A new Netflix docuseries has reignited the interest in the JonBenét Ramsey murder.
JonBenét Ramsey, 6, was found dead by murder in the basement of her home in Boulder, Colorado, on December 26, 1996. Her killer still has not been identified.
There has been a lot of fascination with the case over the years and the latest series on Netflix called Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey? is directed by the Oscar-nominated Joe Berlinger.
While it starts out with a little background on the case, the docuseries quickly gets into the Ramseys as a family, including about JonBenét's mom, Patsy, a journalism graduate.
She met John Ramsey—JonBenét's dad—when she was 23 and he was 35. Despite the age difference they fell in love and married. The couple moved from Atlanta, Georgia, to Boulder to help grow John's lucrative business.
They welcomed son Burke in 1987 and three years later, JonBenét, but tragedy soon struck the family when one of John's older daughters from a previous marriage was killed in a car accident.
But the bad news did not stop there because shortly after that, Patsy was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and had to undergo one year of intense chemotherapy.
Archival footage of Patsy showed her describing how JonBenét had innately understood her mom was going through a tough time and offered her care.
"She just knew... she was a very sensitive child," Patsy said.
The three-part docuseries showed how Patsy found a lengthy ransom note on their stairs the morning after Christmas that said their daughter had been kidnapped. Patsy's panicked 911 call was played in the first episode, before JonBenét's body was found in the basement.
As media fascination grew around the case of the murdered child pageant star, police attention quickly turned to John and Patsy as potential suspects.
They were eventually charged with child abuse resulting in death and accessory to JonBenét's murder in 1999, but those charges were eventually dropped due to a lack of evidence.
Patsy died in 2006 from her ovarian cancer after relapsing in 2002 and the docuseries' director believes she had nothing to do with her daughter's death.
"It defies logic to think that Patsy could have done this," Berlinger told Today.com.
"Does anyone really think that Patsy Ramsey had the presence of mind and the ability to torture her daughter in that way with a device that's kind of hard to make?" he said.
"Just the autopsy itself tells you there's no way that this could have been done by anything other than a knowledgeable, deeply disturbed person who knew how to do this."
Patsy and John both passed a conducted polygraph test after hiring a private firm to do it in 2000 and were asked if they murdered JonBenét, per CBS.
"Neither John nor Patsy were attempting deception when they gave the answers," the polygraph examiner, Ed Gelb, told CBS at the time.
English (US) ·