THIS MURDER IS OURS, CHIEF

By JAMES R. GAINES

I'd had enough of New York City--the crime, the filth, the mean streets, the daily acts of random violence. And after twenty-plus years in the hurly-burly of magazine journalism, it seemed the right time to slow down, find a nice, quiet place to write books and do some teaching, a place where my three young children could grow up without worrying about having their bicycles hijacked. Just before Christmas, my wife and I decided to move to Boulder, Colorado.

What happened in Boulder on Christmas night was, among other things, proof that tragedy honors no boundaries. Of course we knew that, but one continues to hope. I read in a magazine once that Patricia Neal and Roald Dahl decided to leave Manhattan after their son Theo was brain damaged in a car accident; his nanny was pushing him across the street in a carriage when a taxi jumped the light. Deciding Manhattan was not a safe place to raise kids, they moved to a farmhouse 30 miles outside of London. A year later, their daughter Olivia died in a measles epidemic.

Still, Boulder is not New York City, and Boulder, which averages three murders a year (to New York City's 900 or so), was shocked. Adding to the city's sense of its own plundered innocence was that of the victim, a six-year-old girl: a lovely six-year-old girl, a Little Miss Colorado, it turned out (an invitation to the tabloids if ever there was one), and the more we saw of her--her beautiful eyes, her coquettish smile, her perfect hair and make-up, her seductive walk--the lovelier she became, until the unwanted thought arose, like a shudder, that this crime could be even stranger than it seemed at first.

Since then the Boulder police department has understandably and pretty successfully enforced a media blackout in the interest of the investigation. But last week Boulder police chief Thomas Koby made an unusual appearance on local television. There was still no suspect, he said, but he thought it would be "healing" to let people know they were doing all they could. (Very Boulder, I thought, in keeping with a place where snow is cleared from bicycle paths before roads.) Accusing the national press of an "intrusive...assault," he said, "[this case] is something that means a great deal to the Boulder community, and that is why we are here tonight. This situation is a curiosity to the rest of the country--and quite frankly, it is a sick curiosity."

So it is that I come to be in this not so quiet place after all, back in the hurly-burly of magazine journalism.

Let's get this straight. Chief Koby believes that this crime belongs to Boulder and that the rest of the country is just rubbernecking. Hello? Maybe I am new here, but when I think about JonBenet Ramsey, it is not a matter of prurient curiosity; I'm wondering what to believe in. Wanting to know who did it "is a natural response," the chief allowed (though only for Boulderites). "It is often an effort to assure ourselves that such a tragedy will never happen to us." Well, yes. Beyond that, there is the question of whether this is a work of the darkest evil imaginable or a more or less random act of malice and greed gone awry. Random violence cannot be dealt with as a practical matter, but it can be comprehended. Evil on this scale is impossible to comprehend. To know who murdered JonBenet Ramsey is to know what world we live in, where we are.

That this murder happened in Boulder is an accident of geography. It is a cliche to say that JonBenet Ramsey has become everybody's daughter, but it is true: the community in which this crime occurred is one to which we all belong. In chicken-and-egg fashion, the media is cause and effect of this fact. There is to be sure a certain frenzy about the Ramsey case, and media frenzies make no one look good; otherwise distinguished correspondents find themselves competitively scrambling after crumbs, and they leave behind people looking dazed and stunned and people with stars in their eyes. But for all the chief's and the Ramseys' complaints about press coverage, how many other parents of missing and murdered children would give all they had for a little public pressure to solve their cases? And who sends the press into these places? Unless you're one of those people who don't own a television or read newspapers or magazines (in which case you won't be reading this anyway), it's you--you and all the Nielsen families and focus groups who are scientifically selected to be just like you. The press doesn't go into these stories because we have kinky appetites; we go because we are sent.

Not incidentally, the national press is in Boulder because, despite its tabloid aspects and despite what the tabloid press will do to exploit the story, the murder of JonBenet Ramsey is important. Listen to her mother, who said this on CNN: "You know, America has just been hurt so deeply...the young woman who drove her children into the water, and we don't know what happened with O.J. Simpson. America is suffering because we have lost faith in the American family."

Give the rest of the country a break, Chief. And don't kill the messengers. They work for you.

James R. Gaines is the former managing editor of TIME.