bah! humbug!

Shortly before Christmas I had noticed an article about Dr. Don Foster - JonBenet case followers would definitely remember him as the self-titled 'literary detective' who was, for a few fleeting but fatal moments, the star witness for the Boulder Police against the Ramsey's. One of the other victims of Foster's faulty analysis in the Ramsey case, Jameson, has commented on that experience here, where the article by Dr. Beverly Merrill Kelley originally ran in part concerning authorship attribution of the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas".

As far as quantifiable methods of determining authorship go, I am extremely partial to particular methods of forensic linguistics. To be brief but specific, the kind that are independently tested, measured and validated as opposed to qualitative methods that Foster, based on the apparent subjective analysis of the poem in question, seems to still be reliant upon - -

Traditions abound — but who gets the credit?

Published in the Ventura County Star
by Beverly Kelley

"...Now, however, Dec. 23 seems destined to live in infamy because an English professor at Vassar has decided to point an accusatory finger at Clement Clarke Moore and bray “plagiarist”!

So, just who is this bookish mythbuster? Meet Professor Donald Foster, who achieved celebrity status in 1996 when he correctly identified Washington journalist Joe Klein as the author of “Primary Colors.”

...To boot, as a high-profile criminal-case consultant, Foster compared examples of Theodore Kaczynski’s writing with the Unabomber’s manifesto as well as lending his expertise with respect to the ransom note in the JonBenet Ramsey murder...

So what is Foster’s evidence, albeit circumstantial, of literary fraud?

— Moore’s stern personality would not have permitted such a playful approach. His desire, as a father, was to instill humility, freedom from transient pleasures and disciplined deportment in his children.

— Moore railed against tobacco (think Santa’s pipe) as “opium’s treacherous aid.”

— The influence re: meter, style, images and vocabulary of William King and Christopher Anstey, favorites of Livingston, jump off the page.

— A Lapland expert and Dutchman, Livingston wrote elsewhere about reindeer and annual visits by St. Nicholas.

— This wasn’t the first time Moore plagiarized. He previously lied about translating a sheep-farming manual.

...Fear not, you don’t have to take sides. Scholars will — for the next 186 years.

Besides, you’ll be otherwise occupied with the annual unwrapping-of-gifts debate. Let me know which faction wins. [...read more]

Beverly Kelley is the founder of the Communications Department at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California. She is a regular contributor to the editorial pages of the Ventura County Star and the Los Angeles Times. For five years she was the host of Local Talk with Beverly Kelley on KCLU-FM and hosted the local television show A Conversation With.... Reelpolitik, published by Praeger, is now in its second printing. The second volume of Reelpolitik, published by Rowman and Littlefield, is available now. Dr. Kelley is currently working on a third volume focusing on films of the '70's and '80's.

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?