Season 1 |
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Episode Guide
Keep Your Babies Close
Umbrella of Suspicion
The Truth is Going to Prevail
The murder of 6 year old JonBenet Ramsey rocked the quiet town of Boulder, Colorado, causing a ripple of shock to ensue across the entire nation. Nearly 30 years since her murder, Netflix are here to recap and dive into this cold case once again, trying to shed new light on this and putting it to bed once and for all. If you’re familiar with this case though and have been following this for a while, you’re unlikely to garner much in the way of new information. Regardless though, this is undoubtedly a compelling deep dive all the same.
Split across three episodes, the show centers on the kidnapping and murder of JonBenét Patricia Ramsey. An American child beauty queen, she was killed in her family’s home on the night of December 25th 1996.
Her body was found in the basement about seven hours after she had been reported missing, with a ransom note in the kitchen and father John being the one to actually find her.
JonBenet had sustained a broken skull, and a garrote was tied around her neck. The autopsy report stated that JonBenét’s official cause of death was “asphyxia by strangulation associated with craniocerebral trauma”. This single bit of information led to an influx of media speculation and drama.
As one retired journalist tells us in episode 1, this homicide brought “a wave of adrenaline as you know it’s a big story”. In true media fashion, fingers are immediately pointed but eventually settle on parents, John and Patsy, thanks to some dodgy evidence and a couple of seemingly dodgy developments. However, there’s definitely a balanced perspective here with episode 1 exploring the Ramsey’s hiring lawyers immediately and keeping quiet. It does look dodgy on the outside, but John explains here that he received a tip-off about being pinned for the murders so pre-emptively remained vigilant.
This balanced perspective certainly helps this documentary a lot, and around the case being recapped and explored, we see numerous archival news reports, interviews with detectives and journos involved with the case, and even a 3D diagram showing the design of the Ramsey house so you get an idea of how everything ties together.
The first episode basically works to lay the groundwork for the case itself, before the second moves into the theory against John and Patsy along with the possibility that JonBenet’s murder occurred at their hands.
The third and final chapter then moves beyond this, recapping how the Boulder police’s handling of the case before diving into various different theories around quite who the killer could actually be. It’s here where we see multiple names spring up, including one man, John Mark Karr, who may have been the real culprit. Each of these theories are followed, eventually leading to a culmination of where we are with the case to this day.
Unsurprisingly (given the name of this documentary) the case is still open, and there’s definitely question marks around this one. Whether we’ll ever get definitive proof one way or another is up for debate but one thing’s clear – Netflix’s docu-series is about as thorough an examination of this case as you could get. Sure, it re-treads familiar ground and doesn’t really provide anything new, but it does bring everything together into a compelling, three-part documentary.
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Verdict - 7.5/10
7.5/10