The Writer's Guide ... revisited.

In a previous posting I lamented the lack of a Writer's Guide to Criminals while noting the existence of various such reference works that allow for realism by providing writers with data on everyday life. The dispelling of myths about the settlement of the American West was used as an example that I thought might help shed some light on the world of criminals and particularly on the world of perverts. Its not just the availability of facts and figures relating to daily life but the use of those facts and figures to dispel our oft-cherished but unproven assumptions.

I was taken to task by someone who pointed out that any particular type of crime would have sufficient variance as to make such a reference book inapplicable to those who wish to solve the JonBenet Ramsey case. To a certain extent, I do agree with my critic. Some crimes escalate, some do not. A simple burglary can become a murder, a rape or an abduction simply by chance or whim. What is intended as a car-jacking can wind up as assault or murder. Many a wife has rattled a chair in the night as her husband has prepared to descend to investigate strange noises downstairs. The thumping alerts the nocturnal burglar and provides an opportunity to drift silently off into the night rather than have a confrontation with the homeowner. The burglar is alert and motivated, the home-owner is groggy with sleep. So a wife's thumping of a chair against the floor may save her husband's life even if the husband is armed. Would the burglar who faded away into the night have resorted to deadly force? That is a question a wife may not want to find out the answer to. So the crime gets logged as attempted burglary by persons unknown and the database lacks an entry under homicide. Or alternatively some man tries to defend his obsolete television set even though there is nothing good on it these days and gets stabbed to death for his efforts. Some homicide statistics result from vehicle breakdowns, dead phone batteries or the sheer bad luck of a chance encounter with a depraved maniac. Variance. Unforeseen consequences. Unintended actions. An imprecisely elucidated variance but a variance sufficiently great to disable the reference work's usefulness.

Yet consider that Writers Guide. It does allow us to dispense with a great many myths. No gunfight at high noon. Actual homicide rates of the notorious towns. The truth still dispels our myths. And that is a good thing. What sort of variance would be applicable to the JonBenet Ramsey case? We have no way of knowing. However, if myths about pedophiles can be dispelled perhaps some truths would emerge. And at all times and in all things, the truth shall set you free.

I wonder how many victims were subjected to bondage for brief periods of time when their attackers had available to them extended durations for such activities? This information might help us decide if the bondage in the JBR case is real or a misdirection or if it holds some intermediate position indicating desire but not indicating paramount importance.

I wonder how many torturers use only two stun gun shocks or two cigarette burns when there is plenty of time available for further entertainment. This might help us decide on the intruder's ultimate goals. It is indeed quite possible that an intruder became satiated after two brief electro-shocks from the stun gun, but I question this primarily from the aspect that it is a clue to the age of the perpetrator. For any sort of experimentation about anything at all would be a sign of inexperience and therefore a sign of youth. We of course could not be certain that the experimentation was not an intentional distraction for the investigators but its mere existence would tend to help narrow the field of suspects.

It is in this manner that we would proceed to apply the lessons learned from the as yet non-existent reference work: Writer's Guide to Criminals. If we can dispel myths can we then review the case with a renewed vigor and focus? After all, many crimes are actually solved by police simply applying common sense to the actions of criminals who seem not to have utilized any common sense but mainly simply do not have needed information available to them. Occasionally a murder is staged to appear as if it had been a homeowner's interruption of a burglary. Police know what items are actually of value to a real burglar. If the kitchen toaster is one of the items that has been put on the floor to be taken out by a burglar, the cops tend to think immediately of staging because most real burglars who must make their living as burglars know that you can't pawn a toaster. Or if a chest of drawer or bedroom bureau has its drawers disarranged in the wrong manner, the cops will suspect staging. A professional thief values time and silence. A professional thief knows his trade and will open the bottom drawer first, rummage through it quickly and quietly and then neither waste time nor make noise by closing the drawer. The professional thief simply opens the next highest drawer and continues. Quickly, quietly, efficiently. The wife who wants to be a widow is someone who might make a mistake on this point involving burglary protocols and in so doing make the police suspicious. In a Hollywood movie a burglarized home may appear to have been ransacked but in the real world very few burglars smash anything unnecessarily and very few burglars create a disorganized, chaotic mess simply because they have no reason to waste their time and energy doing so. The professional burglar is seeking small, light-weight highly portable items of substantial value to a fence. An inexperienced spouse may believe in making a mess and assembling items that are uninteresting to a fence.

A Writer's Guide to Criminals would allow greater confidence in our decisions about disposal of the body or its degree of concealment. The note induced hours of agonizing but futile waiting for the phone to ring. Such agony of the parents would have been unavailable to the intruder as imagined entertainment if the body had not been concealed. Such notes and manipulation suggests ulterior motives beyond the perverse pleasures of the basement. It also suggests an attention being focused on the parents which while not dispositive of the issue involving the intruder's pedophilia is at least suggestive that the intruder's real focus might be elsewhere than the perversion.

If we utilize this as-yet-non-existent reference work, we might discover that so much of the crime was concocted as to make us doubt the validity of the dna. I've rarely felt that anyone was capable of planting dna and that if planted dna was to be used, copious amounts would be planted rather than a few minute droplets. So I don't really want to reject the dna, I just want to determine if the dna is that of the primary actor or that of a mere puppet. If it is the dna of a puppet, then I would surely assume that puppet died quite soon after the murder. After all, what else are puppets for?

If we utilize the reference work to determine that the crime scene was not largely misdirection but was instead a fanciful experience then we would surely conclude the perpetrator was an inexperienced youth well acquainted with the realm of fiction. What we need to do is to find the culprit irrespective of our musings as to his age range, however, such speculations about the age range of the intruder do help narrow the field of focus a bit and might provide us with a degree of confidence that the performance of the BPD has failed to instill in us.

"...Yet when I think of the utterly fanciful and almost nonsensical nature of the note and the amount of the ransom demand, I can only think more of an absurdly youthful prank rather than a mature man's plot."

An absurdly youthful prank rather than a mature man's plot? Perhaps that's it! At one time, an age marked by prosperity, the beatniks and their successors, the hippies, could lead a life of general disdain for the workaday world. In our present reality, the Beat Generation is long gone, the Hippies either abandoned making candles and joined the workforce or they stayed in The Lifestyle and now own The Candle Factory, The Condominiums at the Candle Factory and own distribution rights to the film Naked Hippie Chicks at the Candle Factory. So as the societal drop-outs transitioned from Beatnik to Hippie to Hippie-Entrepreneur, with what are we now confronted? Perhaps Austin's layabouts, losers and loners give us the clue. Slackers! The disaffected youth of today are Slackers. The beatniks and hippies could work half a day as pearl-divers at some restaurant and after the dishes were washed they could devote their attentions to poetry, music, art or wherever else their passions lead them. Yet in today's world, the pearl diver at a trendy restaurant is not a frustrated poet or frustrated artist. He is simply frustrated by a relentless inescapable poverty and a paucity of real job opportunities. It was all he could do to master mechanical drawing and now there are no jobs for draftsmen unless they know Autocad. His life is clearly that of an overworked minimum-waged serf forever yoked to a life that can be experienced only in his imagination. His ambitions are not stunted, but his ability to achieve any of them is truncated by a poverty of intellect and a poverty of resources. He is of a generation that can't go down to the docks and ship out, but can sing the theme song of Gilligan's Island without hesitation. He knows he will never be James Bond, he will never make a James Bond movie, he barely makes enough money to rent a James Bond videotape. It just might be amongst Boulder's Slackers that we look for those whose dreams have been foreclosed by poverty and hopeless despair. Slackers are utterly without hope and utterly immune from the usual encounters with authority. They can't strike back at the world in rage, because nobody can strike back at the entire world. They can however strike back at the man who took their draftsman job away from them but did not teach them Autocad. They can strike back at those who have cornered them in the People's Republic that offers them little but a succession of dead-end jobs and rising rents.

Will our Writer's Guide to Real Criminals aid us? Or is variance going to make it ineffective. I do not know. I know there are alot of Slackers who are not child murderers. I do however favor realism over fantasy and perhaps that is why it is difficult for me to deal with a case that involves such absurd fantasies.

The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life.

The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life and similar reference works used in the film industry are just what we need for the JonBenet Ramsey case. For those of you unfamiliar with such reference works let me just give a brief explanation of them. They are the works that would be consulted to maintain realism on movie sets and in dialog. Today a young woman might walk into an office and announce that she was a secretary but in the early part of the twentieth century she would have announced that she was a typewriter. Not secretary, not typist, ... typewriter! Such things might be cut out of a film now or the dialog might be altered for current audiences but the director usually wants realism as a starting point. Its the same way with the background of location scenes. If the action takes place near a sidewalk fruit market, the display baskets will be appropriate to the time period and the price signage will be in prices that were in effect at whatever time the action is taking place. Advertisements in the background are appropriate to time and place, movie marquees show what would actually have been reasonable at the time. Such reference works give writers an ability to avoid gross errors. Knowing what an average wage was for a cowboy is just as important to a writer as knowing how far a horse may be ridden in a day or how much a plate of beans would actually cost in a saloon. Fashions and hair styles have to be appropriate to the time, as does architecture. Oh sure there can be exceptions, sometimes notable ones. Recent movies shot in Las Vegas have featured casinos that have been somewhat transplanted in time or location. I've previously mentioned in this blog the movie In The Heat of the Night (see: I Said Check It, Sam). Well, the action supposedly takes place in Sparta, Mississippi on a hot Summer night, but early in the movie Shagbag is seen chasing a suspect through what is obviously Fall foliage and obviously not Mississippi. Sometimes things simply don't get noticed or sometimes costs outweigh a desire for realism. Even today, studios tend to "not want the picture good, they want it Tuesday".

I just wish we had such a reference work for the world of criminals. What would it tell us if we could consult a Writer's Guide to Everyday Life of the Criminal? I wonder if its really reasonable for a pedophile to be willing to kill a six year old girl after but a few moments of jolting her with a stun gun. I wish we had a reference work which would tell us the length of time that a pedophile considers "bondage play" to be sufficient. I wish I had a reference work that would provide ready access to reliable facts and figures about crime and criminals.

I've based a fair amount of my conclusions about this case on assumptions that I have no way of verifying. It strikes me as strange that a man would be thought of as satiated by two lousy jolts from a stun gun. Was he disappointed or was he elated? Whats the matter? You object to my referring to the stun gun use on a six year old girl as "two lousy jolts"? Well, the whole point of this blog post is realism from the point of view of the criminal, so lets get real! If we are to solve this case we have to cast off our sensibilities and take a look at this crime from the viewpoint of the evil vile perpetrator who did these unspeakable acts.

I have at my desk ready reference works that will tell me just how many homicides the famed cowtowns of the Old West had. (Quite frankly, there were relatively few homicides and ofcourse not one instance ever anywhere of any gunfight at high noon). Our impressions are based on all the Westerns (known in the trade as "oaters") that we've seen. Yet our impressions are sorely lacking any relationship to actual history. Hangings, even outright lynchings? Sure, but check your history books and you will find that most were quite rightful according to time and place. Mining law districts in California, Nevada and Colorado may not have had formal peace officers but they did have both law and justice. Far less law than we have today and far more justice than we have today!

It is relatively easy to wade through reference works about real life and to then discard our media-fed myths. Ofcourse there are some tempting paralells to be drawn. I often wonder if the financial journalists of yesteryear were in fact any better than the financial journalists of today. In olden times we had newspapers that advertised cans of Gold Paste that were to rubbed onto your clothing prior to your rolling down a California hillside. At the bottom of the hill, you merely washed your clothes and retrieved the gold. Perhaps we can make comparisons to present day wealth acquisition where it was thought that all one had to do to obtain wealth was to go to a swank Palm Beach party and give your money to Bernie Madoff. Perhaps the quality of journalism never changes.

Nevertheless, we do have reference books that feature the nuts and bolts details of the real world rather than the world of myths and fantasies.

But what do we really know of pedophiles? Do they really prefer long-term relationships to one-night-stands? Its rather obvious they don't limit themselves in that regard. Some young children have been forcibly kidnapped and promptly disposed of. I recall one San Diego pedophile who apparently disposed of his victim promptly and then went treking all over the Mohave desert for a few days. His crime appears to have been impulsive and may have resulted from having been rejected by an adult female that he knew to fit the description of loose morals. He had lived next to his victim for several years but one night he entered her home and abducted her. Had the pervert lusted after her previously? I've no idea and I'm sure if there is any answer to that question it is an answer that has been mediated by defense counsel and self-interest on the part of the pervert.

So what do you want to know about "the Wild West"? I can instantly look up material on foods, fashions, education, land-ownership, tools, coinage, salaries, education, entertainment. I can show you the menu from a luxurious French restaurant in a Colorado boom town. I can show you the educational achievements of outlaws and miners. I can show you the operas and plays that were available in the places that your movies depict as having only cheap saloons and horse stalls. I can show you the real world because I have ready reference works at my fingertips. I can show you that the Indian did not consider the West to be wild until the arrival of the White man. I can show you that many women taken captive by Indians and then rescued, chose to return to their Indian tribes. I can show you battles that were contemporaneously described as victories that are now described as massacres. I can show you battles where Indian chiefs and military officers were close relatives. I can end your false mental images in a few moments with such reference works.

But where are our reference works on criminals? Oh you say there are profiler interviews by trained psychologists. Well, self-serving statements in prison by people who have not much in the way of entertainment are not really valid. I've not seen any validation studies. Most of what prisoners say is quite removed from the truth the moment anyone but other prisoners are around. And even in the company of other prisoners, cons tend to be guarded in their comments. So don't quote criminology texts to me. It just won't wash. Data is indeed available, but data-quality is simply too important to me to rely on some of the hogwash that I have seen bandied about. Cops get lied to all the time, tabloid television shows even reveal criminals not only lying before they've been shown a videotape but after they've been shown a videotape of their crimes.

So was it a neighborhood pervert? Was it a long-term grudge? Was it a momentary impulse? Was it a planned and carefully re-written ransom note or was it a bit of pure whimsey concocted on the spot in one sitting? So is a burglar alarm decal something an intruder even notices? Does entry via a basement window imply prior skillful entry? Does anything less than extreme activity as far as the perversions go indicate a psychological hesitancy or an ulterior motive? Does a walkway devoid of footprints show careful attention to detail or simply show that the BPD would have been wiser to use stretch plastic wrap on the walkways and apply their stun guns to it to reveal the remnants of footprints?

How is it we can get facts and figures on the wild west but not on the ransom note? I can tell you that cackleberry was a term for an egg, but can't tell you about attache case in the ransom note. I can tell you that rawhide was a derogatory term in the West, but can't tell you anything at all about the vocabulary of the ransom note.