Before the sun was high;
So brief her time, she scarcely knew
The meaning of a sigh.
As round the rose its soft perfume,
Sweet love around her floated;
Admired she grew–while mortal doom
Crept on, unfear’d, unnoted.
Love was her guardian Angel here,
But Love to Death resign’d her;
Tho’ Love was kind, why should we fear
But holy Death is kinder?
– Hartley Coleridge
On August 16 2006 MSNBC broke the story that an arrest had been made in the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, a pretty 6 year old girl, winner of several beauty pageants, who had been garroted and bludgeoned to death on Christmas night 1996 in Boulder, Colorado. Through 1997 the case became the biggest story of any kind in the United States, until another princess died on August 31 in a Paris tunnel. The story was fueled by the wealth of her parents, the brutality of the assault, its savage cruelty, even if in the annals of mayhem and murder in the Republic, in the long list of slaughtered innocents, JonBenet’s death was not especially exceptional.