The Killing of JonBenet Ramsey

I have followed this case literally since I was a child and have read all the books out there- Watched all the documentaries and shows. This podcast is absolutely the best. Lots of new information/evidence was divulged in this series that I had NEVER read or heard of before! Very impressed and it’s good to hear from her older brother, John. Prior to this, I always believed the older siblings (aside from Burke) were absolutely not interested in participating in anyway- this was refreshing. Good for them. She deserves justice, they all do.

This is a great podcast. It's nice to hear about all of the evidence that was ignored and left out by the Boulder PD and the media. Lou Smit was amazing. It's a shame that the family is still blamed after all of these years. People want them to be guilty. It's sickening and sad. Thank you for revealing the truth !

There is so much out there on this case and this is by far the best version I’ve ever heard. I hope they find the person who did this before her dad passed. He deserves to have closure after a lifetime of this.

I learned a few new things. I had no idea John had received a heads up by one of his employees about the cops wanting to blame him for the murder of his daughter. I hear a different version of the “facts” each time I hear an interview. Some of the logic used to come up with the suspects is contradictory to the logic used to absolve the Ramseys. Apparently for some people the DNA can rule out the Ramsey family but doesn’t rule out some others. There are some far reaching suspects on the list. I suppose when it comes to solving the case it doesn’t matter how unlikely the suspect. The police really messed this up from the beginning, this little girl may never have justice. I would like to have the confidence to know her family is innocent but I’m not convinced. Either an intruder did it or a family member and only the culprit knows.

This show really misses the mark in a few important ways, chief among them: it allows the “experts” to make assertions without any pushback or breakdown of the facts. For instance, at one point an expert says that the ransom note was conclusively proved to not have matched of the Ramsey’s handwriting, which is misleading at best. It’s completely one-sided, and no effort is made to explain any of the very concerning issues that caused people to look at the family.

I went into this a completely blank slate and sought out a podcast during a long road trip to understand the case. Not only does this podcast do a poor job at laying out the basic facts of the case, but it is possibly the most biased piece of media I’ve ever consumed. I understand wanting the people in this family to be innocent, I truly do. But in order to debunk internet theorists, you actually need to engage with those arguments to deconstruct them and ultimately disprove them. There is no good-faith effort of doing that, at least in the first 3-4 episodes I could stomach before I turned it off completely. This bad faith effort doesn’t do the family justice and it certainly doesn’t do that little girl justice. Even if the father’s name is all over it, it feels like a great deal of the creative control and intellectual honesty was lost when they gained that level of access to the family. It felt like incoherent streams of consciousness from various people about what everybody at the PD did to handle the case did wrong. Meanwhile, the crime scene was completely messed up by the people in that home and nobody was like “man, in hindsight, that wasn’t a great idea.” The father was indignant and insulted that anybody would even DARE question his contaminating the scene. I can acknowledge that the trauma this man faced is something I can never comprehend, but the complete lack of introspection or humility this man displayed was staggering and very “rich white dude trying to control the narrative by any means necessary.” One person was described as a “Jonbenet expert” which is kind of bizarre, no credentials given. No book title, articles, or relationship to this girl — just a pundit for a six year old’s murder. Fine, whatever. Then the experts were saying the most moralistic garbage like “the father couldn’t have done it because he’s a god-fearing man.” That’s obviously not an uncommon thing for somebody say in true crime when being interviewed about a suspect, but it’s usually paired with genuine attempts to filter out all of the noise and get more clarity on the case. That is not done here. This is bad reporting. This is bad storytelling. Your media company should feel bad.