served a couple more purposes. Though Patsy was aided, consciously or not, by the sordid emotions she harbored towards her daughter, closing her own hands around her still loved, trophy daughter’s throat was too much for her to do. Using the garrote allowed her turn her head and maintain a degree of separation from what she was doing to her. But it also served the added bonus of not leaving hand marks on JonBenét’s neck that matched her own. John was then the one to abuse her body to make it look like perverse gratification was a key motivator for an outside perpetrator. This was a betrayal too far for the mother to do to her daughter herself, but he did so based on Patsy’s insistence without understanding the full reason for it. Which was, of course, to cast the blame for the abuse investigators were likely to detect on the fictional character they were fabricating, and most importantly, away from Burke. John potentially figured out her motivations when the autopsy indicated signs of chronic abuse. It is not clear which of his sons he suspected, or what Patsy may have shared of her own suspicions/knowledge, but the implication of the cards lean towards him believing it to be Burke. Patsy may have kept quiet to not admit to failing to protect her daughter, and Burke was the more obviously troubled child. I believe John remains ignorant of his older son’s actions that were the original indirect impetus for so much of what happened.
In the morning, they told Burke that someone had broken into the house in the middle of the night and killed his sister. They claimed that though he was not to blame and the timing was purely coincidental, he must never admit to hitting her over the head because otherwise, people would assume he was guilty and they would all be in serious trouble. Being someone who thinks more “rigidly” and is more inclined to take things literally, he believed them and still does to this day. It can, incidentally, be harder for some people with certain mental disorders to grasp that not everything can be taken at face value or to question what they are told as potentially untrue, so while most people‘s minds wouldn’t “fall” for what his parents told him, his very well could. And there’s the powerful factor of him really wanting to believe it to be true, and who is one meant to trust more than their parents?
The parents, of course, wrote the ransom letter and staged the scene further as additional red herrings pointing toward an outside intruder. This was done for Burke’s benefit as much as for the authorities. But unbeknownst to John, Patsy also decided to plant some evidence that pointed to the half-brother. They had positioned his suitcase to look as if the perpetrator had used it as a step-stool to climb out the window, but in it, Patsy placed the blanket with his semen on it and a children’s book, to at least plant a seed in the investigator’s minds. I don’t think she wanted the crime to ultimately get pinned on him or for it to be proven that he sexually assaulted her daughter (as she believed), for the sake of their family image, but wanted spiteful payback for what he put her through and to let him know, without a direct or explicit confrontation, that she knew. This could serve both to blackmail him into silence, assuming they shared with him the truth of what happened (I believe so), and allow them to carry on, on the surface, as if nothing ever happened, a more cowardly but much easier solution for them all. Particularly as Patsy didn’t know that the half-brother’s actual victim wasn’t now out of further harm’s way. But also, if they did fail in their endeavor to convince the authorities of an outside intruder, the second best option would be to point the finger to a culprit (at least for the previous assaults) that she wasn’t biologically related to, which would shield her somewhat from the full brunt of the shame.
For what it is worth, the parents were heartbroken over their daughter’s death, as deeply as their more limited emotional capacities allowed for, even with Patsy’s feelings being somewhat complicated. But they felt they did what was right for their family under the grisly circumstances they found themselves faced with. They assessed in the moment that JonBenét was past the point of no return to an acceptable version of herself, so they did what should have been unthinkable to protect their son and the rest of the life they had created for themselves.
The cards indicate that the half-brother lives a lonely existence and that there is still a strange and unhealthy connection between him and Burke. Neither have been able to hold healthy relationships with others, though they may have tried to carry out the charade of one on occasion. No one in the family has known peace or happiness since. They didn’t pay the legal price they should have, but they paid a steep one all the same.
There are so many levels of tragedy in the tale the tarot cards weaved and if even one thread of it is true, it is a dark one to grasp, even for a murder case. The only piece of evidence that the tale does not account for, or that can’t be pretty easily accounted for otherwise, is the DNA under JonBenét’s fingernails and on her underwear. I can not dismiss this as an insignificant piece of evidence just to bolster the credibility of the cards. Many investigators, who are actual criminal experts, pin everything on this DNA and have fully exonerated the entire family over it. However, there are also plenty of experts who say that the amount of DNA is so minimal that no conclusions can be drawn from it and no one should be ruled out based on it alone. I have no standing to rule on this one way or another, so will leave that to others to do.
I have a hard time wrapping my head around the older half-brother storyline, especially the part involving Patsy, but even if I were to toss that part out as fiction, the rest of the story feels right to me. But if at all true, that part does help answer some hard questions.
As a final note, that has nothing to do with the cards, the one thing that struck me the most in revisiting this tale that I had never fully processed before, was that over the many years since her murder, I had rarely seen a photo of JonBenét, the six-year-old, but had seen image after image of JonBenét, the beauty queen, and I think there’s an element of tragedy in that as well. I think the beauty queen facade that transformed an adorable, but quite normal six-year-old girl into an unnerving woman-child in looks, masks just how small, innocent, helpless, and real she was underneath the make-up and the overly provocative poses she was groomed to make. In my mind, when we see the beauty queen, we are truly seeing Patsy. When we see her in everyday life, we are seeing JonBenét, and that’s the beautiful child the world should know, celebrate, mourn, and remember. And it makes me sad that her parents and the media have, by and large, chosen to show “Patsy”. I don’t know what absolution was found in the afterlife for the mother, if she truly needed it, or if they are together now there, but I hope there is at least peace for the little girl who was lost to this world in more ways than one.
Again (and again), everything said here is hypothetical and for entertainment purposes only.
talesofthetarot.com 