In February 1997, a regular visitor to the popular online discussion forum Usenet had reached his limit. All the talk about JonBenét Ramsey, the six-year-old beauty queen recently found dead in her parents’ basement in Colorado, was driving him crazy. “I have been lurking, and occasionally posting, on this news group for over three years,” he wrote. “I am at the point of abandoning it, because it is *very* difficult to locate anything that is not a Ramsey post, and frankly, I am sick of this morbid crime and speculation.”

“It’ll all go away in a month or so,” counseled another.

JonBenét Ramsey: a puzzle whose pieces never fit together. Photograph: Sipa Press/REX/Shutterstock

No such luck.

Since the moment Ramsey’s body was discovered on 26 December 1996, her murder has been fertile territory for speculators.

The case presented a confusing set of facts. JonBenét’s wealthy parents insisted that they’d woken up the day after Christmas to find a ransom note left by kidnappers on their kitchen staircase. “You will withdraw $118,000 from your account,” it instructed. Her father, John, apparently made arrangements to pay the ransom and called the police, but soon after authorities arrived, his daughter’s body was found in the wine cellar. There was a nylon cord around her neck; her wrists were tied above her head, and her mouth was covered by duct tape. No call to collect the ransom ever came, there was no sign of a break-in or a struggle, and JonBenét’s parents swore they had nothing to do with it.

It was a puzzle whose pieces never fit together. The eerie videotapes of the blonde beauty-pageant-contestant child, the big, dark-windowed mansion, the parents who insisted they were innocent, the lurid but inconclusive physical evidence, the strange false confession of schoolteacher John Mark Karr: all of it was a recipe for conspiracy theories in every direction. In the 1990s, the tabloids ruled, and they blanketed the country with the most lurid and outlandish headlines about the case they could think of.

Continued intrigue

This year marks the 20th anniversary of JonBenét’s death and in the wake of the new popularity of true crime stories, America will get no less than five new examinations of the Ramsey case. The first item, an A&E documentary called The Killing of JonBenét, aired 6 September. NBC recently announced its own new Dateline special. Dr Phil will interview Burke Ramsey, JonBenét’s older brother, on Monday. On 18 September, CBS will air its six-part docuseries called The Case Of: JonBenét Ramsey, which will see experts examine a full-scale replica of the wine cellar in which JonBenét’s body was discovered. Finally, should that not be enough to sate you, Lifetime has announced a movie that will air in November.

All of this promises a new explosion of interest in the yet-to-be-solved case, particularly in those online spaces where obsessives congregate to discuss true crime.

The internet was a different place when the case first broke open. The “World Wide Web”, as people quaintly called the internet in 1996, was more or less made up of text. There was no YouTube. There was no Facebook. There was, however, Usenet, a loose and difficult-to-navigate assortment of message boards. And after the JonBenét Ramsey case became a national obsession, curious minds gathered online to try and solve the case themselves, much in the same way as Serial or Making a Murderer. They uploaded documents and traded theories – and contacted authorities with their findings.

Several new examinations of the case are forthcoming in a year that marks two decade since her death.

Photograph: AP

It was, in a sense, America’s first crowd-sourced murder mystery.

Within a month of the Ramsey case going public, journalists and law enforcement in Boulder were already saying they’d been inundated by emails from across the world, people hundreds of miles away who were sure they knew who killed JonBenét. By late 1997, USA Today was reporting that there were more than 2,000 webpages dedicated to solving the Ramsey case.

Digital sleuths

Factions formed quickly. Some unequivocally believed in the Ramseys. Others unequivocally believed the Ramseys were guilty. They pored over physical evidence. They constructed elaborate scenarios that fit just about any theory of the crime. Some were convinced that a servant must have been responsible – “the gardener did it.” Others made any number of claims about the Ramseys: their hobbies, their finances, their friends.

They argued, especially, about the ransom note. At two-and-a-half pages, it is believed by criminal justice experts to be the longest ever recorded. Whoever wrote it – the lettering is shaky and awkward – is believed to have been disguising their handwriting. All of the official handwriting experts who have ever opined in the case have excluded John Ramsey as the author of the note; the majority have never been able to link it to Patsy Ramsey, either. This has not stopped anyone from speculating about that on the internet from an armchair handwriting-analysis perspective.

The ransom note sent in the JonBenét Ramsey case. It is believed to be the longest ever recorded. Photograph: Handout

None of it ever solved the case. Even after weeks of poring over old internet postings and webpages, I wasn’t able to locate a single piece of useful evidence that could definitively be said to have originated with internet users. Instead, the internet obsessives caused problems for officials working on the case, and became the the source of some of its more bizarre narratives.

They constructed elaborate scenarios that fit just about any theory of the crime

Take the case of Susan Bennett who went by the alias “Jameson” online. Bennett speculated so prolifically online on the popular Websleuths forum and on pages she herself set up, that she ended up becoming a figure in the case herself. Despite the fact that Bennett was a housewife living in North Carolina with no legal training whatsoever, her prolific online postings established her as an authority in the case. She was quoted in innumerable newspaper articles in the late 1990s and appeared on television. Bennett was the first online amateur sleuth to be given such a prominent platform. (Attempts to reach Bennett, if she is still alive, were unsuccessful. Her website is still up, but her email address is defunct and her common name makes her difficult to locate.)

Three years after the case opened, Bennett appeared on a CBS 48 hours segment about the case to discredit a so-called handwriting expert’s claim that Patsy Ramsey had written the ransom note. It was a curious choice for the television producers to make, given that Bennett herself had no expertise or evidence to counter the findings. She was a civilian, like anyone else who’d followed the Ramsey story – but there she was on national television, presenting herself as an authority. The only difference between Bennett and any other person who’d been closely following the case was that she’d shared her opinions online.

A modern phenomenon

Since the era of Sherlock Holmes, private detectives had long been able to influence cases on their own. But the online detective, who had no sort of professional training, or even long practice, is a purely modern phenomenon. The internet changed everything by letting anyone become a self-appointed “expert” on a case.

JonBenét’s grave. There were reportedly more than 2,000 websites dedicated to solving the case. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Bennett is just one example. Hundreds of JonBenét case obsessives scoured documents, then developed theories based on any name they came across. Even though their speculations were often deeply far-fetched, they had the power to affect people’s lives, so much so that at least one person took the matter to a court.

One of the Ramseys’ friends brought suit against an anonymous internet commenter who had speculated on his guilt for the murder. Some documents in the case are sealed but the suit appears to have been abandoned after a few filings. (The Ramseys and Wood have been involved in a number of lawsuits against tabloids and other media organizations and typically request that the documents in those proceedings be sealed, too.)

The new wave of coverage promises to re-awaken these issues. On Reddit, a JonBenét subreddit is already starting to catalogue the evidence. Speculation is unfolding at a rapid pace. And should the various documentaries turn up any new evidence, online detectives can be relied on to pursue it. After the recent reversal of Making a Murderer subject Brendan Dassey’s conviction, online sleuths feel they have more power – and more cause – to intervene against injustice than ever.

Patsy Ramsey died of cancer in 2006, but John Ramsey is an active participant in several of the projects coming this fall. The speculation promises to be rampant. But at least Ramsey can be said, at this point, to be used to that.