On Mixing Metaphors and Next Steps.

We can quibble about whether there ever really was an investigation rather than a police instigated campaign to enmesh the parents in an ordeal-by-tabloid, but rather than continue to spin our wheels lets just focus for the nonce on making some progress in this perplexing and frustratingly maddening case.

I've been focusing for quite a while now on just what the stumbling blocks might be for this case. Its obvious we can not go back in time and do a neighborhood canvass which is not only the universally accepted procedure but also the one most likely to be helpful. The BPD's error is indellible. It can not be overcome. There is never any way to do a historical canvass. There is no such thing as a "cold-case canvass". There never will be.

I've suggested that we draw some wisdom from Friedrich Durrenmatt's The Pledge which dealt not only with a perverted serial killer but also with the interplay between a methodical scientific investigator and a purely random event. I've particularly noted in another of Durrenmatt's works, The Judge and his Hangman, that the name of the policeman translates to Chance and the name of the criminologist to Doctor Light of Lights. Durrenmatt's sense of humor is well known. Nothing herein contained is meant to indicate that I consider the torture, rape and murder of JonBenet Ramsey to be a random event or that anything other than perhaps the letters SBTC were selected in a random manner.

I've also suggested that we focus on the initial actions of the BPD prior to the time they turned so stubbornly defensive of themselves and their turf and turned so obsessively angry at the Ramseys. This involved a focus on the early questioning which I thought was largely a sensible set of questions to ask. Who are your enemies, who thinks you owe them money, who has been around JonBenet when neither parent was present? I think if you put aside the police inspired and tabloid perpetuated feeding frenzy that soon developed and continues to this day, you will agree that those initial questions were quite sensible indeed. Its almost as if you were seeing a film wherein the Keystone Kop actually knows how to twirl his nightstick. The rest of the film may be pure slapstick but those first few scenes of competent nightstick twirling sure make an impression if you will only pause to think about it.

I've also suggested that we broaden the cultural perspective involved in the investigation. Now ofcourse sociology and anthropology are of great interest but the question is are they of relevance to the investigation. They certainly open up the field of candidates rather than narrowing it. Sleuths generally prefer to narrow the field of candidates!

What sort of cultures or subcultures have I suggested? Oh it really doesn't matter much, but I've suggested that we look at foreign males more closely. This is because of the different value systems but also because they have at times a difficulty in establishing relationships with adult American females. I realize its a bit of a longshot to suggest that a combination of inability to have normal adult relations just happened to combine with a hatred of the Ramseys but we could use a longshot in this case. We surely could!

I've also suggested we look at what might be termed culture-by-shared-values or what a marketing oriented person would now term an affinity group. One such group would be what I've termed the "I don't get mad, I get even" type person. These people are found in prisons, in the police, in the military and in many other areas of life. One place to encounter them is in a real gym rather than a fern-foliaged foo-foo health club. If you start with a health club and strip away the valet parking, the ferns, the perfumed ladies wearing fetching outfits and bedecked in eye shadow, you eventually get to a real gym. No frills, no marketing, no nonsense. You go to that gym to work out, not meet some broad. The gym will have males from many walks of life and will have males from many different income levels, but they will tend to share certain values. Amongst the shared values is the "I don't get mad, I get even" ethic. Every man at that gym, irrespective of his occupation or wealth or interests in life keeps himself in shape. Every man at that gym puts in time with a body bag rather than being some sort of rythmic show-off with a punching bag. Its a place wherein wealth varies, age varies, strength varies, but values tend not to vary all that much. Its the intersection of this sort of a group with the Ramsey family that might benefit the investigation.

I've also suggested we look at situations involving other cultural norms than we might normally consider for Boulder, Colorado. I used as an example the incident of controlled flight into terrain of an Egyptian airliner carrying homeward a disgraced pilot who was unable to curtail his actions towards American females so as to make them culturally acceptable in this country, although they would clearly have been perfectly acceptable and expected in his own society. I've suggested a simple interaction of the Ramseys with a man of a foreign culture might have been sufficient to set off a chain of events that would otherwise not be of the remotest interest to a sleuth. Most homicide investigators in Boulder, Colorado would not take particular note of some rather trivial act such as Patsy Ramsey having asked an Arab male to wash his dinner plate. Most homicide investigators would not look askance at Patsy Ramsey having been generous in supplementing the woefully inadequate food at the church event which took place in their home. Yet we must not forget that there are indeed foreigners in Boulder and in Charelevoix. Is this too a longshot? Ofcourse it is a longshot when viewed from one aspect, but when viewed from the aspect of a fundamental question of who are your enemies it becomes a fairly sensible point of inquiry. An enemy usually chooses to be your enemy for reasons that are good and sufficient to his viewpoint. And some people have viewpoints that are quite different than those of the average sleuth. The Ramseys statements to the police about not having enemies really means that they do not have enemies from the point of view of the Ramseys. However, its the point of view of the demented child-killer that is the relevant vantage point. His point of view may be difficult for us to visualize and we will never be able to comprehend it intellecutally or emotionally, but we should indeed be able to comprehend the necessity for our focusing on his point of view rather than our own.

One fundamental stumbling block in the investigation is that the squeaky clean Ramseys simply were not aware of anyone who was a child molester or anyone who had any reason to hate JonBenet or hate anyone in the Ramsey family. It might be different if John Ramsey had been an Enron executive, but Access Graphics was viewed by most as a good place to work. The atmosphere was relaxed and friendly and it was a generally open place without secrets or cliques of any sort. It is possible that the BPD got their dander up at John Ramsey's insistence that he had no enemies or skeletons in his closet but after a thorough investigation by the police and the well-funded tabloids no enemies or skeletons at all have been found. And lets face it, those tabloids can hire more private detectives than could be fielded by all the police departments in the entire state of Colorado. And those private detectives would have really fat wallets when it came to paying for information, something the state of Colorado can't do. So if the well-funded and very experienced tabloids can't come up with any real dirt, it doesn't exist.

I thought that a way around this stumbling block of "no enemies" might be to broaden our sense of what might provoke someone to become an enemy. A cultural view might help us in that regard. We would not necessarily be looking for someone in a deviant subculture we might then be only looking for someone in a different culture. By broadening the definition of enemy we just might be able to crack this barrier to progress in the investigation since not much headway was being made by focusing on deviant subcultures.

I also thought that a way around the "no enemies" stumbling block might be to consider some of the aspects of the homicide that indicate a "mission kill". This would make the child murder less of an act of a depraved pervet and more an act of a person who was dedicated to a principle of some sort and who viewed the crime as an assasination rather than a murder. Ofcourse that in itself is a bit of a stretch but a sleuth's desperation knows no bounds! I suggested the corporate employment policy imposed upon John Ramsey by the defense contractor of which they were a subsidiary might be a source of that "principle" that for some might turn child-murder into assasination, but that alley seems to be a dead-end since the BPD, two District Attorneys and the FBI have done nothing in that direction. Some have suggested a real estate transaction or a zoning variance involving peripheral players in the case might have been an impetus for what would otherwise be viewed as improper retaliatory measures in our society. My view that the case might best be described as a mission kill is butressed by the lack of any similar crimes in the decade following the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. If we view the crime as simply a pervert who enjoys strangling little girls and is somewhat weird about his penchant for leaving notes at the crime scene, we come up against the immutable stumbling block of "n". How do you have a serial killer when n equals one. How do you develope additional clues when n equals one. How do you maintain confidence that you are chasing a kinky, demented pervert when n equals one? Kinky demented homicidal perverts don't suddenly get cured, they continue to rape, torture and kill. Its what they like, its their hobby! Its their meaning in life. Its their fun and quite likely its their only fun. So why would such a demented pervert suddenly decide to limit himself to but one venture into the netherworld of madness? Or are we being too strict in our determination of the value of "n"? Do other crimes actually exist that our intruder has committed but simply altered his signature pattern sufficiently to avoid our efforts to classify him? Did he learn to bring a book of crossword puzzles with him so as to kill time rather than to compose weird ransom notes to while away the hours? Is that why n still equals only one?

We have the attempted rape at a fairly nearby and large home which everyone but Linda Arndt seems to consider to have been an entry during the day and a lying in wait situation. Now personally I am of the opinion that this probably was not the same intruder, but the BPD reached the conclusion that it was not an intruder at all. And they reached that conclusion instantaneously. Is it possible that n is equal to 2? Or more? I don't know. How strict should our narrow-margin classifier be? If we have more "n" we surely have more clues and more chances to get the perpetrator. Yet if we erroneously introduce a false-positive into our calculation of "n" we only introduce conflicting and erroneous clues. Where do we draw the line? If we have drawn the line properly then what do we conclude from this n=1 situation? No one goes from normal person to demented homicidal torturer and rapist of a helpless six year old girl and then promptly shifts back to their former self. If n really does equal 1 and only 1, then I think it is proper to conclude that the target was the Ramsey family and that the intruder was not a pervert but only engaged in perversions as a tactic to mislead the investigators. Yet once we conclude that the crime was simply to injure the parents rather than fulfill a demented lust for a six year old girl, are we any closer to finding the intruder? Its particularly hard to find someone who merely wanted to hurt the parents when that darned "list of enemies" is so utterly blank.

In reality, it is clear that the "no enemies" stumbling block is a difficult one to circumvent. I merely suggest it might be easier to see enemies if we look for enemies that according to our cultural values would not exist but which might exist in other cultures. Ofcourse the danger is that we might start seeing enemies that are not in fact actually there. And it is definitely a mistake for a sleuth to allow his desperation to distort that which he observes.

I've also thought that a disgruntled investor in some prior corporate entity might have become angry at the financial success of John Ramsey's Access Graphics. The recent publicity may have triggered a desire for revenge. I considered it unlikely that such a revenge would take the form of the rape and torture and murder of a helpless six year old girl, but I felt it was a proper avenue of inquiry for an investigator to make. An investigator must plod along despite a sense that the particular lead he is following is not likely to pan out. So far, it does not appear as if there is anyone who feels he was cheated by any prior partners involving the entities that later became Access Graphics. And ofcourse we should recall that most of that publicity was limited to the Colorado area so it is less likely that prior investors in geographically remote corporate entitities would have even become aware of it.

I've also thought of the Value Added Retailer business model in general. I've not found anyone who would really have an objection to a firm that buys high-end unix boxes, high-end graphics cards, high-end monitors and links them all together to work seemlessly with AutoCad drafting software. It really is a win-win situation. Sure, its the business world and there are competitors and the ordinary working world situations that develop, but its not a cut-throat business atmosphere at all. Its hard enough to imagine an enemy and its even more difficult to imagine the type of enemy who having a business related grudge opts to work his mad off by doing battle with a six year old girl. When you add in such things as gratuitous but modest use of a stun gun as well as bondage trappings its hard to figure out just how a business oriented grudge could be worked off that way. Wouldn't a man given to such excesses have succumbed to his prior excesses in his life? How did he manage to get old enough to develop a business grudge if he is the type to fly off the handle at rather trivial or even totally imaginary wrongs?

I feel my head is spinning because I just don't know what direction to go in. And this constant spinning-my-wheels is futile and foolish. I just can't think what other options are available. Its quite likely that somewhere in the files is a forgotten lead that wound up being buried because an investigator was overworked or unenthusiastic due to the BPD's administrators being so convinced that the parents had done it. I sometimes feel we really can't blame some anonymous drone for inadvertantly burying a clue if the official party-line within the department is the parents did it. Just as it is probably wrong for us to blame the uniformed officers who fruitlessly searched the basement. It was the supervisory detective who gave them vague instructions and who failed to obtain detailed reports from them. They wandered around the basement not really knowing what they were supposed to do. It was sort of like being on a routine patrol and happening to turn down a particular street. They didn't do anything special or fulfill any specific mandate. They just pretty much strolled around not quite knowing what they were supposed to do. Oh, if they had encountered a large pool of blood they would have reacted to it. And if they had encountered a stack of particularly interesting jazz recordings in the basement they may well have paused to paw through them out of curiosity, but in reality the uniformed cops were really just strolling thru the basement without any clear sense of exactly what it is they were supposed to be doing. They did not know what they were to do or how thoroughly they were to be looking through those nooks and crannies. A quick "once-through" or a detailed examination or something inbetween? Linda Arndt gave no guidance and received no feedback.

We can cast a jaundiced eye at the journalism integrity of Dateline and at the history of Perverted Justice but watching those episodes we surely note that many of the guests would clearly be of interest to an endocrinologist. We also know that weak grip strength is an indicator of low testosterone values but we can't quite go around shaking hands with half the males in Colorado. Prowling the internet for pedophiles might prove worthwhile but after over a decade he has surely learned how to keep hidden. No matter what project we might embark on to snare one particular pedophile out of all the filth out there, we still have the fundamental question. Is the project worthwhile when we can only say that the intruder was probably a pedophile?

I've mentioned before about the massive investment of time and manpower in the Unabomber investigation when all along one wise soul at the end of the conference table kept saying its not a disgruntled aeronautical engineer, its a monk on a mountain top in Montana. Some people can be right but they are not heeded because their analysis falls on ears that have been deafened by adherence to a pre-determined theory of the case that has become cast in stone. Well, I'm trying to chisel away at that stone but I just don't seem to be making much progress.

I guess I've mixed my metaphors rather horribly: chiseling away at stone while spinning wheels in an automobile. Seems strange. Questions about mixed metaphors aside, does anyone have a suggestion as to how I can stop spinning the wheels or how I should strike that next blow on the chisel?

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...