Forensic evidence

Rash, yes, I think it would have been a challenge, a tough one. The lawyers they hired were good ones. If the word "good" can even be applied to a lawyer...In any case, they would have been like pit bulls in defending whichever Ram got charged.

I think both PR and JR were together all the way. My current belief is that the initial head injury came from JR and he directed the Patsy Stage Show the whole time. I guess that means I don't think Patsy did it. I think JR wiped down JonBenet and wrapped her in the blanket. I think that is how his shirt fibers got into her vaginal area. I also think he did the paintbrush part. I am 100% certain Patsy wrote that note, but had direction from John. She added her own special flair, but he is the "small foreign faction" author.

But how to prove any of it? The only way to figure out what happened would have been to put them both in jail from the beginning, and to have kept the crime scene pristine. Even if police didn't put them in custody from the start, they probably still could have prosecuted if the crime scene had been intact. Assuming, that is, that there was a DA with a pair to start the BALL rolling.

 

Sorry, heymom, but I have a very difficult time believing John delivered the head blow, knowing how his daughter Beth was killed in that car accident with all that blunt force trauma and so forth.


-Tea

 

That's OK, Tea. I understand, and I don't want to believe it myself, but I think the rage that night may well have come from John. I read somewhere that he was sensitive to noise and disruption, it was late, the kids may have been whining or arguing, Patsy may have been b*tching about something, it was probably chaos. I think in a moment of fury you don't consider your previous pain or grief, you just act. And I don't know if anything people say about John is real to him.

I don't have every detail worked out, and I could be 180 from the truth, but I have a hard time visualizing Patsy cracking JonBenet over the head. I don't think it was an accident either, though. I think John has a lot of stuff hidden behind that ever-smiling facade. Whatever happened, I believe he directed most of the staging that night, and made whatever phone calls necessary. He was reading John Douglas' book, after all. He was the one who usually cut Patsy off when she started moving off into dangerous territory.

And if he was the one who was abusing JonBenet, he might have also had anger toward her.

 

But Patsy's fibers in the garrote wrappings, in the paint tray where the brushes were kept and on the duct tape link her to the large parts of the staged scene.
I too think that John is a dark horse and may well have been JonBenet's sexual abuser.

But I have difficulty believing that Patsy would have covered up for John if he had actually killed her daughter.
Patsy too must have had something to hide, otherwise she would not have taken part in a cover-up.
I've always had the feeling that the only Person Patsy Ramsey would ever have covered up for was herself.
I believe that it was Patsy who struck the head blow, maybe by violently yanking JB's head against a hard object. We know from a poster on Websleuths (who once watched Patsy hysterically fly off the handle in the Boulder post office just because a package hadn't been delivered promptly), that PR was very well capable of nasty outbursts.
the only explanation I have for both Patsy and John taking part in the staging is that common guilt must have tied them together. They both wanted to save their hide, and each was in the other's hands.
Possible scenario: Patsy caught John molesting JB, but on a first impulse, directed her anger against JB instead of at John. After realizing what she has done, she and John want to save what is left from the family remnants. Patsy does not want to be exposed as the mother who killed her daughter in a rage, and John does not want to be exposed as the father who had been molesting his daughter. I think they had Burke in mind too, and the traumatic effect all this would have on him.
So instead of turning themselves in to the police, they decide to cover it up. And their common guilt tied them together till death parted them. Jmpo.

 

I agree with you, especially the last part. John must feel liberated now, he doesn't have to constantly worry that Patsy is going to slip up. That may have also contributed to him looking a bit younger!!!!

I have always felt that he was sexually abusing JB. And I have always felt that JB's death was an accident that was turned into murder by way of cover-up.

I'm not sure who did what, but I do know that Patsy wrote the note!!!!!

 

I agree with your scenario, but consider that John may have been threatening Patsy with pinning it on her. I haven't ignored the fiber evidence - I see JR directing Patsy to do things, step by step. But perhaps I am letting Patsy off the hook too much. Just don't know, and will never know, unless Burke saw something or heard enough to figure it out, or, like some here believe, was responsible for the death and may confess at some point.

Tez just wrote what I would have said. But JR still gives me the absolute creeps. He's just too happy now, for a father who has lost 2 daughters tragically. Not that you can't move on, but in some way, he seems smug and actually free from negative emotions, which in this case is not normal.

 

It occured to me last night, that if Smit and the rest of the IDI's think some outside homicidal maniac committed this brutal murder...why is there only ONE blow to the head? If he was enraged at JR and venting...why only ONE blow to the head? Just a thought...

 

JR gives me the creeps too. The man actually smiled and JOKED when the police came over to his house on the morning of Dec 26 - can you imagine a man joking under the circumstances?
RST members would say this was probably a defense mechanism, like when some people laugh at funerals.
But if you couple his joking on the morning of Dec 26th with his current smugness (cynics would say he looks smug like the cat who has just eaten the canary, and not like a grieving husband and father), the picture remains fairly consistent.
He now looks smug because the Damocles' sword of Patsy spilling the beans has been removed for good.
And he joked on that Dec 26 morning because Patsy, by killing JB in a rage, had done the dirty work for him and eliminated JB as a witness who might expose him to others as the sexual abuser that he was.
For it is also possible that Patsy's rage attack on JB did not happen as she caught John abusing his daughter, but for other reasons.
And when Patsy (not knowing that John was JB's abuser) tells him in her panic what happened, he decides to help her with the staging because he knows he has to hide the signs of chronic abuse. And suggests to her that she stage it as a bizarre sexual predator scene, but his true motive is to camouflage the signs of sexual abuse.

But the question remains why a rational type like John let Patsy write that idiotic, rambling and totally implicating ransom note.
Frankly, I believe that John initially thought Patsy would not get away with the crime. Which is why he decided that in case she should be arrested, to leave as little forensic and other circumstantial evidence behind as possible, so that nothing could be tied to HIM.

 

A question:
Where do you posters think these many small marks or 'abrasions' on the front of JB's neck (above and below the ligature), come from?

 

Wow, Rash. That is the first time I have ever actually considered John letting Patsy be arrested for the crime. I believe he would have done that. I believe he could easily have done that. Yes, he has been emotionally inappropriate since the morning of 12/26, and probably long before that, but this was the culmination of it. I am sitting here open-mouthed.

So it really wouldn't have been him and Patsy against the world, if Patsy had been put in custody...would it??? Nope, that pilot would have been ready to fly him away...bye, bye, Miss American Pie...

 

Rash, I believe he would have let her be arrested. And yeah, he would have flown off for parts unknown.

One question I have though. Everyone but the dog was provided legal counsel paid for by JR. His ex-wife even had a lawyer and that lawyer refused to let her be questioned about JR. Something just ain't right there.....And maybe the dog did have legal counsel, I can't remember...LOL

 

rash

The small "abrasions" I think you are talking about are actually petechiae, as mentioned in the autopsy. some people try to say they are from JBR's fingernails but then they would be scratches or abrasions which the autopsy calls petechiae, which are kind of like patterns of pin-point bruises. I see these marks, for instance, under automatic blood pressure cuffs at the end of surgery when I take the cuff off the patients' arm.

Okay-edited to add - I have gone back and looked at the autopsy and it does say both petechiae and abrasions. But it does go on to list where some of the abrasions are. I still think the small marks are actually petechiae in the skin caused by the garrotte.

 

::yes::
It's hard to tell from the photos what are abrasions and what are petechiae, but if she had been struggling to get the garotte off, there would be more abrasions and scratches also. I think any abrasions on her neck were caused by the process of putting the garotte on.

 

I think he *had* to hire the lawyers (he couldn't sacrifice Patsy immediately, since she could have implicated him), but if the police had gotten difficult, he would have thrown Patsy under the bus to save himself.

No, the dog was with the neighbors that night and didn't need a lawyer (one lucky dog!). Too bad JonBenet didn't spend the night with the neighbors too.

 

Thanks Texan. Any help from posters with medical knowledge is much appreciated by us laypeople.

An IDI poster just wrote on another forum that petechiae can only occur in conscious people: do you or others know if this is true?

The poster's point being that the presence of petechiae shows that JB was still conscious when strangled by the intruder.

 

Petechiae has nothing to do with being "conscious" or not. The only requirement is that your heart is beating and you have blood pressure.

It's been discussed here and on other forums; the presence of petechiae does NOT mean it was caused by strangulation. Petechiae can be caused by convulsions, and convulsions are one side effect of severe head concussion.

 

::yes::
Here's an example of petichiae in unconscious people

 

petechiae

Yes they can happen because of convulsions and other reasons. I had a friend at work who had some on her cheeks, I asked her what happened and she told me she was coughing really hard.

All that being said though, the ones on her neck around the garrotte are from the cord. That is why I think the theory that the cord was never tightened, but rather it was swelling that caused the garrotte to be embedded in the neck, just doesn't work. The ones on her eyelids could certainly come from seizures but there are petechial hemmorhages scattered on each lung and I wonder if that is more indicative of strangulation as opposed to convulsions.

I have a daughter who has more experience with patients that have convulsions and I will ask her about how often these patients have petechial hemmorhaging.
My patients are happily asleep and convulsion free!

 

On one of the websites about the cord (Stansport), it was stated that this cord SHRINKS when wet. I wondered when I saw that whether the cord around JonBenet's neck could have gotten wet and shrunk during the staging, to where it was tighter than it started out. Just a thought.

 

I saw a show the other night where a young man had died in a car crash. He had petechial hemmorhaging all over his neck, hundreds. The forensic doctor could not understand it but finally figures it out. When the car rolled over, he landed in a position where his head and chest where bent over the opposite seat and he was in a sort of fetal position. She later finds out that he had a heart problem (which he did not know about and that combined with the cocaine he ingested did not help). In so doing(falling over himself and lying in that position, he strangled himself, hence the hemmorhaging (hate that word, can never spell it). He was alive but unconscious and he strangled himself.

If this helps.