Why JonBenet Ramsey's violent death still grips America to this day

It was the murder which tore the veil off the strange world of American child beauty pageants.

Six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was found strangled in her basement in Boulder, Colorado on Boxing Day 1996.

The killer of the Young Miss Colorado left her on a heap of clothes with an eight-inch fracture to her skull and a fragmented paint brush stuck into her neck by garrotte.

No one has ever been caught for the murder and now in a new three-part true crime Netflix documentary one of America's most notorious cold cases is revisited.

In the aftermath of her death, there was an ensuing media frenzy with photograph after photograph of JonBenet emerging, on-stage wearing make-up, dancing and singing in costumes.

For the American public, it was almost as though her death represented an attack on the American dream - a young and talented girl, brutally murdered in an inexplicable crime.

And as the search for the killer began, theories over who was responsible spawned at an astonishing rate.

But it became quickly apparent large swathes of the public were just as interested in the 'Hollywood star' appearance of JonBenet, as they were in the killer's identity.

To some, the premature adultness of her makeup, the outfits and dance routines seemed to verge on having a 'sexual quality'.

Her parents John and Patsy insisted she was a normal happy girl performing on stage and that there was nothing untoward.

But in the days which followed her murder, stories of former child beauty queens who were sexually abused emerged in the press, and suspicion fell on John and Patsy.

Though files on known paedophiles were reviewed and their alibis for the night checked out, detectives working the case began to focus more and more on the parents and their account.

To understand why, the disturbing events of 26 December 1996 ought to be outlined.

At 5.45am, Patsy walks downstairs to prepare for a family trip to visit friends.

But she screams, waking John, as she reads a ransom note left on the bottom of the stairs demanding $118,000 for the safe return of their youngest child.

'At this time, we have your daughter in our possession. She is safe and unharmed and if you want her to see 1997 you must follow these instructions to the letter,' the note read.

Whoever wrote the letter goes on to demand that the first $100,000 is paid in $100 bills and the remaining $18,000 in $20 notes. If there is any deviation JonBenet will be beheaded.

By 5.52am Patsy is on the telephone to the police to report a kidnapping and moments later officers arrive at the three-storey 6,500 sq. foot property.

In the note, the abductor says there will be a phone call between 10am and 11am but no call comes.

John is seen pacing round the house and begins to ask officers what he should do at 12pm.

By 1pm one officer suggests John makes a search of the house, and he heads to the basement.

Inside he finds a broken window open and makes a mental note, believing it to be strange.

Behind a door leading to an old coal cellar, he found his daughter lying on the ground with a garrotte round her neck and masking tape over her mouth.

He picks her body up and carries her back to the police officer, who informs him she is dead and calls colleagues back at the Boulder Police Department.

Immediately police place John in the frame for the killing, arguing not only is he her father, but he has also found her body.

But crucially an unidentified male's DNA was found on her underwear.

The question in everyone's mind is what possible reason could a stranger have for touching a young girl's underwear?

On further medical examination of JonBenet's body vaginal bleeding is uncovered, seemingly supporting the theory she was the victim of sexual abuse.

However, there is no evidence to support any claim of family abuse and JonBenet's own paediatrician went on the record confirming he had no reason to fear her parents were harming her.

Police ran tests on the DNA discovered in the underwear and found it matched no one in her family and could not find a link to anyone else.

Despite this vital piece of evidence, supporting the parent's argument that an intruder was responsible, police withheld the information for months, prolonging suspense.

Upon release of the DNA evidence, the public asked again: Who then killed JonBenet?

A clear rift between Boulder police and the District Attorney had now begun to open up.

As evidence pointing towards one of the family being responsible stalled, alternative theories, including an intruder were put forward, this time with the backing of some police officers.

One detective brought in to review the case established it was perfectly possible that an intruder could have killed the beauty queen.

In a demonstration Detective Lou Smit climbed in through the same window which John found open.

He concluded it would have been possible for the killer to hide in the basement, sneak upstairs, bring JonBenet back down and kill her in the coal room without anyone hearing.

With the competing theories over who was the murderer raging on, two years later in late 1998, the District Attorney for Boulder called for a grand jury to review all the evidence and decide if anyone, in the frame for the killing, could be charged.

This would only permit prosecutors to bring a case, it would not mean the guilty person had been identified.

After the jury made their decision in October 1999, DA Alex Hunter, said his prosecution team did not believe they had 'sufficient evidence to warrant the filing of charges against anyone who has been investigated at this time.'

It later emerged, the jury had agreed the parents could be indicted on child abuse allegations, but prosecutors decided not to prosecute.

For a decade the case rumbled on until in 2006 John Mark Karr, an American living in the Philippines, began to give a detailed account of how he was responsible for JonBenet's death to a professor researching the case.

He was ultimately arrested, and his DNA checked against the profile found in the underwear, but there was no match.

To this day the case remains unsolved. The Netflix series available now is called: 'Cold Case: Who killed JonBenet Ramsey'.