CBS' JonBenét Ramsey docuseries has finally arrived, and tonight's first half of the four-hour special has already got us all worked up.
The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey promised to unite original investigators from the 1996 case with new experts and technology to bring us new info that might help solve the 20 year-old murder, and at the very least, we certainly learned some things we didn't know before.
Retired FBI profiler Jim Clemente and former Scotland Yard criminal behavior analyst Laura Richards made great use of one of those classic crime-solving glass dry erase boards to outline the many, many questions and very few answers that have arisen in this case over the years.
Since it's only night one, the case hasn't yet been solved, but there are a few bombshells The Case Of revealed that had our jaws on their way to the floor:
The 911 Call: The first and probably biggest reveal of tonight's special was the end of the 911 call that JonBenét's mother, Patsy, made, supposedly upon finding a ransom note on the stairs. Lots of things were weird about this call, including odd language like "we have a kidnapping," and "I'm the mother," and the fact that Patsy neglected to even give JonBenét's name.
But probably the most important part of the call is that Patsy tried to quickly hang up, but the 911 operator stayed on the line, and recorded six seconds of what used to be an inaudible conversation. The experts in The Case Of managed to slow it down enough to hear what sounded like JonBenét's father John Ramsey saying "We're not speaking to you," Patsy Ramsey saying, "What did you do?" and "Help me, Jesus," and a small child, probably nine year-old Burke saying, "What did you find?"
The 911 operator heard even more, including Patsy saying, "OK, we've called the police, now what?"
The Ransom Note: One of the strangest parts of the Ramsey case has always been the ransom note, which not only made no sense given the fact that JonBenét's body was found in the house a few hours later, but was abnormally long and asked for almost the same exact amount as the bonus that John had been given that year.
During tonight's special, the experts explained that multiple lines from the note were taken from movies like Dirty Harry and Speed, and they conducted a very interesting test. Each expert timed how long it took them to write the letter out—dotted I's included—and everyone took at least 21 minutes. That means that whoever wrote the note would have spent at least 21 minutes on it, even without the time it took to decide what to write, or to put the pen and paper back where they found it.
Forensic linguistics expert James Fitzgerald also believed that the note used "maternal" language, and that mistakes, like misspellings, were deliberately included to make it seem as if the writer wasn't a native English speaker. However, based on his analysis, English was the writer's first language.
Cause of Death: With help from famed criminologist Werner Spitz, the team did some very creepy experiments on fake skulls wearing wigs. The experiments involved hitting the skulls with a flashlight, and even having a 10 year-old child see if he could exert the force needed to break the skull.
As creepy as that sounds (and was to watch), the kid was able to create the same injury in the fake skull, meaning not even Burke could be ruled out as a suspect on those grounds.
The team also learned that with a blunt force injury like JonBenét's, there wouldn't need to be traces of blood or skin on the weapon, meaning that the unclaimed flashlight found on the Ramseys' kitchen table could have been the murder weapon.
The conclusion of The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey airs tomorrow night at 9 p.m. on CBS