Tuesday, April 30, 2019

JonBenet and Columbine

By sticking to the facts and inferences from those facts, the fine blog Solving JonBenet and its author DocG purports to solve the JonBenet Ramsey murder case, finding John Ramsey to be the murderer.  I submit it does what it claims. The largest piece of evidence in the case, the 2 and a half page ransom note staging a kidnapping, is simply left unexplained by any other theory. Once John is "ruled in" as a merely possible author of the note, he becomes the necessary author of the note. No intruder. No 9 year old culprit. Patsy called 911. 

He also does a fine job explaining away the suspicions of Patsy as red herrings, leading one instead to focus on John's ostensible discovery of the body, the poverty of his explanations for the broken window, the hour he managed to get away from the detective in his house, his phone call to fly to Atlanta after bringing the body upstairs, his lawyers controlling the investigation, his Navy and Philippines experience at Subic Bay Training Center, his experience as a pilot and the similarity to the Lindbergh kidnapping, and on and on. 

While there is no question about the perpetrators of the Columbine High School massacre, and the motive, as with the Ramsey case, cannot be stated with certainty; there is a similar problem in explaining the modus operandi, and what the facts, and inferences from those facts, reveal about their plan, and why they took the actions they did that horrible day. Thus, while it is a bit pretentious, I name this blog as a tribute to DocG and his methods.  

The above differences aside, the similarities are numerous. Both the JonBenet Ramsey murder and the Columbine High School massacre were infamous murders committed in Colorado suburbia in the 1990s. Both are also very muddled and confused in all the books and news media and online fora. Both have those who have intentionally muddled the case: in the former case John Ramsey, to avoid being charged with murder; and in the latter case the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department, to avoid copycats as well as explain their inability to stop the massacre. Both involve several people cocksure about their views, despite those being unfounded opinions and a mere parroting of media narrative for the past 20 years. Also, as I hope to show, there are parallels in how one can set people straight.