JonBenét Ramsey’s unsolved murder is your next true crime obsession

Netflix can’t stop revisiting sensationalist tabloid stories of the 1990s with his latest effort on The Menendez Brothers (Ryan Murphy drama). Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Eric Menendezand non-fiction The Menendez brothers) as well as Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer StoryThe streaming service examines the unsolved murder of JonBenét Ramsey, the six-year-old beauty pageant contestant who is believed to have been killed in her Colorado home on Christmas Day 1996.

This headline-grabbing case captivated the nation and led to massive speculation about the guilt of her parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, and her nine-year-old brother Burke Cold Case: Who Killed Jon Benét Ramsey? John speaks about his decades-long ordeal, as do numerous others closely connected to the investigation. The real targets of this documentary’s ire, however, are not the Ramseys. Rather, it’s a Boulder Police Department that was allegedly blinded by tunnel vision, and a media outlet that allegedly lied – and allowed itself to be manipulated by police – to sell newspapers and attract viewers.

Director: Joe Berlinger (Conversations with a Murderer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes And Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street, Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey? (November 25) revolves around the long struggle with John, whose wife Patsy died of ovarian cancer in 2006. Through his testimony, the show returns to the fateful December 26, 1996, the morning Patsy discovered a long ransom note on the spiral staircase of her suburban home. It was said that JonBenét had been kidnapped and would only be released if the family coughed up $118,000 – a sum everyone agreed was strange.

A few hours later, while police were at the apartment, an officer asked John and his friend to check the apartment again to see if anything was wrong. In a secluded corner of the basement he found his daughter in terrible condition, her body hidden under a tarp and a white cord wrapped around her wrists and neck, the latter being tightened with a broken brush handle to form a garrote. An autopsy revealed that she had also suffered a devastating blow to her skull from an unknown object.

Near JonBenét’s location, John discovered an out-of-place suitcase under an open window. But despite this fascinating scene, investigators quickly focused on John and Patsy. This suspicion was supported by the lack of attempted break-ins or footprints in the snow around the house – a detail that was picked up by the press. But as Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey? revealed that no footprints were discovered as there was virtually no snow on the ground. In Berlinger’s series, this is the first of many examples of reporters repeating police-sourced information that they never verified and turned out to be false. Another example of this negligence was an article by Rocky Mountain News‘ Charlie Brennan, who stated that John personally flew a jet to his daughter’s funeral in Atlanta with her casket inside – a report he now calls “inaccurate…that was a mistake.”

Cold case suggests that these errors were not isolated cases. Instead, it was a coordinated effort by the police to frame John and Patsy in order to force them to confess, with the media only too happy to oblige because Americans had an insatiable appetite for reporting on the matter, especially when they pointed the finger at the parents. Therefore, when the analysis of the DNA samples found on JonBenét (including from her vaginal area) did not match John, Patsy or any other family member, this bombshell was neither published nor leaked for months, keeping John and Patsy on the lookout for suspicion. Lest this sound like a mere conspiracy fantasy, Detective Steve Thomas admits in a 2001 deposition that the police used the press to put pressure on John and Patsy, even though they had little reliable evidence of any kind to back them up implicated the crime.

“There were a number of stories told about the case that were lies,” says Michael Tracey, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey? seems to confirm this point of view. John certainly believes it, as do some of the reporters featured on the show.

Still, John and Patsy remained the prime suspects in the years following their daughter’s murder. The series illustrates how the coverage invariably focused on JonBenét’s beauty career, implying a strange, salacious and sexually deviant angle on the murder (one CNN reporter said the girl looked like “a dolled-up miniature midget whore”). The director also focuses on Detective Thomas’ persistent promotion of his own hypothesis: that Patsy, in a fit of rage over JonBenét’s bedwetting, attacked and killed the girl, staging what looked like both a kidnapping and an outlandish murder.

In some of Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey?Based on Patsy’s extensive archival footage – Patsy’s voice can be heard everywhere – Thomas makes this accusation without having a shred of evidence to back it up. However, as Berlinger points out, this came to nothing, as did the convening of a grand jury to decide whether John and Patsy should be indicted. JonBenét’s parents were never charged because, as District Attorney Alex Hunter explained in a post-grand jury interview, there was no way to convict them beyond a reasonable doubt.

But by this point, the couple’s reputation had already been damaged. It was then further sullied by a CBS primetime special in 2016 that claimed nine-year-old Burke took his sister’s life over a petty argument over snacks – a notion so ridiculous that CBS settled a dispute with him out of court and took the lead. Grand jury prosecutor Michael Kane wrote a letter formally clearing him of any wrongdoing.

After providing a detailed overview of the investigation and its numerous shortcomings and dead ends, Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey? spends its final third covering a handful of alternative suspects. Since they too were exonerated by DNA, Berlinger’s documentation does not end with a final solution or a clue. The best it can do is let a few speakers theorize that the DNA samples may be contaminated and require more rigorous testing to produce a clear match.

What is certain, however, is that almost three decades later there are still more questions than answers about JonBenét Ramsey’s murder – and therefore more heady small-screen inquiries are likely to follow.