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Why bother?
#1
I have been told this is not going to be solved, why bother putting money aside for a reward when we are going to be living on just a bit less when I am paying for rewards, ads, Internet forums, travel....

Today I was going through an old story and Gaby Wood was talking about meeting with Michael Tracey - - and this section reminded me of exactly why.

............


When Tracey pulled the image out of the manila envelope, I thought it was one I had already seen - a close-up of JonBenet's neck, designed to show the garrotte and the marks thought to have been made by a stun gun. But I noticed Tracey only pulled half the picture out of the envelope. The photographs I had seen were not close-ups but crops of this one. On instinct, I reached for the photo and pulled it out a little further. JonBenet's face came into view. She was lying down, and shot in profile. Her mouth was slightly open, her eyes were closed. If the photo had been in black and white, so that her skin's bluish tinge was invisible, you might have thought that she was merely asleep - until your eyes were drawn down to the fine blonde hair trapped under the cord with which she had been strangled. I looked at this photograph only briefly; in an unforeseeable split second I felt suddenly, swimmingly sick. Tracey's voice became background noise. Come on, I told myself, you're not squeamish. But back she came, the seemingly sleeping child. I started to sweat.

Later, I realized what it was about the photo that had haunted me: it was so ordinary. Over the course of many conversations, I'd become accustomed to hearing of 'the garrotted neck', 'the fingernails', 'the blood in the underpants'; these things were never hers. And the infamous pageant photos, haunting in their own perverse, made-up way, put her at several removes from herself. So in our minds she seems to have gone from icon to crime-lab fodder without passing through the most obvious and fundamental incarnation. I expected her body to look unrecognizable in some way, to be bloody or obscured or overly clinical. The last thing I expected it to be was what she was: a little girl.
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