Netflix can’t stop revisiting sensationalistic 1990s tabloid stories, and thus in the wake of its recent Menendez Brothers efforts (Ryan Murphy’s drama Monsters: The Lyle and Eric Menendez Story, and the non-fiction The Menendez Brothers) as well as Dahmer—Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, the streaming service dives into the unsolved murder of JonBenét Ramsey, the six-year-old beauty pageant contestant who was believed to be killed in her Colorado home on Christmas Day 1996.
That headline-making case gripped the nation and led to massive speculation about the guilt of her parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, and her nine-year-old brother Burke, and in Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey, John speaks out about his decades-long ordeal, as do numerous others closely associated with the investigation. The real targets of this docuseries’ ire, however, aren’t the Ramseys. Rather, they’re a Boulder Police Department that it contends was blinded by tunnel vision, and a media that allegedly lied—and allowed itself to be manipulated by the cops—in order to sell papers and attract viewers.
Directed by Joe Berlinger (Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes and Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street, Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey (November 25) is driven by its lengthy sit-down with John, whose wife Patsy passed away from ovarian cancer in 2006. Through his testimony, the show returns to the fateful December 26, 1996, morning when Patsy discovered a lengthy ransom note on her suburban home’s spiral staircase. It announced that JonBenét had been abducted and would only be released if the family coughed up $118,000—a sum that everyone agreed was strange.
A few hours later, with law enforcement in the residence, an officer told John and his friend to re-check the place to see if anything was amiss. In a remote basement nook, he found his daughter in horrific condition, her body hidden beneath a tarp, and white cord wrapped around her wrists and her neck, the latter tightened with a broken paintbrush handle to create a garrote. An autopsy determined that she had additionally suffered a crushing blow to her skull by an unknown object.
Close to where JonBenét was located, John spied an out-of-place suitcase standing beneath an open window. Still, despite that intriguing scene, investigators swiftly focused their sights on John and Patsy. Bolstering that premise was a lack of forced entry or footprints in the snow around the house—a detail that was picked up by the press. Yet as Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey reveals, no footprints were detected because there was virtually no snow on the ground. Berlinger’s series casts this as the first of many examples of reporters regurgitating police-sourced information that they never verified and which turned out to be false. Another instance of this carelessness was an article by Rocky Mountain News’ Charlie Brennan which stated that John had personally piloted a jet to Atlanta for his daughter’s funeral with her coffin inside—a report that he now describes as “inaccurate…that was a mistake.”
Cold Case suggests that these blunders weren’t isolated incidents. Instead, they were coordinated attempts by the police to slander John and Patsy in order to compel them to confess, with the media all too eager to do their bidding because Americans had a voracious appetite for coverage of this affair, especially if it pointed the finger at the parents. Consequently, when analysis of DNA samples found on JonBenét (including from her vaginal area) didn’t match John, Patsy, or any other family member, that bombshell wasn’t released or leaked for months, the better to keep John and Patsy looking suspicious. Lest this sound like mere conspiratorial fantasy, detective Steve Thomas admits, in a 2001 deposition, that police used the press to exert pressure on John and Patsy, even though they had scant reliable evidence—of any kind—implicating them.
“A series of stories were told about the case that were lies,” is how University of Colorado Boulder professor Michael Tracey sums it up, and Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey appears to corroborate that viewpoint. John certainly believes it, as do some of the reporters featured in the show.
Nonetheless, in the years following their daughter’s slaying, John and Patsy remained the prime suspects. The series illustrates how reporting invariably fixated on JonBenét’s pageant career, which implied a strange, salacious, sexually deviant angle to the killing (one CNN reporter says the girl looked like “a tarted-up miniature dwarf hooker”). The director also concentrates on detective Thomas’ dogged promotion of his own hypothesis: that Patsy, in a fit of rage over JonBenét’s bedwetting, had lashed out and killed the girl, and staged things to look like both a kidnapping and a deviant homicide.
In some of Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey’s copious archival material—which is how Patsy’s voice is heard throughout—Thomas makes this accusation without a shred of proof to back it up. However, as Berlinger lays out, it went nowhere, as did the convening of a grand jury to determine whether John and Patsy should be indicted. JonBenét’s parents were never charged because, as district attorney Alex Hunter pronounces in a post-grand jury interview, there was no way to convict them beyond a reasonable doubt.
Yet by that point, the damage had been done to the couple’s reputation. It was then further sullied by a 2016 primetime CBS special that argued nine-year-old Burke had taken his sister’s life because of a petty dispute over snacks—a notion that’s so ludicrous, CBS settled a lawsuit with him out of court, and lead grand jury prosecutor Michael Kane wrote a letter officially clearing him of any wrongdoing.
After presenting a thorough overview of the investigation and its numerous failings and dead ends, Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey spends its final third covering a handful of alternative suspects. Because they too were exonerated by DNA, Berlinger’s docuseries ends with neither a definitive resolution nor lead. The best it can do is have a few speakers theorize that maybe the DNA samples are contaminated, and more rigorous testing is needed to attain an iron-clad match.
What is certain, though, is that nearly three decades later, there are still more questions than answers regarding JonBenét Ramsey’s murder—and thus likely more bingeable small-screen inquiries to come.
