The new Netflix true crime docuseries Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey puts forth a theory that hasn’t seen a lot of defenders in recent years: that JonBenét’s family didn’t do it.
The series, from veteran true crime director Joe Berlinger, takes a fresh look at the case that became arguably the biggest media sensation of 1997, the year following JonBenét’s violent death. She died sometime during the early morning hours of December 25 and 26, 1996, in her family’s massive home in Boulder, Colorado.
To this day, many members of the public look at the 6-year-old pageant queen’s parents, John Ramsey and his wife Patsy (who died in 2006), and assume their guilt. One big reason for that is an infamous ransom note, packed with weirdly specific references and movie quotes, found at the house.
Yet if we look beyond the ransom note, what are we left with? Not only was the evidence found at the scene insufficient for the Boulder District Attorney’s office to bring either of the Ramseys to trial, it was insufficient for a judge in a 2001 civil suit, who ruled that “the weight of the evidence is more consistent with a theory that an intruder murdered JonBenet than it is with a theory that Mrs. Ramsey did so.” The DA ultimately exonerated the pair altogether in 2008.
Part of the reason it’s so difficult to pin down exactly what happened that night is the lack of integrity of the investigation. In the hours immediately after the Ramseys called 911 to report their daughter missing, rather than treating the house as a crime scene, police allowed friends and family to traipse in and out for most of the morning and afternoon. The Ramseys and company were allowed to clean rooms, remove evidence, and tamper with JonBenét’s body. Because of this fiasco, nearly all of the publicly available evidence from the crime scene has been hotly contested and debated for decades. Other evidence from the original investigation has been unavailable thanks to a 1999 grand jury hearing. The jury voted to indict the Ramseys for charges of child abuse resulting in death, as well as accessory to murder, but the DA declined to move forward and the voluminous amount of evidence shown to the jurors has been sealed from the public ever since.
Still, over the decades, three main competing theories have emerged. The first is that one or both of the Ramseys did it. The second, arguably the most popular thanks to the 2016 CBS docuseries The Case of JonBenét Ramsey, is that their 9-year-old son Burke did it and they covered up the crime. The third — the least popular theory but one that the district attorney’s own investigator believed — is that an intruder broke into the home that Christmas night.
Why it’s so hard to reconcile the murder itself with the Ramseys as suspects
One of the most difficult parts of the case to grapple with — and the part of this case that frequently gets lost in all the furor — is that JonBenét Ramsey’s murder was extremely violent.
The 6-year-old was strangled using a garrote — a rope attached to an object on one end that’s typically used to tighten the rope — that cut deep into her throat. The garrote was made from a broken-off paintbrush handle taken from Patsy Ramsey’s paint supplies and a cord of unknown origin. She was also forcefully struck on the head with an unknown object that left an 8-inch crack in her skull. She had injuries all over her body, including two evenly spaced circular marks on her back that many have speculated could have been from a stun gun. (The CBS documentary posited that train tracks from a toy train set could also have caused this injury, but that theory seems far-fetched given the level of intentional violence inflicted on JonBenét.) Most horrifyingly, a 2003 court filing revealed that remnants of the handle of the same paintbrush used to garrote her were located inside JonBenét’s vagina, putting an end to years of debate about whether there was conclusive evidence of sexual assault.
Experts have long debated whether the autopsy report indicated long-term sexual abuse. Patsy Ramsey confirmed that JonBenét had been experiencing bedwetting issues, which is a well-known sign of sexual abuse — but typically only when the child is older than JonBenét; at age 6, nighttime bed-wetting is a normal phenomenon. Further, JonBenét’s pediatrician insisted she showed no signs of sexual abuse, and to date no publicly available evidence has contradicted this. The 2003 court ruling found that “absent from the [Ramseys’] family history is any evidence of criminal conduct, sexual abuse, drug or alcohol abuse or violent behavior.” Although wildly popular, the theory that familial sexual abuse played a role in the crime simply isn’t supported by currently available evidence.
The supposition that the crime was committed accidentally seems equally implausible. JonBenét was alive while she was being garrotted — we know this because according to the autopsy report, she had hemorrhaging in her eyes and heart due to the strangulation. Theories that the garrotting was staged after an accidental blow to the head — a theory popularized by former head of the police investigation Steve Thomas in his book Foreign Faction — wouldn’t explain the timing of her injuries. As for JonBenét’s brother, the hypothesis that a 9-year-old with no history of violence before or after the murder could have been capable of delivering such a brutal blow to the head, either accidentally or in a fit of rage, doesn’t seem likely either. If the Ramseys did this, their loving family facade would have been obscuring deeply disturbing, dark secrets — secrets buried so deep that there’s no credible sign of them.
Still, there’s no doubt that the Ramseys invited the decades of speculation about their involvement. In the hours after the 911 call, they acted strange. John located JonBenét’s body immediately upon being asked by the sole police officer at the scene to search the house, in another jaw-dropping police failure. He and Patsy both let the time window for the call promised by the note-writer pass by without any comment, leading the police to suspect they weren’t bothered because they concocted the note themselves. Later in the day, John went about preparing to fly the family to Atlanta, giving the impression to police that he was behaving as though nothing was out of the ordinary. (He claims he just wanted to relocate to be with his Atlanta-based family.)
There’s some evidentiary basis for the suspicion, as well. In addition to the fact that the paintbrush handle used as the garrote came from Patsy’s paint collection, fibers from both John’s and Patsy’s clothing were found all over the crime scene. Fibers from a sweater Patsy was wearing that day were found on a strip of duct tape that had been placed over JonBenét’s mouth, while black fibers consistent with a sweater belonging to John were found on her underwear. According to the coroner’s report, her body appeared to have been cleaned at some point, a detail that leads many people to point to the parents rather than an intruder.
If the body had been cleaned, that could also theoretically explain the total lack of Ramsey DNA associated with the attack. A small sample of touch DNA was found on JonBenét’s long underwear and a DNA mixture believed to be saliva was found on her underwear. All samples were consistent with one another and all matched an unknown male contributor who has yet to be identified. That said, touch DNA, sometimes called trace DNA, is extremely easy to leave behind and therefore generally considered more unreliable as evidence than other types of DNA. Investigators also found an unknown palm print on the door of the wine cellar where JonBenét was found.
So. What do we know about who that unknown person might be?
The other suspects
One of the frustrating aspects of this case is that if we’re looking for people who had access to the Ramseys’ house, the list is arguably endless; the Ramseys hosted a Christmas party for the tech company where John Ramsey was CEO a few days before the murder which saw hundreds of people coming in and out of the house. Other breadcrumbs in the case include multiple unverified allegations of a local child sex ring that led nowhere but gave plenty of fodder to conspiracy theorists.
Here are a few other frequently mentioned names associated with the case, some of which are likely to raise eyebrows.
Bill McReynolds, a.k.a. “Santa Bill”
A family friend of the Ramseys, Bill McReynolds was so good at playing Santa that he did it for three years in a row at the Ramseys’ annual Christmas party. According to Patsy in her book Death of Innocence, McReynolds, a retired journalism professor, asked her to throw the party in 1996 because he was filming a segment for famed CBS anchor Charles Kuralt’s news show and wanted JonBenét and her family to be part of it. McReynolds had a special friendship with JonBenét — so much so that, according to his wife, he took a vial of glitter she gave him with him into heart surgery.
This might all sound sweet and innocent, but it gains significance for several reasons. JonBenét had personally given McReynolds a tour of the Ramsey house, so he was familiar with the layout. Additionally, according to Laurence Schiller’s book Perfect Murder, Perfect Town, JonBenét had told family friend Barbara Kostanick just days before her murder that “Santa” had promised to come visit her “after Christmas.” According to Kostanick, JonBenét had emphasized that the visit was after Christmas and that it was to be a secret.
Chillingly, as a child, McReynolds’ own daughter and her best friend had been kidnapped exactly 22 years earlier, on December 26, 1974. Before they were located, McReynolds’ daughter’s friend had been sexually assaulted. The perpetrator was never caught. Because of these many coincidences, the Boulder police looked into McReynolds as a suspect. Ultimately, he was cleared after he claimed to have been miles away with his family during the time of the killing. He died, still a beloved community figure, in 2002. In interviews given since, his daughter has proclaimed his innocence, describing him as a kind and loving man “who just believed in magic.”
Linda Hoffman-Pugh
The Ramseys’ housekeeper, Linda Hoffman-Pugh, is an outlier among suspects because if she committed the crime, her motive would have been not sexual but financial and perhaps personal. The Pughs — her husband is often thought to have been an accomplice — were struggling financially, and Linda had recently asked and been granted a payday loan from Patsy. Under this theory, the Pughs would have genuinely intended to kidnap JonBenét for the ransom money — Linda would likely have known about John’s Christmas bonus, mentioned in the ransom note — and would have decided to stage a sexually motivated murder together after something went horribly wrong in the commission of the kidnapping.
There’s little concrete evidence to support this theory, however, despite the popularity of “LHP” as a suspect. Linda sued Patsy in 2002 over a passage in Patsy’s book in which Patsy described her as acting suspiciously, but the case was ultimately dismissed.
The predators: Gary Oliva, Randall Simons, and John Mark Karr
The Netflix series spends most of its final episode exploring several known predators who each have connections to the case. Gary Oliva is a convicted sex offender who confessed, in a series of letters written from prison in 2019, to murdering JonBenét. According to John Ramsey, Oliva, who lived in Boulder at the time, was a known suspect in the case early in the investigation. He was released from prison in January, was living as a transient, and has since reportedly fallen off the radar of officials. Oliva was known to have an obsession with the case and had a photo of JonBenét in his possession at the time of a 2000 arrest. In 2023, new handwriting analysis concluded that he was “very likely” the author of the ransom note.
Randall Simons seems to have been an under-investigated subject at the time of the murder, despite multiple parents expressing concern about his potential involvement, according to Berlinger’s docuseries. A photographer for many of JonBenét’s child pageants, he worked with her directly on multiple photoshoots and seemed to have a prurient interest in children that ultimately revealed itself when he was convicted on 15 counts of possession of child pornography in 2021 and sentenced to 10 years. Despite his having a history of assault charges prior to JonBenét’s murder, it’s unclear if he was properly investigated at the time.
John Mark Karr is famously the only person to have ever been arrested in the Ramsey case, though the evidence for his guilt seems to come down to his status as a known sex offender and a really disturbing interest in the case — including a creepy recorded rape fantasy that Berlinger subjects Netflix audiences to during the new docuseries. Despite being extradited to the US from Thailand to face charges for the murder, Karr’s DNA didn’t match anything found at the crime scene so he was released.
Again, only faint trace amounts of DNA were located in a crime scene that was hopelessly contaminated before it was ever locked down. So — as the new docuseries argues — trying to use it to eliminate anyone seems to be as impossible as everything else about the case.
