THE dog spotted me as I walked around the garden of the empty mock-Tudor villa in the Boulder City suburb where the six-year-old beauty pageant queen JonBenet Ramsey was found strangled or beaten to death last December 26th.
The French poodle ran yelping across the quiet street, while its owner, an elderly man mowing his lawn, stared at the prowler. It is this kind of inquisitiveness which has roused the people of Boulder to denounce "media vultures". I waited for the tirade.
But instead Joe Barnhill walked over, picked up the dog and said "hello". After I introduced myself he said, "This is Jacques - JonBenet's dog".
I had just been looking at the little girl's swing and yellow slide beside the patio of the she was lying in a grave in far-off Atlanta, Georgia, where she had been born. And after six months of police investigations and the frenzied attention of the world's media, her murderer is still at large.
Mr Barnhill, a US Navy veteran, last saw JonBenet, a winner of the Little Miss Colorado child beauty pageant, alive at her Christmas party three days before her murder. "She was just playing around having fun. She had lots of classmates at the party and they and the grown-ups all got gifts. Patsy, her mother, was so well organised."
Still holding the poodle, Mr Barnhill, who is 76, talked about the shock of the brutal murder. "It's such a nice, quiet neighbourhood. We can't believe anything like this could happen here.
Could he ever imagine that someone in the family could be responsible? "I would find it absolutely impossible to believe the family could be involved. And even if it turned out to be true I could hardly believe it.
"It would be heartbreaking if that family was involved. They worshipped her almost as if she were Jesus Christ. The parents are good Christian people. They're members down at St John's Episcopalian Church," Mr Barnhill said, before he excused himself and went back to his mowing.
The Ramseys will never again be neighbours of Joe Barnhill. The 15-room mansion near the beautiful Chatauqua Park overlooked by the Flatiron peaks is for sale. Patsy is living in their holiday home 1,000 miles away at Charlevoix on Lake Michigan.
Her father, John Ramsey, is continuing to run the S1 billion Access Graphics computer company on Boulder's fashionable Pearl Street, but he will commute from Atlanta, where the Ramseys came from five years ago and where the new family home will be.
But will the Ramseys ever enjoy their new home? The District Attorney in Boulder, Alex Hunter, publicly identified the Ramseys last April as the "obvious" focus of the murder investigation.
The sleazier tabloids have openly accused the Ramseys of involvement in their daughter's murder, but without any hard evidence beyond the undoubted difficulty of explaining how an outsider could have broken into the Ramsey home, beaten and strangled JonBenet, taken her body to the cellar and written a two-and-a-half-page ransom note, and then disappeared without anyone in the house seeing or hearing anything.
Patsy Ramsey has now given five different samples of her hand-writing to the police to see if she wrote the ransom note. John Ramsey has given three samples and has been cleared of writing the note, according to police sources.
It seems incredible that the Ramseys only agreed to be formally interviewed by the police four months after the murder, although they had submitted samples of blood and hair three days after the body was found.
The day after their separate interviews with the police on April 30th, the two Ramseys called a press conference to declare their innocence again. In an extensive CNN interview the day after JonBenet was buried on January 1st, Patsy Ramsey declared: "There is a killer on the loose". John Ramsey said that the idea that he or other members of his family could have committed the crime was "nauseating beyond belief".
YET, in such murders, family members are always seen as suspects until they can be definitely eliminated. The Boulder police spokeswoman, Leslie Aarhon, told The Irish Times that "with the exception of the older children (JonBenet's step-brother and stepsister), the police have not ruled anyone in or anyone out." The step-children, John Andrew and Melinda, have been ruled out as they were not in Boulder on the night of the murder.
The Ramseys quickly built up a formidable defence team which includes John Douglas, a former FBI behavioural expert who was the inspiration for the detective in the movie Silence Of The Lambs, and Patrick Korten, a former spokesman for the Department of Justice who handled such incidents as the Achille Lauro hijacking in 1985.
In contrast, the Boulder police and prosecutors have been feuding internally to the stage where the police are said to be refusing to turn over the latest DNA evidence to the district attorney. The police chief, Tom Koby, has had a vote of no confidence passed in him by his force. The head of the investigation, John Eller, is looking for a new post in Florida.
Two of the police officers involved in the early stages of the case have been removed from it. The local media, such as the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, have shown that the inexperienced Boulder police made such elementary blunders in the early stages that the murder may never be solved.
On the day after Christmas, Patsy Ramsey got up to make coffee around 5.30 a.m. and found a ransom note on a back staircase saying JonBenet had been kidnapped and demanding to the police, but the first detective only arrived at 8.10 a.m., after friends and a clergyman had come to console the family.
While the police began investigating what they believed was a kidnapping, John Ramsey searched the house a second time with a friend in the afternoon. They found the body of JonBenet in a basement that had been used to hide the Christmas presents, eight hours after the note was found.
She had been gagged with duct tape and the garrotte used to strangle her was still around her neck. She also had severe head injuries.
He removed the tape and carried the body upstairs, where it was covered as it lay on the floor awaiting removal that evening by the coroner's staff.
The woman detective assigned to the case has since been accused by the media of "bonding" with the grieving family instead of treating them as possible suspects.
As criticism of the police's over-respectful treatment of the rich and influential family grew, other "facts" were leaked to the media which were seen as damaging for the Ramseys.
Thus, there were no signs of a break-in or the alarm system being set off; there were no footprints outside the house where there was a light fall of snow; some traces of semen were found on the girl's body; the windowless basement was a hidden room which an outsider would not have known about.
Now, six months later, these details are said by Newsweek - which originally reported them - to be "wrong". The melting of the snow would explain the absence of footprints; the Ramseys often did not bother to set the alarm; no semen was found on the body; the so-called hidden basement was a common storage room.
The results of DNA tests which could have linked the Ramseys to the killing now seem to be inconclusive.
THERE still remains the ransom note. The investigators said last January that it appeared to have been written on paper torn from a pad inside the house. Later they found what seemed to be a first draft, also inside the house.
Although the full text of the note has not been released by the police, the odd figure of previous year. This has prompted the theory that the murderer might be a disgruntled employee.
There is a bizarre reference to the kidnapping being carried out by "a small foreign faction" which respects Ramsey's business "but not the country it serves". The company which Ramsey founded has since been taken over by the huge Lockheed Martin aerospace and weapons systems corporation.
Former FBI kidnap specialists now in private consultancies have scoffed at the obviously "bogus" character of the note and say the police should have immediately seen through it and ordered a body search in the house before the friends and neighbours milling around destroyed possible incriminating evidence.
The trail has now grown cold, after six months. "All the public indicators point towards the conclusion that it won't be solved," Christopher Mueller, a University of Colorado law professor said last week. "The only conceivable answer for why we don't have an arrest is that they don't have a case, and if they don't have a case after the DNA has come in, then it doesn't look hopeful."
