Grand Jury Urged Charges in JonBenet Ramsey Case

DENVER — Nearly a decade before DNA evidence cleared the parents of JonBenet Ramsey in the killing of their 6-year-old daughter, a grand jury pursuing the case decided to indict the couple on charges of child abuse leading to the girl’s death, according to documents unsealed on Friday.

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John and Patsy Ramsey, the parents of JonBenet Ramsey, in Atlanta in 2000.

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The documents, four pages in total, were released in response to a lawsuit brought by a newspaper reporter and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. They provided a new detail in the tangled story of one of Colorado’s most notorious unsolved murders.

JonBenet, a child beauty queen, was found strangled and bludgeoned in the basement of her family’s home in Boulder the day after Christmas in 1996. The girl’s short life and the investigation into her death — which remains open — became instant fodder for true-crime books and television specials.

In 1999, a grand jury investigating the case decided to charge John and Patsy Ramsey with “knowingly, recklessly and feloniously” placing the girl in a position that led to her death. They did not pursue murder charges. The jury’s foreman signed the indictments, but prosecutors declined to file any criminal charges against the couple, who had long declared their innocence.

The existence of the indictments was disclosed in January by The Boulder Daily Camera. The article changed longstanding public perceptions that the grand jury in the case had disbanded without deciding to indict anyone.

Lin Wood, Mr. Ramsey’s lawyer, criticized the unsealed documents as “nonsensical.”

“They reveal nothing about the evidence reviewed by the grand jury and are clearly the result of a confused and compromised process,” he said in a statement.

In 2008, prosecutors in Boulder County wrote a letter to Mr. Ramsey exonerating his family, which had lived for years shadowed by suspicions and conspiracy theorists. Prosecutors said that new techniques of forensic analysis had found DNA traces from an unidentified man on JonBenet’s long johns, which matched a drop of blood found on the girl’s underwear.

The evidence “vindicated your family,” Mary T. Lacy, then the district attorney, wrote in the 2008 letter. She added, “No innocent person should have to endure such an extensive trial in the court of public opinion.”

Ms. Ramsey died of ovarian cancer in 2006.