Unsolved Murders: True Crime Stories

JonBenét Ramsey: the brutal child murder that shook America

Such is the level of suspicion in this story that even the date of death is deemed proof of a conspiracy. a six-year-old girl known for ever to the world by the uncomfortably adult poses she struck in her beauty pageant photos, was found bludgeoned and garrotted in her family's basement in Boulder, Colorado. The killer has never been found and, ever since, the case has been picked over by experts, the tabloids and an endless slew of internet obsessives.

It is impossible . Every year, the US media promise "A chilling new discovery" and "Latest twist", even though the case remains as cold as Christmas in Colorado. There is now not one single part of this sad tale that has not been seized on – by the public, by the police, by JonBenét's parents, John and Patsy – as proof of a coverup, even down to the child's gravestone near Atlanta, Georgia, where she was born. There, the date of death is literally carved in stone: 25 December 1996. Yet even this is seen as a lot less stable than its material suggests. After all, doubters say, how could John and Patsy have known that their daughter died on Christmas Day if they didn't find her body until the early afternoon of the 26th? Surely the gravestone is evidence of their guilt that so many have long assumed, despite them being exonerated in 2008 by DNA evidence?

The few undisputed facts are as follows: just before 6am on 26 December, Patsy called the Boulder police department from her home. Her daughter had been taken from their home in the middle of the night, she said. She had found a two-and-a-half-page ransom note demanding $118,000 for her safe return. The police arrived at the Ramsey house, along with many of the Ramseys' friends, who wandered freely around the property. After the kidnappers failed to call at the promised time, one of the officers suggested to John that he look around the family's large house. He went down to the basement with a friend and there he saw his daughter, bound and gagged. When he brought her upstairs, it was obvious she had been dead for some time. She had been bashed over the head, strangled with a garrote fashioned out of a nylon cord and her mother's paintbrush, and possibly sexually assaulted. There was no immediately obvious sign of a break-in, and the house was so large, the perpetrator must have known its layout very well to have found JonBenét's bedroom in the middle of the night and taken her down to the basement without waking anyone else.

Some historical crime stories fascinate the public years later because of what they say about the times in which they happened. and are two obvious examples, both of which have experienced a revival of interest this year, thanks to their retelling in pop culture. The story of JonBenét Ramsey is different.

The case is certainly in the spotlight again, with three US networks – , and Investigation Discovery – all recently screening their takes on the case to varying degrees of tackiness. The media coverage of this case was, and remains, almost unparalleled in its tawdriness. Photos of the little girl's autopsy were bought and published by US tabloid the Globe. One journalist claimed to convert from Judaism to Christianity in order to attend the Ramsey's church and glean insights from staring at the back of John and Patsy's heads. ("I had never seen anyone pray for his own soul the way Patsy was praying for hers ... At that moment, I decided she was the killer," the journalist, Jeff Shapiro, said in probably the best-known book about the case, Lawrence Schiller's Perfect Murder, Perfect Town.) The whole story has long been covered in a thick sheen of schlock. The only interesting thing about its historical context is that the case happened in the aftermath of the OJ Simpson trial, just when the media was desperately seeking another case that would similarly hold the public's attention.

But while JonBenét's murder may well never be solved, there has never been any mystery about why it still exerts such a fascination. Like Madeleine McCann, JonBenét was a pretty blond child from a well-off family, allowing the public the pleasure of looking at this photogenic child while simultaneously experiencing a quiet, unacknowledged frisson of schadenfreude at her parents' pain. Add to this the undeniably sexualised pageant photos, in which the six-year-old wiggled and pouted in a manner that looked all the more fascinatingly horrific after her brutal death, and you have the perfect made-for-media confection. But none of these factors really explains the passion this case excites.