by Michael Tracey

Postscript

In November 2007, just as I was finishing a draft of this essay I was talking to a television executive during a visit to London. He asked if there was anything “new” in the Ramsey case.

I told him there wasn’t, unless you include a flurry of stories over the summer about the fact that John Ramsey was dating the mother of Natalie Holloway, a pretty blond college student who had gone missing two years ago while on vacation on the Caribbean island of Aruba. Full Story »

by Michael Tracey

In his essay, “The White Negro,” Norman Mailer references Marxist thought with a level of respect but pointed to its failure in application because, as he put it, “it was an expression of the scientific narcissism we inherited from the 19th century,” motivated by the “rational mania that consciousness could stifle instinct.” I have this awful feeling that he is right, that we are driven not by the profound harmonies and profundities of evolved consciousness, but by base instinct that is primitive, not modern.

The Delicious Occupation of Gossip

In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud writes of this question which Mailer was addressing, that the fundamental instinct of the species is aggression: Full Story »

by Michael Tracey

Let me return to a period which is widely regarded within the advanced industrial societies as a high water mark of public service broadcasting, the BBC in the early 1960s. A key figure from those years was Sir Arthur fforde (that is the correct, if old-fashioned spelling of his name), in my view quite possibly the greatest of the chairmen of the BBC. In 1963 he published a little booklet called What is Broadcasting About, which was printed privately in an edition of 400. In this at first curious piece he tries to lay out a theological context for what was happening within the BBC, which was then at the height of its creative and social impact on British society, and causing all kinds of heartburn among what used to be called the Establishment. Full Story »

by Michael Tracey

It isn’t just that there is an appetite for scandal, sex, sleaze, death narratives, it is also that feeding such appetites can be very profitable. The fact is that an essential problem with today’s media, one that has been gestating for many years, even decades, lies with the families and trust-funders that own media chains, and with the media moguls that, like great beasts, roam the landscape of a new grim cultural ecology, gobbling up this and that tasty morsel, a television station here, a newspaper there, forever seeking to sate their own insatiable appetite. Full Story »

by Michael Tracey

“Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

So on to the really interesting part: what has it all meant, what do I take away from this curious episode in my life, and from a decade-long involvement not just in the narrative around the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, but the cultural ecology out of which that narrative climbed?

Henry James once wrote that to be an American is a complex fate, a sentiment I’d like to amend by suggesting that to be alive is a complex fate, pulled asunder as we are by the competing forces of deep, unspoken Neolithic urges, the demands of the caring heart and struggles in usingdavid the Rational mind, all elements present in the World of JonBenet.

Three general issues suggest themselves: Full Story »

When we launched Michael Tracey’s series on the Ramsey case we frankly didn’t know what to expect. We hoped for intelligent engagement around the essay’s central thesis – a runaway media and what it tells us about the sad state of our democracy. We feared that the place would be overrun by nutters. In the end, though, neither our hopes nor fears have been realized.

Instead there’s been a lot of silence. We know some people are reading – we have access to the stats, after all – but there’s been minimal response.

I think I know why. The other day Lex, one of our most prolific commenters, posted this: Full Story »

by Michael Tracey

There had earlier been another development that caught the attention of the local US intelligence services based in the embassy. In July Daxis had told me that he had got a job teaching in an international school and that while there for the interview he had “made some lovely new friends ~ little girls age five…” In a mail on July 13 he mentioned one in particular, adding “I lust for a little five year old at school…” He wrote to me of how he had massaged her bare foot and how she said to him, laughing, “…you’re a monster” except that because of her accent it came out as “monsta.”

DNA

The only rational conclusion was to assume the worst and that he had his next target. Full Story »

by Michael Tracey

In the spring of 2006 one email caught my attention. Daxis had been demanding that I provide him with contact details for Patsy, an email address and a phone number. I had of cohushurse refused to do this and, in a highly frustrated tone he wrote that he would be sitting in their living room in Charlevoix before he got the information.

How to interpret this? He claimed that he was out of the country, that there was an arrest warrant for him (which we now also know to be true) and that he could never return. What if all that was nonsense, what if he did intend to go to find Patsy, what might he do? Hindsight, to borrow a cliché, is an exact science but then it was less than clear as to what he was implying or threatening. I chose to err on the side of caution and interpret the message as a threat, that he would indeed turn up in Charlevoix. Full Story »

by Michael Tracey

“O hateful error, melancholy’s child!
Why dost thou show, to the apt thoughts of men,
The things that are not?”

- (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ib, 67)

Then something strange happened. In 2002, a friend of mine Mike Sandrock, a sports writer for the Boulder Daily Camera, was in Paris and met a young American who it quickly became clear, after Mike had mentioned he was from Boulder, was extremely interested in JonBenet and in me.

After Mike had returned he received an email from this man, who used the email handle “De-cember25 1996,” signed the mail with the letter “D” and wrote that he very much wanted to communicate with me. Full Story »

Dr. Michael Tracey played a major role in the capture and arrest of John Mark Karr, the man who confessed to killing JonBenet Ramsey. This much we know. However, in the wake of Karr’s release Tracey became a source of scorn and vitriol. Spurred on by the same irresponsible media coverage that got the whole case so criminally wrong in the first place, many in the public concluded that was nothing more than a self-obsessed glory hound. Full Story »

by Michael Tracey

In the mid-1980s David Mills had tried to get a budget together to make a documentary based on my work on public broadcasting, making the case that market forces would prove disastrous for broadcasting as a means of serving the public interest. We would also argue that deregulation, along the lines of American television, would be deeply unfortunate, along with the more nuanced argument that there is, anyhow, no such thing as de-regulation – there is only regulation (ie someone making decisions about content) in the public interest or a private interest. Culture is never, finally, neutral.

David’s efforts came to nothing. Full Story »

by Michael Tracey

Several incidents in particular focused my attention not on the murder but on how we seemed to be dealing with it as a culture. In March 1997 the CU branch of the Society of Professional Journalists organized a forum on cheque book journalism, particularly as it related to the Ramsey case. The panel consisted of two reporters from the National Enquirer, a reporter for the cable tabloid programme Hard Copy and Chuck Green of the Denver Post. Green, a strangely bitter, cynical man was known to be hyper-critical of the investigation, and of the role of the DA’s office in pursuing the case and in what Green took to be the protection of the Ramseys.

“…it’s not an important story, but it’s entertaining” Full Story »

by Michael Tracey

SHE pass’d away like morning dew
Before the sun was high;
So brief her time, she scarcely knew
The meaning of a sigh.

As round the rose its soft perfume,
Sweet love around her floated;
Admired she grew–while mortal doom
Crept on, unfear’d, unnoted.

Love was her guardian Angel here,
But Love to Death resign’d her;
Tho’ Love was kind, why should we fear
But holy Death is kinder?

- Hartley Coleridge

On August 16 2006 MSNBC broke the story that an arrest had been made in the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, a pretty 6 year old girl, winner of several beauty pageants, who had been garroted and bludgeoned to death on Christmas night 1996 in Boulder, Colorado. Full Story »

Few events in recent memory have inflamed the American imagination quite like the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. More to the point, it’s hard to recall a case where passion and profound ignorance of the facts came together in such an explosive mass media cocktail. Ramsey’s death remains unsolved, but how many dollars has it generated for the nation’s “press”?

When push comes to shove, we still don’t know as much about the case and the people involved in it as we think we do, but what we do know is this: JonBenet Ramsey’s murder and the incoherent frenzy it sparked tell us a great deal about America as a culture. Full Story »