Exterior: Suburbia
JonBenét Ramsey, Part I
We never know what goes on inside other people’s houses. Every front door might as well be the portal to another universe. Even when invited in, we’re only seeing what they want us to see and—if we’re very careful—what they can’t manage to hide.
Suburban house design is a series of variations on a theme, iterated over and over, until they reach a pinnacle of anxious projection. In affluent suburbia particularly, these houses are full of separate spaces for public and private consumption, as if every house is a castle that requires a throne room. Here is the living room, where no living truly occurs. Here is the powder room, where thanks to modern innovations in cosmetic chemistry, powdering no longer needs to happen. The “formal” dining room, the “eat-in” kitchen, naming rooms in a suburban house is an act of annexation defining who can enter, who does enter in the course of a day. Huge tracts of house are left to gather dust while the “family spaces” are magnets for clutter and resentment.
English manor houses used to function like ancient city-states, several hundred people living and working there all year round, under the watchful, not to say tyrannical eye of butler and housekeeper. It was a great responsibility and a respectable career, to be a housekeeper. I think about that a lot, about how the responsibility of housekeeping became a wife’s, how wives had to do it with shrinking amounts of hired help. How—instead of a coterie of salaried servants in a rigid hierarchy—modern women see a housekeeper, a nanny, a cleaner, as something to be vaguely ashamed of, as extra to requirements. As an acknowledgment that they have, somehow, failed. The manor house has contracted, but the weight of the responsibility remains the same.
I think about all of this when I think about the JonBenét Ramsey case, the murder of a six-year-old that resists a solution twenty-five years after it happened. I think about that recently remodeled house. I think about a house that had no consistent keeper while its wife was undergoing experimental chemotherapy. A strange, porous house where people came and went, and power came and went with them, where rules must have been inconsistent, where schedules attenuated and sprang back, where two young children watched their mother come and go, jostled by the terror of loss that didn’t come to pass and was called a miracle. A house with many spaces all jumbled up together. There were so many doors. A home that strangers were invited to walk through. Where parents slept in a vast, renovated attic and a child’s body was found in a far corner room of a cluttered basement, behind a closed door.
I think about these things. About both the consciously fought out contradictions in multiple narratives of a single crime—it was an intruder, it wasn’t, was too!, was not!, and throwaway lines embedded in passages focused on different things—she slept in her brother’s room sometimes, he played by himself a lot, she was awake when she got home, or maybe she wasn’t.
How do you solve a crime where all the evidence was tampered with, where all the evidence is tampering, one way or another? How do you investigate a house?
A child died in her own house. A culture washed over and over with stranger danger for a decade, the lives of children increasingly bounded and confined to their houses with the promise of safety—a promise laughable to too many children in the first place—and then this happens. A child murdered in her own house, and there is no culprit. How can that be? In a world of security systems and exterior lights and all that money, how could it happen?
It’s not hard to see why the country flipped out. Primed by the OJ Simpson trial the year before to think about things like DNA and trace evidence and chain of custody and celebrity tell-alls—but there weren’t any celebrities here. Boulder wasn’t LA. And in this case, the only person to celebritize was the dead girl.
There is no solid evidence. Nothing that couldn’t have been touched or interfered with prior to less biased observers arriving. There were multiple people called by her parents who showed up before the police and the detectives that morning. There is only a house, and a body, and a family. We don’t know where she was killed, or if she was killed on purpose. We only know that someone said a body was found, or maybe the body was never lost to begin with. Maybe there wasn’t a time when she was truly out of reach of somebody.
And here, a necessary disclaimer. I am an agnostic in the matter of who killed JonBenét Ramsey. I do not know. I have no special information to offer. I am not a believer in any of the religious factions that sprung up in the wake of her death, the cults of intruder and parent-murderer fighting bitterly over control of the narrative connective tissue surrounding the network of fragile fact-adjacent information that could be wrested from forensic evidence that remains contested and untrustworthy.
She was not an angel, and there was no heaven to accept her with open arms. The investigation into who killed her was immediately an obsessive search for someone to punish, for a story about that person or persons that would be acceptable to the public and the DA’s office. With the idea of justice for her, as if any justice could help her.
All I know for certain is this: any justice there could ever have been in the entire arc of JonBenét Ramsey’s life would have intervened before she died. Her death was an accumulation. Of what, I do not think we’ll ever know for sure.
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Thank you for reading this first piece in my essay series on JonBenét Ramsey. If you think someone you know would like it, forward it along! If you want to talk about it, you can find me here or @writingmiranda on Twitter Dot Com.