For over a decade, Ganesh “Remy” Ramsaran has been incarcerated for the murder of his wife, yet he describes his experience as surprisingly easy.
“Prison is easy. You don’t understand. There’s so much freedom in prison,” he confidently stated to Dateline correspondent Andrea Canning during an interview featured on Dateline: Unforgettable.
Despite Canning’s questioning in the two-hour episode, titled “The Perfect Life,” Remy stood by his controversial statement.
“Have you ever been in prison? It is hilarious. You can get cell phones, you can get anything you want in prison if you are looking for it. It is insane,” he said, before adding, “I’m telling you, prison is a joke.”
Remy — who continues to proclaim his innocence — is serving out a sentence for manslaughter in the 2012 death of his wife, Jennifer “Jen” Ramsaran, after his initial conviction of second-degree murder was overturned in 2022.
“I’ve interviewed thousands of people and there’s no doubt that Remy is one of the most fascinating,” Canning said of why the crime is so memorable.
Jennifer “Jen” Ramsaran vanishes
On December 11, 2012, Remy reported that his wife had never returned to their New Berlin, New York, home from a shopping trip to Syracuse.
“Uh, my wife left this morning between 10 and 11… and she hasn’t been back, and I’m really freaked out,” Remy told a 911 dispatcher. “This is totally unlike her, and none of our friends have heard from her.”
The next day, with still no sign of Jen, Remy decided to try using the Find My iPhone app while he was at the police station to try to locate his wife’s device. It led authorities to a location about 20 miles outside of town along the roadway. Officers went to the area in South Plymouth and looked around, but didn’t find anything.
Unsatisfied, Remy went there himself and found the phone, then called 911 once again.
“I found my wife’s iPhone,” he told the dispatcher.
Investigators weren’t sure whether Jen had tossed the phone herself or met with foul play, and initially treated it as a missing person case.
Then, five days after she disappeared, Jen’s father found her red Chrysler minivan abandoned in an apartment complex parking lot, eight miles from her house. There were spots of blood inside, suggesting foul play.
Those suspicions wouldn’t be confirmed until Jen’s naked body was found in a remote area on February 26, 2013 and the medical examiner concluded she’d died in a homicide.
A secret extramarital affair
Jen and Remy had once been college sweethearts, but detectives learned that 13 years into the marriage, cracks in the union were beginning to emerge. Jen, a mom of three, fell deeper into the world of online gaming, spending much of her time playing the role-playing game “Kingdoms of Camelot.”
She’d even begun flirting online with one of the other players, a man living in England named Rob.
But it was Remy, a project manager for IBM at the time, who had an even more explosive secret. He was having an affair with Jen’s best friend, Eileen Sayles. The pair even had sex the day before Jen disappeared, but by then a guilt-ridden Sayles was ready to call off the clandestine romance, she said.
“He gets upset,” Sayles said of Remy’s reaction. “You know, he wants what he wants.”
Investigators look into Ganesh “Remy” Ramsaran
The affair caught the attention of detectives who began taking a closer look at Remy. They were troubled by the way Remy had found Jen’s cell phone himself and felt that he was trying to control the public narrative about the case through frequent media appearances.
They also questioned Remy’s alibi. Although he told authorities that after Jen left to go shopping, he went for a run, no surveillance cameras captured him along the route he told detectives that he took until he suddenly appeared at a YMCA.
“His alibi of running this certain route appears to be false,” said Richard Cobb, who at the time worked for the Chenango County Sheriff’s Office.
Investigators also found a spot of blood on the couple’s mattress and blood on the sweatshirt Remy had been wearing that day and concluded that Remy had killed his wife, dumped the body, dropped off the van, left Jen’s phone on the side of the road, and then ran the short distance to the YMCA to establish his alibi.
Remy was arrested and charged with second-degree murder on May 17, 2013.
In an interview with Dateline not long after the arrest, Remy insisted he had no reason to want to kill his wife, claiming he was leading the “perfect life.”
“I had the perfect life. I had a wife, had a girlfriend, had kids, I have everything anyone would want,” he insisted, claiming he “didn’t do anything” to his wife.
Ganesh “Remy” Ramsaran’s first trial begins
The case went to trial in 2014.
Remy’s best friend took the stand to tell jurors that Remy had planned to divorce Jen, but was somehow also confident that he’d end up with custody of their children.
Prosecutors believed that Remy wanted to get rid of Jen to carry on his heated romance with Sayles unhindered.
Remy was convicted of second-degree murder in 2014 and sentenced to 25 years to life behind bars — but it wasn’t the end of the story.
Judge overturns murder conviction
In 2022, a judge overturned the conviction after concluding that Remy had ineffective counsel. The judge called the actions of Remy’s former defense lawyer Gilberto Garcia — who had never defended a murder case before — “egregious and prejudicial” and determined that it prevented Remy from getting a fair trial according to NBC News.
Garcia had reportedly used Google for help deciphering basic forensic issues in the case and at one point even told the jury during closing statements that he’d questioned Remy’s innocence himself “a million times.”
Remy’s new attorney David Hammond told Dateline that Garcia had never contacted any potential expert witnesses for the case and failed to prepare Remy before he took the stand himself.
“Here’s a guy who loves to talk, he’s got no direction, the questions are poorly framed and so on cross examination, it’s a complete disaster,” Hammond said.
Even the special prosecutor on the case, Ben Bergman, agreed that Remy should get a new trial.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen or have heard of the sort of ineffectiveness that occurred in this case,” he said.
Garcia declined to comment on the criticisms, but told Dateline that he respected the court’s decision to give Remy a new trial.
Ganesh “Remy” Ramsaran pleads guilty to manslaughter
Bergman, however, still had “no doubt” in his mind that Remy killed his wife. He found new evidence including voicemails that Jen had left for Rob the day she was killed, that seemed to give no indication she’d ever planned to go shopping.
But the case suffered some blows due to the passing of time. Lead investigator Cobb had died of a heart attack at the age of 53 and therefore couldn’t testify in a new trial.
As for Remy’s new defense team, they believed they had evidence to suggest an alternate killer and pointed out that a forensic expert they hired reported that male DNA found underneath Jen’s fingernails did not belong to Remy.
But rather than try his luck again in court, Remy agreed to plead guilty in 2023 to manslaughter in exchange for a 22-year sentence. His attorneys believe, with good behavior, he could be out in eight and a half years. Until then, Remy will be enjoying the “freedom” of prison.
“There’s so much freedom, you wouldn’t believe,” he told Canning.
