The Case of JonBenet Ramsey-CBS Sept. 18

[andreww]

CBS decided that on the heels of so many shows regarding JBR that they would shorten the 3 part series 6 hrs to 2 parts 4 hrs with the conclusion tonight.

Not true. LW threatened legal action if James Kolar spoke about his hypothesis. It was removed.


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[johnjay]

Not true. LW threatened legal action if James Kolar spoke about his hypothesis. It was removed.


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What's the source of that information?

 

[UKGuy]

Not true. LW threatened legal action if James Kolar spoke about his hypothesis. It was removed.


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andreww,
LW will be hoping that there are no nasty trolls out there who will flood his twitter page and media setup with links to Kolar's FF book site and Amazon page, LOL.


.

 

[UKGuy]

1567 peeps on board, that's a lot of eyeballs.

.

 

[asyousay]

So we have a kidnapper that used

Pen and paper from the house
Fed the victim before killing her
Put the pen and paper back in its rightful place
Borrowed the flashlight to whack Jon Benet on the head with it
Wiped it down and left it on the counter
Laid out the pages on the stairs just incase the Ramsey's missed a page ( it was the longer ransom note in history so that was kind of the kidnapper to think ahead)
Ignored Burke who has admitted he was downstairs and playing with his toys


Anything else ?

 

[buggiegirl]

- Mark Klaas was suspect #1 in his daughter's murder and you know what he did? He took a polygraph, he cooperated with police, he did everything he could to help and he allowed police to do what they needed to do so he could be cleared. That's the way a parent handles a killing when it was *someone outside the family.*

It scares me when people refer to taking a polygraph as something an innocent person should do. NO ONE should be taking polygraphs. They should be illegal. They are inadmissible in court because they are ridiculous pseudoscience. The most they show is that you are willing to take a polygraph.

 

[Madeleine74]

It scares me when people refer to taking a polygraph as something an innocent person should do. NO ONE should be taking polygraphs. They should be illegal. They are inadmissible in court because they are ridiculous pseudoscience. The most they show is that you are willing to take a polygraph.

They are an investigative tool and the willingness (nay eagerness) to take one often informs LE that the person has nothing to hide. And then passing it cements that. No, not accepted in court, but those who take them willingly seem to feel fine with it.

 

[UKGuy]

So we have a kidnapper that used

Pen and paper from the house
Fed the victim before killing her
Put the pen and paper back in its rightful place
Borrowed the flashlight to whack Jon Benet on the head with it
Wiped it down and left it on the counter
Laid out the pages on the stairs just incase the Ramsey's missed a page ( it was the longer ransom note in history so that was kind of the kidnapper to think ahead)
Ignored Burke who has admitted he was downstairs and playing with his toys

Anything else ?

asyousay,
Dressed her hair in asymmetric hair ties, and put on nice clean pair of size-12 underwear, after wiping her down, so says the Coroner, his big mistake was to leave a footprint in the wine-cellar, so maybe we can trace that ...

He must have spoken to BR and said I think I strangled your sister as BR was overheard talking over the asphyxiation with DS, can you imagine that, and the mother, i.e. Susan Stine heard it all ...

What must the gossip have been like: what did he say Doug?

.

 

[PositiveLight]

Jim is interviewing Elliot Zaret Reporter for Boulder daily camera 1996.
Jim asks him if anything they said during that time strike him as odd.

Zaret: "*sighs* The whole thing was odd at that time."
Jim: "How did that affect the community here?"
Zaret:" I don't think the people believed her."
Jim: "What did you know about the Ramsey's as a family? What was known in the community about them at that point?"
Zaret: "Very Little. It's not like OJ Simpson. They weren't famous people. Yeah they had money, he had a successful company, but they weren't nationally famous. So there was no compelling reason why this should have become the big sensation that it was. But it was the week after Christmas, before New Years. There's no news. It's a very quite time of national news and that was when the 24 hour news cycle was still pretty young. The idea of how you fill it in these 4 hour gaps where nothing is happening for a whole week drove I think a lot of what happened next. Which is there were these videos of this little girl in the pageants with makeup on dancing almost seductively to the (unintelligible) to be wrong and sexual in a way that a 6 year old shouldn't be. Growing up in the North East Pageants were not common in the deep South in Georgia where they are from, that's a normal thing for little girls to do."

Discussing the media frenzy.
Discussing the similarities with OJ in regards to how news coverage was taking to it.
Zaret also comments that he thinks it played a part in the LE and DA way of handling it. That they didn't want to fall into some of the same pitfalls that the prosecutors in the OJ trial had because the police hadn't did a superb job gathering evidence in OJ trial.

4 months after daughter's death, parents do separate interviews with the police lasting 8 hours. (April 30, 1997)
May1. 1997 Ramsey's hold press conference.

The experts are back looking at the interviews and the press conference.
JR makes a comment that they had finally accomplished talking with investigators.
Fitzgerald asks them to stop the video.
Fitzgerald: "Why is that such an accomplishment to go and talk to the police about the possible resolution of your daughter's homicide?
Stan: "120 days after it happened"
Fitzgerald: "Why is that a successful accomplishment?"

Press conference continues.
JR and PR denying they would ever hurt JonBenet 'that child".
both experts say they came across as adamant in their statements.
Yet, when they started answering questions JR started hemming and hawing and couldn't properly answer questions.
Compare their responses to their practiced I didn't kill my daughter speeches.
Completely different.
On to tonight's episode~

 

[buggiegirl]

Also I find it strange and almost insulting that the R's, DP, and LW care more about what people on the Internet think than spending time finding the "real killer" in BR's own words. :facepalm:

To be fair, their lawyer should really only be concerned with his clients well being. I suppose the best way to show his clients are innocent would be to show who is guilty, but investigation isn't his job. The Ramseys though, they should be a bit concerned with finding the intruder if they're so sure there was one. The similarity to OJ promising to find The Real Killer is so glaring it's gross.

 

[ElleElle]

Finally! I am watching Part 1, and this is what I hear from Patsy:

Why did you do this

 

[buggiegirl]

The touch DNA (skin cells) was recovered from two places on the long johns (waste band and leg). These samples match a deposit of blood DNA on her underwear. It has been established that it is male DNA but race is either unknown or has not been made public.

So is the DNA from the two places confirmed to be touch DNA from skin cells? I've gotten nowhere googling for an answer from an unbiased source and someone on Reddit says amylase was found in the sample making it saliva. Is that true? Anyone? And could a saliva sample from packaging in the factory be transferred via touch to the leggings?

 

[Schuby]

They are an investigative tool and the willingness (nay eagerness) to take one often informs LE that the person has nothing to hide. And then passing it cements that. No, not accepted in court, but those who take them willingly seem to feel fine with it.

It is a common tactic for LE to tell someone who has passed a polygraph that they actually failed to give the suspect a sense of the inevitability of their guilt and persuade them to confession.

 

[Schuby]

So is the DNA from the two places confirmed to be touch DNA from skin cells? I've gotten nowhere googling for an answer from an unbiased source and someone on Reddit says amylase was found in the sample making it saliva. Is that true? Anyone? And could a saliva sample from packaging in the factory be transferred via touch to the leggings?

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/touch-dna-cleared-jonbenets-kin/

 

[buggiegirl]

They are an investigative tool and the willingness (nay eagerness) to take one often informs LE that the person has nothing to hide. And then passing it cements that. No, not accepted in court, but those who take them willingly seem to feel fine with it.

Even if I was 100% innocent of something I'm accused of I would absolutely refuse to take one. It can only hurt you, not help you. And you are saying that being willing to take one and passing it means something, but if I am innocent and refusing to take one, does that mean I might be guilty? It means I know polygraphs are useless and dangerous.

 

[UKGuy]

So is the DNA from the two places confirmed to be touch DNA from skin cells? I've gotten nowhere googling for an answer from an unbiased source and someone on Reddit says amylase was found in the sample making it saliva. Is that true? Anyone? And could a saliva sample from packaging in the factory be transferred via touch to the leggings?

buggiegirl,

Excerpt from Kolar's book originally posted by cynic

There are six unique and unidentified genetic profiles – five male profiles and one female profile.

DNA testing involving fingernail scrapings from both hands revealed JonBenet’s genetic profile on both sides. In addition to JonBenet’s profile, scrapings from the left fingernails revealed unidentified male #1 The right fingernails indicated that two further unique profiles were present, unidentified male #2, and a unique unknown female profile. (JonBenet could not be excluded as a contributor) The waistband, seams, and crotch of panties (Distal Stain 007-2) CODIS all matched and produced the profile that has been entered into the CODIS database, unidentified male #3 (Strength/weakness of profile: 10 markers)

The above profiles were determined through typical STR DNA testing. Touch DNA (TDNA) testing, all presumably done at the Bode facility revealed one matching profile and a further two unique profiles, both male:

TDNA on the waistband of leggings matching DS 007-2 male #3

TDNA on the wrist bindings – male #4 (Strength/weakness of profile: 6 markers)

TDNA on the “garrote” – male #5 (Strength/weakness of profile: 7 markers)

(Also, TDNA on the pink Barbie nightgown found in the Wine Cellar with the body of JonBenét was identified as belonging to BR and PR.)

*A full CODIS profile has 13 markers; any profile with fewer markers is a partial profile. All DNA profiles in this case are partial profiles The highest quality DNA, and the only profile in this case that has been entered in the CODIS database, at 10 markers, is Distal Stain 007-2 All other DNA is weaker, in other words, less markers. *

Kolar’s book confirmed the speculation that the profile from one of the blood spots that eventually ended up in CODIS originally had only 9 markers.

The male DNA sample, subsequently identified as Distal Stain 007-2, only contained 9 genetic markers, and like the DNA collected from beneath JonBenét’s fingernails, was of insufficient strength to be entered into the state and national databases. Moreover, the sample was so small that technicians were not able to identify the biological origin of the exemplar. Foreign Faction, Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet, James Kolar, page 140

Eventually a 10th marker was identified which then met the minimum standard for entry into CODIS:

DNA replication technology was utilized in the Denver Police Department’s crime lab, and the 10th marker was eventually strengthened to the point that the unidentified male sample discovered in JonBenét’s underwear was able to be entered into the state and national databases. This laboratory success didn’t take place until 2002, nearly 6 years after the murder of JonBenét Foreign Faction, Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet, James Kolar, page 140

I met with the man who had worked so diligently to enhance the DNA sample identified as Distal Stain 007-2. Denver Police Department crime lab supervisor Greg Laberge met me for lunch in early December 2005 and advised me that the forensic DNA sample collected from the underwear was microscopic, totally invisible to the naked eye. So small was it in quantity, consisting of only approximately 1/2 nanogram of genetic material, equivalent to about 100 – 150 cells, that it took him quite a bit of work to identify the 10th marker that eventually permitted its entry into the CODIS database. Foreign Faction, Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet, James Kolar, pages 303 - 304

The profiles found from the fingernail clippings of JonBenet were presumably not from the non-sterile nail clippers that the coroner was in the habit of using. (However, to the best of my knowledge, clippers are not used in medical autopsies, only in autopsies performed for legal reasons. I don’t know the reasons for those eight prior autopsies. Therefore, as an example, if the last time the clippers were actually used was 10 autopsies ago it would have missed by this screening process.) Investigators were able to obtain the DNA samples from eight (8) of the autopsy examinations that preceded that of JonBenét. These samples were analyzed, but none of these matched the unknown male and female samples collected from JonBenét’s fingernails. Perhaps more disappointing, was the fact that the unknown samples lacked sufficient identifying markers that permitted their entry into the state and national DNA databases. Foreign Faction, Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet, James Kolar, pages 137 - 138

Amylase or something else? Laberge indicated that the sample had flashed the color of blue during CBI’s initial testing of the sample, suggesting that amylase was present. Amylase is an enzyme that can be found in saliva, and it had been theorized by other investigators in the case that someone involved in the production phase of this clothing article could have been the source of this unknown DNA sample. It was thought that this could have been deposited there by coughing, sneezing, or spitting or through a simple transfer of saliva on the hands of a garment handler. Foreign Faction, Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet, James Kolar, pages 137 - 138

The only test that “flashes blue,” in the presence of amylase is the Phadebas test. Take note of some of the things which can produce a false positive:

What is the Phadebas Press Test? How specific is it and what can cause a false positive result?

The Phadebas Press Test uses a filterpaper “test sheet” impregnated with an insoluble starch-dye complex. The test sheets are moistened with sterile water and then laid on an article of evidence. Saliva present on the item being examined will contain α-amylase that will hydrolyze the starch in the overlying area of the test sheet. This process releases a blue dye to form a blue stain that co-localizes with the position of the saliva stain. Areas of the evidence that do not contain α-amylase should not show the presence of a blue stain. Phadebas Press Test provides only a presumptive indication of saliva and is not human specific. This test is known to yield false positive results with fecal samples and some investigators have reported positive results with vaginal swabs, human milk, some plant materials and the saliva of animals including dogs and cats. Positive results have also been reported as very likely resulting from secondary transfer of saliva (e.g., from the hands to an article of clothing). http://forsci-associates.com/serologysaliva.html

Pro and con for the “sweatshop” theory

Pro: The male sample identified in Distal Stain 007-2 was weak, and degraded to begin with, and weaker samples of the same genetic material were found in the waistband and leg bands of the underwear. It was observed that these were areas of the clothing that would have been handled more strenuously during the production phase of the clothing article. Foreign Faction, Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet, James Kolar, page 304

Con: Laberge advised, confirming what Tom Bennett had previously shared with me, that some random DNA tests had been conducted in ‘off-the-shelf’ children’s underwear [SNIP] He indicated that DNA samples had been located on the articles of new clothing, but that they had been approximately 1/10 the strength of the unknown sample found in JonBenét’s underwear. Foreign Faction, Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet, James Kolar, pages 304 - 305

Conclusions (from the book.)

Laberge indicated that it was his opinion that the male sample of DNA could have been deposited there by a perpetrator, or that there could have been some other explanation for its presence, totally unrelated to the crime. I would learn that many other scientists held the same opinion. Foreign Faction, Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet, James Kolar, page 305

The same theoretical principles of transfer thought to be involved in the DNA collected from beneath JonBenét’s nails could be applied to the transfer of genetic material from her underwear to the leggings. “Cloth to cloth” transfer could be responsible for this new evidence. Foreign Faction, Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet, James Kolar, page 427

I believed, as did many of the other investigators working the case, that that there may have been a plausible explanation for the DNA found in the underwear and that its presence may have had nothing whatsoever to do with the death of JonBenét. The presence of this DNA is a question that remains to be resolved, but it continues to be my opinion that this single piece of DNA evidence has to be considered in light of all of the other physical, behavioral, and statement evidence that has been collected over the course of the investigation.

Foreign Faction, Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet, James Kolar, page 305

...

 

[just the facts pls]

Let's be fair, though. A DNA expert came forward during the ID show to say that clearing someone on DNA alone is not a good idea, and LW admitted on Dr Phil that he threatened to sue BPD if Mary Lacy (sp?) did not stop investigating the Rs. The Rs being "cleared" isn't just the result of dubious touch DNA testing but also an aggressive legal move on the part of LW.

 

[TartLemon]

JR takes charge of everything EXCEPT the 911 phone call? The most crucial thing to begin the whole opening of themselves to 'get help'? It;s the ONLY thing PR did to be in contact with LE that morning. She didn't accost the responding officers with 'My baby is gone! Help me!' I realize there is no playbook to follow when something like this happens to you, but wouldn't the first response be to grasp at your only hope at that point? It's like when someone is drowning. The first response is to flail away and the life guard is trained to approach without the drowning person being able to pull them under. The analogy is to describe how I would assume someone 'drowning' in the throes of such a horrific scene.

 

[buggiegirl]

LW admitted on Dr Phil that he threatened to sue BPD if Mary Lacy (sp?) did not stop investigating the Rs.

What the heck? In what universe is that even possible? What could he possibly sue them for? I presume harassment but they're cops investigating an unsolved murder.

Clearing someone due to unsourced DNA is so sketchy. If it was semen DNA, or blood even, I could see being very sure it was the killer's. But saliva? When there's a not infinitesimal chance it's a sneeze or something, no way!

 

[just the facts pls]

Even if I was 100% innocent of something I'm accused of I would absolutely refuse to take one. It can only hurt you, not help you. And you are saying that being willing to take one and passing it means something, but if I am innocent and refusing to take one, does that mean I might be guilty? It means I know polygraphs are useless and dangerous.

I am also concerned about how many people use privately administered polygraphs to prove their innocence, so anyone with enough money can buy the results they want. Poor people are more likely to be railroaded by biased results than rich people.