JonBenet.

There's no need for a last name.

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In death, this 6-year-old moppet with the sparkling blue eyes and blond hair achieved the kind of fame held by one-monikered icons like Cher and Madonna.

In the days following her 1996 murder, videos of the tiny beauty queen strolling to and fro across the stage in cowgirl spangles or Las Vegas showgirl glitter seemed to play on a continuous loop on every news channel.

Her smiling face graced the covers of supermarket tabloids and celebrity magazines. Experts and authors popped up overnight with their essays, books and Web sites, all seeming to have a theory or some special insight into who killed JonBenet.

Now, nearly 10 years later, the crime that had gone unsolved for so long, settling into a slow simmer in recent years, is brought to a full boil with the arrest of John Mark Karr. The 41-year-old teacher was arrested in Thailand Wednesday on suspicion of murdering the Boulder, Colo., grade school student who became a household name.

Mr. Karr has confessed to the killing, calling it an accident and declaring "I loved her."

While it may remove the umbrella of suspicion that has been held over JonBenet's parents, John Ramsey and his late wife, Patsy, it likely will be just one more log on the media fire.

From the beginning, the public has been fascinated with the murder, and there are any number of theories as to why.

Clay Evans, a senior editor at the Daily Camera, a Boulder, Col. newspaper, covered the case as a reporter a decade ago.

"I think a lot of things happened right there at the beginning," he said. "This story came down on Dec. 26. That week between Christmas and New Years is just a slow news week."

The timing of the murder automatically elevated it to an item of interest, but there were other reasons that led to the media frenzy, contends Mr. Evans.

"I think the beauty pageant angle gave it pretty much a weird spin for people who probably didn't know this world existed," he said.

The murder, in fact, resulted in greater scrutiny of children's beauty pageants and stage mothers. Patsy Ramsey was castigated in some quarters for turning her daughter into a rouge-cheeked, strut-your-stuff pageant pixie. Many theorized that Mrs. Ramsey, who had represented West Virginia in the Miss America pageant, may have wanted to carry out her own dreams of stardom through her child.

During their pageant travels, Mrs. Ramsey and JonBenet often sang a song from the musical "Gypsy," a play and film about the ultimate stage mother.

The JonBenet case prompted a number of documentaries on the subject, including HBO's 2001 "Living Dolls: The Making of a Child Beauty Queen" and Bravo's 2004 reality series "Showbiz Moms & Dads."

Another reason the public latched onto the story is what Mr. Evans calls "the Agatha Christie angle"

"It was a little different than a lot of child murders because it had that mystery novel aspect," Mr. Evans said. "No matter which way you tried to spin this out, all the puzzles you could put together with answers had pieces missing."

JonBenet's parents also heightened the level of fascination with the case by retaining lawyers early on, he said.

"I think I understand why they did it, but it didn't look good to the public," Mr. Evans said.

"I hate to say this, but I think the leaks in the case, mostly from investigators, mostly from police, really painted a picture of a family that had done something horribly, horribly wrong."

The socio-economic level of the Ramsey family also helped fuel interest in the case, Mr. Evans added. "We obviously do respond as a media culture to pretty people ... The media probably does latch onto those kinds of cases maybe more so than [cases involving] the less classically middle-American person."

Mr. Evans would get no argument on that from Diana Blaine, senior lecturer in writing and gender studies at the University of Southern California.

"This case is about our racist, sexist, classist culture, because we idealize little white girls and we idealize highly feminine women and we idealize the wealthy," she said.

Ms. Blaine, who has lectured on the JonBenet case, said there are as many as six children murdered every day in the United States -- most of them by their parents. The majority of those families, however, are from lower classes and are non-white.

She believes JonBenet's story garnered attention because of all the photos and video of JonBenet that showed her as the ideal "woman" -- beautiful, smiling and eager to please.

"Her murder gave us access to these images and an excuse to look at them obsessively, publish them repeatedly, continually watch her perform," she said.

JonBenet's murder prompted dozens of books, including "JonBenet Ramsey: Perfect Murder, Perfect Town," by Lawrence Schiller; "JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation," by Steve Thomas and Don Davis; "Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey," by well-known Pittsburgh coroner Cyril Wecht and Charles Bosworth Jr.; and even "The Death of Innocence," produced by her parents.

It also led to a raft of TV projects either directly examining the case (CBS's 2000 mini-series "Perfect Murder, Perfect Town," based on Mr. Schiller's book) or clearly inspired by the murdered child beauty queen. A one-hour Fox production that aired before CBS's mini-series explored multiple theories of who killed JonBenet, but mostly pointed a finger at her parents. "Perfect Murder, Perfect Town" leaned more in the direction of the-intruder-did-it theory.

The case even became fodder for the scandal-mongering "E! True Hollywood Story," which will re-air an episode on JonBenet's murder at noon Sunday.

Since Mr. Karr's arrest, a Google search of JonBenet renders nearly 7.5 million Web hits, including to sites established by Brandon Havens, a 22-year-old bank employee from Radford, Va. Among them: jonbenetlegacy.org and patseyramsey.com.

His most popular, however, is maketoast.com, a name he chose because it was "totally off the wall and different," he said.

"I've followed the case for as long as I can remember," Mr. Havens said, although he did not develop the Web site until 2003.