The response has been overwhelming. In less than a month since Netflix’s documentary Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey debuted, investigators have been deluged with more than 100 new tips about the infamous 1996 murder of 6-year-old pageant princess JonBenét Ramsey at her home in Boulder, Colorado.

“The next move is to decide which ones are credible and which ones are not,” a Boulder Police Department source told the New York Post. “But we’re looking at every single tip and deciding if it can help us solve the case. It’s a priority here.”

An Anonymous Woman Claimed Her Ex-Husband Killed JonBenét

There was one tip no one saw coming: a shocking confession.

“Based on all this publicity, recently I got a letter from a lady saying, ‘My ex-husband’s the killer, and I’ve kept this inside for as long as I can — please, please call me,’” John Ramsey, who found his daughter’s bludgeoned and strangled body in the family basement that fateful morning, recently revealed, adding that he got no answer when he called the number, which he’s since shared with a private investigator.

But after enduring what many believe was a botched investigation by the Boulder Police, who focused solely on the child’s parents as suspects, followed by 28 years of dead ends, Jon Benét’s loved ones have learned not to get their hopes up about new leads – and instead focus on the crime scene clues that authorities collected long ago.

“The family has not lost the will to fight,” John’s son John David has said of finding justice. “If we leverage the evidence and follow the facts, we will find this killer.”

Missed Clues in the JonBenét Ramsey Case

The most promising evidence is DNA from at least one unknown male, found under her fingernails and in her underwear. The tests further concluded that the DNA did not match any member of the Ramsey family and was filed in an official police report 20 days after the murder.

“They kept that secret from the media and the district attorney for months,” John explained, adding that authorities were convinced that he or Patsy killed their daughter, despite lack of any prior evidence of abuse.

“I grew up with him, he raised me, and I saw him raise JonBenét, and I don’t understand why they don’t believe me, that he is the most caring father in the world,” John’s daughter Melinda has tearfully insisted. “He has never, ever abused us in any way.”

Then-Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter wasn’t convinced of the Ramseys’ guilt, either. In March 1997, Hunter coaxed veteran homicide detective Lou Smit to come out of retirement to crack the case. Smit immediately zeroed in on the DNA and other critical crime scene evidence, introducing what is now known as the “intruder theory” — that someone hid in the house and killed the little girl. Smit also uncovered one clue that he believed everyone missed. Through weeks of research and experiments, Smit posited that marks on JonBenét’s back had been made by a stun gun.

“You can’t throw a piece of evidence like that away,” he said, but authorities remained skeptical and frustrated, and Smit resigned from the official investigation in 1998.

But he never gave up. When Patsy Ramsey was on her deathbed in 2006, Smit promised her he would continue the quest. And before his own death in 2010, he recorded eight hours of video laying out his theory, compiled a massive database, and gave his daughter a spreadsheet listing about 20 suspects.

“In the end, Lou believed that DNA would someday solve this case,” his friends and family said on a GoFundMe set up to fulfill his dying wish of finding the killer. “We are confident that the killer’s name is on that spreadsheet.”

Several names have already been scratched out. Due to DNA, those eliminated include convicted sex offender Gary Oliva, who admitted to being obsessed with JonBenét but has denied killing her; former schoolteacher John Mark Karr, who once confessed to the murder; junkyard worker Michael Helgoth, who died by suicide two months after her death; and Randy Simons, a photographer who took shots of JonBenét and is in prison on child pornography charges (he’s denied killing her).

A New Lead in the Case

One suspect has never been identified. A 12-year-old girl who went to the same dance school as JonBenét was sexually assaulted in September 1997, and her father believes the crimes could be connected.

“My feeling is he hid inside the house,” the victim’s father told 48 Hours. “The first thing that occurred to us was that it was the parallel to the Ramsey case because it was exactly the same situation.”

John agrees: “It could very well be the same guy, and yet the police blew it off.”

The current police chief, Stephen Redfearn, has insisted that they’ve left no stone unturned.

“The assertion that there is viable evidence and leads we are not pursuing — to include DNA testing — is completely false,” he wrote on X. “This investigation will always be a priority for the Boulder Police Department.”

John is meeting with Redfearn in January 2025 to lobby for more testing.

“We want the evidence that has been previously tested — and we think there is some that has never been tested — to be resampled by a cutting-edge lab,” he has said, in hopes that the information can be entered into a genealogy database, which is how Joseph James DeAngelo was identified as the Golden State Killer in 2018, 32 years after his last known crime. “I believe if we do that, there’s a really good chance we can solve it.”