Quote of the day

This case was a text-book example of how not to conduct a criminal investigation. The Ramsey house was a crime scene from the moment the kidnapping was reported, and it should have been treated as a crime scene — meaning the house and yard should have been taped off and as few people as possible allowed to enter. Instead, multiple police officers trampled around the house and grounds in the hours just after the 911 call, and they allowed numerous friends of the Ramseys to do the same. We will never know what evidence might have been recovered from the scene if the police had just done their jobs properly.

The responding officers also failed to search the entire house (which would have led them to the child’s body in the basement wine cellar), and failed to separate the parents and question them apart from one another. Then you have Det. Arndt actually moving the child’s body and placing a cover from the home over the body — actions which severely compromised the probative value of trace evidence found on the body (e.g., did hair and fibers on the child’s clothing come from the killer, or were they simply transferred to the child’s clothing from the blanket, and/or transferred as her body was moved about to different places on the floor?).

As for the handwriting analysis, that is not a science, let alone an exact science. It is more accurately described as a matter of opinion. And opinions, as we all know, are not always correct. In this case, there were multiple handwriting “experts” who examined the ransom note — some of whom concluded that Patsy Ramsey could be excluded as the writer of the ransom note, and some of whom concluded that she could not be excluded.

Does the reference to the $118k amount in the ramson note implicate the Ramseys? If you were a parent who had just killed your child and you were trying to point the finger of blame at a stranger, would you write a ransom note demanding an odd amount of money that you had recently received as a bonus? That seems rather stupid. A more likely scenario is that a disturbed male, possibly one who had seen JonBenet in one or more of her pageants, was watching the Ramsey home. He saw Mr. Ramsey take the dog away, and he saw the Ramseys packing the car full of presents and other items on Christmas morning. The man correctly assumed that the Ramseys would be gone from the home for some time. He entered the home, and spent several hours walking around inside — reading personal letters, looking through Mr. Ramsey’s financial records (which Mr. Ramsey admitted were lying about on his home desk), and familiarizing himself with the layout of the house. The man probably also wrote the ransom note during this time. Did he actually plan to kidnap JonBenet, or was he just indulging his fantasies by writing out some crazy, rambling, make-believe scenario in his mind? We’ll probably never know; I tend to believe it was the latter. He probably never had any actual plan in mind for anything — he just wanted to see where JonBenet lived and touch her clothes and her things.

When the Ramseys returned home that evening, the man hid and waited for them to go to sleep. He went to JonBenet’s room — perhaps to molest her or kidnap her, perhaps just to look at her before he left. Something happened, whether intended or not, and he ended up cracking her skull with some type of blunt object. After he hid the body in the wine cellar, he fled the house. Did he intend to leave the ransom note behind to throw police off, or did he just forget it was there? Who knows? This was not a rational, well-organized person. This was a man who had broken into a home, and molested and murdered a young child.

Was there enough evidence left at the scene to enable competent police investigators to find and catch the killer early on? We’ll never know. Often the toughest cases to solve are those where the killer is a stranger with no known connection to the victim. Advances in DNA technology make it more likely that the police will find the perpetrators in such cases, but it’s still not a sure thing. It’s possible that someday the unknown male whose DNA was found in JonBenet’s underwear and on her leggings will be located in a DNA database. Unfortunately, it’s also possible that he will never be found (because he will die without being convicted of any other crime which causes his DNA to be placed into a database). We can only wait, and hope.

AZCoyote on July 10, 2008 at 11:23 AM