Resolved: Sometimes there is no resolution.
Even if a Boulder, Colo., grand jury had returned an indictment in the JonBenet Ramsey homicide last week — and even if the person or persons named eventually were convicted — the case still may have remained unresolved in the public mind. That’s because certain cases, even when they result in a definitive decision following lengthy legal actions, continue as objects of speculation and suspicion, haunting the edges of the public consciousness. They are imbued with a sense that the “real” truth remains unknown.
Despite our deep hunger for closure to famous criminal cases, then, often that sense of finality is forever denied us.
“Some cases aren’t resolved because the issues they represent can’t be resolved,” said Jonathan Turley, professor of public interest law at George Washington University and frequent commentator on the social, moral and psychological aspects of legal affairs.
Turley, a Chicago native who holds degrees from the University of Chicago and Northwestern, recently completed a study of 50 prominent 20th Century trials that “captured the imagination of the public,” as he put it. From the Lindbergh kidnapping to the Leopold and Loeb case, certain horrific events seem to rest beyond the powers of investigatory and prosecutorial entities to seal them off and stamp them “finis.” Thus even when there are either trial verdicts or official findings of fact by august governmental bodies, some cases still evoke a kind of certainty of uncertainty: a firm conviction that the truth is still out there.
The Ramsey case is very likely one of those, Turley believes. Even if the grand jury had indicted someone for the killing of 6-year-old JonBenet three years ago, the public may always be persuaded that the real killer got away with it.
The Ramsey homicide “is unique because it has captured national attention without a trial,” Turley noted. Trials are typically the means by which the public accesses a case, he added. “The function of a trial is to create an understandable narrative.”
Even without a trial, though, the public has been enthralled by the saga of the girl, a frequent beauty pageant contestant, who was found dead in the basement of her parents’ $760,000 home in Boulder about seven hours after John and Patsy Ramsey had reported their daughter missing and presumably abducted. The parents have continued to deny any involvement in JonBenet’s death, although suspicion continues to swirl about them.
Ann Rule, author of 18 books that detail notorious crimes, said JonBenet’s death has all the markings of a classic case that may never be fully resolved. “The crime scene was so contaminated that we’ll never be able to reconstruct it.”
That uncertainty is troubling because “we all feel that JonBenet owns a little part of our hearts,” said Rule, whose latest book, “. . . And Never Let Her Go: Thomas Capano: The Deadly Seducer” (Simon & Schuster) deals with the murder of Anne Marie Fahey by her rich and politically powerful former lover. “With no resolution, it’s as if we’re letting her down.”
When she heard the news that the grand jury had not returned an indictment, Rule said, “I just thought, `Oh, no.’ I’m sure other people felt the same way. People feel life is unfair — which it is. When you see justice go unserved, it’s personally disturbing.”
The personal element that onlookers find in famous criminal cases is the very aspect that makes resolutions so elusive, Turley said. The same things that keep us riveted to certain cases are what prohibit those cases from ever coming to a satisfying close.
“We can all talk about the same case, but we’re talking about different things. Every case is viewed by citizens through the lens of their own experience,” he said. “These cases become symbols of something extrinsic to the case itself.”
In the O.J. Simpson case, race was a crucial element; in the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in 1953 as communist spies, anti-Semitism doubtless plays a part in the arguments about their guilt or innocence that rage to this day.
Anti-Semitism also figured into the case of Leo Frank, notorious in its day. Frank was a Jewish businessman in Atlanta convicted in the 1913 murder of a young girl, although fair-minded observers then and now believe he was innocent.
In the Ramsey case, Turley said, the issues include whether the nation maintains a separate system of justice for the rich and well-connected, and parental responsibility. “No taboo is more ingrained in our social fabric than (failure to protect) children.”
We can hardly expect to resolve certain criminal cases, then, until we have resolved the underlying social issues that make the cases so relevant, so compelling. Famous cases “are vessels into which we pour our own perspective and experience,” as Turley put it.
Ironically, the very notoriety of certain cases seems to relegate them to the realm of the unsolvable, he said. “It perverts the process. The pressure of public attention tends to mutate the standard operating procedure of police and prosecutors. They make mistakes and cut corners. In the fog and frenzy of a famous case, the authorities make errors that deprive the public of a true resolution.”
Even as law-enforcement officials in Colorado vow to continue their investigation, JonBenet’s death is settling into the pantheon of famously unresolved cases. All we know for sure is that we may never know for sure.
