I am placing this here rather than in the Pit or Great Debates because (a) I try to stay out of the Pit and (b) I don’t really wish to start an argument on the merits or newsworthiness of the case. What interests me is WHY this case has stayed in the public imagination so long. So, Dopers, do any of you actively follow this case, or have you ever done so in the past? If the answer to either question is yes, why? If you have stopped following it, why not?
Also, does anyone HERE think I’ll ever stop putting typos in my thread titles, :smack: or care enough to ask a moderator to fix it?
I found it moderately interesting at first. It was a strange case with a number of odd details. I wouldn’t say I actively followed the case but probably knew as much about it as the average news watching person.
I know investigations can take a while, but after about the first year (maxiimum) the only thing that would interest me is a news item saying, we have conclusively found the killer and he will be in prison for the rest of his life. So at 10 years out I have no interest in seeing or hearing anymore about it except for the above, which it seems will never happen.
I don’t know if my interest lies in the actual case about her, or if I just want to know more about Karr. Of course, this also could be due to the fact that if it was 10 years ago, I was about 9-10 years old. I don’t even remember how long ago the actual murder happened.
The situation with Karr is interesting to me because, while it is not my area of study (english education), I do enjoy studying criminology/psychology on my own. My girlfriend is now getting her masters in criminology and planning on a PhD in (I believe) forensic psychology. We have spent a good bit of time discussing the facts surrounding his confession as well as what his motives might be, and I find it extremely interesting.
Just my .02
Brendon
I don’t give two toots about it, and I’m (slightly) proud that I still don’t give two toots about it.
The news media’s continued obsession over Jon-Benet Whatshername is a sterling example of how it’s nothing more than a circus show to distract the masses nowadays.
I find it amazing that anyone actually cares anymore. How many thousands of kids have gone missing since JBR was killed and the media still can’t get its mind off this one.
Glad you asked. I do not care in the least. It was one case of murder that had the right ingredients for the news to cover it out of all proportion. I prefer real news with real effect on people or totally useless news like sports coverage.
Network news sucks!
Jim {IMHO of course}
I could care less about it. Unfortunately, late August is the silly season with TV news. We had Chaundry Levy, Cindy Sheehan, and now Jon-Benet to monopolize the time during the tv dead time.
I’m also really sick of the crocodile guy as well.
I’m interested in it. I’ve always said that I hoped the parents were guilty, otherwise the treatment they’ve received over the last decade is disgraceful. For that reason alone I’ve been curious to see it resolved one way or another. I began leaning toward thinking they were innocent a few years back and the DNA results bolstered that opinion, and so for the sake of the living parent, I’d love to see the case solved and their names cleared. If it turns out they were guilty, I’d still like to know for sure and perhaps see justice done.
I think most of my interest comes from my feelings of sympathy for the family. To have a child snatched away in such a manner should be the worst thing that a family could endure, but in the Ramseys case a decade of blame and hatred directed at them has been it’s own ongoing nightmare. Perhaps if I believed more strongly in their guilt I’d have lost interest before now.
I follow it because I have an interest in both true and fictional crime, it’s local, and it’s an almost perfect locked room mystery.
P.S. I fixed the title.
The media (and, by logical extension, at least a portion of the public) has a certain fixation whenever a young, attractive, often blond female is killed or otherwise harmed. Look at Nicole Brown Simpson, Natalie Holloway, Amber Hagerman, JonBenet. I’m not saying it’s not tragic, just that these cases seem to draw a disproportionate amount of interest. Perhaps it has a particularly profound effect on our psyche when harm comes to someone that we perceive to be especially vulnerable and innocent.
But…but I was in the midst of preparing several brutal practical jokes against you in retribution for your closing the sex threads last week! Now I have to call them all off, damn it!
And there’s no way I’m getting my deposit back on all those squirrels.
I’ve been meaning to ask, but how do you pronounce Jon Benet?
I’m interested mainly because of the despicable way the parents have been treated. The media tried and convicted them before any evidence was available, and now that it’s been established that they are almost certainly innocent, I’d love to know who really did it. I wonder about the fact that the ransom note asked for the exact amount of JonBenet’s father’s bonus. To me, that suggests that the police should have been focused on dad’s coworkers, or anyone else who might have known about the bonus.
It has a certain sick joke value.
I feel bad that I don’t care, but I don’t really care. It was obvious from the start that something fishy was going on, possibly with the parents or some such, so for the media to act as if it was the HUuuuuUUUGE mystery was just annoying.
In fact, the media can take a case that I do care about and make me not care about it at all in very little time at all.
I’m interested in it because of the “OJ” justice involved…I see the parents as guilty, and the fact that they could afford to protect themselves legaly and hire PR firms to pound their “innocence” and get away with it really says something about justice in the USA.
I think there are occasions where stories are kept alive because the news media itself strives to keep it alive. It gives them something to talk about and to compete with each other over, and whenever someone gets fed up and tells 'em to knock it off they simply respond with “the public wants to know”, and who’s to say different.
If the parents had never been accused, with someone going around saying they thought the mother wrote the ransom note, this case would’ve fallen out of the news within a year or two.
The idea (quite popular at the time, IIRC) that one or both of the parents or the brother was involved turned an already odd case (her being involved in beauty pagents at such a young age already made it out of the ordinary) into a thing of lasting interest for many, many people. Not me, necessarily, but I will breathe a tiny sigh of relief when the killer is found.
I have an interest and I do care. Possibly because I don’t like mysteries- I still would like to know the identity of Jack the Ripper.
Nothing I have seen stands up to logical scrutiny in either case.