Interior lives and investigations in fishbowls
JonBenét Ramsay, Part III
The first book I read in my journey through the distorted mirrors of the Ramsey case was the tormented We Have Your Daughter. In it, Pamela Woodward—a Boulder journalist who reported on the case from the beginning and became an occasional confidante for Patsy, and later for John—is ready with a handful of Ramsey family photos and an unshakeable confidence in the intruder theory. She is ready to defend the Ramseys as people who loved their children deeply and were, apparently, just kind of incompetent at locking their doors.
She leans in to what might eventually have been a defense team strategy if the case had ever gone to trial, with plenty of details about multiple unlocked points of entry—unlatched windows, a back door standing open—a paper bag containing a coil of rope left under a guest bed, a suitcase with a favorite blanket and well-loved books of JonBenét’s found in a basement, doors left ajar, brazen intruders, a mysterious visit from Santa that JonBenét told a friend’s mother she would be receiving “sometime after Christmas,” which was apparently known at the time but discarded by investigators as just something a kid might say.
Six-year-olds have vast interior lives. This is what strikes me as I read. No one acknowledges this about JonBenét. No one allows that there was an idea in her head that a trusted adult didn’t put there somehow, except when it’s some kind of thoughtful-adjacent musing that sticks out to the adult she said it to mostly, it’s clear to me, because she died, and those are the things that stick out when a kid dies. The Chicken Soup for the Soul moments.
But certain things about the night itself, certain facts that are used to cast or expiate guilt for others, for adults, could be explained by a child having agency. Why was she found in different clothes than she went to sleep in? Well. Children have been known to change their clothes in the middle of the night. She was six years old, not an infant. The smoking gun for a lot of people is the pineapple. Why was pineapple—a favorite snack—found in her stomach when the adults around her swear she didn’t have any that night? Why was a bowl of pineapple chunks observed on the kitchen table the next day? Why was a Tupperware container that may have had pineapple in it found in her room?
How did she get the pineapple? She knew where the refrigerator was. Children—in my experience of knowing them and having been one—usually have an encyclopedic grasp of what snacks are available in their house at any given time. This is as likely as any other explanation, and far more likely than a lot of explanations, but no one allows for it. No one permits it.
So many of the incidental holes, the narrative cul-de-sacs we are invited to barrel down at breakneck speed in search of truth and justice, can be filled by believing—just for a minute—that JonBenét Ramsey had an inner life. Maybe an inner life the adults around her wouldn’t have been comfortable with if they knew about it. Or maybe one that they just didn’t take seriously. After all, can you trust a child?
When does a child become trustworthy? A child is a collection of other people’s influences. A child is a movable object. A child can be influenced, bribed, coerced—in exactly the same ways an adult can be, that adults are, all the time. But this society projects a greater aura of chaos and unreliability on children, especially when they tell us things we don’t want to hear. Children need discipline. Children need controlling. Children are apt to become messy and unruly if they aren’t taken care of constantly, if it isn’t an obsession with their parents to make sure they have the right experiences and accurately reflect the reality their parents hope to convey.
Children are sometimes, maybe, like suburban houses. And just like suburban houses, plenty goes on just around the corner that isn’t necessarily known, even by the people nominally in charge.
The men in charge of the investigation were unprepared for the chaos of a house at Christmas. A house with so many doors and windows—in a house with so many doors, why become fixated on the most difficult access point of them all? The one with the grate and the small window to the basement—just try a bunch of the outside doors. Or—if it was an intruder who knew the family, someone who could have been invited if it had been a different time of day—just use a key. Or—leave a door unlocked. Or—bribe a kid with a prearranged signal.
The limits of your imagination are the only limits that exist when it comes to Ramsey murder theories.
And here, too, are the limits of the imagination. Steve Thomas, one of the detectives on the case, was convinced—he probably still is convinced—that Patsy Ramsey did it, and that John Ramsey participated in covering up her poorly managed cover-up when he found out about it. His bias was confirmed by what he saw as the Ramsey reliance on their defense team and their unwillingness to perform grief in the ways he wanted. Their unwillingness to cooperate with his conviction that they had, in some combination, killed their daughter.
This fed into the narrative the rest of the country was latching on to. That if the Ramseys really wanted to help find their daughter’s killer, they should be willing to become suspects themselves, even if they were innocent. Doesn’t that sound ridiculous? But that’s one of the core tenets of the anti-Ramsey Ramsey murder cult. That it would have been necessary to destroy the family in order to save it.
The problem with reading all these books, gaining a passing familiarity with the many, many theories and their variations, is that no one story can possibly account for every piece of evidence. Or, rather, every “piece” of “evidence,” because the things that are pointed to most often have many possible explanations. And, you need to remember that the primary and secondary crime scenes were completely fucked up from the beginning. The people investigating the case at the time and writing about it later knew that. They knew it at the time. But still, they developed their pet theories and polished the evidence that supported those theories until it shone.
Another facet of the True Crime industrial complex raises its head, as if on cue. In order to publish a new book about a crime, there has to be a new or different angle to make it worth the publisher’s while. Lawrence Schiller had the “here’s what happened every day for months in mind-bendingly boring detail, the sound and fury signifying nothing, we can’t prove anything” beat covered. Steve Thomas had the wrathful “Mommy Dearest” angle. What’s left? James Kolar writes a reality-bending conspiracy thriller in Foreign Faction: Who Really Kidnapped JonBenét?, which takes as its thesis that the ransom note was written in earnest, and spirals outward from there. And then, years later, Paula Woodward shows up to lay out the best defense that money could buy for the Ramsey family without a prosecution to object. She has new DNA evidence to share, but the circumstances of that evidence don’t necessarily have anything to do with who killed her. Or maybe it does.
To dive into all these accounts is to be set adrift on a sea of petty masculinity in a boat made of frustration. There is scarcely a woman’s name among the investigators, and the women on the case seemed to be sidelined in the hopes that maybe Patsy would become friendly with them and… what? Breezily confess over wine coolers? It is impossible to know.
It is telling to me that a woman became the focus of an investigation handled and fought over by men. That a murder investigation in a big house during the chaos of Christmastime proved too much for a team made up mostly of men who were already disaffected in their departments and—many of them, anyway—on vacation when it began.
That the possible monstrosity was hefted on to the shoulders of a “bad mother,” and that her badness was wrapped in a particular kind of disdain for the feminine, a reflexive distrust of pageantry, and of an all-woman world where, apparently, the mores of a past we want to forget or ignore are alive and well. Pageants, private planes to shuttle them among their multiple large homes, the image of a blended family with no problems. What do you do with a crime scene that is also a stage set for a happy, affluent family? Where anything could have happened?
To read these books is to be overcome by the futility that defined the entire exercise. One after another these men blame, they squabble, they curse freely, they distrust, they steal information. The dramas they recount seem pointless now, but everything does at a distance of almost twenty-five years.
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Just one more to go! This has been Part III. Part I is here, and for Part II, click here. If you want to talk about it, you can find me here or @writingmiranda on Twitter Dot Com.