The murder of the six-year-old beauty queen is the coldest of cases, and the Netflix series put the heat on exactly no one.

As the thirtieth anniversary of the still-unsolved Christmas 1996 murder of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey approaches, we can expect plenty of warmed-over rehashes of the story, starting with the three-part Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey?, which debuted on Netflix on November 25 and got big ratings over Thanksgiving weekend.

Netflix last tackled the topic back in 2017, and this package doesn’t expose any additional secrets, despite producer Joe Berlinger and John Ramsey — JonBenét’s father, who kicks off the new Netflix narrative after a lot of disembodied voices and shots of circa 1996 computers and video clips — doing the rounds of morning network shows to tout the series. At the end, you won’t know who killed JonBenét, but you will know a few other things.

Five takeaways:

The Ramseys lived in “a very big house,” according to the police department that failed to find the body.
Getty Images/Michael Smith

The Ramseys lived in “a very big house,” according to a video clip with then-Boulder Police Chief Tom Koby shortly after the murder. That was one of the excuses the Boulder Police Department used for why JonBenet’s body was not found right away. Patsy Ramsey, JonBenét’s mother, had called 911 before 6 a.m. on December 26, shortly after she found an unusually lengthy, bossy ransom note that proclaimed “We have your daughter” and then quoted from Speed. But despite the police being on site for hours, the body wasn’t found until after one that afternoon, when the sole officer encouraged John Ramsey to tour the house with a friend. Her father wound up discovering JonBenét’s body in the basement, then carried it upstairs himself, contaminating the crime scene.
“We were pretty quickly escorted out of the house,” John Ramsey told Netflix.

The size of the house also played into why some don’t buy the intruder theory.

“The first time I was in the Ramseys’ home, it took me ten minutes of walking around just to find the wine cellar,” private investigator Ellis Armistead, who was hired by the lawyers representing the family shortly after the murder, told author Stephen Singular years later. “You’d have to be very familiar with the layout of the house to know where that is.”

All the Way With DNA

Despite the contaminated crime scene, DNA was collected and quickly sent off to a lab. It determined that all of the people tested — including the Ramsey family, friends and others — were “excluded” from the DNA found under JonBenét’s fingernails and in her underpants. (More on that below.) But that report was not released publically.

The contamination of the crime scene was a concern from the start. “I was always convinced that may have made an important difference, says DNA expert Mitch Morrissey, the former Denver district attorney who was called in to help the grand jury convened over a decade later to look into the case.

The Media Did Not Kill JonBenét

“There is a killer on the loose,” Patsy Ramsey proclaimed in an early CNN interview, a statement the mayor of Boulder was quick to deny, the better to avoid panic in the streets. The Boulder Police Department backed her up, and the Netflix series makes a great deal of all the leaks made to the media, primarily from the BPD, the better to focus attention on the family rather than a random killer roaming Boulder.

Many familiar faces — Charlie Brennan, then of the Rocky Mountain News; Paula Woodward, then the lead investigative reporter with 9News; Julie Hayden, then with Channel 7; and Carol McKinley, then with Fox, now with the Gazette — appear in vintage clips, current interviews and even voiceovers discussing various developments in the case. One of them included the leak of the grand jury’s 1999 decision that John and Patsy Ramsey should be indicted on a lesser charge than murder…but the DA determined the case was unsolvable.

But despite all the finger-pointing about the leaks, the media did not kill JonBenét — though the coverage has certainly been overkill. Perhaps the low point in a lot of low behavior: Geraldo Rivera’s “The Trial of the Ramseys,” in which an “expert” suggests that a clip of JonBenét at a holiday performance shows her masturbating with a saxophone. Um, no. Just no.

Various Oddballs Did Not Kill JonBenét

The Netflix series brings up some favorite suspects and debunked experts from years past, including Gary Oliva, a Californian who popped up again this year; and John Mark Karr, imported to Boulder from Thailand by then-District Attorney Mary Lacy at great expense…and to a great deal of ridicule. The series devotes a lot of attention to Karr, and to University of Colorado journalism professor Michael Tracey’s obsession with this obsessed false confessor, without ever addressing basic questions about why an intruder would spend time crafting the long-winded ransom note and an elaborate garotte, using items that were already in the house. Escaping scrutiny this time: Bill McReynolds, a former journalism professor who’d played Santa at a Ramsey Christmas party two days before the murder. He remained under the “umbrella of suspicion” when he passed away.

John Ramsey says he’s confident following the completion of the Colorado Cold Case Review Team’s probe.
Access Hollywood/paulawoodward.net

All the Way With DNA, Round II

In the Netflix series and various recent interviews, now-eighty-year-old John Ramsey hinges any hope that the case will be solved on new DNA studies, particularly of five samples that reportedly were never tested.

Ramsey has taken his case to Jared Polis, petitioning Colorado’s governor in 2022 to have items retested using today’s technology. “All we’re asking the police to do is use the latest technology,” he says.

For years, defenders of the Ramseys insisted that the case would be cleared by DNA — and that the family had been “exonerated” by Boulder DA Mary Lacy because of DNA. But it turned out that Lacy misrepresented what the DNA could prove, and subsequent district attorneys haven’t embraced her point of view. That whole brouhaha receives no mention in this series; the party line now seems to be that if there are problems with the DNA, then maybe others who were supposedly “cleared” by the absence of their DNA, like Karr, should be investigated all over again.
Cold Case notes that the Colorado Bureau of Investigation did a cold case review in 2023, and determined the BPD should take certain steps. The BPD wouldn’t release the CBI’s recommendations, it says, adding that the BPD also declined an interview request.

But the BPD did release its own response, in the form of an early annual announcement on the status of the case from new Boulder Police Chief Tim Redfern.

“The assertion that there is viable evidence and leads we are not pursuing — to include DNA testing — is completely false,” he said on X.

“I know that our community would like to know more information and specifics on our progress, but like any major criminal investigation, there is no way that we can share that information publicly without compromising the integrity of this case and any future prosecution by the district attorney’s office. What I can tell you, though, is that we have thoroughly investigated multiple people identified as suspects throughout the years, and we continue to be open-minded about what occurred as we investigate the tips that come in to detectives,” Redfern added. “We are committed to following up on every lead and we are continuing to work with DNA experts and our law enforcement partners around the country until this tragic case is solved. This investigation will always be a priority for the Boulder Police Department.”

After all, the thirtieth anniversary of JonBenét’s death is just two years away.