Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey isn’t so much about proving who is responsible for the death of the 6-year-old beauty pageant winner who was found strangled in the basement of her Boulder, Colorado, family home on Dec. 26, 1996, as it is showing who isn’t: Her parents, Patsy and John Bennett Ramsey, and her older brother Burke Ramsey.
“A lot of shows try to play both sides of the fence, and although we clearly in episode one talk about the case against them, we then in episode two show what we really think is going on,” executive producer and Oscar-nominated director Joe Berlinger tells The Hollywood Reporter of the three-part Netflix docuseries, now streaming. “I think we can solve the case. I want to give that family a measure of justice.”
The Netflix documentary isn’t shy about pointing the finger at the Boulder Police Department as the culprit for why the case remains unsolved 28 years after the murder was committed — uncovering the research done by detective Lou Smit, who came out of retirement to work the Ramsey case yet resigned 18 months later after concluding that the Ramseys were innocent and were being unjustifiably pursued as suspects. The series further outlines numerous missteps on the part of law enforcement, from the inexperienced detective at the helm of the investigation to the feeding of false information to the press which has left John, who appears in the documentary, and his former wife Patsy, who died from ovarian cancer in 2006, the target of public scrutiny for decades, even after District Attorney Alex Hunter failed to prosecute them following grand jury proceedings in 1999, citing doubt that he could meet the standard of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
In 2008, the entire Ramsey family was cleared as suspects in the killing, with Boulder County District Attorney Mary Lacy apologizing to John in a letter that stated, “To the extent that we may have contributed in any way to the public perception that you might have been involved in this crime, I am deeply sorry.” Yet, in 2016, a six-part CBS docuseries, The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey, theorized that her older brother Burke, who was 8 at the time, killed her for eating part of his snack. Burke, who declined to participate in the new documentary on account of how he’s been portrayed by the media, sued the network for $750 million. The defamation suit was settled in 2019 for an undisclosed amount.
Another lawsuit may be the Ramseys only path to indisputably clearing their name, says Berlinger as John continues to publicly plead for police to re-test the DNA evidence that was captured in their home the night his daughter was found. Below, the true-crime documentary aficionado talks with THR about why he decided to revisit this case now, his hopes for the outcome of the documentary and why he believes JonBenét’s murder can finally be solved.
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This is a high-profile case that’s been dissected many times. What did you feel was still there to mine regarding the murder of JonBenét Ramsey?
The case has been dissected, but often incorrectly. For example, in 2016, there was a huge CBS documentary blaming the brother that was the subject of a defamation lawsuit. So I actually think there hasn’t been a clear-eyed dissection of the case in a while. We are bringing some new things to the table. Most specifically, I had access to all of Lou Smit’s [files]. Some of his work has been talked about before, but the family wanted to continue with Lou’s work after his passing in 2010. And once I really started digging into his research, it became very clear to me that the parents have been treated poorly over the years. So that was one reason to do it.
The other reason is that, after studying the case, I feel like the case can be solved, that there are some basic things the Boulder Police need to do. For some reason, despite a new police chief, despite most of the old players being gone, some of whom were reprimanded, there was still some institutional intransigence into really doing the right thing. They keep saying that they’re following all leads. If you reach out to them for a comment, they’ll say, “We can’t comment on an ongoing case” and “We’re doing everything possible.” But the family doesn’t believe they’re doing everything possible, and I don’t believe they’re doing everything possible. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation, last year, had a meeting and a cold case review committee gave recommendations to the Boulder Police Department about concrete steps that needed to be taken. I don’t think they’ve taken those steps. Chief among them is new DNA testing. I think with new DNA testing, there’s a good chance we could solve the crime.
There’s very little DNA evidence in this case, unfortunately, because the crime scene was poorly handled. But there is male unidentified foreign DNA — “foreign” meaning it doesn’t belong to any family member. That DNA is mixed together in some blood, sadly, of JonBenét’s, so it’s a mixed DNA profile that had just enough markers back in the day to be loaded into CODIS, which is the national database of perpetrators. But this perpetrator may not be in that database, and we’re not even sure that the profile is as accurate as it needs to be. So there is technology where the two mixed DNA samples can be separated and a more robust profile of the male DNA could be used in all the ways that a good profile is used both in CODIS, but also more importantly, almost, it can be used in genealogical DNA testing, like 23andMe and family DNA, which has been used quite successfully in recent years to solve some cold cases like the Green River Killer. So the “why do it now?” is I think John Ramsey’s 80 years old, he’s been blamed for this crime for three decades. I can’t think of anything worse than not just losing your child, but then to be blamed for it. I want to right that wrong.
That feels similar to The Menendez Brothers documentary which, in tandem with Ryan Murphy’s Monsters series, changed public sentiment toward Erik and Lyle Menendez. Are you hoping to see a similar effect here?
Absolutely. The big difference here is, of course, the Menendez brothers’ did do something, and we should have sympathy for them. This is an example of where the parents are completely innocent and deserve justice. But yes, I hope public sentiment will put some pressure on the Boulder Police Department to take the right course of action here.
The many missteps of the Boulder Police Department are laid out across all three episodes of the documentary. How do you explain their eagle-eye focus on the Ramseys as the killers and the overall poor handling of the case?
I wish I could say it was unusual. I’ve had a specialty in wrongful conviction, in particular. Obviously, the Ramseys are not wrongfully convicted — they were never tried. But they certainly were wrongfully convicted in the court of public opinion. And the bias against them by the police, I think, really screwed up the investigation. So having done a lot of wrongful conviction work — I’m proud to say that my film and TV work has actually helped get six people out of prison who were wrongfully convicted, not just the West Memphis three, but three additional cases I’ve had an impact on. So in doing wrongful conviction work through film and television, I have noticed some similarities in what happens in wrongful convictions also happening here.
Five percent of people in prison are wrongfully convicted. And wrongful conviction happens for a lot of things — racial bias, all sorts of problems in the prison industrial complex — but the thing that contributes to many wrongful convictions is a crime that happens that overwhelms a local police department. This was an unusual murder in a place that doesn’t usually have murders. The lead detective came from narcotics. And you see in wrongful convictions all the time, a small-town police force that’s inexperienced to deal with a particular crime, they lock into an early idea on a suspect. In this case, the family. And they just can’t seem to move off that idea. And the investigation is all about confirming a bias instead of being open-minded about all possibilities. I think that’s what happened here. The responding officer just got a bad feeling early on, and I think that drove a lot of what has happened and has continued to happen for three decades.
The media also has a lot of culpability in that they didn’t fact-check the misinformation being fed to them by the police.
Absolutely. This is a theme that has concerned me for decades. It’s one of the [other] reasons I wanted to do the show. There has been a decades-long blurring of the line between entertainment and news, and news and opinion. It’s why we find ourselves where we are today in a country where we are very divided — as we know, we’ve just come from an election — and one of the reasons we’re divided is that everyone operates with a different version of reality. Half the country wakes up and says “the sun is shining,” and half the country says “no, the sun is not shining” on so many issues, and that’s driven by this rise in opinion journalism.
I think the Ramsey case was one of the precipitating cases that has led to where we are today with regard to this rise of tabloid journalism and opinion news. Quite specifically, the early to mid-’90s was the explosion of cable networks and the advent of the 24-hour news cycle on cable was really coming into its own, and opinion and tabloid journalism. The O.J. case was now fading from memory and the next big story they needed to feed the monster, this provided all the fodder for that. I think the Boulder Police acted quite shamefully in feeding false and misleading information to the press. Maybe they thought it was the right thing to do. I don’t want to act like they were doing it for bad reasons in terms of who they were as people. I am sure they believed in what they were doing. But it was a bad result to leak incorrect information or half-truths to a press that was only too willing to not corroborate these things and just run with it.
Given those realities, how did you earn John Ramsey’s trust in wanting to dig up this story? Was it difficult to get him to participate?
He had some initial healthy skepticism, just because he’s been so mistreated. We talked a number of times. Luckily, I have a good reputation in this business as somebody who isn’t just here to exploit people’s stories. He saw some of my previous films and decided to participate and since then, we’ve gotten to be very friendly. I truly believe this is one of the most brutalized families in American history. Can you imagine losing your child under any circumstances, let alone through this brutal sexual assault and murder, and then to be blamed for it as a sexual abuser? The fact that he’s still standing and pounding the table for the truth to me says a lot about his character.
JonBenét Ramsey’s brother Burke decided not to participate in the documentary as a result of how he’s been treated in the media. Did John share anything with you about how he’s doing?
I think by all accounts, he’s doing well. He just doesn’t want the attention, and I don’t blame him.
In episode three, Michael Tracey talks about how hard it was having that 11-hour conversation with a man who claimed to have killed JonBenét and having to listen to him describe allegedly sexually assaulting and killing her. Is it difficult for you telling these true-crime stories and living with them for as long as you do?
It is and it isn’t. It is because this stuff is disturbing, and you have to be on guard to not become immune to it. I try very hard not to. I also try very hard not to bring it home. That’s an essential lesson. Consciously, when I walk in that door, I try to leave it all behind, and that goes back to when I was making Paradise Lost. I had a year-and-a-half-old daughter in a crib at home, and I had been editing all day looking at horrible crime scene footage and autopsy photos from that case — terrible things were done to 8-year-old boys. And I got home that night after editing late in the city and walked into my home, which is an hour away, after a long drive of thinking about these images and I remember picking up my daughter and flashing on some of the most horrific autopsy photos that most people really should not ever see, and holding my daughter and feeling like I had stared into the abyss of evil. And I really resented the moment because I feel like it was robbing me of my fatherly innocence. So from that point on, I determined that once I leave the office, I have to compartmentalize. So that has helped.
The other thing is that I try very hard to make sure there’s a social justice reason for telling the story I’m telling, even if it’s horrific. True crime is very popular, but also has a bad rap as being exploitative — and it can be exploitative; not everything is done well or with a social conscience. So in order to combat the awful feeling you feel by dealing with somebody’s horrible tragedy, I ask myself at the start of each project, what is the needle I’m going to move with this project? What help can I bring to the table? Is it a wrongful conviction? Do laws need to be changed? Even when I do my serial killer profiles, these serial killer profiles have helped identify new victims of a serial killer, which brings closure to families. So I always ask myself, what can I do on this show to justify spending a year and a half, two years in that world?
In this case, I feel like the case really can be solved if people have the will to solve it and do the DNA testing that can be done. Technology has so advanced in the last 30 years. It’s ludicrous. And that’s the other characteristic that you see in a lot of wrongful conviction cases, not just inexperienced police having tunnel vision after an initial thesis and not being able to move off that tunnel vision, its prosecutors who routinely will fight tooth and nail to not allow DNA testing in a post-conviction situation. I actually think that should be illegal. I’ve never understood why a prosecutor who is sworn to uphold the truth — if you’re so convinced that that person you’ve put on death row is a killer and new DNA technology or new DNA opportunities because of evidence or whatever [is available], you’d think they’d bend over backwards to make that DNA happen so that they can be absolutely 100 percent sure of their conviction. That’s why these wrongful conviction cases take decades to unwind because prosecutors fight the testing of new evidence. It’s glacially slow.
So, again, why isn’t Boulder doing what they’re supposed to be doing to our knowledge? Maybe they’ve done it and they’re just holding onto it and not telling us. I say that because they are using the rationale that it’s an open case and they can’t comment on it. Well, it’s been an open case for 30 years; let’s get some DNA testing done.
Is there a higher court to appeal to?
There really isn’t. One of the funny things about how policing is structured in this country — and again, I’m not anti-police. I’m not defund the police’ I think most police do a good job. But I think one of the flaws from a criminal justice standpoint is that there are, I don’t know the exact number, some [17,000] police jurisdictions in this country, and whether it’s a two-person department or a big city like L.A. or New York, those jurisdictions retain authority over a case, and it’s up to them to do what they want to do with the evidence. The Ramseys could sue them, but they shouldn’t have to go through that. They lost everything defending themselves, and they shouldn’t have to sue the Boulder Police Department to do what should be done.
Have you already identified the subject of your next documentary?
Oh yeah, definitely. Netflix keeps me busy, thankfully, but I try to keep it to myself until we’re done because sometimes talking about an idea, especially in this market, it encourages other people to compete with you — other filmmakers. Or, more importantly, it sometimes hurts your ability to investigate the case if stakeholders in a particular case know a documentary is being made. So I keep it to myself. But rest assured that we will be talking again this time next year, hopefully.
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Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey is now streaming on Netflix.
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