Ramsey Case - a summary of the evidence

[Watching You]

Elle, I always thought this was the most damming statement Patsy Ramsey made in her interviews. She didn't hesitate - she was concise as to how she knew the heart was there. She was asked three times:

PR: Because it was on there in the morning, that's why,

TD: And you remember it from the next morning?

PR: Uh huh

TD: You saw it the next morning?

PR: Uh huh.

...and each time she said she remembered it from the next morning, meaning December 26. There is absolutely no doubt what she said or what she meant.

The next day she tried to refute what came out of her own mouth, but her story about reading about it and being confused, or whatever, was obviously trying to cover her moment of truth the previous day. Lame.

[Elle_1]

Red and Black scarf - NE Police Files page 246 - 247

Patsy was shown photos taken off a roll of film that John Ramsey turned over to the police in the hours before JonBenét's body was found. The roll was in the camera he used to take pictures that Christmas. To get the film to the end of the roll, John snapped off the last few shots. In doing so, he inadvertantly photographed the wet bar near the foot of the spiral staircase. The photo showed a black and red scarf left on the sink counter there. Patsy couldn't say whether it was John's scarf or one of the scarves she had given to the men who attended the Ramsey Christmas Party on December 23rd.

PR: This (scarf) just looks strange to me ....

TH: Well, this photo ... was on your roll of film in your camera. And on the same roll is the next photo, a Christmas morning photo of the kids.

PR: Oh, God.

It was the first time Patsy had seen the photos. She broke down in tears at this point. After she regained her composure the questioning continued.

The photo John Ramsey had taken of the wet bar area, also showed a table near it. On it, were two white lined legal pads. One of them had been usedto write the ransom note. It was the same pad that contained Patsy's doodles, other writings and the so called practice ransom note


TH: ...Like I say, this was on your roll of film and it's not exactly the same photograph taken by the police.

PR: Uh huh.

N.B. This part of the interview changes to the ransom note pad, so I will finish off this interview on the ransom note thread." Elle

[Elle_1]

NE Police Files - 247-248

Continuation of police interview with Patsy Ramsey relating to the roll of film in the Ramsey camera Christmas, 1996.
It was the first time Patsy had seen the photos. She broke down in tears at this point. After she regained her composure the questioning continued.

The photo John Ramsey had taken of the wet bar area, also showed a table near it. On it, were two white lined legal pads. One of them had been used to write the ransom note. It was the same pad that contained Patsy's doodles, other writings and the so called practice ransom note.

TH: And this legal pad that you -

PR: Right:

TH: - Identified -

PR: Right:

TH: Do you know when that would have been in that position?

PR: No. So this, this was taken before ...?

TH: Before the police photos ... do you recognize that pad...?

PR: Yeah, but we had a lot of those around ...I bought like those at Office Depot's or Office Max or whatever they are, and I usually kept a bunch of them, you know, kept them over here, right around here in the kitchen.

TD: By the telephone?

PR: Yeah, but you know, they float all over.

TD: So it wouldn't have been unusual to be where it is.

PR: No. No. Gosh.

TH: Just a second, okay?

PR: Uh huh.

TH: So, would this particular note pad be, belong to sombody in particular or -

PR: No, not necessarily.

[Elle_1]

Fleet White confirms Ramsey attorney already in play, 27 December, 1996.
.......................
Fleet told us that Ramsey lawyer Mike Bynum had called them after the body was discovered. Surely he was talking about the December 27, the night John Ramsey talked with Bynum at the Fernie house. White found his notes and said, "No, it was the day before, on the afternoon of the 26."

You sure of that date? I asked. White checked his notes again.Yes.

The minds of two detectives went into overdrive. The body was found at 1:05 P.M., and John and Patsy left the house at about 2:30 P.M. Now White was saying that an attorney was already in play, calling witnesses, only a few hours later. WOW!

Fleet added that he was also interviewed by three people associated with Team Ramsey the following day, December 27, when he didn't know any better than to speak with them. The private investigators weren't out canvassing the neighborhood for an intruder but were pinpointing the Ramsey's best friends while the police were being stalled.
Source: Steve Thomas "JonBenét" page 287 - 288

[Elle_1]

A Pretty Polite Kidnapper - NE Police Files page 272-274
Detective Tom Haney questions Patsy Ramsey on the ransom note.

TH: Now this is a pretty polite kidnapper to write, "Mr." or "Mr. and Mrs." But they are not too well prepared, because they didn't bring - I got here, I forgot my pen. So they find the tablet and write the note.
PR: Uh- hum.

TH: Now as you're reading through it. "We have your daughter." Now you said that kind of set you off a ....

PR: Right

TH: "She is safe and unharmed. But follow our instructions to the letter." About that time, you kind of go upstairs ...so at some later point, you read more of it?

PR: I glanced at it, yeah.

TH: Okay, and I think you said you observed that it said $118,000?

PR: Uh huh.

TH: And what is that to you?

PR: That seemed like a very unusual amount of money. But if it was somebody interested in Access-related, they would have asked for a lot more money than that.

TH: First of all, it's kind of an unusual amount.

PR: It's an unusual amount.
TH: Plus kind of like winning a lottery, who wants to win a little lottery, you want to win the 10 million?

PR: Exactly.

PR: Right, Exactly.
TH: What would $118,000 be to you guys, the price of a new sailboat?

PR: ... No, not - I mean, not a large sum of money, but I mean, you know, it would just seem like especially somebody that made reference to business and all that, you know, they would be knowledgeable that Access had just made a million - billion dollar year something, I mean why would you piddle around with $118,000? You know? So it just seemed unusual to me.

TH: Then in the middle of the next paragraph it says, "Bring an ... adequate size attaché." Again, we have a pretty polite kidnapper.

PR: Uh huh.

TH: "The delivery will be exhausting," they are preparing somebody for all this. And again, unlike any of the other ransom notes that I have ever seen.

PR: I have never seen a ransom note.

TH: Well I have seen a few. Now we start getting, "Immediate execution of your daughter. Denied her remains for proper burial. Two gentlemen will be watching her. Police FBI, your daughter will be beheaded if she - if she dies , she dies, she dies 99 percent chance of killing her." You get through all of that?

PR: No, I didn't... You know, I caught a few of those words but I just couldn't ... I couldn't seem to go there.

TH: But still you call the police?

PR: Yes, sir.

TH: Did you and John have any discussion though about all of these admonitions in this letter?

PR: We didn't go over this together, no ... I mean all this happened so fast. I mean you know, you're just out of your mind. You know, when you're- I got the lady on the phone, or man, whatever it was, said,"Help, come over here." Why do you think they did say, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey" then said "Mr." only?

TH:Well, I think it's pretty bizarre. That kind of indicates some respect....

PR: Yeah. So why would they have had "Mr. and Mrs." on one and then not use it on -
... ... ... ... ...

[Elle_1]

This was forwarded to me by a friend who was involved in the JonBenét case a few years ago.

As if the JBR case isn't complicated enough already, now we have this to contend with.
I suppose this new finding blows the RST's "Caucasion DNA" argument outta the water. (Orphan)


DNA

A DNA match is all you need to win a court case, right? Not so fast. Some feel one in a billion doesn't literally mean one in a billion and argue DNA may have sent innocent people to jail

http://www.ottawasun.com/News/National/2006/10/22/2095676-sun.html


When you hear the letters DNA in a court case, you usually think it's a slam dunk for either the defence or the Crown.

Some aren't so certain that is always the case, however.

Some lawyers and experts are questioning the belief that DNA profiles are unique and can only belong to one person.

When Arizona State Scientific Analysis Bureau workers reported in 2001 that two convicts shared very similar DNA profiles, they didn't know they were opening a legal can of worms and a debate over the uniqueness of DNA profiles. The two men, one African- American, the other caucasian, were unrelated, with very different dates of birth and different last names.




They were not an exact DNA match, as would be expected with identical twins, but they shared almost 70% of the DNA markers that forensic scientists check when they try to determine identity. Nine out of the 13 spots (scientists call them loci) analyzed on the offenders' chromosome were the same.

Their shared DNA was thought to be statistically unlikely.

"We found it interesting," Randal Johnson, the supervising criminalist of the bureau's DNA section, later told an Arizona court of the reasons for reporting the finding.

Turns out, bureau statisticians said such matching profiles could be expected if you searched the database.

DNA databanks around the world are growing and being used to solve crimes. Canada's Convicted Offender Index (COI) has 101,000 DNA profiles.

Matching those profiles to crime scene DNA -- called cold hit matches -- has solved crimes. Crown prosecutors have used the evidence on everything from break and enters to sex assaults to murders. Take that match, add expert testimony about the astronomical odds of two people sharing the same profile and you're well on your way to a conviction.

After Arizona, however, DNA is getting a closer look.

"I really have a strong belief that someone already has been, or will be, convicted of a very serious crime, who is actually innocent because of a false cold hit match from a databank," says Bicka Barlow, a public defender in San Francisco.

"Given what we are seeing in Arizona, it's only a matter of time," she said.

Barlow has decided to open that can of worms. She's part of a legal team representing a man facing a cold hit prosecution. Her team obtained a subpoena to force Arizona to turn over a match report in 2005.

By then, the number of matches had grown from one pair out of 20,000 profiles to 144 matching offender profiles out of 65,000.

The State of Arizona, taking heat from the FBI over the disclosure of the matches, slapped Barlow with a court order. It barred her from releasing the findings on the Internet. The Sun obtained the information through other sources who had already obtained copies of the Arizona match report.

"There have been so many people charged with crimes from 30 years ago and the witnesses are all dead. The police are gone, the coroners who did the autopsies are gone ... all they have is a DNA match," Barlow says.

She says jurors should be told about the Arizona findings -- and elsewhere -- to put match statistics into perspective. Often, juries are told the odds of more than one person matching a crime scene profile are one in a trillion or more.

Indeed, one of the first matching profiles detected by the Arizona lab was calculated to have a statistical rareness of one in 2.1 billion. But just because something is rare doesn't mean it won't happen more than once, says one expert.

"The amount of sharing is not unexpected if you do the statistics," says Dr. George Carmody, a Carleton University biology progressor and a member of Canada's National DNA Databank Advisory Committee.

Carmody says the Arizona findings have little to say about the uniqueness of DNA profiles found at crime scenes and the infinitesimal likelihood that a match with a police suspect is a pure coincidence.

GENETIC PROFILE

The odds that any two people will share a genetic profile is a different question entirely, he says. He likens it to a probability experiment called the birthday game. Take any group of 23 people. The odds are better than 50% that two people will share the same birthday. But if you were just to select a random person off the street, the odds are one in 365 that you will find someone who shares your birthday.

The difference, Carmody says, is that in one set of odds any birthday will do. In the other set, you are looking for a particular birthday.

Not everyone shares Carmody's opinion.

Larry Mueller, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, says it's been well demonstrated that Arizona's database has more matches than would be expected in a group of 65,000 unrelated people.

Some academics have tackled the problem of the Arizona matches by suggesting the matching offenders are related. Based on current statistical assumptions, he says, some 1,500 pairs of relatives would explain the matches. But there are different types of matches.

For example, to explain the 20 pairs of 10-loci matches, there would have to be 3,000 pairs of relatives in the databank. Bottom line: More research is needed to figure out what's going on in the Arizona DNA databank.

But Arizona authorities are reluctant to open up the database to outside researchers, citing privacy concerns and contractual obligations with the FBI.

EXPLANANTION

But even without a proper explanation, the findings in Arizona could give people a better handle on the statistics surrounding DNA evidence, Mueller says.

"Our ... idea of what one in 100 billion means is not very good. In fact, things that are that rare, you can see in a population of just 65,000."

Mueller says there is a bigger question. Is the data on which the statistics are based sufficient to make claims about how frequently a genetic profile might appear?

We all assume DNA is irrefutable evidence for one side or the other. Barlow says she thinks people in the forensic science community don't want to examine how we compare DNA for fear its credibility will be damaged.

"I think that's what the FBI and states are afraid of. They know they have people in (their databases) who match."

---

GLOSSARY

- Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA): The chemical inside the nucleus of a cell that carries the genetic instructions for making living organisms.

- locus: The place on a chromosome where a specific gene is located, a kind of address for the gene. The plural is "loci."

- Allele: One of the variant forms of a gene at a particular locus, on a chromosome. Different alleles produce variation in inherited characteristics such as hair colour or blood type.

- Chromosome: One of the threadlike "packages" of genes and other DNA in the nucleus of a cell. Different kinds of organisms have different numbers of chromosomes. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, 46 in all: 44 autosomes and two sex chromosomes. Each parent contributes one chromosome to each pair, so children get half of their chromosomes from their mothers and half from their fathers.

- Combined DNA Index System (CODIS): A database of offender and crime scene DNA profiles run by the FBI and states which allows crime labs to exchange and compare DNA profiles electronically, thereby linking crimes to each other and to convicted offenders.

- Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (RFLP) analysis: The first method used by forensic scientists to analyze DNA evidence and link it to an accused person. The use of RFLP as a forensic tool was pioneered by Sir Alec Jeffries and his team of researchers in the UK in the mid 1980s. - Short tandem repeat (STR) analysis: The current method used by most modern forensic labs to analyze DNA samples for identification purposes.

[Little]

Was it a case of the evidence being analyzed improperly or was the evidence mishandled?

Or, was it a case of the DNA being too old and degraded to analyze?

Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Data Quality Begins in a Glass Jar
By: Susan R. Benes, Issue: August/September, 2005

snip:

When a sample is said to have poor data quality, typically we think of that sample being compromised during analysis such as drug or DNA testing. We don’t often immediately think of poor collection or storage techniques. Rarely does someone think of mislabeled samples. Should we? While Ms. Reno was correct in urging students to maintain their integrity in the lab, quality data is useless if the samples were obtained under improper circumstances. So where does data quality really begin?

snip:

Bridging the Gap
The “CSI factor” has caused juries to expect forensic evidence in a case, but when the evidence is picked apart and science fails to convict, who is to blame? Take a look back at some of the high profile forensic cases like OJ Simpson and JonBenet Ramsey. Was it a case of the evidence being analyzed improperly or was the evidence mishandled?

read entire article here - source: http://www.forensicmag.com/articles.asp?pid=53

[koldkase]

We need to get these screen shots for the DNA lab analysis here, if it isn't already. I

NEVERMIND! FOUND THEM!

[koldkase]

Just wanted to put these links to some good threads on the DNA evidence so we don't have to go looking for them as time passes...which unfortunately in this case, IT PASSES BY THE DECADE NOW:

DNA Questions, "Touch DNA" & "Familial DNA":

http://www.forumsforjustice.org/foru...ead.php?t=9277

NANCY GRACE TRANSCRIPT - July 9, 2008 - Ramsey DNA

Includes "touch" DNA, plus important autopsy "prior molestation" info: http://www.forumsforjustice.org/foru...ead.php?t=9273