Where there is smoke; there is a smoke machine.

Where there is smoke, there is a smoke generator machine, particularly in Hollywood.

Jane Doe 2 a/k/a Jenna T a/k/a Jenna Thompson:

>>Thompson described her story to People,
Strange how these lice always talk to the media, not the police or lawyer or respectable press.
>> in which she was a 17-year-old from Maryland who visited a New York City modeling agency in 1988.
>>There, she said, she was sent to meet Cosby during the height of his fame on ”The Cosby Show.”
Oh, a powerful modeling agency it must be to risk sending a 17 year old girl out. What records exist of this agency?
>> His interest in her developed
Developed?? Over time?
>>into uncomfortable advances by Cosby, People reported Thompson as saying.
Advances? (Plural)! She went back for more?
>> She visited his home during a last encounter in the late 1980s.
Can't be more specific, can you? I would think she would remember the date.
As well as also remembering a reason she went to man's home instead of his office.
>> Cosby gave her $700 upon her departure.
In which bank did she deposit the money? Surely she would remember that. Seventeen year old boys who get a windfall, blow it in a bar, but seventeen year old girls bank it.
Did she give the agency their ten percent?
Or did she rip off the agency thereby revealing her proclivity for crime and deception?

Luke Mitchell and the Satanic Struggles

Wednesday November 23, 2011: The Supreme Court(UK) backed judges in the High Court(Scotland)who had previously refused Mitchell the right to appeal again.

Maggie Scott QC said the Crown had relied on evidence of Mitchell’s comments and demeanor during the lawyer-less police interview, resulting in “a fundamental unfairness amounting to a denial of justice”.

Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that evidence taken from a police interview where a suspect was not first offered access to a solicitor was unreliable and could not be used in court.

However, in the instant ruling it respected the “finality” of the rejection of Mitchell’s appeal against conviction in May 2008 and did not believe there were any live matters that would lead the court to re-open his case.

At appeal in 2008, the justices criticized the “overbearing and hostile interrogation” by police of the teenager during the investigation in an attempt to gain a confession. However, the justices noted Mitchell had not been cowed nor submitted to the pressure.

The Supreme Court said that verdict marked the end of the case.


UPDATE:
The Scottish Criminal Review Commission rendered its uniquely absurd conclusion quite some time ago which left Luke Mitchell virtually without any further hope of release. However the commission has now ordered that murder victim Jodi Jones clothing be re-examined forensically since the scientific state of the art has changed in the interim and usable profiles might yet be obtained.

Four men were believed to have left their DNA on, in or inconveniently close to the corpse, but none of the four were ever arrested or considered suspects. One of the men when questioned, though not as a suspect, was provided by the police with a reason his dna might have been on the victim's tee shirt. The victim's sister later married one of the men whose dna was found at the crime scene.

A few days after the announcement of further dna testing, Corrine Mitchell's Caravan Park was fire bombed by "persons unknown".

Yep. Its started. And it will persist!!

Even though Ryan Ferguson is finally a free man its still a litany of guilt. "We won't re-try him" rather than "He is obviously innocent". And now the former police chief going on record as approving of prosecutor Kane and believing that Erickson and Ferguson were properly arrested, properly interrogated and are the actual perpetrators.

Cops just can't give up or admit they were wrong. They want to win at any cost.

Parents of JonBenet Ramsey indicted?

JBR:
JonBenet Ramsey related article in Daily Camera alleges once again that the Grand Jury actually voted to indict each of the Ramseys but that DA Hunter, doubtful he could get a conviction against either one, refused to sign the indictment. Colorado law requiring both the Foreman of the Grand Jury and the Prosecutor to sign a True Bill of Indictment.

There were tabloid inspired rumors of this right from the start and even now I'm not convinced it actually happened. The indictment, if it existed, was for child neglect not murder or torture. Four year statute of limitations.

Most of the Grand Jurors are refusing to speak and it seems some are only speaking if their identity is not revealed. The indictment, if indeed it ever existed, seems to have been born of frustration and hopelessness, and not based on any specific actions or inactions by the Ramseys.

It still seems strange that the parents would have been indicted by the grand jury when the jury failed to call either of the parents as witnesses.

Scott Shapiro is, of course, magnifying this out of all proportion and claiming that the possible indictment for child neglect is a complete repudiation of Lou Smit and his theories and complete acceptance of the theories of that incompetent motor mouth from the BPD.

Death of Gareth Williams: MI 6 Agent

Once again, I visit the death of an MI6 agent and note certain disquieting facts.

Despite all attempts by the various intelligence agencies involved to portray him as a nerdy technician rather than field agent, it is clear that he had been trained for operations and, in fact, had been conducting field operations.

As someone tasked to any field assignment it is necessary to have a cover story and as all good cover stories go, it is sensible to have depth and breadth to them so that any character appears to have a variety of interests and activities and does not appear to be one-dimensional and therefore a suspected mole. Those who look for moles or intruders are apt to be impressed by discoveries of non-mainstream interests. The famed "cover story within a cover story" is far more believable than a shallow, single-dimensional cover story that is easily blown.

To what extent the decedent's visitations to cross-dressing sites, auto-eroticism sites, bondage sites, etc. represented an actual interest versus a career-motivated affectation is unknown and to a great extent unknowable.

It is true that twenty thousand pounds is a rather substantial investment in ladies undergarments but it is also clear that a one time purchase of such items is more suggestive of a cover story than an ongoing interest persisting over the course of many years.

Exploration of a variety of extreme websites is a very sensible way to build a complex cover story for later adventures in the world of Hackers. Hackers who discover one of their number has various cross-dressing interests and auto-eroticism interests would be less likely to view him as a possible government agent sent to penetrate their network.

As in any forensic investigation, it is often impossible to exclude an option it is only possible to term it unlikely. People often have extreme skills or unusual knowledge: regurgitated keys, cat burglar climbing skills, lock picking skills, contortionist routines, etc. all come to mind as items frequently possessed by the general population and therefore unable to be rejected by a coroner.

A person who wished to advance his career by becoming accepted in the world of auto-eroticism and cross dressing may well have applied himself to some fairly interesting situations. Not only is the self entry into the holdall physically possible but there is a measure of evidence to indicate that self entry into the holdall may have been a particularly valuable career skill for him to acquire as it transcends the world of auto eroticism and extends to ordinary burglary skills.

It is impossible for a coroner to rule that self entry into the holdall did not take place. We may find comfort in the fact that we ourselves would never attempt such a thing and that if we were indeed to attempt such a dangerous contortion we would do so under conditions of greater safety, but such thoughts are of no use to the coroner. We can think the intelligence services played a role and that forensic evidence was tampered with. It is a comfort to us to think that but a coronial inquiry is not an exercise in intellectual comfort.

Would the appropriate coroner's verdict be Death by misadventure? No. Death by patriotism seems much more appropriate.

Please note that the coroner is of the opinion that the visitations to the alternative lifestyle sites were brief and sporadic and therefore should be given little weight. I accord the sites greater weight due to the assumed goal in such visitations to the alternative sites. Everything is strange about the case. Even the initially much sought after and now discounted Mediterranean Couple has ties to the Italian embassy so the intrigue seems to never stop.

Police fixation as outright frame-up. Trial at last!!

Since the trial is currently underway, I wanted to re-post this blog item that was originally posted in relation to an analysis of the JonBenet Ramsey murder investigation.


Police fixation on initially adopted viewpoints.


A retired Detective Superintendent of the Fife Constabulary has been indicted for Perverting the Course of Justice, a rather serious charge in the UK, for actions that resulted in two defendants each spending ten years in prison.


Quite obviously a murder of an alcoholic in Scotland has no factual relationship to the Jonbenet Ramsey murder in Colorado, but I took particular note of it solely because the officers involved, although guilty of multiple wrongdoings, embarked on their course of illegal suppression of exculpatory evidence solely because it was contrary to the then-accepted theory of the case which had been prematurely adopted by the police.


This is yet another example of how people become fixated on an early interpretation of the evidence and will go to great lengths to make certain that all later developments are in accord with the prior view. It is quite obvious that the first few witnesses to give evidence that was contrary to the accepted viewpoint may have been given short shrift for a variety of reasons but once the number of contrary witnesses mushroomed the police clung to their prematurely adopted viewpoint despite the utter reliability of the contrary witnesses and the clearly verifiable circumstances of their observations. Police computer records were knowingly altered so that all statements indicating the contrary point of view were suppressed. Witnesses were apparently threatened by a police official who later was appointed to a position wherein he was inspecting other police forces.


This incident might be of some interest to those who feel that it is improper for innocent persons to promptly “lawyer-up” or that meeting with senior officials will clear up early misunderstandings created by initial investigators.


Note: Although the significant point is the fixation on an early-adopted viewpoint, those who care to follow some of the underlying facts of the case should be aware of certain unique terminology. Bent is a term that is often used in the UK to refer to a homosexual but in relation to a police officer the term bent refers to one that is corrupt and the word then carries no connotation of sexual orientation. The word tip in the UK can indeed refer to information provided by a member of the public to the police in order to aid the solution of a crime but it can also refer to what in the United States would be called a garbage dump. The word grass refers to an act that in the United States would be perhaps termed snitching or informing. The term Procurator Fiscal in Scottish law is the rough equivalent to coroner in the United States, meaning an official who makes a preliminary inquiry into the circumstances of a death and who issues a formal report of allegations relating to deaths, violent crimes or police corruption.


Excerpted from the Daily Record:

Scots cop accused of corruption
Mar 24 2008 Exclusive by Mark Mcgivern.


A BENT detective who fled Britain when he was accused of corruption is facing a new police probe after being tracked to Devon. Police want to quiz former chief superintendent Richard Munro over claims he framed two innocent men for murder. Munro who served 26 years in Fife Constabulary, left the force in disgrace in 2004.


The corruption investigation was launched after the appeal judges branded Munro a liar and said he and his colleagues were guilty of grave misconduct. Munro quit Britain and lived in various countries in a camper van and finally slipped back into the UK to a bolthole in Devon. Before Munro left the force, he was on secondment to HM Inspectorate of Constabulary – which inspects police forces and advises ministers.

Jo Yeates Murder Case. Trial evidence.

This was a strange case. A very young and attractive female whose movements were confined to a narrow time frame and a geographically limited area containing intensive surveillance camera coverage. Although some items became of particular interest only after the initial reports it appears that the Avon and Somerset Constabulary made some very significant errors early on in the case.

The boyfriend who returned from his out-of-town family visit reported what was essentially a missing persons case but which clearly had overtones of missing under highly unusual circumstances indicative of violence since she was missing from her apartment yet her coat and cell phone were in the living room indicating at the very least an abrupt departure and most likely indicating an involuntary departure.

It seems that the police made two crucial errors. They did not empty the trash bins in the immediate area and thus failed to discover a pizza box that was in the killer's trash bin. It was sometime after the crime was reported that surveillance film revealed her purchasing the pizza. It also seems that the police concluded virtually immediately that the apartment was too neat to have been the scene of a violent struggle. Later evidence indicated a series of screams and the sound of a brief struggle took place promptly after her entry into her home and the presumed inadvertent discovery of her next door neighbor's presence in her apartment.

In any situation such as this any situation involving a hasty departure is to be explored. A neighbor stopping over for a moment, a knock on the door that is a ruse, or anything else wherein the missing woman's evening is suddenly interrupted by a person who is known to her and perceived as non-threatening. Similarly, any telephone message or answering machine message or notepad in the area is normally explored for any indication of a reason why she might have made an abrupt departure from home but left behind her cell phone and coat on a cold night.

All manner of garbage bins inside the home and in the general area would normally be investigated. Weapons, clothing, blood, anything someone had an urgent need to dispose of may at trial become crucial evidence. These are customary steps and hardly need explaining.

As yet unreported in the press, the ability of the Dutch engineer to enter via a common door in a refurbished wall is of unknown ease and the presence of that door is unknown to someone viewing the wall from the victim's flat.

The victim's landlord who was briefly of interest in the case mainly due to his eccentric reputation will be giving evidence in the separate phone hacking inquiry.

ADDENDUM: So far the trial has been the usual cowardly stance of She let me in, I misinterpreted her signals and never having had any intent to rape or kill simply panicked and tried to keep her quiet thus making it manslaughter not murder. Of course after this sudden panic he quietly ate a pizza and disposed of her corpse.
I do so hope the jury sees through all that utter nonsense and makes it premeditated murder with malice aforethought.
It seems that 10 out of the 12 jurors did see it as premeditated murder. The sentence is life with a mandatory 20 years in custody.
As is often the case, there was a post-conviction revelation of the defendant having had dozens of images of women being strangled on his computer.

Dateline August 5th 2011 Ryan Ferguson case.

A two-hour Dateline special on Friday August 5, 2011, entitled The Mystery of Halloween Night will cover the Ryan Ferguson case wherein an 18 year old slightly built youth was convicted of murdering a 300 pound athletic sports editor during a lengthy fight based on the dreams of an alcoholic drug addicted schizophrenic.

Death at the Met.

As a PC at The Met he killed a puppy. As a Sergeant at The Met he killed two highly trained police dogs by leaving them in a hot (29 degree Celsius) car with all the windows closed up tight. I wonder how many dogs he will kill as an Inspector.

There is something wrong at the London Metropolitan Police.

Luke Mitchell to be released by Supreme Court

Amidst much crying and carrying-on by Scottish politicians, the Supreme Court, an English court, will order the release from custody of Luke Mitchell, convicted of murder under Scots Law which at the time allowed initial interrogation without counsel. Under the Cadder decision allowing counsel at initial interrogation in accordance with the European Commission on Human Rights, Luke Mitchell was deemed to have been denied a fair trial.

Of course, why on earth a 14 year old boy whose dna was not found at the crime scene was tried when the three males whose dna was found at the crime scene were never considered suspects was not considered by the court. Nor did the court consider the massive press coverage about Luke Mitchell's supposed Satanism or fascination with Marilyn Manson simply because a Manson CD given to him a week after the murder was found in his house.

Amidst all the palaver about an English court being allowed to undermine Scots Law it should perhaps be remembered that if the Luke Mitchell case is an example of what Scottish police, Scottish prosecutors, Scottish judges and Scottish juries can do, then I submit that at long last Scots Law should indeed be undermined.

For those of you requiring an introduction to the Luke Mitchell case suffice it for me to say that the Lothian and Borders Constabulary promptly decided that fourteen year old Luke Mitchell would be considered the sole suspect in the murder of his fourteen year old girlfriend. The police did not seem at all troubled by Luke Mitchell having no scratches and having left no dna at the crime scene. The police therefore decided to ignore the three males whose dna was left on, in or inconveniently close by the corpse despite the fact that the three males had chosen to adopt various actions such as leaving the area, giving rather unusual explanations for their scratches and altering their appearance.

Soundly condemned by the press, termed a devotee of Satan and Marilyn Manson and banned from attending school Luke Mitchell endured hours of police questioning without benefit of counsel. After trial under circus-like conditions wherein he was denied the use of dna experts, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to a minimum term of confinement of twenty years even though it was clear that the notoriety of his case meant that he would serve the full life sentence without ever being allowed parole. Countless appeals to the Scottish Courts availed him naught. Even his petition of Nobile Officium presented at the Court of Inner Sessions fell on deaf ears.

Finally, the English Supreme Court will be ordering his release since his being denied counsel at the initial interrogation has been ruled to be a denial of fundamental human rights protected by the European Union. While Scottish politicians are bemoaning the destruction of Scots Law, it is perhaps time that we should all rejoice that at long last common sense seems to be prevailing.

For those of you who find such matters to be of interest, there appears to have been no comment made by the sister of the homicide victim who soon thereafter married one of the men whose semen was found on the victim’s tee shirt and underwear.

An earlier posting on this case is herewith set forth for the convenience of the readers:

A Final Incompetence …

Their Lordships, the five Justices of the High Court of Criminal Appeals, formally severed Luke Mitchell’s appeal from the proceedings since he was not then represented by counsel. This was done so as to give him additional time with which to seek the advice of counsel but the justices formally advised Luke Mitchell they would expect any such advice of counsel to be consonant with a recognition that the present proceedings as continuing against appellant Nat Fraser declared the grounds of the appeal to be legally incompetent.

Oh what a fine nicety of the law! We are not now denying your appeal because you don’t have a lawyer and we are giving you time to go get a lawyer but its obvious you will never be able to actually get a lawyer since we are now formally announcing your appeal to be legally incompetent.

What an awful mess. At age 14, Luke Mitchell gallantly set forth in the night to search for his overdue 14 year old girlfriend. Each and every member of the small search party stated to police that Luke’s dog created a ruckus at a small cleft in the wall and only then did Luke Mitchell proceed to discover the naked and woefully bloody corpse of his girlfriend. After extensive and persistent police questioning the witnesses changed their recollections as to the dog having located the corpse rather than Luke Mitchell having done so. This of course gave the police, the prosecutor and the press the opportunity to repeatedly point out that Luke Mitchell had guilty knowledge of the corpse’s location.

The press repeatedly harped on the fact that the injuries to the corpse bore a resemblance to the injuries suffered decades earlier in the Black Dahlia case that was oft mentioned by rock star Marilyn Manson. The press informed the public that Luke Mitchell was an obsessed fan of Marilyn Manson but failed to point out that there was not one reference on Luke’s computer to the Black Dahlia and that the only Marilyn Manson CD found in Luke’s home was one that was purchased after the murder. The press repeatedly described Luke Mitchell as a devotee of Satan but failed to point out that the school book scribbling they repeatedly described as satanic was in fact a quotation from a very popular computer game.

His girlfriend had struggled valiantly suffering extensive defensive wounds and almost total exsanguination but Luke Mitchell had nary a scratch nor a single drop of blood on him.

Although it was publicly announced that the crime was murder not rape semen was found on the girlfriend’s body yet it was not from Luke Mitchell.

Meanwhile the police, prosecutor, press and public show not the slightest interest whatsoever in a male known to have been fond of the location where the body was found, known to have appeared disheveled at the time, known to have borne the next morning facial scratches for which there were absurd and ever-changing explanations and known to have penned an essay about having killed a girl within a week of the murder.

Ah the ever so fine niceties of the law: we will give you additional time to try to get a lawyer to represent you in a futile appeal but we won’t even question much less arrest or prosecute the facially scratched violence-prone druggie and sex-offender whose dna was found on the corpse.

What is the use of having dna databases if such evidence as semen found on a murder victim is ignored? What is the use of having advanced forensics if a corpse is allowed to remain out in the woods unprotected from overnight rains and morning dew that will clearly wash away evidence deposited by the attacker? What is the use of having juries if they accept ownership of a Marilyn Manson CD as proof of murder? What is the use of having guidelines for the questioning of a 15 year old youth if all judges do is mildly rebuke the police for their obvious excesses?

Clearly, the one lesson to be learned is that when the police want you they will not shift their focus elsewhere. Obtaining counsel may availeth naught but going without counsel is utterly absurd. The police, prosecutor and press have all railroaded Luke Mitchell and allowed a known sex offender to go un-prosecuted.

Getting Away with a Murder... and a Cover Up.

I'm not quite sure why this morning's log-on page brought me to a re-hash of an LAPD detective, Stephanie Lazarus, having been charged with a decades old murder based on her DNA having been found on the victim, Sherri Rae Rasmussen.

The police of course tried to say the investigation was a regrettable incident of tunnel vision but its a very strange tunnel indeed. Sure there were a couple of items placed by the door as if a burglar was assembling his loot prior to removing it, but a lousy VCR and a disc player sure ain't much to commit a murder over. It was quite obvious right from the start that although even burglars who do kill to get away from a crime scene when a homeowner returns unexpectedly that such surprised burglars primarily want to get away. They don't make a long, drawn-out battle of it that ranges over two floors of the home and they don't make it a massively violent and highly emotional over-kill.

Now it can be assumed that the loot was going to be fenced but just how much money does the average burglar think he can get by fencing a stolen marriage license? So don't tell me that the LAPD detectives investigating this "burglary" were too dumb to realize that a stolen marriage license means a highly personal motive and that the assembled valuable items were merely staging. I mean lets face it, the detectives may or may not have been corrupt but they most certainly were not bumbling idiots. They knew what they were doing. And it seems what they did was to ignore the obvious implications of the purloined marriage certificate and to avoid papering the file with excessive adverse statements. All the statements by the victim's family to the investigators about the prior girlfriend seem to have been kept verbal and not memorialized by the investigators into memoranda for the file. Even over the years, it seems that adverse paperwork was being kept out of the file.

Rising young star in the LAPD, rapid promotion to detective, eventual promotion to an elite Art Squad even though she knew nothing about art. Don't tell me that woman didn't have a happy and rewarding life after she committed the murder. Sure she is the clink now and that is not too happy a retirement for her so she surely did not get off scott free but let's face it, she sure fared better than if she had not been an LAPD patrolman at the time of the killing!

Intensely emotional overkill, protracted fight, shooting and biting and beating the victim. Attributed to two men, at least one of whom was armed. Yeah, LAPD, that really makes sense! A female homeowner returns unexpectedly and finds two male burglars one of whom has a gun so she immediately goes on the attack? And that theft of the marriage certificate! Why just think of all the dough the burglars thought they would get from some fence for that item! Its obviously not an item of any value whatsoever to a burglar or a fence or pawnshop owner. I can just see burglars searching out items of great and obvious value and coming up with someone's marriage certificate!

Tunnel vision? A mistake in the investigation? Inexperienced investigators? Nah. The LAPD was not that stupid back then. And they are not that stupid now! They didn't want to have an embarrassing result then, so it was an investigation that went nowhere. Either that or the investigators really and truly thought that a marriage certificate was an item that a burglar would truly want to steal. Which of those two alternatives do you think is more reasonable?

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.

Luke Mitchell case to be reviewed by SCCRC.

The Scottish Criminal Convictions Review Commission has notified Luke Mitchell, now a prisoner serving a Life Sentence for the murder of 14 year old Jodi Jones that his case will be reviewed. The communication from the SCCRC did not indicate any dates but this usually takes at least six months and in a case that has achieved such notoriety it is likely to take longer.

For those unfamiliar with this case:
Jodi Jones put up a great struggle yet her boyfriend, Luke Mitchell, had no scratches and was shown to be calm and normal when interacting with his friends about twenty minutes after the alleged time of the murder. Three men whose dna was found on, in or near the corpse were never arrested or considered suspects; Luke Mitchell whose dna was not found at the scene was convicted of murder. Two of the three men concealed themselves and altered their appearance soon after the murder. The sister of the deceased victim later married the man whose semen was on Jodi's shirt and bra. A third man stated that he had deposited his semen in a condom found near the corpse while he was alone in the woods with no one nearby. He stated that he did not see the naked corpse at his feet and he claimed that this event took place at a time when local reports indicate it was raining heavily. Despite his semen being found near the corpse of a 14 year old girl, he was not arrested or charged with her murder as the Lothian and Borders Constabulary apparently believed his statement about his using a condom despite there being no one else present at the time.

RCMP Homicide 101 Difficulties.

Well now, you find a luxury mobile home burned in the remote woods. You don't find the 78 year old law-abiding owners anywhere nearby. You don't find them at their real home but that doesn't alarm you enough to even talk to the neighbors who were aware of their travel route and schedule. You fail to make any inquiries concerning the missing tow-car that was normally at the rear bumper of the mobile home despite having all the registration information. And when five days later you issue a plea to the public for information: you fail to mention the missing car and only mention the expensive mobile home in the flyer despite your knowledge that it was already a burned-out hulk in the remote forest.

RCMP? I think the Mounties trusty sled-dogs could have done a better job on this case than those horsemen did!

Females on investigative teams ...

The advantage of having a female on an investigative team!!

Scenario: Borrowed tee shirt on victim, donor of semen found on tee shirt and bra lived with the owner of the tee shirt. Cops thought transference although amateur sleuths were quite dubious about innocent transfer.

Female sleuth pointed out: Tee shirt being black would never have been put in the same laundry load as a white bra.

Luke Mitchell...further information

Recapitulation:
Luke Mitchell the 14 year old boyfriend of 14 year old murder victim Jodi Jones was the immediate suspect and the police rather obviously never even looked elsewhere. Perhaps they had some early confidence that the forensic evidence would bear out their views but none of Luke's dna was found on or near the corpse and Luke's clothing and person were utterly devoid of even the slightest speck of blood or scratch or other evidence.

The police repeatedly described the attack as not a sex crime despite three separate men's semen being found on in or near the corpse. The socks were folded over the victim's otherwise naked body suggesting sexual deviancy which is lacking in the boyfriend.

The pathologist stated that the victim's mutilations bear only the slightest resemblance to the Black Dahlia's mutilation which was depicted on the Marilyn Manson website. Luke Mitchell, although described by the police as obsessed with Marilyn Manson, merely had been given a magazine that contained a Marilyn Manson CD and this gift took place a few days after the murder.

Newspapers and police engaged in a campaign of media vilification and Luke Mitchell was clearly convicted of murder simply because the entire village had heard endless nonsense about tattoos, Satanism, knives and mutilation.

It appears that the family of the victim soon adopted a united front that implicated Luke Mitchell and the family has been obstinate in linking Luke Mitchell's selected path through the woods to the presumed path of the murder victim.

With three paths, the safest being along an open field it is more likely than not the victim took the path that meant crossing a fence and passing nearby an area of known drug dealers. Instead the family and police took the view that the victim chose Roans Dike Path, on which she encountered Luke Mitchell and was forced over a nearly six foot wall and then killed.

There is considerable reason to doubt the information given by the victim's family to the police. Indeed there seems doubt at to just why when police wanted a photograph of the victim to put on flyers and on the TV the only photo they were able to obtain was that of the 14 year old victim as a 5 year old girl. With an obstructionist family the police should have been more suspicious of the blood relatives of the victim. It boggles the mind to think that a truly concerned family would resist providing a recent photograph. Perhaps they had difficulty finding one, but it seems that they found flashlights and batteries with which to conduct a search quite rapidly. In fact according to one time-line they found the equipment and embarked on the search five full minutes before learning she was missing, strode in a direct and purposeful manner to the right area and there began the searching behavior.

And it seems the police never even considered anyone but the boyfriend in this attack they repeatedly describe even to this day as non-sexual.

Luke Mitchell hearing

April 28, 2010 at 10:30am in High Court in Edinburgh.

The motion relates to a removal of the twenty year minimum prison term of his life sentence based upon the Tender Years doctrine. Even if the court does remove the mandatory twenty years confinement provision of his life sentence it is unlikely the parole board would release him even at that 20 year mark.

Formal decision expected within three months.

NOTE: At an earlier proceeding Luke Mitchell was unrepresented by counsel and therefore the court did not formally dismiss his Nobile Officium petition but indicated they would allow him time to seek representation but that if any counsel were obtained counsel should be informed that the petition would be held to be legally insufficient and without merit. At this proceeding, Luke Mitchell was represented by counsel and so the petition was formally dismissed and the question of the 20 year minimum confinement was taken under submission.

General Update ... (nothing special)..

Nothing much has been happening.

I did keep up with some of the Scottish Fingerprint Inquiry involving Shirley Mckie's misidentified print. I became a bit disillusioned with the official inquiry however when there seemed to be a focus on experts merely having a difference of opinion rather than a focus on the fact that the mis-identification is utterly unsupportable by anyone with even a few weeks of experience in fingerprint identification. It seems that the five technicians who had been prevented from voicing their doubts were still being ignored and that the inquiry never addressed the real issues which were clearly more political than technical.

I think the police campaign against Detective Constable McKie including all those rumors about her having had sex at a murder scene were not due to her having challenged her misidentified fingerprint but were more likely due to her having approached defense counsel about the likelihood of evidence having been planted at a crime scene based on her having been told that her fingerprint had been found at that crime scene when she knew she had never been there. The cops were willing to drive one of their own into the madhouse simply because she had been honest and forthright with defense counsel. The pre-dawn raid on her home to effect the perjury arrest was simply to humiliate her as a further punishment for being a renegade who spoke to defense counsel and thus was on the wrong side. Weird tales about sex with married constables at the murder scene were just to make things worse for her on the job and in the newspapers there could have been no basis in fact for them. Indeed, the very certainty that she had about the print not being there legitimately shows that she clearly knew she had never entered the premises for any purpose, much less an illicit one to be conducted in a disgraceful place and time.

I've heard of the recently recanted testimony of Chuck Erickson in the Ryan Ferguson case but think it will have absolutely no impact whatsoever. Lost amongst all the hoopla in this case is the fact that the police interrogators were capable and experienced police officers who had a history of conducting proper interrogations. It seems there is a general acceptance by the press and the public that this one interrogation of Chuck Erickson was some sort of an annomally. Of course if the motion does indeed get the appeal away from the "Good Old Boys" of Boone County that will surely be of some benefit to the chances of justice finally being done. The factual situation remains: neither of the two young men were anywhere near the scene of the crime! At the time Chuck Erickson testified at the trial he knew he was not involved in the murder in any way. The police and the prosecutor were intelligent men who were experienced at their jobs. Those cops had not just fallen off some turnip truck and wandered in to conduct an interrogation. They know they shouldn't be spoonfeeding information to the subject much less spoonfeeding him information that was originally withheld from the press solely to aid the police in eliminating false confessors. The cops had a two year old homicide on which they had made absolutely no progress and if some punk-kid weirdo wanted to confess to having dreamed he was involved in the murder that was fine with them and fine with the prosecutor who knew he was likely to win the career-enhancing case. After all, it doesn't take all that much in brain power to realize that a 300 pound former football player is not going to be attacked by a seventeen year old slightly built youth who doesn't even know how to fight. Its clear from the crime scene that the attacker had to be a very large and powerful man, but above all, he had to be a man who really knew how to fight. Although I've had doubts about the co-worker and his various lies, I think it likely that this was simply a chance encounter with a very violent career criminal. The belt has probably been handled by far too many persons for touch dna testing to be of any use but other clothing should certainly have been subjected to such testing. It is however troubling to invent some large male passerby who escapes by car simply because I think the co-worker is large but not large enough and not skilled enough. Its clear the co-worker had a car there though he lied about which car it was and he lied about his departure time.


I was disappointed that the Nobile Officium plea at the Court of Sessions went against Luke Mitchell. This is yet again a case of great distress to me. I saw a brief video clip of Jodi Jones and she seems to have been a nice fourteen year old girl who deserved to live. I didn't consider her particularly Goth-like despite the modest lip piercing she sported. She seemed to be pretty much like all fourteen year old girls: young, beautiful and full of promise. It is a sorry state of affairs that she died with the dna of at least three males associated with her corpse or her murder-scene and yet none of those three males was arrested or prosecuted. It may be that her home life was rather more difficult than she had indicated in her diary or her statements to her boyfriend. It is to the ever lasting shame of the Lothian and Borders police that the sole focus was on her 14 year old boyfriend whose dna was not found on her and who bore no cuts or scratches at all despite the vigorous defense Jodi Jones had clearly put up. The initial blundering by the police is suggestive to some of a police involvement in the murder but I consider it to be merely a situation involving a typical police blundering due to stupidity and arrogance and general incompetence. Once the police adopted the viewpoint that the assailant was the boyfriend no action was later taken that in any way challenged that "party line" viewpoint. I doubt the police even suffered any increasing concern about the very strange and highly illogical behavior of the victim's family in the hours before the discovery of the corpse.

Luke Mitchell seems to have been railroaded right from the start. I fail to see how the police could have been so inept at their forensic duties. While the media role may bear the greatest fault, it does seem that there was police influence if not downright police orchestration of the media campaign. This of course is not justice. I do wonder however just how despite all the shortcomings in the performance of the police, press and prosecutor, there was not one single solitary juror with an ounce of backbone and common sense! Decades ago Scottish jurors used to be held without heat, light, food or water until a verdict was reached. It took real courage in those days for a juror to be bold. I simply can not imagine a juror being able to maintain his composure during testimony from a so-called expert that a small amount of semen on a bra strap was able to migrate due to rain water across the adjacent bra cup, across the cleavage area and upwards against gravity all the way across to the contra-lateral bra cup. Why is it that jurors lose all sense of reality when listening to an expert and accept utter nonsense. Its not as if a woman's breasts and the law of gravity are alien subjects that need an expert's testimony before a juror can understand them. And a juror is not supposed to forget his knowledge of a woman's breasts or his knowledge of the laws of gravity when he enters the jury room.


I don't know if Jodi Jones was killed by a family member but I seem concerned by the general level of lack of candor from her family coupled with a sort of unified script of family member evidence. Such orchestrated testimony is deplorable and certainly suspect. After all, just how many families have 67 year old grandmothers who go out at dinnertime for a search while all the able-bodied men stay home? How is it the family members stride purposefully and directly to the area in which the corpse is found and do not engage in any enroute searching behavior? And why, with so many blood relatives living nearby the search area do the women not phone them and have them simply walk a short distance and do the searching? And why is it that the family claims they had a sudden impulse to pay a grave-side visit on that afternoon. This gives them use of a car and no witnesses as to their location: just what is needed for a body disposal interlude. One voice mail message that was preserved rather than being immediately deleted was a sugary-sweet "you're grounded" message that sounds like it was drafted by a script-writer intent on having the message publicly disseminated. Ozzie and Harriet talk like that to a teenage daughter, real parents don't. If the voicemail message had been "Okay, you little slut, you are grounded for life!" it might be more believable. Also I am a bit concerned about the family's impromptu trip to the cemetery. An impromptu trip to the pub would have been more believable! Was it a crime of sudden passion by the mentally disturbed brother with a history of violence? Was it rape by the fiance of Jodi's sister? After all, it is his DNA that is all over the victim's bra. (Oh yea, I forgot: innocent transfer!) Usually its a bold and clever defense attorney who makes such unbelievable statements about a man's DNA being found on a murdered woman being the result of an innocent transfer but in this case its the police and prosecutors who keep saying that its not a sex crime and the transfer is innocent because the fourteen year old girl chose to wear a shirt that had semen on it from her sister's fiance. Or perhaps, rather than a crime of passion, was it simply that the victim had discovered something and had to be silenced? Its clear the newspapers made a big deal about the defendant's drug dealing but the fourteen year old defendant was no major drug dealer, he only sold a little bit to his friends. The victim's family members seem to have a variety of criminal activities in their past. Perhaps Jodi overheard something and became a threat? Its probably not too likely because they would have planned the crime better. Its more likely that it was a crime of sudden passion either committed by the mentally disturbed brother or by the sister's sperm-donating fiance.

I've not made any progress on my project involving an artificial intelligence program to be more discriminating regarding submerged metallic items. Finding a cell phone in a muddy river bed just seems beyond the capability of the devices. In the Britanee Drexel case I had thought that the corpse and cell phone were each jettisoned at the same time and location well south of the point of abduction. Despite it being Spring Break with hundreds of college aged males in the city, I'm quite certain the abduction and murder was the work of a local who was familiar with the area. That seven minute window of opportunity is in reality even narrower and I think the only way the abduction could have taken place was a non-threatening approach with a suitable vehicle being immediately available. A church van with someone hawking treatises or tapes would have been a perfect lure. Doors already open and draped. The van carpeted. A few strong arms to instantly subdue her and stifle any screams. I don't think it was some alleyway or shortcut that Britanee took. It happened right there on her intended path of travel and well before she reached that seventh minute after her departure filmed on the hotel's lobby surveillance camera. The mother's constant tattoo of her daughter being depressed seems a strange attitude to be taken given the circumstances of the crime.

I tried to see if I could find a product of decomposition that was uniquely human but it seems that idea didn't pan out. I had thought that water courses could have downstream sensors that would indicate decomposition of human remains but it seems nature does not really endow humans with any unique decomposition products. Pheremones and kairomones are not a help since no carrion-oriented species seems to have evolved to favor human flesh over other decomposing flesh. It was an interesting study particularly of the statistical basis for determining if someone truly was the bite-magnet that he imagined himself to be. Jack Jumper ants from Tasmania seemed interesting though they hunt largely by sight and not by chemosensitive receptors. I've often wondered why fleas can detect an odor of an approaching mammal and then the heat source but search and rescue parties have such problems in locating missing persons that mosquitoes and flies are able to find from great distances. I thought that perhaps the abilities of some insect species to seek out targets from great distances could be utilized in forensic work or search and rescue missions but I've not been able to make sufficient progress on this project.

I've had minor correspondence with the people involved with the James Kim search in Josephine County, Oregon. Oddly enough the search and rescue people there in Oregon were very impressed by the news reports of a search in The Everglades wherein search parties were at all times accompanied by an armed guard with a rifle actually in his hands ready for instant use. It seems that SAR personnel have different attitudes and often share the same lack of situational awareness that causes people to become lost in the first place. The Kim family made a mistake when they ventured onto a road that looked deceptively inviting on a map but was in fact a poorly marked maze of roads not used at that time of the year. The Kim's assumptions about traffic or snowplows finding them were unwise but its often hard for people to transition to an "outback mentality" when they don't realize that they are in fact in the outback! Use of their residual gas or oil to light a spare tire and generate a large quantity of dark smoke might have helped them as would have remaining with the car for only a few more hours. Even the highly-specialized SAR personnel seemed unable to get things right. One technical rescue team arrived in SWAT clothing that was dark while brightly colored vests were available in the local school's gymnasium. Volunteer Search and Rescue personnel in a poor county did a wonderful job but miscommunication of vital information and unnecessary delays made the mission successful only as to the wife and two children.

I'm not doing much of anything else right now due largely to some health issues. Gout is a particularly immobilizing and distracting disease and it seems strange that its impossible to obtain testing for Pasturella Multicida in relation to gout symptoms. Gout's onset is always nocturnal and in early Spring. Triggers involve fungal products and all effective treatments happen to be anti-fungal agents, yet Gout is not viewed by medicine as a disease caused by a microbial agent. It is utterly absurd. The events of September 11th and their consequences on our nation and its economy weigh heavily on me despite the efforts of friends and acquaintances to excuse my cowardice and incompetence on the eve of the attack. I was so concerned with being charged with the making of a terroristic threat! I do admit that as I become more and more frustrated with the medical profession over the issues of gout and diabetes, I also become less and less concerned over my failures on September 10th. I sit here in the wee hours of the morning listening to a feral cat slowly coughing its life away as it suffers from pneumonia of some sort that it came down with during a sudden cold spell. I feed the feral cats as best as I am able to, but it is of course not enough. And as I think back on mistakes and wasted opportunities, I refer to medicine as A Black and Evil Art and I truly mean it.

My interest in the JonBenet Ramsey case has not waned despite the relative inactivity in the investigation. For quite some time little else has been done on the case but perform an automated search of the CODIS database search for a match to the intruder's dna found beneath the fingernails and on the panties and outer garments. Of course that is better than not performing the dna searches but I've often felt the crime may not have been the sex crime that it appears to be and that therefore the likelihood of an eventual arrest for some other sex crime is very low. I've never really settled on an estimate for the perpetrator's age. Some items thought to be indications of maturity such as the use of the term brown paper bag or the use of the term attache case may not be at all valid as indicators of maturity. The wiping of the corpse afterward may indicate a forensic awareness which some feel is an indicator of maturity but I think even twelve year old boys know enough about crime to avoid leaving evidence at the scene.

I've not kept up with the Borgesson case in Scotland. Its unfortunate that a police force would so adamantly cling to a suicide or accidental drowning theory when the facts make such a conclusion absurd. Making an appointment with a hairdresser in Sweden and having the Swedish library books with her show an intent to return to Sweden rather than some sort of intent to commit suicide in Scotland. The weirdo who impersonated a noted soccer player is the prime suspect.

It so often takes great courage for a homicide investigator to avoid being lead astray by potentially lurid matters. In the carbon monoxide related boating accident on Lake Huron, Dateline did a great disservice by focusing on the abuse and prior violence issues as well as the intent to break off the relationship. Such things improve the shows Neilson ratings but they don't improve the show's ratings with me! Britanee Drexel disappeared a few weeks before her eighteenth birthday and so much was made of the fact that she was underage. What a foolish distraction to the investigation! Moira Murray's little white lies and her alcohol use have been great fodder for the would-be sleuths but the fact remains: once her car careened into a snowbank in the dead of night she didn't get far before something went very wrong for her. My first thoughts were the nearby houses, the tow truck driver and others who would be those she first encountered. Yet these would-be sleuths are forever going off on tangents about a different destination, a secret rendevous, or some other lurid nonsense that is entertaining for them to consider but hardly advances the status of the search.

I meant to check up on the status of the compensation claim in the Billie-Jo Jenkins murder case. There again it was a police force that turned the wife against the accused and she then refused to allow the daughters to give evidence at his trial. Even without such police misconduct the case was contaminated by poor communication with the serology expert and a failure to photograph the status of perimeter fence gates. If there is a mental case recently arrived in the area who is enamored of plastic and the victim is found with plastic placed inside her nose, why did the police focus on the father?

Well, as I said. Nothing much going on.