‘Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey’ Trailer Unearths Decades-Old Mystery

More than two decades after six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey was killed, Netflix has announced a three-part documentary examining the whodunit murder investigation. Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey traces the pageant princess’s murder along with how law enforcement and the media are alleged to have mishandled the case. Joe Berlinger, who worked on Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, directs the docuseries, which releases Nov. 25.

On the morning of Dec. 26, 1996, John and Patsy Ramsey discovered their daughter JonBenét was missing along with a chilling note. The same day, John Ramsey discovered his daughter’s body in their basement: a nylon cord wrapped around her neck, her wrists tied above her head, and her mouth taped shut. The six-year-old had been sexually assaulted and brutally murdered. As Boulder, Colorado, police hopped on the investigation, they began to look at Ramsey family members as suspects. A local and national media storm quickly ensued.

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Some believed a member of JonBenét’s family staged her death to look like a kidnapping, but DNA evidence in 2008 exonerated the immediate family members. Others believed former school teacher John Mark Karr, who confessed to the 1996 strangulation in 2006, as a prime suspect; the family housekeeper Linda Hoffman-Pugh; or the town’s Santa Claus Bill McReynolds as the potential killer. The Daily Mail reported in 2019 that longtime suspect and convicted pedophile Gary Olivia confessed to “accidentally” killing the six-year-old in a series of letters.

Around the cold case’s 20th anniversary, several networks released TV specials commemorating the contentious case: CBS’s aired The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey, A&E released The Killing of JonBenét: The Truth Uncovered, Lifetime dropped Who Killed JonBenét?, and Investigation Discovery released JonBenét: An American Murder Mystery.