After doing so, she said she formed her own personal belief about who was responsible for JonBenét’s death.
“Just my personal feeling. My heart says no one in the family could have done that,” she told Variety.
“I don’t have the ability, or probably the right, to say that, but that’s what my gut says. Which I probably am not supposed to say.
“But shooting [the new show], I had to pick. I had to have that for myself, if nothing else.”
McCarthy also emphasized that the upcoming series is not intended to function as a traditional whodunnit. Instead, she described it as a “character study” focused on the people at the center of the case and what they experienced.
“This might sound nuts: I’m very fond of Patsy,” she said.
“I have so much compassion for them, what they went through, and go through currently.”
Patsy died in 2006, after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
The Ramsey case dates back to December 1996, when JonBenét was found dead in the basement of her family’s Boulder, Colorado, home. She had been beaten and bound, and a ransom note demanding $118,000 for her return was discovered near her body.
An autopsy later revealed that JonBenét died from asphyxia by strangulation associated with craniocerebral trauma. Her death was ruled a homicide.
Despite a major police investigation and years of public attention, no one has been charged with killing JonBenét.
John Ramsey has continued to speak publicly about his daughter’s death over the years. He was not involved in the new Netflix drama and has since remarried, living in Michigan with his wife.
In 2024, John spoke to PEOPLE about a theory of his own, pointing to another violent incident in Boulder that occurred nine months after JonBenét was killed.
According to John, a masked intruder broke into the home of a 12-year-old girl, attacked her and then escaped. The person responsible was never caught.
John said that intruder could “easily have been the same person” responsible for his daughter’s death.
“The police blew it off as, ‘No, it’s not the same,’” he said.
The case remains open nearly three decades later. Boulder Police say they are still actively investigating JonBenét’s homicide as this year marks 30 years since her death.
Melissa McCarthy's comments describe the perspective she formed while preparing to portray Patsy Ramsey. They are presented as a personal response to the material she read, not as a new finding by investigators. That distinction matters because an actor's preparation and a criminal investigation serve different purposes. A performance needs an emotional understanding of a character; an investigation must establish what happened through evidence.
Her description of the series as a character study explains why compassion occupies so much of the discussion. The focus she describes is on people living through an extraordinary loss and the public attention surrounding it. Feeling compassion for those people does not settle the unanswered questions of the case, and the quoted comments themselves acknowledge the limits of her position.
For viewers, keeping those boundaries in mind allows the drama to be considered as a portrayal without confusing it with a resolution. The central loss remains the death of a child, and the account's closing emphasis is that the case remains open.
