Just when you thought it was safe to walk though the supermarket check-out aisle again, the JonBenét Ramsey circus is back in town, nearly 10 years after the 6-year-old girl was murdered in her Boulder home on Dec. 26, 1996.
Today, JonBenét should be 16 years old without a care in the world.
The case is back in the headlines because of the arrest of John Mark Karr, a 41-year-old teacher who’s given a garbled confession to reporters in Bangkok where he is in custody.
Karr’s arrest raises the astounding possibility that, despite what we came to believe all these years, John and Patsy Ramsey actually had nothing to do with their daughter’s murder. Confession or not, the Boulder County prosecutor is counseling caution.
Of course, if they had been poor, this case would have been solved before New Year’s Day 1997. The police would have hauled them in, questioned them harshly, 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. 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. It happened in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, putting a poignant holiday twist to the sad tragedy.
Another factor was the childhood pageants that JonBenét competed in. All the video footage from those meant pictures of JonBenét were easily 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 to 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. 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. But a brutal murder in a mellow, green college town – that’s a “man bites dog” sort of dissonance that lifts 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. A murderer on the loose? Not to worry. The surest way to get people to talk about something is to tell them they shouldn’t. 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.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column normally appears Tuesday and Sunday.
