True crime docuseries about long-ago famous cases have two purposes: 1) to remind people what happened in the case, and 2) to give information that may give a more complete picture than the media at the time gave. One of the most explosive cases of JonBenét Ramsey, and a new attempts to show that there was a whole lot more about the case than what we heard and saw on our televisions.
Opening Shot: A desk strewn with tabloid newspapers, then two old TVs flicker on with news coverage of JonBenét Ramsey’s 1996 murder.
The Gist: Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey, directed by Joe Berlinger, is a 3-part docuseries that tries to shine new light on the still-unsolved murder of JonBenét Ramsey, the 6-year-old girl who went missing on December 26, 1996, and was found hours later in the basement of her house in Boulder, Colorado. The case captured the imagination of the country for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that there were plenty of photos and video footage of JonBenét in makeup and costume on the pageant circuit.
Suspicion soon focused on JonBenét’s parents, John and Patsy Ramsey. John is among the people interviewed for this series; archival interviews with Patsy, who died in 2006, are also included.
Also interviewed are journalists who covered the case at the time, as well as members of the Boulder police department. Their handling of the case came under heavy suspicion even back then; JonBenét’s death was the city’s first homicide of 1996 — six days before the end of the year — and the department’s inexperience with such investigations was evident. The biggest issue is that they didn’t search the basement room where JonBenét was found; John Ramsey found her, and carried her upstairs before the scene could be processed.
At the end of the episode, it’s revealed that Boulder PD had DNA results from JonBenét’s body that didn’t match anyone in the Ramsey family, but didn’t release that information to the media or even the district attorney. Did they really hold back that evidence because it contradicted they had created around the family’s guilt?
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey has the same feel as many of Berlinger’s other true crime docuseries, like the various Crime Scene series.
Our Take: The initial thought when you sit down to watch Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey is, essentially, what kind of new information can this docuseries impart that anyone who has followed the case for 28 years hasn’t already heard? But what people forget is that the case has never been solved; suspicions that were raised against members of the Ramsey family, including JonBenét’s then-9-year-old brother Burke, have died down but that’s about it.
So it’s interesting to get a viewpoint of the case that goes beyond the narrative we got in the ’90s, which mainly had to do with the “pageant kid” angle, with scenes of the painted-and-coiffed JonBenét parading around on stage.
Berlinger is trying to show that the narrative that has pretty much hard set into our brains in the almost-three decades since JonBenét’s murder is one-sided at best, not true at worst. There certainly is a sympathy towards John and Patsy in the narrative of the first episode, given that John’s interview and Patsy’s cancer battles are significant parts of the episode’s narrative.
The idea, as it is in many true crime documentaries, is to point out the deficits in both the police investigation and the media coverage, and we came away from the first episode with a better picture of the day JonBenét’s body was found than we ever had in the past.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: “So who’s DNA is it?” asks one of the experts interviewed.
Sleeper Star: John Andrew Ramsey, JonBenét’s older half-brother, who was about 19 at the time of her murder, gives some good perspective on what his family went through during the ’90s, including the death of his sister Elizabeth in 1991 in an auto accident.
Most Pilot-y Line: We could have used less photos of the garrot found on JonBenét’s body embedded into her neck.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey fills in blanks in the JonBenét Ramsey case that have faded over the decades, and brings information to light that gives an indication that the case could still end up being solved.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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