It was during the week before finals, where watching the Great British Baking Show is infinitely more exciting than reviewing the same PowerPoint over and over again, that I stumbled upon the trailer for a documentary entitled “The Casting of JonBenet." In truth, it took me a while to remember exactly why I had heard that name before. JonBenet Ramsey is not a common name, and the tragedy that surrounded the 6-year-old’s murder was apparently strong enough to warrant a fresh new take this year.
Released on April 28, 2017 and with almost a month to spread through the masses of people who have placed this new release on their "watch later" lists, the project directed by Kitty Green brings to light once again the question that people have been asking since December 26 of 1996: who killed JonBenet?
The young Ramsey’s murder case was wrought with conflicting evidence and a barrage of strange behavior from her family, who people immediately looked to as the potential main culprits. Was it the mother, the father, the brother whom the parents then helped protect? The ransom note came from a notepad inside their house, the mother had a history of semi-aggressive behavior, and the brother could have accidentally fractured her skull, leaving the parents scrambling to help conceal the nature of their youngest child's murder. Or was it Mark Karr, completely unrelated to the family who had followed young JonBenet’s brief career as a beauty queen? All of these ideas are discussed in Green's documentary, and the people that Green chooses to interview are not what people would normally expect from a documentary of this kind. It strays from the “Making a Murderer” style of talking directly to the suspects. She draws from the surrounding Boulder, CO area, people who had known the family, but no one that had been directly involved in the case itself. And everyone had their own theories as to what happened.
This sort of speculation seems harmless enough now. It’s odd to think of how interested I could be in someone who died before they even had a chance to truly impact the world; someone who both lived and died in the same decade that I was born in. It explains why my interest was piqued as much as it was upon watching the trailer for this film. It was and is the same way for just as many other people about the case of JonBenet. Found murdered in her home on Christmas day after her mother reported her kidnapping and a note was found requesting a ransom, the entirely strange circumstances of her death lends itself to becoming a national speculation. There were theories everywhere, and there still are since no one was ever found guilty for her murder despite a substantial amount of evidence being presented. Everyone had wanted justice for different reasons.
But it became everyone wanting justice for their own theories, and not for JonBenet. People have become accustomed to catering, and people have become accustomed to catering to an audience. JonBenet’s death and her ensuing murder case is evidence of all that. It had one of the biggest audiences since cases like the Black Dahlia’s or the Lizzie Borden cases, and news outlets and magazines all over the country capitalized on that.
They turned the murder of a child into the Clue movie; turned it into a conceptualized “whodunit” fiasco that was never able to be solved. When I went to research for the finite facts of the case, the first articles I was coming across all held titles like “10 People Who Might Have Killed JonBenet and Why?” or “How to Get Away With Murder: the Case of JonBenet.” It was almost impossible to find information on the case that wasn’t another fad story or something created to stir up drama or get views. News outlets especially capitalized off of this case, publishing article after article on speculations simply to drive up their popularity, and as a result stir up even more questions in the general public.
And still, what this documentary did once again to the case of JonBenet was to draw attention to its own spectacle. It wouldn’t go without saying that this movie once again did what nearly every single news outlet has done to JonBenet. They once again brought her case to the forefront of people’s attention, a case over twenty years old. While the documentary once again stipulates the same ideas that have been presented, the documentary doesn’t do anything for the actual case of JonBenet. The documentary itself acts for the people’s confusion, their diverse understanding of what happened, and how that correlated into the final decisions that were made within the court system under the national pressure they were facing to make not only a decision, but the right decision. JonBenet’s case became one of an irresponsible audience.
What the movie does well that no article written about JonBenet has done is blatantly obvious in the final scene of the film, which I won’t spoil for anyone who has yet to have watched the documentary. The film doesn’t focus on garnering input from the family or those directly involved or suspected in the case. It draws, instead, from the public. It takes the perspectives of the very same people that turned this case into what it became: a fad. A highly intriguing and emotional fad, but a fad nonetheless. They all have their own theories, and their own interpretations. But this film doesn’t shy away from this fact. It pushes this idea to the forefront. It doesn’t mock the people that it interviews, but it sympathizes with the frustrations, the different interpretations that people have formed because of the elusive nature of this case.
It cannot be denied that the courts failed in the investigation of this case, but a big part of it is because so many people were so quick to dive into theories, posting them online and spreading rumors that may have very well impeded the progress of her case. So many people wanted their own form of justice, wanted their own theories to be verified, acknowledged as correct. These people, most of which had never even met the young girl, held a voice in the decisions made in her court ruling and in the immense spread of the details of the case, whether they were real or mere speculation. The inability of the courts to avoid sparking more public outrage with a final decision may have inadvertently inhibited the final rulings of this case.
So does it matter who killed JonBenet? It absolutely does. It also matters why, and how, and when, and every other detail of the case that I struggled to find through the outpouring of theory articles and rumors that I had to sift through in order to find any real information on this case. What is even more important, in the cases like these, is that external speculation and external voices don’t impede the justice that JonBenet’s case deserved. This film’s take on the documentary style exemplifies that, but it invariably draws attention back to the craze that her murder caused, and however unwitting it was, used that fad to lend itself to its own popularity. The fad and craze that this murder caused not only made “whodunit” impossible to truly figure out, but ended up stamping it into irrelevance, with no one being held accountable in the end.
