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Gary Oliva, who allegedly confessed to killing JonBenét Ramsey, is reportedly missing, per TMZ.
The convicted pedophile allegedly claimed that he was responsible for the death of the 6-year-old beauty queen, writing to a high school friend in 2019, "I never loved anyone like I did JonBenét and yet I let her slip and her head bashed in half and I watched her die."
He has confessed to other murders as well, but has never been charged. He was, however, convicted on child pornography charges, and sentenced to 10 years. After serving around eight of those, he was released from the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility in Ordway, Colorado on January 31.
Oliva is on parole until February 2027, but per the terms of his parole, he is required to check in with the police. He has not checked in with police since February 2024, according to records from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, as reported by TMZ. His last reported address was the Silver Spur motel in East Colfax, Colorado.
A police source told the Daily Mail that Oliva checked in with them earlier in November, though that is not reflected in state records, and TMZ reported they were unable to confirm that information. Oliva reportedly has a history of failing to report as a sex offender, and has multiple addresses — in addition to the Silver Spur address — on the CBI sex offender registry.
Oliva was arrested in 2016 after being caught with 695 images depicting child pornography, 335 of which were either of or relating to JonBenét, per the New York Post. Oliva, who had previously been arrested for assaulting a 7-year-old girl in Oregon, was a suspect in the Ramsey case, revealing in a 2002 48 Hours Investigates interview that he had written a poem called "Ode to JonBenét."
The TV episode revealed that the sex offender was in Colorado at the time of JonBenét's 1996 murder, and could have been by her family's Boulder home when it happened.
In 2018, a former classmate of Oliva's, Michael Vail, told In Touch magazine that just days after JonBenét's body was found, Oliva called him to allegedly confess he had "hurt a little girl." The following year, Vail claimed that Oliva confessed to accidentally killing the young girl in a series of letters.
In 2023, Vail claimed that Oliva had a fixation with knots and nooses as well as stealing art supplies, like paint brushes, in high school. That led him to believe Oliva had killed JonBenét, seeing as the murder weapon in the cold case had been a garrote, made of a rope attached by a knot to a broken paintbrush handle.
Oliva, who told police he never harmed JonBenét, was never charged because the DNA evidence did not link him to the case. John Mark Karr, a school teacher, is another name connected to the famous case, as he falsely confessed to the murder and was arrested in Thailand in 2006.
The news of Oliva reportedly being missing comes just as Netflix released a new documentary about the unsolved case. Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey debuted on the streamer on Monday, November 25.
The documentary references Oliva, and questions why he has been eliminated as a suspect, even with the unreliable DNA evidence.
Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey revisits the details of the almost 30-year-old cold case, featuring interviews from key figures in the case, like her father, John Bennett Ramsey.
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