Decade Of Mystery: John Ramsey Speaks

JonBenet's Father Breaks His Silence Since His Wife's Passing, The Karr Arrest

(CBS) 
Tracey called the mysterious e-mailer "December Man." "He clearly knew that I was trying to find out who are you. 'Did you do it? Do you know who did it? What do you know about what happened that night.' And the more I pushed, the more he began to kind of resist," he says.

Then with no explanation, the e-mails stopped.

As December Man appeared to move on, so did Michael Tracey. He was determined to explore other leads and other potential suspects. Then, after 18 months of silence, he unexpectedly got an e-mail from December Man.

"He’s back. And that is when it really started to unfold," Tracey remembers.

This time, there were details – dark details of what happened to JonBenet – and the writer was saying he was there. Alarmed at what he was reading, Tracey turned to Lou Smit, a former detective and expert on the Ramsey case.

Smit has solved over 200 homicides in his career. "I encouraged Michael to try to find out as much as he could about this individual because it may lead us to the killer of JonBenet," he remembers.

But December Man, or "Daxis" as he later called himself, did not want to tell his story just to Michael Tracey: he pleaded to talk to JonBenet’s mother.

"He was in love with JonBenet. And that is what he wanted to tell Patsy and ask her forgiveness. Because he wanted to say was it didn’t, it wasn’t meant to happen in the way in which it happened," Tracey says.

"This is one step even above a person confessing. Here’s a person that wants to confess to the parents. To the mother and to the father. And being very insistent on it," Smit says.

By this time, John and Patsy Ramsey had retreated to northern Michigan, to the small town of Charlevoix. This quiet, remote place was where the couple once enjoyed vacations with all their children and Charlevoix was also the place where Patsy was fighting the return of her cancer.

"This last time that it recurred, it just was a tougher fight, you could tell that right from the beginning. And it was the first time, I guess, I started to realize that we might lose this one," John Ramsey says.

As Patsy’s health declined in the spring of 2006, Daxis kept pressuring Tracey to give him the Ramsey’s phone number and e-mail address.

"I’d been stalling. And in one e-mail he said, and this is May, he said, 'I’ll be sitting in the living room in Charlevoix before you give me those details.' And I looked at that and I thought, 'This as a threat basically. I’m gonna go there if they won’t talk to me,'" Tracey remembers.

He was so concerned, he got the e-mails to the Boulder district attorney, Mary Lacey, who launched a formal investigation.

The question now became how to find Daxis.

"They didn’t know where he was. He did not want to get caught," Ramsey says.

But Daxis did want to be heard: he gave Tracey a phone number and investigators, who were now working with Tracey, a way to track him down.

Tracey made phone calls to Daxis, taping them. Slowly, he began to draw Daxis out.

But just as a killer seemed to emerge from the shadows, Patsy was losing that other fight. On June 24th, Patsy Ramsey died, at the age of 49.