On December 26, 1996, the six-year-old child beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey was found murdered.
The death quickly became a tabloid sensation – not just because of JonBenét’s youth, but the brutal circumstances of her killing, the pageant shots that accompanied newspaper reports around the globe and the fact that her killer was never found.
It’s already been explored in detail, including in a 2017 Netflix film, Casting JonBenét. Now, a new Netflix series – titled Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey – has launched, and is exploring the murder in detail once more.
Who were the Ramseys?
The Ramsey family were affluent. John Ramsey, her father, was a software executive who made his money selling his company to Lockheed Martin; her mother, Patsy, was his second wife.
Patsy was a beauty queen who won the title of Miss West Virginia in 1977. JonBenét was born in August 6, 1990, the youngest of two children (her brother, Burke, was three years older) – her unusual name is the result of combining her father’s first and middle names, while her middle name, Patricia, came from her mother.
Patsy soon channelled her love of pageantry into her daughter. A few years later, they moved from Atlanta to Boulder, Colorado and JonBenét became part of the local beauty queen scene. She was soon winning titles, like America's Royale Miss, Little Miss Colorado, and National Tiny Miss Beauty – and proud Patsy was stage-managing it all, including her wardrobe, contests and rehearsals.
The murder
On December 26, Patsy called 911 at 5.52am to report her daughter missing. She told the police that she’d found a handwritten ransom note on the stairs, demanding a figure of $118,000 – a figure which John later said was the exact amount of his bonus.
The police searched the house; because the case was initially treated as a kidnap, rather than a homicide, they also interfered with potential evidence in a way that would repeatedly crop up over the investigation.
It was John who found his daughter, at 1pm, after a second search. She was in the basement, her mouth had been duct-taped, her skull had been broken and a nylon cord had been tied around her wrists and neck. John carried her body upstairs, further contaminating any evidence.
The police quickly ruled that her death was a homicide, and the following autopsy suggested that JonBenét might have been sexually assaulted before her death.
The aftermath
Patsy and John became the subject of intense scrutiny in the months after her death, both from the police and the media. Patsy was branded a “stage mom” by the media for her obsession with JonBenét’s beauty career, further accelerating press interest in the case.
The Ramsey family also didn’t see eye to eye with the police. In on New Year’s Day 1997, the Ramseys gave their first interview with CNN, after telling police they were too emotional to be interviewed by any detectives.
In it, Patsy claimed that there was a “killer on the loose”.
“If I were a resident of Boulder, I would tell my friends to keep — keep your babies close to you, there’s someone out there,” she said.
The furious Boulder police force sent five detectives to Atlanta, where the family had flown shortly after JonBenét’s murder – and on April 19, 1997, the Boulder district attorney stated that they were treating Patsy and John as the main targets of their investigation.
The evidence
As the case rolled on, speculation grew. In 1998, a Colorado Springs detective who was brought out of retirement to cover the case resigned in protest at how it was being handled; a grand jury was organised to try and convict a suspect.
It was plagued with missteps. A lot of attention rested on the supposed ransom note that the family had received. In March, the police conducted handwriting analysis tests that confirmed John had not written it, but didn’t rule out Patsy.
There was DNA testing. The Ramseys had given police samples in the hours after the attack, which didn’t match up to unidentified samples taken from JonBenét’s body at the time of her death. The police took hundreds of samples from people around the community, and investigated hundreds of leads (including the family’s housekeeper, a local reporter and a mall Santa Claus) but it wasn’t until 2008 that the Ramseys were conclusively ruled out as suspects.
“We assumed that the police would show some level of discernment and wisdom and say, ‘Yeah, well this is crazy, to think [we] murdered our child,’” John told People in the run-up to the show’s release “Well, they never did. They made that decision on day one, and tried desperately to prove it.”
Detectives also interviewed JonBenét’s brother Burke, who was nine at the time (he was ruled out as a suspect in 1999). Interviews with him painted the Ramseys as loving parents, but in 1999 the grand jury voted to indict John and Patsy on two counts of child abuse result in death.
This indictment never happened: the then-District Attorney, Alex Hunter, refused to sign it, citing a lack of evidence. Shortly after, the jury was dissolved, and in 2000 the Ramseys published a book, titled The Death of Innocence.
In it (and in interviews to promote it), they maintained that they were not to blame for the murder.
Where are the Ramseys now?
The Ramseys have struggled to move on from the glare of the media spotlight.
In 2004, John Ramsey attempted to run for a seat in Michigan’s House of Representatives, but was unsuccessful. In 2006, Patsy died from ovarian cancer, which she’d been battling for years. Burke, who now works as a software engineer, has stayed out of the spotlight – except in 2016, when he gave an interview on the Dr Phil Show.
“It blows my mind,” he said of the case. “What more evidence do you need that we didn’t do it?”
This was in response to CBS’s new documentary, The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey, which theorised that Burke had killed his own sister. Burke later filed a defamation lawsuit against CBS, which was settled in 2019.
"Is Burke happy? He's as happy as he can be, given the circumstances," a family member told US Weekly recently. "He's productive. He's moving past all the trauma and living the best way he can. That's all you can expect."
John, who is now 80, still continues to speak out about the death of his daughter. "We want to keep the case alive and in front of people,” he told NBC’s Today show recently. “I believe it can be solved if the police accept help from outside their system. That's been the flaw for 25 years."
"It's a double-edged sword,” he added. “We're grateful that the public, and frankly the world, cares about the murder of our child. Hopefully there's someone who knows something that would come forward."
Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey? is streaming now on Netflix
