Introduction
For the past year I have been following a new line of inquiry into the Ramsey note and the larger crime scene around JonBenét Ramsey’s murder. This has led me to find many pieces of information that I believe are highly relevant for understanding what happened the night of her murder and how her death was covered up by her mother Patsy and how the crime scene was staged. The inquiry also has uncovered what I think is the most damning evidence against John Ramsey with regard to him showing guilty knowledge of Patsy’s involvement and her method of staging. It also (again) points away from Burke being involved in the crime in a significant way, with his involvement likely being at the most that he has some knowledge of what really happened that night.
In my analysis I have put the ransom note central as many people have often pointed out that it is the most important piece of evidence in the case. I agree with that assessment but I believe the note has never been analyzed in a satisfactory manner. Although much focus has rightly been placed on analyzing the handwriting, in my opinion the publicly available information about this analysis (particularly the analysis done by Cina Wong) is already convincing enough, when considered alongside all the other available circumstantial evidence as presented for example by Steve Thomas in his book, to thoroughly implicate Patsy as being involved in the crime. In my opinion Steve Thomas’s analysis of the case has very convincingly shown that Patsy Ramsey should be front and center when trying to understand the murder. Even though I don’t necessarily agree with all of his conclusions or interpretations of some pieces of evidence, I think his arguments for Patsy being the main suspect are far more convincing than any arguments that have been made for Burke’s involvement (or for John or anyone else being the main culprit). In my analysis, I have therefore mostly taken for granted that Patsy was involved in coming up with the words of the note and the staging elements of the crime scene, with only John’s possible involvement being an open question. However, my findings have supported and justified this approach with virtually all new circumstantial evidence pointing back to Patsy again and again and with pretty much all of the evidence making sense if John suspected or found out about Patsy’s involvement in JonBenét’s death only on the morning of the 26th, as Steve Thomas has also credibly argued.
I think the informational value of the content of the note has been relatively neglected or explained away too much. This is probably partly due to the fact that Don Foster’s analysis of the note has never been made public, in addition to his credibility being attacked because of his actions prior to becoming involved in the case. Furthermore, because the full inventory of videos and books present in the Ramsey home that night has never been made public, people seem to believe that no further relevant information about the crime can be gleaned from the content of the note.
People have either dismissed too much of the note’s content because they believe the only important conclusion is that the note was obviously fake and a clear sign of deception or, alternatively, they have (in my opinion wrongly) claimed to understand how the note came about by appealing either to an evident master plan by either parent to get rid of the body or some other plan (taking the note’s message too much at face value) or by appealing to a general and too vague a notion of the note being inspired by movies. In particular, the ‘movie buff’ explanation of the note has never quite explained just how one gets from the suspected movies (most often named are Dirty Harry, Speed, Ransom, Ruthless People and Nick of Time) to the actual words and concepts in the note. The appeal to a person having seen these movies so many times that they could easily recall and borrow key concepts and phrasing on the spot I believe is not a good explanation and overlooks many distinctive features of the note.
The new circumstantial evidence that I present and that I incorporate into my analysis of the Ramsey note and the larger crime scene hint at a particular unfolding of events that led to many of the mysterious elements in the crime scene that have been part of much speculation.
Although my theory admittedly still involves a lot of speculation, it also at least backs up many of the more speculative claims with new circumstantial evidence. For this reason, I hope that even if people disagree with some, or even many, of the smaller points that I make or with some of my interpretations of particular pieces of evidence, they can see the value of my approach for better understanding the crime scene and for explaining some of the more mysterious and infamous parts of the case.
Among the many things that my theory tries to explain (apart from the method of composition for the ransom note) are a motive for the crime, the use of a garrote, the use of a paintbrush for the garrote, JonBenét’s hair being tied into the knot of the garrote, the time between the skull fracture and the strangulation, the physical injuries sustained by JonBenét including the two dotted abrasions on her lower back as well as the abrasions on her face and throat and the genital trauma evidence, her being dressed in the over-sized panties and the long johns, the presence of the blanket and the gown in the wine cellar, the markings on her palm, the markings on the photos in the article about the Esprit awards, the flashlight on the kitchen counter, the binoculars upstairs, the underlining of verses in the Bible, the Christmas card in the trash bin in JonBenét’s room, the kitchen knife being found upstairs close to JonBenét’s bedroom, how the intruder theory came about and why Lou Smit became convinced a stun gun was involved in the crime, the ransom amount being $118,000, the sign-off ‘Victory! S.B.T.C’ and its meaning and origin, Patsy’s 911 call showing guilty knowledge of staging including what was said at the end of the call and why, Patsy’s behavior post-911 call on the 26th showing guilty knowledge, the Ramseys’ behavior in interviews post-crime showing guilty knowledge, as well as several pieces of evidence that I believe are relevant to the crime but that can only be seen to be relevant in light of the theory. On top of it all, I believe I have uncovered a deliberate confession by Patsy Ramsey that hints at the nature of the event leading up to the skull fracture.
A brief overview
There are two main major claims that I make from which I derive my interpretations about all of the more specific pieces of evidence listed above. Therefore, again, I hope that even if you disagree about any number of the more specific interpretations about specific pieces of evidence (and I readily admit that there is a good chance that I am wrong about a number of them, plus I’m certainly not as sure about some of the interpretations as I am about others), that you will see the value of approaching the case and trying to understand and explain the crime scene from these two larger points of view.
The first claim is that, whatever happened to cause the skull fracture that most experts (including coroner John Meyer who performed the official autopsy) agreed came first, Patsy Ramsey was desperate to reverse her daughter’s misfortune and turned to (her knowledge of) the book Healed of Cancer by Dodie Osteen. This is the book which Jeff Shapiro suspected could explain the ransom note’s sign-off ‘S.B.T.C’. I think that his observation on the role this book played in Patsy’s life is absolutely crucial for understanding the case although I don’t think Shapiro took his analysis of this aspect of the crime far enough and I also don’t think he got the interpretation of 118 right (he suspected it may have derived from Patsy’s reportedly being enamored with the number through Psalm 118 that was mentioned in some of her healing books, including Healed of Cancer, and on which she relied during her battle with cancer). In addition, I think he overlooked some crucial aspects of the crime and crime scene in connection with the book. But I agree that 118 was inspired by the Osteen-Bible connection and that it was NOT intended (at least not primarily, if she was even aware of the bonus amount at all) as a reference to John’s bonus. Something similar applies for the outside Seraph report’s profile on Patsy which looked for religious motives in the crime, which is an aspect I agree was important, even if their specific interpretations were not right in my view.
I think Patsy turned to Osteen’s book in sheer desperation to try to apply what she had used in her battle with cancer (which she believed had worked and saved her from cancer) to the predicament her daughter was in after the skull fracture. She tried to interpret the grand claims and promises made in the book to mean that she could save JonBenét through the power of faith healing so that she could avoid having to come clean about what happened. When this didn’t work, and as JonBenét’s condition deteriorated, she turned to the ultimate promise in the book that the Lord and his representative on Earth, Jesus Christ, Patsy’s Savior, could heal ALL sickness, and she interpreted that even the greatest miracle Jesus performed, that of the resurrection of Lazarus, was possible in her own life if she obeyed God’s commandments. But when, after trying to apply all of the advice she found in the book and interpreting all of the commands she believed she encountered through following the book’s references to the Bible, JonBenét still didn’t get better, she began staging a kidnapping-turned-to-murder scene in which a JonBenét left behind to resemble the scene from Lazarus’s resurrection could double as a crime scene left by a kidnapper-killer in case the miracle of her resurrection would not actually come about.
Still being in denial about her daughter’s death, she wrote a ransom note that had dual meaning for her. The note was overtly intended as a message by a mysterious intruder that could possibly mislead police and the outside world if JonBenét really was going to remain dead forever, but she covertly still desperately hoped for and clung to the belief of the possibility of the real-world resurrection of her daughter if she followed the commands she had encountered in Healed of Cancer plus the NIV Study Bible and if she imbued the scene around JonBenét’s death/condition with enough religious meaning that had spiritual potency. The problem was that one of the commands she encountered was to confess her sin. This was something that Patsy, whose observed behavior has been widely interpreted to show signs of narcissism, was not willing or able to do. That’s why she set to writing a note with two meanings. One meaning is that of the strange, not-so-believable kidnapper-killer note we are all familiar with. The other is the religious meaning that many of the lines can be seen to have when compared with the advice given in Osteen’s Healed of Cancer and the Bible books and passages that it references.
This brings us to the second major claim: the Ramsey note was NOT the product of paraphrasing half-remembered/memorized movie lines spontaneously and conveniently recalled at the right time when Patsy needed them. It was a sourced note, the product of actively gathering and using books that could help inspire Patsy to come up with some believable bad guy words, phrases and concepts. Going through these sources, I think she looked for words and concepts that showed some overlap with those that she encountered in her Osteen/Bible readings and which she was trying to leverage for spiritual healing through magical thinking. In other words, as she went through these books trying to come up with a kidnapper narrative, she paid special attention to words and concepts that could simultaneously be used as bad guy talk for the outside world and as a message for her God to show that she had followed His instructions and that the miracle of JonBenét’s healing/resurrection deserved to be brought about by Him. I have identified a number of sources that I hypothesize were present in the Ramsey home that night (used alongside some of the books known to have been present) and that I believe were used by Patsy to come up with most of the words and concepts in the note as well as a number of staging elements in the larger crime scene outside of the note. I have done some intensive reading and comparing of these sources with the Ramsey note and crime scene (as well as later Ramsey interviews and testimony about their behavior) and I have tried to identify as many of the specific passages that I think were used by Patsy that night to stage the crime scene (including the note) and some of which I think were used by both Patsy and John in the weeks, months and even years after the murder to flesh out the intruder theory. The first major breakthrough I experienced while investigating this approach that convinced me this approach could be fruitful was finding a connection between the murder weapon and a piece of evidence (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary) that Steve Thomas described in his book and that has been much speculated about.
Another early key result was the realization that the movie Dirty Harry was not only a movie but had a movie novelization as well. In investigating this source I became very much convinced that this book makes a lot more sense as the source for the Dirty Harry elements overlapping with the Ramsey note than a reliance on memories from repeated exposure to the movie.
Once this was clear in my mind, I used the genre of the action-crime-suspense movie novelization to look for other books that might have been owned by people who had the Dirty Harry novelization. This led to some further sources that in my opinion are highly likely to have been used for the note, e.g. the Lethal Weapon novelization. In addition, a comment on a YouTube video by True Crime Rocket Science (investigating the movies that might have been used for inspiration) in which user @ziggypop8106 mentioned that kidnapping movies like Kiss The Girls were big in the 90s but who pointed out that Kiss The Girls was from 1997 made me realize that movies from after 1997 could still have stories based on books from before 1997. When I eventually checked the Kiss The Girls novel (1995) by James Patterson, I was shocked to find just how much the book showed overlap with the JonBenét Ramsey murder and the crime scene. Combing through this book and its detective Alex Cross predecessor Along Came A Spider and follow-up book Jack & Jill very attentively and comparing it with the facts of the case and the Ramseys’ behavior (also paying close attention to the police and media interviews with the Ramseys) made me convinced that the books were consulted that night by Patsy as inspiration for staging the crime scene and that John Ramsey was aware of this as least as early as the CNN interview one week after JonBenét’s body was discovered.
A substantial part of my theory is an attempt at reconstructing what may have gone through Patsy’s mind the night of JonBenét’s death so that some of the more strange aspects of the crime scene may start to make a little more sense when seen in light of her hypothesized actions, state of mind and thinking. It is obviously not possible to actually read a person’s mind exactly or to know for certain exactly what Patsy thought and did that night, but in some places I may write from a perspective that suggests such knowledge of Patsy’s mind and actions. This is not meant to suggest that such claims about what was in her mind or about what she possibly did are facts, but I have tried to interpret the (extended) crime scene on the basis of certain assumptions that I believe can be plausibly argued for and that hold some explanatory power. This is why I sometimes write from the perspective of certain things being taken for granted even if they are not actually facts. The aim of writing in this way is to hopefully make it easier to see the big picture benefit of conceptualizing the crime (scene) in terms of the major claims I make. I hope that the impartial reader can read through such language and keep in mind that I concede that a lot of assumptions and subjective interpretation are built into the theory.
A last methodological point I want to make for now is that I used the database of books and other (printed) sources found on archive.org Not only did I use the books it contains to search through the content of sources after I had identified them, some of the hypothesized sources I only managed to identify through its database-wide search function. Although I have tried to refrain from using its function to search through the contents of its entire collection too liberally, as this runs the risk of identifying too many false hits with books that show some odd overlap with the Ramsey note or the crime scene of JonBenét’s murder that aren’t really relevant to the murder, for some parts of the note I did use this methodology and it helped uncover at least two sources that I believe were highly likely used in writing the note and that I would have been unlikely to find without using this tool.
A note on the materials of my theory
My initial plan was to make a video presentation out of my findings in order to create a visually appealing and easily digested form of the theory. However, my rambling writing style and the nature of my analysis through close reading of the various hypothesized sources made the script I tried to write for such a video very dry and unappealing very quickly. Not only that, since I started writing this text/script while I was still actively analyzing the case to uncover more evidence and interpretations and since I’ve been writing it for a period of more than nine months already, some of my earlier analysis is no longer indicative of my current interpretation of some parts of the note and crime scene as I have continued to find new material and connections that I believe explain some parts better. In other words, the main running text with analysis is already in need of much revision. I want to stress that this type of analysis can obviously not be a hard science and is necessarily a matter of much interpretation in which a subjective judgment plays a part and which is hard to communicate or justify completely to others. Having said that, I don’t mean to suggest that all of the analysis is baseless speculation that holds no value or that cannot bring greater objective clarity on many aspects of the case. In fact, I would argue that the analysis overall, as it stands, proves beyond a reasonable doubt Patsy’s involvement in the staging of the crime scene and John’s knowledge of this after the fact.
Two of the documents that I share with you now are the original two documents I worked on while working out my theory. One is the main running text/commentary in which I first started my analysis and explain, in a very long-winded, rambling way, how I approached interpreting much of the note and the overall crime scene. The other document is a sort of index file (‘ANNOTATED TEXT …’) in which I catalogued candidate passages and sources that might explain elements in the Ramsey note and crime scene. This last document, too, needs revision as I have not kept it completely up to date while working on the (newer) diagrams of visual references in recent months during which time I discovered many new connections. Some of the page numbers referenced also still need to be updated because I changed some of the editions of the books that I used.
The diagrams (which can be downloaded from a folder through the link below, along with the Main running text since that file appears to be too big to share directly on Websleuths) are the most recent material I have worked on. They were intended to be a somewhat more visually appealing and more accessible entry into the most important findings and interpretations of the theory. However, as stylish and terse presentation is simply not a strong suit of mine, some of these too will probably appear somewhat chaotic, convoluted and off-putting. I share the files of the diagrams in SVG format (which can be opened with most modern internet browsers) in the hope that it is relatively doable to zoom in on specific parts and follow the visual (colored) lines and connections between various elements. Here I struggled as well with the fact that I encountered new material and developed new interpretations even as I was making them so that much of the ordering of the elements is probably less than efficient let alone optimal. I hope that a close look at the diagrams will make it easier to search for some of the relevant commentary in the running text with analysis that will provide some additional reasoning for some of the interpretations although some of the diagram’s material has not yet been incorporated into the running text. The diagrams contain some copyrighted material that is mostly hosted on archive.org I have tried to make it clear where all the material comes from and who the original authors are. I have tried to limit the screenshots of the copyrighted material as much as possible without making the theory inaccessible and I hope it can be considered a fair use to present the material in this way given the context and nature of the subject and the argument really requiring seeing the visual of the actual pages. As a warning, some of the documents contain graphic images of crime scene photos with parts of JonBenét’s body visible in them which are disturbing. I have kept out the most graphic photos however and I mostly use close-ups of her palm. Some of the passages from the books also contain spoilers for the stories of those books. The pdf document A Smoking Gun is the beginning of an exploration of the overlap between words and concepts used by the Ramseys in their interviews with those found in the hypothesized sources used for staging the crime scene (mostly the Alex Cross stories). I will let people judge for themselves whether they believe such a degree of overlap can be due to coincidence or not.
I have decided to share the material that I have at the moment, including mistakes, inconsistencies, poor formatting and all, to not further delay the possibility for all people with an interest in this case to evaluate the information I provide and to come to their own conclusions about the new circumstantial evidence I provide and the (im)plausibility of the theory around it. In my opinion, the DNA evidence is completely irrelevant in this case and any investigative focus on it is a waste of time and resources and in my opinion it cannot and will not bring justice for JonBenét. It is my hope that this theory will inspire others to consider the general approach I take to understanding the crime scene and its elements and to look more closely at some of the particular aspects of the case from this point of view in order that it can hopefully help bring us closer to the truth about what really happened to JonBenét, who was responsible for it and to what degree.
Although it is very likely that at least some of my interpretations about the material in the hypothesized sources leading to particular features in the Ramsey note and crime scene are wrong, I hope people will not underestimate the explanatory power of the theory in general and some specific parts in particular. I have followed closely the kinds of questions and interpretations that people familiar with the case tend to share online (mostly on Reddit, in YouTube videos and comments, and on Websleuths) about some of the more puzzling aspects of the case and I have found that for many of these elements that appear to be decidedly odd and inexplicable, my theory can provide a fairly natural interpretation and reasonably plausible explanation that can fit together virtually all of the well-known elements in the case. I do disagree with some interpretations of some pieces of evidence by people who are considered experts on them and it is to be expected that people will not be willing to accept to have some of these expert opinions questioned by a layperson. I can only say in my defense that I try to follow the evidence as best I can and that I try to go with the interpretations that to me make the most sense out of all the known evidence in the case taken as a whole and which can give a coherent theory of the crime.
I intend to keep working on the theory and to update the documents that I share today. It is my hope that through people’s feedback on my findings and interpretations that I can work on a more focused, convincing presentation of the theory and that it can be improved upon by removing the weaker material and adding stronger material. Ultimately, I hope this can help us come closer to an understanding of the truth about what happened to JonBenét and why.
I would like to say thank you to Cynic, who is the only person who I have informed of part of this material and who was generous enough to sacrifice his time and effort to give feedback on the theory. The documents I shared with you did not yet include the diagrams and were therefore very inaccessible and unappealing to read yet you were kind enough to take a look at them anyway and give some valuable feedback. Even though we disagree on the D-U-I interpretation and other points, I welcome any and all such criticism of the theory and I look forward to discussing some of the major and finer points of the evidence I present and the interpretations I give them with people who, like Cynic, are knowledgeable about the case. Since the moment I shared those versions of the documents with him, I have made several new, interesting discoveries that can explain more aspects of the case and that have made me even more convinced that the interpretation of 118 and the NIV Study Bible-Osteen connection are correct. Some of the more important new material I recommend (for Cynic) taking a look at is the ‘want to see 1997’/page 1997 NIVSB connection along with the subsequent reconsidering of just about all of the note’s lines having a similar deliberate dual meaning, the Jack and Jill material in relation to the general idea behind the intruder targeting wealthy people, the Copycat material in relation to how JonBenét was found, and the Murder and Mayhem material in relation to some of the earlier hypothesized connections such as the Fritz Lang M / palm / ‘keep your babies close’ connection.
Finally, I would like to dedicate this effort to all the people who have long pursued the truth in this case and who continue to do so. People like Steve Thomas, Jeff Shapiro, Fleet & Priscilla White (and again Cynic as well as Tricia) and many others have all contributed to this pursuit in their own ways and I believe all of them have helped make it possible to keep investigative focus where it really belongs. The efforts of Steve Thomas (through his book and his interpretation of Patsy as the central suspect in the case with John only joining the cover-up the next morning) and Jeff Shapiro (through his pointing to the importance of Healed of Cancer) have particularly influenced my own theory, and like many others, I hold the former’s contributions to the case in especially high regard. Although I don’t know if any of them would ultimately see any merit in the material and speculative interpretations that I present here or approve of my approach, I hope that they and people like them who care about the case and about its true victim, may find at least some new perspectives that can hopefully resolve some of the many lingering questions about what happened to this little girl and why.
I have decided to finally share this theory publicly in the wake of Easter as I think it is an appropriate time (not as an April Fools' joke mind you) since I believe the concept of resurrection and belief in it were so central to what happened that night. JonBenét may not have had the fortune to really be resurrected physically that night or the next morning, but I hope that the chance of more of the truth about her fate coming out can help raise her spiritually.
Rest your soul, JonBenét.
Diagrams + Main running text download
For the past year I have been following a new line of inquiry into the Ramsey note and the larger crime scene around JonBenét Ramsey’s murder. This has led me to find many pieces of information that I believe are highly relevant for understanding what happened the night of her murder and how her death was covered up by her mother Patsy and how the crime scene was staged. The inquiry also has uncovered what I think is the most damning evidence against John Ramsey with regard to him showing guilty knowledge of Patsy’s involvement and her method of staging. It also (again) points away from Burke being involved in the crime in a significant way, with his involvement likely being at the most that he has some knowledge of what really happened that night.
In my analysis I have put the ransom note central as many people have often pointed out that it is the most important piece of evidence in the case. I agree with that assessment but I believe the note has never been analyzed in a satisfactory manner. Although much focus has rightly been placed on analyzing the handwriting, in my opinion the publicly available information about this analysis (particularly the analysis done by Cina Wong) is already convincing enough, when considered alongside all the other available circumstantial evidence as presented for example by Steve Thomas in his book, to thoroughly implicate Patsy as being involved in the crime. In my opinion Steve Thomas’s analysis of the case has very convincingly shown that Patsy Ramsey should be front and center when trying to understand the murder. Even though I don’t necessarily agree with all of his conclusions or interpretations of some pieces of evidence, I think his arguments for Patsy being the main suspect are far more convincing than any arguments that have been made for Burke’s involvement (or for John or anyone else being the main culprit). In my analysis, I have therefore mostly taken for granted that Patsy was involved in coming up with the words of the note and the staging elements of the crime scene, with only John’s possible involvement being an open question. However, my findings have supported and justified this approach with virtually all new circumstantial evidence pointing back to Patsy again and again and with pretty much all of the evidence making sense if John suspected or found out about Patsy’s involvement in JonBenét’s death only on the morning of the 26th, as Steve Thomas has also credibly argued.
I think the informational value of the content of the note has been relatively neglected or explained away too much. This is probably partly due to the fact that Don Foster’s analysis of the note has never been made public, in addition to his credibility being attacked because of his actions prior to becoming involved in the case. Furthermore, because the full inventory of videos and books present in the Ramsey home that night has never been made public, people seem to believe that no further relevant information about the crime can be gleaned from the content of the note.
People have either dismissed too much of the note’s content because they believe the only important conclusion is that the note was obviously fake and a clear sign of deception or, alternatively, they have (in my opinion wrongly) claimed to understand how the note came about by appealing either to an evident master plan by either parent to get rid of the body or some other plan (taking the note’s message too much at face value) or by appealing to a general and too vague a notion of the note being inspired by movies. In particular, the ‘movie buff’ explanation of the note has never quite explained just how one gets from the suspected movies (most often named are Dirty Harry, Speed, Ransom, Ruthless People and Nick of Time) to the actual words and concepts in the note. The appeal to a person having seen these movies so many times that they could easily recall and borrow key concepts and phrasing on the spot I believe is not a good explanation and overlooks many distinctive features of the note.
The new circumstantial evidence that I present and that I incorporate into my analysis of the Ramsey note and the larger crime scene hint at a particular unfolding of events that led to many of the mysterious elements in the crime scene that have been part of much speculation.
Although my theory admittedly still involves a lot of speculation, it also at least backs up many of the more speculative claims with new circumstantial evidence. For this reason, I hope that even if people disagree with some, or even many, of the smaller points that I make or with some of my interpretations of particular pieces of evidence, they can see the value of my approach for better understanding the crime scene and for explaining some of the more mysterious and infamous parts of the case.
Among the many things that my theory tries to explain (apart from the method of composition for the ransom note) are a motive for the crime, the use of a garrote, the use of a paintbrush for the garrote, JonBenét’s hair being tied into the knot of the garrote, the time between the skull fracture and the strangulation, the physical injuries sustained by JonBenét including the two dotted abrasions on her lower back as well as the abrasions on her face and throat and the genital trauma evidence, her being dressed in the over-sized panties and the long johns, the presence of the blanket and the gown in the wine cellar, the markings on her palm, the markings on the photos in the article about the Esprit awards, the flashlight on the kitchen counter, the binoculars upstairs, the underlining of verses in the Bible, the Christmas card in the trash bin in JonBenét’s room, the kitchen knife being found upstairs close to JonBenét’s bedroom, how the intruder theory came about and why Lou Smit became convinced a stun gun was involved in the crime, the ransom amount being $118,000, the sign-off ‘Victory! S.B.T.C’ and its meaning and origin, Patsy’s 911 call showing guilty knowledge of staging including what was said at the end of the call and why, Patsy’s behavior post-911 call on the 26th showing guilty knowledge, the Ramseys’ behavior in interviews post-crime showing guilty knowledge, as well as several pieces of evidence that I believe are relevant to the crime but that can only be seen to be relevant in light of the theory. On top of it all, I believe I have uncovered a deliberate confession by Patsy Ramsey that hints at the nature of the event leading up to the skull fracture.
A brief overview
There are two main major claims that I make from which I derive my interpretations about all of the more specific pieces of evidence listed above. Therefore, again, I hope that even if you disagree about any number of the more specific interpretations about specific pieces of evidence (and I readily admit that there is a good chance that I am wrong about a number of them, plus I’m certainly not as sure about some of the interpretations as I am about others), that you will see the value of approaching the case and trying to understand and explain the crime scene from these two larger points of view.
The first claim is that, whatever happened to cause the skull fracture that most experts (including coroner John Meyer who performed the official autopsy) agreed came first, Patsy Ramsey was desperate to reverse her daughter’s misfortune and turned to (her knowledge of) the book Healed of Cancer by Dodie Osteen. This is the book which Jeff Shapiro suspected could explain the ransom note’s sign-off ‘S.B.T.C’. I think that his observation on the role this book played in Patsy’s life is absolutely crucial for understanding the case although I don’t think Shapiro took his analysis of this aspect of the crime far enough and I also don’t think he got the interpretation of 118 right (he suspected it may have derived from Patsy’s reportedly being enamored with the number through Psalm 118 that was mentioned in some of her healing books, including Healed of Cancer, and on which she relied during her battle with cancer). In addition, I think he overlooked some crucial aspects of the crime and crime scene in connection with the book. But I agree that 118 was inspired by the Osteen-Bible connection and that it was NOT intended (at least not primarily, if she was even aware of the bonus amount at all) as a reference to John’s bonus. Something similar applies for the outside Seraph report’s profile on Patsy which looked for religious motives in the crime, which is an aspect I agree was important, even if their specific interpretations were not right in my view.
I think Patsy turned to Osteen’s book in sheer desperation to try to apply what she had used in her battle with cancer (which she believed had worked and saved her from cancer) to the predicament her daughter was in after the skull fracture. She tried to interpret the grand claims and promises made in the book to mean that she could save JonBenét through the power of faith healing so that she could avoid having to come clean about what happened. When this didn’t work, and as JonBenét’s condition deteriorated, she turned to the ultimate promise in the book that the Lord and his representative on Earth, Jesus Christ, Patsy’s Savior, could heal ALL sickness, and she interpreted that even the greatest miracle Jesus performed, that of the resurrection of Lazarus, was possible in her own life if she obeyed God’s commandments. But when, after trying to apply all of the advice she found in the book and interpreting all of the commands she believed she encountered through following the book’s references to the Bible, JonBenét still didn’t get better, she began staging a kidnapping-turned-to-murder scene in which a JonBenét left behind to resemble the scene from Lazarus’s resurrection could double as a crime scene left by a kidnapper-killer in case the miracle of her resurrection would not actually come about.
Still being in denial about her daughter’s death, she wrote a ransom note that had dual meaning for her. The note was overtly intended as a message by a mysterious intruder that could possibly mislead police and the outside world if JonBenét really was going to remain dead forever, but she covertly still desperately hoped for and clung to the belief of the possibility of the real-world resurrection of her daughter if she followed the commands she had encountered in Healed of Cancer plus the NIV Study Bible and if she imbued the scene around JonBenét’s death/condition with enough religious meaning that had spiritual potency. The problem was that one of the commands she encountered was to confess her sin. This was something that Patsy, whose observed behavior has been widely interpreted to show signs of narcissism, was not willing or able to do. That’s why she set to writing a note with two meanings. One meaning is that of the strange, not-so-believable kidnapper-killer note we are all familiar with. The other is the religious meaning that many of the lines can be seen to have when compared with the advice given in Osteen’s Healed of Cancer and the Bible books and passages that it references.
This brings us to the second major claim: the Ramsey note was NOT the product of paraphrasing half-remembered/memorized movie lines spontaneously and conveniently recalled at the right time when Patsy needed them. It was a sourced note, the product of actively gathering and using books that could help inspire Patsy to come up with some believable bad guy words, phrases and concepts. Going through these sources, I think she looked for words and concepts that showed some overlap with those that she encountered in her Osteen/Bible readings and which she was trying to leverage for spiritual healing through magical thinking. In other words, as she went through these books trying to come up with a kidnapper narrative, she paid special attention to words and concepts that could simultaneously be used as bad guy talk for the outside world and as a message for her God to show that she had followed His instructions and that the miracle of JonBenét’s healing/resurrection deserved to be brought about by Him. I have identified a number of sources that I hypothesize were present in the Ramsey home that night (used alongside some of the books known to have been present) and that I believe were used by Patsy to come up with most of the words and concepts in the note as well as a number of staging elements in the larger crime scene outside of the note. I have done some intensive reading and comparing of these sources with the Ramsey note and crime scene (as well as later Ramsey interviews and testimony about their behavior) and I have tried to identify as many of the specific passages that I think were used by Patsy that night to stage the crime scene (including the note) and some of which I think were used by both Patsy and John in the weeks, months and even years after the murder to flesh out the intruder theory. The first major breakthrough I experienced while investigating this approach that convinced me this approach could be fruitful was finding a connection between the murder weapon and a piece of evidence (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary) that Steve Thomas described in his book and that has been much speculated about.
Another early key result was the realization that the movie Dirty Harry was not only a movie but had a movie novelization as well. In investigating this source I became very much convinced that this book makes a lot more sense as the source for the Dirty Harry elements overlapping with the Ramsey note than a reliance on memories from repeated exposure to the movie.
Once this was clear in my mind, I used the genre of the action-crime-suspense movie novelization to look for other books that might have been owned by people who had the Dirty Harry novelization. This led to some further sources that in my opinion are highly likely to have been used for the note, e.g. the Lethal Weapon novelization. In addition, a comment on a YouTube video by True Crime Rocket Science (investigating the movies that might have been used for inspiration) in which user @ziggypop8106 mentioned that kidnapping movies like Kiss The Girls were big in the 90s but who pointed out that Kiss The Girls was from 1997 made me realize that movies from after 1997 could still have stories based on books from before 1997. When I eventually checked the Kiss The Girls novel (1995) by James Patterson, I was shocked to find just how much the book showed overlap with the JonBenét Ramsey murder and the crime scene. Combing through this book and its detective Alex Cross predecessor Along Came A Spider and follow-up book Jack & Jill very attentively and comparing it with the facts of the case and the Ramseys’ behavior (also paying close attention to the police and media interviews with the Ramseys) made me convinced that the books were consulted that night by Patsy as inspiration for staging the crime scene and that John Ramsey was aware of this as least as early as the CNN interview one week after JonBenét’s body was discovered.
A substantial part of my theory is an attempt at reconstructing what may have gone through Patsy’s mind the night of JonBenét’s death so that some of the more strange aspects of the crime scene may start to make a little more sense when seen in light of her hypothesized actions, state of mind and thinking. It is obviously not possible to actually read a person’s mind exactly or to know for certain exactly what Patsy thought and did that night, but in some places I may write from a perspective that suggests such knowledge of Patsy’s mind and actions. This is not meant to suggest that such claims about what was in her mind or about what she possibly did are facts, but I have tried to interpret the (extended) crime scene on the basis of certain assumptions that I believe can be plausibly argued for and that hold some explanatory power. This is why I sometimes write from the perspective of certain things being taken for granted even if they are not actually facts. The aim of writing in this way is to hopefully make it easier to see the big picture benefit of conceptualizing the crime (scene) in terms of the major claims I make. I hope that the impartial reader can read through such language and keep in mind that I concede that a lot of assumptions and subjective interpretation are built into the theory.
A last methodological point I want to make for now is that I used the database of books and other (printed) sources found on archive.org Not only did I use the books it contains to search through the content of sources after I had identified them, some of the hypothesized sources I only managed to identify through its database-wide search function. Although I have tried to refrain from using its function to search through the contents of its entire collection too liberally, as this runs the risk of identifying too many false hits with books that show some odd overlap with the Ramsey note or the crime scene of JonBenét’s murder that aren’t really relevant to the murder, for some parts of the note I did use this methodology and it helped uncover at least two sources that I believe were highly likely used in writing the note and that I would have been unlikely to find without using this tool.
A note on the materials of my theory
My initial plan was to make a video presentation out of my findings in order to create a visually appealing and easily digested form of the theory. However, my rambling writing style and the nature of my analysis through close reading of the various hypothesized sources made the script I tried to write for such a video very dry and unappealing very quickly. Not only that, since I started writing this text/script while I was still actively analyzing the case to uncover more evidence and interpretations and since I’ve been writing it for a period of more than nine months already, some of my earlier analysis is no longer indicative of my current interpretation of some parts of the note and crime scene as I have continued to find new material and connections that I believe explain some parts better. In other words, the main running text with analysis is already in need of much revision. I want to stress that this type of analysis can obviously not be a hard science and is necessarily a matter of much interpretation in which a subjective judgment plays a part and which is hard to communicate or justify completely to others. Having said that, I don’t mean to suggest that all of the analysis is baseless speculation that holds no value or that cannot bring greater objective clarity on many aspects of the case. In fact, I would argue that the analysis overall, as it stands, proves beyond a reasonable doubt Patsy’s involvement in the staging of the crime scene and John’s knowledge of this after the fact.
Two of the documents that I share with you now are the original two documents I worked on while working out my theory. One is the main running text/commentary in which I first started my analysis and explain, in a very long-winded, rambling way, how I approached interpreting much of the note and the overall crime scene. The other document is a sort of index file (‘ANNOTATED TEXT …’) in which I catalogued candidate passages and sources that might explain elements in the Ramsey note and crime scene. This last document, too, needs revision as I have not kept it completely up to date while working on the (newer) diagrams of visual references in recent months during which time I discovered many new connections. Some of the page numbers referenced also still need to be updated because I changed some of the editions of the books that I used.
The diagrams (which can be downloaded from a folder through the link below, along with the Main running text since that file appears to be too big to share directly on Websleuths) are the most recent material I have worked on. They were intended to be a somewhat more visually appealing and more accessible entry into the most important findings and interpretations of the theory. However, as stylish and terse presentation is simply not a strong suit of mine, some of these too will probably appear somewhat chaotic, convoluted and off-putting. I share the files of the diagrams in SVG format (which can be opened with most modern internet browsers) in the hope that it is relatively doable to zoom in on specific parts and follow the visual (colored) lines and connections between various elements. Here I struggled as well with the fact that I encountered new material and developed new interpretations even as I was making them so that much of the ordering of the elements is probably less than efficient let alone optimal. I hope that a close look at the diagrams will make it easier to search for some of the relevant commentary in the running text with analysis that will provide some additional reasoning for some of the interpretations although some of the diagram’s material has not yet been incorporated into the running text. The diagrams contain some copyrighted material that is mostly hosted on archive.org I have tried to make it clear where all the material comes from and who the original authors are. I have tried to limit the screenshots of the copyrighted material as much as possible without making the theory inaccessible and I hope it can be considered a fair use to present the material in this way given the context and nature of the subject and the argument really requiring seeing the visual of the actual pages. As a warning, some of the documents contain graphic images of crime scene photos with parts of JonBenét’s body visible in them which are disturbing. I have kept out the most graphic photos however and I mostly use close-ups of her palm. Some of the passages from the books also contain spoilers for the stories of those books. The pdf document A Smoking Gun is the beginning of an exploration of the overlap between words and concepts used by the Ramseys in their interviews with those found in the hypothesized sources used for staging the crime scene (mostly the Alex Cross stories). I will let people judge for themselves whether they believe such a degree of overlap can be due to coincidence or not.
I have decided to share the material that I have at the moment, including mistakes, inconsistencies, poor formatting and all, to not further delay the possibility for all people with an interest in this case to evaluate the information I provide and to come to their own conclusions about the new circumstantial evidence I provide and the (im)plausibility of the theory around it. In my opinion, the DNA evidence is completely irrelevant in this case and any investigative focus on it is a waste of time and resources and in my opinion it cannot and will not bring justice for JonBenét. It is my hope that this theory will inspire others to consider the general approach I take to understanding the crime scene and its elements and to look more closely at some of the particular aspects of the case from this point of view in order that it can hopefully help bring us closer to the truth about what really happened to JonBenét, who was responsible for it and to what degree.
Although it is very likely that at least some of my interpretations about the material in the hypothesized sources leading to particular features in the Ramsey note and crime scene are wrong, I hope people will not underestimate the explanatory power of the theory in general and some specific parts in particular. I have followed closely the kinds of questions and interpretations that people familiar with the case tend to share online (mostly on Reddit, in YouTube videos and comments, and on Websleuths) about some of the more puzzling aspects of the case and I have found that for many of these elements that appear to be decidedly odd and inexplicable, my theory can provide a fairly natural interpretation and reasonably plausible explanation that can fit together virtually all of the well-known elements in the case. I do disagree with some interpretations of some pieces of evidence by people who are considered experts on them and it is to be expected that people will not be willing to accept to have some of these expert opinions questioned by a layperson. I can only say in my defense that I try to follow the evidence as best I can and that I try to go with the interpretations that to me make the most sense out of all the known evidence in the case taken as a whole and which can give a coherent theory of the crime.
I intend to keep working on the theory and to update the documents that I share today. It is my hope that through people’s feedback on my findings and interpretations that I can work on a more focused, convincing presentation of the theory and that it can be improved upon by removing the weaker material and adding stronger material. Ultimately, I hope this can help us come closer to an understanding of the truth about what happened to JonBenét and why.
I would like to say thank you to Cynic, who is the only person who I have informed of part of this material and who was generous enough to sacrifice his time and effort to give feedback on the theory. The documents I shared with you did not yet include the diagrams and were therefore very inaccessible and unappealing to read yet you were kind enough to take a look at them anyway and give some valuable feedback. Even though we disagree on the D-U-I interpretation and other points, I welcome any and all such criticism of the theory and I look forward to discussing some of the major and finer points of the evidence I present and the interpretations I give them with people who, like Cynic, are knowledgeable about the case. Since the moment I shared those versions of the documents with him, I have made several new, interesting discoveries that can explain more aspects of the case and that have made me even more convinced that the interpretation of 118 and the NIV Study Bible-Osteen connection are correct. Some of the more important new material I recommend (for Cynic) taking a look at is the ‘want to see 1997’/page 1997 NIVSB connection along with the subsequent reconsidering of just about all of the note’s lines having a similar deliberate dual meaning, the Jack and Jill material in relation to the general idea behind the intruder targeting wealthy people, the Copycat material in relation to how JonBenét was found, and the Murder and Mayhem material in relation to some of the earlier hypothesized connections such as the Fritz Lang M / palm / ‘keep your babies close’ connection.
Finally, I would like to dedicate this effort to all the people who have long pursued the truth in this case and who continue to do so. People like Steve Thomas, Jeff Shapiro, Fleet & Priscilla White (and again Cynic as well as Tricia) and many others have all contributed to this pursuit in their own ways and I believe all of them have helped make it possible to keep investigative focus where it really belongs. The efforts of Steve Thomas (through his book and his interpretation of Patsy as the central suspect in the case with John only joining the cover-up the next morning) and Jeff Shapiro (through his pointing to the importance of Healed of Cancer) have particularly influenced my own theory, and like many others, I hold the former’s contributions to the case in especially high regard. Although I don’t know if any of them would ultimately see any merit in the material and speculative interpretations that I present here or approve of my approach, I hope that they and people like them who care about the case and about its true victim, may find at least some new perspectives that can hopefully resolve some of the many lingering questions about what happened to this little girl and why.
I have decided to finally share this theory publicly in the wake of Easter as I think it is an appropriate time (not as an April Fools' joke mind you) since I believe the concept of resurrection and belief in it were so central to what happened that night. JonBenét may not have had the fortune to really be resurrected physically that night or the next morning, but I hope that the chance of more of the truth about her fate coming out can help raise her spiritually.
Rest your soul, JonBenét.
Diagrams + Main running text download
