EXCLUSIVE – John Ramsey, father of JonBenet Ramsey, says the loss of his two daughters within a four-year period in the 1990s "challenged" and eventually strengthened his faith.
Ramsey made the comments about faith while reflecting on 6-year-old JonBenet's murder 28 years ago, when he found her dead in the basement of their Boulder, Colorado, home the day after Christmas in 1996.
"I don't know of anything worse for a person than to lose a child. I've had several things that I've been through: a divorce, I've lost my job, I lost my life savings," Ramsey told Fox News Digital. "But the loss of the child was overwhelmingly much, much more hurtful and much more of a loss to what life's all about for a parent."
He has been through that loss twice — once in 1992, when his oldest daughter Beth was killed in a car accident, and again in 1996, when JonBenet was killed.
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"When I lost my daughter Beth four years before we lost JonBenet, it just took me to my knees. I was just devastated. … I wasn't prepared at all for that," Ramsey recalled. "And it really challenged my faith as well. How could a loving God let this happen to an innocent child? But then, over the next few years, a lot of soul-searching and thinking and talking to friends helped me process that part of the loss, which was … potentially the loss of my faith as well."
After Beth's death, Ramsey began to reflect on whether there is "more to life than what we see and live here on Earth." He described finding his faith as a several-year-long process.
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"And when I lost JonBenet, that was rock solid," he said of his faith. "Faith is something that's in your heart. I'm a left-brained person by nature, I guess. I was an engineer and educated that way. And you're always looking for proof and facts. And so it's not abnormal to fall back into, 'Wait a minute. I'm not sure I believe.' … But if the faith has gotten to your heart, and you've wrestled with the whys and what ifs … then it's pretty solid."
Ramsey said he believes both of his daughters are in heaven, even though he can't personally conceptualize what that looks like.
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For years after her death, his family did not celebrate Christmas, but they decided that putting an end to the holiday festivities was not fair to her older brother, Burke, who was 9 years old at the time of her death.
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"It just was too hard. We didn't have a Christmas tree. We didn't decorate the house, and we just got through it. And we just said, 'Well, that's not fair to our youngest son, Burke,' who was at the time a 9-year-old, little boy. So, we tried to do things that would put his life back to normal as best we could. And celebrating Christmas was one of those things that we — after, I think probably three years — we just said, 'OK, that's why we need to do that for Burke's sake' and just kind of eased into that celebration again."
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JonBenet's murder has not been solved despite police initially having a list of suspects they considered, including the Ramseys themselves. The Ramseys were cleared of wrongdoing in 2008.
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Police also arrested a suspect named John Mark Karr in Thailand in 2006 after he admitted to killing JonBenet, but prosecutors dropped charges against Karr because his DNA did not match DNA found at the crime scene.
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Ramsey wants police to retest certain evidence for traces of DNA, including external male DNA that federal officials disclosed in 1997, and test other items for the first time using modern genetic genealogy test labs, which have made significant advancements over the last decade. Numerous decades-old cold cases have been solved in recent years due to DNA testing.
There are more than 20 significant pieces of evidence in the JonBenet murder case that have never been tested.
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While it is unclear if officials will be able to find or identify any suspects in the case by partnering with an independent lab with access to private databases, Ramsey is hopeful that it is the next step for him in his pursuit of justice for his daughter, whether it yields results or not.
He previously told Fox News Digital he plans to meet with the Boulder Police Department in January to discuss DNA testing possibilities.
