John Ramsey: Candidate; Some Thoughts on Jobs, the National Spotlight, & the Hunt for the killer of JonBen

July 14, 2004

Being in the national spotlight is nothing new for John Ramsey. After his six-year-old daughter JonBenét was found murdered on Christmas night, 1996 in the basement of the family’s home in Boulder, Colorado, John and his wife Patsy found themselves caught in a firestorm of national interest in the case.
By any measure, theirs was a very tough ride: An inept investigation by the Boulder police and lurid stories in the tabloid press made the Ramseys targets of suspicion in their daughter’s death, and it wasn’t until last year that a federal judge and the Boulder district attorney absolved them of any guilt. Today, even the tabloid press agrees that the killer was most likely a male intruder who used a stun gun to subdue JonBenét. The Ramseys believe that recent advances in DNA tracing technology will eventually produce the killer.
Eight years after JonBenét’s death, Republican John Ramsey finds himself in a new spotlight, running for State Representative in the 105th District that includes Antrim, Charlevoix and Otsego counties and part of Cheboygan county.
He’s been on “Larry King Live” and “The Today Show,” among others, and has generated stories in newspapers across the country over what is a relatively modest legislative post.

NE: Why did you decide to run?
Ramsey: It was a combination of reasons. Fundamentally, it boils down to a desire to give back to the community and try to make a difference here. The first two-thirds of my career I was focused on making my business a success, but when we lost our daughter in 1996 it was certainly a lifechanging event; but we had many, many people reach out to us with caring and concern and I wanted to reach out and make a difference in return.

NE: With your level of name recognition and all of the publicity you’ve had, why did you decide to go for State Rep instead of a bigger office, like Congressman?
Ramsey: There was an open seat here (vacated by Ken Bradstreet) and it was a logical place to offer to serve. I was interested in serving in Northern Michigan -- I think it’s the greatest place to live.
It’s about serving the community I’m part of. This isn’t a career for me (Ramsey made his fortune in a computer products distribution business) -- I’m not looking at it as a career. I’m not tied up with ambition and ego, which politics so often involves. I’d like to serve and make a difference, but I’ve also learned that you can’t plan too far ahead in life -- life has a way of making left turns on you. The loss of our two children gave us a perspective on living for the day (the Ramsey’s oldest child Beth was killed in an auto accident in 1992).

NE: Some of your critics say that as a part-time resident of Charlevoix, you may not have the experience or knowledge to represent the district.
Ramsey: That critic is absent the facts. The facts are that my family moved to Michigan when I was 12 years old in 1956 and I attended junior high, high school and college in Michigan, coming back here for a Masters degree after serving in the Navy. I hit the road after that to make my fortune, but Patsy and I have owned a home in Charlevoix since 1992 and have spent every moment we could here. We decided a year ago to make our permanent home here.

NE: How do you feel you could help the region?
Ramsey: I think that when you cut through everything, you’ll find that when the voters send a representative to Lansing, he’s just one of 110 people in the Legislature. So you want to make sure that that person represents you with a strong voice, is listened to, has access to, and has the ability to make things happen. And I think that’s fundamentally what I can do better than any other candidate running.
With my experience and accomplishments, I have a pretty good track record at getting things done in my business career. Secondly, because of the publicity we’ve received from the media, rightly or wrongly I find that doors are open to us that would perhaps be difficult to open otherwise.

NE: What kind of experience have
you had?
Ramsey: I’ve actually started two or three businesses, but the largest was started in my garage in 1982 in the computer business. It was a good time to be in the computer business and I caught the wave of that whole industry at the right place and the right time. The business grew through internal growth and mergers and acquisitions to about a $1.5 billion business by 1998 when I left. We had about 800 employees at that time around the world.

NE: Do you have any thoughts on how to handle Michigan’s current job loss problem?
Ramsey: I’m probably uniquely qualified to help there. I understand what business needs from government and how government can obstruct business. I think I’m uniquely qualified to help accelerate job growth in Michigan. It’s a perspective only a businessman can have -- understanding what businesses need to survive and thrive. You can’t get that perspective except by having been there.

NE: What would you suggest for Governor Granholm in handling Michigan’s manufacturing job flight?
Ramsey: In the jobs arena there are three things you can do to move this in the right direction. One is to do whatever is necessary to contain the jobs you already have. Basically you have to eliminate any and all regulations, taxes, fees -- whatever is causing business heartache in this state and making us non-competitive with other states. The most visible example of that is the Single Business Tax -- no other state in the union has such a tax. It is onerous, it is a negative for attracting new business to the state, it is an encourager for businesses to leave the state if they can. It’s the perfect example of the kind of negative we need to eliminate. We have to be competitive with other states for jobs and eliminate all of the things that make us uncompetitive so we can keep the jobs we have.
Second, I’m an entrepreneur -- I believe we need to be sure we’re nurturing new businesses and ideas because new businesses tend to stay where they started out. Silicon Valley didn’t happen because everyone liked living in California -- it can be traced back to the 1930s when two people came out of a university and started making power supplies in a garage -- and that was where Hewlitt and Packard came from. Over the next 60 years they spawned other businesses and it became a world capital for technology. But it came out of a small business in a garage that was nurtured.
One of the keys to doing that is putting a network in place in Northern Michigan of ‘angel capital’ -- capital to fund business ventures and new ideas in the region. Government can’t do that because this is risk capital and has to be substantial risk capital awarded by knowledgeable businesspeople who recognize good ideas. But government can wrap around that program to encourage that process. That’s not a short term solution, but in 10 years, you could have major impact on Northern Michigan.
Third, Northern Michigan has a unique competitive advantage in our recreation industry. We have a three-season recreation industry made possible by our unique environment and we need to invest in, protect it and advertise it. And we need to make sure our tax structure is such that people who come to Northern Michigan to take advantage of that industry rent it or pay for it to help us fund our roads
and schools.
So, to summarize, containment, nurturing new business, and investing in the recreation industry are what we need to do.
There’s lots of things the government needs to wrap around that. We need to have a business recruitment team that’s world-class. When we hear of a new business potentially coming to Northern Michigan, that team needs to be all over it.”

NE: How does that pro-business background square with your stand on the environment? As you know there’s a huge segment of the population here that’s protective of the environment on issues such as diversion of the Great Lakes and the controversy over the water bottling plant.
Ramsey: Being pro-business doesn’t mean being anti-environment, particularly here in Northern Michigan. If we have one undeniable asset here, it is our environment. That’s a huge attraction for good business, so we have to protect it -- we can’t squander it.
I was in the technology industry for a long time and as businesses grow they need to attract key people. And one of the fundamental attractions is where you’re located. If you have a key scientist or engineer who’s considering several options, always a key part of his decision process is where do I live? Northern Michigan has a huge advantage in that arena, so we’ve got to protect it -- we can’t kill the golden goose.
That also applies to our recreation industry -- the reason we have a great recreation industry is because we have a great environment and we can’t let that be destroyed.
In terms of water, we sit on 20% of the world’s fresh water supply and 90% of the nation’s fresh water. It’s probably more valuable than oil. We can live without oil but we can’t live without water. So Michigan has to recognize that we have this tremendous asset and have to protect it.

NE: You’ve had a huge amount of national publicity and news coverage. Has that surprised you?
Ramsey: We’ve always had that interest -- we didn’t ask for it, but it’s been there because of our daughter. We looked at the media initially as a way to advocate pursuing the investigation. For the first four years of the disaster in our lives, our objective was to get the investigation handled correctly. We selectively appeared in the media to get the investigation in the right hands. Four-and-a-half years ago, we got it in competent hands with the district attorney’s office, so for the next two years we didn’t do anything with the media because we didn’t see any point in it.
When I decided to run for office, I decided to open up and let people know what my positions were. We decided to do some limited national media, but the real focus is on the media around the region.

NE: How do you feel the case is going?
Ramsey: We are delighted with where the case is now. More has been done in the last year than in the first five years.
The most significant physical development was the perfection of DNA samples. We now have strong DNA evidence and we’re working to put it in the federal, Canadian, and ultimately the European data base. (Two strong crime-scene DNA samples will be compared with the DNA of possible suspects on these data bases.) We have a great data base system, but the problem is there’s not a lot of data in it yet. People say you’ve got a DNA sample, but there’s no match, but there are more samples being put in the data base every day.
Michigan has a 10-year backlog of samples of felons and crime scene evidence waiting to go in its data base. Michigan’s not unusual -- all states have a huge backlog. The good news is we have the killer’s DNA and the detectives believe the same thing. The bad news is that the national data base isn’t loaded yet. What that says though is that in time it will be loaded, whether that’s a year or 10 years, and ultimately we’ll get the killer.

NE: In his book on famous unsolved cases, FBI profiler John Douglas theorized that an intruder hid in your basement and then used a taser of some sort on JonBenét...
Ramsey: Well there’s virtually no doubt that a stun gun was used. That’s been pretty thoroughly tested and is a medical certainty as to what made the abrasions (on JonBenét’s body). But the most significant piece of evidence is the DNA. We also have a two or three page ransom note and I’m told by the experts that with that much of a handwriting sample given, an adequate known comparison can virtually identify
the source.

NE: Speaking of that case and the media, you had a terrible rough time with the tabloid press. Do you still have suits pending with the tabloids and FOX News?
Ramsey: We still have a suit pending with FOX based on what we believe was a very irresponsible update they did on the case a couple of years ago. We’re not only suing for slander, but for slander with malice because they knew what they said was wrong but they said it anyway.
All of the other suits we filed -- five I guess -- have all been settled in our favor.

NE: Did that make you feel vindicated in some sense?
Ramsey: The only absolute vindication will be when the killer is caught and convicted, and there will still be that small percentage of people who won’t believe it. That’s just the way human nature is.
The more irresponsible media and grossly irresponsible media were the ones that we filed suit against, and frankly the only way we could hold them accountable was financially. There were lots and lots of potential suits there, but in this scenario you only have one year to file a suit for slander or libel; many of the more egregious ones were expired. As one of our attorneys said, we could have had enough suits to keep an entire law school busy for years if we’d filed all the suits that were appropriate.
Certainly the legitimate media has figured out that we got a raw deal with how this was handled. Even the tabloid media seems to be now on a slant now that, gee, it wasn’t the parents after all and there’s still a killer out there. Over the past six to eight months they’ve been running stories about who that killer might be. In fact, they probably gave the most publicity to the fact that we were exonerated by the district attorney and a federal judge. The mainstream media did a pretty good job of ignoring that, so that’s been a bit ironic.

NE: In hindsight do you have any suspicions as to who killed JonBenét?
Ramsey: No. We don’t know anybody this evil -- this dark, dark evil. Anyone who would take the life of a child in this cruel way... No, we don’t know. But the detectives working on it tell me they will get him. And I say him because the DNA is male.

NE: What’s been the response locally to your campaign? You have such a high level of name recognition -- are people surprised that you’re running?
Ramsey: Well, some are. What we’ve found through this whole ordeal over the last eight years is that people have been wonderful almost without exception. We came through this with the overwhelming feeling that our fellow man really cares about us. We had hundreds and hundreds of letters -- people stop us in the streets or in airports and give us a hug. So that outreach, compassionate outreach -- that has never been a negative for us. People are great and continue to be great. It’s just been a very warm, uplifting experience.