John Ramsey Explains Why 'It Doesn't Bother' Him When People Claim He Murdered Daughter JonBenét (Exclusive)

John Ramsey and his late wife Patsy were initially treated as suspects in the 1996 killing of their 6-year-old daughter JonBenét. Nearly 30 years later, the case remains unsolved — and John says he has come to brush off those who claim he’s responsible.

“Once your reputation is tarnished, rightly or wrongly, it never goes back to pure white,” John tells PEOPLE in an exclusive interview. “That’s just life. And it doesn’t bother me. I mean, we were so overwhelmed by kind people and caring people, and that 5% or 10% is irrelevant, and I’m not worried about it.”

In their Boulder, Colo., home on Dec. 26, 1996, John and Patsy found a ransom note handwritten on a pad with a black Sharpie that belonged to the family. The note demanded $118,000 — the exact amount of a workplace bonus recently received by John — for the return of JonBenét.

The young beauty pageant contestant was later found dead in the basement of the family’s home. She had been struck on the head and strangled. She also showed signs of being sexually assaulted.

In 1998, a grand jury voted to indict the parents for child abuse resulting in death and accessory to a crime. But the district attorney at the time said there was not enough evidence to bring charges against the couple.

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Then, in 2008, a statement by then-District Attorney Mary Lacy publicly apologized to the family for how the office placed suspicion on them. The statement announced that evidence had cleared JonBenet’s parents as well as her brother Burke, who was 9 years old at the time of the murder. (Patsy died in 2006 after a years-long battle with ovarian cancer.)

Local police followed up on thousands of tips over the years and had interviewed nearly 1,000 people in connection with the case as of 2021, but it remains unsolved.

To this day, John believes that a masked intruder who snuck inside the home of a 12-year-old girl in Boulder, Colo., nine months after JonBenét’s murder, could be his daughter’s killer. The suspect raped the girl and then ran away when the child’s mother scared him off.

For more about John Ramsey’s fight to see JonBenét’s murder solved in his lifetime, subscribe now to PEOPLE or pick up the new issue of People, on newsstands next week.

“To me, it could easily have been the same person,” Ramsey tells PEOPLE in next week’s cover story.

Ramsey is also speaking out in Netflix’s three-part docuseries, Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey?, which begins streaming Monday, Nov. 25.

The series explores what Ramsey considers to be missteps made by authorities when investigating JonBenét’s murder amid an international media frenzy.