Another Pending JBR Documentary in the UK

But JonBenet was portraying a character ... "Patsy Ramsey as America's Princess."

 

Tracey's latest documentary

All about how clever they were to track down John Mark Karr, but how they couldn't actually place him in Boulder..... actually, they couldn't even place him within 2000 miles of Colorado!

Finished off with exciting new evidence to suggest that Karr had an accomplice (why does that seem familiar?).

They claim that the accomplice lived close to Karr and is a rapist who is awaiting extradition from Australia. Claimed that Karr was also in Australia at one point which in Traceyland is a big clue - ignore the people who were in the house when the murder took place and let's just concentrate on people who were in the US.

Anyway, here's the photo of Karr and Australiaman's houses:-

 

http://www.5280.com/issues/2007/070....php?pageID=703


Page 3

Gigax isn't hard to find. One wonders how sincere this is.

 

Can you imagine what this must be like? You're living your life quietly, you've got a steady job and then suddenly you find that someone has made a documentary accusing you of a catalogue of heinous crimes in another State. What's more, the programme-makers claim that you've mysteriously disappeared when you haven't. To make matters worse, there are people who think there must be truth in it and forever more, they keep bringing your name up as a viable suspect for these crimes.

We only have one life. It's tragic that one person's life can be so badly affected because another person had an "idea" for a tv programme.

I think Mills and Tracey own Gigax more than an apology. They should be offering him financial compensation for what they put him through.

 

I agree wholeheartedly! The damage Mills and Tracey have done to Gigax's life is irrepairable.

How would they like it if someone named THEM as murder suspects in a documentary that shown to millions of viewers and then because of global media, the accusations floated around forever on the Internet like an urban myth with no basis in fact?

Michael Tracey thought Gigax was expendable; just another invented suspect to help his own PR campaign to improve the Ramsey's self-tarnished image. Tracey even admits he threw Gigax to the lions while he was grooming John Mark Karr to be his next intruder suspect. Michael Tracey has no conscience. People are pawns to be used by him in order to gain fame and money. He is a sociopath and a parasite. And those are his nice qualities.

 

Oh, talk about a LYNCHMOB!

And all Tracey can say is IT'S A METAPHOR FOR EVERYONE ELSE'S BAD INVESTIGATING?!

I swear, that man is a walking textbook example of narcissistic personality disorder.

I watched the British version of this show which someone posted online. THEY ACTUALLY SHOWED VIDEO OF GIGAX'S TRAILER IN THE TRAILER PARK! I am NOT making this UP! What exactly made Gigax HARD TO FIND?

And Mills' mea cupal is pure insincere BS. He knew very well what he was doing and he did it anyway. SACRIFICE ANYONE IN SERVICE OF THE RAMSEYS! THAT'S THE METAPHOR HERE! One they've spent a decade serving. Gigax was not the FIRST victim of their indiscreet accusations of child molestation and murder. We had Oliva, a demented indigent who didn't even seem to understand he'd been set up on camera. We have A DEAD MAN, Helgoth, who CAN'T defend himself--how PERFECT for the RST! They love dead bus victims. They splashed FULL-FACED PICTURES OF HIM LYING DEAD OF SUICIDE! How do they think HELGOTH'S FAMILY felt when it was all done ON THE WORD OF KENADY, A MAN WITH HIS OWN WINGNUT HISTORY WHO HAD NO CREDIBILITY, NO EVIDENCE BUT HIS IMAGINATION, and who BROKE THE LAW BY BREAKING INTO THE HELGOTH'S HOUSE TO ROB IT "FOR EVIDENCE," TAKING THEIR PROPERTY?!

That's the kind of "journalism" the team of Mills and Tracey are, and THIS is the problem with THE RST AMATEUR, FAKE INVESTIGATIONS: they spin, twist, fabricate, and run over the reputations and lives of anyone they choose because they are so desperate to LEAD THE INVESTIGATION AWAY FROM THE RAMSEYS.

And then they turn around and ATTACK anyone who looks at the evidence and actually FOLLOWS IT to the only true suspects that have ever existed in this case: the RAMSEYS.

And Lou Smit is THE FATHER OF THEIR SCANDALOUS FOLLIES!

Shame on ALL OF THEM.

 

Exactly, Cherokee! And to think that the U of C School of Journalism HAS NO PROBLEM WITH A PROFESSOR WHO NOT ONLY HAS PERSONALLY PROFITED TIME AND AGAIN WITH HIS INEXUSABLY BAD JOURNALISM, but who has BROUGHT THE ENTIRE OF BOULDER INTO THE INTERNATIONAL EYE FOR THE COLOSSAL BLUNDER OF JOHN MARK KARR?

It truly boggles the mind to know that such incompetence goes not only unchecked in Boulder and Colorado, but that it's REWARDED!

 

From Woody's Westmoreland suit:

Why isn't Gigax able to pursue a case against Tracey and Mills...seems he would have a real case unlike Woody's whistling in the dark :whistle:

 

The thing about the civil law, if you can't get an attorney to take your case on contingency, you're outta' luck unless you are rich or at least wealthy and don't mind losing tens of thousands of dollars in fees if you lose the case or it gets thrown out of court. Period.

And believe it or not, walking into an attorney's office doesn't mean you're going to get him/her interested in your case, no matter how good you think your chances are. You see, it costs LOTS OF MONEY to even bring a suit, which means the lawyer who takes the case is going to ask you to at least pay initial charges like filing costs, and possibly other costs that might not be much to people like the Ramseys, but could be in the thousands and might not be possible for a man like Gigax who is sick and unemployed.

 

KK,
I understand that but why oh why can't someone do something right where this case is concerned? Gigax deserves to be compensated for the pain and suffering he's suffered. Not to mention his name being slandered and defamation of character. Some lawyer, somewhere owes him, imo.

 

Tylin, if you haven't, READ THE ARTICLE and you'll see the answer to your question...by deduction.

This is the way the world works: Tracey, a mediocre person gets drunk one night and decides to become a journalism major. Somehow not quite explained, he gets an inside track into the BBC's head man...heh...and hangs out with him for 7 years, probably by feeding his ego and sucking up to him for a biography Tracey was penning of the guy. The biography was mediocre, but Tracey parlayed his inside contacts he'd made, plus publication of some other, unnamed mediocre books, into a stint at the U of Co. to start a new journalism research program to the tune of a yearly $100,000+ salary. Though the actual program never got off the ground, Tracey's career as a Ramsey case sycophant, jams-style, replaced it (it's called "failing up") and the birth of the series of "Disgracefully Incompetent And Irresponsibly Slanderous" crocumentaries were born of a favorable article Tracey wrote about the Ramseys, which was picked up by the ever-sharking firm of Ramsey attorneys who knew they needed all the MEDIA shills they could get...and Tracey was in. Add Smit and Mills into the mix, and you've got a perfect example of how sycophancy actually works and why it's the inevitable path of all those who have become such well known Ramsey shills: the rich and powerful pay for favoritism, one way or another. Hyenas like Tracey, Mills, Smit, and jams sniff this out instinctively and the scavenging begins.

But the shills must do their part: they don't get to eat off the road kill for nothing. So what they do is provide the rich and powerful with whatever they need to RUN DOWN the road kill, when they need it. In this case, it was INNOCENT BYSTANDERS who got eaten alive. Collateral damage, according to the contrite Mills and trite Tracey: metaphors were needed, and that they provided them BY EXAMPLE is totally lost on these soulless egotists. That's all it takes to steam roll a LITERALLY poor man, well chosen for his inability to fight back. But as we have seen with Fleet White, even money can't stop their driving need for more blood.

And since the Ramseys are all about letting blood...as in, they are true bloodsuckers in the METAPHORICAL tradition of vampires, there are lots of leftovers. Which brings us to lawyers...and finally to the point of your question, Tylin, my favorite joke: Where do vampires go to learn how to suck blood? LAW SCHOOL.

The first lesson of law school, the unbreakable rule: never work for free. Pro bono work is NOT free service. It's quite lucrative in that it's free advertisement and professional networking for lawyers who do it. Even the Innocence Project is serving for training law students by professors who benefit greatly from having their choice of lost souls to pick and choose which lesson they need for what book they're going to write. No other reason. None. Never make the mistake of thinking a lawyer has a heart once they hit the clock.

 

I see jameson has copied the entire article to her forum so that she can comment on it.

She says:-

She doesn't name this Internet poster from scotland, but for the record, that was MOST DEFINITELY not me. Sure I watched the programme, transcribed it, took screen captures of it... I recorded it on all three of our video recorders and sent the spare copies to a couple of interested parties in the States..... but I did NOT e-mail or phone Gigax. I'm not the only Scot on the Internet forums.

 

Come off it Jay, you know and I know there are only two people living in Scotland, you and Sean Connery... :yes: :yes:

 

ROFL!

I happen to know that jameson pestered the life out of Gigax in those early days. She denies it and claims he contacted her! She invited him to post at her forum but fortunately, he didn't take her up on her offer. She would have fed him to the sharks.

 

If Tracey wrote honest documentaries, I would welcome them. No-one objects to the truth being told, it's when they start accusing people who live thousands of miles away of murder and claiming that they "disappeared" when they hadn't that it becomes intolerable.

We only want to silence the lies

 

Exactly! That's why Tracey chose Gigax as his invented intruder ... because he knew Gigax was not wealthy or in a position to fight back. Tracey considered Gigax a throw-away, a person he could malign with impunity, a human being he could slander at will because Gigax would not have the means to defend himself.

Michael Tracey has such a high opinion of himself that he doesn't care if he ruins another person's life; after all, their life is just a metaphor to him. In Tracey's world, people are treated as things to be manipulated for his own selfish gain.

 

Since the article is no longer available to be read at that URL (and since Susan Bennett has posted the copyrighted article at the Swamp WITHOUT links or credit), here is the complete article as written. There are six pages; each page will have it's own post.

The Hungry Toad

When CU Professor Michael Tracey isn't lecturing his students on journalism ethics or pounding pints at his off-campus office, he's hunting for JonBenét's killer—turning up the likes of John Mark Karr to feed his obsession.


By Cheryl Meyers
January 2007


Page 1 of 6


It’s 7 p.m. on a school night and professor Michael Tracey is tipsy again. Leaning over the table, his face red from the alcohol or the conversation, or more likely from both, he launches into a monologue about his favorite topic: JonBenét Ramsey.

It was 10 years ago this December that the 6-year-old beauty queen was brutally murdered inside her family’s Boulder home and the three-ring circus surrounding the tragedy began. And throughout it all, it has been Tracey, a University of Colorado journalism professor, who has served as the controversial ringleader. Stepping into the macabre spotlight, he’s built a career and gained international fame and infamy.

For his contributions to the unsolved homicide, Tracey has been exalted and eviscerated, especially in the last few months—Tracey is the one who cultivated the “confession†of the enigmatic bust of a suspect that was John Mark Karr. Local and national media pundits like Denver radio talk-show host Peter Boyles once again took to calling the professor an opportunist, claiming he has perpetuated the JonBenét mystery for his own benefit. Others, like Paul Voakes, the dean of CU’s journalism school, defended Tracey as an altruistic investigator.

On this late autumn night, I’m with Tracey at the Hungry Toad, north Boulder’s British bar. It’s where the 58-year-old has been drinking for nearly 20 years, since he emigrated with his family from England. Tracey calls the Toad his “downtown office;†he’s famous campuswide for being the professor who holds office hours at a bar. Most Tuesday and Thursday nights you’ll find him here, throwing back pints and solving the world’s problems with a revolving posse of admiring students, armchair scholars, Ramsey aficionados, and drunks.

Tonight, he’s surrounded by the few people he believes he can trust: his 23-year-old son, the eldest of three children from his first marriage; Tracey’s longtime pal Paul Christman, who’s written a play about JonBenét’s murder; and his girlfriend, Jen Davis, who, since Tracey dragged Karr from obscurity, has acted as her boyfriend’s publicist. Tracey asked me to join them at the Toad for what he described as a secret meeting. “I’ve got interesting information about Karr in Thailand,†he had called to tell me. “But we can’t talk about it on the phone. Meet me at the Toad.â€

So far, Tracey’s already polished off three pints of Fuller’s and his accent has grown stronger, his voice louder. His son, who until now has been busy text messaging, attempts to lighten the mood: “You’ve probably noticed my dad gets passionate about stuff. You should see him when he can’t get the remote control to work.†The table erupts into laughter. Tracey smiles coyly at me, as if to convey, See what I have to deal with? Then he motions to the waitress for another beer.

A couple of weeks earlier, in his campus office, Tracey’s emotional wheels are spinning from the Karr debacle; the professor is feverishly recounting his career highlights from the past 10 years—sounding like a man desperately trying to justify himself. Around him, the four walls of his office are covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves swelling with the papers and books he’s stockpiled during his tenure as a professor. One entire shelf is dedicated to the books and articles he’s written. Lately he’s been working on his ninth book—this one about JonBenét. The manuscript was 50,000 words at last count, only a third finished, yet he says he’s already got an agent trying to sell it.

On top of a filing cabinet there’s a research binder labeled “Mothers Who Kill Their Children.†At the foot of his desk there’s a pile of VHS tapes, copies of the three JonBenét documentaries Tracey has coproduced. On his desk, there is a pair of white, porcelain baby shoes; written in gold paint on the toes: “JonBenét 1996â€â€”a gift from one of the investigators on the case.

Tracey pulls out the autopsy pictures of JonBenét’s tiny, obviously abused corpse. The pictures, he says, are a reminder of what he’s fighting for. He points to a close-up shot of JonBenét’s wounded neck—the deep, red gashes caused by a makeshift garrote the killer used to restrain her while he penetrated her, just before killing the child. Tracey feverishly flips to another picture, this one of JonBenét’s bludgeoned skull, an enormous crack through the middle.

With great theatrical flair, he tosses the pictures across the desk to me and begins to make his case, not so much to me but more like he’s addressing any and all critics who would dare to question him. “That penetration was real. There is the general sense that there was an intruder.

“You don’t sort of, in your 40s, become a homicidal maniac,†he continues, referring to JonBenét’s now deceased mother, Patsy. “Patsy doesn’t suddenly, out of nowhere, have the capacity to do that [crime]. She may be lacking in taste—the pageants are not my style—but nothing about her would suggest this kind of behavior.†He pounds his fist at the end of every sentence. “If I have to spend the rest of my life telling America one by one that the Ramseys didn’t do it, I will.†He leans back in his chair.

Tracey’s wearing what he wears almost every day: worn-out jeans, sport sandals, and a wrinkled cotton shirt, unbuttoned one too many times. He has that I’ve-just-been-on-a-hike tan that many CU professors enjoy. His wavy, silver hair is glazed with an unctuous gel. “There are times when I feel like a mini-Clinton,†Tracey says defiantly. “He was one of those characters who people either really loathed or liked. And I sometimes feel like I’m in that position. If you like the Ramseys, you like me. If you don’t like them, you hate me.â€

Considering the myriad cul-de-sacs and characters of the JonBenét saga, it’s easy to forget how Tracey got involved in the first place. Almost from the very moment back in December 1996, the day after Christmas, when John Ramsey discovered the mangled body of his 6-year-old daughter in the basement of their Boulder home, he and his wife were considered prime suspects. Those were the days you could overhear someone at a cocktail party say, between sips of Chardonnay, “I just know that trashy Patsy did it. You can see it in her eyes.†On “The Geraldo Rivera Show,†a staged jury declared John and Patsy were “liable†(read: guilty).

Watching this all unfold from its Boulder epicenter, Tracey decided to weigh in on the case. A media scholar by training, he saw the Ramsey story as a perfect example of a flawed American media, the broken Fourth Estate, and he wrote an op-ed piece for the Boulder Daily Camera. Titled “Media-Saturated Culture Too Quick to Judge Ramseys,†Tracey’s article chided the press for its sensational coverage, its endless imagery of a bedazzled JonBenét, and its rush to judgment, as well as the consumers who devoured it all. He asked sociy to step back, take a breath, and grant the Ramseys their basic inalienable right: the presumption of innocence. “If I wrote a scholarly article about the media coverage, who the hell was going to read it?†Tracey has said about his work. “The choice I made, to engage people, was to get in the boxing ring. That’s where the debate is.â€

 

Page 2 of 6

John Ramsey’s attorney Bryan Morgan in Boulder read the op-ed piece. He picked up the phone to thank Tracey for his refreshing viewpoint. And over the next few months, Morgan says, Tracey convinced the lawyer to talk to his clients about doing an interview.

The embattled Ramseys hadn’t granted a formal interview in months, not since a horribly botched press conference in May 1997, when the Ramseys had insisted they didn’t do it; to which the whole world responded, Oh, yes you did! Suspicion of their guilt intensified, especially in Boulder, eventually running the Ramseys and their son out of Colorado, to relatives in Atlanta. Until Tracey’s op-ed, John and Patsy, adhering to the counsel of their attorney, avoided the media.

The Ramseys agreed to sit down with Tracey. Getting the couple to talk, particularly with a grand jury yet to convene and perhaps indict them for murder, was a journalistic coup, not to mention a potential gold mine. The professor, touting himself as an unbiased scholar, offered them a safe platform from which they could tell their side of the story, and John and Patsy committed to cooperating with the interview. Tracey called his friend David Mills, a television producer back in England known for his work at the U.K.’s Granada news production company, and told him to get on the first plane to America. They all met at the Ramseys’ new home in Atlanta to work out the details of the interview.

The resulting documentary, “Who Killed JonBenét?â€, aired on Britain’s publicly owned Channel 4 in July 1998. In their Atlanta home, with Patsy in a mock-turtleneck sweater retelling tear-filled memories of JonBenét, the Ramseys indeed appeared to be parents in mourning, not savage killers. Their friends and family, also interviewed, appeared supportive, too. Even John Ramsey’s ex-wife, with whom he had two children, was exceedingly cordial, insisting he was incapable of such violence.

The biggest takeaway, though, was when the Ramseys challenged predominate misgivings about them. Point by point, they answered questions that had been frequently raised by the tabloid media. You hired a publicist and a lawyer soon after the murder, surely that means you’re guilty. We hired a lawyer because it was becoming clear the police saw us as prime suspects. It was our right to seek legal counsel. Our lawyer hired the publicist—to field all those calls from journalists. And so on…

The program, produced by Mills’ private company, Mills Production Ltd., with the help of two reporters from Newsweek, sold for a relatively modest $150,000. In August 1998, after it aired in Britain, Denver’s NBC affiliate, KUSA, aired it without commercials. The A&E network later broadcast the show, retitled, “The Case of JonBenét: The Media vs. The Ramseys.†Mills says that, in total, their personal payday for the production was about $25,000. If they really wanted to, Tracey says, he and Mills could’ve made millions with the interview footage, but they refused to sell anything but the whole documentary.

But Tracey and Mills wanted to maintain control over their message; that was the whole point. “We had to [make that documentary] because what was happening was wrong,†Tracey says. “The story of JonBenét is a wonderful metaphor for a larger problem…. It was wrong in moral terms, it was wrong in professional terms, and it was wrong in constitutional terms. And so that’s how I felt, and that was what I was going to say.â€

Critics of the documentary faulted Tracey and Mills for, among other things, the timing of the production, as it aired on KUSA only one month before the grand jury convened in Boulder and chose not to indict. However, beneath the controversy, Tracey’s thesis was rooted in a valid point: The Ramseys were entitled to the presumption of innocence. The problems for Tracey, and for that matter, for law enforcement, for the media, and for society in general, began when Tracey no longer had a point to make, yet kept talking—when he began concocting stories and coaching “suspects.â€

It’s last October, and John “Steve†Gigax puts me on hold; the timer on his kiln has just gone off and he needs to remove all the Nazi-themed rings from the heat. Jewelry making used to be 52-year-old Gigax’s hobby, but because of Tracey, Gigax has had to quit his printing factory job in Indiana; the jewelry gig’s the only career he has left.

After Tracey made that first documentary, the professor became obsessed with the JonBenét case. “I got this sense,†Tracey says, “that the investigation was dying, that it was going away. So David and I thought we didn’t want it to go away. Last time we checked, no one had been charged with killing her.†The two men collaborated on a second documentary, “Who Killed the Pageant Queen?†Now they had set out to prove someone other than John and Patsy, someone from the outside, broke into the house and killed JonBenét.

The program was based on the research of Detective Lou Smit, a seasoned Colorado Springs crime investigator who had worked with the Boulder DA’s office on the JonBenét case. For Tracey to cast 71-year-old Smit as the star of the documentary made perfect sense: Smit had quit the DA’s team in September1998, with a much-publicized resignation letter that read, “I find that I cannot in good conscience be a part of the persecution of innocent people.â€

 

Page 3 of 6

The documentary followed Smit as he outlined his theory. He used pictures from the crime scene, expert witness testimony, and even demonstration—crawling through the Ramseys’ basement window himself—to demonstrate how easy it would have been for someone to enter the Ramseys’ house. The documentary aired in July 2001 in England, and a year later in the States on Court TV. For each sale of this production, Mills says, he and Tracey earned about $15,000 apiece.

Tracey was lambasted for making a documentary based on the theories of one investigator. At least one enraged viewer, Fleet White Jr., who was cleared as a suspect and was an estranged friend of John Ramsey’s, wrote to the University of Colorado, demanding Tracey’s termination.

The criticism only emboldened Tracey. In 2001, Mills and Tracey, now both convinced of the intruder theory, made a third documentary, “Who Killed the Pageant Queen? The Prime Suspect.†There had been a number of unsolved crimes in Boulder in 1996 and 1997 (the time of JonBenét’s killing): a murder, burglaries, and even the sexual assault of another young girl. Mills and Tracey figured if one person was tied to all of those crimes, it would make for a likely JonBenét murder suspect.

Mills and Tracey zeroed in on a man they did not identify. They depicted him as sinister figure who prowled the streets of Boulder at night dressed in a black ninja outfit, and built a case supporting their theory that this man may have killed JonBenét. Two men identified on camera as the mystery man’s friends even hinted that, yes, he was the murderer.

According to the documentary, a group of “independent investigators†was hot on his trail. A court document from one of his previous arrests was displayed on camera to prove that he existed, as if that proved so much more. While the documentary did not reveal the man’s name, redacting it from the document, the case number was visible. One amateur sleuth used basic research skills and Google to trace the document to Gigax—who, according to the Boulder DA’s office, never had been nor ever would be under investigation for the murder of JonBenét.

But that fact didn’t stop the effects of Tracey’s fiction. After the program’s 2004 broadcast, Gigax’s e-mail inbox filled with correspondence from as far away as Scotland, and all had the same message: A television program had just aired in Britain in which he, Gigax, was being implicated in the murder of that little girl in Boulder.

With a criminal record of menacing and attempted sexual assault, Gigax had left Boulder more than 10 years earlier, months before JonBenét’s murder, to clean up his act. He’d gone to Indiana to escape from the drugs, the alcohol, and the unsavory crew he rolled with at the trailer park where he lived in Boulder. He wanted to leave behind the stigma of a drunken altercation that had put him on house arrest. He wanted to go home and reconnect with his estranged son.

On the phone with me, Gigax spends an hour defending himself from charges he should never have had to face. He cites unassailable alibis (including credit card receipts) that put him in Indiana around the time of the murder. Today Gigax wants to know: Why the hell would Tracey blame him for a murder that he couldn’t possibly have committed?

“I live a nice, clean, decent life here,†Gigax says. “I live in a small town where there isn’t even a stoplight, a store, or a gas station. These are homespun people I live with, and I’m an outsider; it took a while to build relationships,†he says. “But since the media started calling me, it’s gotten weird.†So weird that he had to quit his job at the factory. “That was the kind of job where people ‘accidentally’ die,†he says, completely serious. “I worked with a bunch of tobacco-chewing, stock-car-driving, good ol’ boys. If they ever caught wind that I was a suspect in the murder of JonBenét, well…â€

David Mills takes the blame for the Gigax blunder, insisting that Tracey had nothing to do with it. Never mind that they’d formulated the thesis for the documentary together, Mills says it was his decision to go with Gigax. “Tracey is the thinker, and I’m the technician,†Mills says, adding that Tracey wasn’t present when Mills edited the documentary in England. “If I could talk to Mr. Gigax right now, I would apologize. I am desperately sorry that I put something on screen that revealed him.†Mills removed the direct references to Gigax before the program aired in the United States later that year.

Tracey isn’t as remorseful as his colleague. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to see what the evidence tells me. It doesn’t mean I always get it right. In the kind of work I do, things are open to intrpretation. But at the very basics, it’s what I know. So what it became was a metaphor for everything that wasn’t done in the investigation, about leads that weren’t being followed.â€

 

Page 4 of 6

When I first met with Michael Tracey at the bar to talk with him for this story, his girlfriend, Jen, showed me a two-inch-thick stack of business cards; they were from journalists all over the world who wanted to talk with him about his role in the JonBenét Ramsey investigation, specifically, about the story of him and John Mark Karr. Tracey turned them all down and was agreeing to talk with me, he said, because I was an alumnus of the CU journalism program. “Of course I will talk to a former student.â€

I was a graduate student at the University of Colorado, working towards a master’s degree in print journalism in 2004, and that August I signed up for a media-studies class, taught by Tracey, whom I’d heard was one of the program’s most charismatic instructors. I arrived at his classroom on that first day expecting guidance on journalistic ethics, figuring Tracey would take us through the moral quandaries and professional responsibilities wrapped up in benchmark works like All the President’s Men and found in cautionary tales such as Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer. From the murkiness of journalism, I expected, Professor Tracey would reach in and extract for us some clarity. Instead, he immediately led us into his JonBenét house of mirrors, launching into a seemingly endless diatribe about the case. No one had paid any attention to that story in more than five years. Yet, that fall marked the release of Tracey’s third documentary—the Gigax “metaphor.†And unbeknownst to any of us seated before him, Tracey had already struck up a conversation with a guy who called himself “Daxis,†the man who would be unveiled to the world as John Mark Karr, another prime suspect.

The first time Tracey saw live footage of Karr was the same moment the rest of America did. It was on television, during that bizarre, impromptu press conference in Thailand where Karr, then in custody after “confessing†to JonBenét’s murder, feigned surprise that he’d been caught—even as his body language screamed that he loved the attention. “I am so very sorry for what happened to JonBenet,†he said sheepishly, as if he himself were a child. “Her death was an accident.†Then he was swept away in the churning sea of reporters and popping camera flashes.

In the days that followed, as Karr was extradited and made the trek from Thailand to Boulder for the DNA test that would clear him of the crime, the media industry thrived on Karr like he was oxygen. Cable news networks and local talk-radio stations filled their 24-hour schedules with handwriting analysts, speculating whether Karr could have written the ransom note found at the crime scene, and psychologists guessing whether Karr’s past could have driven him to this kind of behavior. Journalists on the plane with him from Thailand gave reports on what Karr ordered for dinner and how many times he used the bathroom. Papers across the country, bumped other, “less important†news stories, like President Bush’s wiretapping program or the Israel/Lebanon conflict, to page two, to make room for this breaking news. Newspaper sales and broadcast news ratings soared.

Tracey met Karr via e-mail, back in April 2002. Writing from an undisclosed foreign country and using the name “D†(later “Daxisâ€), Karr used a handful of peculiar e-mail addresses, including December1996@hushmail.com. In his early e-mails to Tracey, Daxis wrote that he was interested in the case and admired Tracey’s documentaries. Tracey heard from these whack jobs all the time. But then Daxis hinted he had something to reveal about how JonBenét was killed. Tracey started forwarding the e-mails to Lou Smit, who’d been asked back on the Ramsey case by the new Boulder DA, Mary Lacy.