What Netflix’s Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey Leaves Out

Beyond the obviou$ one, there is little reason for Netflix‘s Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey to exist. Nearly 30 years after the tragic murder of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey, the case remains as cold as the fateful Boulder, Colorado night on which it occurred.

Despite the lack of fresh developments (or maybe because of it), the true crime-consuming public remains captivated with the story of this innocent child pageant participant killed in her upper class family’s home on Christmas night in 1996. Countless online forums are singularly devoted to solving the mystery that has beguiled so many professional investigators for years. JonBenét sleuthing is more than a cottage industry, it’s its own culture nestled within the larger true crime phenomenon. It’s only natural then that streaming titan Netflix would want to break into that conversatoin. Hell, it has done so already with 2017 documentary Casting JonBenet. What’s one more docuseries on top of that?

The problem with that latest effort, Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey, though, is that there is truly nothing left for it to say after decades of other, better articulations of the case. In lieu of anything novel to report, Cold Case largely hands the mic over to one of the chief players involved, JonBenét’s father John Ramsey, and invites him to share his narrative alongside a handful of sympathetic interviewees.

This is not to say John Ramsey’s story is unimportant. Though true crime devotees often view him and the rest of the family as chief suspects due to the crime’s “locked-room mystery” nature, the Ramseys remain very much Not Guilty in the eyes of the law. But his perspective is just that: a perspective. Longtime followers of the JonBenét Ramsey case have more than enough testimony to wade through. What they’re in the market for is more evidence. This three-episode Netflix series, directed by Making a Murderer‘s Joe Berlinger, is unable to provide that. Perhaps nothing can.