Former Boulder Police Detective Linda Arndt Was Convinced She Knew Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey

Netflix is following up Ryan Murphy's wildly successful Menendez brothers series with another polarizing decades-old story. This time we're revisiting one of the most famous unsolved crimes: the murder of JonBenét Ramsey. The 6-year-old beauty pageant queen was killed on Christmas day in 1996 at her home in Boulder, Colo. When JonBenét went to bed on Christmas Eve, the only people in the affluent house were her 9-year-old brother Burke along with their parents, John and Patsy Ramsey.

In the documentary Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey, we hear from John himself along with investigative reporters who covered the case and members of law enforcement who worked it. Unfortunately, Patsy passed away from ovarian cancer in 2006, but archival footage from previous interviews allows her voice to be heard. Speaking of voices, one of the more controversial people involved is former Boulder police detective Linda Arndt, who had a lot of thoughts at the time. Where is she now?

According to The Daily Camera, Arndt was widely criticized for her handling of the crime scene which resulted in a lawsuit in 1998, followed by her resignation a year later. She claimed that while mistakes were definitely made, the detective was forced to accept responsibility for most of them. Arndt was the first and only police officer at the house for roughly five hours, and had trouble containing the crime scene especially after JonBenét's body was found. She argued that wasn't her fault.

The 11-year veteran retired with a tarnished reputation and a lawsuit that wasn't decided in her favor. In June 1999, it was dismissed by U.S. District Judge William F. Downes after the ninth day of testimony. Following that, Arndt briefly worked at the University of Colorado but was fired after five months. She tried to find employment with the U.S. Census Bureau in 2000 but they wouldn't hire her. The disgraced detective eventually got a job trimming trees for $8 an hour, per The Daily Camera.

In an interview with Good Morning America that aired in September 1999, Arndt claimed to know who killed JonBenét but kept that to herself due to the fact that it was an ongoing investigation. "The person who killed JonBenét will not see justice as we would like to see," she said cryptically. What she did do was paint a fairly unflattering picture of John Ramsey.

When Arndt first arrived at the Ramsey house, she described John as cordial but wouldn't say if he appeared to be upset in any way. "I remember seeing John in the kitchen looking through his mail. I made a note that he was looking through his mail, and made a note wondering where it came from." Arndt said this stuck out to her but in the Netflix documentary, John said he was looking to see if the kidnappers sent another letter.

The house had been searched by patrolmen earlier on in the day, but things were getting tense by 1 p.m., so Arndt asked John and a friend of his to go through the house again. That's when he found his daughter's body in a back room of the basement. Arndt claimed she gave them both explicit instructions not to touch anything, but John soon brought her body upstairs. While kneeling over the body, Arndt claimed that they had a nonverbal exchange she would "never forget."

The detective told John to call 911 and said when he turned to look at her, she felt for her gun. She was "consciously counting out the 18 bullets." When asked why, Arndt said, "Cause I didn't know if we'd all be alive when people showed up. I knew what happened. I knew what happened to her."