My boyfriend killed JonBenét: It’s an explosive claim. Now judge her reasoning… from the stained clothes to the ransom note ‘code’ and a chilling OJ Simpson link

It’s been 28 years since Jacqueline Dilson’s boyfriend disappeared from their Colorado home for a few hours on Christmas Day. But the eerie memory still plagues her now. 

His explanation at the time was innocent: a work party. But his erratic behavior when he returned home that night, and in the days and months that followed, led her to a horrifying conclusion: He was involved in the murder of JonBenét Ramsey.

Dilson’s lover, Robert ‘Chris’ Wolf, is one of only two suspects to have been detained in connection with the six-year-old pageant queen’s slaying, which remains unsolved to this day.

Wolf, now 65, has repeatedly denied any involvement in the murder and was never charged. In 2011, police said he had been thoroughly investigated.

JonBenét’s parents had woken up on the morning of December 26, 1996, to find their daughter missing from their sprawling mansion in Boulder. 

The little girl’s body was found later that day, swaddled in a white blanket in a storage room in their basement. Her wrists had been tied, duct tape covered her mouth, and a garrote fashioned from paintbrushes was wound around her neck.

Dilson, now 76, claims glaring evidence against Wolf was overlooked because police were laser-focused on the child’s parents, John and Pasty Ramsey, who were placed under an ‘umbrella of suspicion’ after their daughter’s body was found.

Dilson first reported Wolf to Boulder Police just weeks after the murder in January 1997, citing his bizarre actions on Christmas night and eerie statements he had made about the crime afterwards. 

She later handed over his clothes for DNA testing and handwriting samples to check if they matched a ransom note left on a staircase near JonBenét’s body.

Now, as the murder continues to grip the nation, Dilson has spoken out in an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail as she calls for a fresh investigation. 

For his part, Wolf testified to his innocence under oath during a deposition in 2001, and has always insisted he did not know JonBenét or the Ramsey family before she was killed. 

However, Dilson believes the events of the night – and the secret extreme views allegedly harbored by her ex-boyfriend – go some way to proving he was involved.

She tells the Daily Mail that she woke up in the early hours of December 26 to find Wilson showering, with his mud-stained clothes left in a heap on the floor.

She told detectives Wolf became aggressive when she questioned his whereabouts that night. He then later became irate when JonBenét’s death first made the news – ranting that he wanted her father John Ramsey to die and accusing him of sexual abuse, according to police records.

At Dilson’s insistence, Wolf was detained and taken in for police questioning. He denied any involvement but initially refused to provide DNA or handwriting samples.

Wolf was soon released. Boulder Police Department claimed he was extensively vetted and was no longer being treated as a suspect.

But Dilson is far from convinced of his innocence and hopes her suspicions will finally be taken seriously after sharing her story publicly for the first time in a new self-published book, The Unheard Call.

In it, she portrays Wolf as an anti-capitalist radical who believed John Ramsey was complicit in the killing of innocent women and children because of his business ties to arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin.

Using a host of personal observations, circumstantial evidence, and anecdotal accounts, Dilson sensationally alleges that Wolf murdered JonBenét as an act of retribution for her father’s role in the slaughter of civilians.

‘I’ve felt this burden of responsibility that I was one of the only people who could help to finally solve this case,’ she now tells the Daily Mail.

‘And there’s no way I can stop pushing until I get answers. It’s like a train inside of me that refuses to quit.’

For Wolf, Dilson’s accusations remain as ludicrous to him as they were in 1997, telling the Dail Mail that claims he murdered JonBenét as political retribution are ‘completely absurd’.

CONFLICTING ACCOUNTS

The Ramseys had also identified Chris Wolf as one of their prime suspects in their controversial book, The Death of Innocence, published in 2000.

Wolf sued the couple for defamation, but his $50 million lawsuit was dismissed in 2003. The judge ruled evidence in the case strongly supported that an intruder could have killed JonBenét, and the Ramsey family were within their rights to discuss Wolf as a suspect.

John and Patsy Ramsey were themselves the prime suspects in the case for more than a decade before being publicly absolved of suspicion in an open letter from the Boulder District Attorney in 2008.

The only other suspect detained in connection with the murder was John Mark Karr, who falsely confessed to the crime in 2006. DNA evidence found at the scene did not belong to him and he was released.

The investigation remains active and ongoing, but the current focus of Boulder PD’s probe is unknown.

This leads Dilson back to Wolf. 

Her entanglement with him began in the spring of 1994. Wolf, then 35, had been hired to work as a stripper at a bachelorette party that Dilson, then 45, was hosting at Dakota Ranch, a Boulder County wellness retreat she owned and lived in.

At first, she found Wolf charming, but over the next two years their romantic relationship was beset by fights and what she describes as his unpredictable behavior.

They were living together at the retreat in December 1996, but Dilson says she wanted to kick Wolf out because he was getting ‘kind of scary’ and prone to violent mood swings.

She also claims she became suspicious when Wolf started borrowing her truck and disappearing for hours at night.

Tensions reached boiling point on Christmas Day when Dilson’s adult son Mason gifted Wolf a blue t-shirt with the words ‘Santa Barbara’ emblazoned across it.

According to Dilson, Wolf became annoyed and asked if it was from a tennis club, which he deemed to be a symbol of capitalist indulgence.

His disdain for capitalism, she says, was a constant. Two years earlier in 1994, she says he complained about looking like a ‘capitalist pig’ when she asked him to wear a jacket to a restaurant.

After complaining about the gift, Wolf allegedly announced he was going to a party at the Boulder Daily Camera offices, where he worked as a freelance reporter.

Dilson thought it strange to hold a work party on Christmas Day, but didn’t question him to avoid another argument.

Wolf returned several hours later in a state Dilson describes as ‘psychotic’. He burst through the back door and stormed downstairs to sit alone on a couch.

When Dilson asked him where he’d been, all Wolf said was that he was ‘starving’. 

Dilson says this bizarre behavior continued when Wolf warned he may be gone again by the time she woke up on December 26.

At 5.30am, Dilson woke to the sound of running water. Wolf eventually emerged from the shower and put back on the same clothes he’d been wearing the day before – with fresh streaks of dirt across his knees and sweatshirt.

Wolf didn’t offer an excuse for the stains and left to go to a coffee shop, she says.

In a 2001 deposition, Wolf admitted leaving Dilson’s home on Christmas night but claimed he returned at around 9.30pm.

He stood by those remarks in an interview with the Daily Mail.

Wolf admits that he used to be a heavy drinker and ‘marijuana addict’ who would frequently get high in his car. But says he has no recollection of a Boulder Camera party.

‘I just drove around a little bit, smoked some marijuana, listened to some music in the car, and then came home and went to sleep,’ he says.

In his 2001 deposition, for the defamation case against the Ramseys, Wolf said the dirt on his clothes could have been from lying on the ground to check his car or from wearing them for multiple days.

‘I may have been doing laundry that morning. I owned almost no clothes, and I did a lot of laundry,’ he added.

PERFECT MURDER, PERFECT TOWN

Three hours after leaving for that coffee shop, Dilson says Wolf returned to Dakota Ranch, his eyes bulging.

She adds that he pulled her inside a dorm room, slammed the door behind him, and started shouting something that still haunts her.

Wolf was screaming about the ‘motherf***er on the hill with his computer systems that are killing women and children in third world countries’.

‘The Hill’ was a nickname for the affluent area of Boulder where the Ramseys lived. But at this point Dilson hadn’t heard about the murder.

‘He’s going to prison,’ Dilson claims Wolf said during a 20-minute tirade that included obscenities about Lockheed Martin, the company John Ramsey was linked to.

She says Wolf pinned her against a wall while ‘leaping around and screaming like a man possessed.’

Wolf claims he first heard about JonBenét later that morning, when her case was first reported as an abduction on the radio.

He blames the rant on being ‘pretty agitated’ and ‘p***ed off by the whole thing,’ but questions the timing.

‘For all I know, I could’ve made those comments the day after, when it was no longer just a kidnapping, or when it was evident that she was actually dead,’ he says.

‘I don’t know which one it was, and I’m pretty sure Jacque doesn’t know either.’

Dilson says she did not learn about JonBenét’s disappearance until the afternoon of December 26, when a friend called her while she was washing Wolf’s clothes.

When Dilson sat down with her adult daughter Marah to watch the first reports on the five o’clock news, she says Wolf started shouting at the screen. 

‘You know that little girl was sexually abused. Just admit it! You know her father sexually abused her! […] Her father was selling arms to third-world countries,’ he allegedly snarled.

It was then that Dilson says she first realized the ‘motherf***er on the hill’ Wolf had been ranting about could be John Ramsey.

In the days that followed, Dilson claims Wolf became obsessed with the news coverage of JonBenét and would curse the media for how little information was available.

But it was something he said a few days after Christmas that chilled her the most.

‘You know, me and O. J. [Simpson] have a lot in common. We get away with everything,’ Dilson recalls Wolf saying.

On another morning, she claims he suddenly announced: ‘You know I was just thinking, if I was going to strangle someone, I wouldn’t use my hands. I’d use a rope. Wouldn’t you?’

At that point, the authorities had not yet revealed JonBenét had been strangled with a rope.

On New Year’s Day 1997, Dilson confided to a friend that she believed Wolf may have been involved in the case and became so concerned by his actions that she stopped taking guest bookings at her retreat. The decision crippled her financially and forced her to shut down the business, she says.

Dilson’s daughter Marah also says she noticed a ‘complete 180’ in Wolf’s behavior after JonBenét’s murder, including one incident where he asked her boyfriend how to pick a locked door with a credit card.

She also remembered Wolf claiming months before the murder that he had just seen ‘Patsy and JonBenét’ at a supermarket in downtown Boulder – despite insisting he didn’t know them until he heard about the case on the radio.

Another incident that stood out to Dilson and her daughter was when Wolf erupted at a guest reading an article about John Ramsey being named Entrepreneur of the Year by the Boulder Chamber of Commerce for his work at his company, Access Graphics.

She recalls Dilson saying Ramsey was a ‘merchant of death’ complicit in the slaughter of women and children.

In 1995, Wolf wrote an article in the Boulder Business Report about Access Graphics and later admitted he had a close friend who worked for one of their major customers.

But he rejects any suggestion that this proves he knew John Ramsey or harbored any resentment towards him.

A ‘TERRIFYING’ REALIZATION

Dilson finally decided to meet with a sheriff in Boulder County in early January 1997.

She took along Wolf’s pillowcase for DNA testing and a line of rope she’d purchased from Home Depot days before the murder that was missing several feet.

Dilson says her claims were met with skepticism, but Detective Steve Thomas still agreed to pick up Wolf for questioning.

Wolf was pulled over under the ruse of a minor traffic infraction and told the arresting officer: ‘Can’t you find something better to do? You people can’t even solve the Ramsey murder.’

Wolf refused Detective Thomas’s request to hand over a handwriting sample to compare it to the ransom note and had to be restrained during questioning.

He says he started to panic when the two cops in the interrogation room suddenly started demanding he tell them ‘everything about the murder’, even though he was detained on a suspended license.

Meanwhile, Dilson had gathered up more of Wolf’s clothes, a bedsheet, and a copy of a book on his bedside table titled Mr Murder to hand over to the cops.

However, she then received a call from Detective Thomas, informing her they were letting Wolf go because he ‘wasn’t the guy,’ she claims.

Wolf insists he was only hauled in for questioning to appease the Ramseys’ lawyers and demonstrate that other leads were being pursued.

He says he refused to give DNA and handwriting samples because he was scared the Boulder PD – who were struggling to find a breakthrough elsewhere – might try and frame him. (Years later, in 2011, Boulder PD officials confirmed Wolf had been ruled out as the ransom note author by a hired expert.)

‘At some point, my blood ran cold when I started thinking, “They’re trying to pin this murder on me.” From that point, the case became terrifying to me,’ Wolf told the Daily Mail.

‘EVIDENCE’ OVERLOOKED

When he returned to the home he still shared with Dilson, Wolf bashed the police as ‘f***ing a**holes’ and ‘crazy idiots’.

Dilson says she was terrified he would accuse her of tipping off the police and alleges that Wolf tried to strangle her in her sleep that night.

In his 2001 deposition and his recent interview with Daily Mail, Wolf denies ever engaging in or threatening violence against anyone.

After her disappointing experience with Boulder PD, Dilson turned to District Attorney Alex Hunter – who was more open to the theory an intruder killed JonBenét.

On February 13, 1997, Dilson, her daughter Marah and Wolf watched Hunter hold a press conference where he directly addressed the killer: ‘I want to say something to the person or persons…that took this baby from us. I mentioned this list of suspects narrows. Soon, there will be no one on the list but you.’

Dilson claims Wolf was frantically biting his nails and bouncing his legs up and down.

‘You think I killed her, don’t you? You think I killed her! You think I killed her! Admit it,’ Wolf allegedly later shouted at Dilson.

Wolf cannot recall that incident in detail but says his conversation with Boulder PD weeks prior had left him shaken.

By the end of February, Dilson was sleeping in a bedroom barricaded by furniture on the other side of the resort from Wolf and remained paranoid he was going to hurt her.

The Ramsey investigation, meanwhile, was stalling.

Then, in September 1997, the ransom note was published in full for the first time.

The killer’s words – written on a legal pad belonging to Patsy Ramsey – included references to John’s work, bizarre quotes seemingly lifted from action films, and a signature of a so-called foreign faction identifying themselves by the acronym SBTC.

Dilson says she was stunned when she saw the killer’s writing for the first time. She claims it is identical to Wolf’s, and that some of the political sentiments expressed in the document match his.

She also believes she has cracked the code of what SBTC stands for: Santa Barbara Tennis Club, an allusion to the T-shirt her son gifted Wolf on Christmas night.

After seeing the ransom note Dilson alerted the DA’s office and handed in Wolf’s leather jacket that could be tested for fibers, along with his handbook and journal.

She later informed investigators of three more pieces of evidence that she still believes are crucial to the case against Wolf.

The first is a fur hunting hat that she says he stopped wearing immediately after the murder and which she believes may account for strange animal hairs found at the scene.

The second is a flashlight missing from her home. A large black Maglite flashlight had been found on the Ramseys’ kitchen counter the morning after JonBenét’s murder. The family said they didn’t own one and were unsure where it came from.

The third item is a letter Wolf wrote to journalist Carol McKinley in 1998, where he pointed the finger at JonBenét’s older brother Burke, and repeated President Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about the ‘military-industrial complex’ from his 1961 farewell address to the nation.

In the letter, Wolf called John Ramsey a ‘Merchant of Death’ and suggested that six-year-old JonBenét’s participation in pageants could foment pedophilia.

‘We’ve seen the videos of the little girl in the costumes with the hip thrusts,’ Wolf continued. ‘Everyone who thinks a grown man couldn’t possibly ever have sex with a six-year-old girl has got their head so far buried in the sand that that’s exactly where it should remain so as to spare us the tyranny of their ignorance.’

He concluded: ‘JonBenét Ramsey was born into a world of exploitation within a culture of death, and I’m not surprised she didn’t survive.’

During his 2001 deposition, Wolf admitted he wrote the letter but again denied any prior knowledge of the Ramsey family before JonBenét’s death.

Today, Wolf calls the letter the work of a very immature, ‘marijuana addicted, graduate student’.

‘That letter was like a lot of things I was thinking at the time; I didn’t care. I don’t have anything to hide. I don’t have anything to hide now,’ he adds.

Wolf rejects Dilson’s claims that he was some sort of ‘radical militant’ and explains his political ideology was a reaction to a ‘very disturbing period in our history’ and the Latin American foreign policy he was learning about in school.

‘I was far too stoned and far too lazy to break into someone’s house and murder a child,’ he adds.

But Dilson believes Wolf’s ‘fuse’ may have been lit by multiple local news articles in the months preceding JonBenét’s murder.

On December 21, 1996, five days before the murder, an article celebrating Access Graphics surpassing $1 billion in revenue was published.

In 2022, John Ramsey said himself that he regretted the ‘boastful’ article, believing it put a target on his family’s back. He added that he believed the killer had been watching his family and tracking their movements.

Dilson says that is what she believes Wolf was doing during his mysterious nightly drives in December – an allegation he denies.

Under oath, Detective Thomas admitted in 2001 that he was unsure if the items supplied by Dilson were ever tested to compare with DNA and fibers found at the crime scene.

Thomas said he believed Dilson to be ‘unstable’ but admitted he hadn’t consulted with any mental health professionals before coming to that determination.

Lou Smit, a veteran homicide detective, was one of the only cops who gave Dilson a glimmer of hope

Smit resigned from the investigation in 1998 because he felt JonBenét’s parents were being unjustly pursued by Boulder PD.

When it came to Dilson, he said he found her a reliable and potentially valuable witness.

In a deposition, Smit said he believed there was substantial evidence an intruder broke into the Ramsey home and a lack of evidence of the parent’s involvement.

He added that he believed Wolf was a worthwhile lead to follow.

BAD BLOOD 

In her book, Dilson states numerous times she believes Wolf to be the killer and begins the tell-all with a letter addressed to him, urging him to confess.

Wolf was last contacted by Boulder PD more than 20 years ago and says he has been assured he’s not a suspect.

John Ramsey, now 81, has recently voiced optimism that his daughter’s case will soon be solved.

He believes the key to snaring the killer lies in a small amount of DNA found underneath his daughter’s fingernails and in her underwear.

The DNA profile has never been identified and was not deemed a match for any of the Ramseys, nor their friends who poured into their home in the wake of her disappearance.

Boulder PD declined to comment on this story, citing an active investigation.

Dilson grows emotional each time she envisions an arrest finally being made in the case.

‘I just want him off the streets,’ says Dilson through tears. ‘I’m 76 now, my life is three-quarters over, and I don’t want this to consume me anymore.

‘This isn’t about me, but do I want justice for me, for the pain he’s caused me and everything I’ve lost? I want this nightmare to finally be over.’

For Wolf, his nightmare renews each time Dilson revives her campaign to implicate him in JonBenét’s murder.

‘I think it’s something that I’m going to have to deal with forever,’ he says.

He always questions why she constantly accuses him, but adds that he will always regret how their relationship ended.

‘It’s hurtful because I really wish I could’ve done better for her as a boyfriend and not have had her ever become this angry with me. 

‘They say, ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’ But I want to make it clear I never intended to scorn her.

‘I loved her, and that’s what makes this hard.’