JonBenét Ramsey: Who Killed the Child Beauty Queen?

Christmas morning in Boulder began exactly as you might imagine Christmas morning beginning, in a house with two young children.

Excitement, presents, toys everywhere.

Six-year-old Jean-Benet Ramsey and her nine-year-old brother Burke were up and ready to see what Father Christmas had brought them.

Their father, John Ramsey, would later remember going downstairs first and switching on the Christmas tree lights.

there was a bicycle he had hidden in the garage as a surprise for Patsy.

The children came downstairs, presents were opened, JonBenet wanted her dad to film everything, although Jon later recalled that the battery in his video camera was dead.

They had Christmas breakfast together.

It is such an ordinary collection of memories, and that's what makes what happened next so difficult to comprehend.

Because sometime before the following morning, one of those two children, would be dead.

Jean Benet Patricia Ramsey was six years old.

She was born on the 6th August 1990, the youngest child of John and Patsy Ramsey.

John was a successful businessman.

Patsy had previously been a beauty queen herself, winning Miss West Virginia in 1997, and Jean Benet had followed her mother into children's pageants.

Those pageant photographs would later become almost inseparable from the case.

the makeup, the costumes, the elaborate hair.

After JonBenet's murder, those images appeared repeatedly across newspapers and television.

And in some ways, they created a version of JonBenet that became more famous than the child herself.

because away from the pageants she was still 6, she went to school, she played with friends, she had toys, she rode her bike and on Christmas day 1996 she had absolutely no reason to know that her name was about to become known around the world.

The Ramsey family lived at 755 15th street in Boulder Colorado.

And the house itself matters, because this wasn't a small property where you could stand in the hallway and know what was happening in every room.

It was large, multiple floors, numerous rooms, a basement divided into several different spaces.

There were different staircases and entrances, and eventually almost every corner of that house would become part of an argument about what had happened to Jean Benet.

But on Christmas morning, none of that mattered.

It was simply home.

John later remembered neighborhood children coming and going during the day.