NIGHTMARE WITHOUT END

FALSELY ACCUSED OF MURDERING HIS DAUGHTER JONBENÉT, JOHN RAMSEY IS REFLECTING ON HIS PATH TO PEACE AND URGING AUTHORITIES TO FIND HER KILLER

- EMILY PALMER and EILEEN FINAN

John Ramsey gently picks up a tiny pair of black-and-white cowboy boots from a shelf in his home. Embellished with cutouts of steer heads and cacti, the shoes were worn three decades ago by his daughter JonBenét as she sang “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” in a beauty pageant. Ramsey smiles. “She loved to perform,” he recalls in a new docuseries.

It’s taken a long time for Ramsey to embrace the sweetness of a memory without dwelling on the cruelty of his daughter’s death. “The pain was so intense,” Ramsey tells People. “Time doesn’t erase it. You don’t get over it. You get beyond it. But if I didn’t have that pain, I wouldn’t have had the joy of the time with my daughter. I was blessed to have her in my life for six years.”

The anguish Ramsey first faced when he discovered JonBenét’s battered body in their Boulder, Colo., home nearly 28 years ago only grew as he saw his family’s tragedy become a national obsession. In the days and years after his daughter’s killing, Ramsey, his wife, Patsy, who died of cancer in 2006, and even their then-9-year-old son Burke were falsely accused of her murder by a police department inexperienced in homicide investigations and by media captivated by the death of a bright-eyed girl with golden curls and pageant crowns. “I can’t think of a family in American history that’s been more brutalized, by their daughter being murdered and then being blamed for it,” says Joe Berlinger, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker behind the new Netflix docuseries Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey, streaming now. “They were wrongfully convicted in the court of public opinion.”