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. I did, however, offer him two thoughts: JonBenet will be back, there will be an event, maybe an arrest, new information, something, but she is not going away; and that hers, for good or ill, is a story for the ages – mystery, tragedy, metaphor, booster of circulation and ratings, the very gold standard of tabloid journalism.

As I write, E! Network is planning a two-hour special on the 20 most famous unsolved murders in American history. JonBenet is number one. TruTV, formerly Court TV, is also producing a documentary about the case in which they will use psychic investigators. The documentaries that David Mills and I made are regular reruns on cable. Last year Channel Four in the UK and CBS in the US ran documentaries about Daxis and me, and were extremely happy with the ratings. It’s strangely, even weirdly, inevitable.

The question I am often asked is whether the case will ever be solved? The only logical answer, of course, is that there is no way of knowing. It certainly could be solved, assuming that the “foreign” DNA is indeed that of the killer. It is obviously vitally important to bring that person to justice. It would be a great relief to have closure, and to be able to move on because I know that there are many people for whom her murder is ever present.

My head says, who knows? My heart says something different and almost inevitably, as if by some bizarre destiny, it was Karr who offered the appropriate words. On the day of Patsy’s funeral, in his room in Bangkok, he paid what he called a “private tribute to Patricia…” He sang songs, old hymns. One is called “Farther Along…”

“Farther along we’ll know all about it,
Farther along we’ll understand why.
Cheer up my sister, live in the sunshine.
We’ll understand it, all by and by.”

Appendix

Here is the text of the article I wrote for the Sunday edition of the Daily Camera in September 1997. It took me about an hour to write. It would change my life for the next ten years.

The first finger of blame was pointed at the paparazzi. But it didn’t take much reflection to understand that these young men – it is a male sport – scummish and ruthless though they may be, were low down the food chain. There were the agencies that bought their photos, the papers, magazines and TV programmes to whom they were sold. And there was us, the reader, the viewer, the merely curious, the ogler, the voyeur, the fantasist who perhaps compensated for a drab life by borrowing something, God knows what, from the images of the famously glamorous. More than once we have heard that her death is “like a Greek tragedy,” the essence of which is that it speaks to a larger truth, in this case the despoiling of public and private life by media and their consumers obsessed with the flashy and the trivial and the seedy. But we did not need a car crash to tell us this. The truth of what we have become as a media saturated culture was already right before our eyes.

Three days before Diana’s death I had given the latest of a number of interviews about the media coverage of the Ramsey case. This was to MSNBC, but there had been others with local stations, talk radio and local press. It occurred to me that I had never actually put pen to paper about this. Twenty-four hours before she died, here is what I wrote about a child and her murder and the way we have dealt with it.

There is a line in a James Woods movie which keeps sloshing around my mind. Woods is playing the lawyer, Danny Davis, who defended the McMartins, the owners of a day care center in Los Angeles who were accused in 1983 of appalling sexual crimes against children. Davis is toying with the idea of defending the McMartins. His wife is trying to dissuade him along the lines of “how can you even think of defending those scumbags after what they did to those children…” Because they have a Constitutional right to be defended, because that is what the rule of law is all about, he tries on her with growing exasperation. He pauses and finally screams, pointing to a TV picture of a baying mob calling for all kinds of horrors to be visited upon the hapless family, “how come everybody in America knows they’re guilty?” It was a good question, because not only could everyone not ‘know’ of their guilt, we now know, after one of the longest trials in American history that they were innocent. They were abused, wrongfully accused, their lives and careers destroyed but the hysterical mob, the avenging and vengeful prosecutors did not get their way.

I keep asking myself, “how come everybody ‘knows’ that John and Patsy Ramsey are guilty?” It’s a question that puzzles and troubles, hanging there like a gargoyle with a grotesque and taunting grin. I’ve tried it in the office, in my favorite bar, with friends and family.

Almost everyone is so sure. Everybody seems to “know” they’re guilty, rather in the way in which everyone “knew” that the McMartins were guilty and every white jury in Mississippi “knows” that that black boy standing before them is guilty. But on what basis? Surely not from the available evidence, which circumstantially might provide grounds for wondering but not the Salem-like damnation which has been heaped upon them.

I cannot bring myself to be so sure. I remember too well the atmosphere in Britain in the 1970s in the wake of a series of pub bombs by the IRA how many Irish men and women were captured, prosecuted, found guilty and placed in prison for lengthy spells. I remember how we all, in the community, ‘knew’ they were guilty. Problem was they weren’t, they were merely ruined.

We are so ready to judge, to damn, to seek revenge, to leap to judgments that lie well beyond an evidential base. But the Ramsey case throws up so many troubling aspects of the society.

Further evidence of the corruption of journalistic values. Of the fact that where there had once been clear water between mainstream values and those of the tabloids, there was now little or none. Of the voyeuristic, manipulative, trashy, exploitative character of the coverage. Of the fact that an increasing habit of our culture is to salivate at the violent, to take private tragedy and use it as public spectacle for the crude and boorish end of boosting circulation and ratings. Sad that it has come to this.

Further evidence of the corruption of the rule of law, of the undermining of the judicial process as it becomes a department in the gargantuan, all consuming entertainment industry. The pressure to get more and more evidence released, including the autopsy report, may have been rhetorically underpinned by something called “the public’s right to know” but was too often a cynical exercise in keeping the story alive, to feed the public appetite for more morsels from a child’s death. And hardly anywhere did the media allow for the presumption of innocence, rather preferring to suck as much marrow as possible from the presumption of guilt. The Ramsey case, through the way in which it has been covered, and the way in which we have devoured that coverage, is insight to a culture which seems far more willing to attend to the minutiae of shameful murder than it is to issues of greater import to the successful functioning of the society. A society which seems to find in the murder of a child, as a leading local columnist put it, “entertainment,” a curious kind of pleasure in another’s pain. So sad that it has come to this.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the Ramsey case is that it is as if an awful lot of people want them to be guilty. The question is, why? It’s an interesting question and I have only speculations in the way of answer. Perhaps they have been told so often through the media – implicitly and explicitly – that that is where the guilt resides. Perhaps they want closure. There may also be the circumstantial evidence, though that should stimulate a modicum of suspicion, not conclusion. It may have something to do with a sentiment among a good number of American women that all men are sexual predators from whom no female, including their daughters, are safe. That has very much been the gist of the coverage in the tabloids, whose biggest audience is by far women.

Whatever the reason and whoever hopefully is brought to justice what I do know is that when someone squeezed the life from that child they robbed her of all that she might have been. But every time we use JonBenet’s story, flaunt her picture, pick up a tabloid because she is on the cover, gawk at the television as the latest twist or turn in the story is rendered in breathless, shocked tones, dripping with false pity and concern, each and every time we do these things we feed the pockets of an industry that cares for nothing other than its share or its circulation. Each and every time we rob the soul of a small child resting in the warm rich soil of Georgia.

INDEX

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:

“Men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but that a powerful measure of desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment. The result is that their neighbour is to them not only a possible helper or sexual object, but also a temptation to them to gratify their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without recompense, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus; who has the courage to dispute it in the face of all the evidence in his own life and in history? This aggressive cruelty usually lies in wait for some provocation, or else it steps into the service of some other purpose, the aim of which might as well have been achieved by milder measures. In circumstances that favour it, when those forces in the mind which ordinarily inhibit it cease to operate, it also manifests itself spontaneously and reveals men as savage beasts to whom the thought of sparing their own kind is alien. Anyone who calls to mind the atrocities of the early migrations, of the invasion by the Huns or by the so-called Mongols under Ghenghiz Khan and Tamurlane, of the sack of Jerusalem by the pious Crusaders, even indeed the horrors of the last world-war, will have to bow his head humbly before the truth of this view of man.

The existence of this tendency to aggression which we can detect in ourselves and rightly presume to be present in others is the factor that disturbs our relations with our neighbours and makes it necessary for culture to institute its high demands. Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another. Their interests in their common work would not hold them together; the passions of instinct are stronger than reasoned interests. Culture has to call up every possible reinforcement in order to erect barriers against the aggressive instincts of men and hold their manifestations in check by reaction-formations in men’s minds.”

Nietzsche got there first in his own bleak rendition of the nature of the human condition, the brute forces that drive it and that mangle the Paulinian notion that love will triumph:

“To see others suffer does one good. To make others suffer even more: this is a hard (saying) but an ancient…all too human principle, to which even the apes might subscribe…without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches…and in punishment there is festival.”

Perhaps it is then simply part of what we are, that we have an inherent disposition to vent, to aggress, to hate, feelings that require that we seek someone or something against which to vent, aggress, hate. However since we also have pretensions to being civilized, caring, human, decent, it is difficult to face up to such a loathsome disposition, so we deal with it by rationalizing it away, justifying with whatever pretext is available.

Peter Gay, in his monumental work, The Cultivation of Hatred; the Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, pours over the vast, long literatures that have sought to come to grips with this condition. He notes that:

“Aggressive acts, to begin with, are not all primitive pugilism, wanton cruelty, or routine murder. They range across a broad spectrum of verbal and physical expression, from confident self-advertisement to permissible mayhem, from sly malice to sadistic torture. They emerge as words and gestures – less fatal, to be sure, than physical violence, but little less unmistakable…The practice of invidious social comparisons is awash with aggressive impulses. So is the delicious occupation of gossip…”

It is clear, however, that no one will ever admit to arbitrary or instinctive aggression – the project of Modernity has at least been successful in convincing us of the impropriety of such a disposition. We are, after all, the Children of Reason. So how do we go about this business of aggressing, of hating? Why, of course, we find an excuse, a reason. As Gay notes, “Every culture, every class, every century, constructs its distinctive alibis for aggression.” I think that Gay is getting close to a very uncomfortable truth about who we really are, and reminds me of Gandhi’s response when asked his opinion about Western civilization: “…it would be a good idea.”

Better Angels of Our Nature

As for me and Karr, I suppose one issue I need to deal with is why I did it, why did I spend do much time helping to find him, and why was I willing to put myself through what was, in all honesty, a terrible experience. I say “suppose,” because for much of the time I have been writing this piece I had no intention of addressing these questions. Part of this was to do with a certain stubbornness in refusing to respond to the commentaries that were oh so prissy and righteous, verbal and written exemplars of how it was all so inappropriate, not what a journalist should do, not what they would do. I had this feeling that being lectured by those who covered the case was not unlike being nagged about the dangers of promiscuous sex by a nymphomaniac. It is also a bit rich to hear these critiques from a profession that in the whole saga of covering the Ramsey story were only too ready to share bodily fluids with law enforcement – in at least one case, so it is said, literally.

In the end I have relented and want to take on the issue, in a very particular way. But first let me say something that my friend and colleague Len Ackland was quick to point out to those who asked for his thoughts. I am not, nor have I ever claimed to be, a journalist. I am a media scholar who has spent a lifetime studying journalism, who has done some journalism, numerous opinion pieces here and in the UK and, most notably, working with David Mills on the documentaries, but I have not sought the mantle of “journalist.”

However, even if I were I would still have done what I did, because in the end what is important, vital and necessary is that we define ourselves not as this or that professional but as moral beings, that our humanity should be defined by such and that when we are not guided by moral systems, by an ethical compass, then we let loose not those “better angels of our nature” that so entranced Lincoln but that dark side, that cruel and exploitative instinct that so haunted him. By an ethical compass I mean the literal definition:

“Ethic \ ‘eth-ik \n: the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation; a set of moral principles or values; a theory or system of moral values; the principles of conduct governing an individual or a group.”

I don’t want to be misunderstood here. I’m claiming no high moral ground and recognize that I have vices galore and that, for example, some of the women in my life have decent grounds for a war crimes tribunal. I understood that life is a constant struggle between the competing sides of our nature, and that in fact the whole issue of cultural identity, of the dialogue about what is good and bad in culture is an enlarged version of this agonizing struggle about personal identity, and the vexing question of, is this who I am, is this who I should be?

In this instance, from that first stirring of empathy for the Ramseys to the decision to find Karr, for good or ill, I sought to do the right thing, and I am perplexed that there were those who chose not to see it that way.

“It was truly intimate and very sexual.”

Let me make the point by taking you, the reader, to one moment in time, one place: July 19, 2006, Bangkok, Thailand. On that day I received an email from Daxis, with a Word document attached. Earlier in this piece I wrote of how when he first went to the school where he would be teaching he saw a number of young girls, one of whom in particular he lusted after. On the 19th he wrote a long note about her. Here it is (I have changed the names of the children):

[EDITOR"S NOTE: S&R has received a cease-and-desist request from John Mark Karr in which he alleges that his e-mail to Michael Tracey, subject "About Melanie," enjoys copyright privilege. We do not believe that we have infringed Karr's copyright, but are in the process of seeking legal opinion on the subject. While we explore the details of this issue, we have elected to remove the text in question.

However, this communication is and has been widely available online for some time. So while we have removed the text itself from this post for the moment, we see no reason why we shouldn't link to it. So, we direct our readers here, where the full e-mail is available, as well as the full text of ALL Karr's e-mails to Michael Tracey. In addition, the reader can listen to the recorded calls and view all relevant public papers concerning this case. The "About Melanie" e-mail begins on page 297 of the PDF.]

He Has His New Target

There was by the time I received this nothing that particularly surprised me, and I have no doubt that he genuinely believed that the child was attracted to him, nor that given the opportunity he would have had sex with her. Note how he talks about his interaction with her, the flirty playfulness, her attraction to him, his declaration of his patience in being willing to wait until she was in his charge in a year. In his fevered imagining she, like JonBenet, would be saying, “I love you Daxis.”

This was his new romance and in his mind it was all consensual and come hell or high water she would be his. When I read this I simply said to Tom Bennett, “ he has his new target.”

The idea that anyone would not wish to stop what was going to happen to the child because of an over-inflated sense of their “professionalism I find disgustingly dangerous. And if there are those who would still say it was all wrong to do what I did, just close your eyes and imagine that it is your five year-old child whose belly button he wants to eat and about whom he expresses his lust.

And how did it feel for me? Dealing with the media was not difficult. I’ve been doing that on and off since 1998. However, there is no doubt that 2006 turned into an awful, dark year. By its end I was exhausted. The idea of teaching in the Fall was dreadful, not because I dislike teaching since ordinarily it is, more often than not, a delightful experience. In all my many years in Colorado I have never bought out of a course or sort relief, even at the busiest times.

Yet over the summer break I went to my Dean, Paul Voakes, and asked if I could buy out of at least one course. As the words left my lips I understood that he would have to say no. He agreed to discuss this with the Provost, Phil DiStephano. I also knew that Phil would have to say no. The reason was simple, since that group of people who hated me and the Ramseys – and the degree of their vitriol is truly splendid to behold – would be watching me like a hawk and at the first sign of special treatment (even though buying out of a course and banking courses is routine) they would be screaming holy hell. I managed to get through the Fall semester, even though I knew I was missing a beat, and in fact found the classroom pleasantly therapeutic.

What I did come to understand was that while being attacked publicly and viciously is never pleasant, I was used to it and could handle it without too much difficulty (my therapist disagrees). The mood of deep despair, anxiety, sadness that descended on me like a thick, cold, clinging fog came from the experience of having to deal with dark intelligence day in day out, for months on end.

I will never forget the Saturday night following the phone conversation in which Daxis had, at great length, described how he killed her. I sat in my study until the sun set. It was dark, and I sat there thinking about what I had just heard, not knowing if it was true or not, but ethically feeling that I had to continue to believe that it might be, and knowing that, true or not, something similar to what he had described had happened to that child, as evidenced in the awful autopsy photos. In my mind’s eye the images of his description ran constantly, like a permanent reel of film, replaying over and over.

I could not get rid of one image in particular, that of his tying the ligatures to her wrists and then hanging her from the window. I don’t know how long I sat there, but there came a point when I could hold it inside no longer and, for the first time in almost a decade of thinking about and talking about the appalling things that were done to JonBenet and to her family, I started to sob. Not just tearing up, not just tears running down my cheeks but a flood and a wail of anguish and sorrow. In that sense Karr may not have killed JonBenet, but he sure as hell came close to destroying me.

He Cries for Understanding and Forgiveness

Patsy Ramsey died in the early hours of June 24th, 2006. The funeral service was on June 29th at the United Methodist Church, Roswell, Georgia. I had flown there with Pete Hofstrom, former number two in the Boulder DA’s office, Bryan Morgan, John’s attorney and Pat Burke, Patsy’s attorney. Lou Smit was there as was Hal Haddon, Morgan’s law partner, and Trip DeMeuth who had, when he was an assistant DA, fought passionately to get other people to take Lou Smit’s “intruder” argument (I refuse to call it a theory anymore). Mary Lacy and her husband were also there, as was Ollie Gray, who for several years had been working with Lou on their own, private investigation of JonBenet’s death.

I think for everyone it was simply important to show a kind of solidarity for this poor woman. The service lasted about 40 minutes and was a celebration of her life, with passing reference to, but no lingering on, that wretched Christmas night almost ten years before. Her sisters were there, wearing large summer hats, a silent, colourful reminder of Patsy’s love for her own hats. After the funeral a long line of cars proceeded on the drive to St. James Episcopal Cemetery in Marietta, where Patsy would be laid to rest alongside her mother Nedra, her step daughter, Beth (John’s child, who had been killed in a car crash in 1992) and but a few paces from JonBenet’s grave. The drive from church to cemetery took about 30 minutes and police and state troopers cleared the roads, closing off side streets, to allow the cortege to proceed unhindered.

As I looked out of the car windows there was a surprising, moving sight. The officers were standing to attention, some saluted, troopers held their hats over their hearts. I don’t think it is too much of an exaggeration to suggest that they were not just paying their respects, they were acknowledging what the rest of us there knew with a passion, that the only thing that Patsy had ever done to JonBenet was love her. There would of course be those who continued to believe in her guilt, even if they no longer cared. And then there are the remnants of the mob that would continue to hate her, but for them hating is what oxygen is to the rest of us.

The press coverage the following day was unusually caring, not dwelling on the accusations against this most maligned of women. The coverage noted that cops were taking video tapes of all the car plates, reporting that they had been told that this was because the case remained open and this was just a precaution. In reality they were looking for Daxis.

In April 2007, I received an email from “Daxis.” It was written in German and apparently asked the question of where deception begins. A few more came as he expressed his desire to talk, again. In July he wrote: “I ache for her, Michael. I feel such confusion. I am so utterly confused about what happened.”

In a later one in July, he asked me if I had seen an interview he had done with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren. I had, and realized that he was still trying to convince the world that he was responsible for JonBenet’s death. At one point Van Susteren, clearly bewildered by this, asks him if he understood the difference between first and second degree murder, to which he instantly replied, “of course, first implies intent.”

There it was again, what I had spent months listening to – it was an accident, it wasn’t meant to be. I replied, briefly, that at least he was consistent. He replied: “Thank you, Michael. I shall continue to be consistent when it comes to my darling JonBenet. I am glad you saw that interview. I’ve regrets about some of the things I said only to protect myself. For instance, I think of her every day. There is not a time when I am not thinking of her. I wanted to say that so bad but was not afforded such. I look forward to the day when you can respond with more than a sentence or two. Michael, listen to me carefully – nothing has changed. I am the same man you knew me to be. Law enforcement’s worst mistakes cannot change that. We’ll talk about it all more on Friday.” No we won’t, I thought.

John Ramsey today lives with his son Burke in Charlevoix, Michigan. John Mark Karr lives in the Atlanta area and has a fiancé who lives in Las Vegas with her young daughter. He visits regularly the graves of Patsy and JonBenet. In the early summer of 2007 he placed by her grave a large angel holding chimes. He also placed a pot of violets, a small crystal bear and her August birth stone. He sits and cries, and asks, as always, for understanding and forgiveness.

Next: Postscript

INDEX

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.

The Sheer Banality of Contemporary Culture

The book is, on first reading, impenetrably obscure. On second reading what becomes clear is that it is fforde’s attempt to harmonize the BBC’s emergent agnostic and humanistic ethos with a more ancient view of the nature of religious experience. Even as I write that it does feel almost quaint, but there lies within the pages of fforde’s book arguments that are, or should be, central to any contemporary discussion of the role and purpose of broadcasting in an allegedly mature, cultured democracy. He writes:

“By its nature broadcasting must be in a constant and sensitive relationship with the moral condition of society.”

He felt that the moral establishment had failed modern society and that broadcasting was a way in which that failure could be rectified. He added that it

“is of cardinal importance that everyone in a position of responsibility should be ready to set himself or herself the duty of assuring, to those creative members of staff, who must take the daily, hourly, and even instantaneous decisions . . . that measure of freedom, independence and elan without which the arts do not flourish.”

fforde understood that then, just as now, the moral condition of society was undergoing an important change as standards which had for so long, for so many people, been successful route maps, were being redrafted. What concerned him, was not the change per se, but whether the standards which would replace them were worthy, even if they were secular rather than religious? It is a good, always necessary, question.

It goes without saying that it is my firm conviction that it is precisely the absence of such protective layers and imaginative commitments that have nurtured, brought to the surface, the boorishness, sheer banality of contemporary culture, here and elsewhere. That idea of providing a protective layer within which the imaginative spirit might create, lay at the heart of the BBC version of public service broadcasting which increasingly flourished in the post-war years.

Ian Jacob, Director-General of the BBC from 1952 to 1959, refined the notion. In 1958, in an internal document called Basic Propositions, he described public service broadcasting as:

. . . a compound of a system of control, an attitude of mind, and an aim, which if successfully achieved results in a service which cannot be given by any other means. The system of control is full independence, or the maximum degree of independence that Parliament will accord. The attitude of mind is an intelligent one capable of attracting to the service the highest quality of character and intellect. The aim is to give the best and the most comprehensive service of broadcasting to the public that is possible. The motive that underlies the whole operation is a vital factor; it must not be vitiated by political or commercial consideration.

This is one of the best attempts to capture in words a concept and view of broadcasting which remains central to the world of cultural politics. Yet even here the vision, the articulation, is limited. Jacob’s words imply that we understand the nature of public service broadcasting not by defining it, but by recognizing its results, rather as one plots the presence of a hidden planet or a subatomic particle not by “seeing” it, but by measuring the effects of its presence.

The Pilkington Committee, a committee under the chairmanship of Sir Harry Pilkington set up by the British government in 1960 to undertake an inquiry into the future of British broadcasting, said as much when it reported in 1962: “though its standards exist and are recognizable, broadcasting is more nearly an art than an exact science. It deals in tastes and values and is not precisely definable.” The committee added:

“The duty of providing a service of broadcasting, and the responsibility for what is broadcast, are vested in public corporations since the purposes and effects of broadcasting are such that the duty and responsibility should not be left to the ordinary processes of commercial enterprise, and because there are compelling objections to their being undertaken by the State…”

It suggested that the products of these bodies should be a service which fully realizes the purpose of broadcasting, which it later defined as:

“…one which will use the medium with an acute awareness of its power to influence values and moral standards; will respect the public right to choose from amongst the widest possible range of subject matter, purposefully treated; will at the same time be aware of and care about public tastes and attitudes in all their variety; and will constantly be on the watch for and ready to try the new and unusual.”

The Dream of the Mob

The beast that lurks in the shrubbery of these kinds of discussions is that whatever the definitional uncertainties, that great broadcasting can be experienced and recognized but never properly captured by language, means that someone has to decide on what is “good” and “bad,” that there should be a guiding hand, by what has been referred to as “custodians” or the “caretakers” of culture. For much of the history of public broadcasting this idea – so anathema today – was simply taken for granted. Hierarchies of social status and cultural judgment were simply assumed.

A key justification for the custodial role in most societies where public service broadcasting was established was that since the radio frequency used for transmissions was a limited natural resource, someone had to ensure that its use served the public good, and the whole community. The cultural geology of this decision had, however, a deeper level to it, based on 19th Century assumptions about the ways in which the arts and humanities could elevate the human condition.

In fact, one way of looking at the creation of public service broadcasting in the early years of the 20th Century is that it was the relocation of a 19th Century humanistic dream that through culture the fragile structure of civilization could be nurtured and protected. The fear that drove that dream was of “the mob,” the pervasive belief among cultural, religious and political elites that there was indeed a dark side to the human soul that was, when let loose, dangerous and devastating to the flesh as well as the spirit.

And who is to say that they were wrong, nestling as they did between the first great war and a looming second. And let us not forget that John Adams in his dialogue with Jefferson about the nature of democracy made the comment that a “mob is no less a mob because they are with you.” There remained, however, well into the 20th Century, a residual faith, tied to the whole condition of Enlightenment humanism and belief in progress, that popular culture need not be debauched but could in fact transcend itself. Consider these key passages from the Pilkington Report:

“Television does not, and cannot, merely reflect the moral standards of society. It must affect them, either by changing or by reinforcing them…..

Because the range of experience is not finite but constantly growing, and because the growing points are usually most significant, it is on these that challenges to existing assumptions and beliefs are made, where the claims to new knowledge and new awareness are stated. If our society is to respond to the challenges and judge the claims, they must be put before it. All broadcasting, and television especially, must be ready and anxious to experiment, to show the new and unusual, to give a hearing to dissent. Here, broadcasting must be most willing to make mistakes; for if it does not, it will make no discoveries.”

The suggestion here isn’t that public broadcasters are all hoping and dreaming that their programs will transform people from cultural and intellectual slobs into something of which one can more readily approve. But rather that objectively some such argument must be the last line of defense. The language is of standards, quality, excellence, range. The logic is of social enrichment, that in however indefinable a manner this society is “better” for having programs produced from within the framework of those social arguments that pursue a public interest, compared to those programs produced within an environment in which commerce or politics prevail.

The Consequences of Public Taste

It is interesting and extremely useful, to counterpose these principles, values and ambitions documented over the past several pages with the evolving realities of cultural production as a market, since they entail very different world views. I have long suspected that the potency of the market is its simplicity, in that it doesn’t ask very much of anyone – there is no required effort to engage at some deeper level what it is that is being broadcast. The more purposeful, social and cultural agenda of the European model does demand – as it should – some effort on the part of the audience-qua-citizen. The audience-qua-consumer is easier to feed.

There is, however, another ironic potency in the market model, one that speaks to an inherent tension in the deep commitment to the idea of the collective, “the public,” “the public sphere,” the “cultural sphere.” This inevitably rests uneasily with what is an even more basic principle on which our cultures were, and are, established, the foundational sovereignty of the individual. The fact of this latent tension could be avoided for much of the history of broadcasting, for example, by touting the argument that because the natural resource of the radio spectrum was scarce it had to be carefully controlled so that everyone could benefit. This was a useful fiction. The agenda of the founding figures of public broadcasting was always about nurturing social and cultural good, and maintaining standards that would not be populist. In other words there was always a residual fear of the consequences of untrammeled public taste.

The beauty of the idea of the market, for those who wish to make the case rhetorically, is that it represents the triumph of populism – some of which is intelligent, much of which is corrupted, but it is populism nevertheless. Its potency lies in the fact that it embodies a kind of faux democracy, the individual making his or her own choices from the range of cultural goods made available by the market. It is a difficult argument to oppose since the essential premise of western governance and culture in modernity is that society is constituted of individuals who are rational, informed and sovereign, an admittedly nonsensical but nonetheless potent conceptualization. There is obvious utility in this for proponents of the market, because if one cannot interfere with the right of Everyman as citizen to act as Everyman as consumer then one cannot, by definition, interfere with the market because one would thereby not be interfering with this or that company that markets its wares, but with the very stuff of democratic civilization.

Another charge against the kind of values I have been discussing here rests on a rejection of the very idea of making a judgment about what is good or bad, since this implies a hierarchy of values. In the argot of pseudo-postmodernism this is anathema. In his latest book, Richard Hoggart writes well about the problems of this relativistic perspective:

“It is a growing characteristic of mass communications today – in the press, magazines and much broadcasting – that they show no respect at all for the ‘life of the mind’ (a good and essential phrase), but dismiss such things as elitist and not for people ‘such as us’; not that ‘we’ now think ourselves inferior, but quite the opposite; we are members of the overwhelming majority who are going the way the world is going. This is the dead center of popular and unassailable taste. Chat-show hosts and hostesses display it daily, television ‘personalities’ are pleased to indicate that they have no tastes which in anyway differ from those of their mass audiences, and certainly none which might seem ‘better’ than those of the audiences. The broadsheet newspapers often fall backwards into those postures. Such words, words of evaluation, have fallen out of the populist lexicon. Broadcasting interviewers see themselves as ‘the voice of the common man,’ which is a reductive myth; their common man is all too often an invented vulgarian.”

He points out that the Booker Prize for 2001 was not awarded to a writer that public opinion seemed too favor. When asked why, one of the judges said, “This prize is not meant to be a reflection of public taste. It is a prize for literary quality.” Hoggart concludes:

“At the bottom of the acceptance of relativism as the only belief is, paradoxically, a belief that there is no such thing as belief or conviction. That can do much to remove guilt or even the feeling of being somehow lost, since relativism provides a Dead Sea of common feelings in which we float, all warm and supported. The motto used to promote the soap-opera East Enders, repeatedly shown on television, hammers away with: ‘Everyone’s talking about it.’ ‘So what?’ – is the only self-respecting response.”

It is terribly easy to turn this around and to make the accusation of elitism, made all the more weighty in an age where the very idea of a hierarchy of values is called into question, indeed seen as out of date – useless, of course, we are dealing with the majestic superior ability of a Michael Jordan or a Roger Clemens or a Peyton Manning.

Those who would argue for the market, for giving people only what they want, for abandoning other, larger more principled judgments that see human beings, citizens, as something other than statistics in skins, principles that celebrate excellence as much they reject tat, must persuade us that all is well and cheery, must hope that we never do come to understand the comment made by Hector, in Alan Bennett’s History Boys. He suggests that in the presence of great literature (and I would expand this to all great culture, whether in print, or on the screen at home and in the movie theater) it is as if a hand has reached out and taken our own.

The Foundational Principle of the Republic

There is, however, another important lesson from the events of the past ten years, for me most profoundly reflected in the hate mail (e- and snail-) that I received, particularly after Karr was released. This is far from the first time this has happened and it was probably on no greater scale than the attacks that took place after David Mills and I made the first of our documentaries. The reactions then were incredible, with phone-in campaigns to the Dean’s office, letters to the President of CU, to the then-Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Phil DiStefano, to the Regents, almost all calling for me to be fired. The university was nothing but supportive, for which I was and am grateful. There was even a bizarre attempt by some to get Congress to revoke my green card. It was all very strange and intense, so when Karr happened the flood of attacks was neither unusual nor unexpected. I simply became a useful whipping boy for, well, for what?

I think the answer here is again quite complex. Obviously there were those who hated the position I had taken on the Ramsey case, and the fact that I had been very vocal and public in my belief that John and Patsy were innocent. (That was actually not my position in 1997 and 1998. I didn’t know, because I couldn’t know, what the evidence was so that when we made the first documentary the question of their guilt or innocence was conceptually irrelevant.) To then, in 2002, make a documentary, working with Lou Smit, that laid out the case that an intruder killed JonBenet would inevitably incur further wrath. Clearly, however, what was thrown at those who came out in support of the Ramseys and argued their innocence (one of the lead detectives on the investigation described Lou Smit as a “delusional old man,” a comment that would be offensive if it weren’t so silly), was nothing compared to the intense and unrelenting abuse that the Ramseys and their family had to endure.

However, what perplexed then, as it does now, was, why? Why the fury, the anger, the inability to disagree without hating, a condition which defines not just the narrative around JonBenet, but a vast acreage of public discourse.

Honest disagreement, the ability to engage in rational discourse is the foundational principle of the Republic. On April 13, 1943, the bicentennial of the birth of Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt inaugurated the Jefferson Memorial in Washington and declared:

“Thomas Jefferson believed, as we believe, in Man. He believed, as we believe, that men are capable of their own government, and that no king, no tyrant, no dictator can govern for them as well as they can govern for themselves.” FDR concluded his address by proclaiming Jefferson’s own words that are etched into the memorial, words that are wonderfully and determinedly paradoxical, the very essence of the Enlightenment: “I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” In his 1988 biography of Jefferson, The Pursuit of Reason, Noble Cunningham notes that despite Jefferson’s numerous interests and accomplishments, “…certain basic tenets motivated his life and shaped his actions in whatever challenge he faced. Of these, none was stronger than his belief in ‘the sufficiency of reason for the care of human affairs.’ As a man of the Enlightenment who believed in the application of reason to society as well as to nature, Jefferson throughout his life pursued the use of reason as the means by which mankind could obtain a more perfect society… (He believed) that ‘knowledge is power, that knowledge is safety, that knowledge is happiness’…” His faith in the power of reason “nourished his belief in progress, under-girded his political principles, explained his devotion to learning and to educational opportunity for every person, and produced the optimistic outlook that failed him only as he approached the end of a very long life.”

In 1927, in the case Whitney v. California, Justice Louis Brandeis, in what is widely regarded as the most profound articulation of the meaning and importance of the First Amendment, wrote:

“Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties; and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to speak as you will and speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth. But they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies; and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones…. “

Brandeis’ vision rests on a basic premise: that there is both a human capacity and an urge to use language to pursue truth. The assumption about the power of language and evolved thought has guided the whole history of our culture, or, perhaps more accurately, it has guided the idea of what our culture should look like: informed citizens, engaged in mature reasoning, arriving at decent and proper ends.

The question now in play is this: in a society whose forms of popular, mediated, mass culture are all but bereft of evolved language, whose education system leaves much to be desired in its failure to nurture the critical thinking capabilities of its students, to what extent can it still claim to continue Jefferson’s “pursuit of reason,” and Brandeis’ “secret of liberty”?In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that we live in a place in time in which there is a great demand, from different corners, for a studied silence. It was clear to me, still is, that there was, to many people’s way of thinking, something unseemly about even suggesting a counter-narrative about the Ramsey case.

There is, unfortunately, nothing remarkable about this. Witness the rigidities of great swaths of people, here and elsewhere, with fundamentalist religious beliefs. Consider what happens when the likes of Daniel Moynihan in the 1960s and Bill Cosby more recently tried to engage a debate about the social ills of the African-American family. And, of course, think through the extraordinary difficulty that was faced by anyone who, in the years after 9/11, wished to challenge the brutish and stupid foreign policy of the Bush administration, underpinned as it was by a public hysteria that sought some kind of psychological relief by clinging desperately to the symbol of the flag and the mother’s milk succour of patriotism.

Passion and Reason

There is another, related way of thinking about this that also comes out of 18th Century thought. In that time physicians believed that the mind was divided into three main faculties – reason, feeling and will and that, as Norman Dain wrote in his 1964 book, Concepts of Insanity, “sanity prevailed when reason remained master over feelings and will. Violent emotions would overthrow the power of reason.” The essential premise then, as now, is that we are rational. That is why we expect the juror and the citizen to arrive a conclusion in the wake of a clear and rational engagement with the available information and evidence, even though in neither case are they required to explain how they arrive at any given conclusion. However, as Arthur O. Lovejoy notes in Reflections on Human Nature, while “…the philosophers of the Age of Reason believed that although reason should control the other mental faculties, in fact the passions, or emotions, always ruled supreme: reason served primarily to accomplish the aims of the passions.”

This description fits perfectly to what happened in the Ramsey narrative, where many people were driven by intense, even primal passions, all the while using their capacity to reason to cobble together “information” to demonstrate the legitimacy of the visceral hatred of the Ramseys and of anyone who argued the case that an intruder killed JonBenet. On a larger scale, as I write, fully one-third of the public believes that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11, and almost half of the public continues to hold to the idea that humans were created in their current form at one moment in time in the past 10,000 years, offering a mountain of “evidence” to support what the scientific community would deem to be an absurd belief. They hold fast to such beliefs, even in the face of their obvious falsity, because not to do so would shatter whatever semblance of emotional calm they still cling to, and still desperately need.

Another issue that perplexed me was that there was something about Patsy that seemed to make a lot of people not just uneasy, but ready and willing to believe that she was capable of killing her child, possibly with the assistance of John, and then making it like someone else was responsible. The obvious question is: why? Yet again, I think the answer taps into a complex of emotional and psychological conditions of how, in this instance, we come to think about crime, and in particular, how we “see” guilt.

What was important here in understanding the narrative that surrounded Patsy was that it was not the presence of any meaningful evidence that suggested her involvement, and indeed what evidence did exist, such as the DNA, pointed away. Rather, there was a loose and vague perception, held by many, as to who she was. There were many facets to the case, the forensics, the theories, the flawed investigation, the small town Gothic atmospherics, but I had long understood that much of the essential energy within that narrative had literally been looking us in the face, Patsy’s face, and the fact that she entered JonBenet in the pageants reflected, for many people, a moral laxity the depth of which was such that she was indeed capable of brutalizing her daughter in a moment of anger and then pretending that it was someone else. It is not an argument that I can even begin to understand, but it is one which was simply assumed by many people. It was almost as if, in pointing the finger at her, there was some kind of emotional relief.

In her 1990 book, The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm takes a fascinating look at the case of Jeffrey MacDonald and the writer Joe McGinnis. MacDonald was serving three life sentences for murdering his wife and two children. McGinnis had come to prominence in the 1960s for his book The Selling of the President, which told in savage detail the way in which advertising had been used by the Nixon campaign. He had subsequently developed a successful writing career, including a book about the MacDonald case, Fatal Vision.

McGinnis had written the book at the suggestion of MacDonald, whose intent was to have McGinnis vindicate him in his claim that he was innocent. Malcolm’s account points to the way in which McGinnis ingratiated himself with MacDonald, leading him to believe that he was a friend who did indeed believe in MacDonald’s innocence. When the book finally appeared it was a portrait of a psychopathic killer, not the ode to a wrongfully convicted friend which MacDonald had been expecting. MacDonald sued and almost won (one juror refused to support MacDonald) prompting Malcolm’s wry comment: “…five of the six jurors were persuaded that a man who was serving three consecutive life sentences for the murder of his wife and two small children was deserving of more sympathy than the writer who had deceived him.”

There is one passage in Malcolm’s book in which she describes a dinner conversation she had with MacDonald’s attorney, Gary Bostwick, and his wife, Janette, a psychotherapist. At one point Janette interjects:

“In my work, a patient will come in and say, ‘This is the truth about me.’ Then, later in the therapy, a significant and entirely opposite truth may emerge – but they’re both true.” In Malcolm’s account, Bostwick responds: “It’s the same with the judicial process…People feel that it’s a search for the truth. But I don’t think that is its function in this society. I’m convinced that its function is cathartic. It’s a means for allowing people to air their differences, to let them feel as if they had a forum. You release tension in the social body in some way, whether or not you come to the truth.”

There is much to agree with in what Bostwick was saying and in explaining what happened to Patsy. It also perhaps helps explain why the media pay an almost obsessive attention to certain cases, not just to formal legal proceedings, but also to the pseudo-trials that take place on television, talk radio and in print media. They do so in part because they are part of that process of societal catharsis, given energy by rumor, gossip and almost obsessive voyeurism and the cruel brew of “certainty,” as to what “happened.” In the end “truth” is not what judgment of guilt and innocence is about, it is all about mood.

The Unreal Made Real

The problem is compounded by the fact that the media, who should properly have been a countervailing force to these tendencies, were themselves complicit in fueling the firestorm in which the Ramseys found themselves engulfed. It has been pointed out by such people as Tom Patterson, the Benjamin C. Bradlee Professor at the Kennedy School of Government, that at some point in the 1970s, the tradition and character of investigative journalism in the American media began to change. At its best that tradition had journalists going to considerable lengths to unearth facts, to dig beneath the surface of a story to reveal hidden truths or, as with the Pentagon Papers, to offer enriched interpretation of information which already exists. As Patterson told the Committee of Concerned Journalists,

“by the late 1970s we find a substitute for careful, deep, investigative reporting – allegations that surface in the news based on claims by sources that are not combined with factual digging on the reporter’s part. The tendency increased in the 1980s, increased again in the 1990s… The use of unnamed and anonymous sources becomes a larger proportion of the total…”

It certainly characterized the coverage of the Ramsey case.

One particular consequence of this is to allow rumor and gossip to flourish and to establish potent, feverish irrationalities and “understandings” of an event in which the unreal is made real, the stupid profound, ignorance knowledge and the bigoted insightful. There is no question that rumor and gossip are part of who we are, and serve as social and emotional utilities in “explaining” the world around us. In the context of crime rumor, gossip and innuendo can become a potent means of establishing a paradigm from within which one sees something “this” way rather than “that.” The only way to step outside of this is to engage the evidence, think through the narrative of the crime, question commonsensical ways of thinking, use critical faculty, in other words to do what most people, most of the time have neither the patience, the resources nor desire to do. What is clear, though, is that in the vortex of rumor and gossip minor personality traits, small eccentric quirks of character can be quickly transformed into hints of some dark underlying condition.

A particularly odious aspect to rumour, gossip and innuendo is that they are rarely if ever presented as such. They can masquerade as “concern” for the victim, a pretentious proffering of “…it pains me to say this but…” The gossip or rumour-monger is not especially concerned with solving a problem, rather drawing a kind of narcissistic sustenance from them, from “knowing” something that others don’t. I was, for example, told by three different people, who were in no way connected, that they knew someone who had been on the chair lift at the Eldora ski area near Boulder with a cop who told them that the Ramseys were about to be arrested, and I was told this in each case with a kind of knowing glee. And gossips thrive on the negative, the controversial and the sensational – qualities which were present in abundance in the Ramsey case, as neither the media nor their public heeded the admonition of Psalm 34: 13-15: “Guard your tongue from evil, your lips from deceitful speech.”

So at one level the lesson was, yet again, that the idea of reasoned discourse is, in this culture as in much of the rest of the world, on life support. What still plagues me, though, is why, how did this come about? Perhaps it was always there, this corrosive hostility to an idea not liked, a person who is different, “the other,” the “alien,” a fear of narratives that are complex, a demand for that which is simple and readily understood. I’m reminded of William James’ comment that “…a great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” Perhaps there is a deep human instinct to manage neurotic anxiety by projecting outward irrational loathing. One way of thinking about how the culture dealt with the case (and one could put many others cases and situations in here) is to see it all as what one might call a “persecution text,” an acting out of something that, however troubling, seems to be deeply human.

There is in fact an extensive literature on this, such as R. I. Moore’s The Formation of a Persecuting Society, Laurie Carlson’s A Fever in Salem, Richard Sugarman’s Rancour Against Time, Rene Girard’s The Scapegoat, Max Scheler’s Ressentiment, Robert Wuthnow’s Meaning and Moral Order, Hugh Trevor Roper’s work on historical patterns in lynchings and a veritable library of works dealing with Salem, perhaps most notably Kai Erikson’s Wayward Puritans.

This is a rich and fascinating literature, but at its core is a relatively simple argument: that anxiety at the individual and collective level, caused by external circumstance, creates a powerful urge to punish – someone, something, somewhere. The emotional physics are: punish – feel better. It doesn’t, of course, except in a momentary sense, work. This would be troubling in and of itself, but it becomes especially so when the mood is used as fodder for entertainment, and therefore boosts in ratings and circulation.

I have long thought that John and Patsy Ramsey were “guilty” well before JonBenet died, that they would both be, but Patsy in particular, the ready object of resentment, a kind of class loathing, but that in this presumption of guilty evil lay emotional utility and significant profit. It has certainly been my experience that much of the public mind in the Ramsey case was defined by unreason and that its suggestible irrationalities reflected a larger condition, and a fearsome thought, that the Age of Reason never really happened except in the fevered, if would-be noble, utopian imaginings of the Founding Fathers.

Remember those comments I used at the beginning, where people expressed their profound, if unfounded belief in Ramsey guilt. In them I had the first whiff of what I’ve been trying to engage here, a sense of a canker in the social and moral order within which we just happen to dwell. It troubled me partly because of that feeling I expressed earlier of the desire for life to be fair and decent and just, a good and caring place of fine principle with a moral culture (of whatever theological or a-theological stripe) that was not of the Fallen. It also troubled me because within the stench of spite and hate lay a very serious question as to who we really are, of who we should properly see in the morning’s mirror.

Next: An Awful, Dark Year

INDEX

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.

Somehow the Gold Isn’t All

The point is actually very simple, even obvious and even allowing for an understanding that the logic of Kapital is accumulation, a Vice for the Ages: they are greedy. If there were a large public appetite for Goethe in the original medieval German, they would feed it. There isn’t, and so they plunder the global treasure and rape the human spirit in ways that make the Vikings and the Visigoths look like UNICEF.

For them, it isn’t that the truth shall set you free, it’s the belief that wealth will make you happy, and as far as I can see, they can’t even get that right. To make this point I could point to a bevy of social theorists and clinicians, the armies of therapists, the mountains of anti-depressants, the addictions, to the sheer turmoil, if I read Dominic Dunne correctly, that seems to afflict the lives of the wealthy. I won’t; I will simply borrow this from Robert Service’s “Spell of the Yukon”:

“I wanted the gold, and I sought it,
I scribbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy – I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it -
Came out with a fortune last Fall -
Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn’t all.”

The fact is that the lesson learned from the coverage of cases such as JonBenet is that we face not just a crisis of the media in general and journalism in particular, with its fearful flight from purpose, but a larger crisis of prevailing values. The problem isn’t complicated: in a market economy, and in a culture defined to an inordinate extent by economic calculation, other values are inevitably squeezed out, values that recognize a public interest, a public good that needs to be served and that is different from the aggregation of individual wants, indeed that suggests that what people want is not the same as what they need. Witness the way in which around the globe public service broadcasting organizations are being marginalized or, in some instances, systematically dismantled, to make way for a market-driven media culture, something which strikes me as akin to pulling down the Taj Mahal and replacing it with a shanty town.

The issues raised by rampant materialism and consumerism, and the sidelining of other “virtues,” does not only speak to a critique of American culture and media. The problem is global, if only because global media are also dominated by large corporations. If I look at my home country, the UK, there are many critics arguing that, in its once-celebrated culture of broadcasting, it has lost its way, unable to fulfill its public service remit, mired in sleaze and tat, no longer vigorous, vibrant and socially significant. And if it is a shadow of its former self, is that a failure from within or is it one more portent, one more shrill illustration that history has moved on, the market is dominant, feeding public appetites that suggest a larger cultural and spiritual deterioration, a culture full of what Richard Hoggart once called “corrupt brightness, of improper appeals and moral evasions”?

I accept, however, that people like Hoggart and so many others (and I would include myself here) who regret what has happened are declared to be on the wrong side of history. Maybe so, but what I think we can say is that what’s being lost are some important values that, once gone, will be extremely difficult to retrieve: respect, responsibility, trustworthiness, caring, justice, fairness, civic virtue, citizenship. In other words, all the values and commitments that define a mature civilization and that provide the possibility of realizing the essential demand of liberal humanism, the achievement of the full and complete individual.

The Moronic Inferno

The absence of that fullness and completeness, the startling lack of mature judgment and cultivated taste, so prevalent in much popular culture, is very much suggested in the fact that by some bizarre alchemy of the times JonBenet became a celebrity and remains one – which begs yet again the question of why. How did a dead six year-old child become part of what Sean O’Hagan has called the “moronic inferno that is contemporary celebrity…”? As ever, the answer is both simple and complex: simple because it’s clear that people like and need celebrities; complex because of the complex intertwining of psychology, culture and personal biography that feed that need.

As I was writing this, on Sunday morning, December 9, 2007, an event was taking place in South Carolina that is a pitch perfect example of the odious cult of personality. Oprah (her name is in your Microsoft Word spellchecker dictionary, by the way) was on the stump for Barack Obama (and neither “Barack” nor “Obama” are in my spellchecker dictionary). The original intent had been to hold a rally in an indoor arena, seating 18,000 people. When it sold out in minutes, they decided to switch to an outdoor stadium with 80,000 seats. It also sold out.

Does anyone seriously believe that those in attendance are there for any other reason than to “see” Oprah, rather than to “listen” to Obama. (I understand that this has since changed, since Obama himself morphed into a politician-as-rock star.) Put this another way, there were then candidates for the Democratic party nomination with enormous experience, many ideas and thoughts about how to deal with the troubled times within which we live, including Christopher Dodd, Joe Biden and Bill Richardson, all of who were hard pressed to fill a high school gym. This is telling us something – as a culture we are about the “moronic” rather than the profound and important. And it is precisely here that the issue becomes worthy of unpackaging, because in a curious, even bizarre sense, Oprah and JonBenet and all those others are cut from the same cloth, and it is we who wield the scissors.

For example, can there be any more pathetic, sad, revealing comment about the state of the culture – and not just in the United States – than the following comment from David Samuels, in an article about the paparazzi who follow Britney Spears around (30 to 45 on any given night) in The Atlantic, April 2008:

“History’s best-publicized celebrity meltdown has helped fuel dozens of television shows, magazines and Internet sites, the combined value of whose Britney-related product easily exceeds $100 million a year, and helped make ‘Britney Spears’ the most popular search term on Yahoo once again in 2007, as it has been for six of the past seven years…”

Read the whole piece and you might, if you have any sense of decency, want to slit your wrists. (In kind of related, nauseous vein, try this: the journalist Tana Ganeva pointed out that in 2006, the British retail chain Tesco – think Target – launched the Peekaboo Pole Dancing Kit, designed to help young girls “unleash the sex kitten inside.” Amidst protests from parents, Tesco moved the product from the toy section, but shelved it elsewhere in their stores.)

Affluenza

As ever, the observation of the fact of celebrity culture is less important than the question, why, from within what psychological and cultural pathologies does the need for celebrity gestate, what sustains it to the point where it metastasizes into compulsive needs, and why is it that those needs seem to be particularly acute, if Samuels is correct (which I suspect he is) among women between the ages of 16 and 34? In two books Oliver James has argued that the problem is that we live in a troubled time of “Affluenza,” where the drives of neo-liberal economics, with its compulsive competitiveness, materialism, and individualism produce not happiness but emotional distress, anguish and insecurity. As Margaret Bunting writes:

“Drawing extensively on the work of American psychologist Tim Kasser, James argues that our recent increased wealth has come at the cost of the emotional well-being of a large proportion of the population; rates of distress among women in the UK almost doubled between 1982 and 2000. This is true of New Zealand and Australia as well as the UK and the US, in striking contrast with more egalitarian and collectivist countries such as Denmark or Germany. He tracks how ‘selfish capitalism’ generates insecurity and inflates comparisons; how a winner-takes-all competitiveness merely creates losers and a pandemic of low self-esteem, with its compensatory pathologies around celebrity and status. Remarkably, Erich Fromm, the Marxist psychoanalyst and Buddhist writer, foresaw much of this half a century ago and James quotes his prescient analysis of the ‘passive, empty, anxious, isolated person for whom life has no meaning’ and who compensates through “compulsive consumption,” mass consumer societies which despite their claims to kneel at the altar of sovereign individualism inevitably and ironically, cripple personal agency.”

Tim Kasser, in The High Price of Materialism, suggests that there is a “scientific explanation of how our contemporary culture of consumerism and materialism affects our everyday happiness and psychological health. Other writers have shown that once we have sufficient food, shelter, and clothing, further material gains do little to improve our well-being. Kasser goes beyond these findings to investigate how people’s materialistic desires relate to their well-being. He shows that people whose values center on the accumulation of wealth or material possessions face a greater risk of unhappiness, including anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and problems with intimacy – regardless of age, income, or culture.

What I am suggesting, then, is that one of the ways in which we deal with the pain of living in a hyper-consuming society, is by focusing in on those more famous than ourselves, whether they be dead or alive. The implication, however, is that in salivating over celebrity, something is being lost, and something is awry.

James is suggesting that “affluenza” and its attendant conditions is actually a mental illness, a darker version of Doris Lessing’s comment in her 2007 Nobel lecture, when she spoke movingly of a desperately poor woman she had seen in Africa who, despite the misery of circumstance, was reading Anna Karenina. She asks, rhetorically, “…do we think we are better than she is – we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?”

The question is, what to do? For Lessing, the answer would lie in “the storyteller, the dream maker, the myth maker, that is our phoenix that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.” It is the conviction that great art, great literature, great culture can make us morally better by, as F. R. Leavis wrote, kindling “our own best self…” echoing Plato, who said that the muses gave us arts not for “mindless pleasure” but “as an aid to bringing our soul curcuit, when it has got out of tune, into harmony with itself.” The English poet, Ted Hughes wrote to one of his students that the “mentally sick” could be cured by being “put in contact with their real nature,” which for Hughes could be achieved through poetry. The point is simple: the obsession with celebrity is not some harmless whim, not to be taken seriously, it is window into a poisoned spirit.

Emblematic of this is the sight of a culture which is to an extraordinary extent driven by emotion, not reasoned thought. The sociologist Jose Ortega Y Gasset wrote, in the early part of the 20th century, that there was “a democracy of the emotions.” If he were writing today he would say that we are a democracy of emotions on steroids, as if Barry Bonds and Barbara Cartland had conjoined and spawned the populace of late modernity. It is not that emotion per se is not a deeply important part of what it is to be human, it is faux emotion, manipulated emotion, hysterical emotion that swamps reason, buries all thought beneath it like an enormous mudslide devouring a Guatemalan village.

The Great Renunciation

What I would like to argue here is this: what is suggested by the media coverage of the Ramsey story and others like it, this escalating dynamic that we have witnessed in the past two decades or so, is what I am going to call the Great Renunciation. What is being renounced, as a necessary part of the reorganization of global political economy, are ways of thinking about the purpose of the making of culture, most potently in broadcasting, that are informed by a concept of public interest and public good.

Those ways of thinking are, necessarily if mischievously, presented by the ideologues of the market as remnants from a time before. Remnants that are deemed to be not just anachronistic, but seen as toxins in a body politic that needs to ‘modernize,’ better to confront the challenges of global capital. It is as if the only way they can validate the present, their present, is to invalidate the past.

It is an ideological tendency brought to the fore by Ronald Reagan’s first Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Mark Fowler, who announced in 1981 that henceforth the public interest would be that in which the public was interested. Those people around the world and in the United States who argued that there were certain profound values that needed to be protected (and I include myself in that number, having spent the best part of two decades studying, writing and lecturing about public service broadcasting all over the planet) were treated as suffering from the affliction of either a rheumy-eyed nostalgia which was no longer relevant or a stubbornness that was, for the financial well-being of the company, dysfunctional. Either way, they had to go.

I can understand the latter argument better than the former. If there is an honest claim that what matters is the bottom line and the profit margin, while I may not agree with that at least I know what it means. The argument that cultural values as traditionally understood are not quite relevant or modern or useful to the society is something that mystifies me. What exactly is it that is no longer relevant? Creativity, diversity, quality, standards, serving a citizenry, balance, intelligence, curiosity, innovation, not pandering to a superficial mass taste, being optimistic that the audience can discover pleasures and understandings that they otherwise might not have known, independence from pressures that dilute and corrupt the process of the creative act, that erode journalistic standards, that diminish insights that the broadcaster can have when allowed to do so? Are these not relevant, are these passé, do we no longer need such things, such commitments?

There is running through the commentaries of the new modernism in cultural production a terrible conceit, an arrogance that avoids, because it has to, what Yeats called the “ancient questions’. It is for this reason that we must in the first instance fess up to the fact that the world has become, again, not just a dangerous place, but in those realms that strut their economic and populist significance, a vulgar reality. We need, indeed, to resurrect the very idea of vulgarity, loutishness, moral and intellectual impoverishment, to acknowledge the sourness and bile, resentment and fears of much of contemporary life. Let’s be honest, do any of us know very many happy and grounded people?

I remember only too well when David Mills and I were negotiating, with Channel Four and then ITV, budgets for our documentaries. The sense one had was that many of the people we were dealing with lived and breathed in terror. Their faces had the shadow of strain of a man who has just been told that he has cancer. It isn’t that they weren’t decent people, or that left to themselves their creativity would not pour forth. It’s just that they functioned in indecent circumstance. They were surrounded by circumstances in which to fail was anathema, where to take a risk was to court failure and where, ironically, the forces of competition made failure all that much more likely.

This is not how it should be. This is not healthy either for the individuals involved or the society they are supposed to serve.

What the ideologues of this new age of consumption have done, and will continue to do with ever greater relish, is to take the stuff of the vulgate and present it as if it were the equivalent of Rilke and Joyce, Greene and Hemingway, Picasso or Dali, the Beatles or Beethoven, Rowling or Tolkien, Hancock or Pynchon, Attenborough or Murrow, Tony Garnett or David Chase, Paddy Chayefsky or Dennis Potter. Well it isn’t, and the suggestion that it is, mouthed by apparently highly intelligent individuals, is simply stupid, so lacking in substance that there has to be an explanation.

And there is: self-interested cynicism, with an IV drip of greed. The emerging ‘culture’ of television is the twin of that other corporate culture in which preen the exquisite, perfectly formed grotesques of Enron and WorldCom, of Global Crossing and Arthur Andersen, the oil companies and their brethren elsewhere in the world of modern capital (I do not by the way subscribe to the chic, tad optimistic, notion of “late-capitalism”; It’s just beginning. I’m with Max Weber: “Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness.” Weber went mad and looking around one can begin to see why – the madness, as well as the pessimism).

Basic Moral Values

I came to know and think about the culture of broadcasting through the writing of a biography of Hugh Greene, Director General of the BBC from 1960 to 1969. If there was one bone of contention which Greene gnawed away at it was the question of the relationship between the need for creative freedom and a wider social responsibility. He explored the theme brilliantly in a speech in Rome in 1965, in which he spoke of his concern about attempts at censorship of broadcasters

“which works by causing artists and writers not to take risks, not to undertake those adventures of the spirit which must be at the heart of every truly new creative work…historically, the greatest risks have attached to the maintenance of what is right and honourable and true. Truth for ever on the scaffold, wrong for ever on the throne…”

In the same speech, he continues:

“Relevance is the key – relevance to the audience, and to the tide of opinion in society. Outrage is wrong. Shock may be good. Provocation can be healthy and indeed socially imperative. These are issues to which the broadcaster must apply his conscience.”

In the first draft that Charles Curran had prepared for Greene, he had written, “shock may not be good.” Greene literally put a red line though ‘not.’ There was no brighter star in Greene’s firmament than the creative mind, in whatever genre. And there was no greater responsibility that he possessed than to try and find, nurture and protect that mind. And for this the need to be “truly independent” was crucial because without that one could not be truthful, accurate, impartial, creative, one could not court failure and therefore one could not take risks. Truth for him – which involved the truth of journalism as well as the truth of art – was like a constantly endangered species that one needed to breed and then protect, all the better to sustain what he called “basic moral values – truthfulness, justice, freedom, compassion, tolerance.”

I refer back to Greene for two reasons. Those values and commitments – which invoke the “ancient questions” – remain vitally important to the maintenance of a mature, vital, creative, humane (the thing that troubles me most about large amounts of culture today is its lack of common humanity), democratic society. The second reason is to point up how such reasoning has all but disappeared from the landscape of public discourse, which is obsessed with the material, the consumed, the pragmatic, “inward investment,” as if the making of culture was like asking Toyota to build a car plant in Toledo. The generation which now rules the roost seems decidedly uncomfortable in using such language – bad career move maybe, bit old fashioned, so yesterday.

At the heart of that debate about culture in general, and broadcasting in particular are two elemental questions: what actually do we mean by standards, “great” programs, television as an art form but also infused with other, even larger, social, democratic purposes; and if we can assume that whatever the definitional problems, we all do recognize that, as John Donne wrote, “no man can draw a line twixt day and night, tho’ light and dark are tolerably distinguishable,” then what exactly were the arrangements – institutional as well as philosophical – in which such moments of excellence happened?

And can those arrangements live on in a market led world?

Even as one types that last sentence the silliness of the proposition feels all too clear. Of course, there will be moments of great television, and even more of great radio, which seems to me to be a potentially more resilient medium partly because in economic terms it is less important than television. That, however, is not the point, since the real question – given the fact that even deserts have the occasional tree – is what will the overall landscape of television look like: will there be original, edgy long-form documentaries that explore issues of magnitude?; will there be dramas that are literate, that challenge and needle and provoke, that linger in the memory because they made you think?; will there be news worthy of the democratic project, providing for the political life of the society in ways that serve it well, that feeds the needs of the citizen, that pushes and jostles its way onto the stage of public discourse because to ignore it would be foolish and perverse?; will there be children’s programs that are worthy of the colossal importance of raising our children well, of seeing in them the future, rather than a market to be sold to?; will there be comedy that works because of the brilliance of the performer and the fineness of the writing, in no need of a laugh track to simulate humor?; will there be the quirkily original, the eccentric, the lateral thinking and creativity that springs, unbeckoned but welcomed and applauded, from the folds of imagination?; will there be those moments when we watch not alone, but as part of an integrated culture, drawn together through the mysterious alchemies of communication?; will there be refinement, range, diversity, integrity, professionalism, courage, the ability to make mistakes?Will we have a culture of which we can be proud, and about which we will feel no shame? And can we do this within the same universe of social practice as the market, all the while regulated with the lightness of a snowflake?

I hope so, and if we can then fears about what is unfolding will have gladly and delightfully proven to be unwarranted. But then I think of the beast, looming and lurking, threatening, ravenous, uncaring – at least of others – dangerous, America, Britain, the planet as a cultural Jurassic Park, governed by the canny intelligence of velociraptors. There is, then, only one way to deal with the beast: the whip! The lash!

Bend It Like Rousseau

I want to suggest, then, that the only meaningful question that one should ask about culture is what are, and what will be, the values that inform its practice. Indeed, utterly central to this debate is the conviction that at the heart of the very idea of, for example, public broadcasting, there are certain values which should guide the process of program making and the relationship with the audience which are to all intents and purposes abstract, but which are nonetheless important for that: excellence, standards, quality, truth, impartiality, intelligence and so on. And of course it is obvious, even trite, to observe that these are difficult and abstract and almost beyond language to capture, as if noting that were sufficient grounds for denying their significance. A metaphor: few people understand the physics of applying a specific kind of pressure to a spherical object which then arcs through the ether, but an awful lot of people nevertheless seem to find a kind of majestic beauty in David Beckham’s use of his right foot. Some things, let us be blunt, do not need to be explained, merely recognized and appreciated.

The reason why this question of values is, at least to my way of thinking, absolutely front and center to any debate about culture is that, because of its ubiquity and presumed sense of importance in people’s lives, any such discussion is actually a discussion of what values should prevail within the larger culture and society. It is surely vital to understand and accept that the definition of policies and values for the cultural industries is inevitably and necessarily suggestive of a definition of policies and values for the character of a whole society. They capture the sets of choices and preferences, which color all the imperatives, ambitions and institutions, which constitute, in the most literal sense, a social order. Two hundred years ago when Poland was going through one of its periods of political reform, the leadership called on Rousseau to advise them. As to the economic system, he observed:

“(The choice) to be adopted by Poland depends on the purposes she has in view in reforming her constitution. If your only wish is to become noisy, brilliant and fearsome, and to influence the other peoples of Europe, their example lies before you; devote yourselves to following it . . . Try to make money very necessary, in order to keep the people in a condition of great dependence; and with that end in view, encourage national luxury, and the luxury of spirit which is inseparable from it. In this way, you will create a scheming, ardent, avid, ambitious, servile and knavish people, like all the rest; one goes to the two extremes of opulence and misery, or license and slavery, with nothing in between. I know that men can only be made to act in terms of their own interests; but pecuniary interest is the worst, the basest and most corrupting of all, and even, as I confidently repeat and shall always maintain, the least and weakest in the eyes of those who really know the human heart. In all hearts there is naturally a reserve of grand passions, when greed for gold alone remains, it is because all the rest, which should have been stimulated and developed, have been enervated and stifled.”

There is another, guiding assumption behind the argument I am trying to make here. It is that the most profound values and conceptual commitments that constitute humanity at its best – might I suggest life and liberty, justice and truth, rights both civil and human, democracy, love – by definition have no materiality. There may be material expressions or metaphors – the scales of justice, the voting booth, the statute book, the kiss – but these are only, can only be, the necessary tangibility which allows us to realize, use, benefit from the language of our human imagination. So language is crucial – and I know that is stating the obvious – to our very ability to realize that which the mind has wrought.

It is then a reasonable argument to suggest that insofar as language born from the reflective mind and the play of informed, mature imagination is diminished, then so are those values and philosophical commitments. And there lies my essential concern with how this, and other cultures, are evolving and will continue to evolve: symbolically and concretely. It is a situation which suggests that in pursuing the necessary materiality of the market, where the only value is commodity value, we are inevitably marginalizing the mysterious possibilities of the mind and the heart that have formed the essential elements of that long march of the species to establish a civilized and caring world guided by a potent and powerful moral imagination, and a commitment to values that are none the less vital because they are non-material.

In fact, some of the most powerful visions of the purpose of, for example, broadcasting emerged within unusual and trying circumstances. Consider, for instance, the cultural histories of the occupations of Germany and Japan in the late 1940s and the formulation of Allied policy for broadcasting in the rebuilding of those societies. There one can see powerful testament to the idea of broadcasting as primarily a social rather than an economic process, as something with moral, cultural, intellectual and creative purpose and not just as a source of mild comment and moderate pleasure. The Charters of NHK in Japan and the ARD in Germany, dictated to a great extent by foreign military governments in Japan and Germany, were replete with the public service ideal. If broadcasting was to comment, it should do so with a flourish. If it was to amuse, it should do so with élan. If it was to educate, it should do so with real professionalism. It was simply understood by the American and Allied leadership that the life of the mind of a society was far too precious and important to be left to the vagaries of a commercial system.

It could be argued that such policies were creatures of the moment, as massive destruction demanded enormous reconstruction, of which communications would inevitably be part. But what was required was the restoration not just of highways, buildings, plants, but also of the shattered imaginative lives of whole populations. The architects of postwar Germany and Japan sensed correctly that healthy, diverse cultural institutions were a prerequisite to a functioning liberal democracy. Broadcasting was thus to be used as a key part of the cultural and social regeneration of those societies.

In that lies the real clue to the nature and purpose of great public broadcasting: that it makes best sense when it represents a national and moral optimism within a society, when it suggests – through the diversity and quality of its programs – that we can be better than we are: better served, better amused, better informed, and, thus, better citizens.

Next: Public Service

INDEX

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: the first is what was revealed about the condition and nature of contemporary American culture; the second involves what might be called the mood of the public mind; and the third is the personal experience.

The Media vs. Justice

Perhaps the most serious issue which emerged, or was revealed, yet again was the relationship that now exists between two core institutions, the media and the judicial system. In fact, increasingly, and wrongly, these two elemental parts of this society as a democracy seem to be engaged in a danse macabre, where the law has become part of the entertainment industry, and where that industry is consistently fed and led by leaks from law enforcement. As I suggested in the opening sections of this essay, and in the email to David Mills, small but influential sections of law enforcement in Boulder willingly provided “information” from the investigation which had one clear purpose, to persuade the American people of that which the police department was utterly convinced, that John and Patsy Ramsey killed their daughter. That “information” was presented uncritically to a public only too willing to believe what they were being told. In effect, it seemed that what was illustrated here was that the very integrity of the rule of law is increasingly compromised by the role of ratings and circulation driven media.

The role of publicly constructed rumor and suggestion, publicly made falsehoods, through the mass media, the Internet and everyday chatter in people’s lives, raises a profound issue of law. The public verdict was of the Ramsey’s guilt. If one thinks of this in terms of the proper demands of the law, any case of guilt has to be demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt. Any conviction on less than proof beyond a reasonable doubt is constitutionally infirm under state statutes and the Constitution. At the heart of this lies the notion that guilt beyond a reasonable doubt cannot be premised on pure conjecture. The jury has to consider, as does any appellate court, whether the evidence, considered most favourably to the State, was such as to permit a rational conclusion by the jury that the accused was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Can the jury rationally choose the hypothesis that supports guilt rather than the hypothesis which is consistent with innocence?

The question which needs to be considered in this context is whether the media coverage of this or any other case is prejudicial and therefore harmful to the basic rights of the accused because of the precise way in which it nurtures, even advocates, pure conjecture that inhibits the ability to look at the evidence rationally. What was certainly being undermined was an ancient tenet of Anglo-Saxon law, one which is embedded in the Constitution’s 5th, 6th and 14th Amendments, the presumption of innocence or, as the Supreme Court has asserted, the assumption of innocence.

The burden of proof is on the prosecution to convince the court that the accused is guilty beyond reasonable doubt. This right to be presumed innocent is so important to democratic culture that many societies, not just the United States, have included it in legal codes and constitutional documents. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in Article 11, recognizes the presumption of innocence, as does the Council of Europe’s Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. In many countries journalistic codes of ethics clearly state that journalists should clearly refrain from referring to suspects as if their guilt was clear and certain.

A very basic question then, one to which we will never know the answer, is whether or not the Ramseys, one or both, could have gotten a fair trial, given the clear and overwhelming evidence that the whole narrative around them was one of their being guilty. For the record, Bryan Morgan, John’s attorney, thinks that given the makeup of the population in Boulder (which has been declared by Forbes Magazine to be the smartest city in America because it has, per capita, more people above age 25 or over with at least a Bachelor’s degree – 52.9% – and this resting on the highly questionable premise that possessing a degree is a simile for being smart) and given voir dire, where potential jurors are questioned, they could have gotten a fair trial. I have to say, Bryan has more sunshine in his soul than I have.

In this context, also, there was an intriguing presentation in the winter of 1999 by the pollster Dave Sackett in a speech on “Key Trends in National and Colorado Public Opinion.” He suggested that: 1. truth is what people believe; 2. villains must be identified; 3. rhetoric is more important than fact; 4. the intensity of the focus is on detailing the problem, not the solution.

One of the arguments used by media lawyers to demand that information be released from the investigation, such as the ransom note and the autopsy report, was that there was a public “right to know.” It was, lawyers such as Denver based Tom Kelley who would claim, in the public interest.

The obvious question that emerges from that is, why? And what if one could reasonably argue that maintaining the integrity of the investigation served another equally compelling public interest, apprehending a vicious killer and therefore protecting public safety?

What seems perfectly clear is that the issue isn’t one of the public’s right to know but, all too often, the public’s right to ogle, at the expense of those who may or may not have been charged with a crime, or who simply may have a desire for their privacy to be protected. The premise seems to be that if the public’s interest in a story is understandable then it is by definition legitimate and therefore a valid media story. This begs, again, the question of: why? Obviously there are some stories that are both of interest to the public and which speak to obvious issues of the public good and interest. Corrupt politicians on the take would be such an example. Corrupt cops would be another. What public interest or good is served, however, when every detail of a serious issue such as child murder is made available in the public square in a manner almost guaranteed, and in the Ramsey case intended, to harm other rights that the individual properly has in a society in which the rule of law is deemed to prevail? In such moments, what drives the story and its consumption by a slack-jawed public is not their need for the knowledge to sustain democratic culture, but the desire for tittle~tattle and to sate a ravenous prurience.

Perhaps my own sense of the problems they would have had in obtaining a fair trial is based in considerable part on the feeling I increasingly had that this society was extremely concerned in establishing guilt, in punishing, in condemning, but yet it was not necessarily concerned with the possibility that the innocent could get caught up in the rush to justice. Indeed there is a not inconsiderable section of the population which is willing to accept that the death penalty should be maintained, even if the innocent are occasionally wrongfully executed – though one suspects that their views might be a tad different if they were the innocent being strapped to the gurney.

I also came to see that there was a small but influential group of what one might call professional accusers – I have in mind people such as Dominick Dunne, Mark Klass and John Walsh – three men made bitter and angry by the terrible experience of having a child murdered – and such programs as Cops, 911, True Stories of the Highway Patrol, Forensic Files, as well as the numerous other people and programs that give visible force and meaning to the society’s desire, need, to put bad people away. There is nothing in and of itself wrong with this even if, as I will suggest in a moment, it reflects impulses fed by deeper social and cultural pathologies.

Accusing, Damning, Condemning

As I first began to make some notes about what might become a book, in the summer of 2003, I noticed a new member of this band of those who would seek and render justice to those they deem – no, know – to be guilty and all beneath the glare of klieg lights. She was called Nancy Grace, and became a frequent pontificator on the Larry King Show. Eventually she would have her own shows on CNN and Court TV. She is, inevitably, a former prosecutor.

At that time she was particularly eager to tell us that a California woman, Lacy Peterson, was killed by her husband, Scott. There had been no trial, the evidence had not been laid out , but that didn’t matter one jot. The bastard’s guilty because Nancy says so.

A few months before, in 2002 she was equally sure that Richard Ricci, a handyman who had done work for a family in Utah, the Smarts, had kidnapped and probably murdered young Elizabeth Smart. The poor wretch, whose wife was adamant that he was asleep in her bed on the night of the disappearance, turned out to have an arrest warrant for him on an unrelated matter. He was arrested and imprisoned. While in prison he had a brain aneurysm and passed away. On March 12, 2003, Elizabeth Smart was found walking down a street in a Salt Lake City suburb in the company of a psychopathic drifter and self-proclaimed prophet, Brian David Mitchell, and his wife Brenda Barzee, with whom the whole while Elizabeth had been camping out in the hills near her home.

Nancy never said sorry, because she clearly had no more capacity to admit error than she has to offer forgiveness or the benefit of the doubt. Given these serious character flaws it should come as no surprise that she is in great demand for talk shows, has her own show on CNN and has a following of viewers, overwhelmingly women, who call in and before offering their question and comment say “I think you’re great Nancy,” at which point a faux smile crosses her face like a sunbeam on a granite cliff.

Honesty makes me confess to the fact that when I first saw her I had an immediate and visceral dislike. Her face is flinty, hard, drained of warmth. Her eyes are dead and cruel. She drips anger at God knows what, like a divorced soccer mom who lost custody, no kid or ball, but all of the attitude. She is the very embodiment, the Goddess Athene, of the resentment that seems to afflict so many lives, a disposition that demands: punish them and make ME feel safe; punish them and make ME feel better. I nevertheless had a sense that somehow she was a victim of something, that she was in pain, that some dynamite trail led to what Mailer once called a “stricken place.”

And there was. Her fiancé was murdered.

Dunne in particular interests me. He has never seen an accused who wasn’t guilty. There is the dandy dress, the ostentatious spectacles, the name dropping, the apparently perpetual lunch at the perpetually fancy hotel, the obsession with celebrity crime, about which he writes for Vanity Fair. In his 2001 book, Justice – Crimes, Trials and Punishments, he writes about the various celebrity trials he has covered, such as Claus von Bulow, OJ, the Menendez brothers and Michael Skakel. In a moment of either candor or idiocy, during his account of the Menendez trial, he writes: “In cases of high crime, I’ve never made any attempt to present a balanced picture. This was no exception.”

I had an interesting, and to me revealing, experience with Dunne on the Larry King Show. I can’t recall what it was that happened in the Ramsey case that led to the call to see if I could go on that night. Dunne had been booked for the whole hour, but was now to share the first couple of segments in a discussion about the murder. Early in the first segment King asked Dunne what he thought about the case. In that rather faltering style of his he said, “well you know Larry, I think that the brother might have done it.” Since there are two brothers, Burke, who was nine at the time of the killing, and John Andrew who was in his early twenties and was JonBenet’s half-brother from John Ramsey’s first marriage, King asked Dunne “which one?” “Burke,” Dunne replied, and then proceeded to ramble on about how this small boy had strangled and bludgeoned his sister, concocted a long and literate ransom note, got rid of much of the objects and materials used in the crime (including a stun gun), gone back to bed and fallen asleep.

If there was any truth to this then Burke would surely count as one of the more interesting psychopathic nine year-olds in history. The fact of the matter was that Dunne seemed to be the only person on the planet who did not know that the one person who had been cleared by the Boulder police as a suspect was Burke, on the not unreasonable grounds that given the nature of the crime no small boy could have done it.

As I listened to Dunne I became furious and let him know my contempt for this extraordinary combination of arrogance and ignorance. King, I think, was slightly embarrassed and did his best to defend Dunne. What stayed with me most, however, was the unspoken assumption that one had a perfect right to make such an accusation and the fact that he knew nothing of any value about the case was irrelevant. What was important was being in the spotlight of the Larry King show, and the adrenaline rush of accusing, damning, condemning whoever happened to have wandered into the cross-hairs, and if only he could do this enough then maybe some of the anger and anguish over his own life’s loss would be diminished. That innocence and the innocent would be trampled in the process was, well, just too damn bad.

Post-OJ America

In another sense when one looks at how the media dealt with the case over the years, from that Christmas of her death to the August of Karr’s arrest, one is reminded, not for the first time, that so much of what represents itself as “journalism” is actually a broth of fantasy, the trivial, the sleazy, the sexual. It isn’t that this is so new. Since the beginning of modern media, including the early newspapers that spoke to this new Republic, crime, scandal and sex have been staples. Today, however, there is so much, at the expense of much else, and it thrives not at the margins but in the heartland of the culture. It is this that is so troubling, and of which the Ramsey case has been so potent a symbol.

Lewis Carrol might have recognized the world in which the Ramseys found themselves: “I’ll be Judge, I’ll be Jury, said cunning old fury, I’ll try the whole case and I’ll condemn you to death.” In other words, the story constructed a surreal view of reality, but one that many people were only too willing to accept as if it were real. The Ramseys and those trying to defend them had to deal with a kind of “consensual hallucination,” to use Gibson’s phrase, constituted by what the famed sociologist C. Wright Mills called the cultural apparatus that “not only guides experience (but) often as well expropriates the very chance to have experience that can rightly be called ‘our own’…” galvanizing the extraordinary force of the irrational.

The context within which the case would be reported would be the America of post~O.J Simpson. It was a new media world in which the void left by his acquittal would be quickly filled by the Ramsey case. The Clinton sex scandal had further fueled a 24/7 voracious media monster. JonBenet’s murder happened just as this new media environment was being birthed. Adding to this was the deepening legitimization of the tabloid press in American journalism as they had shifted their attention away from the bizarre ~ Elvis seen paddling down the Colorado river ~ to real-life scandal, sleaze and human frailty, in which it seemed the nation was now drowning and for which the public had an impossible to slake thirst.

The Internet had also happened, with God knows how many Web sites dealing with the case and a culture of obsessive online interest in her death sprouting up with extraordinary speed. And driving it all was the fact that the images of JonBenet in the pageant videos, the sense of “that’s awful,” “tacky,” “exploitative,” the beauty, the youth, the violence, the sex, the wealth, the lifestyle and the fact that it happened on Christmas night made many giddy. One book editor, pointing out these characteristics of the case, told Sherry Keene Osborne, “I can’t tell you how excited we are.”

There was also a surfacing of a moral mood in the country that fed off a public hardened to cries of innocence, especially from parents. They felt duped by Susan Smith, who had for a time convinced everyone that her two sons had been abducted by a black man, only to eventually confess that she had taken them to a lake, fastened them in their seat belts in the back seat of her car, pushed it into the dark, cold waters and watched them slowly drown and all because she wanted to keep a boyfriend who didn’t want kids.

Millions of Americans also believed that Simpson had bought his “innocence” with his wealth and that in fact he was a killer. And the mood seemed also to feed off a delight in seeing the “better off’ brought down, as class resentment reared its head, as anger, fear and loathing became the defining emotional motifs of countless lives. It was a set of circumstances, a perfect storm, that would lead people to look at John and Patsy Ramsey and “see” killers.

The story that would be told over the coming months began, however, almost as a whisper. But even within that there was beginning to lurk the essential suggestion: here lie dark secrets, perversity of an almost unimaginable kind. Major stories work by taking on a life of their own, but, as with any life form, the essential elements are there from the moment of conception. What is remarkable is just how much and how quickly “information,” was being leaked from “sources close to the investigation.” It was, to be blunt, from the standpoint of contemporary media values, a great story.

After all, it’s just comedy…

In thinking about the nature of the media coverage I am reminded of the prescient comments of the English writer Richard Hoggart (who was also my boss for eight years) in his famously brilliant book, The Uses of Literacy, published in 1959, that moment when television had all but finished its conquest of public culture. He wrote of this

“newer mass art…This regular, increasing, and almost entirely unvaried diet of sensation without commitments is surely likely to help render its consumers less capable of responding openly and responsibly to life, is likely to induce an underlying sense of purposelessness in existence outside the limited range of a few immediate appetites. Souls which have had little opportunity to open will be kept hard-gripped, turned in upon themselves, looking out ‘with odd dark eyes like windows’ upon a world which is largely a phantasmagoria of passing shows and vicarious stimulations.”

Later in the book he writes:

“Most mass entertainments are in the end what D.H. Lawrence described as ‘anti-life.’ They are full of a corrupt brightness, of improper appeals and moral evasions. To recall instances: they tend towards a view of the world in which progress is conceived as seeking of material possessions, equality as a moral leveling, and freedom as the ground for endless irresponsible pleasure. These productions belong to a vicarious spectators’ world; they offer nothing which can really grip the brain or heart. They assist a gradual drying-up of the more positive, the fuller, the more cooperative kinds of enjoyment, in which one gains much by giving much .They have intolerable pretensions; and pander to the wish to have things both ways, to do as we want and accept no consequences.”

The experience also yelled, once more, that the case, and the public’s sense of it was much ado about sex, and particularly sex with children. This often invokes a dark brew of condemnation and fascination. Andrew O’Hagan has written:

“We could go a stage further, and suggest that our tabloid media have a paedophile element to their subconscious, a child-abusing energy at the heart of their own anger. The British tabloid newspapers demonstrate this every day, with their talk of ‘our tots’ and their enthusiastic ‘revelations’ about suspected child abusers and child murderers. You can’t read the British papers without feeling polluted, not only by the stories but by the degree to which the writers and editors of those stories appear to want them to be true, even before the evidence has proved it. Beyond this, a carnival of sensationalism vies with a deadly prurience, matched by a creepy populist appeal to the ‘common decency’ of the mob. You feel that the hacks are getting off on the horrors they ascribe, getting high on the pseudo-democratic vengeance their stories might excite.” [He quotes Margo Jefferson, who wrote an essay about Michael Jackson:] “‘Here’s an ugly fact,’ Jefferson writes. ‘The sexual abuse of children largely goes underreported. And even when it’s reported, it often goes unpunished. But here’s a sorry fact. We’re mesmerized by such crimes: they have become a form of mass culture entertainment, and a cover story for all kinds of fears.’”

O’Hagan is correct that conclusions about guilt made ahead of the available evidence are now a commonplace in popular culture and in fact have become the stuff of comedy. In the Los Angeles Times, Jay Leno’s former scriptwriter, Brad Dickson, points to the comedian’s habit of accusing people of being guilty. He writes, “…my job consisted largely of waiting for public figures to be accused of something vile, preferably illegal. Murder was No. 1 on our hit parade. Once a public figure was accused, we writers pounced like mountain lions on a lame goat. The jokes did not necessarily have to be good…but almost always assumed guilt… Much like a hangman, a ‘Tonight Show’ writer must recognize that as a well paid jury-pool-tainter, your charge is to not question guilt.”

He writes of how uncomfortable he was, for example, with the accusations Leno consistently made against Richard Jewell, who was for a while a suspect in the Atlanta Olympic bombing – Leno called him ‘Doofus Dick’ Jewell. Jewell was later exonerated by the FBI and indeed declared a hero for his actions that night. Dickson also writes: “The most potentially injurious jokes I wrote were about the parents of murdered JonBenet Ramsey. If not guilty they still had to endure a national late-night drubbing insinuating that they killed their own child. Although Leno has a reputation for presuming guilt the fastest and being the most relentless with mean jokes, almost all late-night hosts assume the accused are guilty. But does it matter? After all, it’s just comedy.”

Clearly it does matter, since it is now clear that more and more people, particularly the young, look to such shows for “information.” Why else would would be governors or presidential candidates declare their intention to run on the “Tonight Show.”

The Joy of Killing

One other possible, even likely, explanation for the popularity of the story of her death and others like it, the energy which feeds the news value, is that they ‘speak’ to a vital aspect of the human condition, an innate, morbid curiosity in death and mayhem, a compulsion of sorts that incites excitement and fear in exploring macabre topics such as death and horrible violence.

Mark Twain wrote in “Following the Equator,’ which was published in 1897: “The joy of killing! The joy of seeing killing done – these are the traits of the human race at large.” It is a disposition that has been described as “necrophiliac voyeurism.” There is nothing new here. In a review of Perry Curtis’ Jack the Ripper and the London Press, published in 2002, Richard Davenport-Hines writes: “When Tennyson and Jowett sat up late together, it was to talk of murders. The Victorians took a ghoulish pleasure in every phase of their more ghastly homicides; from the moment a corpse was found the hunt for morbid thrills was intense. After seven members of the Marshall family were hacked to death at Denham in 1870, ‘pleasure vans’ brought hordes of day-trippers from London to see the gore, and to purloin souvenirs. The Victorians were not dainty in their interest, and journalists were seldom squeamish in their reporting… executions generally fed a public appetite. Twenty thousand people went to watch William Palmer hang outside Stafford Gaol. Coventry Patmore’s rousing poem ‘A London Fête,’ describing ‘the wicked treat’ of a public hanging at Newgate, conveys the public’s ‘horrid thirst’ for gore.” One of the conclusions drawn by Curtis is that “Jack the Ripper” (whose name was almost certainly made up by a journalist at the Central News Agency) may not have been very good for the health of prostitutes but he was massively good for the health of newspaper circulation.

The obvious question I’m trying to engage is why do stories such as the death of JonBenet take hold of the collective imagination, and why stories that what one might properly define as more substantive, are so often marginalized? The answer is both simple and complex. Simple because there is an obvious public appetite, complex because of the mystery of why there are such appetites in the first place, ones that originate on the dark side of the human condition. In The Empire Strikes Back, young Luke Skywalker asks his Jedi master, Yoda, whether the dark side of the force is stronger than the good. Yoda replies with his Jedi wisdom and irony, “no, easier, quicker, more seductive.” Indeed.

Next: A Crisis of Prevailing Values

INDEX

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:

Honestly, I didn’t think that this would be very interesting at first…but that almost certainly stems from the JonBenet overload that, apparently, still affects me. I was wrong. I’ve now gone back and read the whole thing (twice for a few of them) and I’m hooked.

Of course, now I’ll never be able to watch one of those Hollywood serial killer flicks without thinking how the actual scenario would probably go.

Thanks to S&R and Mr. Tracey.

“JonBenet overload.” In truth, there has certainly been plenty about this case to get sick of, and I’m guessing that the smarter you are, the sicker you are. If ever there was a case of Tabloids Gone Wild, this was it. I suspect a lot of people see any mention of JonBenet and lunge for the remote, and it’s hard to blame them.

Of course, this means they’re avoiding this remarkable series without understanding what it is that they’re avoiding. And what they’re avoiding isn’t tabloid mania, it’s instead one of the most well-reasoned and coherent analyses of tabloid mania that you’re ever likely to encounter.

Early on in the series I got an e-mail from the editor of a highly respected blog. He’d initially made the same mistake that so many others had. Here’s what he had to say:

This is great stuff, Sam.

Really wonderful. For those who didn’t read it because it’s about Jonbenet, well, it isn’t. It is about how Media NARRATIVES are established. JonBenet is simply the example which is used.

Highly Recommended.

We’ve now completed the prologue, the section on the media malpractice surrounding the case and a chronicle of how one of the more disturbing admitted pedophiles we’ve encountered in awhile was tracked down and arrested. Up next comes the meat of the series: Tracey’s extended examination of what it all means for those of us who live in a society that’s oversaturated by irresponsible media and undernourished by any genuine perspective on how we’re being manipulated and automated out of our freedom.

We hope you’ll catch up, as Lex did, and join us in the coming days as we engage in some of the best work that has ever appeared on Scholars & Rogues.

For my part, I think that’s a pretty big statement.

Index

• Prologue
• JonBenet, pt. 1: the establishment of a narrative
• JonBenet, pt. 2: vile bigotry and voodoo stupidity
• JonBenet, pt. 3: Time to wake up, Professor Tracey
• Daxis, pt. 1: son of the Devil
• Daxis, pt. 2: Bangkok
• Daxis, pt. 3: snake on a plane

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. Some of the people in the US embassy had young daughters in international schools. Daxis now had their very serious attention since they, like everyone else, were working with the possibility that they were dealing with the person who had tortured to death a six year old girl on the other side of the world.

The new school term would begin on August 15th, and assuming that Daxis was telling the truth about the school, Mark Spray, who had flown to Bangkok as soon as news came of the pick-up, and other American and Malaysian officials put Daxis under 24-hour surveillance. They knew where he lived, having followed him from the drop to his apartment, but they still didn’t know who he was. Mark had managed to get an apartment on the same corridor as Daxis, and to find out who this person was he arranged with the Thai authorities to send two Thai police officers to do a passport check on the complex’s inhabitants, something which is not uncommon. They know which room he’s in, ask to see his passport. Daxis is John Mark Karr.

Then there were two outstanding questions: could they get his DNA and which school was he being employed at? The question of the DNA was crucial because of the “foreign” DNA in the drops of blood in JonBenet’s panties. The question of the school was important in case, in the brief period he had been there in July, a child had been harmed.

Mary Lacy would later be much criticized for not having DNA tests done in Bangkok. There would be much ballyhoo and squealing about this, usually from people who were actually massively relieved that Karr’s DNA did not match since they could then get back to their decade-long accusations against the Ramseys. The fact of the matter was that DNA was gathered in Bangkok, it was just never tested.

The DNA was gathered in two ways. Mark cleaned the door handle to Karr’s apartment so that when he returned and opened the door, with presumably sweaty hands, he would inevitably leave trace samples of DNA. Wearing latex gloves, Mark held the handle tight and, pulling his hand away, inverted the gloves to preserve whatever sweat and skin cells had attached to the door knob. Agents did the same to the handle bars of the mountain bike. There was, in short, a massive amount of DNA that could be tested. The question was, what to do with it, test it there or send it back to Boulder?

The decision on this was made not by Lacy but by the Denver Police Lab’s Greg LeBerge. He insisted that the DNA gathered in Bangkok should not be tested, but that Karr should be brought back so that the sample could be taken under proper, controlled circumstances and so that there could be no question as to how it was gathered or, crucially, about the chain of evidence. I have no way of proving it, but I suspect this was what might be called the “OJ effect.” You will recall that in the Simpson trial Barry Scheck, for the defense, demolished the prosecution’s case by raising all kinds of questions as to how DNA had been gathered, how it had been processed and raising serious doubts about the chain of evidence – that is, who had handled it and when. LeBerge did not want to be Schecked if this was going to trial.

Arrested

The other question had been, which school? From the moment he was identified the decision was made to keep Karr under surveillance until the start of the new term, which would be on August 15th, following a national holiday in the 14th. Karr rose early on the morning of the 15th. Mark, pretending to be a bum, was hanging around in the corridor outside Karr’s door. He could hear the shower. It would stop, and then start again, and again, as Karr was blow drying his hair, rewetting it and blow drying again. In fact, Mark became so frustrated that he started looking for the valve which would cut off the water supply to Karr’s apartment. Finally Karr leaves, mounts his bike and starts to wend his way through the heavy Bangkok traffic, followed by two surveillance cars, in one of which was Mark Spray and other agents and in the other an agent from the Department of Homeland Security, Gary Phillips. There came a point when it seemed they would lose Karr because of the traffic and so Spray and Phillips leapt from the cars and started to run after him. They did so for four miles, but remarkably they kept up and saw him, finally, enter the New Sathorn International School.

It was real, as I knew it would be since, to reiterate, everything about Karr that could be checked out, checked out. It was therefore reasonable to assume that the children that he had mentioned in the emails were real as well.

Karr’s classroom was exactly as he had described it, including a large window overlooking a road. The surveillance team had a clear view of him as he taught his eight students, four of whom were girls. On the evening of his first day he wrote me a long email describing how things had gone, and mentioning that “I have an unusually young girl in my class. She is six but will be seven in September. She’s very affectionate with me. She likes me. I’m not really that attracted to her but I need her badly. I showed her a photo of JonBenet today…” The following day, the 16th in Bangkok, the surveillance team could see him in his classroom with a young girl sitting on his lap. They saw another teacher enter the room and he quickly pushed the girl away.

Spray had seen enough and that night he accompanied Thai police to arrest Karr. They had the manager of the complex knock on his door on the pretext that there was a water leak. As John Mark opened the door, the police entered; one turned and put his hand on Spray’s chest, telling him to wait. When Mark did enter the room he noticed a suitcase by the door, one that turned out to be full of clothes. He asked Karr about this. Karr replied: “I always have a case packed so I can flee at a moment’s notice. That’s how I live.”

The Canker Afflicting Contemporary Journalism

August 16, Boulder. It didn’t take long for news of the arrest to break. The calls began. Not just from US television and radio but from all over the planet. My office phone’s voice mail became full in what seemed like an instant. The CU switchboard, the SJMC’s phone lines, all were under siege. Then my cell, all of this within a matter of hours.

It occurred to me later that I can’t recall giving out my cell phone number but an awful lot of people seemed to have it in an awfully short time. But then, in the bizarre intensity of today’s media, these people can find out the colour of your jockey shorts and how long you’ve been wearing them without breaking a sweat.

There were so many calls in the days following the arrest that my partner, Jen, became an unpaid, but rather good, press secretary, fielding calls on her cell as well as mine. The fact that there were so many requests for interviews came as no great surprise: JonBenet does that. One did surprise me however. It was a request from the BBC’s august ~ at least it used to be ~ Radio Four. Here, if ever, was evidence of the extent of the canker afflicting contemporary journalism.

Journalists and camera crews wandered up and down the corridors of the School. One of the film crews from Japan ( there were several) asked Dona Olivier, who has a desk outside my office, if they could film my door. Understand, it’s not even a special door – no ornamental flourishes, no unique wood, just an ordinary, utilitarian office door which they had come 12,000 miles to film.

Geraldo Rivera’s people sent a crew to film what I refer to as my down town office, The Hungry Toad. The New York Times turned up, as did the Los Angeles Times. Actually, the reporter from the LA Times, who had flown up from Texas and clearly didn’t want to be there, turned out to be someone with whom one could have an interesting conversation, in this case about the condition of newspapers ~ not good, we agreed.

Every local paper, TV channel and radio station called repeatedly. Calls came in from Australia, Canada, the UK, Germany… In fact, we lost track. For all I know Iceland could have called. I received a call from the local newspaper in the town I grew up in, the Oldham Chronicle. It is difficult to think of a major network show that didn’t request an interview. The London Times, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, various British tabloids.

One of the things we discovered was that when they really want to put the pressure on for an interview they get “the star” to call. I remember one moment in the scrum that followed Lacy’s press conference (of which more in a moment) when a young field producer slid over to Jen and handed her a cell and said, “Matt Lauer wants to talk to you…” To which Jen replied that she had zero interest in talking to Mr. Lauer.

My own personal favorite was receiving a call from Larry King, who was, as he called, picking his boys up at school. He really wanted me to go on his show; he was the only major interview show that I agreed to ~ unless you include Wolf Blitzer, who interrupted his war coverage and interviewed me from a sand dune in Iraq.

The truly fascinating figures were the field producers sent out by all the major networks and the cable news stations. Invariably young, they weren’t just hungry, they were ravenous, ruthless and determined. They would call, cajole, beg, offer money (“…we’d like to offer you a network consultancy…” She was from Fox, and so I thought, maybe not.) The CNN field producer, a nice, affable but determined man, was particularly intense in trying to persuade me to be interviewed. He had one curious habit that perplexed me for a while. We would be talking, I’d make a point, and he would say “Roger.” It happened several times and I began to think to myself, “who the hell is Roger?” It turned out he was ex-military so what he was saying in fact was “roger that.”

“You’ve been accused of writing a book…”

Mary Lacy held a press conference on August 17, outside the Justice Center. She didn’t say very much but there was a great throng of reporters, producers, camera crews. It was the kind of sight that we’ve become used to whenever OJ or Michael Jackson are put on trial (for the record, I wrote this before OJ’s arrest on armed robbery charges), or the “runaway bride” explains herself or Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan gets arrested again, or Madonna turns up with another baby, or Angelina and Brad buy Zimbabwe or the latest Christian evangelical leader turns out to be a part time drag queen.

For my sins I chose to go and watch, which on reflection was probably a mistake, since after Mary had departed, surrounded by Nagel, McGuire and Bennett, I suddenly found myself in the middle of that scrum. It is a curiously interesting experience, having questions being barked from all around you, not wanting to answer them, knowing, and regretting, that I’d become part of the spectacle.

One comment that was thrown at me was by a local attorney, former prosecutor, radio talk show host and long time Ramsey accuser. He said, “…you’ve been accused of writing a book…” It was a quite remarkably stupid comment, and in a way slightly fascist in its hint that books that would arouse hostility should not be written. I suggested that, as a professor with tenure in a research university, who has written a number of books over the years, it is not only what I do but what I’m expected to do. The subtext, the one that so many people loathed, was that they knew that the book I had been working on, essentially based on the documentaries that David Mills and I had made, would be arguing that the media got the story wrong, overdid it and that the evidence was overwhelming that an intruder killed JonBenet. Oh, how they did not want to hear this, how they wanted to continue their corrosive loathing of John and Patsy. I admit to a certain pleasure, immature perhaps, in goading them.

There was, however, a real issue of how to respond to the questions; what, if anything, to say? I’d discussed this with John Ramsey some time before, and we’d agreed on what I suppose might be described as a strategy. John, as much as anyone on the planet, understands what it is like to be accused by the media, willy-nilly, absent any meaningful evidence, year in, year out, of the most odious act, being complicit in killing your own child. He, like few others, also knows what it is like to have trashed that most precious right, allegedly guaranteed under the Constitution, to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, trashed because it is less important than the entertainment, and therefore ratings and circulation, value of the accusation.

It was quite clear that there was brewing that sense in the public mind that since he had been arrested, Karr must therefore be guilty and a deeply dangerous psychopath. When the Thai Airways flight landed in Los Angeles reporters were asking passengers whether they had felt in any danger with Karr on their flight. What exactly did they think was going to happen, did they imagine that this slight male would overcome both Mark Spray and Gary Phillips, who were returning Karr to the U.S., take it over and fly it to Cuba? The most appalling illustration, however, of how his rights were being trampled would be the New York Post’s front page photo of Karr on the flight back, with the large print caption, “snake on a plane,” taking its cue from a recent, bad movie.

I decided that the moment was perfect to make a point by not. This may sound a tad Zen, but what I mean is that the one question that I was being repeatedly asked was whether I thought Karr was guilty of the things he had claimed, specifically sexual relations with many young girls and, the most horrendous claim, that he had killed JonBenet. To each and every question I had a simple reply, that I had no comment, that he had a right to be presumed innocent, a right that had never been extended to the Ramseys. John Ramsey would say the same thing.

It was, to those asking, an infuriating response. Why can’t you just say what you think? Come on, he’s guilty, isn’t he? I was quite clear, and determined, that I would use the platform of interviews to make this simple point. I told King’s producers, Wolf Blitzer’s people, in fact anyone who wanted a interview that this was all I would say. It didn’t matter: one, because they thought that I would be pressured into saying more, and two, they just wanted to be seen doing the interview. Substance was less important.

One final thought on this. It is difficult not to like King; he is very much a gentleman, not shrill like so many other interviewers, shrewd but not full of rancor even when he didn’t get what he wanted.

The press coverage was huge and global. Some of it was shrill, some of it balanced. Karr’s every move was followed. Business class on the flight back from Bangkok was packed with journalists. Helicopters hovered over LAX as he was being transferred to the plane used by the Governor of Colorado. News copters were also over the Boulder County jail. It was an amazing, but deeply troubling spectacle.

Released

Later, after Karr had been released, on August 28th, because his DNA didn’t match that found on JonBenet, there would be the inevitable attacks on me and Lacy, particularly in two ridiculously long pieces: one in Westword, a local free paper that seems to make much of its revenue from small ads for prostitutes and gay male escort services, and the other in a Denver glossy magazine, 5280.

This latter was written by a recent graduate of the School, Cheryl Myers, and when she asked to talk to me she referenced the fact that she was an alumna. Who was I to say no, and in the end I gave her a lot of time. The piece that emerged, and that I admit I did not see coming, was an extremely aggressive attack on me, which to this day I don’t fully understand.

A colleague, who didn’t read it until August 2007 while sitting in his dentist’s waiting room, described it as reading like a piece written by a 13 year old girl who hates her father. It was in the category of what one might call uber~bitch journalism. Indeed, if one could tap in to the bile that flows through that young lady’s veins you could open a bottling plant the size of Coors brewery in Golden, Colorado.

The chair of her masters committee and a faculty member who felt that she had been a mentor to Myers let it be known to her that they were ashamed that she was one of our graduates. I have no doubt she will do very well.

Next: Meanings

INDEX

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.

An Extraordinarily Courageous Decision

I decided in the first instance to share some thoughts and concerns with Lou Smit, and on April 22 wrote an email to him:

“Lou, I’ve been seriously thinking of going to Bryan Morgan and Pat Burke about December -man. I have said nothing to them to date, but there were a couple of comments he made recently that trouble me. Let me explain. In the e-mail of April 17 where he is raising the question of wanting to communicate with Patsy, he says: ‘ I believe I will be sitting in her living room before I get the phone number and e-mail contacts I requested.’ I’ve obviously been stalling on this. When I didn’t reply immediately he repeats the same point in the mail of April 19. When I did reply I picked up on this and reminded him that he has repeatedly said that he couldn’t come back to the US. He replies: ‘ What strange reaction to such a strong statement.’

First point, I had this weird feeling that he was here, Boulder. I then began to think about the way he represents himself and the case. What he has been trying to say is that everything is the opposite of how it appears. The ransom note was indeed not serious, the ‘magician’s trick;’ the murder was not an act of violence, but an act of ‘love’; the asphyxiation was not torture, but a means of creating euphoria; the whole thing was not a sadistic ritual but a ‘dance,’ ‘a symphony.’ And don’t forget that his great hero is Charles Dodgeson aka Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland where everything is topsy-turvy.

His expression of his love for JonBenet is of course total bullshit since – perp or not – he is drawn to the violence of what happened to her, but reconstitutes it in this bizarre romantic form – as with all his little girls. The thing that worries me about the reference to being in the living room is that he is also back to saying how much he loves and adores Patsy, rather in the way he did JonBenet. My worry is that the person he really wants to harm – given the idea that everything is the opposite of what it appears – is Patsy. Hence my thinking that – just in case – they should know about this guy.

Or you could tell me that he really is a total nut-case, and I can end this weird, Kafka-like situation I find myself in.”

I finally decided that it would be prudent to share my concern with Bryan Morgan, John Ramsey’s Boulder based attorney, a man I had come to like and admire but whom I knew to be cautious and not given to panic. I took a copy of the email to Bryan’s house, along with examples of the kinds of things Daxis had been saying about the murder. He read them that afternoon and immediately decided that he had to talk to Mary Lacy, the DA. A meeting was arranged for the following morning, testimony if nothing else to the ability of a very senior criminal defense attorney to get prosecutorial attention.

They met, she read and was horrified. I received a call from Bryan, from her office, asking if I could provide more of the emails, which I did that afternoon. Lacy took them home and spent that evening poring over them and, as she would tell me later, feeling the hair on the back of her neck stand on end.

The decision to begin the investigation was made by her that night, having read the mails. I am convinced that only a woman such as Lacy, who has a reputation for a serious lack of affection for those who commit sex crimes, and here was a sex crime and a homicide, could have launched this investigation. I think to her the risk of being wrong was less important than the possibility that she might be right, and save other children from JonBenet’s appalling fate. It was an extraordinarily courageous decision.

A Brave Woman, a Truly Decent and Dedicated Man, and a Father of Two Daughters

I was asked to go and meet with the DA, and two of her senior colleagues, Bill Nagel and Pete McGuire. Tom Bennett was also present, as was Lou Smit. I understood that this was becoming a very curious position for a media scholar to be in, but in a curious way it felt then, just as it does now, that this was a proper thing to do.

What had happened as the narrative of the emails had unfolded was that I had gone from being a media scholar to someone who was becoming more and more concerned about what I was reading. I was a father of two daughters, I was a member of this community, this society, I was horrified by the possibility that what I was reading may be true and that here was not just a killer but a serial pedophile.

I cannot imagine the moral universe within which one would not try to do something. I would be attacked later. I could care less. I did what I thought, and think, was the right thing to do.

There is, however, something about JonBenet, or rather the tortured universe that surrounds her, that makes the most decent people do bad things. At the meeting in Lacy’s office something happened that was strange and, to be honest, deeply troubling. That morning Smit and I had gone to meet with Mike Sandrock. Lou wanted to meet Michael and get a description of what had happened in Paris. We met in The Trident coffee house, I introduced them and they started to talk. I was there because Michael had requested that, on the reasonable grounds that he wanted someone there other than just a cop.

He gave his description of the meeting at the Shakespeare bookstore near Notre Dame. He described the young American, Lou took some notes and that was it. It all seemed to me necessary, if not especially revealing. That afternoon in Lacy’s office Lou mentioned, in passing, the meeting with Michael.

To everyone’s surprise she started to berate him and in a curious gesture slouched across her desk, her face almost touching its surface, looked at Lou, pointed her finger and said, barely containing her anger, “that (the meeting) was out of order.” Lou did not miss a beat and, himself looking furious, said that he was resigning from the investigation there and then.

It was embarrassing and, whatever the reasoning for the rebuke, unnecessary and deeply unfortunate. Lou Smit is truly decent and dedicated a man, who was working the case for the DA without pay, only receiving expenses, and did not deserve to be treated this way in front of colleagues and, me, a civilian. More importantly it was stupid to lose Smit in this way, since he still knew more about the case, and had thought about it more, than anyone. Here was an important asset which would now not be available. The obvious question was why did she behave in this way? As I sat there and watched this unfortunate scene I was totally perplexed, and remain so. Nevertheless, she was a brave woman.

Conversation

The emails continued, with ever greater pace, ever greater detail, confession followed by further confession, soaked in a certain self-pity and a belief by Daxis that is was all a misunderstanding: “it wasn’t meant to be the way it was Michael, I loved her, I love all little girls, but JonBenet was the most precious of all…” Here was the perpetual mantra.

Responding to the mails became an almost daily task. There were times when I simply needed to get away from the communication and so I would make up stories, for example that I was going on a camping trip or helping friends to move and so would not have Internet access. The brute reality was that I knew in my heart and head that I was trapped by the logic of the situation, that if this is the killer he cannot be allowed to disappear, he has to be found, and now law enforcement wanted him to be found.

The first effort was to try and trace the emails. The service he used was “Hushmail,” one designed for people who do not want to be found and whose servers are in Vancouver, Canada. International law kicked in and even though Canadian law enforcement were eager to help, and there was a technical way, possibly, to identify the user and the location, all of this required overcoming the bureaucracy that is attendant on all international law ~ formal requests, a court order and so on. It never happened.

There then came a moment when Daxis asked me if I would like to talk to him. I thought about this for oh, I would say, a nanosecond. Yes. He sends me a number, but I wait, I don’t immediately call it. On a late, early summer’s afternoon Bennett phones me and asks if I will go to the Justice Centre and make the call. The reason for making the call from there was that he wanted me to use one of their phones, one that they use so that the receiver of the call cannot trace it or get the number ~ this is mainly used to protect, for example, victims of domestic violence.

I turn up at the JC, Tom is waiting, it’s about 6pm. We know that Daxis is somewhere in the Far East because he’d told me that he would be going “up,” to Malaysia. For a time I thought he was in Australia, but as it turned out he was in Bangkok. I have the number, Tom has hooked up a digital recorder, I hit the keys on the phone. Suddenly a voice is heard, one of those robot sounding voices, “sorry, there are insufficient funds in this account to make this call.” We looked at each other, and expletives flew! Daxis is expecting the call, so what to do? It wouldn’t be wise to use one of the ordinary phones in the JC. I suggest that we go to my office. We call. The conversation is on. This was all getting even weirder.

In the calls my role was to make it clear to Daxis that I was not going to stand in judgment. I just want to understand, I told him, which in truth, to a certain extent, was the case. I was appalled by what I was reading and hearing, but understood that it would have been nonsense to moralize with him. But I also wanted to hear him say what he had been saying in the emails. The calls were of course recorded, as I think he instinctively knew. Slowly he opened up about JonBenet, of his feelings for her, as we edged towards his account of that night.

While these initial conversations had been taking place, Bennett had been working on getting a trace established. The technology of this surprised me, since it depends upon the fact that every phone emits a unique signal and it is this that is employed to do the trace. So I had to use the same phone for each call. Bennett worked mainly with the FBI in Atlanta, but the trace would also include a British intelligence agency, one office in London, one in Manchester, and US intelligence agents in Bangkok.

The idea was simple, keep him talking. We knew that he was using a cell phone that he had specifically bought for our “chats,” that it would be switched off when we weren’t talking and would only be switched on at an agreed time. Daxis was nothing if not controlling. The way the trace would work would be to follow the signal and then triangulate it in relation to cell phone towers, picking up the signal that any cell phone emits when it is live.

The time came to make the call that would begin the trace. Tom Bennett was there, in contact with the FBI in Atlanta. About 5 minutes into the call he handed me a note, “they can’t do the trace.” It turned out later that the CU phone system was one of about 1% of phone systems in the United States which they couldn’t tap into, which may bring glee to those who fear that civil liberties are being increasingly threatened. At the time it was deeply frustrating. I had to carry on talking to Daxis, maintaining the pretence. Tom then handed me another note, “hang up.” I made an excuse, saying that I heard someone coming into the office, needed to hang up but would call later. The FBI had called Tom with a code that had to precede Daxis’ cell phone number. I tapped it in, made the call, and the trace was on.

“I want the last photo taken of JonBenet…”

Over the ensuing weeks there followed hours of conversation, with me all the while pretending everything was fine, no judgment would be made. In a curious kind of way for much of the time everything was fine, the pressure didn’t feel too great, my emotions were in check, I had every confidence in Bennett and the investigation, and I had no doubt that what was being done had to be done.

However, as we moved towards the climactic moment when he would say on the phone what he had been saying in the emails, I began to sense that the experience was taking a toll on me, I was starting to be drained emotionally. Tom clearly saw this and on a number of occasions asked me if I wanted to carry on, that they would not think ill of me if I backed out, that maybe someone else could take over writing the emails, something which Daxis would have spotted in an instant.

I decided to carry on, but came to understood that dealing with someone like this requires that you give something of yourself up, and understand that a person such as Daxis wants to get into your head, play a game, show that he is so much smarter than you could ever hope to be. For a while, there was an element of truth to this, particularly in the sense that despite all efforts, and while they narrowed the area down to a few blocks in Bangkok, they couldn’t exactly pinpoint the location. During one conversation Tom passed me a note saying that those doing the trace were asking if I could hear anything in the background, children playing, traffic, anything that might help. I couldn’t.

Then came what turned out to be an intriguing decision by Tom: he hired Mark Spray. Mark is a remarkable figure. He worked undercover for the DEA, was an experienced cop, a commander in the Boulder bomb squad and he collected sauvignon blanc wines. I met him for the first time on July 29, a Saturday, when he came with Tom Bennett as I was to call Daxis one more time.

It was clear by now that the trace was not working and a certain frustration was setting in. Mark had been reading the emails and noticed that in an email received the previous day Daxis had said “I want the last photo taken of JonBenet…” He knew that I had it and had had asked on a number of occasions that I scan it and send him a copy as an email attachment. I never responded to the request. We had used it in the first documentary and it shows Patsy with JonBenet by her side. It is at once beautiful and heartbreaking since it was taken Christmas morning 1996, JonBenet’s last day alive.

After the call we were discussing how to proceed, how to find Daxis, when Mark suddenly said “he wants a copy of the photo, why don’t you offer him the original.” I looked at him and said, with a smile, you’re crazy, to do that he’d have to give us an address. What, though, was there to lose? And so the next day I emailed Daxis and offered the original photo, adding that Patsy had given it to me personally and that therefore it carried her soul, or something equally strange. He replied immediately, was so grateful and, ever wanting to be in control, insisted that I use UPS, adding that he would set up a mail drop. I must admit, at one level, I was amazed at this development since he had gone to enormous lengths to both hide his whereabouts and his identity. I had, however, also begun to sense that whoever Daxis was, there was a part of him which wanted to be found, needed to come in from the bleak cold of anonymous isolation.

On August 3, Bangkok time, he sent me the address and on August 3, Boulder time, Mark went to a UPS office and put the photo in an oversize envelope so that whoever picked it up could not hide it. The other thing we knew was that he had bought a mountain bike. All that was required now was to set up 24 hour surveillance on the drop. August 6th was JonBenet’s birthday and he had been eager to have the photo by then. On Monday August 7th, which just happened to be my birthday, the surveillance team sees a slight, Caucasian male turn up at the drop riding a mountain bike.

Hello Daxis.

Next: Snake on a Plane

INDEX

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. It was a rather roundabout way of proceeding, though, as would become clear, nothing about this person was straightforward. Mike forwarded the email and I, in what some might regard as a moment of madness, replied saying something to the effect that I see you want to talk, so let’s talk. In my mind, I saw “D” as one of many people who were fascinated with the case, used the internet to explore its every nook and cranny, and about whom I eventually wanted to write. It didn’t quite turn out that way.

The Killer Loved Her

The correspondence began, at first on an occasional basis. All the emails are available out there in the vastness of the Internet and so I am not going to dwell on them in any detail, not going to seek to psychoanalyze them any more than I am gong to try and “understand” him. All I will say is that they were the product of a highly intelligent, if strange and controlling mind, and that they were torrid, violent, sinister, an endless word tapestry of unyielding compulsion. Here’s a sampling:

“it was never a kidnapping attempt, Michael. Never. Her death was a ritual and every aspect is harbored by her killer.”

“Patsy, please, I beg thee, listen to a man who has a connection with your daughter as no other can have…”

“On my last visit to her home, I remembered the sweetness of JonBenet’s laughter.”

“She ‘played rough’. She was no ‘sugar and spice’ girl. She did not break easily.”

“The killer loved her. He made love through killing her.”

“He is mortified that his violent passion has culminated in the death of the very object of his love.”

“JonBenet’s killer is not a serial killer. He is a serial lover.”

“We must cure ourselves of the word torture. It was a sexual act.”

“Do you know what it is to crave the blood of a lovely child. Do you know what it is to want this so bad yet not want death for her?”

“Michael, my face was the last JonBenet saw. Does that not connect me with her mother?”

“Would you like too hear my voice? It’s nothing special but it was the last voice JonBenet heard.”

One question I had to engage was how to “read” the emails. They were extraordinarily detailed and graphic, written by someone who clearly had an obsession with JonBenet, was clearly highly intelligent and who might just be telling the truth. It was also clear that he might be a total nut case. How to decide?

It is worth recalling that eventually these emails would be read by the Boulder DA’s office, the senior judge of Boulder county, the FBI, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a British intelligence agency, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, ICE, Homeland Security, Thai police and a Thai judge. At no point did anyone say, at least to my knowledge, this is a waste of time, he’s just crazy. Every single agency felt that whoever he was and wherever he was, “D” had to be found and the more he wrote and spoke, the more that became the case. And one remarkable coda: no one leaked, a small miracle in this day and age.

In a sense the most interesting emails are those that contain details that can be verified: the fact that he knew that JonBenet’s nickname for her grandmother, Nedra Paugh, was Neddie; his apparent detailed knowledge of the Paugh property; the fact that his description of abducting his first wife, who was just 12 years old at the time, was true; that the description of the schoolroom in Bangkok was accurate, down to the wall coverings; that the children in Bangkok, and his behaviour with them, that he detailed in a number of emails, was confirmed in interviews conducted with them by US agents; the fact that he had indeed begun the process of a sex change operation. In fact, one of the final mysteries of the whole saga is why he was telling the truth so often, but apparently lying about his relationship with JonBenet?

Obsessed

From the beginning there was a strange tone to the emails. It was quite clear that he was hinting that it wasn’t just that he was interested in the case, but that he knew more than he was revealing. I used to occasionally show them to my then assistant Dona and say, “have a look, what do you think?” Her reply was invariably “that’s creepy.” There were constant hints and allusions, with one theme being “Michael read closely and carefully.” It was as if he was suggesting he was writing in code or with a deliberate opacity. It all became very strange, very fast. It also became very clear that he had a deep need for young girls in general, and JonBenet in particular. At some point he also began to suggest that his love for JonBenet was matched by his love for Patsy Ramsey. Then, in early 2004 he disappeared for about a year. Nothing.

I had been in the habit of forwarding the mails to Lou Smit. I had got to know him well when we made the second of our documentaries about his intruder “theory.” As I became more and more perplexed and intrigued by the emails it seemed natural to share them with him and ask his advice. He found them intriguing enough that he forwarded them to Tom Bennett, the DA’s chief investigator in Boulder.

As he would later tell me, Tom ignored them because he thought I was making them up. In a curious kind of way, I welcomed Tom’s skepticism, since I would have done exactly the same thing. One thing I learnt from Tom and Lou was that good cops always question, are always looking for clues, eying possibilities, picking apart evidence, letting that evidence lead them to a conclusion, rather than having a conclusion first and then letting that be the guide through the evidence, which is exactly what happened with certain figures in the Boulder police’s investigation.

In that sense to be a good cop you have to have a certain obsessive compulsive quality; you can never close shop. This seems to me a necessary quality to do anything well. I noticed, however, that when anyone wished to get at me ( or imagine that they were getting at me) because of my work on the Ramsey case they would say I was “obsessed.” Had I been a grisly, old archeologist who had spent thirty years digging away at the same patch of sand in Egypt they would have said I was dedicated. Buried inside the “accusation” of obsession is a subtext, one suggesting that this person is a tad off kilter, misplaced, “unmoored,” as one journalist would put it ( and of whom more later) and that, therefore, anything I said or did about what actually happened to JonBenet was almost certainly wrong, illegitimate.

Confession

2005. One day I check my emails and he’s back, the correspondence starts again with an increasing pace and force. He is clearly telling me that he knows who killed JonBenet, referring to “the killers.” In one set of exchanges he says that not only was there a man involved but that there was also a woman in the basement. He then implied that one of them left as the assault proceeded. I told him that I assumed it was the woman who had left to which he replied, “why would you assume that?” He then writes that he no longer wishes to talk about the woman, she’s not there, forget her, move on Michael, read closely and carefully. I did.

Beginning early in 2006, the pace gathers and the confession begins. It was him, he was clearly saying, who was involved in the death ~ not murder, a key nuance ~ of JonBenet.

He begins to tell me in great detail what had happened, and he was pleading with me to put him in touch with Patsy so that he could say how sorry he was for what he had done and to beg her forgiveness. What he was begging forgiveness for was his accidentally killing her daughter, in a manner that was as awful as it was bizarre, and that clearly reflected either direct knowledge or, at the very least, a careful study of the injuries actually incurred by JonBenet.

I’d asked him at one point what the letter “D,” with which he signed his emails, stood for. I’d been expecting ~ naivete fully present ~ that it would be Donald or Delbert or David. The reply came that it stood for “daughter, death, December.”

Later he asked if I would really like to know. Why not? It came back, “D” stands for “Daxis.” Well of course, obvious. Next step, Google it. Nothing meaningful emerges, and to this day the meaning has never been properly explained, though inevitably there has been a good deal of speculation on the internet. He himself would say that it meant “son of the Devil,” though I suspect he said that as something of a joke.

Next: Bangkok

INDEX

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.

On Monday S&R will publish the next installment in Tracey’s series on the Ramsey case, in which he focuses on Daxis, as Karr called himself. In this sequence, readers will finally see communications from Karr that have never been made public.

Not to shade your expectations too much, but suffice it to say that the contents of these e-mails are chilling, and I suspect you’ll come away from next week’s posts with a different view of the case than you have heretofore been afforded.

We hope you’ll make a few minutes for this S&R exclusive. In the meantime, the links below will help catch you up.

Index

• Prologue
• JonBenet, pt. 1: the establishment of a narrative
• JonBenet, pt. 2: vile bigotry and voodoo stupidity
• JonBenet, pt. 3: Time to wake up, Professor Tracey

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. We did however keep in touch. He was aware, vaguely, of how during 1997 I had been drawn into talking about the case in scores of interviews, across all media. It was, in fact, a good opportunity to make the point about the problems of journalistic practice in a market-driven environment that he and I had discussed many times.

In September 1997, I decided to write an op-ed piece for the Sunday edition of the local paper, the Daily Camera (cf. appendix.) The peg for the piece was the debate about the role of the paparazzi in the death of Princess Diana in Paris on August 31, 1997. I argued that the question of the tabloid and mainstream media obsession with Diana should come as no surprise to anyone, particularly anyone living in Boulder. We had had for nine months a pitch perfect example of exactly the same kind of obsession in the coverage of JonBenet and her parents. At the end of January, a month after her death, there were three hundred reporters in Boulder, covering the case. The rhetorical question that the piece asked was simple: how come we all know the Ramseys are guilty? The answer was obvious, as I have already stated: that was the only story being told.

Shortly after the op-ed appeared I got a phone call from Bryan Morgan. I didn’t know much about Bryan then (we have since become good friends) other than that he represented John Ramsey and that he was founding partner, with Hal Haddon, of one of the most powerful criminal defense law firms in the western states. My immediate reaction was to wonder if there was something in the article I had written that had raised his hackles. I couldn’t imagine what that could be since I think I can reasonably claim that it was one of the first times the possibility had been raised in the media that maybe the case wasn’t so tight and shut as everyone was assuming. He told me that he wanted to come and talk, and so we did, meeting in my small cramped office in the Norlin Library on the CU campus. I explained to him my position, a mini-version of the arguments I expanded upon in the Prologue, and added that I had no view as to the guilt or innocence of his clients, and that my main concern was with the nature of the media coverage, the role of the tabloids and the fact that, guilty or innocent, the Ramseys still had rights that were being trashed. It was an interesting conversation but when he left I assumed that was the end of it.

A couple of days later, however, Bryan called me again with a startling proposal. He told me that Patsy Ramsey wanted to come and talk to one of my classes. I must admit that I burst out laughing. The Ramseys were the most wanted couple in America, the ultimate “get” for all the major media figures like Barbara Walters, Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer, but they had been totally hunkered down, on the advice of their attorneys, for whom defense law 101 is your clients don’t talk, and here she wanted to come and talk to a bunch of college kids. We agreed to meet next day for lunch.

As I put the phone down, I had an idea and called David. I found him in a bookshop in Scotland. I briefly explained the context and then with that temerity again showing its head said that we should make a documentary that would allow us to make the point that we had discussed all those years before by telling the story of how the story of JonBenet had been told. And I added, if I can get the Ramseys will you produce it. Barely thinking (something that there would be many moments he would regret) he said yes.

The First Time I Met John Ramsey

I met Bryan the next day at The James Irish Pub. With him was Pat Burke, Patsy’s attorney. They had come expecting to discuss how we could get Patsy into one of my classrooms, without drawing any media attention. I suggested that I had a better idea. I told them that I wanted to make a documentary about the media story of JonBenet’s death, but that to do that I had to put their clients on camera. In television terms you could no more make such a movie than you could stage Hamlet without the Prince. There was also a practical reason, in that no network was going to put up a budget if they were not interviewed.

As they heard my proposal, Bryan and Pat – both of whom are very high-end criminal defense attorneys whose talents you definitely never want to be in a position to need – looked at me as if I were a lunatic. When your clients are assumed by the whole world to be guilty of killing their daughter, when an indictment is obvious, when the whole of the world’s media would love to talk to them and is anyhow spewing forth extraordinary amounts of so-called “information,” the absolutely last thing you do is let them talk. However, as I was about to learn for the first (but not the last) time, the normal laws of moral physics do not exist in the universe that swirls around her death. They said that they would put my proposal to the Ramseys, clearly assuming that there was no way this was going to happen. They were wrong. Within about 24 hours Bryan called me again and said, much to even my amazement, “they’re interested.”

The first time I met John Ramsey was in the foyer of the Hyatt in Marietta, Georgia, in early December 1997. He had come to take Bryan Morgan and I to his house on Paces Ferry Road. David would be flying in later from filming in Bucharest. As we shook hands on first meeting, I couldn’t help but wonder whether I were shaking hands with a child killer. That whole weekend had a kind of out of body sense to it: trying to negotiate an interview, all the while looking at them, searching for a clue, something that would reveal an inner, ghastly persona capable of killing.

Nothing. Here was a life, it seemed of wealthy ordinariness, caught up in vicious extra-ordinariness. There were other little clues that weekend. We went to dinner at a private, elegant club on Peachtree, in Atlanta, where they were well known. The waiter greeted them warmly, not it seemed to me out of any obsequiousness, rather out of genuine affection. At one point in the evening David, who was sitting next to Patsy, asked how she coped with the pressure of being accused by the whole world of killing her child. She started to cry. Not out loud, rather out of what seemed like a private agony. David and I would both note that John seemed not to react, carrying on his conversation with me. Instead Bryan got up, moved around the table, put his arms around her, and led her from the dining room. From another table, a lady rose, followed them out, and suggested she take Patsy into the ladies powder room so that she could compose herself.

Later David and I discussed this incident and John Ramsey’s apparent aloofness to his wife’s distress. Could it be, as many had suggested, that he did indeed have ice in his veins, that he had the cold stone heart of man who could indeed kill his own child with blithe indifference? Or could it be that in the context of unimaginable pressure and accusation he had to hold his composure, for his sake, for Patsy, for the family? For if not him who could, would, should? I now see John Ramsey as man with almost surreal courage, the likes of which I have never, before or since, seen.

The following morning, Sunday, David and I sat down with the Ramseys at the dining table in their home to discuss the interview. Bryan sat quietly alongside one wall. We had a drawn up a list of conditions that we insisted on. Looking back there was nothing if not British hubris in this: here were two people who were possibly, one or both, facing the death penalty, who were being begged by their attorneys not to talk to us, who were in demand by every major news organization in America for “the interview,” and here we were saying we’ll do this but only if you accept our conditions. These were basically that we could ask any question we wanted, no exceptions; that they would have absolutely no editorial involvement, indeed that they would never see the programme before it was broadcast; and that if we found out anything damaging to their case we would use it. The only clause which Morgan asked to be included was that we would agree not to broadcast the documentary during the time that any grand jury – if it were empanelled – was sitting. ( This clause would cause much confusion and silliness, and in the end was revoked by the attorneys at our bidding.)

That we had put these conditions forward came largely from the fact that we knew that any attempt to get a commission out of the UK would be very much dependent on our convincing the commissioning editor that what we were proposing was a piece of independent investigative journalism and not – as we would inevitably be accused – a softball interview. We laid out these conditions to John and Patsy, and generally discussed our ideas as to what we had in mind: a story had been told about them and this crime, a story which we wanted to interrogate to see if another story could have been told. They listened , agreed, we stood up, facing each other across the table, shook hands and they signed the agreement. Bryan Morgan went to an even whiter shade of pale because of what had just happened.

The inevitable thought that came to mind, however, was why would two people, if they were the killers, allow two Brits to interview them with these terms. If they were guilty, and they were still agreeable to cooperating, in the form of a major interview, then we were clearly involved in something that married the bizarre with the surreal. It could be argued that they, or at least those, like Susan Stine, whose counsel they sought knew something of my own position because of the numerous media interviews I’d given over the previous months. That position, however, was never that that they were innocent or guilty, only that the media coverage was vastly overdone and deeply prejudicial to any legal rights they had under the Constitutional provision to be presumed innocent.

However, they could have no idea about Mills’ position on the case if only because he didn’t really have one. I also explained to them that David came out of a tradition of broadcast journalism, that of British public service broadcasting, that treasured its integrity and independence. His mentor, Ray Fitzwalter of Granada Television, was legendary for both his nurturing of brilliant investigative journalism and for his utter, incorruptible integrity ( pity the producer who put in padded expenses to Ray, or didn’t nail the story factually as well as conceptually.) The Ramseys would have been stupid beyond belief to imagine that Mills would allow himself to become – please forgive the pun – a patsy.

Left Hand, Right Hand

When I returned home after this meeting there were the inevitable questions of: well, what are they like, did they do it? To which my reply, utterly subjective, grounded in nothing more than a feeling, was “no way.” But I was always quick to add: but even if they did, that’s irrelevant to us.

Later, as we filmed, the same experience would confront others. Dan Glick and Sherry Keene-Osborne, who wrote for Newsweek, were working with us as associate producers and had done some wonderful, revisionist journalism about the case. Neither had met the Ramseys until we started to film the interview. Both came away with that same sense of “no-way.” Having said that, it is important to understand that Dan and Sherry were as open to evidence that pointed at the Ramseys as that which pointed away. Dan and I in fact used to keep what we would call our left hand, right hand column moments. In the left column would be evidence that pointed away, the right evidence that pointed at them, and in particular Patsy. There was also one memorable moment at dinner the first night of filming, in March 1998. Bryan Morgan, tears in his eyes, recalled the moment when he realized that John at least was not involved. It was when, at one point in 1997, he was describing how JonBenet had died and it became clear to him that John “hadn’t a clue.”

For me, though, one reaction in particular stood out. We had hired as our cameraman-director Patrick Turley. Patrick is wonderful at his craft. He was by this time semi-retired. He had won numerous awards, and when Stanley Kubrick had wanted someone to shoot the New York scenes of Eyes Wide Shut, he had asked Patrick to do it – Kubrick famously never traveled. Patrick could also be testy, something that reflected both his perfectionism and an edgy psychology. He was also deeply cynical in a manner that Brits have mastered. He had in his career seen and filmed it all, war, mayhem, corruption. That same first night of the interview he said, to no-one in particular, “ I can’t see it.”

Of course, none of this was, or could, be conclusive. To have “seen” in the Ramseys “innocence,” would have been as wrong-headed, as irrational and stupid, as to have “seen” in them “guilt.” Over the next several years and two more documentaries , however, Mills and I became convinced that they were innocent. Following the December Atlanta meeting there were weeks of intense negotiation, a back and forth between me and the attorneys, as David was back in the UK trying to get a budget together.

What became quite clear was that whatever the advice, John Ramsey wanted to talk, indeed needed desperately to talk. I remember one key meeting, on a Saturday in the law offices of Mike Bynum, John’s friend and business partner. Everyone was there, (with one key exception): David, Dan, Sherry, Bryan, Pat Burke, Hal Haddon and Lee Foreman, the other senior partner in the Morgan, Haddon law firm. I made the pitch as to why they should do it, basically arguing that we would be professional, that their clients needed to be heard and definitely wanted to be heard.

There was surprisingly little opposition, because John Ramsey, the one vote that counted, had decided that we should proceed, and had told his attorneys of his decision. The deal was done. David got a budget from the British network, Channel Four, and in March 1998 we arrived in Atlanta. It had started.

There was one strange, vivid moment that, looking back, suggested the real extent to which JonBenet would enter my life. I had set my alarm for 6:00 am on the morning I would fly out to Atlanta. I had a dream about her, and recall vividly her saying, “Time to wake up Professor Tracey.” I awoke, slightly startled because it really did feel real. It was 5:59 am.

In January, 1998 I wrote a longish note to David suggesting what seemed to me to be the essential themes we needed to confront:

“David/ here are a few initial thoughts on the programme. We will obviously need to think long and hard about how to proceed. The trump card which we have is the Ramseys. Their involvement is what will get the attention. The down side to that is that we will be accused of being part of their PR campaign. So we will need to stay focused on the heart of the matter, which in effect is to put the American media on trial, and in so doing put America itself in the dock because without an audience for what Teddy White called “the schlock storm” it wouldn’t exist.Background

On December 26th 1996 the body of JonBenet Ramsey was found in the basement of her home. Her skull had been fractured, she had been strangled and she may or may not have been sexually assaulted. She was six years old, her home was in Boulder, Colorado and her death was to become the latest example of an American pastime, private tragedy as public spectacle.

Almost immediately two things happened:

1. her death became a major news story, with remarkably extensive coverage on tv and radio and in newspapers. At one point in January there were three hundred journalists in Boulder covering the story. It became a fixture on local television news, on cable programmes and primetime network news magazines. Even the London Sunday Times was to carry it as the cover story for its magazine, which featured a photo of JonBenet and the line “The Kiddie-Porn Killing: How the murder of a six year-old beauty queen chilled America’s soul.” That in itself was interesting because what it represented was the way in which an essential interpretation of what had happened, that the case was an example of familial sexual abuse, had become so prevalent that it had crossed the Atlantic.

2. there was an immediate and widespread assumption, fueled by media coverage, which was itself partly fed by the Police Department, that the parents were guilty of killing the child. The flow of “information” went: police dept leaks info to media, including tabloids and local paper, which publishes it as ‘fact,” which reassures the public, which has already been reassured by Durgin’s statement ( this was the mayor’s statement on January 2, that the police were not scouring the streets of Boulder for a child killer, a comment she said, when we interviewed her for the first documentary, she very much regretted) and which is anyhow disposed to believe the spin because of its own sense of how these kinds of crime happen, and which is anyhow fascinated with the case, and which wants more, which leads to further leaks to the increasing numbers of journalists covering the case, and so on as a public “understanding” of what happened and who did it becomes a powerful and unquestioned orthodoxy.

There is an obvious connection between the two, since the overwhelming tone of the coverage has often implied, and sometimes overtly stated, that the parents were guilty. It is clear that this was a conclusion that was arrived at early on by the police. Their problem was that they were then unable to make the case so that an indictment could be brought. This is why they decided to use the media to create a climate of public opinion which would force the DA to bring the Ramsey’s to trial. In my first conversation with Bryan Morgan, John Ramsey’s attorney, he said that when the story of the case was eventually told the real hero who would emerge would be a figure in the DA’s office (I now know that Bryan had Pete Hofstrom in mind, a man who was widely regarded not just an excellent assistant district attorney but someone who was ethically unimpeachable, and who has maintained a studied silence on the case to this day.) He seemed to be suggesting that it was this person in particular who had been primarily responsible for resisting the pressure to go to trial. In the recent Louise Woodward case ( an English nanny working in New England who had been accused of killing a child) it became clear that many Brits were surprised, shocked even, by the role of the media in the case, for example the television appearance of the parents before the jury had arrived at a verdict. The reality is that there was nothing unusual in this in terms of the relationship between the US media and the judicial process. In the context of the Ramseys there is no-one in the whole of the United States who has not been repeatedly told that the parents did it. One real puzzle, however, which may be beyond the scope of a television programme is why there was such a ready and potent willingness among the public to accept such an interpretation given that there is little meaningful evidence to sustain such certainty.”

Looking back there is little that I would change.

Storming the Bastille of Words

The errors in the media story were especially egregious precisely because they were fundamentally unfair and utterly denied the Ramseys the most basic of rights, to be presumed innocent. In the end the system worked and there was no indictment, but it was all perilously close.

The point David and I have been trying to make through the documentaries was that the story of JonBenet’s murder was a perfect avatar for a brute and new reality about American journalism, one which is increasingly boorish, banal, corrupt and debased, and that more importantly its condition was metastasizing into the body politic, and in particular into the judicial process and the rights of the citizen under the Constitution. So the brute premise was that even those – perhaps especially those – who would eventually be found guilty of heinous crime had rights. This was, it seemed to me something which never came close to being granted to the Ramseys.

There is, I believe and hope, a certain reasonable purpose in spending a decade of one’s life focused on one child murder. I am, I recognize, grasping here for a certain justification of purpose. Why her, why this case? I’ve thought about this question many times, but only recently began to fathom what might be an answer, with the help of many hours of conversation with a wise and gentle man whom I’ll refer to here simply as DG. It was, in fact, those conversations that guided me to the thoughts that I expressed in the Prologue.

In the same year that JonBenet died there were 804 children below the age of twelve murdered in the United States. She was one. Yet her death took on iconic status. She became Marilyn, Elvis, the Diana of slaughtered children, as her name entered the inner sanctum of public memory and knowledge. About that six year old child, about her demise, a mountain of lies were told. And if we cannot tell the truth about a child’s death, what else can we, as a culture, lie about?

The right to know the truth about JonBenet’s death is no different than the right to know the truth about, say, war and security. Tom Paine warned that if the majority of the people were denied the truth and ideas of truth it was time to storm what he called the “Bastille of Words.” David Mills and I set out to storm that Bastille of Words about the Ramsey case using the power of television. One obvious aspect was that as a student of culture who has spent many years writing and talking about the deepening corruption of cultural and, in particular, journalistic values here was a pitch perfect example of the argument, and it was on my own door step. As I suggested in the Prologue, the nature of the coverage suggested that the country I had idealized as a boy was falling well short of those ideals.

I was also motivated by a profound sense that, not only was she an innocent about whose death the truth should out, a child who had not, in all likelihood been killed by her parents, but that the family were being bullied, by the media and a great swathe of the public, and in my world view there is a special place reserved on the inner ring of hell for the bully.

I’ve felt this way since childhood, perhaps because when your father dies when you are only four years old the world becomes a scary place, and you develop a fearful sense that it is peopled by those who will prey on the vulnerable and when you are four, and your dad has gone, who will protect you? Yourself, if you can. And with that comes a belief, at least it did with me, that when you see someone being bullied, you have a moral responsibility to help them.

I guess it was as simple as that: this was not the America of my boyhood dreaming; it didn’t make sense that they would do this; and I felt profoundly sorry for them.

Next: Daxis

INDEX

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”

One of the many myths that would come to cling to the case like leeches on skin was that John Ramsey was plugged into a Boulder power and cultural elite, one which had circled the wagons to protect their own. It was not true but its mythic potency served a useful purpose of constructing the sense of guilt and responsibility which so many seemed to crave. The composition of the panel on a bleak, cold evening struck me as grotesque, but the room was packed with students ready to sit at the feet of these towering examples of the Fourth Estate. Here were paraded tales of unlimited expenses, traveling hither and thither across the country, picking away at the scabs of society. It was altogether an appalling experience, particularly given that while clearly many of the students in attendance were not taken in others had eyes that grew ever wider.

I was sitting on the front row, feeling angry and despondent at the proceedings. At one point I asked Green a question: “I know this is a big story because you, the media, made it a big story, but do you think it is an important story?” He paused for barely a moment and then uttered a comment that while certainly honest was as appalling as it was revealing: “no, it’s not an important story, but it’s entertaining…” There it was in all its grotesque shabbiness, a cynical truth that spoke volumes not just about Green, or the case, or the media but about the essential nature of the society at the end of the century. The torture and murder of a six year old child was now a form of entertainment. As I pondered the comment in all its horror and listened to the drivel that spewed from the mouths of the other panelists it seemed clear as could be that the Barbarians had indeed crossed the Tiber.

A couple of months later I was asked to talk to the monthly luncheon of the Boulder Democratic Party Women’s group. The other speaker was Mimi Wesson, a law professor at CU. My role was to comment on the media coverage, hers on the legal issues that the case had thrown up. At one point a lady of extended years stood up to ask a question. She wore a nice floral dress, and looked every bit the image of everyone’s favourite grandma. She then asked Mimi, in a voice as shrill as the early morning call of a shrike, “why don’t the cops just go in there and grab the Ramseys and take them down to the police station and get a confession out of them…” Applause swept round the room. Mimi responded bravely “err, because they have constitutional rights, we don’t live in a police state etc etc…”

What caught my attention however was not just the exchange but the fact that everyone’s grandma was literally frothing at the mouth. It was a terrible sight, troubling and frightening in what it meant for some of the most essential guiding principles of any civilized society – fairness, compassion, rationality, impartiality, the presumption of innocence, understanding based on evidence.

I came to think of these kinds of judgments as the problem of ‘the face,’ the extraordinary way in which people would look at the faces of John and Patsy Ramsey and see guilt. One e-mail posted on the internet from Theresa16@aol.com., said – and I reproduce it here exactly as she wrote it – “I think PATRICIA RAMSEY killed JonBenet. I must confess that each & every time I see patsy on television I get a COLD CHILL UP MY SPINE…patricia ramsey is EVIL…i am not trying to be cruel/nasty. but…WHY does patricia ramsey CONTINUOUSLY have that “GUILTY SMILE”???…”

Serious Juju and Lactate Fed Omniscience

There was another occasion when David and I were showing clips from the documentary at the Denver Press Club, a rather dowdy place with sodden hacks at the bar and a genial barman. At the end of the evening, after much discussion which revolved around the question of whether the Ramsey’s were complicit in their daughter’s death, a female journalist suddenly said “I think John Ramsey is a pedophile, he has a twitch.”

This was the sort of statement that all one can do in response is stare in blank amazement. But here we had a member of the fourth estate deciding, like some 19th century quack, that she could divine character from the physiology of appearance. And the assertion that there was a relationship between a twitch and pedophilia was up there with all those stereotypical child molesters who are fat and squat and slavering. The other slight problem with her analysis was that, after spending endless hours in an editing suite staring at John Ramsey’s face, I never did see a twitch. Her sight of this affliction seemed to suggest that the eye does indeed see what the heart desires, because it is quite clear that she wanted to see the pedophile in him. It came as no surprise when, in conversation, she hinted that there had been sexual abuse in her own life, not that this is sufficient excuse to accuse someone of abuse, willy-nilly.

I remember another occasion, one that I pick from innumerable possible examples, that was similar. I was being driven to Denver to do the Larry King programme. They had sent me a car, it was August and I was heading down I-36 in a Lincoln Town Car. The driver was Steve, a soft spoken man, as broad as he was tall, with a wispy beard and shaved head. He would not have looked out of place at a leather bar in the Village. In reality he was married with three children, whom he obviously adored, along with what he called “200 close relatives” in the Denver area, about whom he clearly cared. We chatted and he asked me about the King show and so it was that it emerged that we were to discuss the Ramsey case. He paused and then said “ what’s always puzzled me is why they look so guilty, especially her, Patsy looks guilty.” What I wondered, and not for the first time, does guilt look like? And why did such an obviously decent man utter such dangerous bigotry?

There is one other, powerful example worth recalling, of this tendency to hate but not know. It was the annual Christmas party of the SJMC, in 1998 – our documentary on the media coverage of the case had gone out on A&E in the Fall. Colleagues, friends and enemies, milling around, making small talk and trying to be pleasant. In several such conversations the Ramsey case emerged. In one I was talking to a well known, senior professor. She looked sharp, in the sense of flinty rather then be-suited, her skin was pale and taught. She suddenly muttered, “ I think they are despicable.” “Who?” I asked, somewhat dumbly. “The Ramseys.” “Why?” I asked somewhat stupidly. “Because they abused and killed their daughter.” I replied: “Tell me why you think that?” “Because,” said this senior professor, in a major research university “I’m a mother of two, I know…” I remember thinking, this mothering thing is serious juju, lactate fed omniscience. I also had an overwhelming desire for an extremely stiff drink as I contemplated this perfect coming together of vile bigotry and voodoo stupidity.

The Illusion of Knowledge

And yet I had heard something similar so many times in the weeks and months after the murder, a deep belief among so many people in the guilt of the Ramseys, a belief that could not possibly rest on anything of any substance since there clearly was absolutely nothing that was publicly known that could justify that belief. There was one thing, however, that could not be avoided, and that was the story which had been told by the media, a story drenched with theory, innuendo, allegation, rumour, a story that took as given the likely involvement of the parents. It was a situation that reminded one of similar statements by two very different people: Josh Billings’ comment that “ignorance ain’t so much a matter of not knowing, but knowing so many things wot ain’t so” and Daniel Boorstein’s that “the problem is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.” If ever there was a case were ignorance masqueraded as knowledge it is the public and the media and the presumed guilt of John and Patsy Ramsey.

Initially the media focus was on John, who was publicly and repeatedly called a child molester and a killer. Then the focus moved inexorably to Patsy. There would be those who would argue that Burke was involved, and even JonBenet’s half-brother John Andrew. The fact that there was video footage of him taking money from an ATM in Atlanta on Christmas night did not necessarily deter some from this theory. One especially nasty tactic adopted by the tabloids would be to get someone to goad him into a reaction, with a photographer ready to photo this “aggressive” young man, lending force to the idea that he could be a killer.
To this day, over a decade later, I still hear comments from even apparently sane and reasonable people, unaware of their ignorance as to the most basic facts, who say they just “assume,” that the mother “did it.” End of story. No reflection. No sense of the appalling injustice of making such judgments on the basis of a feeling. There was, and is, an almost religious fervor to those who believed, and believe, in the Ramsey’s guilt, the fervor in fact, of the true believer, and anyone who questioned that ‘truth’ became a heretic.

I understand that underlying much of this is the child herself. In some photos a natural beauty shines through. In others there was the coquettish child of the pageants. In fact it was clear that much of the issue of the apparent loathing of the Ramseys by strangers begins and in a sense ends with JonBenet herself, with her looks and with her name and most of all with the photos and videos of her in those pageants. There is certainly something about the pageant world that comes over as so kitsch, cheapened culture, “bread soaked in perfume” to use Robert Essler’s bitter comment. In a remarkable outburst on Larry King Live, Janet McReynolds (wife of Bill McReynolds, who played Santa at a number of Ramsey Christmas parties and who would become in some eyes a serious suspect) captured this quite brilliantly – some might say too, and disturbingly, brilliantly. She said:

“I feel that ….the media is (sic) saying to this collective community…in some way she deserved to die. That, at least, is a message that I am getting: She deserved to die, she was too beautiful. She deserved to die because she was from an affluent family. She deserved to die because she lived in an upscale community. She deserved to die because her family taught her gestures which might be interpreted as sexually suggestive. She deserved to die because she was in beauty pageants….. And to me, that is a crucifixion of an innocent victim.”

These are strong words. In the bizarre Alice in Wonderland aspect of the case it is worth mentioning that Janet McReynolds’ daughter and a friend had, twenty years earlier, been abducted and assaulted. The date was the 26th December. Janet also wrote a play, Hey Rube, years before about the torture and murder of a young girl whose body is found in a basement. Bill himself had a harp. On the wooden frame were written the names of dead children.

Janet McReynolds’ observation to King had, however, at least to me, a certain insight. There was a deep, pervasive feeling it seemed that no child should have been dressed as JonBenet was. No child should have worn mini-adult clothing, prancing and preening and singing. It was this more than anything that surely lay behind the rush to judgment about the parents, that fed the fires of speculation, that so readily and for so many led to the conclusion that this was all about sex, abuse and therefore death. The fact that there are enormous numbers of children, pretty babies one and all, engaged in pageants seemed irrelevant, even though it is not unreasonable to argue that if there was a relationship between the pageant business and child murder there would be a lot more dead babies in our land.

Over time I came to feel, in the words of Rene Girard in a different time and place, that public opinion had become “overexcited and ready to accept the most absurd rumours…” It did show, however, that the mesalliance between a few members of law enforcement and the media had worked a dark, mendacious magic, and that what happened in Boulder in the days and months and years that followed was perilously close to a conspiracy. A conspiracy to have executed – because if ever was a capital crime, a homicidal act of unusual viciousness, this was it– two people who were innocent.

It was a spectacle that one should never see in mature democracy, with respect for the rule of law and the rights of citizens to be presumed innocent. It was not only perilously close to conspiracy, malevolent and dark, it was all so very sleazy. Real sleaze, not the run of the mill, pathetic thieving of a few bucks here, a few more there; not the wasted curb crawler, the pimp on the corner, the hooker in his sight; the dime-bag drug addict. That’s not sleaze, that’s wreckage. True sleaze is the absence of a guiding morality, an approach to life that is not conditioned by an ethic, by any fundamental sense of right and wrong, an amoral place in which ends justify any means, even if that involves lying – repeatedly. Trotsky once said that “the end may justify the means, so long as there is something that justifies the end.” There wasn’t. For many of those in the media and law enforcement, who connived in the witch-hunt, the chickens would eventually come home to roost accompanied, in the immortal words of Hunter S. Thompson, by several enormous black condors.

The problem was and is that the assault on reason, the trashing of their rights and the shredding of their character almost worked, as evidenced by the overwhelming disbelief that it didn’t.

October 13, 1999; the Justice Center, Boulder Colorado

A short, paunchy man walks out to the lawn in front of the Center to make an announcement. District Attorney Alex Hunter, has been in office for decades but he knows that his reputation is basically in tatters, that the events of the previous 34 months, the hysteria, the mistakes, the mendacity, the conflicts had damaged him, and so many others, in a way that was utterly beyond redemption. Hunter is there to announce to the whole world the results of the months long investigation by a grand jury into the murder of JonBenet. Surrounded by a throng of journalists, gawkers, cops, microphones, cameras Hunter announces: “…we do not have sufficient evidence to justify filing charges against anyone who has been investigated at this time…”

One could sense in Boulder, across the state, across the whole nation and beyond bewilderment, fury, disbelief and, for a small few, unimaginable relief. At an undisclosed location in east Boulder, John and Patsy Ramsey, who had returned from Atlanta so that their arrest would be out of sight of their son, Burke, and their other family, were gathered with their attorneys, Bryan Morgan, who was representing John Ramsey, Pat Burke, for Patsy Ramsey and Hal Haddon, the eminence grise of the whole defence team. A few close friends were also there to share the agony. Patsy and John knelt in front of the television, holding hands. In her other hand Patsy clutched what had been JonBenet’s favourite toy, a small porcelain kitten. In deep agony she moaned that she knew she was going to prison. As they heard Hunter’s words they screamed and hugged each other. A great wave of relief washed over all those in the room. They knew that if there was no indictment now, there almost certainly never would be. They had expected the worst. Bryan Morgan left the room, went outside, sat on rock and wept. John Ramsey followed and placed a comforting arm around his shoulder.

In Colorado Springs, retired detective Lou Smit had been driving his truck as the announcement was about to be made. Smit had been hired by Alex Hunter to act as an investigator for the DA’s office back in the spring of 1997. He was hired because of his extraordinary reputation as a detective who had conducted 250 homicide investigations and had never lost a case in court. When he arrived in Boulder, in that spring of 1997, he had assumed, because he had been following the story in the media, that the Ramseys were probably involved, and that proving this would be a “slam dunk.” These many months later, as he pulled over to the side of the road to listen to Hunter’s statement, he knew more than anyone that the case may have been many things, but slam dunk it was not. Smit had come to author what became known as “the Intruder theory,” his utter conviction that a high-risk, deeply violent, sexually sadistic pedophile had entered the Ramsey home, taken JonBenet from her room, asphyxiated her as an act of torture, sexually assaulted her and finished her off with a blow to the head. He resigned from the case in September of 1999, just ahead of the conclusion of the grand jury, because he refused to go along with what he assumed would be the indictment and, in his eyes, the railroading of two innocent people.

As he waited, that Fall day, sitting in his truck by the side of his road, he was gripped with a deep fear that what he would hear was that the Ramseys had been indicted, the first step on their painful and inevitable walk to the gas chamber. As he heard Hunter’s words, that their would be no indictment, a crushing sense of relief washed over him and, like those others in Boulder gathered around the Ramseys, he started to sob. In all of their minds they knew that despite everything, despite the fact that their had been what was in effect a conspiracy by law enforcement to have the Ramseys convicted, despite public hysteria and a malevolent media, despite all that, a certain kind of justice had prevailed and a profound injustice avoided.

A Devastating Critique

Elsewhere, everywhere, in homes and offices across America, disbelief. Since the beginning of January 1997, when the media first began to really cover the case, the American pubic had lived within a narrative for which there could be only one ending: indictment, trial, conviction, execution – certainly of Patsy and possibly of John as an accomplice. That this wasn’t going to happen beggared belief because, of course, we all “knew” they were guilty.

It is vitally important to remember just how certain almost everyone was that there would indeed be a trial and conviction. The lawyers had already discussed with law enforcement the way in which the Ramseys would be handed over, and had arranged with a bank the monies that would be needed for any bail. That there wasn’t going to be a trial one suspects, though this has never been made clear, was because Hunter did not ask the grand jury to vote. Had he done so they may well have indicted, and Hunter was smart enough to know the difficulty he would have at trial. That he felt this way was almost certainly because he understood two things: he would be up against a superb defence team; and he knew the power of the case that Smit had developed, one which had the backing of America’s premier crime profiler, John Douglas and the extremely bright assistant DA Trip DeMuth. DeMeuth had been asked by his boss, Pete Hofstrom, to “defence” the case – that is, to look at the evidence in the way that the defence attorneys would. On 12 May 1998 he presented his report to the police and members of the DAs. I have read the report. He picked away at the investigation, its intellectual and conceptual flaws, its clear biases, the brute truths it had refused to face, like a buzzard devouring dead carrion. It is a devastating critique. The police case was inherently flawed and weak.

We can see this now. Then was a different story. On Saturday September 25 1999 David Mills and I had lunch with Bryan Morgan at Turley’s Restaurant in Boulder. I had originally suggested the Regal Harvest House but Bryan demurred at that saying that there were too many paparazzi there. This was only a short time before the grand jury would report its findings. Boulder was once more crawling with journalists and camera crews, and Bryan was in no mood to be caught on camera talking to the two of us. His mood was also sombre, his mind utterly convinced that the Ramseys were going to be indicted. His reasoning seemed strong, resting on the received truth that grand juries will always go with the prosecution – the clichéd phrase is that any prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. He felt that Alex Hunter, the DA, had lost control of events and that Michael Kane, an assistant DA who was leading the grand jury inquiry was determined to indict. I tried to argue, somewhat precociously since Bryan had vast legal experience, that the mistake he was making was two-fold. Hunter did not seem to me to be out of the loop – I knew this because of a request I had from him for some information about another suspect, a request which could only be interpreted to mean that he and his office were looking at other people as possible suspects, even as the grand jury was drawing to a close. The nature of the request, and its timing, made it clear to me that he was far from convinced that the Ramseys would, or should, be indicted. It also seemed clear to me that this was not like all the other cases which fed that conventional wisdom about the malleability of grand jurors. Morgan, though, thought differently. We had met to discuss our plans for a second documentary, that would investigate the investigation. For that we would need the cooperation of his clients. He told us that this would depend upon the results of the grand jury, that this would, however, be our last conversation until things were resolved and that he was now “going into trial mode.” We shook hands at the end of lunch with the clear sense that we would not be speaking with him for a long time, until in fact the trial was over.

In the first documentary that David and I made about the case, we drew heavily on the media accounts, the story that was told about the death, the alleged role of the family, particularly of JonBenet’s parents. David knew little about the case, but we had both long shared a growing concern as to how the media in general, and the news media in particular, were evolving as we both saw on the far horizon the growing, dark cloud of market forces.

We had first met after the publication of my biography of Sir Hugh Greene, Director General of the BBC from 1960 to 1969. Hugh was not just a great public service broadcaster, he was a great and brave man with a passionate belief in certain fundamental rights. I had met him when I wrote a chapter of my doctoral thesis about the manner in which he was forced to retire from the BBC – he was, to the government of the day too independent, a troublesome priest who had to go. When I got my doctorate in 1975 I had the temerity ( since I had at that time published hardly anything) to ask him if I could write his biography, to which he immediately said yes, an answer which would prove to be even more life-changing than entering the world of a murdered child in Boulder.

Next: Time to wake up Professor Tracey

INDEX

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. Through 1997 the case became the biggest story of any kind in the United States, until another princess died on August 31 in a Paris tunnel. The story was fueled by the wealth of her parents, the brutality of the assault, its savage cruelty, even if in the annals of mayhem and murder in the Republic, in the long list of slaughtered innocents, JonBenet’s death was not especially exceptional.

What really got the collective pulse beating feverishly were videos of JonBenet taking part in child pageants, dressed and acting in ways that many saw as a sexualized child prancing around in a suggestive manner, an alluring, pouting, posing Lolita, a pedophile’s dream. I understand that there was for many people something, shall we say, curious about the images but to go from that to the argument that she was being sexually abused by her parents, which would emerge as one of the strongest narratives in the media story was, to my way of thinking, a real stretch. That, however, she might have caught the eye of sexual sadist seems highly plausible, someone who would lust for her, not rest until he had her.

As the years passed and no arrest was made, and a grand jury in October 1999 failed to hand down an indictment, the story slowly slipped from the headlines and the public imagination, a chill set in, it became a cold case. When news emerged of the arrest in Bangkok, following an investigation involving the Boulder DA’s office, the FBI, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, British Intelligence, and the Royal Thai Police, within hours hundreds of reporters, camera crews, producers, not just from the United States but from all over the world, were flocking to Boulder. The case of JonBenet had gone from cold to hot in barely a heartbeat.

I happen to know something of this since I was the one who, for four years, had been receiving emails from the man arrested, and it was his confessions in this long exchange of emails and phone conversations that he was responsible for the death of JonBenet, that led to the intense, international investigation. I found myself in the middle of an extraordinary, even hysterical, media firestorm as well as a truly bizarre sequence of events. It was a curious place for a media scholar to be, and it felt at times like having a berth on the Titanic. It provided, however, a fascinating position to think through again some basic questions: how did it all come to be; what did the renewed explosion of interest say about the nature of contemporary media and the cultures that they serve; issues of ethics with which I was confronted; and the most profound question of all, “why are they all here?

“…the miscarriage of American civilization”

The story begins ten years earlier when I had an idea, to make a documentary about the way in which the media had dealt with the murder of JonBenet. I floated the idea with a friend of mine, David Mills, an extremely experienced, London based film maker. The reasons for wanting to do this were both simple and complex, but primarily birthed by those concerns and feelings I expressed in the Prologue. It seemed obvious to me that there was a serious problem with the manner of the coverage: it was both overdone and unfair. Overdone in that there was so much of it, unfair because from the get-go any presumption of innocence was denied JonBenet’s parents, John and Patsy Ramsey. It also troubled me greatly that so many in the public seemed so willing, so needing, to believe what they read and heard. In other words, the story was a profound and troubling metaphor for everything that was going wrong with American journalism and, in a sense, the larger culture. I was reminded of Freud’s comment about “the miscarriage of American civilization,” by which he meant the disconnect between the lofty 18th century ideals upon which the Republic had been founded, and the sorry condition he observed in the 20th century.

My initial fascination was with the manner in which the story of her death was told in the media, the sheer vastness and luridness of the coverage by mainstream and tabloid media alike. What became clear was that the story was a narrative within which were certain themes, suggestions, declamations, a nudge here, a wink there. “Clues” and “conclusions” were thrown about like confetti at an Irish wedding. The essential themes told, basically, one story, but it was rather like a pointillist painting, in which a picture is constructed from dots of pure color that one has to step back from and which viewed from a distance form into a recognizable shape, in this case a portrait of two child killers. The more I researched, the more I came to know, the more evidence I unearthed, the more people I spoke to, the more I studied child murder the more flawed that portrait appeared. There is no space here to render all the stories that were told and retold about the crime and the family but two or three will make the point.

Almost from the beginning, that is within hours and days of her body being found, by her father, in a dingy basement room, that narrative was being laid down. It was claimed, for example, that the house at 755 15th St, was basically a fortress, alarm on, windows and doors locked. Not true. The alarm was off, doors and windows open. The police knew this because it’s in the police report from the morning of December 26, but they whispered their untruths to reporters who, to borrow that by now familiar phrase, acted as stenographers as they began to lay down, totally uncritically, the conceptual groundwork that it was clear that John and or Patsy Ramsey had killed their daughter. As early as December 27th an assistant DA was telling the media, anonymously of course ( though it would emerge later that it was Bill Wise) that “something’s not right.” A few days later the mayor, Leslie Durgin, announced to the press and the public that parents need not fear for the well being of their children, that police were not scouring the streets of Boulder for a crazed child killer.

When I asked her, in an interview for our first documentary, who had told her this she said “the Chief,” that is the police chief, Tom Kolby. The comment may have been an unfortunate mixture of the stupid and the unprofessional, but the implication was obvious and overwhelming, the police were working off the assumption that it was someone in the house who killed JonBenet, which of course they were.

Another, key story emerged in March 1997 when it was reported that police found it curious that there were “no footprints in the snow,” around the house. The implication was obvious, and intended: no footprints, no intruder. The slight problem with this, as law enforcement knew and the crime scene photos from December 26 make clear, was that there was little or no snow around the house.

Another little gem: John Ramsey, it was reported, had flown his private jet back to Atlanta, with his family and JonBenet’s casket on board. So there it is, Ramsey is so calm, so not grieving, so in control, so mentally calm that he could fly a jet. Ergo, he was a sociopath who killed her.

The source was, as we were told by the reporter who first broke the “story,” a member of law enforcement who had always been “reliable.” Problem was, not true. Dan Glick, a stringer for Newsweek who worked with us on the first documentary, did something which we used to teach in Journalism 101, he checked the facts. In particular, he checked the FAA take off and landing log at JeffCo Airport and discovered that in fact the jet had been sent by the Chairman of Lockheed Martin, which had bought Ramsey’s company, Access Graphics, and that the pilot was a Lockheed pilot. When we interviewed the reporter who broke this story, who is as far as I can tell a really nice guy, and I asked him why, he asked me in return “maybe you can tell me it wasn’t his plane and he didn’t fly it.” The script line that followed that soundbite in the documentary was obvious and, to be honest, devastating, “…it wasn’t his plane and he didn’t fly it.”

For the documentary we drew on many sources, tabloids, television, newspapers, news magazines, interviews with the Ramseys, family and friends, attorneys and reporters. We would be accused of overemphasizing the role of the tabloids, to which we would respond that there was little if any clear water between them and the mainstream media. Perhaps the most profound example of this was in a piece in Vanity Fair by Annie Bardach, which had the distinction of being the first publication with the text of the ransom note, but was also riddled with error, half-truth and downright untruths.

She wrote: that the Ramsey’s behavior was “odd;” she quoted Linda Arndt, the first detective on the scene, as reporting that between 10.30 and noon John Ramsey left the house to pick up the family mail. Arndt had said this, but it would later to be shown to be incorrect; she reported that only a small child or a midget could have entered through the basement window. Not true, I’ve been through as have people larger than me; she said that near JonBenet’s body was her red “pageant nightgown. Not true, it was a Barbie nightgown. She reported that Hal Haddon, the senior Ramsey attorney, was a political ally of the District Attorney, Alex Hunter, when in fact they had never even met; she reported investigators saying that the ligatures around JonBenet’s neck and wrists were “very loose,” and were consistent with a staging. Not true, as we now know from the autopsy photos which show that the ligature was so tight it caused a deep gouge in the child’s neck; she reported the story that there were no signs of forced entry, and no footprints in the snow; she reported that JonBenet was a chronic bed wetter and that Patsy had taken JonBenet to her pediatrician 30 times. In fact, it was 27 over a four year period, some of those with the nanny. Dr. Francesco Bueff, the pediatrician, told us that there was nothing abnormal about this, that there were no signs of abuse and that she was not a chronic bed-wetter; Bardach also reported the story that John Ramsey flew a private jet back to Atlanta for the funeral. Not true.

Bardach’s piece was the very gold standard of the media errors, and yet it was certainly influential and was perhaps cited more than any other single piece as laying out the case that the Ramseys were involved in their child’s death.

Frothing at the Mouth

And then there was the big one, the story of all stories: this was all about sex, and JonBenet had been sexually abused at home. The evidence for this ~ which we searched long and hard to find ~ well, it doesn’t exist, but vast numbers of people simply assumed that it did for the simple reason that this is what they were being told, ad infinitum.

Then there were the things that weren’t said because they didn’t fit the police theory that Patsy had flown into a rage over JonBenet’s bed wetting, somehow smashed her head, staged the garroting, tied ligatures round her wrists and then wrote a two and a half page “ransom note.” It seemed to me a palpably silly idea, if only because there was nothing in her past to indicate any disposition to violence, let alone violence of this depravity. What was also missing from the public account was, for example, the clear indication that JonBenet was stun gunned; and the truth about the state of the house, the absence of the snow, the fact that he didn’t fly his jet and so on.

Crucially missing in the public case that was being made was the fact that DNA tests led the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to exclude, among others, John and Patsy Ramsey. This was known to the police by January 15th 1997, when the CBI lab completed the analysis of forensic samples provided by the Ramseys, along with a number of other people. This would be confirmed by further analysis in the early fall of 1999. For reasons best known to themselves the police chose not to share the first test results with the DA’s office until July 22, 1997 and, of course, kept the public blissfully unaware. The DNA was “foreign,” that is belonging to no known individual and was found in two drops of blood in the panties which, to say the least, needs explaining.

Mitch Morrissey, an aggressive member of the Denver DA’s office, who was one of a number of advisers to the Boulder DA, Alex Hunter, theorized, it would emerge later, that it belonged to someone in the Taiwanese factory where they had been manufactured, perhaps by sneezing as the panties were being made or wrapped in their packing. They even sought a supplementary budget from the County Commissioners to send a detective to the factory. The Commissioners declined the suggestion.

There was one other, telling moment involving the Commissioners. Bill Wise was speaking with them at a meeting and assumed that the microphone in front of him wasn’t live. He was heard to say that the person who killed JonBenet was “wealthy.” John Ramsey was wealthy, though not the billionaire that some claimed and while Wise’s gaff led to his removal from any involvement with the case, it nevertheless was shaving with the grain of prevailing belief about the case, the Ramseys did it.

There is so much more, but this will, I hope, give something of a sense of what was going on here: the establishment of a narrative that would convict the Ramseys in the public mind ~ a mind which seemed to want to believe in their guilt ~ and force the then DA, Alex Hunter, to indict, take it to trial, get them convicted and perp walk one or both to death row.

The laying down of that narrative seemed to happen in barely a moment as the whole world just “knew,” the child had been killed by her parents, that “bastard billionaire, John Ramsey,” and the “white trash with cash, Patsy Ramsey, oh God how I hate that woman.” These were the mantras, the banshee squeals around the case that echoed across not just the United States but the whole world. I lost count of the number of times I had people screaming at me, frothing at the mouth, when I even dared to question their certainty of parental guilt. What was really fascinating was that when I asked how come they were so certain, so knowing, the reply was often along the lines of either repeating the media stories but, more often, commenting that they “looked guilty,” or “ it’s a gut feeling.”

I have searched long and hard in the Constitution and in law manuals and have yet to find the proposition that, if accused of a crime, I have a right to be judged by a jury of my peers’ guts.

Monday – JonBenet, pt. 2: vile bigotry and voodoo stupidity

INDEX

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.

And what it tells us isn’t flattering.

University of Colorado’s Dr. Michael Tracey, a professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the director of the Center for Mass Media Research, set out, early on, to explore why JonBenet’s family had been so quickly tried and convicted in the press. He was struck by how appallingly wrong much of the press coverage was and how willing millions of people were to convict the Ramsey family on “evidence” that ranged anywhere from “badly distorted” to “pure fiction.”

What began as scholarly curiosity evolved, to the point where he and his colleague David Mills wound up producing three documentaries on the case. And along the way Tracey himself became a target of the very dynamics of blind ignorance he set out study.

Tracey is currently at work on a book chronicling the odd cultural journey that began on Christmas night, 1996 – a journey that has not yet concluded. The book has as its genesis a lengthy essay he’s been developing for several months now, and he has agreed to publish this essay in serial form with Scholars & Rogues.

Beginning Wednesday, Dr. Tracey’s “From Christmas to August” series will examine, in significant detail:

• His own personal motivation for exploring the case;
• The murder, the botched investigation and the media that distorted it all;
• The bizarre case of John Mark Karr;
• And finally, what it all says about the state of American democracy and culture.

We hope you’ll join us for a fascinating look into what one sensationalized murder case reveals about the darkest heart of America, circa 2008.