A grand jury chose in 1999 to indict John and Patsy Ramsey on charges of child abuse resulting in the death of JonBenet, 6, and accessory to a crime, according to documents released Friday. The grand jury also said the couple helped whoever killed their daughter – but did not name a suspect for the slaying.

The Boulder district attorney then, Alex Hunter, refused to sign the grand jury indictment or prosecute the couple, citing insufficient evidence.

The four pages of documents were released Friday by a Colorado judge in response to a lawsuit by Charlie Brennan, a reporter for the Daily Camera newspaper in Boulder, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

In an opinion piece published Sunday in the Daily Camera, current District Attorney Stan Garnett said he and his staff reviewed the case when he took office in 2009. He noted that the statute of limitations for the abuse charges was three years.

“My staff evaluated the Ramsey case to determine if there was any charge for which the statute of limitations had not run and for which there was conclusive evidence,” Garnett wrote in the opinion piece. “Because there was none, we focused on other” cases.

He said Hunter made his decision based on the evidence he could bring to trial. “I don’t know if I would have made the same decision, but I know how difficult these decisions are,” Garnett said.

The body of JonBenet, who was strangled and bludgeoned to death, was discovered in the basement several hours after the Ramseys called police to report her missing. DNA testing in 2008 indicated that an “unexplained third party” had touched JonBenet’s long underwear. Hunter’s successor, Mary Lacy, later cleared the couple.

Ramsey lawyer L. Lin Wood called the documents released Friday “nonsensical,” noting that the grand jury did not have access to the DNA evidence. “The Ramsey family is innocent,” Wood said.

Patsy Ramsey died in 2006.

Garnett acknowledged that because no charges were ever filed, “the community has had no resolution and the tabloid press has been free to speculate, sometimes recklessly, based on only parts of the evidence.”

Garnett noted that the threshold for a grand jury indictment is “probable cause” to believe that a crime was committed – less than the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt threshold required for a conviction.

The documents claimed the Ramseys “did unlawfully, knowingly, recklessly and feloniously permit a child to be unreasonably placed in a situation which posed a threat of injury to the child’s life or health, which resulted in the death of JonBenet Ramsey, a child under the age of 16.”

They also said the Ramseys did “unlawfully, knowingly and feloniously render assistance to a person, with intent to hinder, delay and prevent the discovery, detention, apprehension, prosecution, conviction and punishment of such person for the commission of a crime, knowing the person being assisted has committed and was suspected of the crime of murder in the first degree and child abuse resulting in death.”

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