For 30 years, the world was sold a lie about the murder of JonBenét Ramsey.

On Boxing Day in 1996, a six-year-old girl was found murdered in the basement of her family's home in Boulder, Colorado.

Her name was JonBenét Ramsey. She was a murdered former beauty pageant child who now belongs in the upper echelon of true crime conspiracies.

It didn't start as a murder investigation.

JonBenét's mother Patsy discovered a ransom note demanding $118,000 for JonBenét's return and once she realised her daughter was missing from her bedroom, she called 911. It wasn't until long after police arrived that JonBenét's father, John, found her body in the basement during a house search.

The child had been strangled with a garrote made from a nylon cord and paintbrush handle, and suffered a skull fracture. The autopsy revealed she was sexually assaulted and died from asphyxiation by strangulation combined with head trauma.

Despite extensive investigations, countless documentaries and public speculation spanning almost 30 years, the case remains unsolved.

A new Netflix documentary, Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey, by director Joe Berlinger is presenting new findings.

Watch the trailer. Post continues after video.

The three-part series seeks to scrutinise the prevailing public opinion that it was JonBenét's family — her mum Patsy, father John, or brother Burke — who had sexually assaulted and murdered the six-year-old.

The series features candid interviews with John Ramsey, who is now aged in his 80s. Patsy died from ovarian cancer, in 2006.

The biggest revelations in Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey.

The documentary effectively casts an ugly light on just how destructive the media attention was in this case, which immediately villainised JonBenét's parents without any real evidence to incriminate the couple.

"People hated the Ramseys," investigative journalist Paula Woodward said in the docuseries. "It was because of the information that had come out about them that was incorrect."

This began with Detective Linda Arndt, who was present at the scene when John discovered JonBenét's body in the basement. He went looking through the house at the request of Arndt, who said she was 'giving him something to do', and he chose to start in the basement.

When John entered the basement, he immediately found JonBenét and carried her up the stairs.

In Arndt's opinion, it was suspicious that he had immediately found her. However, he says it was the logical place to start looking for clues as it was accessible from outside. It's important to note the police on scene did not look in the basement during their sweep.

Arndt went on ABC News and told the hosts she "knew" John had killed his daughter by the "look in his eye," casting doubt over the entire family.

 "We didn't act right in the eyes of this so-called detective," John reflected in the Netflix documentary.

What followed was the Boulder police casting doubt on the legibility of the ransom note.

"I was going through the notebook that contained Patsy's handwriting, and I came across an entire sheet of paper in the notebook still attached with what appeared to be the initial ransom note," retired Boulder police detective, Jeff Kithcart, said.

"I was shocked to find that. It appeared that the ransom note was written from that notebook in the Ramsey household."

After comparing writing samples, the police believed Patsy had written the ransom note. "Very early on, there was (a) massive police leaking that Patsy Ramsey had written the ransom note," Woodward claimed.

However, Bob Whitson, a former police official, said that several experts found that Patsy did not write the note.

Then more suspicions were raised over the Ramseys' theory that an intruder had entered from the basement window, with information leaked to the media claiming that there were no footsteps in the snow to support this hypothesis.

But those present at the time have since confirmed there was no snow on this day.

John Ramsey has long argued that his daughter was killed by an intruder. Image: Netflix.

A veteran investigator, Lou Smit, who helped Boulder's district attorney with the case, has long maintained the intruder theory is the only one that made sense. "Clearly there's evidence of an intruder," he said in old audio clips. "I say this over and over and over again. Nobody wants to listen."

During this time, as speculation grew the Ramseys stopped cooperating with the police and recruited a legal council which only spurred on the speculation around their involvement in the murder.

John reflected that at the time, the family was "followed by the media everywhere. We'd stay with friends and within a day or two, the house would just be surrounded by cameras and people banging on the door and the windows."

The police continued to leak stories to the media, who continued to feed the theory that the parents were to blame. "[They] took these little bits of information, twisted them around, and then gave it to these few media reporters who said, 'Hey, I'll go with it,'" Woodward said.

The lead detective on the case, Steve Thomas, would later resign from the Boulder police department in 1998, and he wrote in his resignation letter that "the primary reason I chose to leave is my belief that the district attorney's office continues to mishandle the Ramsey case."

"What I witnessed for two years of my life was so fundamentally flawed, it reduced me to tears. Everything the badge ever meant to me was so foundationally shaken."

As the narrative around the case continued to spiral, the story was capitalised on for TV. In one infamous moment in 1997, a mock trial was conducted on daytime TV by Geraldo Rivera to decide in the court of public opinion if the parents were responsible for their daughter's death.

JonBenét's pageant days were the subject of harsh criticism. Image: Netflix.

It was on this show that a particularly disturbing scene played out, as a woman identified as 'a child abuse expert' said that during a pageant performance, JonBenét had acted out a sex act.

"She picks up a saxophone and for the next minute and a half, she masturbates with it," she said.

The episode then flashed to JonBenét's performance, with the child innocently pretending to play the instrument with no sexual undertones.

"I could not believe what I was hearing," Patsy reacted in an old interview. "It's sick for someone to even remotely allude to something so horrible; just nauseates me."

After the mock trial implicated Patsy in the murder, she admitted she "went to bed for about two days because I just was mortified."

JonBenét's mum, Patsy, died in 2006 from ovarian cancer at the age of 49. She always maintained her innocence and died never knowing who murdered her daughter.

In more recent years, the attention turned to JonBenét's brother, Burke, with allegations that he was responsible for her murder and the parents had covered it up.

After Burke made an appearance on Dr. Phil in 2019, there was a CBS documentary, The Case Of: JonBenet Ramsey, that implicated him in JonBenét's death, with the program posing a theory that Burke killed his sister for eating some of his pineapple.

At the time of JonBenét's murder, Burke was nine years old.

John Ramsey's child from his first marriage, John Andrew Ramsey, has long defended Burke. "You look back at pictures of nine-year-old Burke and it's just absolutely absurd to think, 'Oh yeah, he could've killed his sister and delivered this level of violence'," he said in the series.

After the CBS claims aired, Burke filed a $750 million defamation lawsuit, which was settled out of court in 2019.

As the police and the media did nothing to sway the speculation, there was one detail from the crime scene that was kept under wraps: DNA was found under JonBenét's fingernails and on her underwear.

This DNA did not match Patsy, John or Burke.

"They were told in January by their lab, 'We tested the DNA. There is unidentified male DNA, which excludes the parents and the son, Burke,'" John Ramsey reflected.

"They kept that secret from the media and from the district attorney for months ... because it conflicted with their conclusion that we were the killers."

It wasn't until 2008 that the Ramseys were officially cleared in the police investigation.

Patsy Ramsey died from ovarian cancer. Image: Netflix.

Along with shining a light on just how poorly the Ramseys were treated, the docuseries does offer some suspects that could have potentially murdered the six-year-old.

Episode 3 relayed the story of John Mark Karr, who had been charged with child pornography and had known a number of details about JonBenét's death that weren't public knowledge. However, Karr's DNA did not match what investigators collected.

That being said, John has raised suspicions over the DNA results as the samples have not been tested using modern technology.

The father also suggests in the series that the murderer could have been under the police's noses the whole time. Nine months after JonBenét's murder in Boulder, a masked intruder snuck inside a home and raped a 12-year-old girl. The child's mother scared him away, he ran off and was never identified.

"To me, it could easily have been the same person," Ramsey told PEOPLE. "The police blew it off as, 'No, it's not the same.'"

The director of the Netflix series, Joe Berlinger, is confident about one thing from working on the case: he doesn't know who murdered JonBenét, but he knows who didn't.

"I am firmly convinced that the Ramsey family is innocent. And I am also firmly convinced that this case can be solved, if the Boulder Police Department finally does what it's supposed to do," Berlinger told the New York Post.

"John Ramsey agreed to sit down with us, did not ask to be paid, and was not paid — we don't pay our subjects — and asked for no editorial input. No questions were off limits.

"To me, that is an 80-year-old guy who wants to get that case solved."

Feature image: Netflix.