Six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey was found dead in the basement of her parents’ home the day after Christmas in 1996.
The tragic details — a tiny beauty pageant contestant bludgeoned in her home after a day of celebrations — captivated the nation and sparked years of fevered speculation about who killed her.
Now, a three-episode Netflix documentary series, “Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey,” is introducing a new generation to one of America’s most extensively covered child homicide cases.
JonBenét’s case has never been solved.
Her mother, Patsy, called the police hours before her body was discovered in the basement, saying that her daughter was missing and that she had found a ransom note demanding $118,000 in exchange for the girl — the same amount JonBenét’s father, John Ramsey, had received in a bonus as chief executive of a Lockheed Martin subsidiary, The Washington Post reported.
Initial investigations focused on family members, with police searching her family’s home in Boulder, Colorado, seizing computers, files, and video and still photography equipment to look for pornography after an examination of her body revealed possible signs of sexual assault.
The former Little Miss Colorado’s doll-like appearance in heavily made-up pageant photos fueled speculation she may have been exploited, although the Colorado Bureau of Investigation ruled out the pornography theory.
A former Colorado police chief inadvertently revealed years later that officers had, in his view, bungled their response by failing to secure the crime scene — in their initial confusion that the crime they were investigating was not a murder but a kidnapping — and failing to immediately take separate statements from the parents.
John and Patsy Ramsey were officially cleared of suspicion in 2008 based on DNA evidence from the crime scene. They repeatedly denied any involvement in their daughter’s death.
Patsy Ramsey died of ovarian cancer in 2006. John Ramsey, now 80, appears in the documentary.
He recalls how the family suddenly fell under a constant media glare. “We’d stay with friends, and within a day or two, the house would just be surrounded by cameras and people banging on the door and the windows.”
JonBenét’s brother Burke, who was 9 at the time of her death, reached a confidential defamation settlement with CBS in 2019 after the network aired a series that included an unsubstantiated theory that he had killed his sister.
The Boulder police investigation remains open, and authorities there say they continue to work with federal, state and local partners and with DNA experts from around the country.
A cold case review team including forensic experts from the FBI, Colorado Bureau of Investigation and Boulder County District Attorney’s Office made recommendations last year on ways to advance the case, but their advice has not been made public.
DNA testing remains a focus, according to Boulder police, as the science “continues to rapidly evolve.”
John Ramsey told NBC’s “Today” show this month he holds out hope the case will be solved, possibly through DNA advances or the jogging of memories if the case is kept alive in the media.
“I believe it can be solved if the police accept help from outside their system. That’s been the flaw for 25 years,” he said.
