It started off as a simple question: What’s the source of Burke Ramsey throwing his toys after a child psychologist [or equivalent, or similar] took a sip from his soda? Not source in the casual sense of the word. The actual source. Where is it documented? Which page, where, when and by whom?

Finding it again independently – and quickly – proved difficult at first. There’s a lot to go through. Several books. Half a dozen of the more recent documentaries. Miles of online coverage but almost none of it dealing with this besides an obscure Reddit thread which wrongly references the offending soda sipper as Dan Schuler.

I knew about Soda Gate but I’d forgotten how I knew. Was it in The Bonita Papers? What about Ramseys vs Wolf? Or the National Enquirer’s paperback on the Police Files? Turns out I’d seen it dramatized in the Lifetime movie Who Killed JonBenet? [2016]. The movie was based on the source but what was the source? The references online to this incident are few and far between, but here’s one from USA Today:

 

Since time was of the essence, I decided to crowd source, appealing to other True Crime Rocket Scientists out there. It didn’t take long. One of them who goes by the avatar CottonStar answered the call within a few hours.

And so, here it is: