Oct. 1997 Article Vanity Fair - Check it

Whaleshark

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Has Anybody Read This?
(Note that some early details may be inaccurate due to this being from Oct. 1997..but the rest of it...well there are details I had not known before. The picture starts to fills in. The extent of the far reaches of power are truly seen in this report. This is a must read).

Missing Innocence: The JonBenet Ramsey Case
http://www.bardachreports.com/articles/v_19971000.html

There are some very eye-opening things in this report. Some things I already knew/most people know...but some things, well, speak for themselves.

For example:

Regarding the R Lawyer Team:
" Haddon became known as a power broker and kingmaker, and had a reputation for socializing with clients such as Hunter S. Thompson. Governor Roy Romer, former governor Richard Lamm, and Congressman David Skaggs are all political allies of Haddon's, as is Alex Hunter, Boulder's longtime district attorney. Haddon's partners, Bryan Morgan and Lee Foreman, by arguing a controversial intruder theory, won an acquittal in the celebrated 1980 trial of Lee Bib Lindsley, who was accused of murdering her husband, a prominent Colorado pediatrician"

"The one press conference Haddon's team has permitted the Ramseys, in the Boulder Marriott on May 1, was so elaborately orchestrated that it was called the "Ramsey infomercial" by Denver talk radio host Peter Boyles. The Ramsey team of lawyers and publicists stood against a back wall, but the selected reporters had agreed not to question them."

"Eight months after the murder - to the bafflement of the public, the FBI, and the police - Haddon's team has been singularly successful in dissuading Boulder D.A. Alex Hunter from filing charges."

"And when investigators finally coaxed the Ramsey team into having its clients provide handwriting samples, it was done not at the police station but Hofstrom's house, "as if it were a *advertiser censored* afternoon tea."

"One day in early July, I was contacted by a source with firsthand knowledge of the investigation. I arranged to meet with him in a parking lot outside Boulder. Edgy and fearful, he said he was speaking to me only as a last resort. He said that a flow of privileged, confidential information critical to a case against the Ramseys has been leaked from the D.A.'s office to the Ramseys' lawyers with the efficiency of a sieve. He said that the Ramseys have been provided with copies of all "the most sensitive and critical police and detective reports" as well as reproductions of both the ransom note and "practice" note found the same day. Haddon's team even persuaded Hofstrom and Hunter to give them "private viewings" of the original ransom notes and "the actual ligature and garrote." "The Ramseys' best defense attorneys are right inside Hunter's office," he mumbled bitterly."

"The sharing of such information, says 25-year F.B.I. veteran Gregg McCrary, "is unprecedented and unprofessional and an obstruction of justice...It's possible you could make a case for prosecutorial malfeasance. It completely compromises the investigation."

"On January 4, one of the Ramseys' private investigators left a message on McCrary's answering machine asking him to join their team as a profiler. McCrary had his secretary call to decline, he says, "because on a ratio of 12 to 1, child murders are committed by parents or a family member. In this case, you also have an elaborate 'staging' - the ransom note, the placement of the child's body - and I have never in my career seen or heard about a staging where it was not a family murder- or someone very close to the family. Just the note alone told me the killer was in the family or close to it."

"Prior to the Ramsey interviews, a show-and-tell presentation had been arranged by the Ramsey lawyers to convince Hunter that their clients had not written the ransom note. According to police reports, Patsy had given two accounts of the morning's events. "Mrs. Ramsey told me that she had gone into JonBenet's room at about 5:45 to wake her up," Officer French wrote. Finding the room empty, she went down the spiral back stairs, where she discovered the note. Later she said she found the note on the spiral back stairs when she went down to make coffee, and then ran to JonBenet's room. The note was written in uppercase and lowercase printed letters on paper torn from a legal pad found in the house. Also discovered on the pad was the practice note, beginning "Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey." Kidnappers, says McCrary, "do not spend hours at a crime scene after murdering their victims composing letters."

"Investigators question why Ramsey seemed to stall over getting the ransom money if he truly believed that the note had been written by dangerous kidnappers. "The money never left the bank," says one insider dryly".

Regarding the Paughs:
...A woman who worked for me in Georgia said, 'These are the meanest people I have ever met.' "

The Paugh house, a brick Colonial with a circular driveway, was a matter of great pride to Nedra. One investigator described their living room as "the shrine room," bedecked with trophies, ribbons and photographs of their pageant winning daughters. "They were so meshed up in each other, and it was my gut instinct that told me something wasn't right there," says Stobie. "They were going on and on about the size of Burke's penis.


"and six of the Ramsey attorneys were there watching the detectives watch their two handwriting experts. It was total ********. Hunter and DeMuth are nodding their heads in agreement as these guys are talking." Ramsey attorney Lee Foreman was seen giving DeMuth a backrub during a break. After the demonstration, Alex Hunter was overheard asking Hal Haddon, "Well, where should we go from here?"

"Why are they showing unindicted, uncharged murder suspects all the evidence?" the source asks. "Is this some privileged discovery process available to rich Boulderites? Everything they have done is against the advise of the Boulder police, the F.B.I., and the Attorney General's Capital Crimes Unit!"

"It's cold outside, and I suggest that we find a late-night coffee shop. In the car, I can see the depth of this man's agitation. "I have never seen politics and preferential treatment play such a major role in any case," he says. "If the Ramseys had been some poor Mexican couple, they would have been in their face for a week, got a confession out of them, and filed first-degree-murder-charges against them within days."

"Gregg McCrary adds that pedophiles and ransom kidnappers never overlap. "Pedophiles grab the child, molest them, and discard them. Ransom kidnappers are in it strictly for the money," he says.

"The following day, investigators videotaped an interview with John Andrew, at the conclusion of which they asked him what he thought an appropriate punishment would be for the person that committed this crime. After a thoughtful pause he said, "Forgiveness." Incredulous, the detectives went into the brutality of his half-sister's murder and asked him to reconsider his answer. Another silence ensued, then he said again, "Forgiveness."

Nanny on JBR and pageants:
"She would say to me, 'I don't want to walk down the runway. It scares me.' She liked to perform but didn't want to have to compete."

"Ramsey panicked and started throwing all his friends under the bus," says radio host Peter Boyles, "beginning with his best friend."

He learned that virtually everyone the police had interviewed got a visit soon after by one of the Ramsey family's sleuths. "I said, 'Why are they doing that?' and the police said, 'To obscure the truth.'

...Weeks later, Phillips says, she learned that she too had flunked the loyalty test. In April, one of Patsy's close friends phoned her to say that the Ramseys never wanted to see me again. I was not their friend."

One elected official in Boulder explains, "This is a small, incestuous legal community. We've never built fire walls, and this case really needed one at the very beginning." Owing to the early police incompetence, the indiscretions of the district attorney's office, and a sketchy coroner's report , many experts question whether any prosecution of the case is now possible.

___

I suggest reading the whole report, then taking time to digest..

..For those of you who may have read this long ago...viewing with fresh eyes is always good...new eyes, welcome to the twilight zone....
 
Whaleshark,
Yes, we have been over it before, including other legal relationships, and real-estate development companies that expose a closed commercial network capable of supplying mutual assistance to its corporate members.

The Paugh house, a brick Colonial with a circular driveway, was a matter of great pride to Nedra. One investigator described their living room as "the shrine room," bedecked with trophies, ribbons and photographs of their pageant winning daughters. "They were so meshed up in each other, and it was my gut instinct that told me something wasn't right there," says Stobie. "They were going on and on about the size of Burke's penis.
If this is a correct attribution, then you do have to wonder what was going on the Paugh household, was Burke aware of his celebrity status?

"Gregg McCrary adds that pedophiles and ransom kidnappers never overlap. "Pedophiles grab the child, molest them, and discard them. Ransom kidnappers are in it strictly for the money," he says.
This is why Coroner Meyer's verbatim remarks regarding sexual contact are so important.

"Why are they showing unindicted, uncharged murder suspects all the evidence?" the source asks. "Is this some privileged discovery process available to rich Boulderites? Everything they have done is against the advise of the Boulder police, the F.B.I., and the Attorney General's Capital Crimes Unit!"
Yes is the answer to that one. Ramsey wealth and corporate connections gave them unprecedented access to the case evidence, allowing them to mount a defense.


.
 
Thank you for resurrecting that article again. Steve Thomas was the mole.....as time went on it wasn't difficult to figure out it was him. He had direct quotes in his TV interviews that matched those in the article. Why no action was ever taken against him since he was part of an ongoing investigation when he was leaking information...some of which was distorted, is beyond me. He tromped all over the Ramsey's constitutional rights and he wanted them smeared in the public arena.
 
Maikai,

You put no credence into anything Gregg McCrary had to say then?
 
Maikai,

You put no credence into anything Gregg McCrary had to say then?

Not in this case.....there were others that only saw the crime in black and white. It either had to be a pedophile or kidnapper. I think John Douglas was the closest in getting it right; and also Lou Smit. Remember...this was in Boulder.......a town with a lot of "interesting" people. A kidnapping gone bad by amateurs.
 
Thank you for resurrecting that article again. Steve Thomas was the mole.....as time went on it wasn't difficult to figure out it was him. He had direct quotes in his TV interviews that matched those in the article. Why no action was ever taken against him since he was part of an ongoing investigation when he was leaking information...some of which was distorted, is beyond me. He tromped all over the Ramsey's constitutional rights and he wanted them smeared in the public arena.

Actually, if action were to be taken against Steve Thomas for leaking information, then a lot of others would go down with him, right? Let's be honest here, there were people in LE and the DA's office who made sure the Ramseys and their team knew everything going on, so how would you draw the line?
 
Actually, if action were to be taken against Steve Thomas for leaking information, then a lot of others would go down with him, right? Let's be honest here, there were people in LE and the DA's office who made sure the Ramseys and their team knew everything going on, so how would you draw the line?


We would also have to add LW, LS and so on. They all would need to be held accountable....
 
Not in this case.....there were others that only saw the crime in black and white. It either had to be a pedophile or kidnapper. I think John Douglas was the closest in getting it right; and also Lou Smit. Remember...this was in Boulder.......a town with a lot of "interesting" people. A kidnapping gone bad by amateurs.


McCrary never even said "it definitely must have been a Ramsey"as far as I know.If you read his comments carefully some of the stuff he says could also work if IDI.He was never biased re this case IMO.
And I agree that IF IDI J.Douglas was right when he said that it must have been someone very close to the family,actually to me this is the only IDI scenario that makes some sense.
But then again,nobody listened to him,WHY????The Ramsey didn't listen,why did they even hire him?It was to build a defense not to make sense or to find JB's killer.
 
Has Anybody Read This?
(Note that some early details may be inaccurate due to this being from Oct. 1997..but the rest of it...well there are details I had not known before. The picture starts to fills in. The extent of the far reaches of power are truly seen in this report. This is a must read).

Missing Innocence: The JonBenet Ramsey Case
http://www.bardachreports.com/articles/v_19971000.html

There are some very eye-opening things in this report. Some things I already knew/most people know...but some things, well, speak for themselves.

For example:

Regarding the R Lawyer Team:
" Haddon became known as a power broker and kingmaker, and had a reputation for socializing with clients such as Hunter S. Thompson. Governor Roy Romer, former governor Richard Lamm, and Congressman David Skaggs are all political allies of Haddon's, as is Alex Hunter, Boulder's longtime district attorney. Haddon's partners, Bryan Morgan and Lee Foreman, by arguing a controversial intruder theory, won an acquittal in the celebrated 1980 trial of Lee Bib Lindsley, who was accused of murdering her husband, a prominent Colorado pediatrician"

"The one press conference Haddon's team has permitted the Ramseys, in the Boulder Marriott on May 1, was so elaborately orchestrated that it was called the "Ramsey infomercial" by Denver talk radio host Peter Boyles. The Ramsey team of lawyers and publicists stood against a back wall, but the selected reporters had agreed not to question them."

"Eight months after the murder - to the bafflement of the public, the FBI, and the police - Haddon's team has been singularly successful in dissuading Boulder D.A. Alex Hunter from filing charges."

"And when investigators finally coaxed the Ramsey team into having its clients provide handwriting samples, it was done not at the police station but Hofstrom's house, "as if it were a *advertiser censored* afternoon tea."

"One day in early July, I was contacted by a source with firsthand knowledge of the investigation. I arranged to meet with him in a parking lot outside Boulder. Edgy and fearful, he said he was speaking to me only as a last resort. He said that a flow of privileged, confidential information critical to a case against the Ramseys has been leaked from the D.A.'s office to the Ramseys' lawyers with the efficiency of a sieve. He said that the Ramseys have been provided with copies of all "the most sensitive and critical police and detective reports" as well as reproductions of both the ransom note and "practice" note found the same day. Haddon's team even persuaded Hofstrom and Hunter to give them "private viewings" of the original ransom notes and "the actual ligature and garrote." "The Ramseys' best defense attorneys are right inside Hunter's office," he mumbled bitterly."

"The sharing of such information, says 25-year F.B.I. veteran Gregg McCrary, "is unprecedented and unprofessional and an obstruction of justice...It's possible you could make a case for prosecutorial malfeasance. It completely compromises the investigation."

"On January 4, one of the Ramseys' private investigators left a message on McCrary's answering machine asking him to join their team as a profiler. McCrary had his secretary call to decline, he says, "because on a ratio of 12 to 1, child murders are committed by parents or a family member. In this case, you also have an elaborate 'staging' - the ransom note, the placement of the child's body - and I have never in my career seen or heard about a staging where it was not a family murder- or someone very close to the family. Just the note alone told me the killer was in the family or close to it."

"Prior to the Ramsey interviews, a show-and-tell presentation had been arranged by the Ramsey lawyers to convince Hunter that their clients had not written the ransom note. According to police reports, Patsy had given two accounts of the morning's events. "Mrs. Ramsey told me that she had gone into JonBenet's room at about 5:45 to wake her up," Officer French wrote. Finding the room empty, she went down the spiral back stairs, where she discovered the note. Later she said she found the note on the spiral back stairs when she went down to make coffee, and then ran to JonBenet's room. The note was written in uppercase and lowercase printed letters on paper torn from a legal pad found in the house. Also discovered on the pad was the practice note, beginning "Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey." Kidnappers, says McCrary, "do not spend hours at a crime scene after murdering their victims composing letters."

"Investigators question why Ramsey seemed to stall over getting the ransom money if he truly believed that the note had been written by dangerous kidnappers. "The money never left the bank," says one insider dryly".

Regarding the Paughs:
...A woman who worked for me in Georgia said, 'These are the meanest people I have ever met.' "

The Paugh house, a brick Colonial with a circular driveway, was a matter of great pride to Nedra. One investigator described their living room as "the shrine room," bedecked with trophies, ribbons and photographs of their pageant winning daughters. "They were so meshed up in each other, and it was my gut instinct that told me something wasn't right there," says Stobie. "They were going on and on about the size of Burke's penis.


"and six of the Ramsey attorneys were there watching the detectives watch their two handwriting experts. It was total ********. Hunter and DeMuth are nodding their heads in agreement as these guys are talking." Ramsey attorney Lee Foreman was seen giving DeMuth a backrub during a break. After the demonstration, Alex Hunter was overheard asking Hal Haddon, "Well, where should we go from here?"

"Why are they showing unindicted, uncharged murder suspects all the evidence?" the source asks. "Is this some privileged discovery process available to rich Boulderites? Everything they have done is against the advise of the Boulder police, the F.B.I., and the Attorney General's Capital Crimes Unit!"

"It's cold outside, and I suggest that we find a late-night coffee shop. In the car, I can see the depth of this man's agitation. "I have never seen politics and preferential treatment play such a major role in any case," he says. "If the Ramseys had been some poor Mexican couple, they would have been in their face for a week, got a confession out of them, and filed first-degree-murder-charges against them within days."

"Gregg McCrary adds that pedophiles and ransom kidnappers never overlap. "Pedophiles grab the child, molest them, and discard them. Ransom kidnappers are in it strictly for the money," he says.

"The following day, investigators videotaped an interview with John Andrew, at the conclusion of which they asked him what he thought an appropriate punishment would be for the person that committed this crime. After a thoughtful pause he said, "Forgiveness." Incredulous, the detectives went into the brutality of his half-sister's murder and asked him to reconsider his answer. Another silence ensued, then he said again, "Forgiveness."

Nanny on JBR and pageants:
"She would say to me, 'I don't want to walk down the runway. It scares me.' She liked to perform but didn't want to have to compete."

"Ramsey panicked and started throwing all his friends under the bus," says radio host Peter Boyles, "beginning with his best friend."

He learned that virtually everyone the police had interviewed got a visit soon after by one of the Ramsey family's sleuths. "I said, 'Why are they doing that?' and the police said, 'To obscure the truth.'

...Weeks later, Phillips says, she learned that she too had flunked the loyalty test. In April, one of Patsy's close friends phoned her to say that the Ramseys never wanted to see me again. I was not their friend."

One elected official in Boulder explains, "This is a small, incestuous legal community. We've never built fire walls, and this case really needed one at the very beginning." Owing to the early police incompetence, the indiscretions of the district attorney's office, and a sketchy coroner's report , many experts question whether any prosecution of the case is now possible.

___

I suggest reading the whole report, then taking time to digest..

..For those of you who may have read this long ago...viewing with fresh eyes is always good...new eyes, welcome to the twilight zone....

Reminds me more of 1984 by George Orwell. Bad is good, ignorance is wisdom, and Big Brother is ALWAYS watching.
 
Why no action was ever taken against him since he was part of an ongoing investigation when he was leaking information...some of which was distorted, is beyond me.

I was just talking to Roy about that, Maikai. Or TRYING to, at any rate. And I can TELL you why: because in order to do that, the people going after him would have to air their own dirty laundry.

He tromped all over the Ramsey's constitutional rights and he wanted them smeared in the public arena.

:boohoo: You're breaking my bleedin' heart, Maikai. Frankly, you should be thankful that's as far as he took it. If it had been ME, I might have just said "sc**w the rules" and gone after them like Dirty Harry or Sheriff Wydell in The Devil's Rejects.
 
I think John Douglas was the closest in getting it right; and also Lou Smit.

Yicch! Two egomaniacal peas in a pod. One forgets everything he ever wrote about finding killers, the other invents "evidence" out of thin air.

Maikai, if THIS is your idea of fighting for justice, it takes some nerve to trash ST! I can tell you that!
 
Actually, if action were to be taken against Steve Thomas for leaking information, then a lot of others would go down with him, right? Let's be honest here, there were people in LE and the DA's office who made sure the Ramseys and their team knew everything going on, so how would you draw the line?

Also, beck, Maikai conveniently omits how the DA tried to RUIN him after he left the case (which I would not have done, BTW) so they could salvage their public image.
 
haleshark, thanks for posting the VF article.
It was a good reread.
Start as you mean to go on, the goings on within the PBD never fail to astound.

http://www.bardachreports.com/articles/v_19971000.html
In fact, in the first week of January, without permission from the department, Arndt gave Ramsey attorney Patrick Burke a copy of the ransom note. "There should have been thunder rolling down the halls of the P.D., and **** didn't happen," says one observer. "She could be the Mark Fuhrman of this case." In mid-May, Linda Arndt was taken off the case.


Ya Maikai, the VF does have that familiarity of stories told by ST?
 
this thing about Burke's size...I don't get it. is there anything TO get or is this just one more thing about this family I don't understand? help me out if you can. But I will say this...Burke wasn't a baby. Did he hear this talk from his family? wow.
 
Not in this case.....there were others that only saw the crime in black and white. It either had to be a pedophile or kidnapper. I think John Douglas was the closest in getting it right; and also Lou Smit. Remember...this was in Boulder.......a town with a lot of "interesting" people. A kidnapping gone bad by amateurs.
I can see how a kidnapping could go bad. If one little thing didn't go as planned, then the whole thing would blow up in smoke. But I can't see how molesting/murdering and then leaving the victim there, was part of the plan. and practicing and then writing a ransom note? for a body they didn't even take? a ransom for what? Surely even 'amateur kidnappers' wouldn't have wasted all that time...just got the heck out of dodge. MOO
 
Actually, if action were to be taken against Steve Thomas for leaking information, then a lot of others would go down with him, right? Let's be honest here, there were people in LE and the DA's office who made sure the Ramseys and their team knew everything going on, so how would you draw the line?

Yes, there's probably blame to spread around, but I think legally, the DA could share the information with the Ramsey's lawyers, and it was above board. The Vanitiy Fair article was done because Steve Thomas wanted things his way, and if he couldn't have it his way,instead of going through channels he took it upon himself to sneak around and share distorted information with a reporter.
 
I can see how a kidnapping could go bad. If one little thing didn't go as planned, then the whole thing would blow up in smoke. But I can't see how molesting/murdering and then leaving the victim there, was part of the plan. and practicing and then writing a ransom note? for a body they didn't even take? a ransom for what? Surely even 'amateur kidnappers' wouldn't have wasted all that time...just got the heck out of dodge. MOO

dodie20,
Well said. Of course it was not a kidnapping gone wrong. It was a staging gone wrong.

P.S.
For the blind who lead the blind i.e. IDI: Why kidnap a dead body then leave it behind, duh!


.
 
this thing about Burke's size...I don't get it. is there anything TO get or is this just one more thing about this family I don't understand? help me out if you can. But I will say this...Burke wasn't a baby. Did he hear this talk from his family? wow.

dodie20,
Its one more thing. Add pageant obsession to your list too. Penis size is patently something of a requirement in the Paugh household. The unanswered question is obviously erect or not?

Nedra obviously had her standards, wonder if Patsy was aware of these?


.
 
I can see how a kidnapping could go bad. If one little thing didn't go as planned, then the whole thing would blow up in smoke. But I can't see how molesting/murdering and then leaving the victim there, was part of the plan. and practicing and then writing a ransom note? for a body they didn't even take? a ransom for what? Surely even 'amateur kidnappers' wouldn't have wasted all that time...just got the heck out of dodge. MOO

Well, picture one...or two that came up with a plan and due to opportunity, would be able to gain access to the house by casing it beforehand. They would know JBR was a trophy daughter, with parents that would do anything to get her back---particularly with a scary note. They may have thought the Ramseys would not call the police....would go to the bank and get the money, and then hand it over. The plan could have started with a burglary plan, after seeing the article in the paper.

They knew they could go back out the broken window, without setting off any alarms. The problem could have started in the basement----JBR may have been more then they could handle--perhaps putting up a fuss. The overkill and assault to me, appear that they became angry at her. Lou Smit claims there was evidence that they tried to put her in a suitcase, but they couldn't get it through the window. At that point the kidnapping plan was unravelling. The note was already on the staircase. I think they killed and assaulted her in a rage, put her in the closest hiding spot they could find---the cellar room, and just got out of dodge then. This wasn't the work of professionals.

I don't know why a half-assed plan at a kidnapping attempt, that went bad is so unbelievable to some, and a parent's doing this to cover up an accident with staging is more believable......especially since you have parents with no past history of abuse---quite the opposite; and parents that did not have the criminal knowledge to do staging or know the movie lines/plots. As Lou Smit has said: most crimes are as they appear to be.
 

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