Were JonBenét Ramsey’s Parents Railroaded?

Three decades after JonBenét Ramsey’s death, her murder remains officially unsolved. But the Little Miss Colorado’s demise lingers as the archetypal crime mystery. Sleuths continue to hash out theories: in bustling and competing Reddit communities, on podcasts and network documentaries. The speculation broadly falls into two opposing camps: Was the murder an inside job by someone in the family, like parents John and Patsy or even older brother Burke? Or did an outside intruder somehow pierce the sanctity of their upscale Boulder home?

The case was perplexing from the moment Patsy found a ransom note the morning of December 26, 1996. “Listen carefully,” began the three-page letter. It went on to blame a “foreign faction” for her daughter’s disappearance and requested $118,000 from her husband, Access Graphics CEO John, for her safe return. The onetime Miss West Virginia called 911 in a panic. The note, the FBI later said, felt like it was staged rather than written by a stranger actually seeking ransom after a kidnapping.

The suspicion ramped up when John found JonBenét’s body later that day, bound and strangled with a garrote in a small room practically hidden in the home’s basement. Still, the case would not have mushroomed into a frenzy without the sudden flood of footage of JonBenét’s child beauty contests. Before Toddlers & Tiaras turned pageant moms into pop archetypes, the subculture was mostly hidden from view. The eerie footage of the little girl parading around in teased hair and heavy makeup played on an endless loop on 24/7 cable television as broadcasters debated the case nonstop. The parents’ insulation with lawyers and spokespeople only heightened suspicions.

The theories proliferated. Eventually, in 1998, a grand jury was convened to hear charges against the Ramseys, but as far as most people remember, nothing came of it. Without a trial to sift through fact and fiction, a content boom took over: books, scripted TV movies, documentaries, and the then-emerging landscape of true-crime message boards and forums. The cycle continues. Reddit has replaced message boards and Usenet forums. Theories have zoomed in on specific family members. And a new scripted series is forthcoming on Paramount+, starring Melissa McCarthy as Patsy and Clive Owen as John.

Netflix’s Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey, directed by Joe Berlinger, doesn’t really offer a new take. The three-part documentary series makes the case for an intruder, but it does so by focusing on police and prosecutorial missteps, a current trend in true-crime content. Berlinger directed 1996’s Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, which centered on three teenagers — known as the West Memphis Three — convicted of murdering four boys. The documentary examined the moral panic incited by violent murders of children, and his work was widely credited with helping free the teens.

Cold Case asks many of the same questions about agendas and power that Paradise Lost did. The filmmakers have the cooperation of John, who remarried after Patsy’s death from ovarian cancer in 2006 and now lives in Utah. Paula Woodward, a journalist who wrote two books about the case with his cooperation, is also a major talking head. But unlike the West Memphis Three, the affluent Ramseys were not unsophisticated, working-poor teens in rural America. And in trying to make a simplistic case for railroading, the documentary skips over cultural nuances that could make for a more definitive account of the story.

Cold Case starts with the confusion at the Ramsey home on the day after the murder. The police officers involved in the investigation did not talk to Berlinger. But in the docuseries, John claims cops and reporters promoted misinformation. John points out that after his discovery of JonBenét’s body, Linda Arndt, a detective on the scene, became convinced he did it. She later gave an infamous interview saying a nonverbal exchange with John led to her conclusion. But John, CEO of a company that reached $1 billion in sales that year, was treated deferentially by police from the start. Officers viewed him and Patsy as victims of a kidnapping, not potential suspects. Cops didn’t seal off the home like a crime scene. Instead, they called in victim advocates, and the Ramseys called friends from the neighborhood to their home for emotional support.

Arguably, the scene was hopelessly contaminated and any conclusive answers that could have emerged almost certainly died that day. That wasn’t because the police suspected the Ramseys, but rather, the opposite: because they didn’t. Still, the series claims that law enforcement painted the Ramseys in a bad light. Cops said there were no footsteps in the snow to indicate an intruder when, according to John, it hadn’t snowed. He claims police leaked that John had flown back to their second home in Atlanta with JonBenét’s casket in his plane when, in fact, he had done no such thing.

Still, the FBI agreed an intruder was unlikely and suggested examining the family first. The police pursued leads that JonBenét might have been sexually abused. The series takes issue with the consideration of evidence that JonBenét’s bed-wetting was getting worse at the time of the murder, and this can be a sign of sexual abuse. In the series, John shrugs as he dismisses the police’s consultation with former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur, an expert on incest, who cautioned police that a “normal,” image-conscious father and family wasn’t evidence of a lack of abuse.

But the police soon moved on from John to Patsy. Detective Steve Thomas settled on the theory that Patsy had murdered her daughter. He believed that with her 40th birthday approaching, she snapped due to a bed-wetting. It’s telling that Thomas’s theory was ultimately the one that took off. He had more power in the department than Arndt, who thought Patsy was innocent.

True-crime cases are always a mix of human interest and forensics, as evidenced by the series’s focus on the media’s portrayals of the Ramseys as unsympathetic. Still, Cold Case never quite acknowledges how, early on, even intimate friends of both Ramseys found their lack of cooperation with police unethical. John and Patsy gave DNA samples in 1996 but refused to come to police headquarters for an official interrogation. Instead, in an early January 1997 interview on CNN, a subdued Patsy declared a “killer on the loose.” In April, they finally went to police headquarters. Did their class entitlement contribute to confusion between them and friends and police? By framing them unilaterally as underdogs, the documentary leaves that question unanswered.

The series instead focuses on the more extreme examples of the media’s witch hunt at the time. On the talk show Geraldo, a mock trial took place and a so-called expert claimed a video of JonBenét swinging a trumpet was evidence of sexual abuse; one panelist called her a “tarted-up miniature-dwarf hooker.” Cold Case’s binary understanding of the battle lines limits its insight. According to Lawrence Schiller’s massive 2000 book about the investigation, Perfect Murder, Perfect Town, the Boulder DA had a liberal culture, emphasizing community policing and plea bargaining instead of going to trial.

Detective Thomas was out of step with Boulder’s liberal culture. District Attorney Alex Hunter didn’t accept Thomas’s claims about Patsy. In 1998, Hunter brought in detective Lou Smit because Smit had solved one case involving a murder and abduction. Smit later claimed the Ramseys were people of faith and couldn’t have murdered their daughter. He offered an unproven “stun gun” theory, claiming that two marks on JonBenét’s skin were about the size of a stun gun used to keep her quiet, which would point to an intruder. The documentary re-platforms these claims, and the series presents Smit, uncritically, as the “Sherlock Holmes of his time.” But Smit’s police work, as much as Arndt’s and Thomas’s, comes off as heavily influenced by their personal biases. Arndt’s work with women survivors shaped how she viewed Patsy as a victim and John as a perpetrator. Thomas’s dislike of Patsy bordered on misogynist confusion about women snapping at 40. Smit’s bonding with them over religion was equally unprofessional.

Hunter ultimately sent the case to a grand jury in 1998, and both Thomas and Smit testified. The grand jury voted to indict the Ramseys for child endangerment. In his 1999 announcement after the grand jury concluded its work, DA Hunter said there was insufficient evidence for prosecution. He arguably protected the Ramseys by not airing out the grand jury’s decision — seemingly, per Schiller’s book, to protect himself from the political fallout either way. Both Thomas and Smit resigned in protest.

It’s unclear if the Ramseys knew the grand jury voted to indict them. The world was in the dark about this development until a judge forced the release of the charging documents in 2013. Instead, the Ramseys were very active non-suspects. They wrote a best-selling book about their alleged persecution by police, The Death of Innocence. Michael Tracey, a communications professor, made a documentary with them about the supposed media witch hunt. He reappears in Cold Case as a talking head.

The last episode investigates old leads about potential suspects from the pageant circuit that never went anywhere. But the most revealing aspect of the final episode is how much the series seems to be in the dark about the police or FBI theories. Early on, the series makes the point that DNA evidence found on JonBenét — on items of clothing and under her fingernails —pointed away from the family and that the police hid the information. But by the end, the docuseries admits that it’s still unclear whether that genetic material, which might just be degraded touch DNA, can exonerate or implicate anyone at all.

Cold Case seems confused about the fact that this case is, in some ways, an exception. Many elements of the case — from the length of the ransom note and the improbability of a stranger kidnapping for ransom to the discovery of an alleged kidnapping victim in her own home — make it a difficult case to universalize. In 2008, Mary Lacy, the new Boulder district attorney, took the unusual, unprecedented step of apologizing to the Ramseys and seemingly exonerating them. “I’d get letters from people for years that say, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’” John says in the documentary. How could they not? “That’s what you were told by the media, by the police,” he says.

The series’s portrait of John, now a remarried grandfather, bears no trace of the litigious figure who hired Trump attorney L. Lin Wood early on to sue media outlets for libel. (That attorney has since been disbarred.) John ran for a congressional seat as a Republican and wrote two more books claiming innocence. John’s domination of the narrative — both in the docuseries and in his books — has helped occlude the fact that it was the “Patsy did it” theory that allowed the case to even land before a grand jury. This raises its own questions. Is there a gendered element involved in cases where victims become suspects? Most parents — and mothers — without the Ramsey resources would have been easily railroaded. It might be too much to expect this docuseries to offer some kind of wider context or patterns about the limitations of police or their relationship with district attorneys, and none is provided.

Instead, in trying to present John’s perspective as the objective truth, Cold Case unintentionally highlights the fraught nature of all the legal and forensic facts in this case.

In some ways, the series functions best as a corrective to some of the more irresponsible instances of platformed conspiracies — for instance, the 2017 CBS special that accused Burke of killing his sister, which he denies. A film from that same year, the faux docudrama Casting JonBenet, took a different route. Interviewing actors from the Boulder area for a supposed casting for a scripted series about the Ramseys, the film brought out their speculations and direct connections to the case. It was a subtle unpacking of how the Boulder community made sense of the murder over time.

And ultimately, the case remains compelling as gothic-spectacle sleuth bait. For those who think the Ramseys did it, the case speaks to the idea that evil is within, that money and power can cover up abuse within families. For those who believe in an intruder, the story confirms the notion that evil lurks outside. Cold Case presents that latter story in its most coherent form yet. But it won’t be enough to put the speculation to rest.