- #Who is the main investigator of the jonbenet murder trial#
- #Who is the main investigator of the jonbenet murder series#
- #Who is the main investigator of the jonbenet murder tv#
And the more innocent the victim - the younger, the fairer, the richer, the whiter - the more horrendous the monster, and the stronger the forces of law and order prove themselves to be.īut even when it was first in the news, JonBenét Ramsey’s murder was never presented to the public in a single, coherent narrative.
Horror can even inspire nostalgia, if the source is understandable. Revisiting crimes and tabloid sensations has long been a staple of American media, and at its best can provide the public with a new sense of understanding, or even closure. Yet so far, though investigative panels have been assembled and viewers continue to hold out for a break in the case, none of our return visits to the story have yielded the kind of information that would make it any less of a paradox.
#Who is the main investigator of the jonbenet murder series#
The same week also saw the premiere of A&E’s The Killing of JonBenét: The Truth Uncovered and Dateline’s Who Killed JonBenét, though these specials were only a prelude to CBS’s two-part series The Case Of: JonBenét Ramsey,which aired Sept.
Phil interview itself was newsworthy, it simply rehashed information that has long been public. Phil broadcast an interview with JonBenét’s brother, Burke Ramsey, who was 9 years old at the time of her death, and whose family once took pains to shield him from tabloid allegations that he was his sister’s killer. Though little more is known today than in 1996 about how the 6-year-old beauty pageant star died, a new wave of JonBenét-related media has nonetheless begun to crest in anticipation of the 20th anniversary of her murder.
#Who is the main investigator of the jonbenet murder trial#
But the Simpson trial had helped to usher in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, and proved that viewers would seemingly watch anything, no matter how dull or inconclusive, so long as it related to a crime that fascinated them. The Internet, still in its infancy, gave viewers little opportunity to talk back to a media that both terrified and informed them.
#Who is the main investigator of the jonbenet murder tv#
Simpson trial, whose unprecedented gavel-to-gavel TV coverage had been a ratings bonanza the previous year, and which had seemed like it would go on forever until it ended in Simpson’s acquittal. In 1996, Americans were still reeling from the trial of Susan Smith, a South Carolina woman who had been convicted, in July 1995, of drowning her toddler sons. She is letting us look at her.įor the past 20 years, the American public has never stopped looking at JonBenét Ramsey, and has never stopped looking for justice in her name: in primetime specials and TV movies, in best-selling true crime accounts and self-published screeds, in online communities that formed in the early days of dial-up and still thrive today, and in magazine and tabloid spreads that prompt readers to mourn, year after year, as if it were always a fresh assault on America, a CHILLING DISCOVERY, an UNTOLD STORY, the MURDER OF A LITTLE BEAUTY. She seems conscious of no desire, no distraction, that will keep her from sitting still as her image is captured. She is not caught in motion, as children so often are in photographs. At 6 years old, she has not just been given a woman’s hairstyle or clothes or makeup, but she’s been taught a woman’s stillness. The photo that accompanies People magazine’s recent cover story on JonBenét Ramsey shows a corona of soft blond curls, a row of glistening baby teeth visible behind just-parted pink lips, and a pair of wide eyes gazing out from behind thick, dark lashes.