My guess has been, almost right from the get-go, that one of the sons did it. The family did what they could to cover it up. Their reasoning, my wild speculation said, was that losing one child was bad enough, no use to make it two.
Perhaps not an entirely air tight theory but I’m sticking with it.
The PD screwed the pooch when it was still a kidnapping. The Ramseys were receiving sympathetic friends, family, and media people in their home when the PD should have cleared EVERYBODY out and allowed their Crime Scene people to thoroughly search the house from attic to basement, and the exterior grounds too. The crime scene was completely desanitized (I’m sure there’s a better word than that to use) and a lot of potential evidence was destroyed.
An article I read recently suggests that the parents wanted to protect their son at the time. Not that he necessarily did it, but they wanted to shield him from any accusation.
Unless there’s a believable confession, no one’s going to know.
To me, that is the most plausible theory as well. Also it would account for the Ramsey’s lawyering up.
I read the book by lead detective Steve Thomas link . The author was convinced that the mother, Patsy, flew into a rage and killed JonBenet and then tried to cover things up by presenting the case as a botched kidnapping.
I came away unconvinced.
It’s been years and the mists of time have worn away some of the finer details but herewith my summary. (I think I’ve posted on this topic before.)
Not long after that, the lawyer friend told Ramsey that it was only a matter of time before he and Patsy would be viewed as primary subjects. When (not if) that time comes, they needed to have a strategy in place and that’s what they came up with. To outsiders it seemed the Ramseys were uncooperative and stonewalling. The author of the book especially viewed this as frustrating and highly suspicious. So did most everyone else.
The ensuing crowd of people completely contaminated the crime scene as they went about thoroughly searching the premises. One of the Ramseys’ friends even tidied the place up including a bowl of fruit that would later prove a puzzling red herring. What could have been a pristine crime scene instead offered up no usable evidence of what transpired that night.
Patsy who participated in beauty pageants in her younger days, always maintained that this was something they did on the side. All the same, once the media had this angle to play, all you saw was the same glamour shot of JonBenet all dolled up and the one of her in a little cowboy suit singing a hoe-down number --almost always with the sound off. If you hear the audio you can quickly deduce JonBenet wasn’t much of a singer.
There was sexual trauma to JonBenet’s genitals which was discovered in the autopsy and it was revealed later that the blow to the head came after she was strangled --strangled by garroting by use of rope and paint brush handle that was found in the basement.
To me there is no way a parent not suffering from serious mental illness would do this to her child. The detectives dug up every scrap of evidence from the past of both parents and JonBenet’s brother to find indications of violence, mental illness or sexual deviancy and nothing turned up.
Phew. Long post. I’ll stick around and try to refute whatever counter arguments come up but do keep in mind that I’m hardly an expert on the matter. I’m just a guy who read a book and who developed an opinion.
In post #472 I said,
Can a nine year old exercise a successful garrote after nightly rape? of his sister
I’d say you are being naive. The parents are always suspects, and I would want to make sure I didn’t inadvertently say anything to the cops that could be incriminating. I disagree with your last sentence to a significant degree.
As for the little Ramsey girl, I didn’t pay enough attention over the years, but it was probably one of the family members.
After we have eliminated everyone else, who is left as evil as Nicole Wallace. And she killed her own daughter. :eek:
If you are completely innocent and truly have no knowledge of the crime, how could you say anything incriminating?
If your child was staying the night at her/his friends and was murdered there, how would you feel if the friends parents lawyered up immediately? Anger and grief aside, you would immediately think the parents were involved or at least knew something.
I always thought it was the brother, playing around with her and she threatened to tell. Years later, though, someone said that he didn’t do it (don’t remember who).
Bob
I dunno–haven’t we seen enough pretty frightening police activity to know that being innocent of a crime isn’t always a defense?
[HEARSAY]We wouldn’t, of course. But we can all speculate, with or without interesting little tidbits … such is human nature. Anyway, here’s my tidbit:
I knew a forensic specialist (I’m not going to get any more specific than that since it’s all just passing along gossip at this point) who had a peripheral role in the original investigation. She seemed to me like a trustworthy source. Her take on the whole affair? “The incompetent police screwed up the investigation totally from day one and we’ll never know for sure what happened. The evidence was too badly mishandled and there is no way now to go back and fix the situation.”[/HEARSAY]
I think that is something we all agree on.
As to the first, God forbid it was a night where you woke up and took a leak and got a drink of water, and your spouse says “I woke up and my husband wasn’t in bed, but didn’t think anything of it. I don’t know how long he was out of bed.”
Or, “my husband suggested I take a sleeping pill so I’d get a good night’s sleep, so I have no idea what happened in the middle of the night.” I’m not saying interfere with the investigation. The cops are still going to look around and do what they do.
As to the second, you are absolutely right. But that has to take a back seat at that point. I think every week we read about someone getting out of prison after 20 years for murder or rape because new evidence shows they were wrongly convicted. Yeah, sucks to be you, losing 20 years of your life because the cops wanted a closed case and the prosecutor wanted a conviction.
I think this would have been a good topic for the second season of Serial. At the time this all was being investigated I was so sick of the media circus that I did my best to tune it all out. But it would be nice to hear it researched by the Serial people now.
I dunno, ask Polly Klaas’ father. He was completely innocent, cooperated with the police in every way and it almost ruined his life because they wasted a huge part of their investigative time trying to pin her death on him.
As for the Ramseys, they operate in a whole 'nother world than I do financially, so I can certainly understand lawyering up. I may (or may not) do that under similar circumstances, but if others did, it certainly wouldn’t make me assume immediate guilt. Just seems a prudent thing to do, perhaps especially if you aren’t guilty of anything.
This is less hearsay, and more the accepted “answer” to who killed JonBenet by pretty much every criminologist not hawking a sleazy book. We’ll just never know.
Klaas didn’t lawyer up, he told the police he’d tell them anything if they’d just go look for his daughter. But that showed the problem, even if the Ramsey’s just talked freely what were the police going to do? Yeah, there’s just no way to tell how they should have reacted.
That was my point. Klaas thought that since he was innocent, it would remove him from the suspect pool and they could then focus on catching the real perp. In reality, it totally shot his life all to hell and back. If he’d have lawyered up, perhaps things would’ve gone differently for him and their investigative time would’ve been spent more wisely.
I’m certain that Chandra Levy did it and Gary Condit covered it up.