WE MAY OR may not have found JonBenet Ramsey's killer in John Mark Karr, the former schoolteacher who publicly stated last week that he'd been with the child when she died in the basement of her Boulder, Colo., home in 1996. Some suspect that he's simply a wannabe, and it's not your average American pedophile who answers media questions as Karr did when he was arrested Aug. 16 in Thailand. But no matter what the new investigation turns up, many Americans will never reverse the conviction of the suspect they nabbed long ago, Patsy Ramsey.

From the time JonBenet's body was found, investigators and the media focused almost exclusively on her parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, as the perps, and the rest of us were happy to go along for the ride. Even after a grand jury and later a federal judge said evidence didn't support the theory, the general public had other ideas, especially when it came to Patsy.

A former Miss West Virginia, Patsy began entering her daughter in pageants when JonBenet was 5. JonBenet was crowned Little Miss Colorado and National Tiny Miss Beauty. Whatever effect the competitions had on JonBenet — and from what we know, she seemed to enjoy the pageants enough — the widely published photos of an alarmingly made-up preschooler effectively pronounced Patsy guilty.

In the collective public imagination, any mother who would dress up her daughter like a tiny drag queen and have her perform sultry moves before a panel of judges was already, in some sense, a murderer.

The nation was exposed to image upon image of a little girl in high heels and teased hair, displaying a coquettish smile she surely didn't pick up from "Sesame Street." In one particularly memorable video clip, JonBenet, outfitted in a tight, pink cowgirl get-up, sang "I Wanna Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart."

THE PEDOPHILIC undertones and general cheesiness were at the least grotesque. In the context of a child's murder, the equation was all too easy to work: A child beauty queen, we reasoned, is an abused child. When an abused child dies, the obvious culprit is the abuser. Ergo, blame the mother. Now there's an American pastime that surely predates baseball. Pointing fingers at moms probably even went on during the Paleolithic era; if some young Neanderthal displayed poor motor skills in his cave drawings, you can bet mama Neanderthal took the heat for spending too much time gathering berries outside the home.