Entertainment

Crime watch

The murder of pint-sized JonBenet Ramsey is re-examined by author Aphrodite Jones in her series, “True Crime,” airing Thursday night on ID. (© Mark Fix/ZUMA Press/Corbis)

For us true-crime junkies, going over and over the same crimes on TV is akin to the way other people re-watch old episodes of “Seinfeld.”

Take the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, for example. Even though it happened 15 years ago, and has been examined and reexamined more times by authorities and on TV than probably any other murder, it remains an unsolved American tragedy.

On Thursday night, true-crime writer Aphrodite Jones returns with Season Two of “True Crime With Aphrodite Jones” on Investigation Discovery. First up? The case of JonBenet, with never-before-seen home video of the child and her family.

What Jones proves is that this was a worst-case scenario meeting a a miscarriage of justice — not just for the child, but for her parents, Patsy and John Ramsey. They were tried, convicted and hung in the media for years — with some outlets calling them sexual predators and the killers of their own child.

If losing a child to murder is the worst thing in the world, having the whole world think you did it is a very close second.

In this segment of the series, Jones revisits all the evidence with forensics experts and we come away with a new understanding of how badly the police completely botched the case.

For example, the authorities decided that since there were no footprints in the snow, it had to have been the Ramseys, who were inside, who committed the murder. Well, when Jones reexamines the crime scene photos, it turns out there was only snow in the front yard, and none in the whole back of the house. Of course there were no footprints.

Then she looks into the suspicious suicide of a local man who was found dead the day after the chief of police went on TV to make a plea to the killer. Not only did the man have the same boots with the words “hi-tec” on the soles as the footprints found at the scene of the murder, but his supposed “suicide,” which was almost physically impossible to have been self-inflicted, was not properly investigated, either.

Patsy Ramsey died of cancer in 2006 at the age of 49 — two years before DNA evidence cleared the family in the case. She died knowing that the whole world thought she killed the most precious person in her life.

Good for Jones for revisiting and letting people remember that the Ramseys lost their lives, their reputations and their very hearts after they lost their child.