cream of the crop

In a conversation yesterday regarding the forensic experts retained by the prosecution in the case against JonBenet Ramsey's parents, it was interesting to hear a leading US forensic scientitst's comments about what forensic experts were left for the Ramsey's to draw from in their defense. Despite the retention of a good number of the leading forensic experts in the US, perhaps depriving the Ramseys of similar quality high profile experts of those times, the prosecution's case failed. Of course the prosecution placed hope in a star witnesses, literary detective aka forensic linguistics expert Dr. Don Foster, who ended up falling flat on his face in the grand jury hearing where court admissibility is extremely broad. Theories and speculation abound, but even without the 2008 exoneration by DNA there is simply not enough evidence to arrest a Ramsey.


Since that time JonBenet's case continuities to be argued by armchair sleuths and media commentators passionate about their theories of who killed JonBenet. Theories and conclusions are based on the limited amount of information that has been disclosed to the public about the crime where perhaps some of the media releases by authorities were intentionally misleading as we just saw in the unravelling of the 'balloon boy' hoax.

Over the past 12+ years hundreds of people have made false confessions that were quickly dismissed, forensic evidence aside, because the content of the confession did not match facts of the crime scene and that information which authorities are privy to about the murder. Even with the DNA findings of 2008 and the well known understanding the majority of ancillary or evidentiary facts on the case and crime scene have been withheld by authorities the arguments for or against 'whodunit' and false confessions are an interesting phenomenon of society and our culture.



In 2006, first responder Detective Linda Arndt stated that only 10% of the facts in the case were disclosed accurately to the public. If you could tie a guestimate in the form of percentage to the amount of factual information disclosed to the public about JonBenet's murder that could lead to a conviction - or that justifies a theory - what would that number be?