John Ramsey's New Book - The Other Side of Suffering

[zoomama]

Ooooh Cynic, I totally agree. There will be no "tough" questions asked of John while on any of these programs. I'm sure that there was some sort of agreement before hand that limited any questions that would touch on something that might be in the least way incriminating or suggestive that John had anything to do with the demise of JBR. Do you still think Wood is in the picture anywhere? Like pulling the strings so John can talk. I certainly hope I miss every one of his appearances. How about all of you?

[cynic]

Ooooh Cynic, I totally agree. There will be no "tough" questions asked of John while on any of these programs. I'm sure that there was some sort of agreement before hand that limited any questions that would touch on something that might be in the least way incriminating or suggestive that John had anything to do with the demise of JBR. Do you still think Wood is in the picture anywhere? Like pulling the strings so John can talk. I certainly hope I miss every one of his appearances. How about all of you?

I don’t think Woody is with him but he probably helped draw up pre-interview terms for his appearances.
With respect to watching the appearances, I will watch them all because watching is free and I have a strong pain threshold. I won’t buy his book but I’ll read it at the library or bookstore.

The press coverage is every bit as terrible as we feared it would be, behold:

[snip]
In fact, with hindsight, Ramsey has a fascinating view of today’s child beauty pageant “Tiger moms,” who parade their daughters on the hit TLC show, “Toddlers and Tiaras.” Ramsey said he never sat and watched the show, but he has caught snippets of it, which he said he finds disturbing.
“It’s very bizarre,” he says outright. “And, it certainly– Patsy and JonBenet didn’t approach it that way. We– they just did it for fun.”
Ramsey said he remembers his little girl in a parade, just days before JonBenet was found killed in the basement of the family’s Boulder, Colo., home on Dec. 26, 1996.
“Patsy had her sitting atop a friend’s convertible in the Christmas parade waving at the people lining the streets,” Ramsey recalled. “Patsy’s mother later told me that a strange man approached the car during the parade and it made her uncomfortable. I think about these things now and it makes me cringe. We were so naïve. I now believe with all my heart that it’s not a good idea to put your child on public display.”

[snip]
Within hours, the Boulder police began treating the Ramseys, especially John, as suspects. Ramsey said he got a tip from a caller inside the Boulder police department, telling him they were targeting him and he should get a lawyer. When the investigation was leaked to the press, it sparked a media frenzy.
“I had 24-hour-a-day cameras outside of our house for, gosh, a year, probably,” he said.
There were tantalizing clues around the house — a footprint, a broken window, some DNA evidence – all sparking wall-to-wall tabloid coverage of the case. When asked if he thinks JonBenet’s killer could still be at large, Ramsey said, “I believe he is.”
“He’s either alive, dead or in prison, and one of those three,” he said.
John is remarkably free of bitterness when it comes to talking about the investigation. The only time he gets worked up is at the thought that the Boulder police’s rush to judgment may have allowed the killer to hurt others.
“That rests squarely on the shoulder of Boulder police,” he said.
It would take 12 years before the Boulder district attorney’s office completely cleared the Ramseys of any wrongdoing in their daughter’s slaying, and issued an apology in 2008. But in the meantime, John Ramsey’s reputation was ruined and he had lost his thriving business. JonBenet’s mother, Patsy Ramsey, died of ovarian cancer at age 49 in 2006.
In his newly released book, “The Other Side of Suffering,” John Ramsey talks about his incredible journey from grief to hope. He recounts how deeply his faith helped him navigate course from suffering to forgiveness.
While no one would blame him for being angry or bitter, ”I was for a time,” Ramsey said. “But you can’t stay there. It’s damaging to you as a person.”
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headline...as-is-bizarre/

Also, his interview on GMA:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMNnyxkigEg

[cynic]

Here’s some more and it’s not pretty:

John Ramsey's Lingering Suspicions
Daily Beast, Lucinda Franks
Oct 13, 2008 2:14 AM EDT
Finally exonerated in the murder of his daughter, JonBenet, Ramsey talks about the loss of his wife and his wealth—and the suspicions that still haunt him.

[snip]
After the child beauty queen was found strangled in the basement of her Boulder, Colorado home in 1996, Ramsey watched the grief, and the stress of being falsely accused, slowly kill his wife, Patsy, who died of cancer in 2006. A grand jury that sat for 13 months refused to indict the Ramseys, yet the Boulder District Attorney announced they were “still under an umbrella of suspicion,” and they spent the next decade shunned by friends and hounded by the press.
Then, in July, a new Boulder DA, citing fresh DNA samples, officially cleared the Ramseys and apologized, in a letter, for the “ongoing, living hell” of their ordeal. In his first in-depth interview since receiving that letter, John Ramsey describes those painful years to The Daily Beast.
After the murder, Ramsey, who had built a billion-dollar computer company up from nothing, fell precipitously from the peak of wealth and prominence, losing not only his daughter, but also his career and his home. "The fact I'm no longer under suspicion will never bring back my life,” he says. “Once your reputation is tarnished, it stays tarnished."
But Ramsey hopes that the new "touch" DNA evidence can eventually release him from the mental torment of not knowing who murdered his child, and from a haunting suspicion that it was someone in the family’s inner circle. He and a few allies from Boulder suspect one particular friend who was familiar with the Ramseys’ home and details of their life. However, District Attorney Mary Lacy, who took over the case in 2005, says that this individual "has been thoroughly vetted and cleared through the new DNA."
The discovery of DNA from an "unidentified male" in three places on JonBenet's long johns allowed investigators to rule out the possibility that a single sample of this DNA found earlier belonged to a worker at a clothing factory (this was the original police theory). They also concluded that this stranger—not any of the people in the Ramseys’ circle, who were previously tested—was the murderer.
Yet Ramsey’s suspicions persist. Asked directly if he thinks this acquaintance killed JonBenet, Ramsey says, "Oh, I don't think so, But then he proceeds to poke holes in the man’s alibi and describe how the Boulder police botched the investigation from the beginning. Moreover, Pam and Michael Archuleta, who remained close to the Ramseys and are also speaking publicly for the first time, tick off circumstantial evidence that they believe points to this man. Asked about the new samples of “stranger” DNA, Michael, who was the pilot of John Ramsey’s King Air jet, adds, “perhaps this person's DNA was not found because he hired someone to do it for him."
[snip]

[snip]
As both a public service and a personal crusade, Ramsey now spends much of his time promoting state laws that mandate the lifting of a DNA sample from anyone accused of a felony, which would substantially expand the national DNA registry. (His website is DNAFINGERPRINTLAW.COM.)
At age 64, Ramsey still has the gloss of wealth about him. He greets me in a wine-colored cashmere sweater and yellow-checked shirt, his wavy hair the color of cornstalks in winter; he is smooth and genial, even debonair.
[snip]
Then he sits up and in a stronger voice says: "As for Burke, I don't let anybody I don't know get near him." JonBenet's brother was nine years old at the time of the murder and is now a senior in college. "If anything happened to him, I wouldn't survive it.”
"Sometimes, in a crowd, I will see the flash of a little coat that looks like JonBenet's… I can't stand to hear children cry, I really cannot bear it."
For solace, he goes every Sunday to a small church nearby, just as he did with Patsy. He obsessively reads the theology books that line the sunroom: Max Lucado, C.S Lewis, even Billy Graham. Having seen true evil, he is trying to find "an intellectual rather than an emotional basis for believing in God."
"Do you still feel married to Patsy?" I ask, "Do you think about her a lot?"
"No, no," he says, his face relaxed but his eyes miserable. "Just occasionally, when a pleasant memory comes back."
"You talk of her in the present tense," I say.
"Do I? Oh well, just an accident."

[snip]
Such a flood of tragedy defies any normal reaction, and John Ramsey's responses have been often judged abnormal. It was his bizarre poise on the morning of the murder that first raised police suspicions about him. "They wanted me to wail and cry in front of them,” he says. “It somehow escaped them that how people really feel is not always apparent."
John was also criticized for immediately getting a lawyer. "I got a call from someone in the law enforcement system on the second day. They told me I better do it, because the police were already considering me the prime suspect."
"It started when our frantic call brought a single rookie cop who was so inexperienced she didn't seal off the house or collect evidence. She even had to send out for a book on kidnapping," John says. "Then, later, they took 200 DNA samples and one by one they purportedly eliminated our friends and acquaintances so they could investigate the only people they really thought had done it—us. And our DNA wasn't even found on our child's body!"
Patsy became a suspect because of the similarity of her writing to that of the ransom note, "But no expert would say that the handwriting absolutely matched," John says. The police floated false rumors—such as the fact that no footprints had been found in the snow around the house, when there was no snow there that day—hoping to smoke out family members.
The tabloid press followed them everywhere. "They banged on our car and, called us child killers. They printed garbage. A Japanese camera crew even broke into Burke's school," John says. "We worried. We didn't know who was out there. Someone had killed our daughter. All we wanted to do was protect Burke and give him a normal childhood."
After Geraldo Rivera broadcast a mock trial of the Ramseys, Patsy went to bed for two days. They took all of the TV sets out of the house and cancelled the newspapers. One day, Patsy was in a supermarket checkout line with her son. "The headlines from a tabloid screamed out that Burke had done it,” John says. “She dropped her produce and rushed Burke out, but the damage had been done." Burke saw a child psychologist for two years.
Ramsey admits, for the first time, that both he and Patsy suffered waves of guilt about the murder. "I kicked myself for not getting more sophisticated house security. We left it off that night because it would go off like a siren and catapult us out of bed."
Patsy, he says, “wondered who she had enticed by putting JonBenet in beauty contests.” And both parents lamented that the videos of JonBenet vamping in these competitions—released by the pageant organizations—became the only thing most people knew about their daughter.
"But she was a born performer, she and Burke would put on all these plays,” Ramsey says. The pageants were only an occasional fun thing."
Yet Pam Archuleta, over coffee and then wine at the Boulderado Hotel, said Patsy was “obsessed” by the contests, and she describes the alcove just outside the master bedroom in Boulder where Patsy displayed all the photos, trophies, ribbons and tiaras from her own days as Miss West Virginia. JonBenet’s pageant costumes were “handmade in New York, much finer than the other contestants,” says another family friend. "Her hair was highlighted, her makeup applied thickly and designed to make her look older. Besides, she had to take piano and singing lessons, she had a coach. Does that sound like fun?”

[snip]
Some friends saw JonBenet's bedwetting and other problems with toilet training as a protest against the pressure of the pageants. They believe she might have soldiered on to please her mother after Patsy’s harrowing battle with cancer.
When JonBenet was two years old, Patsy was essentially absent for a year during her treatment. "JonBenet just stuck to me," John said, with a rare smile. "I was upset because Beth had just been killed in the accident and JonBenet would tell me 'Dad I don't like that face.' I would smile and she would say 'That's better.'"

[snip]
In his campaign for a larger DNA database, John Ramsey points out that thousands of rapes and murders can be prevented, for such criminals often strike many times. “DNA can, of course, exonerate people as well," he says wryly.
Because the new, more sensitive, “touch" DNA test can recover tiny samples from surfaces that the old DNA could not,more and more states are requiring that samples be taken on arrest.
“The last hope I have,” he says, is that “one day I will get a call from somewhere in the country and a voice will say, 'We know who killed your daughter.'"
http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...-daughter.html

[cynic]

Oh, and BTW - he hasn't lost his lizard ways:

[DeeDee]

It is every bit as nauseating as I thought it would be.

[Cherokee]

While drawing up some talking points might be a cathartic exercise, I’m pretty sure that this has all been hand-picked to continue the love fest and the interviews will be confined to screened questions and topics.
Barbara Walters may hit him with a tough question like: If you didn’t have your faith do you think you could have survived the suffering?
Follow-up question: Do you consider yourself to be an American hero?

If he was a real man he would go on the following shows:
Websleuths Radio
Caplis and Silverman
Peter Boyles
That is pure fantasy, though, and continuing with the fantasy, here are a few questions that should be asked that came quickly to mind:

1. Are you aware that the current Boulder DA, Stan Garnett, has publicly stated that Mary Lacy’s exoneration of you and your family has no legal standing with him?

2. You obviously believe that one or more intruders were involved in the death of JonBenet, can you tell us in detail what you have been doing during the last 15 years to find justice for JonBenet? You did say the following in 1997:

REPORTER: What do you want to say to the killer of your daughter?
JOHN RAMSEY: We'll find you. We will find you. I have that as a sole mission for the rest of my life.

http://thewebsafe.tripod.com/0501199...ainterview.htm

3. Why did your son, Burke, refuse to speak to Boulder investigators recently?

4. The 15th anniversary of JonBenet’s death was a few months ago, it appears you did nothing publically to draw attention to that fact, why, and how do you justify that considering the publicity you are presently seeking for your book?

Excellent questions, Cynic, but as you said, John doesn't have the cojones to get within ten feet of a REAL interviewer who would ask them!

[Cherokee]

Sorry to hear you have a sick child on your hands, Cherokee. Sincerely hope all will go well. Is it some sickness which is spreading around?

Thank you, Elle. Right now, they think it's either a severe case of food poisioning or a particularly vicious intestinal virus. We are seeing some improvement, but it's slow. If it's not either of the above, we'll see a gastroenterologist for more tests, but we're hoping it's something temporary and not chronic. They've ruled out appendicitis, and GI tract obstructions. As you know, it hard to see your child suffer.

[koldkase]

Kathy Griffin's response to Ramsey's media BS parade:

JonBenet’s dad says he finds shows like Toddlers & Tiaras “unhealthy.” Hate 2 break it 2 u, freaky,u started it.

Like I said: John ain't fooling nobody but himself if he thinks anyone believes his lies.

[Cherokee]

I don’t think Woody is with him but he probably helped draw up pre-interview terms for his appearances.

With respect to watching the appearances, I will watch them all because watching is free and I have a strong pain threshold. I won’t buy his book but I’ll read it at the library or bookstore.

OMG, I DON'T have a stong pain threshold, and just reading your excerpts of John's sanctamonious BS interviews is EXCRUCIATING!

I won't be buying the book either. I hope the publisher loses money for thinking it would be profitable to promote John Ramsey's crap and lies! I predict the book will go straight to the bargain bin, but not before doing more damage to the truth, especially through these fawning national interviews.

[Cherokee]

Oh, and BTW - he hasn't lost his lizard ways:

Ha ha, I love it! Thanks, Cynic!

Our suffering is knowing the truth, while having to look at John Ramsey's lying lizard-tongued face, and watch him publicly tout a rescinded exhoneration as he throws innocent people under the bus!

[Cherokee]

Kathy Griffin's response to Ramsey's media BS parade:



Like I said: John ain't fooling nobody but himself if he thinks anyone believes his lies.

Hey, KK, it's about time you showed up on this thread ... and good for Kathy Griffin!!!

[Why_Nut]

So, the Kindle version has downloaded to my iPad, and off to the races we go.

This thing is a wreck of writing, that is for sure. Ironic that John writes several times of how he and Patsy would have "pity parties", since this book reads as one giant pity party for John. Literally, homeless men on the street apparently have it better than John, because John Suffers So Much while these homeless men have found peace with their fate.

The book desperately needs fact-checking and annotation, so I will go through chapter by chapter and see what it yields.