The case is certainly in the spotlight again, with three US networks – CBS, A&E and Investigation Discovery – all recently screening their takes on the case to varying degrees of tackiness. The story of JonBenét Ramsey is different. The OJ Simpson case and the Manson killings are two obvious examples, both of which have experienced a revival of interest this year, thanks to their retelling in pop culture. Some historical crime stories fascinate the public years later because of what they say about the times in which they happened. There was no immediately obvious sign of a break-in, and the house was so large, the perpetrator must have known its layout very well to have found JonBenét’s bedroom in the middle of the night and taken her down to the basement without waking anyone else. She had been bashed over the head, strangled with a garrote fashioned out of a nylon cord and her mother’s paintbrush, and possibly sexually assaulted. When he brought her upstairs, it was obvious she had been dead for some time. He went down to the basement with a friend and there he saw his daughter, bound and gagged. After the kidnappers failed to call at the promised time, one of the officers suggested to John that he look around the family’s large house. The police arrived at the Ramsey house, along with many of the Ramseys’ friends, who wandered freely around the property. She had found a two-and-a-half-page ransom note demanding $118,000 for her safe return.
Her daughter had been taken from their home in the middle of the night, she said. The few undisputed facts are as follows: just before 6am on 26 December, Patsy called the Boulder police department from her home. After all, doubters say, how could John and Patsy have known that their daughter died on Christmas Day if they didn’t find her body until the early afternoon of the 26th? Surely the gravestone is evidence of their guilt that so many have long assumed, despite them being exonerated in 2008 by DNA evidence? Yet even this is seen as a lot less stable than its material suggests. There, the date of death is literally carved in stone: 25 December 1996. There is now not one single part of this sad tale that has not been seized on – by the public, by the police, by JonBenét’s parents, John and Patsy – as proof of a coverup, even down to the child’s gravestone near Atlanta, Georgia, where she was born. Every year, the US media promise “A chilling new discovery” and “Latest twist”, even though the case remains as cold as Christmas in Colorado. It is impossible to overstate how huge this case was – and still is – in the United States. The killer has never been found and, ever since, the case has been picked over by experts, the tabloids and an endless slew of internet obsessives. Twenty years ago, JonBenét Ramsey, a six-year-old girl known for ever to the world by the uncomfortably adult poses she struck in her beauty pageant photos, was found bludgeoned and garrotted in her family’s basement in Boulder, Colorado. S uch is the level of suspicion in this story that even the date of death is deemed proof of a conspiracy.
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