The House on 15th Street: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey?

On the morning of December 26, 1996, Patsy Ramsey walked downstairs to make coffee and found three pages of handwritten paper on the back staircase. Her six-year-old daughter JonBenét was gone from her bedroom. The note demanded $118,000 — the exact amount her husband had received as a bonus that year. It had been written on Patsy's own notepad, with a pen from their kitchen. Seven hours later, John Ramsey found his daughter's body in the basement of their own house, behind a door a police officer had walked past that morning and chose not to open.

This episode follows the JonBenét Ramsey case from its opening hours through twenty-nine years of investigation, forensic science, and competing theories. We go through the ransom note and what FBI analysts said about it, the autopsy and what the medical evidence established, the crime scene contamination that haunts every subsequent analysis, the two detectives who reached opposite conclusions and each resigned over it, the grand jury that voted to indict John and Patsy Ramsey — whose indictment was kept secret for fourteen years — and the 2008 DNA evidence that led the then-District Attorney to formally apologize to the Ramsey family. And we look at where the case stands today: dozens of items being retested, genetic genealogy being applied, and a police chief who says his direction to his department is to leave no stone unturned.