Beauty and the beasts

Some 13 years ago, a six-year-old girl called JonBenet Ramsey was murdered in Boulder, Colorado. It was the only murder in the city that year, and a particularly brutal one; she had been dragged from her bed and apparently attacked with an electric cattle prod before being strangled. Which made it all the more astounding that the police quickly came to the conclusion that it was the parents who had killed her. There were, they said, no signs of forced entry to the house, or any indication of how the murderer might have got out.

Even more astonishingly, most people in Boulder agreed with the police. The case became famous internationally. The Ramseys fled Boulder, and Peggy, the mother, later died of cancer.

Luckily Mike Tracey, a British lecturer in journalism at the local university, appalled by the media frenzy, took up the case. He employed private detectives who quickly found — amid much other evidence the police had missed — the way the intruder had got in and out, including a suitcase which he had stood on to crawl out of the basement window.