BLACK STAR OVER BETHLEHEM II

By: Nick van der Leek

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

In 2009, Boulder DA Stan Garnett put together a team of 27 lawyers, six investigators and a budget of $4.5 million to investigate the Ramsey case. They failed, just as the two previous district attorneys had failed. Was this a failure by design? The Black Star trilogy interrogates nearly 20 years of ‘post-truth’ surrounding the unsolved JonBenét Ramsey case. Black Star II focuses on 2009 and 2010. "All the stars eventually fall from the sky above the Ramsey home in Boulder, all except the Black Star...." 21 years after the JonBenét Ramsey case has gone cold, is there anything we can salvage from the ashes of one little girl’s life? Black Star Over Bethlehem II skates beyond the core timeline to delve into Beth Ramsey's car accident, the twisting polygraph narrative, Steve Thomas crossing swords with the Ramseys, as well as plumbing the murkier insights buried in the Grand Jury trial, and indictments. In terms of the Black Star II timeline: in the same year Detective Lou Smit, champion for the intruder theory, died, Stan Garnett, the new DA, took over the Ramsey investigation. Did this mean the Black Star floating over Bethlehem would disappear, or would the new conflagration cause it to rise toward a dark perihelion? The Black Star series is an attempt to understand what our society was and is becoming, and who we are becoming. Is there a cosmic significance to the extinguishing of a single tiny star in the curtain of night above a small hamlet? Does today’s society stand as JonBenét did, perched under a gigantic but artificial star on the edge of a Continental divide? Do we know what it is to fall from those dizzying, glittering heights into an abyss? "Instead of a star over Bethlehem, there’s a darkness where a bright star used to be....The JonBenet Ramsey case is a mythic example of the rubbing out of America's Christmas Star, and replacing it with a Black Star..."