WHOA what ? really wow ? what changed your way of thinking /
That is a LONG Story! It takes up a whole chapter in the book. So to boil it down, it didn't happen all at once. It wasn't a "St. Paul-on-the road-to-Damascus" conversion. The first chinks in my armor appeared during the now-legendary face-off between the Ramseys and Det. Thomas on Larry King Live in May of 2000. It was a massacre. I saw the Ramseys for what they really were: manipulative narcissists who throw a hissy fit whenever anyone stands up to them. They refused to let Thomas make his points, and their behavior was troubling. Patsy had clearly been "preparing" for the confrontation, because she was clearly impaired through the use of some kind of drug. She was swaying, slurring her words, and could barely sit up straight. I really don't mean to be so hard on her, but why she agreed to it in the first place is beyond me. The most precious moment came when Patsy touched Thomas's arm, saying what a good guy he could be and telling him they needed to work together to find the "real killer," as she pushed her breasts in his face, trying to seduce him, I guess. Meanwhile, John was sitting there the whole time smiling, which I later likened to the Emperor in
Star Wars. He laughed at the most inappropriate things, compared JonBenet's death to killing a dog, and threatened to walk off the set when Thomas mentioned the findings of the sexual abuse experts. Clearly, Thomas got to him.
As the show ended, I was in something of a state of shock. All I could think was "whose idea was this, anyway?" I guess I wasn't the only one, either.
Two days later, H. Ellis Armistead, the head private investigator working for the Ramseys, quit. He cited "events taking place in the media," and implied that they were getting bad advice from their new lawyers, whom he did not get along with.
In the summer of that same year, the Ramseys, to hear them tell it, had another uninvited guest at their Atlanta home. Supposedly, while no one was home, a thief broke in. John allegedly came home and caught this guy in th act. His description of the "thief" was right out of the Susan Smith playbook: a well-dressed, soft-spoken, light-skinned black man (hereafter known as Hyphen Man!). John's narrative included such stirring scenes of John locking himself in the bathroom screaming like a girl and the "thief" leaving without stealing anything really valuable. The only thing he took was Patsy's least expensive jewelry. This is the kicker: when asked by the local cops how the "thief" got in, John said he left the door unlocked. It was a count of about 1...2...3 and I started SCREAMING at the TV set. WHAT?! My god! His kid's supposedly been murdered right under his nose because he couldn't be bothered to turn on his burglar alarm, and you're telling me that he'd just leave the door open for anyone to just waltz in?! Especially given his earlier interviews where he said he wanted to live in a fortress for the rest of his life? As you can gather, clearly I don't believe this "thief" ever existed. I guess the Georgia cops didn't either, because he was never found. No one even remotely matching the description was ever nailed. As for the jewelry angle, I think (and keep in mind that I have no real evidence for this, just a gut feeling) that John himself got rid of it because he was afraid that the Boulder police might try to match it to the marks on JB's body. (This was right around the time when the "stungun" theory was under heavy challenge. Werner Spitz and Cyril Wecht were on tv claiming the marks were left by an object with prongs on it.)
One year after the Larry King incident, the chink in the armor became a huge dent. Lou Smit was doing what can only be likened to a traveling medicine show trying to prove his theory of an intruder. One of his points involved a demonstration of how he thought the intruder entered the house through a broken window that John Ramsey and Fleet White saw that morning. In Smit's scenario, the intruder had to lift up the grate, step in, and slide through. Now, there are a few things wrong with this. First, no footprints were found in the dirt at all. Second, to avoid wiping the dirt off with his butt, the intruder would have to go in all at once, like a gymnast on the uneven parallel bars. That could not have happened. The window doesn't open all the way. It can only open part way out because of a pipe. Smit is a skinny man, and was wearing no winter clothing when he demonstrated his scenario. Yet, he could only do it by dropping into the well, squatting, sticking his legs in, sliding around on his butt, and slipping in, during which he completely obliterated the dirt and leaves in the well. It just doesn't work. Steve Thomas said that he and several other detectives did this and they couldn't do it either. Worse than that, he claimed the intruder left the same way, climbing up onto a suitcase under the window and climbing out. His way out was even worse. To start with, the suitcase was not under the window when Fleet White found it. He moved it there. No hand prints were found in the well, and no fibers were snagged on the frame. And he was supposed to have done this in the dark. This man had just shown me that the theory I subscribed to could not have happened. I respected this man. That would change, as well. I'm a regular guy. I believe my own eyes, and I can't not see what my eyes see. I don't have a "stupid" button that I can push to get stupid. It was a shaking experience to say the very least.
That November, John and Patsy Ramsey were deposed in a civil lawsuit. Two things came out of their sworn testimony that turned the chinks into huge dents. First, a chart was produced containing side-by-side comparisons of Patsy's handwriting to the handwriting on the ransom letter. It was shocking, to put it mildly. The second thing came during John's deposition, where he finally confessed that he had been lying for some time. He had always claimed that he had hired private investigators to follow up on leads the police wouldn't because, supposedly, they were too caught up trying to pin it on the Ramseys. In his deposition, he stated that the private eyes were only to help build a defense against any future prosecution against them. "To keep us out of jail," he said. John seemed as committed to finding the real killer as OJ Simpson. And on that note, it didn't help that those same private eyes were caught with their hands in the cookie jar earlier in the year. Tom Miller, a lawyer and court-approved handwriting expert, had gone to trial in July for allegedly trying to buy a copy of the ransom letter illegally. He had been tricked into a setup by a tabloid reporter. He was arrested and approached with a deal: the charges would be dropped if he were to surrender his law license and repudiate his own handwriting credentials. No self-respecting man in his position would take that deal. So, he went to trial in July 2001. At his trial, it came out that David L. Miller, a private investigator working for the Ramseys, had been working behind the scenes to dig up dirt on Tom Miller to use against him if he were ever called to testify against Patsy at trial. David L. Miller admitted this on the stand. He admitted that because Tom Miller had decided that Patsy had written the letter, he had to be taken down. He also admitted that his boss, Ramsey lawyer Hal Haddon, had asked his old buddy, Dave Thomas, the county prosecutor who went after Tom Miller, for a favor. It was a shameful incident of legal circle-jerking that was exposed in court. I'm reminded of Boris Karloff's line in "The Body Snatcher:" "I stood in that witness box and took what should have been coming to you."
Finally, in 2002, the dents became large holes. That year, American television screens were full of the faces of kidnapping victims, whose names we still remember to this day: Danielle Van Dam, Samantha Runnion, and Elizabeth Smart (who was returned safely, thank the gods). And of all of those little girls who were murdered, not one of them even remotely resembled what happened to JonBenet. For years, Team Ramsey told us that JonBenet was killed by some pedophile killer, and we were forced to see what real pedophile killers do: they don't kill their victims inside the home, they don't redress their victims, and they dump their victims after killing them. Lin Wood, the Ramsey lawyer, had the unmitigated gall to co-opt the pain these families were in to push his clients' wild claim. Well, he didn't get away with it. Nancy Grace, the tough-as-nails Southern hellcat prosecutor was on that Larry King show that night, as was Marc Klaas, who has been a tireless advocate for laws to protect children from predators ever since his daughter Polly was kidnapped from her bedroom and murdered by a career criminal who had just gotten paroled for the umpteenth time in 1993. And they didn't go for it. Nancy pointed out how different JonBenet's killing was from those other cases, and Klaas, who is in a unique position to understand just what an insult Wood was committing to the memories of the victims' families, really went to town, reminding the audience that, like the Ramseys claim they have, David Westerfield, the killer of little Danielle Van Dam, also had no history of violent or deviant behavior. He also noted the tendency the Ramseys and Wood have for threatening lawsuits against anyone who questions their version of what happened.
And it was in that moment that I saw just what kind of people the Ramseys associate themselves with to destroy their enemies. Wood, this backwoods John Edwards-with-a-mean-streak redneck lawyer, sat there with his trademark "don't-(Expletive deleted)-with-me-punk" grin and said that no one should be intimidated by the facts, and if you don't know about the case, don't talk about it.
The heated sibilance in his voice made his polite words poisonous with very thinly-veiled threats and cruel mockery. I couldn't believe it. This man, supposedly an advocate for his "victim" clients, had just threatened a genuine victim's advocate. What's worse, Internet "sleuths" who genuflected every time John or Patsy Ramsey so much as sneezed (similar to what the media does with [name deleted here]), were absolutely
butchering the Van Dam family in the same way they claimed the Ramseys were being attacked (which was nowhere near as vicious). It didn't help the cause that on that night, I caught a rerun of the Comedy Central Show "South Park." In it, the Ramseys are ruthlessly parodied (along with OJ Simpson) and told to "stop acting like victims and confess, you (Expletive deleted) murdering murderers!"
By August of 2002, I was clearly in the camp of the people who say the Ramseys were involved. I had seen them for what they really were. The masks had fallen away, and the true faces were horrible to see. My father used to tell me, "always keep an open mind, just not so open that your brain falls out."
My money is on PR in a rage attack and then a big ole cover up with both parents
Sometimes I wonder.
