How Did JonBenét Ramsey Die? Her Autopsy Reveals the Gruesome Details Behind Her Murder

Netflix’s new documentary Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey focuses on one of the most high-profile unsolved murder cases in the last half-century. JonBenét Ramsey was killed on Christmas Day in 1996 and to this day there is no clear indication of what happened to her or who killed her. Her body was found by her father John Ramsay in the basement of the house the family lived in.

Hours before, her mother Patsy Ramsey, called the police to report a ransom note discovered at the bottom of a staircase on the morning of December 26, 1996. Police arrived at the house and after an initial search by the family, the body was not found. A second search, however, revealed the body of JonBenét Ramsey and started an investigation that, for many years, would focus on the former child beauty queen’s family, particularly her brother Burke.

Related: What was the evidence in the JonBenét Ramsey case?

There was never any clear evidence to tie the girl’s family to the murder, only circumstantial one, and the hypothesis of Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey is that the family had nothing to do with it. John Ramsey, JonBenét’s father, even appears in the documentary, aggressively asking for further investigation into his daughter’s murder.

“What we are advocating for—and have been doing so for the last year or so, aggressively, is we know there’s five or six items that were taken from the crime scene. They were sent into a lab for DNA sampling and were not sampled,” John Ramsey explained in the Netflix documentary. “We want those items sampled. We want what has been sampled to be retested. Then use the public genealogy database to look for — not only a match — but a similar relative,” he added. “That’s been used very successfully in the last few years by police departments to find the killer of very old cold cases.”

What did the original JonBenét Ramsey autopsy report say? What did the police know and when?

JonBenét Ramsey autopsy details