COURT TV is rushing a new special about the JonBenet Ramsey case onto the air this week, in the wake of Patsy Ramsey’s death last weekend.
The one-hour special – titled “JonBenet: Anatomy of a Cold Case” – will air tomorrow night at 10, months before it was supposed to run.
“We’ve been planning this and working on it for probably close to a year,” said Ed Hersh, executive vice president of current programming and specials for Court TV.
“You always want a hook to run something, and this Christmas will be the 10th anniversary [of JonBenet’s murder] so we were probably going to air it closer to then.” Six-year-old JonBenet was found dead – with her skull fractured and a crude garrote embedded in her neck – in the basement of the Ramsey home in Boulder, Colo., on Christmas Day 1996.
The case, which has never been solved, became one of the most high-profile crime stories of its era, with TV news outlets repeatedly airing video footage of the little girl performing in elaborate costumes in kiddie beauty pageants.
Some of that footage is seen again in Court TV’s new special, which is produced by author/ filmmaker Lawrence Schiller, who wrote a well-regarded book on the case, “Perfect Murder, Perfect Town: The Uncensored Story of the JonBenet Murder and the Grand Jury’s Search for the Truth.” But the pageant footage is only a small part of this new special, which brings viewers up-to-date on where the JonBenet investigation stands now.
The news isn’t good: Barring any unforeseen lucky breaks, investigators are as far away from solving the crime as they have ever been. In short, the trail in the JonBenet case has run cold, the special concludes.
And the reasons for that go all the way back to Christmas morning, 1996, when Patsy Ramsey first discovered a ransom note that said her daughter had been kidnapped.
Thinking that JonBenet had been taken from the house, law-enforcement officials trampled through the house inadvertently destroying evidence which might have been there.
It was only later, when JonBenet’s body was found, that the house was declared a crime scene.
In the months and years following the crime, Boulder police suspected JonBenet’s parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, while investigators in the district attorney’s office believed an unknown intruder had killed the little girl.
And now, the death of JonBenet’s mother of cancer at age 49 has revived interest in the case.
“Patsy Ramsey’s death has once again put this case back into watercooler discussion, so we thought this week would be a good time to run this,” Hersh said.
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