Yet they fended off the police, sitting down for their first formal interview a full four months after the murder. Investigators cannot agree on whether there is evidence of past sexual abuse. What appeared to be semen on JonBenet's body turned out to be blood. And while four fibers found on the duct tape across JonBenet's mouth were ''consistent'' with a jacket her mother wore on the night of the murder, the book suggests that no DNA or fingerprint testing conclusively linked the Ramseys to the killing. But Schiller, a journalist and author whose last book, ''American Tragedy,'' was an account of O. J. Simpson's defense, does little to separate what is significant from what is not.
Key points surface almost offhandedly, as though on second or third reference.
He has packed so many names into the book that he lists the 147 most important at the back, like the ''biographical names'' section in the back of Merriam-Webster's. In the end, Lawrence Schiller expends little energy making a case that JonBenet Ramsey's murder has any larger meaning that might justify the oceans of ink that he and others have spilled.