Mother of JonBenet Ramsey Dead at 49

June 25, 2006— -- Patsy Ramsey, the mother of one of the nation's most famous murder victims, 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey, died Saturday at her father's home in Georgia with her husband, John, by her side.

She was 49-years-old and will be buried next to her daughter outside Atlanta. She once said she would join her little princess in heaven.

JonBenet Ramsey, a child beauty queen, was found murdered in the basement of her family's upscale Colorado home the day after Christmas, 1996.

Patsy Ramsey first found a handwritten ransom note on the back staircase of the home. It demanded $118,000 -- the exact amount John Ramsey received as a corporate bonus -- if the family wanted to see JonBenet again. Eight hours later, Patsy Ramsey found her badly beaten daughter's body in the basement.

From the beginning, the focus of suspicion was directed squarely at her father, a software millionaire, and his wife, a former beauty queen.

The Ramseys refused to take a lie-detector test and would only agree to be interviewed by police together.

Yet the Ramseys were steadfast in defending their innocence.

"Let me assure you, I did not kill JonBenet," Patsy Ramsey said then.

Lawrence Schiller, author of a book about the Ramsey case, "Perfect Murder, Perfect Town," said that it is unlikely the Ramseys were responsible for the death of their daughter. There was no family history of abuse and he said the way she was killed was so gruesome that it was "like a 300-pound linebacker crushing you up against a solid brick wall."

"The second thing you've got to remember: All this evidence out there? Well, the real evidence was this blood stain with foreign DNA that they found on JonBenet's panties," Schiller said. "They found her DNA on that and they found foreign DNA of someone who the police have never tracked down. They took 400, or 300 to 400, samples in the entire case. So if there's a perpetrator out there who did this, and there has to be, the police have not met him yet."