Introducing Netflix Original Documentary Casting JonBenet

People love true crime stories. We can’t help ourselves. We imagine ourselves as armchair sleuths, picking up nuggets of information that may have originally been missed. This is why we especially love unsolved true crime tales. What if we can get to the bottom of it all? Can we uncover new evidence? Is there a new confession? Will the case finally offer a satisfying, shocking conclusion?

Netflix has been making some incredible documentaries. Hoping to add another stunner to their library, we are given Casting JonBenet. This original documentary looks at the legacy of one of the most famous unsolved crimes in the world. Below we take an in-depth look at the documentary and give a preview of what to expect.

For those of you not in the know, on the morning of December 26, 1996, Patsy Ramsey rises early to find a ransom note on the back staircase of their home. She rushes upstairs to discover her 6 year-old daughter JonBenet is missing. She wakes the household and they contact the authorities. Friends, neighbors, police swarm the house in search of an answer as to what is happening. During the melee, an officer asks John, JonBenet’s father, to search the house for anything unusual. In the basement they find the young girl’s body, bound and cold. What followed was a media frenzy.

JonBenet Ramsey

Behind The Series

From the very beginning the details of the case were just begging to be picked apart. There’s certainly no shortage of Lifetime type movies, investigative reporting shows, and other material about the murder. But this documentary from Kitty Green is different. Instead of taking archival footage and digging into cloudy facts, Green interviews dozens of Colorado regional actors as they audition to play the family at the heart of the crime. She gets the unique perspective of the people closest to the story. Over the course of the film, the participants share not just their own hunches and suspicions about what happened that morning after Christmas, but also personal revelations about themselves and why the case resonates with them so deeply 20 years later.