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?

Straying far a bit?

Straying far a bit ... or perhaps not!!!

I happened to be surfing the net for further information relating to the Royal Scottish Fingerprint Inquiry concerning Detective McKie presently being undertaken by Scottish authorities and I encountered a case involving the use of a Forensic Lip Reader often known for her skills involving conversations video recorded in prison visiting areas. After having had her testimony accepted in hundreds of court cases, she was finally put to the test of lip reading a film segment of two actors speaking to each other: she correctly identified three percent of the words and was unable to identify any of the topics discussed. It is mind boggling how her testimony had been accepted in so many Scottish court cases much less how she had been relied upon in so many additional police investigations wherein her expertise was given great weight.

Now you may think that a Scottish judicial inquiry about fingerprints in a homicide case is a long way from a Boulder, Colorado homicide investigation and yes, perhaps I am straying far. Or perhaps I am not far from the mark at all. We have the much maligned Lou Smit. We have various linguistic pronouncements concerning the text of the ransom note. We have various handwriting pronouncements related to the penmanship of the ransom note. And we have various profiling pronouncements relating to the discovery of a corpse within a home as opposed to outside a home. I guess Scotland is not really that far from Colorado at all. Unfortunately.

If such bogus expertise makes it all the way into court testimony, I cringe at the thought of just how far such bogus expertise makes its way into police investigations wherein there is no preliminary concern about meeting a threshold of a Daubert test or Frye test. How many investigations are being tainted by police reliance upon such unproven forensic techniques such as voice stress testing? We hope crystal balls and tea leaves don't sway investigators but it seems that our hopes may be dashed. Companies that sell crystall balls or tea leaves may be doing real well with various American police forces.

Textual Analysis to indicate authorship.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17639-writing-style-fingerprint-tool-easily-fooled.html

Many case-followers have suggested that the purpose of using text in the note that is taken from a variety of movie scripts is to conceal the author's own writing style through the intentional adoption of the text of other authors. This ofcourse would mean the ransome note's author had a belief that his own natural writing style might be recognizable to the Ramseys or to the police.

I've often felt undecided on this issue. It seems to me that a person can adopt the expression "make my day" for reasons other than concealing his own identity from later analysis of writing style. The use of very popular expressions can be for a variety of purposes unrelated to concealment of actual identity.

Irrespective of the author's intentions, any later analysis and determination of authorship would usually be based on far more data than that which is contained in the ransom note. It is important to bear in mind that peer review, while it may not be the great panacea that everyone imagines it to be, still does serve a vital function of establishing general acceptance amongst the scientific community. Whenever a tool is so easily fooled by rather simple techniques, it is unlikely the process will be well received in the scientific community.

seeing the killer

After JonBenet Ramsey was murdered in 1996 authorities, media, psychics and the general public have been all over the board with criminal profiles in sometimes pointed speculation that JonBenet's killer was a woman, and or a Ramsey. This occurred despite less that 3 weeks after the murder it was established there was male DNA left on JonBenet's undergarment and that this male DNA did not belong to any of the Ramseys. Twelve years later, leaps in proven technologies, it is broadly recognized this same unidentified male left DNA from 3 of his bodily sources in 4 different locations on JonBenet's person.

There are signs that someday emerging technologies like forensic molecular photo fitting will produce an image of this evil person. On the path of research and development toward photo fitting and much closer to real life application is the capability of extracting basic personal characteristics and associating the killer's relatives from DNA. These general characteristic techniques can pinpoint race; height; hair or eye color are now being put through the expected legal, ethical and privacy paces so that once released for appropriate use this information will be of tremendous benefit in creating a verifiable criminal profile in many cases, including JonBenet's. In the meantime that new task force over at Boulder PD submits weekly the killers DNA profile to CODIS on the chance they may get a match to one of the 7m+ criminals whose DNA profile is contained in CODIS.

Offender profiling, outside what characteristics found in crime scene DNA will eventually tell us, can be a risky business most especially for a layperson. It is not replicable, validated and tested meaning it does not qualify as science in standard. Sort of like handwriting analysis or forensic linguistics. Because these practices are qualitative opinion based methods admissibility of results and expert opinions can be challenged, frequently limited, in state and federal courts. Criminal profiling can be useful investigative tool where it is understood by users that it's application is subject to unestablished fault and error rates, again like document examination and linguistic stylistics.

Offender profiling by subject matter experts like John Douglas is can be of high investigative value based on education and experience, often a source of clues in a specific crime scene as derived from historical crime conditions and behaviors of known criminals. With that in mind, and somewhat more realistic than attempting to tie guilt to someone wearing the same clothes two days in a row, because there was a sexual element to this crime we may have more hints to ponder about JonBenet's killer than in 1997--

He is most likely of Caucasian descent

He is now probably at least in his mid-forties

He may be shorter than the average in height

He could be left-handed

In the past, prior to the crime, he might have had a head injury

May prefer alcohol over street drugs

His choice of victim may have been totally random

Is likely to feel he suffered more than the victim; lack of empathy for the victims

Ramseys update own probe
1997, Denver Post
By Marilyn Robinson

"Frustrated at the pace of the police investigation, JonBenet Ramsey's father stepped up his efforts Wednesday to find her killer...

• JonBenét's killer may have been suffering from some stress in the weeks and months preceding the crime;
• A triggering event, such as a job crisis or crisis in a personal relationship may have caused this individual to vent anger, perhaps at a female close to him, or perhaps at me personally;
• Since the murder, this individual may rabidly read news reports of the investigation, listen to talk radio shows oriented to coverage of the murder;
• He possibly has increased his consumption of alcohol or drugs;
• He may have even turned to religion;
• He may be rigid, nervous and preoccupied in casual conversation;
• He may have tried to appear very cooperative with the authorities if he was contacted during the course of the police investigation;
• He may have quickly constructed an alibi for his whereabouts the night JonBenét was killed and may have repeated it several times to key individuals around him as if rehearsing them in the answer;
• The killer is someone who may have previously been in my home..."