Netflix's Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey explored whether early suspicion directed at the 6-year-old's parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, irreparably muddied the investigation.
John Ramsey was shaving on the morning of Dec. 26, 1996, when he heard his wife scream.
Patsy Ramsey was headed to the kitchen to put the coffee on, but instead found pieces of paper lying at the bottom of the staircase in their Boulder, Colo., home.
"Mr. Ramsey, Listen carefully!" began the letter which ultimately alerted Patsy to the fact that her 6-year-old daughter JonBenét Ramsey was not asleep in her bed—as her mother assumed she was at 5:45 a.m. on the day after Christmas.
At 5:52 a.m., Patsy called 911 to report that JonBenét, who would have turned 36 on Aug. 6, had been kidnapped and there was a ransom note.
"It was just unbelievable," John, now 82, said in Netflix's 2024 docuseries Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey. He recalled feeling "this horrible in-your-gut trauma," comparing it to when a child wanders out of her parent's sight for a minute at the mall.
Instead, John found JonBenét's body almost eight hours later in what used to be an old coal room in the basement.
John recalled in the series ripping off a piece of duct tape that was covering his daughter's mouth and carrying her directly upstairs, where officers checked for a pulse and swiftly informed him that she was dead.
She had been strangled with a cord used as a garrote, according to the autopsy report, and her skull was fractured from blunt head trauma. Microscopic fibers from a wooden paintbrush handle found on her body indicated she had been sexually assaulted with the item, retired Boulder Police Detective Bob Whitson, one of the first investigators on the scene that day, recalled in the series.
Paula Woodward, an investigative reporter for KUSA Denver who covered the JonBenét case, recalled being told that a group of investigators had gathered at the Boulder Police Department that morning. And, when word came in that JonBenét had been found dead, Woodward said she was told that one of the investigators "hissed in kind of an undertone and a whisper to another one, 'I knew it, they killed their daughter.'"
And that pretty much set the tone for the police investigation into JonBenét's death, according to John, journalists and several law enforcement veterans who participated in the three-part series, the latest addition to the ever-growing canon of morbid work dedicated to unpacking what really happened to the child.
John and Patsy, who died of ovarian cancer in 2006 at the age of 49, were never arrested or charged in connection with their daughter's death, but they remained under a cloud of suspicion for years. Which, in Patsy's case, was for the rest of her life.
"We could have the killer arrested, convicted, in prison," John reflected in the series, "and there'd still be 5 to 10 percent of the population that thinks we're guilty."
In the Netflix series, directed by Joe Berlinger, John details the ways the cops—and subsequently the media and the court of public opinion—seized on him and his wife as villains and never let go of that theory. But he also remains hopeful that JonBenét's murder will be solved, alleging that there's evidence in police custody that still hasn't been subjected to the most modern DNA analysis methods.
DNA testing over the years has so far only resulted in clearing several persons of interest who were questioned in connection with the case.
