New Ramsey case novel by Joyce Carol Oates - "My Sister, My Love"

ha! John doesn't sue poor people...no money in it.

I too would have the perv's head on a platter, Pearlsim.

 

Just the fact that Lacy and her clown patrol chimed in with "Let's not jump to conclusions just yet" when Karr was captured combined with JR's eerie lack of animosity for a man who publicly spoke about sexual relations with his 6 year old daughter Karr then gruesomely killed tells me that the clown patrol knew then what we all knew- Karr was a creep and much more but he was not JBR's killer nor did he know who was.
Lacy and her minions, however, knew this. Just as they knew who the killer really was.

 

Lord knows they have tried. Jameson, Margoo, Evening2, Rainsong, Don Bradley, Mame and oh so many others, have given insane explanations for the evidence and when that doesn't work, they just ignore the rest or say the authorities are lying plain and simple about the evidence

I have always believed that Jameson doesn't really believe they are innocent anyway and has just made a career of this.

 

Interesting Reading Here....

So much wise observation on this thread from all of you....One can only hope that the internet posters that Barbara mentioned and the rest of the RST cast of characters will read this thread and realize how transparent their words, actions and motives are to an informed public such as the members here on FFJ....

Seems that our mission here continues in getting the word out and keeping the faith about the eventual outcome of justice for the innocent victim, Jon Benet.

And yes, I think there are those who have made a hobby and even a career of declaring Ramsey innocence without truly believing it....They are in it for the money, notority and attention. The result is obstruction of justice and the destruction of the lives of innocent people. Some day, I believe, all of this dishonest behavior will catch up with them.....And when it does we will be here, still advocating...

Voyager

 

ITA with all of the above, rashomon. You have left no stone unturned. Everything related to the intruder is idiotic, from the heavy grate having to be lifted, to the stupid suitcase under the window for escape. If anyone was going to kidnap JonBenét Ramsey, there were many other places she could have been taken from long before this Christmas, and with ease. End of story.

 

Not to mention the WEIRD things John did the morning JB was 'missing'....like reading from the ransom note the killers were monitoring John and would kill JonBenet if he so much as talked to a stray dog. Yet John had no objection to Patsy calling over friends, and more friends, the family minister...all parking cars in the front of the house. And John observing a strange van in the alley way....watched it for a minute and came to the incredible conclusion no 'monitoring' kidnappers were in the van....didn't even ask the cops in his house to check it out for his daughter or kidnappers.

John also shut some window that happened to be partially open....guess John figured out murdering monitoring kidnappers hate to drive vans, will forget to watch his house for cops and neighbors and will never enter a house by window.

Probably too busy monitoring all those stray dogs.

 

Hi Elle

very true

Do you all remember when Jay did her fantastic project on the bloomies and the RST tried desperately to tear her apart? They had no answers so they attacked the researcher! Typical!

 

Redressing the victim in the far too big underwear was a BIG blunder on the stager's part.
For had the stager chosen one of JonBenet's 4-6 size pairs, the investigators would probably never have realized that the victim had been redressed.

Since no intruder would bother to redress the victim, again this evidence strongly implicates the Ramseys.

 

I do believe we all have the truth within us. The fight continues for her justice. I'm not sure it will come in my lifetime....kind of makes me think of the Black Dahlia. But back then, techniques and such were not so good. The techniques were much better in '96 and they are much better now, almost 12 yrs. later. I'm doing my best to recognize that Jamie this won't be solved in society's view. But it is solved ...somewhat in your heart. And JonBenet is and has been okay.

 

And I do my best to not be a judgmental person...I know at least one parent has a clue.....and so do at least 2 others. I hurt that JonBenet wasn't fought for...except by us today. When I see such nonchalant actions and such, I literally want to puke. I give a pass...maybe some are JUST coming upon this case and learning...but when those like Susan, Mame, Detroit and others continue with the intruder crap...I don't understand. We all wish it would have been an intruder. None of us are so twisted minded to believe otherwise. But we have a good idea which one could have been, ...was responsible. It was one of 'em.

 

I can feel your pain and anguish JJ and I understand where you're coming from. As for any newcomers arriving on the scene, one cannot prevent them from buying the wrong books. In 2001, we were heading for Myrtle Beach, and I quickly grabbed a book off the shelf in the book store called "Death of Innocence" by Patsy and John Ramsey. It brought to mind the TV news I had seen a few years back about the young six year old found dead in her own home at Christmas, 1996.

To cut a long story short, I was on the fence for a few months after reading this book. I found Crimenews2000.com where some of the very knowledgebale posters had been studying this case since 1996. I was guided to read many different books, and within four months was knocked off the fence with a THUD. I realized there was no way an intruder had entered this maze of a house. It had to be an inside job, and everything pointed to Patsy Ramsey.

No need to go over it all, it has all been said. So hopefully, the newbies won't concentrate on "Death of Innocence" and get trapped into the intruder theory. When one reads all the other material, it was easy to see how the Ramseys covered their tracks very carefully when writing this book.

 

Amazing and aggravating John Ramsey got away with it all, Show Me, isn't it? What a shame Linda Arndt was left alone that fateful morning. The Ramseys should have been taken to the police station and not allowed to stay with their friends the Fernies.

 

Like Ella, I sat on the fence for quite a while. I needed a reason to believe it was an intruder. I needed a reason to believe that the R's knew nothing about what happened to JonBenet. Being told what to believe isn't the way I'm wired. I needed to read as much about the case as I could as well as read on a few forums.

CN2000 was, at one time, a very diversified place to read. I read at the BB as well early in my internet experience. It didn't take long to catch on to the internet bully tactics. Being told repeatedly that it was an intruder, without legitimate, forensic facts from legitimate or respected sources is worthless.

Coulda, shoulda, woulda, maybe, and "because I said so", are not facts.

I think for me it was the many contradictions that hooked me. The way that JonBenet seemed to be used to further careers has kept me hooked.

Hang in there JoeJame. The case may still make you sick, but eventually you might find a place to be comfortably seated.

Little

 

Here's the cover of the new book by Joyce Carol Oates coming out June 24th. It's called My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike.

Here's a brief synopsis from Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/pr...84/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books

"Dysfunctional families are all alike. Ditto 'survivors.'"

So begins the unexpurgated first-person narrative of nineteen-year-old Skyler Rampike, the only surviving child of an "infamous" American family. A decade ago the Rampikes were destroyed by the murder of Skyler's six-year-old ice-skating champion sister, Bliss, and the media scrutiny that followed. Part investigation into the unsolved murder; part elegy for the lost Bliss and for Skyler's own lost childhood; and part corrosively funny exposé of the pretensions of upper-middle-class American suburbia, this captivating novel explores with unexpected sympathy and subtlety the intimate lives of those who dwell in Tabloid Hell.

Likely to be Joyce Carol Oates's most controversial novel to date, as well as her most boldly satirical, this unconventional work of fiction is sure to be recognized as a classic exploration of the tragic interface between private life and the perilous life of "celebrity." In My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike, the incomparable Oates once again mines the depths of the sinister yet comic malaise at the heart of our contemporary culture.

This is the full Publishers Weekly review:

My Sister, My Love Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, $25.95 (576p) ISBN 978-0-06-154748-5

Oates revisits in fantastic fashion the JonBenet Ramsay murder, replacing the famous family with the Rampikes—father Bix, a bully and compulsive philanderer; mother Betsey, obsessed with making her daughter, Bliss, into a prize-winning figure skater; and son Skyler, the narrator of this tale of ambition, greed and tragedy. Skyler's voice—leaden with grief and guilt—is sometimes that of the nine-year-old he was when his sister was killed, and sometimes the teen he is now, 10 years later, when a letter from his dying mother “solves” the mystery of Bliss's death. The emotionally wrecked Rampike children are collateral damage in a vicious marital battle; Sky is shunted aside, while Bliss is ruthlessly manipulated. Stylistic tricks (direct-address footnotes chief among them) lighten Oates's razor-sharp satire of a privileged enclave where social-climbing neighbors dwell in gargantuan houses; as Oates's readers will expect, the novel is long, propelled at breakneck speed and apt to indulge in verbal excess (as in the 55-page novella within the novel). Oates's psychological acuity, however, ranks this novel as one of the best from a dark observer of our lives and times.

According to Publisher's Weekly, there is going to be a 50,000 first print run, so the publisher is obviously expecting it to be a bestseller.

 

Thanks for posting that link, Karen. I have just now had time to read it. Here are some excerpts from Joyce Carol Oates' excellent article.

http://jco.usfca.edu/jonbenetmystery.html


The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey

by Joyce Carol Oates

Originally published in the New York Review of Books, June 24, 1999.
Copyright © by Joyce Carol Oates

[snip]

The notorious case of the murder of six-year-old child beauty-pageant winner JonBenét Ramsey in Boulder, Colorado, on the night of Christmas 1996, a case that Sherlock Holmes would have "solved" in a few seconds' ratiocination ("No footprints in the snow around the house? No forced entry? A staged kidnapping, ransom note seemingly written by the mother?"), so ineptly investigated by police that no arrests have been made in over two years, is uniquely of our time: a murder mystery which many of the writers under review suggest could be solved is nonetheless stalled, perhaps sabotaged, by a police department and a district attorney's office not only inexperienced at handling homicide cases but intimidated by the wealth of their primary suspects, the parents of the murdered child, and by their high-powered legal team. In his ironically titled Perfect Murder, Perfect Town Lawrence Schiller quotes the distinguished former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi on the legal conundrum of the case, given the meager amount of hard evidence the Boulder city police department has been able to amass:

The strongest evidence against the Ramseys in this case is nothing that directly implicates them. [It is] the implausibility that anyone else committed [the murder]. But paradoxically, the strongest evidence…, by its very nature, is the weakest evidence against the Ramseys…. If we come to the conclusion that JonBenét was not murdered by an intruder, the inevitable question presents itself: which [parent] did it? A prosecutor can't argue to a jury, "Ladies and gentlemen, the evidence is very clear here that either Mr. or Mrs. Ramsey committed this murder and the other one covered it up…" There is no case to take to the jury unless [the DA] could prove beyond reasonable doubt which one…did it…. Even if you could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Patsy Ramsey wrote the ransom note, that doesn't mean she committed the murder.

Schiller summarizes a Denver district attorney's position: "Until investigators could identify each parent's individual actions, two suspects meant no suspects." In other words, the law can shield a suspected murderer or murderers in certain circumstances.

In their joint effort Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey? the forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht and the journalist Charles Bosworth come to a similar conclusion. Given the impenetrable legal wall that has shielded the Ramseys, the case came to seem to the "inexperienced" DA Alex Hunter (in fact, a twenty-five-year veteran) unwinnable; and since in his professional vanity Hunter wanted to file only a case he was certain of winning, he vacillated for months, poisoning the working relations between his office and the Boulder homicide detectives, and further weakening the investigation.

From the first, the Ramseys' wealth and prestige set them apart from ordinary police scrutiny; their alliance with well-known Boulder attorneys who were associates and friends of Alex Hunter's further strengthened their position. As Wecht and Bosworth write, "The case would have been entirely different if the victim was a girl from a poor or even middle-class home."

[snip]

In any supermarket or drugstore you are likely to see, smiling wistfully at you from a display of tabloids, JonBenét Ramsey, forever six years old and the most famous little girl of our time.

JonBenét Ramsey's face in these reproductions is in fact a face grotesquely transformed by cosmetics. Imposed upon her childish innocence like a lurid mask is a look of sexual precocity. Her mouth has been darkened and enlarged, her eyes outlined in mascara, her eyebrows darkened and shaped. She may be wearing an abbreviated bodysuit with a suggestion of padding in the chest. She may be slinky-sexy in an off-the-shoulder flounced dress worn with sheer black stockings and shoes with heels. Her hair may be curled and furled in the bygone style of Farrah Fawcett, or upswept in the bygone style of Lana Turner. She may be wearing an enormous feathered hat with a black lace veil pulled down over her eyes. In TV clips, the child sings and dances with coquettish facial expressions and suggestive movements of her body. Except for her prepubescent figure, she resembles a midget woman.

[snip]

The expensive, ludicrous costumes the child has been made to wear are as much a part of the display as the child herself. Perhaps, for the mother who so obsessively displayed her, a former Miss West Virginia, the costumes were more important than the child for the signals they sent of an exhibitionist, aggressive "femininity." (One of JonBenét Ramsey's pageant songs was "I Wanna Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart." One of her routines was a mock striptease, the removal of a see-through skirt.)

[snip]

At two and a half pages, this alleged ransom note had clearly been written by someone with a good deal of time and no worry of being surprised while writing it; it would be described by an FBI profiler as "the War and Peace of ransom notes" and, in time, it would be identified by handwriting experts as having been written on a note pad belonging to Patsy Ramsey, in a hand similar to hers.

Mistakes followed mistakes. Instead of sealing the house as a crime scene, and questioning the Ramseys separately, officers allowed them to call in their pastor and friends. Police made only a superficial search of the house, missing the child's body in a basement wine cellar. (Such colossal blunders inspired the Boulder County sheriff's officers to have T-shirts made up declaring "We're The Other Guys.") Detectives, though summoned immediately to the "kidnapping," arrived two hours late; by this time people, mostly friends of the Ramseys, were milling through the house, possibly destroying evidence. A police officer would later describe Patsy Ramsey's peculiar simulation of crying, but without tears; she held her fingers to her face and awkwardly peeked at him. There was no physical contact between the Ramseys, who barely spoke or looked at each other. Yet when detectives finally arrived, the string of errors continued. Instead of dealing with the Ramseys as primary suspects (law enforcement officers are supposed to know that crimes in the home are usually committed by family members, in a 12-to-1 ratio, and a crime against a child is often committed by the father), the lead detective, Linda Arndt, "bonded" with the Ramseys as victims.

[snip]

In the living room, in front of numerous witnesses, John Ramsey lay his daughter's body not on a sofa but on the floor; immediately, Patsy Ramsey in a paroxysm of grief or its simulation "collapsed" on top of the body and began rolling around hysterically on the floor. (Though seeming distraught, Patsy Ramsey had opened the door to police fully dressed and wearing makeup.) In this bizarre scene, the victim's body as a source of trace evidence was contaminated by both her parents and crucial clues that might have been gathered by forensics specialists were irrevocably lost. The body, it would later be revealed, had also been wiped clean. Though it should have been clear by now that the "kidnapping" was staged, police officers still failed to control the scene; according to one source, Arndt herself would again move JonBenét's body, and cover it with a blanket.

One thing the police did right that day was to refuse to allow John Ramsey to leave Boulder with his wife and son. Within thirty-five minutes of the "discovery" of JonBenét's body, while the corpse was still lying on the living room floor, Ramsey was making plans with his private pilot to fly to Atlanta that evening. His excuse was that he had "something really important to attend to."

Eighteen months later, at the time of the enfeebled police report, the Ramseys had long since departed Boulder for Atlanta, and their dealings with Boulder authorities have been primarily through their lawyers. John Ramsey, president of Access Graphics, a successful distributor of high-end computers, is a rich man. After four months of refusals, the Ramseys agreed to be interviewed by Boulder police: John Ramsey was interviewed by a retired detective so affably inept that he allowed the suspect to lead the questioning; Patsy Ramsey struck detectives as a tough, defiant woman capable of committing murder, which is very different from having hard evidence that she did commit murder.

Repeatedly, the Boulder police have been made to look like fools and have been ridiculed in the media: for instance, more than a year after the Ramseys were asked to turn over clothing they'd worn on the night of the murder, they finally acquiesced but provided more items than police anticipated, including a blouse of Patsy's that appeared to be newly purchased. In the meantime, the Ramseys hired a PR team to arrange for media coverage favorable to their interests, including a CNN interview, an interview with Geraldo Rivera, and a BBC documentary. In a typical scenario, less than two weeks after the murder, the Ramseys' press agent alerted the media to the fact that the Ramseys would be attending church in Boulder; when the media descended upon the church like vultures, the Ramseys were seen reacting like martyrs. A church member noted: "I was appalled. It looked so staged…. The church had been used…. I felt the church had fallen into the hands of a master manipulator." The Ramseys arranged to be photographed with prominent church leaders, including a bishop.

[snip]

Though toilet-trained for years, JonBenét Ramsey often soiled her underwear and bedclothes; unusual in an intelligent child of six, she was still in the habit of calling out to adults to wipe her when she was on the toilet. As Schiller writes, "Anyone within shouting distance would do. Some adults, thinking she was old enough to do this herself, stopped answering her calls, and it resulted in soiled underpants." (Burke, JonBenét's brother, had suffered from encopresis several years before, to the point of smearing feces on bathroom walls; when Patsy Ramsey began grooming JonBenét for beauty pageants, and turned her concentration away from Burke, his condition improved.) Unsurprisingly, JonBenét had wet her underwear and her bed on Christmas night, not long before she was killed. A melancholy portrait emerges of a little girl emotionally abused long before her death, whose "control" over her own life was limited to the punishing release of her bowels at times and in places contrary to her parents' wishes.

[snip]

After 385 pages of muddled speculation, Schiller discusses the FBI report on the crime in a matter of less than three pages of analysis devastating to the Ramseys:

…The Child's Abduction and Serial Killer Unit was quite certain that JonBenét's killer had never committed a crime before. The experts thought that the ransom note was written by someone intelligent but not criminally sophisticated…. In the note, the kidnappers called themselves "a small foreign faction." That raised the question: foreign to whom?… Every item involved in the crime seemed to come from inside the house, including the pad, the pen, and the broken paintbrush (used in the garrote). The duct tape and the rope for the ligature had most likely been purchased by Patsy Ramsey…. Nothing seemed to have come from outside the house. There was no evidence that anyone had turned on the lights during the crime, trying to find their way around in an unfamiliar house….

To the FBI profilers, the time spent staging the crime scene and hiding the body pointed to a killer who had asked, "How do I explain this?" and had answered the question, "A stranger did it…."

After reviewing what was known about the points of entry to the house…the FBI [concluded] that there was no hard evidence to indicate that an intruder had entered the house that night.

[snip]

 

Looks like I will have another book to add to the collection

Little

 

Thanks Chero,

What a great read again!

Yep, time to clean my reading glasses Little

 

Yes, I remember this fantastic project very well, Barbara, What a lot of work Jay put into this. Didn't half draw attention to the fact JonBenét had been redressed as rashomon stated.

I often think it was John Ramsey who redressed her because of the larger size. If they had both been up for most of the night recreating the crime scene, it's John I see making the mistake of putting larger panties on JB. Something a man would do. Patsy may have noticed this(?). In a panic he grabbed the wrong size of underwear. No intruder would hang around to redress their victim with other people still in the house.

When one goes over these mistakes, how on earth could the Grand Jury not have come up with a guilty verdict?

For sure the Ramseys were up all night.

 

I believe as do many attorneys and other talking heads that the main reason no charges were ever brought is exactly what is written in the article Chero re-posted.

They can't bring charges unless they know exactly WHO did what. Knowing that the Ramseys themselves were involved only gives them reason to eventually let go of the infamous "intruder" and focus on WHICH Ramsey actually committed the crime, WHO covered it up, etc., etc. Evidence to discern all of that has been tampered with and with the crime scene null and void at this point, the evidence is long gone.

That will never be known now. If anything new ever comes to light, for sure John will point the finger at Patsy and claim no knowledge. After all, there's no prison term for the deceased!

You are right Elle, the Ramseys were up all night and John and possibly Burke are the only ones left who know what happened that night.

The rest of the world KNOWS but nobody knows the details like the remaining Ramseys. We can only speculate

 

You are right, this is an excellent article, Cherokee, and I read what was posted here, and it doesn't half make me shake my head in disgust that the Ramseys got away with this crime. Forgive me, with Patsy being already dead. Can we justify this crime by thinking maybe Patsy didn't really get away with it after all because she was taken away so young(?).


Isn't the following information not convincing enough for those who stubbornly think it was an intruder?

From memory, I remember reading a neighbour did see signs of a light moving from the Ramsey home after midnight, proving that all the electric lighting was not switched on. I'm sure you have all read about this, along with a scream being heard, though not necessarily from the same neighbour (?).