The cable channels splashed out huge breaking news logos, brought in legions of breathless legal experts and speculated about every aspect of the case as though the fate of the world hung in the balance.
Now we know that it was all a big waste of time - a hullabaloo over a perverted man who craved attention so badly that he falsely confessed to one of the most notorious slayings of recent decades.
From the start, the death of JonBenet Ramsey was one of those cases that caught the public imagination and attracted inordinate coverage in the US press. The precocious beauty queen was violated and slain in the basement of her wealthy family's mansion on December 26, 1996 in Boulder, Colorado.
Many believed that her parents were involved in the crime. But in the glare of the national media spotlight, police failed to identify any credible suspects until the strange figure of John Mark Karr emerged in Bangkok.
Karr had worked for years as a primary-school teacher and in 2001 left the United States to work overseas after being charged in California with misdemeanour possession of child pornography.
To be fair to the media, it took only hours before legal experts were pointing out inconsistencies in the potential case against Karr. The suspect's family claimed that he was with them for the yearend holidays in 1996, halfway across the United States from the crime scene.
The talking heads on television were not the only ones preaching caution. Ramsey's father, himself once the subject of rampant speculation in the case, urged the public not to presume guilt but to 'let the American justice system take its course.'
Boulder County District Attorney Mary Lacy was similarly circumspect when she announced the arrest, stressing repeatedly the basic maxim of American jurisprudence: every defendant is considered innocent until proven guilty.
The problem for both Lacy and the general media was that they appeared to be ignoring their own advice. The media provided blanket coverage of every move in the case with a mixture of outrage, voyeurism and blatant sensationalism. Under pressure to solve the prominent case, Lacy made a string of fateful decisions that with the benefit of hindsight look tremendously flawed.
Lacy accepted responsibility Tuesday for the debacle but insisted that bringing Karr back from Thailand was the only way to get the DNA samples crucial to the case, and of ensuring that he would pose no danger to other children.
'We had probable cause to arrest him,' she said. 'We also had taken advantage of a forensic psychologist who advised that this person was dangerous, this person was escalating. We felt we could not ignore this. We had to follow it.'
The explanation failed to silence her many critics.
'Investigating John Mark Karr was essential, but the Boulder DA could have avoided an international spectacle with a quieter, more rigorous probe,' the Denver Post editorialized Tuesday. 'Lacy didn't fuel the furore that surrounded the sudden announcement of an arrest, but her headstrong pursuit of the suspect certainly triggered it. There had to be a better way.'
But the blame cannot be heaped on Lacy alone, said legal analyst Andrew Cohen.
'The media, too, deserve their measure of shame for the endless hype and the overwrought speculation,' he wrote Tuesday in the Denver Post.
'It was the media that took the tinder spark and generated the conflagration we have just witnessed. It was the media that created the highest of expectations and now is ready to crucify prosecutors for not meeting them. It was the media that took a 10-year-old investigation and decided that it should have been resolved in less than 10 days or maybe even 10 hours.'
As if to prove the point, Court TV anchor Nancy Grace, who doubles as a mainstay of CNN's Headline News and the doyenne of enraged legal commentators, unleashed her fury at Lacy in the aftermath of the latest developments.
'This is a colossal blunder of biblical proportions,' she raged, conveniently forgetting her own role in fuelling the debacle. 'There was nothing but the musings of a madman and some x-rated emails. Don't tell me that in Bangkok, Thailand, the child sex capital of the world, you can't get a guy's DNA.'
