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Just when you thought it was safe to walk though the supermarket check-out aisle again, the JonBenet Ramsey media circus is back in town, nearly ten years after the six-year-old girl was murdered in her Boulder home on Dec. 26, 1996.
The circus is resuming because of the arrest of John Mark Karr, a 41-year-old teacher, in Thailand last week. Some accounts have it that he has confessed to the crime.
This raises the astounding possibility that, despite what we were told on TV and read in books and newspapers through all these years, John and Patsy Ramsey actually had nothing to do with their daughter's murder.
Of course, if they had been poor, this case would have been solved before New Year's Day of 1997. The police would have hauled them in, then questioned them harshly and interminably and separately without any attorneys around. One or the other would have broken, either confessing or blaming the other.
A plea bargain, something like 10 or 20 years, would follow after a public defender finally got involved. Case closed, and nobody outside of Boulder County would have heard of it or cared about it.
But the Ramseys were people of means who knew their
rights and could engage attorneys to protect those rights.
So they didn't break, even after our own governor, Bill
Owens, observed that Mr. Ramsey is considered to be a
prime suspect.
He urged them to quit hiding behind
your lawyers, your P.R. firms and easy journalism and come
back to Colorado and help us find the killers of your
daughter.
That's one reason that this case became so prominent -- what would have been open-and-shut if the body had been found behind the skirts of her parents' single-wide trailer became a long drawn-out investigation. And of course, we still don't know if it's over.
But there are other reasons that the Ramsey case became an extended national story. Its timing, for instance. It happened in the week between Christmas and New Year's Day, when generally there is little other news. So it gets a lot more national attention than it would have on, say, Sept. 12, 2001.
Another factor was the childhood pageants that JonBenet competed in. All the video footage from those meant new pictures of JonBenet were available for broadcast.
Perhaps these pageants really are a wholesome way for youngsters to develop talent, confidence and stage presence. But these exhibitions seemed flat-out sick to me, and probably lots of other people.
Even so, millions of little girls have been tarted up and paraded across stages, and the vast majority of them survived the experience.
Then there was what I'll call the Boulder Factor. Even
if one national magazine, Brill's Content, called Boulder a
mountain hamlet
(which somehow felt insulting to
some of us who live in real mountain hamlets), Boulder is a
prominent American city with an image and a reputation.
If a child had died there because her parents fed her
unpasteurized home-bottled organic fruit juice, it would
have fit into our perception of Boulder, and it wouldn't
have been big news. But a brutal murder in a mellow green
college town -- that's a man bites dog
sort of
dissonance which elevates a story from routine to
sensational.
The response of Boulder authorities didn't do much to diminish the story, either. They apparently believed in the Boulder myth, too. Every other city of 100,000 people might have homicidal pedophiles, but not their Boulder.
They seemed intent on protecting the city's reputation
by calling a murder an incident,
and telling us how
inappropriate it would be to speculate about the crime. The
surest way to get people to talk about something is to tell
them they shouldn't. And this extended even to an effort to
keep the Globe tabloid from circulating in Boulder.
The police seemed to put more energy into investigating leaks from the coroner's office than into investigating the crime, thereby adding more angles to a story that they obviously wished would just go away.
But it never did go away. And even though there's a new suspect, perhaps this story never will go away. Think of Lizzie Borden and Alfred Packer.
We may never know what happened in the Ramsey house that night. But you can be sure we'll all keep speculating, just as we have for the past 10 years.
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