2000-03-18: “Death of Innocence” written by John and Patsy Ramsey

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"Like a hailstorm continuously pelting our house, another blow hit Patsy and me when a University of Colorado art student created a collage of blown-up pictures of JonBenet under the heading, "Daddy's Little Hooker."

In the entry hall of the Sibell Wolle Fine Arts Building is a display area used for student work. Usually senior projects or personal art exhibits are posted there. This art student took JonBenet's picture from a national magazine cover, as well as other reproductions of her that appeared in a multitude of tabloids, enlarged them, and assembled the pictures in a collage that included lots of scribbled epitaphs. It created a grotesque portrayal of JonBenet.

The very large display ran the length of the hall in the Fine Arts Building. The newspapers rushed to photograph the distasteful display, and the story about the collage made national television news. It hurt us so deeply to see our daughter portrayed in this horrible manner. With John Andrew as a student at CU, the damage seemed even more horrendous.

A number of students had the same offended reaction and tore much of the display down, but the University of Colorado would not act. A university spokesman responded publicly with the explanation that the student was expressing free speech and "artistic integrity," and that the university could not ask him to remove his work. Because he was an art student, the whole sickening display could go back up again in the name of free speech. We were distraught that such an offensive portrayal of our child had been erected in the fist place, and on top of that, the faculty seemed to find the work acceptable. I later heard that the exhibit finally came down only because university officials feared that the use of previously copyrighted photographs could end up in a legal confrontation. I received a particularly hard letter from a man in Denver during all this which said, "If you're any kind of father, you'll tear that down." I had wanted desperately to destroy the grotesque exhibit myself, but knew that would be the media spectacle of the decade.

I decided that maybe the best thing I might do was to write the young man a letter and try to let him know how his cruel and heartless exhibit had

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affected Patsy and me. In my letter, I told him that he was young now but one day he would probably be a parent. Only when he was a parent himself would he realize how deeply people love their children. Then he might understand how much he had hurt us. I sent the letter but never received a response from the "artist."

Throughout the month of February, stories appeared that either intimated or claimed outright that I had in someway sexually abused my daughter. The art student smearing JonBenet's pictures on the wall of the art building played right into this escalating rumor."

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(SNIP)

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"John and I were both amazed at the number of transients who lived in close proximity to our Boulder home. We had learned that the house across the alley was occupied by a house-sitter during that Christmas. This man disappeared within days after the twenty-sixth. Who was he? Why had he left so quickly? The young CU art student who had created the "Daddy's Little Hooker" display had once lived only four doors to the south of us in a student rental house for a period of time. Unfortunately, we were realizing how transient our University Hill neighborhood really was. Some neighbors rented their extra rooms and basements to students and others who moved in and out frequently. We could only hope the police were paying close attention."