True crime is reaching a new Golden Age. In the era of everyone mining their lives for content, TikTok sleuths can investigate murders while whole documentaries can be made out of social media screenshots and archival footage. True crime podcasts have become a huge genre, boasting playful titles like “My Favorite Murder” and “Crime Junkies.” But behind all the spectacle and speculation is always a human life that was cut short — a truth that often falls by the wayside.
A new Netflix documentary takes one of the most famous unsolved murders in American history and lays out a case with new insight from the victim’s own father, never losing sight of the fact a little girl won’t be able to grow up because of what happened the night of Christmas 1996.
Cold Case: JonBenét Ramsey focuses on the now infamous case of JonBenét Ramsey, the six-year-old daughter of a powerful businessman and occasional beauty pageant contestant who was found dead in the wine cellar of her family home in late 1996. She first was reported missing and kidnapped when her mother found a ransom note, but the case quickly turned from “Where is JonBenét?” to “Who killed JonBenét?”
This isn’t the first time Netflix has investigated this cold case. Casting JonBenét, the 2017 documentary directed by The Assistant’s Kitty Green, examined the case by interviewing local actors auditioning for the roles of the Ramseys. It was a statement on how quickly the Ramseys became the subject of the court of mass opinion, a statement Cold Case firmly agrees with.
One of the prevailing theories around the case is that the entire murder happened within the Ramsey household — but whether the culprit was the mother, Patsy, the father, John, or the brother, Burke, was up for speculation. It’s an explanation that the Ramsey family — and this docuseries — sees as extremely offensive. This series actually interviews JonBenét’s father John Ramsey as he describes the shoddy investigation around the murder and who he thinks was involved. It’s a surprisingly comprehensive cross-section of theories surrounding a suspect, with a lot of attention paid on the now-cleared suspect John Mark Karr.
But there’s one big watch word looming large over this entire series: DNA. In the age where the right person doing a 23andMe test could unlock a murder case, all of John Ramsey’s hopes seem pinned to DNA evidence, but it’s unclear how or even if the DNA involved could be the saving grace the series seems to hope for. The text at the end of the series suggests there are a series of steps involved in the ongoing investigation that are being kept secret, but there’s no smoking gun or huge twist ending.
That’s just the reality of this case. It’s more than just a puzzle people can put together on Reddit, it’s a looming mystery that has affected a community for over 25 years now. In one of the final moments, John Ramsey discusses how he keeps images of JonBenét alongside his grandchildren. She’s now frozen at six years old, and even the most satisfying answer won’t change that.
