Interviews

Q&A: Joe Berlinger Talks 'Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey?

Details: By Rick Ellis; Nov 25; 25 November 2024

In the annals of American true crime stories, the murder of JonBenet Ramsey is arguably one of the best-covered stories of its kind.

So in 2024, it's difficult to imagine what a producer could bring to the story that hasn't been said before.

Veteran documentarian and true crime producer Joe Berlinger doesn't appear intimidated by a difficult challenge, given that he has worked on previous projects that told the story of Ghislaine Maxwell, Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy. So I suppose it's not surprising that if someone is going to tackle the JonBenet story for Netflix, Berlinger would be the one to do it.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Berlinger about the docuseries, which tracks the case over three episodes from just before the death of JonBenet to the present day. He talked about the challenges of convincing some people to speak with him, as well as his disdain for some of the press coverage around the case.

The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Let's start at the beginning of the production process. The documentary is a go, it's time to start the work. How do you approach telling a story that is so well-known to people? Because I suspect nearly everyone has at least heard something about the case. They have an opinion about it. How do you, as a documentarian, approach this task of making it fresh and hopefully bringing something new?

Basically, my rule of thumb, especially on a platform like Netflix, which has a huge global audience, is that I tune out the noise of what everyone thinks, what everyone says, and everyone's opinion. And I recognize that I'm generally going for a younger audience anyway, and I generally take the position that this is the definitive take on the story, regardless of what's been out there before.

So you have to serve two audiences at once. One audience is a very large global audience who barely knows the story, believe it or not. And then, you know, all the people who have massive opinions.

But I tell the story from beginning to end through a fresh perspective, a fresh lens. Looking at it from a 2024 perspective.

Did you have an opinion about the case going in? And I'm wondering if that opinion changed by the time the project was over.

Well, I would say I had a different opinion when the case first hit. And by the time I decided to make a show, because we don't just snap our fingers and say, hey, let's do something on JonBenét. I want to make sure I have something to say.

A big part of my wanting to do the show was my being introduced to the work of Lou Smith, the detective who firmly believes in the intruder theory. Obviously I had heard of his work before because it was castigated in the 2016 CBS show that resulted in a $750 million defamation lawsuit against them because of how irresponsible that show was and pointing a finger at Burke. You know, Lou Smith did amazing work and logical work.

But I will say back in '96, I was the father of a two-year-old daughter and already making films. I had just finished Paradise Lost, ironically about a wrongful conviction. But at the time, I kind of bought into the media hype and thought to myself, God, my daughter as a two-year-old is very cute, but I would never expose her to beauty pageants.

I had all the same judgment, all the same misinformation, and I didn't dig into the case until much later. So I think my journey went from buying into the horrible, horribly irresponsible reporting and horribly irresponsible actions of the Boulder Police Department, feeding false information to smoke out the Ramseys. I had bought into that and why I wanted to tell the story was the realization that things are so different from that perspective.

And also, this is not the reason I did the show per se, and this theme is not really, I wouldn't say is discernible to the viewer. But for years, I have been extremely concerned with the lessening of journalistic standards, and the rise of social media as our news source. Ironically, it's one of the things I kind of predicted, if you will, the dangers of blurring the line between entertainment and news when I did the sequel to The Blair Witch Project back in 2000. Which everyone hated, but now is being rediscovered and people are liking it because they understand that that perspective was an important perspective.

But the JonBenét Ramsey case, along with OJ and a few others, were foundational cases for the lessening of journalistic standards and the rise of opinion journalism that we see today, which actually, I think has torn the country apart. Without taking sides on the election, you have half the country, well now, a little less than half the country, and the other little more majority of the country who see the world in two very different ways and believe the truth about the opposite of each other when it comes to who's destroying democracy, basic facts about COVID. I mean, we live in an era where there's like the death of truth.

And that, as a storyteller and a journalist, deeply concerned me. And it all began in this JonBenét Ramsey era of tabloid journalism. You know, there was once a very sacrosanct line between the news division of a network, which was delivering news as a public service in exchange for its FCC license, and the entertainment divisions of networks that were there to make money.

And somewhere along the line, in the early 90s, with the explosion of cable networks, with the advent of the 24-hour news cycle, and with network presidents realizing, hey, news can make money. Let's do everything we can to make news, you know, blur the line between news and entertainment. You saw just irresponsible storytelling or news reporting.

And that's what hurt the Ramseys so much, was just bad reporting as a result of an inexperienced police force having tunnel vision and leaking false stories and bias to the press, you know.

One of the ironic things about this case is, as you know, everyone has a conspiracy theory about it. They're just all different theories.

And most of them defy logic. I mean, look, anyone who thinks the Ramseys are guilty, and there's lots we can discuss. I mean, if you pick up a rock and look at anybody's life, there are going to be things that circumstantially seem out of place, but only circumstantially.

You need corroborating evidence. Every case I've ever worked on has that. So you have to apply some logic.

And so, to me, the fact that JonBenét, it's indisputable, she was tortured while she was still alive. It's just unbelievable to think that over a bedwetting incident, Patsy Ramsey fashioned a garrote, put it around her neck, and tugged, you see finger marks, bruising from her fingers, trying to release the pressure on her neck. She had vaginal bleeding.

And so, to me, the fact that JonBenét, it's indisputable, she was tortured while she was still alive. It's just unbelievable to think that over a bedwetting incident, Patsy Ramsey fashioned a garrote, put it around her neck, tugged, you see finger marks, bruising from her fingers, trying to release the pressure on her neck. She had vaginal bleeding.

I mean, to think that over a bedwetting incident, this is what the parents would do? To think that a nine-year-old Burke would have the strength? I mean, he was dismissed by the authorities back then, and yet still people are hanging on to the Burke theory.

But to me, how she died is the most obvious reason that the parents weren't involved. And the other human factor, which, you could argue with maybe, but John Ramsey has been unrelenting. To this day, he is still pounding the table with Boulder to get this solved.

He was very willing to sit down and do an interview with us. No subject was off-limit. He had no editorial control or involvement at all. He was not paid a penny. And he was very willing to work with us. So that is not the actions of a murderer.

And it's cruel to continue to pound on the idea that the family is responsible. Can you imagine? And this man, I think, deserves like five Purple Hearts.

He lost his daughter from a previous marriage in a car wreck. JonBenet was the daughter who arrived to help the family ease through that pain. She's brutally murdered.

Patsy has ovarian cancer. It's in remission, but all the blaming of her had to have had an impact. And the death of her daughter had to have an impact on that cancer coming back.

There was a Gallup poll done at the time where 70% of Americans thought that this family was guilty and were covering up. And to this day, when I'm at a dinner party, and tell people I'm working on this project, they tell me, "Oh, yeah, I remember that story. The parents killed their daughter, and they were really weird with beauty pageants. It's just not right."

So the main reason I decided to do the show is that there is an opportunity to solve the case if the Boulder Police Department asks for outside help, which they historically have not done for three decades. There is a new regime in place, and they're friendlier and saying the right things. But to this day, we don't know what they've done.

The Colorado Bureau of Investigation made some recommendations about how to solve this case to the Boulder Police. That was a year ago. We still don't know if they've taken any steps to do that.

But there's some very specific things that they can and should be done and that might solve the crime. Old items that were tested need to be retested because technology has changed. Certain items were sent to the crime lab that were never tested.

Those need to be tested. And to me, the most compelling thing that needs to be done is the DNA that has dogged this case, and the police tried to explain away and minimize, is that there was DNA found in JonBenet's underpants, foreign male unidentified DNA mixed with the blood of the victim. And that mixture made it hard to identify, to get the right number of markers to really do an accurate identification.

It was fed into CODIS, but it's a limited amount of information. And CODIS itself is a limited database of known sex offenders. There is now technology that can separate the foreign DNA from the blood DNA of JonBenet, and it needs different data points to then be fed into genealogical DNA, the 23andMe type of DNA, which identifies family DNA.

And that's been a miraculous tool in cold cases recently. What is the problem with not getting that done? Where are we on that?

Do you have a sense of why they're so reluctant? Just looking it at from the outside, being a casual observer, I had the impression that the more press there was, the less likely they were to cooperate with questions people had about it. They just shut down at some point and weren't going to cooperate anymore.

Well, you know, I'm sure there are good people everywhere. I don't want to castigate everybody, but that having been said, one of the fascinating things for me for this case and kind of my aha moment of why I wanted to do it is I have spent a good deal of my career focusing on wrongful convictions. You know, The West Memphis Three, Paradise Lost, are the most well-known of my work in that space.

But I've actually gotten six people, or I should say a lot of people have gotten six people out of prison. You know, all the unsung heroes of the Innocence Project, et cetera, and the defense attorneys. But my work has been a catalyst for getting six people out of prison, two of whom are on death row.

And another dozen cases I've shined a light on that have helped move the needle forward in a glacially slow system for getting post-conviction relief. And I've noticed just the same pattern that is present in the JonBenet Ramsey case, and that is a local police force that is inexperienced. I don't want to use the word inept.

I will say inexperienced. I mean, the JonBenet Ramsey case happened on December 26th, 1996, and that was the first murder of the year. So that shows you how many murders there used to be.

The lead detective came from the narcotics division. And you see this. It was true in Paradise Lost, the West Memphis Police Department.

Guys who don't have the experience, finally have the opportunity, they get tunnel vision and lock into an idea and then have tunnel vision about it. And it's just human nature, sadly, that they don't move off of that opinion. They refuse outside help.

You see that all the time in these cases. You see all the time prosecutors who are otherwise decent people, I'm sure, and I don't think they have nefarious goals. It's just human nature.

You see prosecutors all the time fighting applications for DNA testing in post-conviction hearings. Why on earth, if you're so sure that the person you put on death row is guilty, why would you not want yet one more confirmation of that through DNA testing? Because God forbid, if you're wrong, you're going to put somebody to death who's innocent.

But you see that all the time. I mean, it takes sometimes a decade of legal battles to have DNA finally get retested or tested in a murder case, and then sometimes people are exonerated. I mean, 20, I believe, 20 people have been exonerated from death row because of DNA testing.

So most cases don't have DNA. Most cases don't have a lot of trouble getting that DNA testing approved. And yet, despite all those hurdles, 20 people who were going to be put to death on death row were exonerated through DNA testing.

So you just see these patterns, and I think these patterns were present on this case. At a time when the media landscape exploded in all of this irresponsible journalism, and it has just set a pattern in people's minds of their guilt. But if you study the autopsy report, it's just illogical that this was, you know, Patsy Ramsey in a fit of rage because JonBenét wet her bed.

It's just nuts to me.

You touch on it some in the documentary, but looking back, it feels like you could do an entire documentary just on the press coverage of the case. You could probably do a case just on Nancy Grace's coverage alone. There was a lot going on, and it's really hard to show people in 2024 what it was like back then, how it was just everywhere in the press. You couldn't turn on a TV or open a newspaper without seeing something about the case.

Yeah, it's why the cold open of episode two is, to me, one of the lowest points in media history when Geraldo Rivera does a mock trial. And this expert talks about how JonBenét was masturbating with a saxophone. It's just a cute little girl rocking back and forth.

It's like the fact that she saw masturbation as her problem, not the truth of the matter, and that stuff just had an impact, you know? We also now live in a very fractured media environment, but back then, people got their news a certain way, and you reached a large swath of people. We have so many choices today of how we get our news, which is a problem, too.

But it was nonstop false stories.

You talked about how John Ramsey was more than willing to do this. He wanted to talk about the case and the whole situation. Was everyone that open to the idea? Because, obviously, the detectives, other people associated with the case, a lot of these people frankly went through hell during the case. And I'm wondering how open they were to revisiting it a couple decades down the road.

Most of the original investigators, honestly, had no interest in participating. We went back and forth with Steve Thomas a lot, but I think he just felt...legally, he had concerns, because, of course, he was the subject of a defamation lawsuit. However, I think somebody who has the nerve to go on Larry King, sitting next to the mother of a murder victim and accuse them of murder with his bedwetting theory, should have had the courage to come onto our show and tell his story.

Well, at least you were able to use that clip, which, honestly, I had forgotten about, and seeing that again, it was very cringey to watch it. It's just...

Oh, my God, it's just... Those two media moments, Steve Thomas accusing Patsy, and, again, I'm sure he believes it. I'm sure he believes it to this day.

I don't think he was doing anything other than thinking he was being a good investigator, but he obviously wasn't, in that case, anyway. But the Geraldo Rivera mock trial - to cause that kind of pain to a family and then to accuse a mother on national TV, it just boggles my mind. I mean, there have been a lot of media lows, but those two really stand out.

As a documentarian, I suspect it's a certain kind of challenge to go into a project knowing at the end of the day, you're not going to have that Perry Mason moment that you can show of someone saying, "Hi, I did it, I confess," or whatever. It's going to be ambiguous at the end. And so, how challenging does that make it for you?

That's a good question. I mean, I know I'm going to get raked over the coals by some people who firmly believe these theories. For me, it's enough of a conclusion that the family is unequivocally not involved.

So, that to me is a conclusion because most people think the opposite. And also the call to action, that's why I'm being so vocal in this interview. We're very vocal about it in the show.

This case can be solved and it's time to do the proper testing. It's time for bolder authorities to accept outside help because these very sophisticated tests cannot be done in government labs. You need outside specialty labs and they need to be asked to do it.

And it's time to get this case solved.

Do you think that that's what viewers will take away from the documentary? Because as you know, viewers take away their own messages from these things, maybe not the one that you want. Do you think that this will help along those lines of forcing the Boulder City Police to be more cooperative?

I hope enough people will be outraged that they'll make their voices heard and that I hope the right people in Colorado see this.

But, you can't worry about how people interpret stuff. My previous show on Netflix about the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, a lot of people liked it and got it. Then there were lots of people on social media saying that I'm an agent of Israel and Israel paid me to do the documentary.

So I can't worry about what people think. I care what the right people think and I care about moving the needle on this case. But, I'm sure a lot of people, including people who have appreciated my other work, will think I've taken a wrong turn here by not blaming Patsy Ramsey for putting a garrote around her daughter's neck and torturing her and putting a...breaking a paintbrush and inserting it into her private parts and...it's just nuts.

I'm curious, is there a story, a case that's sort of your white whale? You think with the right timing, the right money, this is the story I would love to be able to tell?

I just generally, as a policy, don't like to talk about the future work. I'm going to give you an unsatisfying answer. To say, you know, we've got some stuff coming up.

Because I think it gets in the way sometimes of actually doing the work. Once people know there's a show, other people come along and want to do a competitive show or it hurts your ability to get access.

So I just, just as a policy, I don't talk about stuff that I'm working on, but...

Let me try it from sort of a slightly different direction. Is there something someone else has done where you thought that was a really good story? I wish I would have done that or they just did a really good job.

The Menendez documentary. I was kind of jealous. I didn't do that one.

I'm not talking about the Ryan Murphy Menendez project, I actually haven't seen it. But the documentary about the Menendez Brothers, that was one where I thought, eh, that would have been interesting to do.

But they did a great job. So I don't think I would... Obviously, I'm not saying I would have done it better, but it would have been interesting to work on.

Cold Case: Who Killed Jon Benet Ramsey? premieres Monday, November 25th, 2024 on Netflix.