“The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey” by Joyce Carol Oates

[Music] This is Private Life, a New York Review Podcast. I'm Jared Ernest. Today's episode is an essay from the archive, The Mystery of John Bene Ramsey by Joyce Carol Oates, which was published in the June 24, 1999 issue of the New York Review of Books. It is read by the writer, Alyssa Bennett. [Music] The Mystery of John Bene Ramsey, Joyce Carol Oates, June 24, 1999. John Bene is our generation's Lindbergh baby, an identified curator, Colorado Historical Society. The study of criminology has by no means made me a cynic. It has encouraged my admiration for the ingenuity of the race. William Ruffied, Chronicles of Murder. One. The profound and disturbing disequilibrium provoked by the Commission of a Crime demands a response if the fabric of society is not to be rent. What we mean by revenge is private justice, committed when public justice is unavailable or untrustworthy, as terrorism is the response of seemingly disparate, despairing persons for whom the more orderly procedures of politics are unavailable or untrustworthy. In the category of nonfiction known as true crime, most of the crimes investigated are murders, and most of the murders have been solved. Disequilibrium has been quelled by the knowledge that the criminal has been identified, apprehended, usually tried and convicted and imprisoned. And errors not too removed from ours, most murderers were summarily executed. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, is the most primitive formula for justice, and possibly the most psychologically satisfying, however, inhumane and uncivilized. The Greeks recognized power and authority of blood lust in the appetite for revenge. Athena doesn't banish the furies, but assimilates them into a new, more rational, yet perhaps in terms of punishment, no less bloody system of justice. Accounts of true crime have always been enormously popular among readers. The subgenre would seem to appeal to the highly educated as well as the barely educated, to women and men equally. The most famous chronicler of true crime trials in English history is the amateur criminologist William Ruffied, a Scots lawyer who between 1889 and 1949 attended every murder trial of significance held in the high court of the Justiceory in Edinburgh, and wrote of them in essays published first in such journals as The Jerritical Review and subsequently collected and best-selling books with such titles as Malice Domestic, the evil that men do, what is your verdict? In Queer Street, Rogues Walk Here, Naives Looking Glass, Mainly Murder, Murder and More Murder, Nothing But Murder, and Many More. Ruffied, much admired by Henry James, wrote in a style that combined intelligence, woody skepticism, and a flair for old-fashioned storytelling and moralizing. His accounts of murder cases and trials have the advantage of being concise and pointed, like folktales. The Rattenbury tragedy begins, sometimes, just sometimes, Cupid's Dart, departing from the romantically assigned role of the poet's gentle image, as met a more-fost into an arrow, a barbed and lethal thing. More than half a century ago now, the target of one such bowstring's cruel deceiver was a little white house nestling amid pines within soothing sound of the murmur of sea. At times, Ruffied display as a startling Borhasian flair as in the opening of Doctor William Smith of St. Fergus. Crime, like history, tends to repeat itself, and the genuine innovator may, quite unfairly, find himself designated imitator. Thus, in the St. Fergus affair of 1853, it is possible to see a curious foreshadowing of the Ardlamont mystery of 1893, which must not, however, be held to denigrate the achievement of Mr. Monson. Ruffied's chronicles often end with blunt and unsentimental summaries for this veteran of the court was a firm believer in capital punishment. His crime earned him a total of $20 and a pair of severely blistered hands, it cost him his neck. And, Laurie was removed by that capital sentence under which we all lie deferred, and from which there is no reprieve. And, on June 12, 1906, Tucker was baptized. He was then executed. Ruffied, political conservative, gentile ironist, and unabashed connoisseur of the most brutal crimes, took for granted that justice was being needed out in such punishments. These were just so stories for adults, cautionary tales, but the unflagging folk moral, and I for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Ruffied's influence was enormous, and since his time, true crime has become a crowded, flourishing field, though few writers of distinction have been drawn to it. To write of true crime is to acknowledge one's subject of more significance than one's style in appropriating it, a difficult concession for literary writers. Notable exceptions are Truman Capote and Norman Mailler, whose nonfiction novels, In Cold Blood, 1965, and the executioner's song, 1979, imaginatively, and in view of some critics, unconscionably blur the conventional categories of fiction and nonfiction. Yet, In Cold Blood has emerged as Capote's strongest work of prose, the sole novel of his that has exerted an influence on other writers, and the executioner's song, modeled upon Capote, but going beyond Capote in its range in variety, may well be Maillers most enduring novel. Perhaps in the fact-obsessed late 20th century, the most palatable fictions are those that aren't really fictions, but rather facts audaciously reinvented in the language of gifted writers. For what is reality, except as it is presented through language? Both nonfiction novels are notable for the relative planeness and directness of their American vernacular prose, and both are based upon crimes of a certain symbolic magnitude. The executioner's song, especially, at over 1,000 large pages, might lay claim to being an exhaustive treatment of its subject. Our apparent fascination with crime and its aftermath, including meticulously recorded trials like that of O.J. Simpson, mirror our collective anxiety about the possibility of the very definition of justice, let alone its realization. Where in the past, the solution of a crime by police, the detection, identification, and arrest of a suspect seem to bring a natural closure to mystery, as in the entertaining fantasies of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales. In our time, these steps are but preliminary to the true drama, which will usually take place in a courtroom. Until a jury announces its verdict, and this verdict, as much as the result of biased whim, ignorance, or runaway contempt for the very process of legal proceedings as of reasoned and objective deliberation, there is no closure. There is no justice. Actual guilt and innocence have become irrelevant, as the focus of dramatic attention shifts from the defendant criminal onto his prosecutors, and especially if he's rich and notorious, his defense attorneys. Lauren Schiller's lengthy American tragedy, 1996, does not consider the probable or even possible guilt of Simpson in the vicious, slashing murders of his ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ronald Goldman, focusing instead upon the dream team, defensive strategy for countering the prosecution's case. Reading American tragedy, one might be lulled into thinking that the murders were simply events that happened as in a fairy tale, or like weather, executed by no one provable, and thus by no one. Portrayed solely through the eyes and ears of third parties, Simpson floats curiously free of any moral condemnation. Simpson is a celebrity, he is celebrated. Simpson's high worth is simply that he is. When he's acquitted of his crimes, by and apparently biased jury, no effort is made in an American tragedy to determine whether this verdict is just. Only in passing, does Schiller remark that one of the jurors was a former Black Panther, and that after the reading of the verdict by the jury foreman, this Black man gave a Black power salute to Simpson. To speculate on what this might mean would be to assume that it means something, but Schiller won't deal with meaning, and what has meaning to do with the technicalities of law. The notorious case of the murder of six-year-old child beauty pageant winner, Jean-Binay Ramsey and Boulder Colorado on the night of Christmas 1996, a case that Sherlock Holmes would have solved in a few seconds ratio-sination. No footprints in the snow around the house, no forced entry, a staged kidnapping, ransom note seemingly written by the mother, so an aptly investigated by police that no arrests have been made in over two years is uniquely of our time. A murder mystery, which many of the writers under review suggest could be solved, is nonetheless stalled, perhaps sabotaged, by a police department and a district attorney's office, not only inexperienced at handling homicide cases, but intimidated by the wealth of their primary suspects, the parents of the murdered child, and by their high-powered legal team. In his ironically titled, "Perfect Murder, Perfect Town," Lawrence Schiller quotes the distinguished former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi on the legal conundrum of the case, given the meager amount of hard evidence the Boulder City Police Department has been able to amass. The strongest evidence against the Ramses in this case is nothing that directly implicates them. It is the in-plosibility that anyone else committed the murder, but paradoxically, the strongest evidence by its very nature is the weakest evidence against the Ramses. If we come to the conclusion that Jean-Banay was not murdered by an intruder, the inevitable question presents itself, which parent did it. A prosecutor can't argue to a jury, ladies and gentlemen, the evidence is very clear here that either Mr. or Mrs. Ramsey committed this murder and that no one covered it up. There is no case to take to the jury unless the DA could prove beyond a reasonable doubt which one did it. Even if you could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Patsy Ramsey wrote the ransom note, that doesn't mean that she committed the murder. Schiller summarizes a Denver District Attorney's position, until investigators could identify each parent's individual actions to suspects, mean no suspects. In other words, the law can shield a suspected murderer or murderers in certain circumstances. In their joint effort, who killed Jean-Banay Ramsey, the forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht and the journalist Charles Bosworth come to a similar conclusion. Given the impenetrable legal wall that has shielded the Ramsey, as the case came to seem to the inexperienced DA Alex Hunter, in fact, a 25-year veteran, unwinnable. And since in his professional vanity, Hunter wanted to file only a case he was certain of winning, he vacillated for months, poisoning the working relations between his office and the Boulder Homicide Detectives, and further weakening the investigation. From the first, the Ramsey's wealth and prestige set them apart from ordinary police scrutiny. Their alliance with well-known Boulder attorneys were associates and friends of Alex Hunter's further strengthened their position. As Wecht and Bosworth Wright, the case would have been entirely different if the victim was a girl from a poor or even middle-class home. The subtext of the Jean-Banay Ramsey case is class and privilege in America vis-a-vis justice. Carlton Smith and death of a little princess concludes, "Where have authorities gone wrong? The grim answers are in the evident lack of police training and experience that allowed so many errors on that critical first day, and the egos of the participants, which came to occupy more and more of the battle to control the investigation as the publicity intensified. And the worst, the clear fact that there are two kinds of police procedures in America, one for the rich, and another for the poor." The parents of any young child found dead under the same circumstances almost certainly would have been interrogated at once, and separately, when the event was still horrific enough to have produced spontaneous answers that did not happen in Boulder, and was why the investigation entered to a state of seemingly interminable drift. It was a betrayal of our expectations about justice. Given the perilous state of the American criminal justice system at the present time, one is moved to inquire, whose expectations? Two. Terror enlarges the object, as does joy, William Carlos Williams in the American grain. In an earlier era, child victim of exceptional beauty and innocence like Jean-Vanée Ramsey, brutally murdered in mysterious circumstances, would live on in folk tales and ballads, and might even miraculously name her murderer after death, like the seven-year-old schoolboy of Trosser's pre-Rest Tale, singing with a slashed throat. In our media-saturated era, tabloid publications like The National Inquirer, which is published more than 40 cover stories on the case, and The Globe, which featured pirated photographs from the autopsy of the dead child and of the crime scene, The Star, American Journal, and others replicate her image endlessly. The six-year-old's posthumous celebrity as a possibly sexually molested victim led to a people cover, mainstream publications, like Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker have printed extensive articles on the case. As of March 1999, there were nearly 2100 items about Jean-Vanée Ramsey on the web, many of these involving photographs of the child and her provocative beauty-pagent costumes. There were more than 300 websites devoted to the Ramsey case, and any supermarket or drugstore you are likely to see, smiling wistfully from a cover, display of tabloids, Jean-Vanée Ramsey. Forever six years old, and the most famous little girl of our time. Jean-Vanée Ramsey's face and these reproductions is in fact to face grotesquely transformed by cosmetics, imposed upon her childish innocence like a lured mask is a look of sexual precocity. Her mouth has been darkened and enlarged. Her eyes outlined in mascara, her eyebrows darkened and shaped. She may be wearing an abbreviated bodysuit with a suggestion of padding in the chest. She may be slinky, sexy, and an off-the-shoulder flounce dress, worn with sheer black stockings and shoes with heels. Her hair may be curled and furled in the bygone style of ferafosad, or upswept in the bygone style of Lana Turner. She may be wearing an enormous feathered hat with a black lace veil pulled down over her eyes. In TV clips, the child sings and dances with coquettish facial expressions and suggestive movements of her body. Except for her pre-pubescent figure, she resembles a midget woman. Unlike those Victorian-era girls photographed in the romantic, erotic fantasy settings created by such adults as Charles Dodson, Lewis Carroll, when some little girls as fairies and nymphs, Jean-Vanée Ramsey is bluntly presented as female merchandise. The dreamy bachelor Dodson would have liked to photograph his subjects nude, but was forbidden by their mothers to do so, but a new Jean-Vanée Ramsey is unthinkable. The expense of ludicrous costumes the child has been made to wear are as much a part of the display as the child herself. Perhaps for the mother who so obsessively displayed her, a former Miss West Virginia, the costumes were more important than the child for the signals they sent of an exhibitionist aggressive femininity. One of Jean-Vanée Ramsey's pageant songs was, "I want to be a cowboy sweetheart." One of her routines was a mock strip tease, the removal of a see-through skirt. Children's beauty competitions are a big business in America, one billion a year involving more than 3,000 pageants, and up to 100,000 contestants. And Jean-Vanée was a winner. Among her titles were 1996 Little Miss Colorado. Colorado State All-Star Kids Cover Girl. America's Royal Little Miss, Little Miss Charlevoix, and National Tiny Miss Beauty. A local bolder artist provoked scandal in the community by reproducing one of Jean-Vanée's showgirl images and a mural above the caption, "Daddy's Little Hooker." In the lurdly titled, "A Mother Gone Bad" by the psychiatrist Andrew G. Hodges, there are paired photographs of Jean-Vanée Ramsey and her mother, Patsy Ramsey, that vividly suggests how the child was the mother's fantasy. On one page, we see Jean-Vanée in a Vegas-style showgirl costume, dangling oversized earrings, bangled white satin high cut on her hips to emphasize her pelvis, white ostrich feathers flaring from her hips to showcase her exposed legs, a flotilla of enormous feathers fanning out from her head, and on the facing page, here's the child's mother, Patsy, circa 1977, and a similar white satin showgirl costume with bare thighs, ostrich feathers at hips and head, dangling oversized earrings, and high-heeled shoes. And another pairing of photographs to heavily made up thick-waisted Patsy Ramsey as glamorously posed in a low-cut, strapless, bizarrely striped gown with fringes over her breasts, while facing her as a much prettier Jean-Vanée and a short-scrooted costume made of the same stripes, frozen in a stylized coquettish pose. Part of the power of Jean-Vanée Ramsey as a symbolic presence in contemporary American consciousness is the paradox of what she or her image might mean. Is she mommy's little girl dolled up to attract the male gaze as mommy no longer can? Is she a defiant image provoking male desire, even as with her underdeveloped seemingly asexual body, she can have no intention of satisfying it, or is she a mockery of female sexiness, all makeup and costumes? Is she purely for show, thus pure, is the perversity of her image exclusively in the eye of the beholder? The made-up face will remind many women of their own childish experiments with mommy's makeup, for which they were likely to be scolded, not encouraged. There is the likelihood that Jean-Vanée may remind women uncomfortably of their own adult faces, artfully made up to simulate fantasy images in others and their own eyes. Theories abound regarding the killer or killers of Jean-Vanée Ramsey. According to polls, many people believe that the child was sexually molested by her father, not raped, but penetrated with fingers protected by rubber gloves, and killed by either him or her mother, both. And the murder made to appear a kidnapping with a bogus ransom note written by Patsy Ramsey. Jean-Vanée's brother, Burke, has become a dark horse candidate in the honor. Maybe out of jealousy of his sister's celebrity, the nine-year-old killed her with a blow to the head, and the elder Ramsey staged a cover-up, garauding, ransom note, etc. Few have been interested in the intruder theory, and the tabloids have snubbed the foreign faction theory. As long as the facts are obscured and no decisive legal action is taken, justice remains elusive, and the Phantom killers acquire a kind of mythic, demonic significance with their victim Jean-Vanée blazoned in the tabloids. For there is a stubborn tenacity to folk culture that suggests not "pureance" or not "murly" "pureance," but a complicated set of responses, having to do with identifying oneself, if one is a woman, with a female child victim, an outrage that a child's murder should go unpunished, and with a wish that justice be done. Mass market consciousness is loyal to a very few sentimental images, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, more recently Princess Die. But only Jean-Vanée Ramsey may have been sexually molested on Christmas night in her own showcase house. Struck so violently on the head that her skull was fractured, and strangled by one of the most elaborate and macabre methods, grotting. Only Jean-Vanée Ramsey was found dead with a red heart inked on her left palm, believed to be her own doodle or her killer signature. Except that a child is dead and the lives of numerous other people badly shaken or ruined, the Jean-Vanée Ramsey case is a comedy of errors. David Lynch or Quentin Tarantino could not have devised a scenario so surreal and bleakly comic. The most inept crime of the century investigated by the most inept police department of the century. Entitling his compendium of blunders in bad behaviors, perfect murder, perfect town, Lawrence Schiller suggests the unfortunate alliance between act and setting. So, rare is violent crime and bolder, where the average house is worth $300,000, still more rare child's murder disguised as a kidnapping that police officers summoned to the scene by a distraught parent were wholly unprepared to deal with the situation professionally. You have to keep in mind a former Boulder City Councilman is quoted that this place isn't real life. This is Dreamland. What happened at the Ramses that night and why is the investigation so jinxed? Unless the killer or killer's confess, which seems increasingly unlikely, the precise circumstances of the child's death may never be known. According to the police report, sometime between midnight and 2 a.m. of October 26, 1996, a neighbor of the Ramses heard a girl scream coming from their house, and another neighbor claimed to see lights and someone moving through the house at about that time. John and Patsy Ramsey would always claim that everyone was in bed sleeping and they heard no scream. Neither neighbor telephone police. The Ramses house valued at $800,000 was in a prestigious residential neighborhood not far from the University of Boulder campus. Not until nearly 6 a.m. would Patsy Ramsey telephone police to report their six-year-old daughter missing in the alleged discovery of a ransom note threatening Jean-Banay's life, unless the sum of $118,000 was paid to the kidnappers, who identified themselves as a group of foreign individuals that represent a small foreign faction. This ransom note soon to become infamous is in fact a lengthy letter written in a manic Hollywood thriller mode containing such warnings as, "If we catch you talking to a stray dog," she dies. And such curiously digressive marks, both familiar and contemptuous as, "Don't try to grow a brain, John. You are not the only fat cat around, so don't think that killing will be difficult. Use that good Southern common sense of yours." John Ramsey, to whom the ransom note was solely addressed, wasn't Southern, being born in Nebraska and raised in Michigan. But Patsy and her mother frequently teased him about being Southern. The Validiction and Signature were yet more curious. Victory, SBTC. At two and a half pages, this alleged ransom note had clearly been written by someone with a good deal of time and no worry of being surprised while writing it. It would be described by an FBI profiler as the war and peace of ransom notes, and in time, it would be identified by handwriting experts as having been written on a note pad belonging to Patsy Ramsey, and a hand similar to hers. Though police officers are trained to be skeptical, this improbable ransom note and the kidnapping ploy seemed genuine that morning to Boulder Police. Mistakes followed mistakes. Instead of sealing the house as a crime scene and questioning the Ramsey separately, officers allowed them to call their pastor and friends. Police made only a superficial search of the house, missing the child's body in a basement wine cellar. Such colossal blunders inspired the Boulder County Sheriff's Office to have t-shirts made up declaring, "We're the other guys." Detectives, though summoned immediately to the kidnapping, arrived two hours late. By this time, people, mostly friends of the Ramzis, were milling through the house, possibly destroying evidence. A police officer would later describe Patsy Ramsey's peculiar simulation of crying, but without tears. She held her fingers to her face and awkwardly peaked at him. There was no physical contact between the Ramzis who barely spoke or looked at each other, yet when detectives finally arrived, the string of errors continued. Instead of dealing with the Ramzis as primary suspects, law enforcement officers are supposed to know that crimes in the home are usually committed by family members in a 12-to-1 ratio and a crime against a child is often committed by the father. The lead detective Linda aren't bonded with the Ramzis as victims. Officers did note that there were no footprints in the snow at entry points around the house, and no apparent evidence of forced entry, yet still the crime scene wasn't sealed. Unbelievably, John Ramsey was allowed to leave the house unescorted for about an hour. It would be speculated afterward that he disposed of incriminating evidence such as a flashlight that had been seen on the kitchen counter, but then disappeared. During this time, the alleged kidnappers were supposed to be telephoning the Ramzis to arrange for picking up the $118,000. This odd figure, a low sum to be demanding for millionaires, happened to have been the amount of John Ramsey's 1996 bonus and known to very few people. Yet more egregious errors were to come. When Ramsey returned home, he was encouraged by Arn to search the house himself, and went immediately to the cellar where he discovered his daughter's corpse in a small room so dark that others glancing into it previously had seen nothing. According to his own report, he removed a blanket wrapped around the child's body, tore off duct tape covering her mouth, and carried her upstairs to the living room. The child was clearly dead, her body stiffened by rigamortas. Her hands were thrown back over her head, and a grot of white cord was wrapped tightly around her neck, furrowing into the flesh. A grot is a particularly cruel means of strangulation using a cord knotted to a stick that can be turned to tighten the cord by degrees. Relatively unknown in the United States, it had once been a public method of execution in the Philippines, where John Ramsey had been stationed at Subek Bay in the Navy. John Bene had also previously been struck a possibly fatal blow to the head, so hard that it fractured her skull. At about the time of her death, a medical examiner would later report she had been sexually abused. In the living room in front of numerous witnesses, John Ramsey lay his daughter's body not on a sofa, but on the floor. Immediately, Patsy Ramsey and a paroxysm of grief for its simulation collapsed on top of the body and began rolling around hysterically on the floor. Though seemingly distraught, Patsy had opened the door to police fully dressed in wearing makeup. In this bizarre scene, the victim's body as a source of trace evidence was contaminated by both her parents and crucial clues that might have been gathered by forensic specialists were irrevocably lost. The body, it would later be determined, had also been wiped clean. Though it should have been clear by now that the kidnapping was staged, police officers still failed to control the scene. According to one source, "Aren't herself would again move John Bene's body and cover it with a blanket." One thing the police did right that day was to refuse to allow John Ramsey to leave Boulder with his wife and son. Within 35 minutes of the discovery of John Bene's body while the corpse was still lying on the living room floor, Ramsey was making plans with his private pilot to fly to Atlanta that evening. His excuse was that he had something really important to attend to. 18 months later, at the time of the infeable police report, the Ramsey's had long since departed Boulder for Atlanta, and their dealings with Boulder authorities have been primarily through their lawyers. John Ramsey, president of Access Graphics, a successful distributor of high-end computers, is a rich man. After four months of refusal, the Ramsey's agreed to be interviewed by Boulder Police. John Ramsey was interviewed by a retired detective, so affably inept that he allowed the suspect to lead the questioning. Patsy Ramsey's struck detectives as a tough, defiant woman, capable of committing murder, which is very different from hard evidence that she did commit murder. Repeatedly, the Boulder police have been made to look like fools who have been ridiculed in the media. For instance, more than a year after the Ramsey's were asked to turn over the clothing they'd worn the night of the murder, they finally acquiesced, but provided more items than police anticipated, including a blouse of patsys that appeared to be newly purchased. In the meantime, the Ramsey's hired a PR team to arrange for media coverage favorable to their interests, including a CNN interview, an interview with Geraldo Rivera, and a BBC documentary. In a typical scenario less than two weeks after the murder, the Ramsey's press agent alerted the media to the fact that the Ramsey's would be attending church in Boulder. When the media descended upon the church like Vultures, the Ramsey's were seen reacting like martyrs. A church member noted, "I was appalled. It looked so staged. The church had been used. I felt the church had fallen into the hands of a master manipulator." The Ramsey's arranged to be photographed with prominent church leaders, including a bishop. At nearly every turn, they seemed to have outwitted their pursuers. Their intention has been, from their point of view, to broadcast their innocence. Others have labeled it "poisoning potential jurors." At a time when police in such cities as New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh are routinely accused of acting with excessive force, including "gunning down innocent and unarmed citizens," it's enlightening to learn from the Ramsey's example how impotent police really are unless they have arrest warrants, unless that is. Suspects are well to do and can retain expert legal counsel. Finally admitting to defeat in March of 1998, District Attorney Alex Hunt was forced to request a grand jury to investigate the case. At the time of this writing, the grand jury is still in session, moving with that glacial slowness typical of bolder justice. Apart from the inherent interest of this sensational case, none of the books under review is distinguished in any way to be compared with the concise yet morally instructive histories of William Ruffied, nor with the work of such true crime contemporaries as Anne Ruhl, Thomas H. Cook, Dominic Dunn, Flora Rita Schreiber, James Elroy, and Edna Buchanan. None is as ambitiously and carefully researched, and in its conclusions, original and provocative as the Toronto journalist Derek Finkel's "No Claim to Mercy" and investigation into a controversial Canadian kidnap murder case. The most direct and workman-like as Carlton Smith's death of a little princess, a pulp paperback in the St. Martin's True Crime series, which includes such titles as Lisa, Heta, and Joel, the Steinberg murder case, and Lethal Lollida, the Surrey of Amy Fisher, and Joe Barifucco, the electrifying case that inspired the blockbuster TV movie. In fact, Smith's examination of the case is reasoned and unsensitialized, mostly called from published interviews and concise in his argument that the Ramsey's were most certainly involved in their daughter's death, yet are unlikely to be arrested. Who killed John Boney Ramsey by Cyril Wackton Charles Bosworth is basically an examination and excruciating detail of the coroner's report on John Boney Ramsey. When Oscar Wilde observed a biography that it lends to death a new horror, he had read no autopsy reports. The book is very awkwardly written with the constant instruction of Wackton to the text. Wackton's sister, Wackt was sure. After Wackt eliminated the pedophile, the sexual predator, the revenge-driven kidnapper, the small foreign faction, he was left with the two adults in the house that night, John and Patsy. Wackt's spirited and repeated advocacy of a molester killer guilty of, at most, voluntary manslaughter is a predominant and puzzling factor in his presentation of the case. The reader wonders if Dr. Wackt, Pittsburgh coroner and world-renowned forensic pathologist of high-profile cases, hopes to be hired as an expert witness for the defense against a murder charge. The most idiosyncratic of the books is a murder-gone bad by the Birmingham Alabama psychiatrist Andrew G. Hodges, who has participated for over 20 years in a breakthrough to the subliminal mind. A murder-gone bad is an ingeniously belabored deconstruction of the ransom note, in Hodges' view, unmistakably the hasty manic work of Patsy Ramsey, that would have impressed Nabokov's Charles Kinvot, but will seem to most readers, should they stagger through 239 pages of prose so broken up into thought-bite nuggets that virtually every paragraph has a breathless headline, damaged feminine identity, a downhill slide, John's secret misleading proposal from fat cats to a stray dog, Patsy is close to confessing, just a bit of overkill. The indefatigable Hodges also psychoanalyzes Patsy Ramsey's pathetic Christmas newsletter. Had there been no birth of Christ, there would be no hope of eternal life, and hence, no hope of ever being with our loved ones again. Hodges is more convincing in discussing John Bene Ramsey's regressing toilet training, a probable sign of the child's stress as a beauty-pagent contestant. How it odds with the seeming percosity of John Bene's public performance in her tabloid image, this compulsive bed-wedding and self-soiling, and Uresus bed-wedding is an uncommon in some six-year-olds, but endcoprisis' defecation is uncommon, a symptom of significant disturbance both within the child and within the family, according to Hodges. Though toilet-trained for years, John Bene Ramsey often soiled her underwear and bed clothes. Unusual in an intelligent child of six, she was still in the habit of calling out to adults to wipe her when she was on the toilet. As Schiller writes, "Anyone within shouting distance would do. Some adults thinking she was old enough to do this herself, stopped answering her calls, and it resulted in soiled underpants." Burke, John Bene's brother, had suffered from endcoprisis several years before, to the point of smearing feces on bathroom walls. When Patsy began grooming John Bene for beauty-pagins and turned her concentration away from Burke, his condition improved. Unsurprisingly, John Bene had wet her underwear and her bed on Christmas night, not long before she was killed. A melancholy portrait emerges of a little girl emotionally abused long before her death, whose control over her own life was limited to the punishing release of her bowels, at times and in places contrary to her parents' wishes. Lawrence Schiller was Norman Mailer's assistant for the executioner's song, providing mailer with voluminous documents, recordings of court proceedings in the trial of Gary Gilmore, and more than 15,000 pages of transcribed interviews. For American tragedy, Schiller's book on O.J. Simpson, he accumulated more than 23,000 pages of transcripts of interviews of more than two dozen people, not including for some reason Simpson himself. For perfect murder, perfect town, Schiller spent one and a half years with at least one assistant, compiling newspaper reports and soundbites, and recording 571 interviews yielding a staggering 25,000 pages of transcripts. Such a non-discriminatory method is to old-fashioned research as the notorious mile-wide harvesting of tuna is to catching fish with manually operated fisherman's nets. Everything and anything is captured, wriggling or already dead, or just plain debris. As if smothered by the very bulk of his catch, Schiller's seamstip made only a minimal attempt to organize it or even present it in a coherent thematic unit. Chapters run on and on in a continuous log of the interminable incompetent police investigation of more than two years given spurious jolt by the splicing in of news clippings, mainstream and tabloid monologues by numberless people, press releases, memos, email, and self-serving letters of resignation, one by a detective who favors the Ram-Z's as chief suspects, the other by a detective who favors the intruder theory. Unlike the much shorter and much less costly paperback books, perfect murder doesn't include photographs, a crucial omission, and any true crime book. None of the books reviewed includes an index, and an index is especially needed in the prolix perfect murder, where names, facts, theories, both obscure and important are mixed together and scattered through more than 600 dense pages with no organizational principle other than the crudely chronological. The immensely popular mystery detective genre known as the police procedural, PD James, Ruth Rundle's Inspector Wexford series, Ed McBain, Michael Connelly, et al. focuses upon dramatically streamed blind successful police investigation, not models. If one must be submerged in muddle, six pages would do as well as 600. Perfect murder may become a classic "how not to" handbook for small-town American police departments. In its research methodology and lack of a discerning point of view, perfect murder resembles other electronically assembled books of our time, including those immense biographies that make their subjects mountainous molehills. As an American tragedy, no attempt has made an analysis, the lifeblood of true crime writing. In responsible journalism, facts are not the point of a story, but the mere building blocks of a story. Presented in a medic bulk, facts can be made to obscure the truth. As a coroner's report presented in scientific details of the layman, though factually true in every particular, obscures the truth if unanalyzed. The crucial problem with Schiller's book isn't that it's too long, but rather that, for its length, it contains too little. It might have been like the executioner's song, twice as long and read twice as swiftly, if the subject had been developed in depth. The best parts of the book are irrelevant to the Jean-Banet case, and deal with the pitalous media invasion of idyllic boulder by tabloid reporters. Clearly, Schiller admires these Leigh Sharks, empowered to hire private investigators and to offer large sums of money for stories while their straight-arrow mainstream colleagues are forbidden for ethical reasons. He quotes the Newsweek reporter who warns the beleaguered DA. "Here are some of the things good reporters learn to do over the years." A reporter finds out something about the person they're interviewing, some special personal thing, and pretends that it has happened to them, too, to gain a sympathico relationship, or the reporter gets into an intellectual discussion and the person lets down his guard and says things he doesn't mean to say. Getting the person mad is another way to do it, confessing something to the person being interviewed makes the subject sympathetic to the reporter and more talkative. Reporters can be really nasty. Watch your ass. If boulder's relative innocence helps to account for its amateurish police and prosecutors, it's also a measure of its integrity. In the Simpson case, everyone and anyone was lining up to sell their souls. In boulder, we, tabloid reporters, all ran into a wall of silence from law enforcement, from prosecutors, city officials, neighbors, the Ramses, friends of the Ramses, enemies, business in every area. Money had nothing to do with it. In time, however, as boulder authorities began to feud amongst themselves and everyone became demoralized, the DA began a media campaign of its own to restore the tarnished image of his office with an aggressive press representative, press releases, and TV appearances. In an unconscionable violation of the integrity of his office, district attorney Hunter even conspired with the tabloid reporter to dig up dirt. I think if you look for enough, you may find a sexual harassment charge somewhere on the commander of the boulder city police detective division. At this time, Hunter was in casual frequent communication with one of the Ramses defense attorneys, an old boulder acquaintance. Where a serious crime remains unsolved and the perpetrators unnamed and unpunished, the inevitable reaction among even observers unconnected with the victim or victims is commingled frustration, anger, outrage. After 385 pages of muddled speculation, Schiller discusses the FBI report on the crime and a matter of less than three pages of analysis devastating to the Ramses. The Childs Abduction and Serial Killer Unit was quite certain that John Manie's killer had never committed a crime before. The experts thought that the ransom note was written by someone intelligent but not criminally sophisticated. In the note, the kidnappers called themselves a small foreign faction. That raised the question foreign to whom. Every item involved in the crime seemed to come from inside the house, including the pad, the pen, and the broken paintbrush used in the grot. The duct tape and the rope for the ligature had most likely been purchased by Patsy Ramsey. Nothing seemed to have come from outside the house. There was no evidence that anyone had turned on the lights during the crime, trying to find their way around in an unfamiliar house. To the FBI profilers, the time spent staging the crime scene and hiding the body, pointed to a killer who had asked how to explain this, and had answered the question, a stranger did it. After reviewing what was known about the points of entry in the house, the FBI concluded that there was no hard evidence to indicate that an intruder had entered the house that night. If Schiller's narrative has been underbrushed through which the reader must drag himself, the news of the FBI report is a sudden, much welcomed clearing. In addition, Schiller summarizes a lengthier report of the Boulder City Police Department, also stating the reasons for believing that the Ramsey's are the guilty parties, and this report, too, seems quite reasoned and convincing. Yet, in his epilogue, with the heir of a man who hasn't read his own book very carefully, Schiller disclaims any special knowledge of his subject. The reader-wonders of perfect murder, perfect town, was assembled by assistance, and only cursorily reviewed by Schiller for his conclusion is unexpected, and in this context bizarre. Since I was not present when John Bonay was killed, I have to question my right to offer an explanation, a best guess, or a likely scenario of the events of December 25th through 26th 1996. So I find myself getting very angry when I hear someone say, "Patty, did it because?" or, "John, did it?" you see. If having witnesses present at every murder were prerequisite for prosecution, we would have very few prosecutions of murder, and a good many more murders than we already have. Can Schiller mean what he says, or was this remark added in haste on the advice of a lawyer to block possible litigation by the Ramsey's? If the presumption of innocence applies to all individuals who have not been indicted or tried for crimes of which they might be accused, are we obliged to become angry when, for instance, Adolf Hitler is said to have committed crimes against humanity, because legally, he was never found guilty of these crimes. What is meant by a presumption of innocence before the law need not have anything to do with actual innocence or guilt? The expectation of the true crime writer is that through his own investigation and analysis, he cuts through the obfuscations of the law and pursuit of a higher truth. The noble epigraph, to perfect murder, stands as a rebuke to its author's pose of disinterest. Evils that befall the world are not nearly so often caused by bad men as they are by good men who are silent when an opinion must be voiced. You can listen to my conversation with Joyce Carol Oates on the previous episode of this podcast, as well as read The Mystery of John Bain Ramsey with a subscription to The New York Review Books, which, in addition to 20 new issues a year, grants full access to our complete archive since 1963, searchable on our website. Subscribe for a discount at nybooks.com/plsub. That's nyb0ks.com/plsub. Private life is hosted and produced by me, Jared Ernest, along with associate producer Luna Hayes Dean. The audio is edited and produced by Tyler Hill. The music is by Matthew O'Coin, and it is a production of The New York Review.