JonBenét the questions part 4

But more than simply covering the case, the media has become part of the case, putting pressure on investigators and piquing public curiosity. 

This began almost immediately after the Christmas 1996 killing. On January 13, 1997, supermarket tabloid the Globe published stolen crime-scene photos. A former sheriff's deputy and a photo lab employee were arrested two days later for leaking the pictures. 

That was only the beginning of the tabloid infiltration. In a new book which details the investigation, author Lawrence Schiller reveals that Globe reporter Jeff Shapiro regularly spent hours at a time in the company of Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter, getting scoops on the continuing investigation. Hunter's office did not immediately return a call for comment. 

Fox News's Boulder correspondent Carol McKinley, who has covered the Ramsey murder case from day one, says tabloids have "come out with some really good stories on this because people close to the case were leaking, knowing that they were using the tabs — and the tabs were using them." 

The only problem, she says is that with their wild-eyed headlines and sensational insinuations, tabloids "take a small kernel and embellish it until it (is) huge and make it mean something else. A lot of times they're right, but (only) half right, and they go 100 miles further than they should have — and a lot of times they're downright wrong." 

In covering the Ramsey murder, McKinley has witnessed the extreme tactics of the tabloids, which she says sometimes come "close to extortion." 

"They misrepresent themselves, they pretend like they're church members and go and sit in a church, they've become friends with families so they can get things," she said. "You can't trust anyone in a story like this because you don't know who they are, and the tabs were able to infiltrate Boulder because Boulder didn't know that. It's basically a sleepy university town, and no one was prepared to be fooled." 

Just as the case has fed the press, the press has changed the case. Without the media heat, "the investigation may have gone on as long, but certainly there wouldn't have been the subtext of the story," Schiller told Fox News. "There wouldn't have been the existence of all the dirt under the carpet because it's the tabloid media that really produced people to act differently than they were accustomed to act." 

This has the potential to hurt the case. "It's unhealthy for the investigation," said Bob Grant, Adams County D.A. and an advisor to Boulder D.A. Hunter. "Thanks to an overabundance of tabloid journalism and the legitimate press too, everybody's got an opinion. Everybody thinks they know whodunit and how." 

The worst danger is that the grand jurors charged with bringing an indictment in the case will be influenced by the press, Grant said. But this is unlikely, he added. "They are to put everything out of their minds except what they hear in the courtroom. They were selected with that in mind."