09-11-2020, 07:56 PM
Only 12 days after that first press conference, Lacy held a second, announcing Karr was not the guy. They had been wrong. In other words, Tracey had been wrong. John Ramsey was grateful to Tracey for his efforts. “John is deeply appreciative [of Michael Tracey],” says Ramsey attorney Morgan. “He followed through with a lead and it was hard on him.”
The media, however, were left seething. Because they’d been stuck out in Boulder for a non-story, or because they’d gone on a wild goose chase to Thailand and back— because they’d been exposed as sensationalists. And because the professor who’d self-righteously criticized them for precisely this behavior in the past was the one now responsible for it all. At the second press conference, they would have wanted the professor’s head, and Tracey knew it. He went to teach class instead.
Tracey’s critics, like KHOW’s Boyles, the local weekly newspaper Westword, and online Ramsey sleuths, once again pounced on him, arguing that his endgame wasn’t solving the case; it was satiating his ego.
Months later, I ask Tracey about the backlash. Seated behind his office desk, he practically shouts: “People don’t realize it was an absolute nightmare, to listen to this stuff and deal with this guy, this control freak, telling me how he killed her, and about his relationships with girls. It was a fucking nightmare. This is what infuriates me—when people imply I’m doing it for profit or it was all a game. Bullshit. Total bullshit. Day after day, week after week, having to listen to this stuff and having to pretend it was OK, because that was the only way to keep him talking? It was tiring and an intense mind game.” Regaining his composure, he adds, “But I’d do it again, if I felt there was a lead that needed to be followed,” sounding a lot like he does when explaining away Gigax.
Whispering under his breath, he dramatically pauses, looks out the window, and says, “Oh, Daxis, why?” Which raises that other often asked question: Oh, Tracey, why?
On Oct. 16, 2006, riding out what hopefully was the last of his 15 Minutes, Karr appeared on “Larry King Live.” After being cleared in Boulder, then carted to California for child pornography charges and released due to lack of evidence, he was a free man. In one of the revealing moments of the show, Karr, almost as if offering an explanation for why he confessed to a murder he did not commit, told Larry King: “When I was walking through that pool of reporters, taking all those photos, I thought to myself, ‘Why am I not walking through this pool of reporters because I am a good, wonderful person, to be acknowledged for being a good, wonderful person?’”
A good person. For Karr being good wasn’t enough to get him the attention he desired, and that is perhaps what makes Karr and Tracey more alike than either of them realizes. Tracey was only 4 years old when his father, John Tracey, 31, a member of England’s Royal Air Force, died instantly in a plane crash. Tracey still carries a photo of his father in his wallet. It’s a worn-down picture of a young, uniformed man who died with his full potential unrealized, a man who died anonymously.
Looking at the picture, Tracey gets introspective. “I can be very hot. I’m less so now, but for a long time, looking back, I was very aggressive, about my work, women, alcohol.”
As a child, Tracey was told he was dumb. Growing up in the blue-collar town of Oldham in northern England, where his grandparents helped raise him, he was a short-attention-spanned kid whose potential wasn’t realized until, he says, he took the school placement exams. He recalls that moment with an air of pride: the day they realized he had a brain.
Academic scores gave him the confidence to set out to earn a Ph.D. He chose media studies on a “whim” one night while, as he puts it, he was drunk at a bar with a friend. He enrolled at the University of Leicester, where he set to work on his first in-depth research project, a 500-plus-page thesis, “The Production of Political Television.”
His first break came when the then-director general of the BBC, Hugh Greene, agreed to let Tracey write a biography about him. Tracey was only 27 years old. He spent the next nine years researching the subject, getting to know him on a personal level.
Greene was a “cocky bastard,” as Tracey tells it, known for his womanizing and I-don’t-give-a-shit-what-you-think attitude. He successfully revamped the BBC, but the broadcasting company retired him in the wake of an “unbuttoned” extramarital affair with a woman named Tatjana. Tracey developed a fondness for Greene and came to view him as a father figure.
The Greene biography was met with moderate success, enabling Tracey to land a position at a media think tank in London. Marriage and three children fell into place. Until then he’d never formally taught a class, but he was a productive researcher (seven books before the age of 40), and had charisma. All this was just enough to convince the higher-ups at the University of Colorado journalism school to hire him as a tenured professor (his current salary is $103,000). Part of Tracey’s CU marching orders was to start the Center for Mass Media Research, a program that Dean Paul Voakes ended once he took office in 2003, because it never got off the ground.
As the media center failed to begin, Tracey’s marriage began to fail. He had an affair with his own Tatjana, Jen, whom he’d met one night at the Toad seven years ago. The affair lasted years before Tracey divorced. He is close to his son from the first marriage, but his two daughters rarely talk to him.
One of the days I visited with Tracey in his campus office, I noticed a copy of the Oct. 12, 2006, issue of Westword. Tracey’s face was on the cover; the story inside eviscerated him, citing the Gigax and Karr fiascos. Seeing me spot the paper on his desk, he said, “I never read it, and I don’t plan on reading it. I don’t care what my critics think of me.” He grabbed the Greene biography off a shelf and read one of the passages aloud, before handing me the copy of the book, as a gift. “[Hugh Greene’s] own preferred culture suggested sin rather than sanctity.”
The media, however, were left seething. Because they’d been stuck out in Boulder for a non-story, or because they’d gone on a wild goose chase to Thailand and back— because they’d been exposed as sensationalists. And because the professor who’d self-righteously criticized them for precisely this behavior in the past was the one now responsible for it all. At the second press conference, they would have wanted the professor’s head, and Tracey knew it. He went to teach class instead.
Tracey’s critics, like KHOW’s Boyles, the local weekly newspaper Westword, and online Ramsey sleuths, once again pounced on him, arguing that his endgame wasn’t solving the case; it was satiating his ego.
Months later, I ask Tracey about the backlash. Seated behind his office desk, he practically shouts: “People don’t realize it was an absolute nightmare, to listen to this stuff and deal with this guy, this control freak, telling me how he killed her, and about his relationships with girls. It was a fucking nightmare. This is what infuriates me—when people imply I’m doing it for profit or it was all a game. Bullshit. Total bullshit. Day after day, week after week, having to listen to this stuff and having to pretend it was OK, because that was the only way to keep him talking? It was tiring and an intense mind game.” Regaining his composure, he adds, “But I’d do it again, if I felt there was a lead that needed to be followed,” sounding a lot like he does when explaining away Gigax.
Whispering under his breath, he dramatically pauses, looks out the window, and says, “Oh, Daxis, why?” Which raises that other often asked question: Oh, Tracey, why?
On Oct. 16, 2006, riding out what hopefully was the last of his 15 Minutes, Karr appeared on “Larry King Live.” After being cleared in Boulder, then carted to California for child pornography charges and released due to lack of evidence, he was a free man. In one of the revealing moments of the show, Karr, almost as if offering an explanation for why he confessed to a murder he did not commit, told Larry King: “When I was walking through that pool of reporters, taking all those photos, I thought to myself, ‘Why am I not walking through this pool of reporters because I am a good, wonderful person, to be acknowledged for being a good, wonderful person?’”
A good person. For Karr being good wasn’t enough to get him the attention he desired, and that is perhaps what makes Karr and Tracey more alike than either of them realizes. Tracey was only 4 years old when his father, John Tracey, 31, a member of England’s Royal Air Force, died instantly in a plane crash. Tracey still carries a photo of his father in his wallet. It’s a worn-down picture of a young, uniformed man who died with his full potential unrealized, a man who died anonymously.
Looking at the picture, Tracey gets introspective. “I can be very hot. I’m less so now, but for a long time, looking back, I was very aggressive, about my work, women, alcohol.”
As a child, Tracey was told he was dumb. Growing up in the blue-collar town of Oldham in northern England, where his grandparents helped raise him, he was a short-attention-spanned kid whose potential wasn’t realized until, he says, he took the school placement exams. He recalls that moment with an air of pride: the day they realized he had a brain.
Academic scores gave him the confidence to set out to earn a Ph.D. He chose media studies on a “whim” one night while, as he puts it, he was drunk at a bar with a friend. He enrolled at the University of Leicester, where he set to work on his first in-depth research project, a 500-plus-page thesis, “The Production of Political Television.”
His first break came when the then-director general of the BBC, Hugh Greene, agreed to let Tracey write a biography about him. Tracey was only 27 years old. He spent the next nine years researching the subject, getting to know him on a personal level.
Greene was a “cocky bastard,” as Tracey tells it, known for his womanizing and I-don’t-give-a-shit-what-you-think attitude. He successfully revamped the BBC, but the broadcasting company retired him in the wake of an “unbuttoned” extramarital affair with a woman named Tatjana. Tracey developed a fondness for Greene and came to view him as a father figure.
The Greene biography was met with moderate success, enabling Tracey to land a position at a media think tank in London. Marriage and three children fell into place. Until then he’d never formally taught a class, but he was a productive researcher (seven books before the age of 40), and had charisma. All this was just enough to convince the higher-ups at the University of Colorado journalism school to hire him as a tenured professor (his current salary is $103,000). Part of Tracey’s CU marching orders was to start the Center for Mass Media Research, a program that Dean Paul Voakes ended once he took office in 2003, because it never got off the ground.
As the media center failed to begin, Tracey’s marriage began to fail. He had an affair with his own Tatjana, Jen, whom he’d met one night at the Toad seven years ago. The affair lasted years before Tracey divorced. He is close to his son from the first marriage, but his two daughters rarely talk to him.
One of the days I visited with Tracey in his campus office, I noticed a copy of the Oct. 12, 2006, issue of Westword. Tracey’s face was on the cover; the story inside eviscerated him, citing the Gigax and Karr fiascos. Seeing me spot the paper on his desk, he said, “I never read it, and I don’t plan on reading it. I don’t care what my critics think of me.” He grabbed the Greene biography off a shelf and read one of the passages aloud, before handing me the copy of the book, as a gift. “[Hugh Greene’s] own preferred culture suggested sin rather than sanctity.”