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MOSCOW, IDAHO: The father of JonBenét Ramsey - who was murdered in her house in 2006 - has remarked on the small police agency handling an unsolved quadruple murder in Idaho and also cautioned officers to not make the same errors made during his daughter's case. John Ramsey stated that the Moscow Police Department which is now in charge of the investigation into the stabbing deaths of four University of Idaho students should give control of the case to "the big guns."
On November 13, Xana Kernodle, her partner Ethan Chapin, both 20 years old, and housemates Kaylee Goncalves and Madison Mogen, both 21 years old, were fatally murdered in their off-campus residence. Over the past five weeks, thousands of tips have come in, but no suspect has been publicly identified yet, and no motive has been revealed. John, 79, claimed in an exclusive interview with The Sun that small-town police agencies like the Moscow Police Department (MPD) are woefully unprepared to handle cases of this complexity and scope. There hadn't been a homicide in Moscow for seven years before this case, adding up to his argument.
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The FBI and Idaho State Police were swiftly called in to assist the MPD, yet the agency has come under fire from a number of sources, including the relatives of the victims for providing scant details and frequently contradicting itself in public pronouncements. "It's a small little town, they've probably got a dozen on the force, most of whom have probably never investigated a homicide before," John told The Sun. "We have 18,000 police jurisdictions in this country, each one's a little island of authority and the Chief of Police is in charge of the island. And if they don't ask for help, help cannot come in, except in the case of a bank robbery where the FBI comes in automatically. Some of those departments are very competent, and some of them are not. They can't be all-knowing about all things and all types of crime ... [so] they shouldn't be able to choose when to accept and request help, any help that's available, to solve a serious crime like this."
It would have been a "worst-case scenario" if the FBI and the state police had not been contacted, according to John. However, until MPD backs off more in the investigation and gives "the big guns" more power going ahead, John believes "the chances of it being solved are pretty low."
John claims that his own interaction with a small, inexperienced police department in a complicated case involving the murder of his daughter, JonBenét, justifies his distrust. On December 26, 2006, JonBenét Ramsey, then just six years old, was discovered dead in the basement of her parent's Boulder, Colorado, house.
The horrifying find was made by John just seven hours after Patsy, JonBenét's mother, found a strange ransom note that claimed to have been written by a "foreign faction" and demanded $118,000 in exchange for the girl's safe return. Burke, JonBenét's nine-year-old brother, as well as John and Patsy, were the subjects of early suspicion. In the subsequent years, dozens of other suspects and people of interest surfaced but eventually, the investigation was closed. Even now, 26 years later, no one has ever been arrested.
The FBI and the much bigger Denver Police Department were offered to assist the BPD at the outset of the inquiry and John feels that if they had done so, the killer of his daughter would have been identified by now. John maintains that Boulder Police Department assured both agencies that "we don't need your help, we've got this." "I've said all along, I'll never criticize the Boulder Police because they didn't know what they were doing, they didn't even have a homicide department [back in 1996], and that's a good thing for that community because it means they weren't recording daily homicides," he said.