predicting expectations

In conversation around Steven Singular's "Never Give Up" blog on who it is that is making real progress in JonBenet's case, our favorite, the one and only FleaStiff weighs in--

Did the killer (s) expect the massive publicity?
July 7, 2009
By FleaStiff

Although in a very strict sense one can dispute the effect that publicity would have on the availability and pricing of pornography, I think we can assume that anyone attempting to market a pornographic image of JonBenet Ramsey would have a difficult time avoiding immediate police scrutiny. This would render the product of any such photography worthless, be it peri-mortem or ante-mortem. Although I don't believe JonBenet was ever subjected to anything at all improper prior to that awful night, whatever photos or films that might have existed would be rendered worthless and unmarketable. Sure there is always some black market but most pornographers want items that are saleable rather than so "hot" that offering them for sale will invite the attentions of the police.

Now as to whether the perpetrator should have expected publicity we all know that the media personnel are indeed fickle people and that some stories will simply get crowded out by items that are considered more newsworthy. Even the errant groom and his attractive bride on a cruise ship avoided media attention until after the mother of one very sensible teenage girl made the digital image of the large bloodstain that had been removed available to the cable news networks.

As to the publicity that is expected we have two ways of measuring it: what would normally happen and what indeed did happen. Normally a young girl who has been kidnapped makes the news. Certainly a combination of a kidnapping and the availability of beauty pageant images makes a media splash almost a certainty. The corpse was stashed out of sight but the intruder had no way of knowing the discovery would take even as long as it did. Surely a young girl murdered in her own home at or around Christmas day would be reasonably expected to bring out more than the usual media interest irrespective of any other local or national stories. Alan Dershowitz said that the story was prominent on Israeli television that day. Perhaps that degree of media attention might have been unpredicted but I can not imagine any perpetrator not realizing that there would be major publicity about this case. Indeed, some case followers have suggested that the intruder's primary focus was on constructing a "case of the century" and have suggested that publicity was a primary motivating factor.

With such indications that publicity was extremely likely and with the clear actual result involving massive publicity, I fail to see how a pornographer would be interested in destroying the market value of the images he supposedly possessed and I certainly fail to see how any intruder, no matter what his reasoning and purposes were, would have failed to have anticipated massive publicity.