Happy New Year ...

Happy New Year?

I dread the milestones of a new year. Will I make it to September 10th? Will I want to?

I've tried to adopt the D. H. Lawrence technique of dealing with guilt: make orange marmalade. Immediate action not theology or psychology. I don't particularly care for marmalade.

No real progress on the JonBenet case. No real progress on the marmalade either.

So I feed the dogs and I feed the feral cats and I wish them all a Happy New Year. Its the thing to do, you know. Wish a hungry cat who copes with the dangers of a feral existence a Happy New Year as if he understood English and understood what a calendar was. We have rules that have to be followed in a civilized society.

Year end review:
Ryan Ferguson: Still doing hard time in prison.
Owen Rooney: Still missing from Grand Forks, BC, Canada but some promising reports in the Lac La Bish area of Alberta.
Luke Mitchell: Still doing a Life Sentence for not having left his dna at the scene of a murder while the three males who did leave their dna at the scene have never been considered suspects.

Death Penalty charged in Ventura County

This is news?

The DA has announced that he will proceed with Death Penalty charges against the former security guard whose DNA implicates him in the murder of Brock and Davina Husted of the Farina Beach gated community in Ventura County, CA.

Sure there is no unseemly rush to proceed in such a manner and a great deal is made of consultation and contemplation of the issue but it was a foregone conclusion right off. A successful couple, wealthy and well-liked in the community killed in a brutal fashion in their own home inside a gated community. Even if you don't throw in the added features of the woman being several months pregnant and her two older children being in the home at the time, you've got an outraged community. Of course the death penalty will be pursued by the DA. There was never any real doubt even in the Public Defender's office, despite their usual mouthings at the announcement about surprise, disappointment and allegations of involvement of others as well as innocence of their client.

It was probably just a drunken interlude on the beach and when a beer soaked biker had his return path to his motorcycle blocked by the rising tide, he took the available stair case which passed by the unlocked patio doors of the Husted's home. A simple opportunity presented itself to an armed motorcyclist with a criminal history. How it turned to dozens of needless knife wounds will probably never be known but he may simply have wanted to eliminate the witnesses. Had his DNA not been found on the helmet visor left at the crime scene this case would probably never have been solved.

Ventura will file additional charges for fleeing the scene of an accident, battery and intimidation of a witness for a vehicular incident involving the defendant having struck a parked vehicle about seven months after the murders. Its not known why the DA is bringing the additional charges or why a trial and sentencing for battery should precede the murder charge. More publicity? More fees to a public defender?

The Growth of Terrorism ...

An American terrorist, having fled Florida to hide out in Costa Rica, had to cross into Panama for some visa-related reason and was nabbed at the border crossing.

The act of terrorism? Well, you see ... its like this: He and his girl were out partying and they each come home pretty blotto. She decides to pack her bags and leave. He decides to continually unpack her suitcase. (Please note: that is a fairly non-violent response. No guns, no knives, no threats, no physical force. He just waits till the suitcase is nearly packed and then dumps it out onto the floor without threatening the woman in any way).

As the night wears on and tempers wear thin she apparently escalates the situation but all he does is get his gun and fire one round into his computer's monitor which may have impaired its usefulness but did not harm anyone or endanger anyone in any way whatsoever. He then unloaded and put the gun away, muttering the inevitable "I didn't know it was loaded".

Police arrested him of course and he was charged with various offenses including firing a missile into a house. The bullet being legally considered a missile and the crime being classified according to crime computer programs as an act of terrorism.

So everyone. Feel safe tonight. An American terrorist was arrested by Panamanian police and will be extradited to the USA to stand trial for what a decade ago would have been known as drunk and disorderly conduct. Somewhere there lurks a draft of a budget request for the fight on terrorism. Somewhere deep in the bowels of officialdom and databases, the counter has been incremented. We now have even more terrorism to deal with. Terrorism! For shooting his computer with a gun he didn't know was loaded. Since when is a dumb drunk who never even threatened his girlfriend with harm classified as a terrorist?

Life is cheap.

A millionaire owner of a chain of nursing homes in the UK who is of Indian heritage married a young woman of Indian heritage who was from Sweden. The couple honeymooned in the Cape Town area of South Africa where she was killed in a late night carjacking attempt on their taxicab.

It seems the husband wanted to keep the dowry but not the wife. Its understood that an English insurance company had insured the wife's life also. If it is true that he had insured his wife in the UK, then perhaps the UK will try him for murder rather than merely extradite him to South Africa for trial. The cab driver confessed to having received about three thousand dollars for the recruitment of two of his friends who committed the murder.

There are, as yet, no reports of patients in his nursing homes being worried. Yet.

Societies that devalue females provide a great deal of opportunities for killing wives. I understand that an Indian male is expected to arrive late for a wedding as an indication that the proceedings are of no great consequence to him. He is also expected to remain in conversation with his friends during the proceedings to similarly indicate that he takes no great notice of the event. Although some Indian laws seem to ban the payment of dowries it is clear that the practice continues and often continued dowry payments are simply little more than extortion. In poorer households an accident with a cooking stove can take place. In a wealthier household it seems a car jacking in a country with a high crime rate and underpaid police can be utilized. Two weeks? Wow!

On-edit: Why is it that no matter what the financial circumstances of themselves, their families or their business enterprises, they can always find money to hire a media relations consultant?

Search for Owen Rooney, BC, Canada.

Owen Rooney ingested mushrooms at an outdoor music festival and became disoriented. He was clearly the victim of an assault that was serious and beyond anything needed for the defense of property or of a person.

His initial encounter with the police took place when he had two black eyes and was bleeding from each ear which gives rise to fears of a serious concussion. He accepted a ride to a bus station but left the bus station to seek medical treatment at a nearby hospital where he was clearly mistreated.

He wandered away from the hospital without the backpack he had taken with him from the bus station and without a wallet or cell phone. Not having been located in the Grand Forks, BC area the search was extended to Vancouver although simultaneous inquiries were made in Alberta since he had recently texted a young lady from Alberta.

The search is now focused intensely on Vancouver Island and the nearby Lasqueti island, a rural area famed for its counter-culture lifestyle. There are reports of him having sold Dream Catchers door to door on Vancouver Island. His Australian accent would be distinctive although his speech might still be slurred due to his injuries. The reports from Vancouver are doubtful to some since they all follow televised reports of an initial sighting that appears to be of dubious value.

He is young and used to traveling light but I would still have focused the search in the vicinity of the Grand Forks hospital and at truck stops in the area. I know he had a brain injury and had been improperly administered morphine which would have depressed his mental acuity even more, yet he left the exterior picnic table without returning to the hospital to obtain the backpack containing his non-functioning cell phone and other belongings. It is possible he merely became disoriented at that outside picnic table. Surveillance cameras at the hospital are few and do not have any recording capability.

The Grand Forks Gazette has editorialized about the inaccuracies of the social media and has stated that the Gazette will endeavor to provide reliable information but so far I've not seen anything in the Gazette about the police officer who contacted a man with cerebral spinal fluid oozing from each hear and merely drove him to a bus station. Nor have I seen anything in the Gazette about improper administration of morphine to a severe concussion patient much less to a patient who was so disoriented he could not find his way back to his room in a very small and uncomplicated clinic. I've not seen any explanation in the Gazette about the mysterious statements that rather than being a patient with a severe concussion he was only there because he had no where else to go. I've not seen anything in the Gazette about the confusion concerning whether the player had his wallet or not; he certainly had it when initially confronted by the police. I've not seen any Gazette evaluation of the SAR mission. The Gazette has complained of the inadequacies of the social media. Perhaps the editorial staff of the Gazette should be focusing their attention on the Gazette. I wonder if the editorial staff of the Gazette think that a Canadian who had just expressed concern over his belongings would get up from that picnic table and go ambling off to the western potato field and leave those belongings behind? Its not exactly an exciting destination and its not exactly well renowned as a good place for hitchhikers.

WikiLeaks is now under DDOS ATTACK

And you thought only the bad guys knew how to orchestrate bot-nets to perform a Distributed Denial Of Service attack! That attack began eight minutes ago and is an attempt to keep WikiLeaks from releasing the massive document dump that will embarrass several ambassadors and probably foment a riot or two in Turkey. USA really does not want this WikiLeaks database to see the light of day.

Thanksgiving...

No. Not for me. I usually spend my Thanksgivings bumping my chin on some foot rail and realizing that it is simply not a holiday for me. I think of phone calls not made and drink myself into a stupor. Carefully nurtured contacts with former White House personnel that were not utilized that night despite my desperate fears weigh heavily upon my mind.

Thanksgiving never was much of a holiday for me, now it is not one at all.

I do, however, wish a Happy Thanksgiving to others.

Legal Families and Legal Fictions.

For countless decades the legal position relating to gambling has clearly been contrary to the actual societal position. We have legalized Off Track Betting and we have legalized lotteries, yet often a facade of not favoring gambling debts or gambling activities persists.

For a long time New York courts granted divorces based on adultery when it seemed strange that one of the early divorce lawyers always used the same photographer, in the same hotel room, in the same suggestive situation and using the same "other woman" who just happened to be his secretary's sister. Do you think the New York judges were fools? Or do you perhaps realize that the judges simply decided that the State's arbitrary and ancient laws simply should no longer be so strictly applied.

Now we have adoption matters before the courts wherein a stable loving two parent home is being deemed as not in the best interests of the child because the biological father's rights were violated. Wrenching a toddler away from a happy loving home is bad enough, but doing it in the name of The Best Interests of the Child seems to make a mockery of arbitrary and capricious judges who deem any whim they happen to have as representing the best interests of the child.

We have marriages in America these days wherein each of the two spouses openly have a few "friends with benefits". One husband has his female auto mechanic spend Sunday afternoons helping him restore an old car and then its a few beers, dinner and then sexual intercourse. Meanwhile his wife is off exploring some used bookstore in the company of a local author with whom she will have dinner and then spend the night at his place where she shares a closet. Social and sexual activities regularly take place with others and yet there is a married couple and issue of that intact marriage. One wonders just how far the official position of the law can be stretched before it snaps back and hits the hands of the arbitrary and capricious judges. As society changes, our laws must change.

We don't always have a loving home consisting of two heterosexual parents who provide for their children, but when that situation does exist, why are judges so determined to tear it apart? Is a single parent home now to be favored over a more traditional marriage? Is a miserable excuse for a man to be favored by the courts due to a simple fact of biology being weighed more heavily than persistent actions?

Ronni Chasen ... Contract Hit ???

Why my initial thoughts are a contract hit:

Anyone able to group five shots in the chest area is not experiencing road rage or any other sort of rage. Even at close range a person experiencing rage would be lucky to get two out of five shots into the torso.

No shell casings? Probably knows enough to use a revolver and therefore never has to pick up shell casings at the scene of his handiwork. Could he have used a semi-automatic and kept it inside the vehicle? Sure, but even if wearing earplugs that noise is loud. However, if he did keep an automatic inside the vehicle that again indicates a lack of rage because having a concern for shell casings would usually mean being calm and experienced.

Driving skill. No skid marks from braking or from peeling away at a high rate of speed. Cool, calm and collected. By the time do-gooders get to the scene he is not only long gone but he has departed the scene quietly. This does not indicate road rage. Did he have a kill switch for the tail lights? I have no idea but it is a possibility since even early arriving witnesses saw no other vehicles.

Location: He chose a good location and may even have chosen an optimal location. This is not likely to have happened as a result of road rage. Nor as some have suggested was it some sort of random gang-initiation shooting. He probably knew where to be waiting and had a spotter car confirm the route and timing signals, although its clear that the location of the shooting was on the route that she would be taking to get from Sunset Blvd. to Wilshire Blvd.

A gang initiation shooting is absurd. They don't have the patience to lie in wait much less in that neighborhood. A gang shooting would be spraying shells all over the place.

I doubt there was any object used to shatter the window prior to the shots being fired. Its difficult to do that anyway particularly from a vehicle. It also gives an alarm that would allow the victim to suddenly accelerate. It was just a sudden firing of at least five well controlled shots into the victim's torso. A sure kill. Then a calm departure without any tire-squeeling. Someone knew the area, knew the vehicle and the occupant, positioned themselves, fired at least five times into the victim's torso and left the area in a calm and deliberate manner. This was not some gang initiation. This was not some road rage incident. This was a hit.

Addendum: Concerning Dum-Dum bullets: Although there are various fine differences in describing hollow point ammunition and no precise information is as yet available concerning what was found in the corpse, it appears that the ammunition utilized was sensibly selected for the task at hand. It would penetrate a body sufficiently and cause considerable damage to tissue but would be unlikely to exit the body. The ammunition is readily available. There was no reason to believe the victim would have been wearing body armor and that therefore non-deforming armor-piercing ammunition would have been required. Once again, it appears that sensible selections were made and that there are no indications of a spur of the moment incident provoked by road rage or any sort of randomly encountered target.

No Country For Old Men

Okay. I saw the film. It featured Michelle Monaghan, the "look at those stems" girl from Kiss Kiss, Die Die. So you know I would watch that movie. I decided I would start the novel too. I hope to finish it but am suddenly having some tough going. The opening of the film shows a young man who is an experienced hunter happening upon the aftermath of a drug dealers shoot-out and appropriating the money for himself.

The novel is able to bring out more of the hunters careful analysis of his situation, his decision making skills and the wisdom of his actions. He correctly assumes that the last man standing left with the money, he tracks it down knowing that a wounded man won't get far, he takes the money home and stashes it. He carefully reminds himself that he has to be careful and not think of it as luck. He has to stay alert to danger because he knows that someone is going to come looking for that money.

So far, so good! Now why would a man like that, who has the loot and has reached a place of seeming safety go and screw his life up by heading back to scene of the shoot-out with a glass of water for the wounded victim who had muttered Aqua Por Dios? I just can't see a shrewd hunter who is so fully aware of the situation as being so weak and so stupid as to take water to a dying man. Yes, he does tell his wife "I'm fixin to do somethin dubern hell but I'm goin anyways". Sure, its a novel. The characters have to have flaws. Without the hunter being a fool, the novel would end right there. I just wonder how plausible it is that man with a whole lot of loot who has made a clean getaway would go back to give a drink of water to a man who clearly is likely to be dead either by the time the hunter gets there or very shortly thereafter. All his self preservation skills that he had just exercised suddenly desert him. Strange. Perhaps the essence of the situation is captured in the terse dialog wherein the wife says "Its a false god" and the highly competent, realist husband replies "Yeah, but its real money".

I hope I am able to finish the novel. I have my doubts however. I wonder too if the killer of JonBenet Ramsey may have made mistakes. Sure those mistakes have not yet tripped him up, but what sort of man was he? Did he have a background involving home intrusions in the dead of night? Or was this his first time? Did he leave the grandiose note to mislead investigators or solely to entertain himself? Did he make a prompt departure in response to the scream or was it planned right from the start? If we adopt a 1:00am departure, do we narrow the "window of enjoyment" so much that it becomes a ploy rather than a goal? Would a pedophile want to linger in the basement or make quick work of the task? Do pedophiles draw out their time with the victim or is the perverted sex itself considered to be simply a sort of foreplay for the murder? Clearly the real goal in the murder of JonBenet Ramsey was indeed murder. Yet it is obvious that the perversion was a major and critical task. What conclusions are proper for us to make when we are dealing with subjects that are so alien to us?

Okay. I finished the novel. Not a satisfactory resolution of the issues. Life is like that. It was interesting. The triumph of evil is often a proper subject. The Hunter got into the mess because he went back to give water to a dying man. The Hunter later got killed because he was protective of a teenage runaway girl. The Hunter's wife was killed simply because the psychotic hit man had promised to kill her. Not entirely satisfying.

The Life of a Sleuth

Chilly morn. Dogs expressing various needs for food and affection. Cats expressing desire for food and demonstrating a whole panoply of new techniques for attempting to trip an old geezer who can't even see his feet much less the cats crossing his path in front of him. Desire for coffee. Three different containers of various blends of coffee. One container of coffee beans. Empty container of coffee filters. Well, will it be improvise or will it be to go without? Improvising sounds very consonant with an "American can-do" spirit but its hard to be so spirited when dragging oneself out of bed on a chilly morning. Perhaps I shall go without my Old Sock Coffee this morning. I'm already behind schedule as it is.

Crank up the cantankerous computer. Time to take the overnight twitter feed and vet it for all references to JonBenet Ramsey. Sort out the insults, the jokes, the threats, the utter nonsense. Will these references to a girl having legs harder to close than the JonBenet Case ever end? Its a stupid joke from an utterly stupid movie. Yet everyone making a reference to JonBenet gets indexed, categorized and investigated. An endlessly trying task of very little investigatory value.

Cold, tired, lacking caffeine ... but still plodding on in search of a killer.

Kyron Horman update: succinct version.

Okay. You got lawyers flinging Terms of Art and Innuendo at each other.

You got Biological Parents doing the TV circuit and saying Give Money, Plant Flowers and Wear Bracelets, but above all else Give Money. (The public seems to view this as admirable).

You got StepMother and Friend saying Go Talk To My Lawyer And Leave Me Alone. (The public seems to view this as evil, vile and proof of guilt).

So what's new?

There are rumors of cell phone PINGS that are in conflict with StepMother's oral statements as to her whereabouts but all we have are rumors, no data as to how likely any such pings might be technologically plausible and still have the StepMother's oral statements as to here whereabouts be essentially truthful.

There are rumors of hit men but such hit men seemed rather reticent to report the overtures to the police.

The StepMother's friend is condemned for escorting her to a lawyer's office since apparently friends are not supposed to think anything about innocent until proven guilty. At least it seems that paparazzi prefer only such fair weather friends.

Divorce proceeding are initiated but such proceedings and paper blizzards from motion-happy lawyers are really just one side which is tapped into the police information pipeline trying to wear down the other side that has not benefited from the investigatory pipeline. As in any war, truth is the first casualty.

From time to time there are modest call-outs of mounted search parties, from time to time budget notices are submitted. Hot air is generated. Media crews run up bar tabs all over town, microphones get stuck in people's faces, nobody says anything worthwhile though.

The fact remains: the police seem obsessed with the step-mother, Terri Horman. She left the school at what appears to have been a time when other parents would be in the area and might have taken particular notice of her. She drove a road that while not exactly heavily trafficked is by no means certain to be deserted. She could not be sure that there would not be people observing her such as hikers, campers, or passersby in other vehicles that might suddenly appear on the road. She arrived at a Fred Meyer store within a reasonable time and did not appear to be nervous or distraught such as might be expected if she had just killed her step-son or just handed him over to a trusted friend who was to kill him. Later travel to Sauvie Island is thought by some to be for corpse disposal purposes but the island is by no means deserted since hikers, cyclists and berry pickers abound. There is really no evidence which indicates the police are the least bit justified in their obsessive focus on the step mother.

On-Edit: It now appears that certain email text can be considered to reflect an attitude of depression or despair and an externally placed blame for her decisions to allow her family life to have depleted her savings. This is not necessarily sufficient motive for killing the kid but it at least provides some understanding of the emotions that were at work. I've no idea if her prior body building involved the use of drugs such as might induce "roid rage" and I've certainly no information as to how long ago she took drugs of any sort. Its always been unlikely that a stranger wandered into the school at such a busy time and snatched a kid. However, that is by no means impossible.

On-Edit: As is always the case, the local law enforcement agency may be inexperienced but it is difficult to get a case taken away from them. The sheriff is in control of this missing persons case and the county sheriff mainly does prisoner custody work with very little patrol and very little investigative work.

What a waste of life

It appears that at age 19 a young lady who had achieved some prior notoriety for incessant hiccups is charged with murder after a robbery that netted the three participants less than a total of fifty dollars.

A New Generation

In order to spark interest in the forensic sciences in youth attending the Science and Engineering Expo in Washington, DC this weekend (23rd-24th October) one researcher will transmit her intellectual curiosity via paintings made by maggots.

Maggot Monets - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences

http://www.the-scientist.com

Kyron Horman update from Seattle University

>It was the biggest news story from the Pacific Northwest all year:
Yes, once a media frenzy begins it just snowballs. Doesn't make it all that much different from similar cases getting less media scrutiny.

>He is still listed as missing and endangered.
Judge Crater is still listed as missing. In a tourist area a swimmer is often listed as missing so as to keep crime statistics low and shark attack statistics out of the newspapers. Crime statistics are often misleading.

>detectives have received more than 4,000 leads,
Most of them probably from people who have had "visions of a body being found near water". Well, most people rarely get pretty far from water so that information just isn't helpful and in the lush greenery of the Pacific Northwest its real hard to get far from water.

>He emphasized repeatedly that they were “not scaling back,”
Which of course is proof positive that they were scaling back!

>Public outrage at the disappearance focused first on the school district,
Why? People disappear from stores, malls, sidewalks. Do reporters encourage anger at malls if some disappears in a parking lot?

>not a single security camera was present at the rural school.
Security cameras often provide no assistance whatsoever and are of little deterrent value. A rural school with no history of crime would be unlikely to have cameras as such funds would be more wisely spent in urban area schools with high crime problems and high population density.

>many became frustrated that the police weren’t releasing enough information.
That is universally the situation. Reporters were claiming that cell phone signals were received at a different tower than would have been likely had her description of her travels been truthful but we don't have details as to times, signal strength or local terrain that might make such spurious signals not at all suspicious.

>Terri Horman, the last person to see Kyron,
Oh!!! The last person to see Kyron??? Well, each and every school day mothers drop their kids off at school and therefore may become the last person to see them. Should we ban this practice?

>a person many now call ‘Stepmonster‘.
A sobriquet invented by some reporter, no doubt.

>Within a few days she posted about going to the gym,
Guilty! String her up on the spot!! No one ever goes to a gym to work off frustration or because the walls are closing in on them and the police are not helpful to them.

>Kyron’s father shockingly divorced Terri, filing a restraining order.
I wonder how many divorces were filed in Oregon that year? And I don't know why the reporter described the husband's actions as shocking.

>Terri Horman had allegedly hired her landscaper to kill Kaine Horman,
Allegedly. I believe he did not report the plot promptly to police and wonder therefore what his thoughts and intentions might have been.

>A string of public appearances made Kyron’s biological parents national news
Well is it better to appear on Good Morning America than to go to your local gym?

>identifying her as the mastermind behind their son’s disappearance
Identifying does not mean they provided supporting evidence.

>Terri is not a suspect in the case,
Look Jack, if the cops are repeatedly calling you, having you take polygraphs, putting your image and your vehicle description onto flyers, trying to find people who saw you and reporters are following you wherever you go, you are indeed a suspect!

>spreading Kyron’s picture around the country,
They think perhaps he might be in Palm Beach?

>and each of them held a birthday party for Kyron in early September
I would think it less strange if they had simply gone to the gym!

>Students have left a desk vacant for their classmate Kyron,
Yep, those schools generally are not known for sensible actions or turning out kids who are realistic.

Mad Goat Disease and Mad Hikers

The Olympia National Forest has suffered its first fatality involving an attack by a mountain goat which was one of eight aggressive goats that were being monitored for a number of years in the 300 goat herd.

The male hiker defended his two female companions but in attempting to leave after having successfully confronted the aggressive goat he may have turned his back to walk away rather than backing up while facing the goat.

Although an experienced hiker, he would not have known that there were eight aggressive goats who were being treated by the rangers with bean bag guns and noise makers but were apparently not responding well to their ongoing therapy. Firearms are not permitted in National Parks. Hikers are not given notice of aggressive mountain goats.

On-Edit: Nope. Sorry. This has nothing to do with prion diseases in goat brains. I've no idea if Alzheimer's Disease is prion induced or not. If it is, we are lucky its so slow as opposed to other species wherein it seems to progress faster. This is solely about a fatal goat attack on a recreational hiker in the Pacific Northwest.

Boulder Police Continue Intimidation By Media

>Police in Boulder, Colorado, want to talk to the older brother of JonBenet Ramsey,
No they don't. They know he is represented by counsel. If they wanted to talk to him they would have contacted his attorney and asked for a meeting to be set up.
All that happened was the BPD sent some officers to a college campus and pretended to just happen to give Burke Ramsey their business card on the assumption that a college senior might not know how to operate a telephone.

>Supporters of the family call it harassment.
It is harassment! And reporters should not be so afraid to call it harassment.

>And yet the mere hint of activity in one of the nation's most famous cold cases has headlines swirling.
Swirling headlines was the goal of the BPD who follow a simple recipe: Add innuendo and let the tabloids do the swirling.

>all the hours of investigation,
There was no investigation. There was only a police orchestrated campaign of harassment by the media.

>but the death of JonBenet was little more than a tragic local news story that holiday season
That's odd. A Harvard law professor was in Israel at the time and reported that the story was the third item on their news.
> until her parents appeared on CNN.
With the police not investigating the case, what else could they do?
>The interview unleashed the now famous pageant video
No, those pageant videos were purchased, against the family's wishes, by the media from a parent who had filmed the event.

>The early evidence seemed to point toward the parents.
No. No evidence pointed to the parents.
>There was no sign of forced entry into the Ramsey home,
Not true at all. There were marks near one lock and one door was found unlocked. There was a trail of debris from a window well and the access grate was found with fresh foliage under it showing that the grate had recently been placed atop the foliage.
>no footprints in the snow surrounding it.
There was snow on the grass but all the sidewalks, alley way and driveway were totally clear of snow so anyone approaching the house after the snow started would not have been likely to leave footprints. There is considerable evidence to indicate the intruder entered the home before any snow fell.
>The rope used to choke JonBenet was tightened with a paintbrush from her mother's hobby kit.
Intruders are not permitted to utilize implements found inside the home?

>An alleged ransom note was written on a pad of paper from inside the house,
A pad kept in plain sight on the kitchen table near the phone. Hardly evidence of parental involvement.
>and some investigators thought the handwriting looked like Patsy's.
That's strange. Not one single solitary expert has said that it looked like Patsy's handwriting.
>It contained details about the family's past and finances that few outside their close circle could have known.
Absolute total rubbish. Nothing at all in the note was limited to only a few people and much in the note was absurd and totally inapplicable to the Ramsey family.
>And the body was found in a little-used basement room that police didn't even notice at first.
Utter rubbish. The police found the room quite promptly, it is not at all difficult to find, they even photographed the area outside the doorway hours before discovery of the corpse, they just never opened the door but they certainly noticed it on the very first trip to the basement. It would be impossible not to notice it.

>Was it an intruder?
DNA of a non-Ramsey male was found in her panties, so why is there continued questioning of the existence of an intruder?
>how could somebody do that to their own child?
Well, there was nothing interesting on TV that night and perhaps Patsy Ramsey simply wanted her husband to lose his job, wanted to lose her health insurance even though she was a cancer patient and wanted to spend all their money on lawyers?

>The Ramseys ramped up public suspicion,
Oh, so the parents are responsible for the police leaks to the media?
>when they hired lawyers and a publicist.
You fault them for hiring lawyers? I refer you to John Ramsey's own words: When you are guilty you need a lawyer, when you are innocent, you need a good lawyer.
Oh and it was the law firm that hired the publicist due to the firm's phones ringing off the hook.

> Their relationship with investigators grew noticeably strained.
That is the fault of the investigators. Can you imagine trying to hold the corpse as ransom! That is what happened.

>Yet here investigators are, once again, knocking on Burke Ramsey's door.
It is nothing but a continuation of a campaign of police orchestrated harassment in retaliation for the parents having failed to kowtow to the BPD and instead having gone on CNN.

>Robinson doubts the killing will ever be solved.
With reporters such as you on the job, he may be right!
Is Robinson aware of a man who harbored an intense hatred for John Ramsey, who made repeated statements in chat rooms prior to the murder vilifying John Ramsey, who made death threats in that chat room and to whom the figure 118,000 held special meaning? This person, referred to as GamePlayer to protect him from the media, had a history of deep depression, cranial injury, personality problems, poor social skills and employment difficulties. His pre-1996 writings evidence a belief in such actions as murder which he terms "justified self defense" in reaction to being "attacked" in relation to his narrow obsession which gave the figure 118,000 a special significance to him.

"The colder the case gets, the colder the trail gets."
It is a pity the police did not bear that in mind when they refused to investigate the homicide instead of simply conducting a witch hunt subjecting the parents to great expense and intense frustration.

Politics, Funding and Publicity

Guidelines should be based on science, not economics and vested interests.

Concerning: A Workshop on the Critical Needs and Gaps in Understanding Prevention, Amelioration, and Resolution of Lyme and Other Tick-borne Diseases: the Short-Term and Long-Term Outcomes October 11, 2010 - October 12, 2010.

"As Lyme disease experts gather for a two-day scientific workshop a trio of disease advocacy groups have withdrawn their participation, claiming that the meeting is biased.

Time for Lyme, the Lyme Disease Association and the California Lyme Disease Association decided to walk away from the meeting, arguing that organizers are not presenting enough information about the possibility that the disease can be chronic, and requires a long-term regimen of antibiotic drugs."

As usual it appears the patient advocacy groups although excessive in their endorsement of long-term treatment are likely correct about the existence of a chronic condition and the conflicts of interest present in those who develop and enshrine the various guidelines.

While walking out of conference is regrettable I do think the fault lies with the scientists who are too close to financial issues. Guidelines should embody the state of the knowledge and should be an indication of the return on investment of steps to be taken, guidelines should not freeze out valid viewpoints with substantial supporting evidence simply because they are so unpopular. This issue was explored a few years ago by the Attorney General of Connecticut issuing a subpoena for records relating to the exclusion of unpopular viewpoints from the guidelines. It would seem strange to see a state attorney-general involved in the issue and it would seem strange to hinge the investigation on antitrust law but for Lyme Disease what state is more relevant than Connecticut?

The science is established. Just as L-forms persist but are often ignored by medicine, it seems that persistent spirochetes exist after antibiotic treatment of mice. Ticks raised in a laboratory and free of the spirochete will acquire an infection after they have feasted on mice that have completed a lengthy course of antibiotic treatment and have tested negative for the spirochete. Such xenodiagnosis is an established technique of immunology.

However measured and far away.

Investigators who insist upon marching to the beat of a different drum:

We all celebrate when a dissident investigator proves himself to have been right. That lone voice at the end of the table who sees a case in a very different manner than the others see it is much admired when he is finally shown to be correct in his views, but what about the time that really matters: before the case is solved. The FBI steadfastly ignored the agent who kept telling them that the Unabomber was a "monk on a mountaintop in Montana" and thereby wasted countless man-years and untold millions looking solely at well-educated, wealthy engineers.

Recently a news item contained the following snippet:
>Did not want to investigate child abuse and child pornography that went outside the Ramsey family..."

Well, there was no child abuse or child pornography inside the Ramsey family and I see no reason to investigate child abuse or child pornography outside the Ramsey family and call it trying to solve a homicide. Some broad inquiry into alcoholism in Colorado does not belong as part of a homicide investigation just because some tabloid editors think the perpetrator might be an alcoholic. I'm much more interested in the unsociable man who made vitriolic threats against John Ramsey prior to the murder than in some broad inquiry into child abuse in Colorado. Its a homicide investigation, not a sociological study. The suspect to which I refer had a brain injury and episodes of deep depression, that doesn't mean you conduct a study of minimal brain damage or a study of depression. Its a homicide investigation, not a socio-medical inquiry into US society. A broad study of pornography is meaningless when the only nude photographs ever taken of the victim were taken by the medical examiner.

The rejoinder was:
Whoa--if there are legitimate reasons Singular is privy to that you might not be that give him reason to explore the world of CP and its consumers, then don't you think that should be ruled out? Its not like the decedent wasn't molested and sexually-sadistically tortured - chronic pedophile or situational molester might be a debatable question.

And my response focused on not so much as it being a logically incorrect association but more that it was incorrect as an investigative goal since it was more an unnecessary detour than anything else. Oh sure, any door may be the right one. We all hope that surely the BPD has by now learned to do such things as open doors.

Well, of course on that night a great many things took place, none of which we really want to dwell on beyond what is necessary for the investigation. A stun gun was used, it appears to have been experimental in nature rather than dedicated torture. Does that mean we should take a detour into a general investigation of sadism? Even if we attempt to limit our study to sadism in Colorado it seems to me to be a waste of investigative resources. Those who have perused the faux ransom note have often used the term "James Bondish" to indicate its style, does that mean we should assign Boulder detectives to read all the works of Ian Fleming? And watch all those silly movies?

In a Hit and Run investigation, do you focus on readers of Car and Driver magazine and elevate chronic possession of a driver's license to the status of a profound clue? It is, of course, entirely possible that the person who left the scene of an accident without rendering aid to the dying will indeed turn out to be a subscriber to Car and Driver and will be in general an aficionado of motor-cars. It is not however an excuse to go off on a tangent and devote resources to a field of inquiry that is more a general survey of sociology rather than a finely focused homicide investigation.

There are a great many allegations of investigators protecting powerful pedophiles. Probably some of these allegations are quite well founded. Chances are that by sheer percentage some of the allegations of Pedophile Rings in High Governmental Circles will turn out to be true, but so far I've seen no evidence that either pornography or child-pornography had the least bit to do with the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. So why are there persistent calls for investigative resources to be dedicated to such tangents which consist of low-grade ore? Oh, its not that we should be unwilling to mine low-grade ore, its simply that higher grade ore should be mined first.

I do not think the entire detective division of Boulder should hie away to foreign shores in search of that "small foreign faction". Its a false trail. One that was provided for a reason. Provided for an unknown reason and provided by a demented mind perhaps, but provided as an artificial construct. No time should be wasted and no funds should be expended sending detectives off on junkets to a variety of foreign shores in search of small foreign factions.

We all have information available to us about which we are uncertain. Uncertain as to its exact nature and uncertain as to its weight and uncertain as to the veracity of our informants. Life is uncertain. Death is certain, but a homicide investigation is a part of life, not death. One of my particularly uncertain sources has provided me with information which does not negate the possibility of a pedophile being involved but which does provide an aspect to the crime which casts serious doubt on the pedophilia aspects of the crime and also casts serious doubt on the torture aspects to the crime. This makes me hesitant to wander off on what I perceive to be a tangent. It is, however, a factor that is clouded by uncertainty. The trouble with the Boulder investigators has always been that they heard the music loud and clear, it is the bolder investigators who hear a different and more distant measure. Yet that does not mean that the famed distant drummer is playing the correct beat.

The stun gun use seems not only experimental but very perfunctory. Its as if it were almost two quick jolts and that's it for the stun gun. Did he stop because he discovered he did not enjoy it? Or perhaps is it that he stopped because he had left the sufficiently misleading clue? Its possible to view the molestation as consisting of largely perfunctory acts performed quickly rather than unspeakable acts performed with care and savored by a demented mind. We do not know for certain what was experienced or how long things took or how much they were enjoyed, but there is at least some body of evidence which supports a conclusion that irrespective of time of entry into the home, time of departure was quite prompt. Therefore if a reasonably intelligent intruder already lying in wait in the JBR/Guest room were to have waited until he felt the parents would be asleep and if the intruder did in fact depart prior to the 1:00am time constraint we have a very narrow time frame for taking his victim to the basement, applying a stun gun, applying a garrote, hiding the body and leaving. With a very narrow time frame comes the obvious question: if he did not linger and savor the events as they unfolded, then perhaps he was not really there for the purpose of enjoying them. Oh, he was clearly there to kill JonBenet Ramsey. Right from the start this was a murder and it was never any sort of kidnapping plot or some faux-kidnapping ploy to obtain a ransom payment. Its just that if the application of a stun gun to a six year old girl was performed so briefly then it is possible that the lack of a prolonged usage means that there was no great enjoyment. Perhaps it is equally true of the perversion: no great enjoyment and therefore not a pedophile and not likely to re-offend.

Normally one would expect any criminal to have a measure of goal directed action. We also expect a short order cook to have a measure of goal directed action. Some places serve fast food, not culinary masterpieces that take great time to prepare. Some people simply do not linger over a meal or linger over its preparation. If there was a failure to linger over a meal that does not mean that a person is necessarily not a gourmand. He may simply have been pressed for time and not been able to dally. So if the intruder who killed JonBenet Ramsey failed to extend the activities it does not necessarily mean that he was not a pedophile. He may have been desirous of limiting his exposure to danger, he may have become slightly concerned by the scream, any number of things may have happened but one thing is still possible: he simply had no interest in prolonging the events because he was no more interested in perversion than he was in foreign factions or ransom payments.

A weekly search of the CODIS database is hardly going to yield good results if the perpetrator is not likely to be a repeat offender. Now I do realize that there are a great many uncertainties in this. Was it a brief crime? Does such brevity actually indicate lack of intense sexual interest, does such lack of sexual interest mean he is not likely to be a repeat offender? These are all unknown imponderables that can be debated forever but meanwhile an investigation should be proceeding and if these musings are to be given any weight at all they should be given that weight now.

Addendum: Elsewhere these comments were posted with the following closing comments.

A police force bears the hallmarks of a paramilitary organization and there is less room for diversity of opinion amongst investigators. Recall perhaps The Caine Mutiny. The burden of command can be great but so to is the burden of subordination. Humphrey Bogart sitting there with his steel ball bearings and a demented conviction that there is a plot amongst his junior officers may make for an entertaining movie but Jose Ferrer’s character is the one who points out that the fault does indeed lie with the junior officers.

We on the internet are a bit more free to speculate about alternative case scenarios and alternative viewpoints. When a little girl is missing we tend to hope she is merely lost but we worry about some demented pervert as well as disorientation. When it is a kidnapping, we worry about a ransom demand but still also worry about a pervert even if the note and circumstances utterly convince us that the kidnappers are professional criminals whose only interest is financial. When a victim is found not only murdered, but brutally murdered and subjected to torture and unspeakable indignities we tend to focus largely on the perverted aspects of the crime. Perhaps that is the correct thing to do. It is certainly the most obvious path for an investigator to take. Yet when that path turns out to be unfruitful, perhaps it is time to reconsider the nature of our underlying assumptions about the crime. Perhaps investigators should consider a more distant drummer may indeed be playing an interesting measure.

Texting and Driving

Some news reports about people making phone calls or even typing on phones as they drive and the various laws against actually leading to roads that are even more unsafe. Is this a surprise? Really, is it? What did people think was going to happen. The texting takes place out of sight of passersby so as to avoid it being reported to the police or spotted by various patrol cars and is therefore even more unsafe than done in a more sensible manner.

Its sort of like opening a candy wrapper in a theater. Get the darned thing open and get it done with, don't try to sneak it open slowly. That just prolongs the agony!

Now as to speeding. For years enforcement of speeding regulations particularly the arbitrary and capricious ones has been to little avail. It does not get bad drivers it only snags random drivers. One might just as well have a cop toss a pair of dice and issue a citation based on that result. Most "cherry patches" are spots on the road where motorists travel at a perfectly safe but technically illegal speed. Cops issue tickets, the motorist gets sore and loses money but the roads are not particularly safer. Usually the best thing that could be done would be to raise the speed limit sign to what most people drive but that would not bring in revenue so it is not going to be done.

Attention to ones driving is important. When learning to drive few can face the sensory overload of a radio playing. After some practice, the radio and some conversation are almost automatic. Most accidents are due to a momentary distraction such as focusing on an ash-tray or simply having the mind wander from boredom. Very few accidents are really due to speeding drivers. So now there is publicity about texting or telephoning. Egads... one need only look at the modern world. People are living in a merged word: leisure and work are not really separated. Someone can be strolling along, sipping a latte and receiving a report from a construction site. Many people now conduct business meetings at coffee shops rather than offices. There is no "off" for cell phones for many people. Of course this annoys a great many people who don't like living inside someone else's phone-booth but that seems to be what modern life has become. Many calls are too long and too loud. Restaurant patrons get annoyed, pedestrians even get annoyed. Sports books used to ban cell phones but they rarely do anymore. Blackjack players step away briefly but more and more cell phones are a way of life. Many people no longer even have a "home phone" or "landline".

Do legislators really think a law will change driver's behaviors? We have sterile cockpit rules for airline pilots, do you think we will have such rules for car interiors? Its absurd! How could anyone have ever thought for a minute that such Drving While Texting regulations would ever make things better?

RMS Titanic Helmsman error claim debunked.

An author of a work of fiction that weaves events about the Titanic into her recently published novel has stated that a long concealed family secret was that the helmsman initially turned in the wrong direction and that Ismay, White Star representative, ordered the Captain to continue sailing after the collision.

Now it is true that in sailing ships the tiller would go in one direction so as to put the rudder over and turn the ship in the opposite direction. In steamships the wheel was turned in the direction of the desired turn. This family secret is nonsense.

First the iceberg had just turned and was so black that it was close aboard by the time the lookout spotted it and the direction of a turn was rather meaningless. Indeed, it was probably an error to attempt any turn at all since hitting it head on would generally be best. The real error was not the direction of the turn but the fact of the turn. The ship did begin to answer her helm but then soon stopped the turn. This was undoubtedly not because the helm had again been put hard over in the opposite direction but because the simultaneous order of Full Astern had been carried out. Once those mighty propellers were put into reverse, the cavitation would have created such turbulence over the rudder that it would no longer be generating any force. Think of a rudder as a vertical hydrofoil. As with any airplane wing, it stalls in turbulence and only generates a resulting moment when the flow is laminar. Its not the weight of the rudder that matters, its size and shape and maintaining a laminar flow that are important. Once the rudder was surrounded by bubbles, its effectiveness was lost.

Full Astern would have been good. Trying to turn aside might have been good. Ordering both evasive actions doomed the ship since the iceberg then scraped along the side of the vessel. The metalurgical flaws, the extremely cold water temperature helped turn the scrape into a mortal wound, but the wound might well have been sustainable if the order had been simply Full Astern with no attempt to turn the vessel or if the order had been an attempt to turn the vessel but no order to put the engines into reverse.

Of course the Captain's failure to take effective action after the collision was bad. He had climbed to the top of his profession without ever having had any incidents. Indeed all steamer traffic across the North Atlantic had only resulted in four deaths before the Titanic. Most lifeboats were used to ferry passengers to nearby vessels. It was never contemplated that all passengers would have to board lifeboats. Had the Titanic been a cargo ship, the number two would be added to the number of the crew, then twice the number of lifeboats would have to be provided that would carry that sum and then two additional boats would have been added. The British regulations for cargo ships embraced the concepts of damage to lifeboats and a need to place the entire crew into lifeboats. The regulations for passenger vessels only foresaw minimal lifeboats to ferry passengers to safety. Of course the regulations were written by a Ministry that suffered the same "revolving door" that our defense contractors and defense agencies have.

Every April the morse code signal is still sent: RMS Titanic. RIP.

Extreme Irony

A manned helicopter crashed near Pike's Peak while filming the unmanned Autonomous Audi climbing the famed peak.

Extreme irony perhaps. Extreme pain for the pilot. Extremely interesting comment on our times when sensors and computers can outperform humans at complex tasks in demanding situations.

For decades military jets have really been beyond the ability of pilots thus paving the way for unmanned aircraft that can pull g's and not black out or gray out, but automobile driving?

Helicopter flying at high altitude with attention on the camera's field of focus proved beyond the task of humans. Climbing Pike's Peak without a driver was fine.

Celluloid Sleuths and the JonBenet Ramsey case.

I've previously taken my readers along a twisted trail of fictional sleuths from various novels to arrive at a depiction of the personality of the intruder. I now present my readers with a brief trip to the cinema so that they may discern from certain films some cultural aspects of this horrendous crime. The films are: Human Traffic, Slacker, Stella Does Tricks and Trainspotting.

First, I'd like to borrow some of the vocabulary of what is politely referred to in Las Vegas as the "entertainment" industry. In that world there exists a certain hierarchy for the ladies. Many of the women desire to work without an agency being involved since an agency simply takes too much of their money. The problem is that if a woman works without an agency she is usually more likely to come to the attention of hotel security and vice cops. Women who drape themselves around the expensive bars of upscale hotels would generally not have an agency but no matter how well dressed they are, they will indeed get noticed by casino security personnel simply because they are alone. After all, they want to be noticed by males who are potential customers but there is no way to cloak their activities from non-customers. Casinos tend to worry about their gaming licenses and prefer that casino guests spend their money at the gaming tables and not inside their hotel rooms. So it is in the casino's interest to have the guests needs met by agency personnel who simply go directly to the hotel room and do not troll for clients on the casino property.

The actions of hotel security personnel tend to make women generally get what is referred to as hobbyists. A hobbyist, unlike what most people might think, is a man who is very often involved with prostitutes. It is a term that does not involve occasional partaking of commercially obtained pleasures. Escorts most often deal with hobbyists but do not prefer them. Escorts are often of the opinion that society condemns them to deal with hobbyists. Stella Does Tricks reveals the societal forces that trap young Galwegian girls into perpetually being On The Game. Prostitutes who escape the streets to become escorts feel trapped into perpetually dealing with hobbyists. Society condemns the prostitute and the prostitute condemns the hobbyists.

How many think the intruder in the JonBenet Ramsey homicide was a hobbyist? If he was not some sort of hobbyist, then why should his dna ever show up in a database? Perhaps the sexual activity was a whim perhaps it was planned but still more in the way of an experiment than a routine practice. Perhaps the sexual activity was more akin to rubbing salt in a wound or keying a car. It might impose far more pain on the sufferer than it provides pleasure to the perpetrator. If the perpetrator did not derive that much pleasure from his experimentation that evening, he may not be tripped up by his dna at some future date simply because his acts that night do not indicate an ongoing lifestyle.

In Canada and the UK the term "Baby Stroll" is used to indicate an area wherein very youthful prostitutes make themselves available but the age is not as young as some perverts seem to prefer. I would imagine that perverts have a variety of preferences when it comes to age or ongoing relationships versus one night stands. A pervert whose motive is homicide and whose primary goal is not the sexual perversion but is instead the act of killing his victim may be forced by circumstances beyond his control to make choices that are less than what his preferences would be. Pedophiles may be at times desperate but they still seem able to select victims with some degree of care. Even if it is a case of snatch one victim from a group of children and then drive off at high speed, the pedophile will still have an intended
destination and will drive in a manner that does not invite premature police attention. Often the inside of car door will have its handle removed so his victim can not escape during the drive to a place of seclusion and disposal.

So if we take these general principles gleaned from an amalgam of newspaper headlines and then try to apply them to the JBR murder, we run into great problems. There were hundreds if not thousands of far more vulnerable victims available to him. The degree of risk taken in obtaining his victim is rather high. There was a taunting note left at the scene which is at least a scintilla of evidence that no self-respecting pervert would voluntarily leave at the scene of a crime. The intruder chose a victim that would surely lead to intense media coverage no matter what other events happened to make the news that day. Is this the behavior of a pedophile? Perhaps it is. Yet perhaps it is not. What conclusions can we draw? How safe are we that such conclusions are even valid much less correct ones?

One liquor store gets robbed, but that night dozens do not get robbed despite perhaps being in worse neighborhoods or having even more lax security measures in place that night. So what conclusions can we draw? Of all the women in the bar the night Natalee Holloway came to grief, many women were far less sober and far less aware of potential danger. So should we conclude that sobriety and traveler savvy are hindrances to one's safety? That would be an absurd conclusion but it is perhaps just as valid as any other to be drawn from the facts that were presented in the newspapers.

What conclusions can we draw from the unspeakable activities in the basement of the Ramsey home that night. Now, we don't really know if the media reports are strictly accurate or not. We don't know about the use of an implement and we also do not know for sure about the occurrence of digital penetration. Sure we can speculate endlessly about brush handles and latex gloves, but we don't know and in many respects we really do not want to know. Or perhaps it is more correct to say that we do want to know about it but we don't want to actually be forced to think about it.

Central tenets of a crime are often wrong. What was once thought to be a "closing time robbery of a fast food joint" becomes a "boyfriend thing" involving the murdered manager thus rendering years of investigative actions futile. A tragic hunting accident often becomes a totally different situation once a large insurance policy is discovered to exist. Sometimes it takes a subsequent tragic firearms accident before that bereaved spouse transitions from tragic figure to prime suspect. A young boy's tragic drowning in an icy stream while on a family outing in the woods can take on a radically new meaning when a letter arrives at police headquarters advising them of the existence of a huge insurance policy on the deceased kid but no insurance at all on either of the parents or on any of the other children in the family.

The famed Craigslist killer is often viewed from the aspect of a sex addict or a sex fetishist but in reality the primary theme of his crimes was robbery in order to meet gambling debts and he was merely selecting prostitutes based on their vulnerability and ease of contact. The Craigslist killer was really the work of a hobbyist who had to bring down his gambling indebtedness promptly and in turning to robbery to do it, he selected a social milieu with which he was familiar but found himself to be a foolishly inexperienced robber and a very unlucky one. The sexual aspects of the crimes made headlines but in each incident as soon as the hotel room door was shut the Craigslist killer turned the activity into a robbery, not rape. Oh sure, you can still classify his crime spree as some sort of sexually motivated chain of events because to a large degree his losses at Blackjack were sexually related. It is not necessary to count cards at Blackjack and at Foxwoods it is particularly difficult to count cards. However, it is necessary to look at the dealer's up-card and then your own hand and to concentrate on the game, even if one is following the most simplified Basic Strategy that there is. The Craigslist killer seems fixated on females breasts and was described after the murder as throwing down hundreds of dollars while staring at a woman's breast so intently that she put her handbag in front of her as a visual barrier. With such a sense of priorities in life, it is no wonder that the Craigslist killer came to grief. His impulsive helping himself to a pair of panties as a momento is in keeping with his sex fetishist orientation, but the crime at hand was always robbery. The Craigslist killer achieved wide renown for his good looks, achievements in life, sex drive, sexual inclinations and sexual fetishes but in reality he was nothing but a two-bit stickup artist who really didn't know the first thing about conducting a robbery and who therefore quickly came to grief in his newly chosen profession. His "cyber-stupidity" sealed his fate since his telephone and email contacts with his potential victims were from his own equipment without any attempts to cloak his electronic identity or do anything to shield his tracks from a prompt official inquiry. In reality, his fate was actually sealed when he selected as his victim a beautiful but tough and very street-smart girl who would not only never give in to any mugger but who would surely never for a moment even consider giving in to some preppy punk. The Craiglist killer might have known this if he had ever interacted with a woman but it seems likely that his interactions were solely with their anatomy. Its not just the solution of crimes that turn on critically important points, its also the commission of crimes that can hinge on what would otherwise be a minor issue. In short, crimes are not always what they appear to be at first glance. Appearances often shift on the basis of one salient fact or at least the perceptions that we have about one salient fact. It is our analysis of a crime scene that can be woefully defective.

If a young attractive female advertising the availability of a massage in her hotel room is killed in the hotel doorway, the newspapers may focus on her youth and beauty and the intended massage but the cops will focus on the fact that the crime took place in the doorway area before she removed any clothing or discussed any fees that were involved. Perhaps we should include the JonBenet Ramsey murder as a crime in which the press immediately lept to a sexual motivation when perhaps that was not the primary situation that was involved. This leap is perhaps normal but its also one motivated by the economics of the tabloids. Its a very profitable leap to make and therefore the press is prone to make that leap well before there is sufficient evidence to support the conclusion. The tabloids are also prone to cling very tenaciously to such an ill-founded assumption because of the profitability that is inherent in their business.

So what are the items that indicate the murder of JonBenet Ramsey was anything other than the work of some sexual pervert? The note, the focus on the family, the time spent inside the house, the preparation time. All these items provide us with considerable doubt as to the nature of the crime. Do hobbyists leave notes? If he were a hobbyist, wouldn't his DNA be in some database by now? Sure, some perpetrators escape DNA testing and sometimes even those defendants whose DNA is taken do not actually make it into the various databases, but by now we would expect the suspect to have been tripped up by his dna. A hobbyist as it relates to such very young girls would be a repeat offender though not necessarily with any of the various trappings of the JonBenet Ramsey case.

One wonders if such trappings were indeed an integral part of that night's adventure for the intruder. He may have enjoyed various aspects of the evening so much that his more risky behavior was altered and he no longer leaves fantasy notes that call undue attention to his crimes.

I just wonder if his real goal was to hurt the parents rather than to hurt JonBenet. In such a scenario, there might be little in the way of successor crimes much less successor crimes of a sexual nature. Let us do what an investigator should not do: speculate and thereby project his own thoughts into the investigation rather than merely following the evidence.

Of course in a way we really are indeed continuing to focus on the evidence. Its simply that we are focusing on the negative. There is plenty of precedent for focusing on negatives. Why did the dog not bark in the night? Why did the insurance beneficiary not get changed? Why were there no fingerprints? Usually such negatives are considered at or about the time at which the crime took place. Here we are considering a negative after over a decade has elapsed. In that decade, no Prime Suspects have emerged other than in the tabloids or amongst the internet sleuths. The tabloids have investigative resources but no motivation to utilize them wisely. The internet sleuths have limited resources, unlimited dedication but absolutely no access to the case files. So it sort of makes sense for those who are without access to the case files to focus on a negative for they are already confronted by a great void.

In focusing on the negatives, we turn our attention to why has there been no CODIS hits? Oh sure, the perpetrator could have been so ecstatic over what he did to a helpless six year old girl that he wrapped his car around a telephone pole later that night and died in some simple little auto crash long ago written off as an accident of no consequence. That is always a possibility, but what is more likely. We know that perverts re-offend. We know that no amount of couch time is going to change his desires. No one has been able to find a trace of the intruder. Not in his modus operandi and not in his dna from crime scenes or arrestees. Did he have some instantaneous changing of his spots? We would be grateful if he were spontaneously cured of his evil desires and therefore would never re-offend, but deep in our hearts we know that does not happen. Its been more than a decade and he is not showing up in databases anywhere! Deep in our troubled sleep, sleuths fear that his dna will never appear in a database.

Perhaps we can explain this negative by reaching a conclusion that will disturb us greatly. Should we avoid the task for that reason? Many sleuths have imagined the intruder as some well disciplined type with the nerves of steel possessed by a jewel thief. In reality what did this joker do? He entered a house that was akin to a crackerjack box and left scuff marks on the wall doing it. He took a stun gun along but all he really did was briefly play with it. Was he foolish enough to think he might need the stun gun to do battle with a sleeping six year old girl? Or was he equipping himself to do battle with an irate homeowner who might have awakened in the middle of the night? Surely an experienced burglar would know to use the time making tracks rather than being combative with the homeowner. How young an intruder would we be dealing with in order for him to need a stun gun to escape a sleepy middle-aged man? He left a weird note which surely is not the sign of an experienced burglar and most definitely is not known to be associated with pedophiles. He allowed a scream to be heard and apparently he left promptly because of that scream perhaps dropping the steel grate noisily as he did so. None of this demonstrates his great skill or great experience as a burglar. He might imagine that it does indeed demonstrate his great skill and his great daring but surely he is merely lucky to have done his evil deeds in the jurisdiction of the Boulder Police Department and lucky that he selected as an opponent a sleeping six year old girl. I don't see any skill or bravery or even basic competence in this crime. I see stealth, cowardice, evil, incompetence, stupidity even childishness. I do not see skill or daring. I see bumbling incompetence. His continued lack of detection is due solely to the greater bumbling and greater incompetence of the authorities, but the obsessions of the BPD do not confer on the perpetrator any sort of skill or daring.

If this great big negative of over a decade of no CODIS hits is staring us in the face, what do we do? Ignore it? Use that lack of later crimes as evidence that he is not a pervert? Perverts re-offend. He appears not to have re-offended. Isn't this sufficient for one of those syllogism thingies? Or does the logic fail us? All we really know is that we have not found his dna at any crime scene, we don't know that it was not in fact at several crime scenes. Perhaps he has even become adept at hiding the evidence but has continued to be a pervert. We do not know. The only thing that we do know is that time has gone by during which we have not detected his dna at crime scenes and arrests have been made yet no routine dna sampling has yielded his profile. Or perhaps not. Perhaps this negative is a negative for a valid reason. He has not re-offended because he is not a pervert. The goal of that night was not sexual. We know there was no ransom, no two gentlemen, no truth behind the pseudo-political intrigue suggested by factions being foreign. Perhaps this was a crime to teach the parents a lesson that would haunt them forever. Or perhaps he was simply striking out and this had very little to do with the Ramseys.

Was JonBenet a Pedophile's Dream? Yes, I would imagine so. Does that mean that a pedophile killed her? No. Teenage girls can be killed simply because they are working a late night shift in a convenience store. Yes, they are young and beautiful and its a terrible shame if they are killed during some penny ante robbery but the motivation of the killer is financial. Youth and beauty were simply factors that happened to be present. Some armed robber may decide to take advantage of the "extra added attraction" offered him by the lone clerk in a convenience store being a young attractive female but any resultant abduction, rape or murder is really a consequence of his behaviors as an armed robber. Lou Smit realized that the Boulder Police had become fixated on parental guilt and he urged the police to realize that if they were making no progress in that direction they perhaps should look elsewhere. Well, I would like to invoke the wisdom of Lou Smit once again and make an attempt to live up to his legacy: if we have not been making progress on the pedophile target, perhaps we should shift our focus rather than remain so steadfastly convinced that we should be seeking a pedophile. We all admire a dogged pursuit but we admire it most when it finally strikes pay dirt. If that pay dirt is eluding us, perhaps it because what started out as promising color did not turn into the mother lode, the vein simply petered out. It was certainly more correct to consider the crime to be the work of a pedophile than that of the parents but it may not have been entirely correct to assume that the crime was predominantly motivated by some pervert's pedophilia.

What scenarios would support this crime if we downplay the pedophile issue? I've previously posted about cultural issues such as a male attendee at the Family Circle Dinner reacting to Patsy's generosity in buying copious quantities of Chinese food to supplement the obviously inadequate buffet table or some male who may have over-reacted to being asked to clear away his dinner plate. Some men would commit an "honor killing" if their daughters did such things as initiate a conversation with a male, smile at an unrelated male or give an order to any male. Demeaning a male in public by asking him to do "women's work" of clearing away or washing his dinner plate could well be an act that in the viewpoint of the intruder merits extreme punishment and the intruder might have a variety of reasons for selecting the exact manner of that punishment as being the death of the daughter. Those who might argue that such values do not pertain to Boulder, Colorado need only look at the resurgence of Belly Dancers and Hookah Clubs. Its not just the province of Dark Cabaret wherein belly dancers are newly popular. Mens clubs and hookah clubs are booming and amidst the perfumed tobacco a great many males in America are finding a re-affirmation of the Middle Eastern views towards females and their roles in society.

Would displaced anger be a sufficient explanation? If someone were angry at John Ramsey would they feel inclined to kill his daughter? Perhaps. It might be simply a cowardly way of choosing a weaker target or it might simply be a weaker target who also offered a degree of entertainment potential as well. It could be that the intruder was inexperienced with pedophilia because he was inexperienced with any sexual activity. Social misfits abound. The ransom note appears to be the work of someone who exists largely in a fantasy world and this may simply be due to his inability to thrive in the real world. There can also be a cultural inability to thrive. A male who would be competent in one culture may be incapable of adjusting his views and behaviors to our society. Someone angry at the Ramseys for some reason that to us is trivial and absurd could well select JonBenet as his target due to his inability to relate to adult females. Its not so much that he has a sexual interest in little girls, he just lacks any ability to confront an adult female and therefore selects JonBenet as a target since that would be reasonable in his own culture.

What weight should we give to this phantom non-evidence? Is the lack of his dna an indication of our investigative failures more than an indication of his not being a pervert? It is indeed possible that when we are most in need of Lou Smit's dogged determination we should indeed stay the course and not waiver from the pedophile focus. There is indeed great danger for us to ignore the pedophile aspects of this crime. Does our level of frustration allow us to take risks with this investigation? Does it compel us to take such risks?

Homicide 101 is a term used to keep the focus on what the speaker considers the most likely rule to follow. Many homicide detectives will focus on what they consider to be a primary rule. If someone comes to them about a possible murder, they will often tell the informant: don't tell me about family feuds or recent threats made in the heat of anger at some family gathering, don't tell me any thing at all about emotions between the parties. Just tell me who benefits financially from his death! The death threat made in the heat of anger is often not as valuable to a homicide investigator as the terms of the will or the existence of a life insurance policy. People cool down after stressful moments but greed persists. And nothing spurs more action than money. Some investigators therefore consider money to be the prominent Homicide 101 motivator. Often they are correct. Often they are not! The basic tenets of Homicide 101 are at all times the province of a particular homicide investigator as modified by the bureaucratic and budgetary limitations of his department. It is therefore a critical choice to select priorities. And of necessity we must each select such priorities according to the dictates of our conscience.

We can not discern any sort of financial role in the JonBenet Ramsey murder, so should we turn to a culturally induced rage felt by a man with poor social skills and thus a culturally imposed inadequate sex life? This might be tempting but it is clearly not a proper sleuthing technique, yet it may be all that we have available to us. So what cultural influences are likely? An Islamic or Middle Eastern male might well and truly be insulted by Patsy's actions at the Family Dinner. Or are we perhaps concerned with a sub-culture that is closer to home? Perhaps you've seen the movie about disaffected directionless youth in Austin, Texas. Slacker. Are the Boulder area youth condemned to low level jobs angry at reading about a Billion Dollar Sales mark? Does someone whose world is constrained by hopeless poverty strike out at a whimsically selected target who is briefly seen as representing great wealth? For some, life is akin to being a valet parking attendant. One gets to drive all these great expensive automobiles but then must face a bus ride home that is of such great duration that the thoughts that most intrude into the sleep deprived brain are the twin visions of utter economic despair yoked to a constant exposure to opulence. Slacker was a movie that presented those with "apathy,
aimlessness and lack of ambition" as somewhat admirable persons. Now one might think that such character traits as apathy, aimlessness and lack of ambition would be found on the FBI profiler's list of traits of the innocent. Recall perhaps that the movie only follows each character for a few minutes at a time and presents the audience with but a small slice of their lives. Yes, such events as are depicted are indeed indicative of their lives and their values, but it is by no means a central tenet of psychology that someone who is apathetic can not also be someone who becomes enraged from time to time. The film Slacker follows some disaffected youths around Austin but it does not represent the film as a confining portrayal of the youth's lives. Someone who is generally apathetic is not immune from a sudden storm of emotions at encountering a newspaper clipping relating to a billion dollars. Indeed, I would think it would be someone beset with apathy about the business world who would not even note the difference between a billion dollars in sales and a billion dollars in profit. Perhaps a certain apathy about the business world might allow someone to think that a ransom demand of $118,000 was a reasonable sum. And perhaps someone who leads an aimless life and lacks ambition might come to the attention of the medical or judicial segments of Boulder society. It should perhaps be recalled that the mental health professionals referred to the area as South Boulder and it should perhaps also be remembered that aimless youth who occasionally wind up in juvenile court often get assigned to menial tasks such as Trash Collecting. Perhaps such aimless youths just might refer to themselves from time to time as South Boulder Trash Collectors. Such a designation would form an alarming acronym: SBTC.

Trainspotting was a study of drug addiction and poverty amidst the culturally rich environs of Edinburgh. Lest anyone suggest that its themes are not applicable to Boulder, let us not forget that it was actually filmed in Glasgow and so surely its lessons are not at all limited geographically. Boulder was at the time undergoing a software revolution as computer programmers flocked to the city and firms prospered. Amidst all that new found wealth in the People's Republic of Boulder there are always those who are left behind. Think perhaps of the student who took mechanical drawing in school but graduates to a world in which draftsmen have been replaced by the mouse click of an AutoCad program. He was encouraged to take mechanical drawing in school and was therefore trained to be a draftsman and expected to be a draftsman. He was not trained to use AutoCad. The Ramsey company, Access Graphics, was a Value Added Retailer, a firm that bought high end unix boxes, high end monitors and the AutoCad program. What Access Graphics really sold was the combination of those items in a seamlessly integrated turn it on and use it configuration. A newspaper article talking about a Billion Dollars and AutoCad just might stimulate rage in a youth condemned to poverty by suddenly finding out that he is a draftsman in an AutoCad world. Sure his rage might better be addressed to the archaic school system or to the teacher's union that perpetuated an archaic curriculum, but we can not impose upon such youth a proper direction for their rage. We can only deal with the directions that rage in fact takes. If someone expresses his rage against redundancy by reacting to a newspaper article mentioning AutoCad we are shocked at such stupidity but have no option to remind the rage-filled youth that there are more sensible targets he could select and more sensible actions that he could take. Raging against one's lot in life is often a matter of private thoughts or else of thoughts and actions expressed within a particular subculture. Such rage and actions prompted by them are not the province of a carefully reasoned response guided by wisdom and experience.

You ask perhaps if the draftsman, redundant upon being graduated from high school might retrain. Sure. Many, however, see no hope and seek only drugs to escape the pain imposed upon them by a lifestyle bereft of hope. Yet when they try to escape from drugs, they find their social life implodes. Consider, once again, the movie Trainspotting: once Renton is off heroin the sexual desires return, but all his friends are still druggies and druggies no longer relate to him. Normal sexual desires return to the addict who has bravely gone cold turkey but normal sexual outlet is denied him because he is bored, depressed and socially isolated. He is therefore trapped in the inescapable. And just as any animal who is trapped, he lashes out in just about any direction. Its not so much the drugs that control his life as the drug culture that controls his life. The values of the drug culture provide an endless supply of youths whose directions and goals are warped. Would drugs per se make someone think that the ransom amount was a sensible figure? No, but the drug culture might well impair someone from re-considering the amount once it had been selected.

Or perhaps we might focus on the movie Stella Does Tricks which explores the world of young girls on the game. It is a world of working class backgrounds, lack of opportunities and artificially imposed constraints as humorously indicated in the scene wherein becoming a shop girl selling eclairs in a bakery is hopeless because society demands she have extensive training for such a menial position. These all condemn Stella to her life of being sexually exploited by her pimp and her customers but she nevertheless remains a young girl who needs love as well as sex. When her young boyfriend rents out Stella's body for enough money for him to buy heroin and then steals Stella's savings so as to keep her from leaving him, Stella realizes that this is as close to an act of love that she will ever have in her life. She is sexually exploited by middle aged men who are her customers and by a middle aged man who is her pimp, but she loves her young boyfriend and is indeed loved by him. She is sexually exploited by her need for money and by her need for love. She is trapped forever in the world of sexual exploitation by the despised middle aged men because she is trapped by the sexual exploitation of love for the boyfriend. Once there is that feeling of being trapped there is the desperation that leads to absurd decision making. Stella likes to scratch automobile paint or vandalize a side-mirror but she is not above escalating to torching the car though her escalated violence happens to be directed at someone who abused her. Not all the Stellas in this world are quite so circumspect in their application of violence. Did some young punk seeking spare change on Pearl Street get treated badly outside the doors of Access Graphics and then recognize that name in the newspaper? I have no idea, but there are indeed some males who are in Stella's situation. Indeed, one can view the situation as being worse for the male.

Access Graphics was located on Pearl Street. Ever since the late sixties Pearl Street was part of the club and concert scene. Many of the acts appearing on Pearl Street also appeared in the off-the-grid hippie haven of Nederland. And amidst the software and real estate boom in Boulder, the club scene continued unabated. So let us now consider the film, Human Traffic. It is a great representation of the drug scene and the club scene, though much of its greatness is due to the lack of any commentary or moralizing about the drug-filled club scene. Amidst the rave's glow sticks and ecstasy consumption the over-riding theme of the drug scene and the club scene is the intergenerational void and the total rejection of the work ethic. The robotic-like fast food worker only has the club scene for relief from misery and poverty. Rejection of their parents and the parent's work ethic is but a representation of the necessary rejection of all such values that are rendered archaic by being trapped in poverty. What little money that is earned in a high stress, low-level job is soaked up by the drugs needed to dull the pain of that existence. A prisoner can think that "any day now, I shall be released" but a person trapped by low wages, lack of hope and lack of options is truly a prisoner forever and does not hope to be released back into the real world. The wage slave knows that there will be no release for him. By day he is a lowly fast food robot. By night he escapes the pain of his work situation by embracing the drugs available at the raves. Come morning, there is no hope of escape, only acceptance of his fate. The lesson for us to learn is exemplified in the film's lack of condemnation. Once we accept that the youth caught up in the drug-filled club scene have utterly rejected our values then perhaps we can be more prone to embrace the horrendous acts in the Ramsey home that night as being a part of a lifestyle of a significant segment of our population.

Or perhaps we should focus on the movie: Slackers. A slacker would not be expected to get his dna into CODIS. The Slacker is not necessarily a pedophile. Its more likely The Slacker is simply lacking in direction in life and lacking in the education necessary to give him skills sufficient for a job that provides him with any sort of hope for improvement of his lot in life. The Slacker might want success but its hard to read about a Billion Dollars while slaving away at a dead-end minimum wage job. A slacker lives in a world where even an obviously forged documentation bestows real value on a urine sample because the forgery links it to an empty-headed Hollywood starlet. In a world of such perturbed values, pedophilia would hardly be exceptional. However, the full gamut of other emotions would hardly be exceptional either. Strike out at a Billionaire due to a newspaper feature? Just as rational as any other behavior in a world devoid of a work ethic or sense of values. One can not spend nights focused on the various hip nightspots wherein a drunken Hollywood starlet has vomited and then expect behavior that comports with the values of church-going worth-ethic oriented computer entrepreneurs by day. Slackers have made choices. They have made commitments!

So if we consider the molestation to be a red-herring or some sort of partial red-herring, what are we left with? A fantasy note that bespeaks a fantasy world? We can go down to the local probation office and look for perverts that were recently paroled but that may be just as sensible a direction for us to take as going to some foreign shore and looking for a non-existent faction that doesn't even pretend to be large and to represent the will of the people.

Are any of these suggested scenarios more valid than another? Recently a good many murder cases have become such darlings of internet sleuths that the police have formally pleaded for an end to false statements. Many tips called into detectives drive the investigation into wasteful directions that drain available resources. Are we doing the right thing in considering that the murder of Jonbenet Ramsey just might be a murder without an overriding pedophilia factor? We have the words of wisdom from Lou Smit echoing in our ears. We have the example of his dedication and we have the demonstrated effectiveness of his emphasis on crime scene analysis. Yet we also have that great big void: no hits in CODIS. No suspects.

Do we have an obligation to go further afield in our quest for the intruder? Internet stimulated tips about a crime can be a great hindrance to the police but often internet sleuths are the only oversight there is to a criminal investigation. I've presented several noteworthy endeavors of the film industry to convey the inner workings of certain cultures and how those cultural values can conflict with our usual views. It is for internet sleuths to find a balance between the dedicated plodding of a detective wading through the evidence and the effects of avant-garde films on our collective wisdom of alternative cultural values. Lou Smit was right. It all harks back to shoes. Its just that sometimes in order to stand in the shoes of the victim, you must try to stand in the shoes of the perpetrator as well. Seeing things from the viewpoint of a different culture can be an aid to the investigation, or it can be a senseless tangent, but what is the use of standing in someone else's shoes if we don't try to take some steps in them as well? People who feel marginalized and oppressed by society will strike out in defense of both real and imagined wrongs. Their violent acts need not be precisely rational and need not be fully in keeping with their usual and customary values. Not all sexually motivated violence in our society comes from demented perverts.

DH Lawrence and Love of Citrus Fruits

From DH Lawrence:
"I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor."

This is actually not about citrus fruits and scrubbing the floor. This would be described as a comment on the difference between depression and depressiveness. One being a psychological state and the other being more related to the over telegraphing to others of the existence of that psychological state.

In DH Lawrence's life he recognized that prompt and immediate action was the cure for depression. Make marmalade rather than contemplate the woeful state of one's situation in life. However, if in the act of making marmalade one spills some sweet citrus fruit it is the necessity for immediate action that prompts one to focus on the sharp knife blade and the need to avoid ant infestations. Action. Not contemplation.

I've often given this advice to people and explained to them that the first thing to tackle is depressiveness. If a young woman does not look quite "together" then that is the first focus. A more stylish outfit, perfume, make-up! That is the key!

Waiting to be inspired to tackle a boring task is futile. No one is ever inspired to mop the floor! If you want to be inspired to clean simply invite your friends over for Poker Night. You know your lady friends will only show up if the bathroom is spotless so the Poker Night invitation is your motivation to clean house!

Well, Here it is ... again.

So once again. It is September 10th. I wake up a bit after two in the morning. Its very quiet. I guess its a good time to contemplate death. Death and cowardice. Oh, don't get me wrong, its not the only time of the year that such thoughts descend heavily upon me. It is, however, that anniversary wherein such thoughts are inescapable and overwhelming.

I know I am likely to survive this day. I have in past years and it does become easier as time goes by, yet guilt feelings overwhelm me this day each year. I engage in the usual tricks of avoiding as much as possible the thoughts of all the media comments there will soon be. I think of my own problems. I scream silently about my rage on other matters and I declare to myself that I am not to blame. Others have of course told me that it is not my fault. I know that they are right yet my knowledge of the correctness of their views brings little solace.

I face this anniversary. Its inescapable. I long for escape of course. Given my age and health I will indeed find an escape at some point in time. It may well be soon. I look forward at times to my escape of this day. I often hope that such escape will indeed come soon to me. It will be a good thing when I no longer have to experience this day each year. I mentally re-live some moments of dread. I mentally trek to a pay phone and imagine myself actually making the anonymous call that I had contemplated. In my mind on each anniversary I get past that apartment door threshold without thoughts of criminal charges or insufficient evidence. I re-live the looking up of a phone number and nearly making that non-anonymous call. I re-live the disorientation and physical collapse of utter exhaustion. Yet amidst all the thoughts of this anniversary I still experience the hopeless rage of my failure.

Time heals all wounds? No. Time diminishes their intensity but it does not heal them.

Kyron Horman "Missing" in Oregon. Revisited.

Yes, I used quotation marks around that word: missing. Its often referred to the Elephant in the room situation. We all know that sometimes abducted children are kept as prisoners but we all know that in most situations they are killed and that often they are killed quite promptly.

So do we even know for certain that it was actually an abduction? No. We do know, however, that he was unlikely to have left the school on his own and become lost. We know there was an intensive search in the nearby rugged terrain and that the search was conducted by experienced SAR volunteers who were well trained and well briefed on the mission.

Do we know it was a parental involvement situation? It would seem that the answer to that question would be an emphatic yes if the question was addressed to any newspaper or television editor in the area. We only have rumors, innuendo, and accusations but no facts that establish parental involvement.

Do we know a friend of the step mother provided some sort of logistical support to the endeavor? No. We have no facts that would establish a friend knowingly aided in an abduction and murder, but once again it seems that news editors do not really need facts they only need to know how to type "sources close to the investigation". Once those magic words have been typed it seems that we live in a world where friends help friends commit child abductions and child murders in an open and notorious manner in the middle of the day while using their own vehicles after having communicated over cell phones that will clearly prove linkages.

We know where the cops are clearly focused, but we don't know why the cops are so certain they are looking in the right direction. Perhaps its based largely on sexually explicit emails. I guess in Oregon women only send sexually explicit emails if they are guilty of murder.

Much has been made in the press of a discrepancy between where the step-mother claims to have been and where the cell phone signals indicate she may have been. Perhaps that five-mile distant cell tower often picks up pings from the claimed area. I do not know and apparently no tests have been performed or atleast none have been disclosed. Cell phones do handshake with multiple towers and in a rural area the lack of closer towers and the lack of any terrain obstruction may allow for a five mile distant tower to pick up signals. Also there are some indications that the signals were picked up only briefly which might indicate proximity but a lack of approach or withdrawal, thus emphasizing that it was probably a spurious signal.

Well, maybe it was a parental abduction. I'd sure like to see the evidence though. Evidence. Not innuendo, not conclusions drawn from risque email content, ... evidence!