On 26 December 1996, 7 hours after Patsy Ramsey informed the police that her daughter had been kidnapped for ransom, 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey's beaten body was found by her father in an unused storage room in the basement of their upper middle-class home. The media and public fascination with this story, and, in particular, with the visual images of JonBenet Ramsey, serve as a point of departure for a discussion of this event and its reception as a signal moment in America's sense of itself. JonBenet's photographic images are the nexus for overlapping and interwoven American narratives on the family, the nation, sexuality, power and violence, inscribed on the body of the emblematic child. The interest in, reporting of and management of information concerning the murder of JonBenet Ramsey suggest a shift in attitude toward the archetypal American child and family and the fragile images of reified innocence and deviance which have undergirded a postwar national ideology. This article seeks to answer not only why such images of this blonde, blue-eyed, murdered child hold such fascination, but what this fascination means to mainstream America's vision and construction of itself.
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