Pedophile Gary Oliva who 'confessed to JonBent Ramsey's murder peeled off' child victims' skin to

A SUSPECT in the murder of JonBenét Ramsey is obsessed with cannibalism and once claimed to have peeled off a child's skin to "taste it" a few years before the pageant queen was brutally killed.

Gary Oliva, 59, is a convicted pedophile currently serving an indeterminate prison sentence for possession of child pornography in Limon, Colorado.

He was arrested in Boulder in June 2016 and will only be considered for release if he passes the state's sex offender treatment program.

When he was taken into custody, Oliva was found to have hundreds of images depicting the sexual abuse of children saved on his phone.

The serial offender was also in possession of more than 300 images of JonBenét Ramsey, including pictures of her autopsy and shrines to the slain girl, and images depicting cannibalism and the mutilation of corpses.

Oliva was identified as a potential suspect in JonBenét's murder in the early 2000s by legendary detective Lou Smit.

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This story is part of an ongoing series investigating Gary Oliva's potential ties to the murder of JonBenét Ramsey.

That classmate, Michael Vail, has been exchanging letters and voice memos with Oliva for several decades and is convinced he was in some way involved in her murder.

During their recurrent conversations, Oliva confessed several times to being responsible for the girl's death and also frequently spoke of his self-described cannibalistic urges and necrophiliac fantasies, Vail told The U.S. Sun.

Such interactions include Oliva sending Vail pencil drawings of JonBenét eating chunks of his corpse and countless other depraved artworks.

Recounting one chilling interaction he shared with Oliva during a jailhouse call in 2019, Vail said Oliva told him he once ate the skin of one of his abuse victims.

The apparent incident occurred shortly before Oliva was arrested in Oregon in 1990 and charged with sexually abusing a seven-year-old girl.

Recounting his conversation with Oliva, Vail said: "From around 2016, I started getting letters from Gary where he talked about not just being a pedophile [...] but also wanting to eat kids.

"It was so disturbing [...] but he talked about cannibalism and he talked about the girl in Oregon, and how he took her out and got her sunburnt just so he could taste her burnt skin.

"He told me he got her sunburned just so he could peel off her skin and taste it.

"It just makes me sick."

SICKENING LETTERS & RECORDINGS

Vail said that it's his hope that Oliva is never released from prison, deeming him to pose a profound danger to society.

He first started corresponding with Oliva via letter a few years after they both graduated high school in Ventura, California.

Their letters were at first fairly typical exchanges in which they'd update one another on their lives, jobs, and families.

Before long, Oliva began sending Vail audio tapes which - at least to begin with - started out innocently enough and often contained odd but amusing skits, including one recording of Oliva pretending to interview a macaroon cookie.

But after a few years of exchanging "stupid sh*t", the content of Oliva's correspondences quickly grew darker and more disturbing sometime around 1989, Vail said.

Regular conversational topics were displaced for long, rambling paragraphs about blood and murder and newspaper clippings of missing girls, and quirky interview tapes gave way to sickening recordings of Oliva simulating the rape of a child.

"The stuff he started sending me just got darker and darker and darker," said Vail.

"Sometimes I would open the package and a bunch of hair would fall out, along with a poster of a missing girl in Oregon or something.

"I wonder who that girl was and why did Gary mail me the poster. Was he involved or was he just aroused by missing people and the poster was some kind of pornography for him?

"I don't know why I got that in the mail, but it's very disturbing [...] and there were cassette tapes with their labels smeared in blood.

"Some of the recordings were so disturbing," he added.

"In one it sounded like he was killing an animal, and in another was a doll that talked and he was simulating raping this doll."

Concerning the latter tape, Oliva is heard talking to the doll and pretending he has been left alone to babysit a friend's daughter.

"How are you doing Roonette?" Oliva is heard saying in a snippet of the tape, to which to doll responds, "Hi."

"Why don't you come over here and sit on my lap and let me touch your back, how do you like that?" adds Oliva.

In another tape, he was heard fantasizing about hurting and eating little children.

"Things I do like making bacon strips out of little girls, I'm into it you know, being a sick dog," Oliva said.

Vail said that it's his belief that Oliva was "100%" serious about having these twisted urges.

Oliva's 10-year sentence is due to come to an end in 2025, though it remains to be seen whether the state will agree to release him.

Vail said that his former classmate should never be permitted freedom because he is incapable of reform.

"Society would not be safe with him out [...] he's told me in some of our calls that you could give him shock therapy and still he'd have these urges.

"I'm mean, this guy is sending me drawings of grilling and eating children.

"He's a menace to society."

UNSOLVED CASE

In addition to campaigning for Oliva's indefinite incarceration, Vail is also urging BPD to reinvestigate his potential involvement in JonBenét's death.

JonBenét was just six years old when her body was found in the basement of her family's sprawling Boulder, Colorado, home on December 26, 1996.

She was reported missing hours earlier after her parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, awoke to find the girl missing from her bed and a bizarre three-page ransom note at the foot of a staircase.

It was John who discovered JonBenét's body swaddled in a white blanket inside a seldom-used room the family referred to as the wine cellar.

JonBenét had been strangled with a garrote fashioned from white rope and a broken paintbrush handle taken from a box of Patsy's art supplies.

Her wrists were tied, black duct tape covered her mouth, and she had suffered a fracture to the back of her skull.

JonBenét's cause of death was ruled asphyxiation and blunt force trauma to the head. There were also signs of sexual assault.

Hours before news of her death reached the front pages of newspapers across the country, Vail said he received a call from a distraught and frantic Oliva sometime around midnight on December 26, 1996, telling him: "I hurt a little girl!"

While struggling to catch his breath, Oliva apparently informed Vail he was calling from a payphone in Boulder, where he had been living on a ranch.

Vail tried to push him for more information, asking for his phone number, the address of the ranch, or the name of someone he was staying with.

But Oliva abruptly hung up the phone.

The following morning, Vail stepped out onto his front porch to collect that morning's copy of his local paper to see the words: "Girl, 6, found slain in Boulder, Colorado."

He immediately dialed Boulder PD's tip line which was listed at the bottom of the article and informed them what Oliva had told him.

Vail says it's that call, more than anything else, that makes him believe Oliva was in some way involved in her death.

"I wouldn't be talking about this right now if I hadn't got that phone call," he said.

"That damn phone call convinces me that Gary's involved. I got a phone call six hours before it was in the newspaper from someone in Boulder 13 houses away, telling me they'd hurt a little girl.

"The emotional burden of this all has been like carrying a backpack of rocks. I feel like the moment I received the phone call I was robbed of my innocence.

"I just want Gary to be held accountable and kept behind bars," added Vail.

"Society would not be safe with him out. Period. He's a menace to society."

MISSED LEAD

After alerting BPD to what Oliva had told him, investigators never responded to Vail's call.

Three months passed before Vail contacted cops again - and again his tip was not followed up on.

"I said, 'Hey, I need to talk to you guys because I'm wondering why haven't you arrested Gary yet?' And they just put me through to a recorded line and I left a message but, again, nothing happened," he said.

"I was just baffled. How can this guy call me and tell me he's hurt a little girl before it's even in the newspaper and the police don't do anything?

"I always just assumed the police knew what the f**k they were doing.

"But there's no understanding not following up on that lead. I was convinced Gary did it because never in my life have I heard a grown man sobbing like that - ever.

"I wasn't there, obviously, but I have my theories as to what happened."

Investigators didn't contact Vail until 2002, after the district attorney's office started looking over the case again with fresh eyes.

He turned over a cache of tapes and letters sent to him by Oliva to then-DA Alex Hunter's office, where they remain today.

CAMPAIGNING FOR ANSWERS

For years after the tragic discovery, BPD investigators zeroed in on JonBenét's parents, convinced they murdered their daughter and staged the scene.

John and Patsy, meanwhile, maintained their innocence and instead suggested a pedophile had broken into their home and murdered JonBenét in a kidnapping gone wrong.

The Ramseys' hypothesis was shared by detective Lou Smit, who worked for years to prove their innocence and hunt down the culprit responsible.

He compiled a list of dozens of potential suspects - and named among them was Gary Oliva.

To justify Oliva's inclusion, in addition to his proximity to the Ramsey home, Smit pointed to Oliva's arrest on December 12, 2000, on the University of Colorado campus on charges of criminal trespass, drug possession, and possession of a weapon by a prior criminal offender.

At the time of his arrest, Oliva was found with a stun gun in his possession, in addition to a photograph of JonBenét and a poem he'd written about her titled: "Ode to JonBenét."

The discovery of the stun gun was a particularly interesting development for Smit, who had long theorized that one had been used on JonBenét to subdue her in the moments before her death.

Smit told CBS' 48 Hours in 2002 that Oliva may have been part of a group of several men who broke into the Ramsey home.

Oliva was DNA tested sometime after his arrest but sources say he was not found to be a match for the DNA evidence recovered from the crime scene.

However, very little DNA exists in the case.

Over the years, BPD has been accused of failing to properly secure the crime scene after JonBenét was found dead, which destroyed or contaminated potentially crucial DNA evidence in the process.

Vail is now urging BPD to investigate Oliva once again, pointing to what he calls an overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence tying him to the murder.

In addition to how close Oliva was to the Ramseys, Vail said it's the garrote found wound around the young girl's neck that gives him additional cause for suspicion regarding Oliva's potential involvement.

"When we were at school, Gary used to creep into homes, buildings, and classrooms and steal art supplies [...] paintbrushes, glue, paint, things like that," said Vail.

"He was getting his mail 13 houses away from the Ramseys, and I think he broke into that home more than once.

"What was down in the basement room, where JonBenét was found? That's where Patsy kept all her art supplies.

"I never looked at that garrote until after 2016, and when I saw it all the hairs on my arm stood up straight away and goosebumps were all over my neck.

"I said to myself, 'Holy crap - that's a paintbrush and there's a knot on the f**king string.'

"When I look at some of Gary's art collages he did at high school, he was fascinated with knots - complicated knots.

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