Losing a child to curiosity

Would our lives be less fulfilled if we knew nothing about the murder of JonBenet Ramsey?

Let's admit it: We wouldn't be diminished at all. Yet we grasp for all the information we can get about her death as if the data counted toward our salvation. I think it might be just the opposite.

JonBenet was the child strangled in Boulder, Colorado, on Christmas night, the girl who competed in child beauty contents, the youngster whose father is a billionaire, the first-grader whose mother was Miss West Virginia, the six-year-old whose videotape the networks couldn't resist showing on almost every nightly newscast and weekly magazine show.

I've listed, of course, all the reasons we think our lives would be lessened if we didn't follow, breathlessly, every sleazy tidbit about the murder -- the sexual molestation, the taped mouth, the bound hands, the garroted throat, the fractured skull.

After all, we rationalize, this is an interesting case. A real mystery. A locked house whodunit worthy of Agatha Christie or Alfred Hitchcock, a brain-twister starring a tragic mother ("Beauty Queen Battles Cancer") and an industrialist father who gave his first and middle name to his beloved child.

Who wouldn't want to know everything possible about such a case?

But wait a minute. Scrounge as we might, we can't dig up any highfalutin explanation for "needing" to know what happened in Boulder in such intimate and gory detail. We can't claim that without this information, our own children would be threatened or our houses would be more vulnerable.

Aren't our real reasons far less noble? Isn't it our sick curiosity that borders on peeping-tomism? Isn't it a warped fascination with money that is almost sinful? After all, it isn't money that is the root of all evil; it's the love of money -- and many of us love money even from afar. That's partly what drove our absorption with the O. J. Simpson trial.

And then there's the sex. It's always the sex, and the nastier the better. A little girl made up like a tart. A mother with fading beauty. Sexual abuse. It should make us want to scrub our hands with lava -- not the soap; real lava. But we hide our hands behind our backs while we lean toward the TV for more.

We pretend to be disgusted by the tabloid newspaper that published photos of the crime scene and corpse. But we like what we see in the mirror and, like tabloid junkies, can't get enough: Who was in the house? Who wrote the note? Who called 911? Why wasn't the alarm system turned on? Who had the extra keys?

Lost amid it all is the real little girl. JonBenet has become, instead, a photo of a child's face smeared with lipstick and bordered by hair that was lightened at a beauty salon. She has no more human reality left. She is now just a TV character, like Elaine on "Seinfeld" or a nurse on "E.R." or the Energizer Bunny. She is called the "Six-Year-Old Beauty Queen" by newscasters who don't even pause to listen to what they are reducing her to.

Next, she will be the Christmas Corpse. Can the book and TV movie be far off?

I pity us.

(01-30-97)

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