So apparently the guy did confess — sort of but maybe not convincingly — to killing the little Ramsey girl, only now some observers are wondering if the confession is legit. At the same time, some others are wondering if the arrest and announcement were premature because the case hasn't been built yet and maybe it's even a stunt to smoke out the real killer and…
Stop.
I was kind of interested in this story the other day for a moment. It was a moment when it looked like all the folks who were damn sure (based on way too little evidence to be that certain) that Mrs. Ramsey killed her daughter were going to have to deal with being dead wrong. I'm not all that interested in who really killed JonBenet Ramsey…no more than you are in who killed a lot of people you didn't know. But I am fascinated by Denial of Reality, or at least by some folks' tendency to pluck opinions out of the ozone layer and then defend them to the death. I think our society abounds in way too many false conclusions.
I'm also interested in the press…in its uncanny ability to get things absolutely wrong and not get called out for it. So when the Ramsey story was briefly about that, I was also interested.
But now, it's all pulled a Geraldo and swung back into Tabloid Territory. We're in "We'll never know for sure" country. No matter what the disposition is of this John Mark Karr guy — even if he comes up with camcorder footage of himself strangling the little lady — there will always be those saying he's innocent, that he was framed, that there was a police conspiracy, yadda yadda yadda. Or if his innocence is proven beyond any reasonable doubt, there will be books about how that miscarriage of justice was engineered. Too many people have too much invested in varying accounts for any view to ever be buried.
So I'm getting off the train. I'll avoid the news stories as much as I can…which probably won't be enough. And I may grumble that, uh, American soldiers are dying overseas but that keeps getting booted off the CNN homepage by the latest Ramsey rumor. But I ain't following this one any more. To those of you who already came to this conclusion because you're smarter than I am: Pardon me for mentioning it at all. I don't know what came over me.