JonBenet Suspect Held in Child Porn Case

Gary Oliva hasn't been ruled out in 1996 murder
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 23, 2016 6:15 AM CDT
JonBenet Suspect Held in Child Porn Case
The exterior of the Boulder, Colo., home where JonBenet Ramsey was murdered in 1996.    (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)

A longtime suspect in the Christmas Day 1996 murder of JonBenet Ramsey is back in custody and back in the news. Gary Oliva, a registered sex offender who has admitted being obsessed with the 6-year-old beauty queen, was arrested last week on charges of sexually exploiting a child and is currently in the Boulder County Jail, reports the Daily Camera. According to an arrest affidavit, the 52-year-old was arrested after Google informed authorities that suspected child pornography had been uploaded to Gmail. The affidavit alleges that Oliva uploaded 22 images of children younger than 10 engaged in sex acts "with each other or with adult males" to an email account registered to him. City spokeswoman Sarah Huntley says police are focusing on the new case, though they're not ruling anything out in the JonBenet case.

Oliva was often near the Ramseys' home in 1996 (some soup kitchens he visited were nearby) and was questioned in 2000 when police arrested him on a drug charge and found a picture of the girl in his backpack, along with a stun gun and poem he had written called "Ode to JonBenet." The "murder touched me very deeply,” Oliva told the Denver Post in 2002. The papers note that some investigators in the case suspect a stun gun was used on JonBenet. A CBS 48 Hours Investigates special the same year found that soon after JonBenet's murder, Oliva called a friend and sobbed as he told him that he had "done something horrible" and hurt a child. The Camera notes that the JonBenet case is facing renewed scrutiny as the 20th anniversary approaches, with at least half a dozen national TV specials in the works. (Boulder's former chief of police says big mistakes were made on Day 1 of the investigation.)

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