Shadowland: Pulp Fact

The reliving of JonBenet Ramsey’s dying over the last few days—the story of a 6-year-old beauty queen found strangled and bludgeoned to death in her parents’ basement in 1996, perhaps by a stranger who has just confessed, or perhaps not—tells a lot about what we don’t know in this world, and why.

The case was and remains one of those true-life police dramas that has all the elements of a great fictional mystery. And, let’s say it, for most people this tragedy is pure entertainment. The life and death of JonBenet Ramsey has absolutely nothing to do with your past, your present or your future. It affects no one directly except that poor little girl, her family, the murderer, the investigators and those who look to make a profit off of the whole ugly tale.

Like pulp fiction, pulp fact is purely vicarious. Heated debates can fill the empty air on 24/7 cable television, drunken arguments may disrupt summer barbecues, tears of sympathy can be shed, even vows of vengeance may be made now and again—then forgotten. Readers and viewers are not required to think, after all, only to react, until the next headline-grabbing soap opera takes over their imaginations.

Sensational interludes in the news are, to be sure, nothing new. Think of Jack the Ripper or read Erik Larson’s recent best seller, “The Devil in the White City,” a marvelous retelling of 1893 headlines about the serial killer who horrified Chicago during its world’s fair. Every generation has its spectacular crimes and court cases, whether the Lindbergh kidnapping or Leopold and Loeb, Sam Sheppard or Charles Manson. We all have a little "CSI" in our DNA, it seems, and we’ll all almost always watch the first few episodes of these true-crime sagas.

The problem comes when these stories not only supplement the news, giving it “color” and “human interest,” they take it over. And that’s just what happened in the 1990s. At the time the wider world was changing very quickly and very dangerously, and the American people—hell, the American government—was barely paying attention.

From the moment the Los Angeles police first fingered former football star O. J. Simpson for allegedly murdering his wife in 1994, salacious murder mysteries became the dominant product of America’s media machinery. The ratings were great. Everybody was talking. And in a business where news outlets—cable channels, sites on the Internet (which were new in those days) and glossy magazines hungry for celebrity and sensation—were proliferating in a fiercely competitive free-for-all, police-blotter dramas became a kind of intellectual loss leader that held on to audiences.