Random Musings on Tangents and Asymptotes

and other topics I don't really know anything about

By Fleastiff
3/13/2009

Perhaps aided by a feeling of frustration with the Boulder Police Department's dogged determination to cling to their obviously misplaced obsession about parental involvement many sleuths have gone off on tangents in an attempt to make at least some progress on the case.

Some notable directions that others have followed involve the divining of meanings for the letters SBTC, the linguistic subtleties of using the word "bring" versus using the word "take" and the oft-noted impressions that the ransom note was written by a person steeped in the fantasy world of role playing games. One particularly notable direction favored by some of the sleuths has been to focus on the oft-used phrase "crime of the century". Now of course such a phrase is utterly meaningless unless you are an editor of a tabloid publication or you are designing the cover artwork for a mystery book that is about to be published. In such a situation the use of the phrase "crime of the century" can mean a great deal of money. There was little doubt that the murder of JonBenet Ramsey would be fodder for the tabloids. I believe that one professor at Harvard Law School happened to be in Israel at the time and found that the murder of a six year old girl in Boulder, Colorado was the lead story on Israeli television that day. A good many pundits have attributed the media's instantaneous interest in the JonBenet Ramsey case to the fact that it was a "slow news day" in Boulder. Well, apparently it must have been an equally "slow news day" all over the world because even with an "if it bleeds, it leads" bias a murder in Boulder simply is not normally going to have such wide spread reporting taking place.

One wonders if the intruder ever considered the degree and intensity of media coverage that would ensue from his Christmastime intrusion into a home to rape and kill a six year old girl. Some sleuths have suggested that the primary purpose of the ransom note was to have added publicity value in the case. Did the intruder know that the phrase "Crime of the Century" would be promptly trotted out by the various talking heads. Was this part of his thought process? Was it merely an inevitable by-product of his activities or did his sure and certain knowledge of the publicity play a more prominent role in determining his actions. Some sleuths have even suggested that his victim might have been randomly selected solely so he could bask in a secret glory of having committed a crime that would forever thereafter be deemed to be a Crime of the Century. Perhaps the perpetrator experiences that same sweet secret enjoyment that an art lover who owns a stolen masterpiece might enjoy. Is there a basement gallery somewhere that displays a stolen masterpiece and beside it displays the missing piece of the paint brush? Or some before, during and after photographs taken with the aid of the strange lights that some neighbors are said to have reported?

On a similar note, some sleuths have suggested that one of the goals was not merely the publicity about the case but the opportunity to engage in a duel of wits with a variety of forensic experts. Some have seen the awkwardly strange sum of 118,000 as being a reference to page 118 of a noted forensic text dealing with criminal profiling. This particular faction of the tangent-following sleuths see the general tone and tenor of the ransom note, together with its possible references to various action movies as constituting a sort of pastiche, a carefully crafted montage culled from well-known crimes and well-known movies. Others see instead of a pastiche, a picaresque novel. A crime concocted with a multitude of characters each of somewhat ill repute but each struggling mightily in an unjust world. At least this latter view is what the intruder would consider appropriate. Sleuths tend to focus on the struggle of the victim rather than the struggle of the criminal but novelists are often more concerned with the struggle of the criminal and the struggle of the criminalist.

One of the many similar situations from the world of literature is the novella by Swiss dramatist Friedrich Durrenmatt, The Pledge. Although it is often sufficient to merely deal with the oft-used short title, it is perhaps critical at this junction to recall that an integral part of the title is the often omitted subtitle "A Requiem for the Detective Novel". Durrenmatt's novella dealt with a murder of a little girl, an immediate focus by the populace at large and by most of the authorities on a very convenient suspect, an active role played by the press in the case as well as some other tantalizingly tempting tidbits such as a role played by food found in the digestive tract of the victim. Ofcourse with Durrenmatt food plays a role in just about all his writings, most notably The Judge and His Hangman. Food often plays a role in literature about crime. Some sleuths have considered the role of food in Hitchcock's masterpiece Rope. Of course the movie Rope may have been thought by some sleuths to be even more relevant due to the use of a length of cord at the crime scene and due to the presence of an unused length of rope said to have been found in a duffle bag in the Ramsey home.

Author Leslie Halpern considers in her 2008 article on the Existentsialist Theme in The Pledge "the relationship between random chance and scientific logic". Its not too difficult to consider "chance" or "luck" in relation to Durrenmatt's writings. Afterall, the name of his detective in The Judge and His Hangman is Tschantz which quite literally translates to "chance". The name of one of the forensic specialists Dr. Lucius Lutz ofcourse translates as Doctor Light of Lights but the character is developed in more Tothian terms as a pompous boor of no great intellectual ability except in his own mind. It is possible to directly apply such descriptions from Swiss literature of the 1950s to todays criminalists.

Halpern opines that "no real technology or time-dependent elements are included in this generic story about one man unsuccessfully trying to fight random violence by using science and logic". This ofcourse allows us to mold just about any crime and its investigation to the novella in which the "veteran police detective's promise ... becomes an obsession when he finds that science, psychology, and logic will not solve the crime. He has no system for tracking down random acts of violence and ... science fails the diligent detective when he needs it most because in keeping with existentialist theory, free will, independent thought, logical deduction, and controlled environments cannot overcome fate". The supremacy of fate is a theme not limited to Durrenmatt and it is a theme that is embraced by another author who happens to be a favorite author of one of the many case "suspects". It is therefore quite possible for would-be sleuths to endlessly plow through a variety of literary works futilely chasing leads that are tangential to the various case participants.

I first became interested in Durrenmatt's novella due to the reference to chocolate as being in the digestive tract as well as in the suspects car. I thought that perhaps in painting a tableau by taking bits and pieces from true crimes and from literature the intruder might have chosen to take a few pieces from The Pledge but after re-reading the work several times I am quite convinced that it is merely one of many examples of food in Durrenmatt's work and it plays no major role. There is no reason to assume that the intruder, who is thought by many to have fed JonBenet some pineapple, was somehow borrowing this particular food theme from Durrenmatt. The novella merely features a reference to chocolate candy bars, an item generally of interest to just about any five year old girl. The chocolate bar is not developed as the child's particularly favorite food nor is the murderer shown to be someone who knew of any particular fondness for chocolate on the part of his victim. The inescapable conclusion is simply that the literary reference to chocolate is but a minor point of utterly no relevance to anyone attempting to create a montage consisting of excerpted material from a variety of notorious crimes. It therefore plays no role whatsoever in the JonBenet Ramsey investigation.

Chocolate is a word derived from the Aztec for "Food of the Gods". In the Jonbenet Ramsey investigation, sleuths have found that chocolate should perhaps be renamed as "Yet Another Tangential Reference That Didn't Pan Out" but was briefly embraced by would-be sleuths in their dedicated plodding in pursuit of justice for Jonbenet.

You'll find this and other Fleastiff posts as a soon-to-be regular special author and regular commentator/contributor. A long time case follower and subject matter expert, we have a question--what is the definition of a FleaStiff, anyway? C'mon...