JonBenet Ramsey was only 6 when her body was found in the basement of the Boulder, Colo. house the day after Christmas in 1996. And almost immediately, everyone thought they knew who was responsible. The greater tragedy other than the death of JonBenet was how so many people weren’t willing to be fooled again in a true-crime case, we got tunnel vision.
John and Patsy Ramsey, her parents, and Burke, their unfortunate child not much older than his sister, were accused of killing her. By the 1990s, murder cases had become sensationalized. The Menendez Brothers killing of their parents had become national news to the point of them wearing sweaters during court appearances became major topics of discussion. Charles Stuart started racial turmoil in the greater Boston area when he claimed a black man had killed his pregnant wife, Carol, during a carjacking. The baby died after a forced birth. Stuart had done it all. Yet Boston authorities targeted all black men with or even without criminal records.
The Rodney King beating by four LAPD officers ended in an acquittal and Los Angeles erupted into a riot where people were killed and injured and properties were destroyed. O.J. Simpson was acquitted of a double murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and a friend, Ron Goldman. People were divided and still are. Then, there was the Susan Smith case in which the South Carolina woman drowned her two sons, ages 1 and 3, in a lake and claimed it was a black man who kidnapped them.
So, by the summer of 1996 when a security guard named Richard Jewell saw a suspicious bag in Centennial Park in Atlanta, he notified authorities and saved a lot of lives. Then, the people turned on him. This had happened before. We had seen so-called innocent people end up being guilty as sin. Jewell along with the Ramseys became victims of the idiom: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
And it was 23 years ago this month, when I was invited to attended a Kiwanis Club meeting in Americus, Ga., where John and Patsy would be speaking, I went and met them. I shook their hands and we chitchatted. Yet, I still believed that despite all their talk, they were hiding something.
Then, I did a very bold thing later – I actually looked into the case further. And a lot of things John and Patsy said on that unseasonably warm January Friday in south Georgia was very much accurate. The Boulder Police Department really botched the investigation and refused any and all help from outside agencies such as the nearby Denver Police and state and federal agencies.
The Netflix true-crime docuseries Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey doesn’t offer many answers. It’s more of a here’s where everything went wrong. The first thing that went wrong was the inexperience of the Boulder police in handling a case, especially the day after Christmas when just about every officer who knows what to do is off for vacation. The Ramseys were some of the biggest people in Boulder, so when they tell family and friends JonBenet is missing and possibly kidnapped, all the movers and shakers are coming to assist.
Do you want to be the police officer telling all these people who are all over the Ramsey’s household they need to leave? The questionable ransom note that was very detailed meant the house was a crime scene and only the Ramseys should have been there. Yet, the house and all of its contents are contaminated. And I believed the police knew it. I think that’s why they let so much information about the case go public. They wanted John to turn Patsy in.
But he never did. And John, who is interviewed at length, cuts through a lot of the outrageous theories. Patsy had just recovered from cancer by the time of JonBenet’s death. Why would she kill her own daughter when she was lucky to have recovered from cancer?
Also, anyone who’s ever seen a pageant knows that JonBenet’s involvement wasn’t too bad. I mean compared to Toddlers and Tiaras, they were no where near as bad. And it was the 1990s, a lot of parents got their elementary school age students to do glamour shots. You couldn’t tell if someone was 9 or 39.
One thing is sure and clear with this docuseries and that’s the Ramseys had absolutely nothing to do with JonBenet’s murder. And any parents can tell you that Burke had nothing to do because kids will scream to the heavens if a siblings is even attempting to beat on them. That’s why I never believed the West Memphis Three. Kids will behave differently if adults are threatening them than other kids.
One thing the docuseries examines and what I’ve been telling people for years, the Boulder government wanted to quash any talk that there was a child killer on the loose. Boulder is the location of the University of Colorado. All the people in charge of the college and the city’s economic development need is for a few nervous parents to refuse to allow their college-aged daughters to return for the upcoming school term and it’s a huge hit to the system.
To paraphrase the mayor from Jaws, “You yell ‘burglar,’ people say ‘who? what?’ You yell ‘child killer,’ we have a panic on our hands.” Colleges and universities for decades have lied to people making them believe the campuses and student life is safe. Yet, sexual assault and violence is very prevalent. If someone is going to break into an affluent house and kill a little girl, they probably would break into a dormitory or sorority house.
The docuseries is directed by Joe Berlinger, who became famous for the Paradise Lost documentaries about the West Memphis Three. He does manage to keep them from being another tediously too long Netflix special. Nor does it have the questionable (and somewhat libelous) tone Casting JonBenet took. Some might accuse Berlinger of making it biased and pointed in favor of John and Patsy, but the DNA results have shown they had nothing to do with their daughter’s murder.
Just like in my previous post about Juror #2, this docuseries makes us examine why we all decided to point a finger at them in the first place. When most children are killed at the hands of their parents, they’ll freak out and try to say it was an accident when they come to their senses. They’ll say the child fell down stairs or was outside playing and the grass was wet and they slipped. Why would they go through so much just to leave their daughter in a obscure spot in the basement? They’d have to anticipate the police would’ve looked over every inch. You also can’t blame John for doing what any loving father would’ve done and rushed toward his daughter hoping and praying that she could still be alive when her body was found. The 10 most strongest men in the world probably wouldn’t have been to restrain him.
Just because the police failed at their jobs doesn’t mean the Ramseys were guilty. Just because we don’t like people because they have an affluent lifestyle doesn’t exactly make them guilty of every bad thing that’s ever happened.
Zane Says 