Better photo of the cross
Here is my previous caption: I had seen this photo back in 1996 but when a ran across again it a couple years ago, something clicked.
It’s 2026 and we’ve learned a lot.
There's a strain of American Christianity that treats faith as something to be displayed rather than lived—and the large cross is its most recognizable prop. A small pendant worn under a shirt is one thing. A cross the size of a hand is a statement aimed at an audience. It's performance, and it's meant to be read as evidence of something: devotion, moral authority, being on the right side of things. Or having survived cancer and a late stage on at that.
What makes it grating to me isn't the faith itself. Catholics wear crosses, mainline Protestants wear crosses, and nobody blinks. The friction comes from a particular style—fundamentalist, prosperity-gospel, revival-circuit—where the display gets bigger as the substance gets thinner. The cross stops being a symbol and becomes a brand. And when someone poses with it, the pose is the point.
It can also read as a kind of self-persuasion. When the display outruns the interior life, the display starts doing the work the belief is supposed to do. That's not the same as delusion, and it's not a diagnosis. But it is a kind of theater, and theater always invites the question of what's being covered up.
In Patsy Ramsey's case, the crosses became part of a larger public read on her—one that turned out to be mostly wrong. That's worth remembering. You can find the aesthetic performative, even off-putting, without it meaning anything deeper about the person wearing it. But it does. It’s how I read it. Something convinced her that she was looked upon as someone special who had overcome and that, ladies and gentlemen, changes the person.
See, some of y’all haven’t lived through the 90s. It must be weird to see the house and the furniture and her outfits for someone born say, in the 90s or later. So here it goes: they played their money down. The house was huge. There was a Porsche in the garage and a PRIVATE PLANE. I know what it takes to get certified. I know how much is cost to maintain this lifestyle. I am convinced, the more people have to lose, the harder they cling to what they have. Business. House. Reputation (Fortune 500). Family. SA is a STAIN of there ever was one.
Look at what was played up and down. John Ramsey has described the pageants as a casual, "Sunday thing," but the reality of the child pageant circuit was anything but casual. It was a rigorous, expensive, and physically demanding operation that consumed weekends, required extensive preparation, and placed enormous pressure on a five-year-old.
The components alone tell the story. There were elaborate costumes—often custom-made, sometimes costing thousands of dollars—requiring fittings and alterations. There was choreography to learn for talent routines, with private dance instructors hired to craft and drill the movements. There was singing to practice and perfect. There was hair to be bleached, teased, and styled, and heavy makeup applied to a small child's face. Each competition meant travel, hotel stays, and days away from home. The Ramseys acknowledged that southern contestants often competed every weekend, and that JonBenét participated in nine pageants in just two years .
And then there's what John Ramsey described about Patsy's health. Patsy had been diagnosed with stage-four ovarian cancer three years before JonBenét's death, battling it for thirteen years total. John later explained that Patsy had "just come out of cancer treatments" and "deep down she didn't know how long she had to live and how much time she had to spend with her child, so she tried to pack a lot into a day".
So the picture that emerges is not a casual hobby. It's a mother facing her own mortality, channeling that fear into an intense, structured, high-stakes activity with her daughter—one that required costume fittings, dance lessons, singing practice, makeup application, travel, and performance under lights. For a five-year-old, that's not a Sunday activity. That's a job, with a schedule, a wardrobe, a skill set, and the weight of a dying mother's love and urgency pressing down on every sequined minute of it.
This is telling. Reread everything. All police interviews. Where they downplay and when they pretend. It’s all there. Just not in a way that leads to an ironclad accusation.