Netflix’s synopsis for this astonishingly good 2017 documentary reads: “A mystery enveloped in myth and memory. And countless voices weigh in on what ‘really’ happened.”
Those quotation marks around “really” speak to Casting JonBenet’s key message: no one can deliver a truthful account of the unsolved murder of six-year-old child beauty pageant queen JonBenét Ramsey, found dead in the basement of her home in Boulder, Colorado in 1996. Casting JonBenet, which is for my money the greatest true crime production to date, acknowledges that the interviewees, the director, Kitty Green, and indeed virtually everybody in the world, do not know what actually happened in the Ramseys’ basement that day.
