She said she went deep into the available material, reading police reports, coroner’s reports and other information connected to the investigation.
And after spending so much time studying the case, McCarthy said she developed a personal belief about one of its most fiercely debated questions.
“My heart says no one in the family could have done that,” McCarthy told Variety.
She was careful not to present that feeling as evidence or fact.
“I don’t have the ability, or probably the right, to say that, but that’s what my gut says,” she continued. “Which I probably am not supposed to say.”
For McCarthy, however, taking a position internally became necessary for playing Patsy.
“But shooting [the new show], I had to pick,” she explained. “I had to have that for myself, if nothing else.”
Her comments are particularly striking because speculation about JonBenét’s family became inseparable from public discussion of the case for years.
But McCarthy says the upcoming Netflix production isn’t designed simply to tell viewers who they should believe killed JonBenét.
Instead, she describes it as something more intimate.
A character study.
The series will explore the people who found themselves at the center of one of America’s most intensely scrutinized unsolved murder cases and the extraordinary public pressure surrounding them.
That process appears to have profoundly affected the way McCarthy sees Patsy Ramsey.
“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 never lived to see the mystery surrounding her daughter’s death resolved.
She died in 2006 following a battle with ovarian cancer.
By then, the Ramsey family had spent nearly a decade living beneath an extraordinary level of public scrutiny.
The tragedy began during Christmas 1996.
JonBenét Ramsey was just six years old when she was reported missing from her family’s home in Boulder, Colorado.
A lengthy ransom note demanding $118,000 was discovered inside the house.
Hours later, JonBenét’s body was found in the basement.
The case quickly became national news.
An autopsy determined that JonBenét died from asphyxia by strangulation associated with craniocerebral trauma, and her death was classified as a homicide.
But despite an enormous investigation, intense media coverage and decades of theories, no one has ever been charged with her murder.
The absence of an arrest created an information vacuum that was quickly filled with speculation.
Television programs dissected the family’s behavior.
Tabloids published competing theories.
Amateur investigators scrutinized photographs, interviews, handwriting and pieces of evidence.
The Ramsey family became part of the story almost immediately.
That history makes McCarthy’s role particularly complicated.
She isn’t simply portraying a grieving fictional mother.
She is portraying a real woman whose six-year-old daughter was murdered and whose actions were subsequently examined by millions of strangers.
McCarthy’s comments suggest she needed to decide for herself how to approach Patsy’s perspective emotionally, even though the actress does not claim to have solved the case.
Her personal conclusion should therefore be distinguished from the status of the investigation.
JonBenét’s murder remains officially unsolved.
Her father, John Ramsey, has continued speaking publicly about the case and advocating for further investigation.
He was not involved in McCarthy’s Netflix drama and has since remarried.
John has also discussed theories of his own.
In 2024, he spoke to People about another disturbing incident that occurred in Boulder months after his daughter’s murder.
According to John, approximately nine months after JonBenét was killed, a masked intruder entered the home of a 12-year-old girl and attacked her before escaping.
The attacker was never identified.
John has argued that investigators should consider whether there could be a connection between that incident and JonBenét’s murder.
He said the attacker could “easily have been the same person.”
“The police blew it off as, ‘No, it’s not the same,’” John said.
That remains John’s theory rather than an established finding connecting the two cases.
And that distinction is important in a case that has generated decades of claims, counterclaims and speculation.
Thirty years after JonBenét’s death, the central question remains unanswered.
Who killed her?
Boulder Police have maintained that the homicide remains under investigation.
For McCarthy, however, portraying Patsy required something different from conducting a criminal investigation.
She needed to understand the woman she was playing.
She needed to imagine the emotional reality of losing a child under horrific circumstances and then living while millions of people debated what happened inside your home.
That appears to be why McCarthy’s preparation went far beyond simply learning lines.
She studied reports.
She examined the history.
And eventually, she made a private decision about how she believed Patsy fit into the story.
“My heart says no one in the family could have done that,” she said.
McCarthy readily acknowledges that her instinct cannot establish what happened on the night JonBenét died.
But as an actress attempting to inhabit Patsy Ramsey’s life, she felt she needed an answer for herself.
Whether viewers agree with her interpretation or not, the real-life mystery remains exactly where it has been for decades:
JonBenét Ramsey was murdered at six years old, no one has been charged with killing her, and the investigation into her death remains open.