That Elusive Intruder

As I posted earlier, the police who first came on the scene reported no unlocked doors, no forced entry, and could find no sign whatsoever of an intruder's presence.  Nor was anything missing from the home. In the weeks, months and years that followed, however, a long list of so-called "intruder evidence" emerged, most of it from investigators hired by or sympathetic with the Ramseys. For a list, I'll send you to one of the most thorough and also impartial JonBenet websites, The JonBenet Ramsey Case Encyclopedia.



You can go to this website, read what's been presented on both sides, and form your own conclusions -- but I'll warn you: what is imo at heart a very simple straightforward, literally open and shut case was turned into the most complicated, confusing, convoluted, zany and bizarre circus you could ever imagine by the strenuous efforts of "Team Ramsey" to toss anything and everything they could think of into the eyes of a very overmatched and confused Boulder police department. Thanks to the eagerness of the District Attorney, Alex Hunter, to give the obvious suspects  every benefit of the doubt in every possible way shape manner and form. Meanwhile, the Ramseys found one excuse after another to delay interrogation, preferring to rely on their own investigative team.

Abandon Hope Ye Who Enter Here

The unforgettable message at the gate of Dante's Hell, but applicable also to anyone bold enough to enter the maze produced by all this bogus "evidence." It's only after a very thorough examination and evaluation of all the many little details and all the claims associated with each and every one that I feel sufficiently Virgil-like to guide my faithful readers through this morass. If ever you might attempt to express some skepticism regarding the intruder theory with one of the Ramsey faithful, you will be sure to hear what I call "the mantra," a long long list of all the many pieces of "evidence" telling us that an intruder had to have been present. Absolutely positively. Never mind that no intruder, not even a drug crazed lunatic, would have done all the things this intruder supposedly did. I'll deal with that aspect in another post.

What is implied by "the mantra" is that anything and everything found in the house that can't be readily explained or sourced must be taken as proof positive that an intruder was present. But every single item on the long long list is the sort of thing that can be found in any house at any time. I've seen things out-of- place in my house that I've wondered about for years until something jogs my memory and I finally recall how it got there. What the law enforcement people noticed, and not just the BPD but also the FBI, was the lack of any real pattern to any of these miscellaneous "clues" and the lack of anything  conclusive.

And if we think a minute we see how easy it would be to have found something conclusive. Any sign of disturbance of the grate or around the grate. Unaccounted for footprints leading toward or away from the house. Signs that someone squeezed through that very tight basement window and displaced the heavy incrustation of dirt on the sill and frame. A ransom note written on paper not taken from the home, with ink from a pen not found in the home. Signs on the floor that someone had walked in from the outside, mud or dirt on a carpet for instance. A clear entry or exit point. A clear breakin point (the basement window is not such a point since the dirt on the window sill and frame was never displaced). Etc. Etc.

And that coupled with the logical problems of any intruder theory, e.g., the reason for the note, the reason why the body was hidden, the phone call that never came, etc., makes it very difficult to accept that an intruder could have been there. The intruder theory has been rejected as unsound by a great many very experienced people in law enforcement for very good reasons.

Here are some examples of what's been tossed out there by Team Ramsey. Each and every item took a huge amount of time and trouble to investigate and in literally each and every instance the source was ultimately tracked down, though this process has literally taken years:

An unidentified palm print -- ultimately identified as that of Melinda Ramsey, JonBenet's half sister.

A photo of an unidentified Hi-Tec boot print -- Burke Ramsey owned a pair of Hi-Tec boots. 

A photo of an opened "Butler door" -- turns out it had been opened by a policeman.

A photo showing fresh grass protruding from under the grate leading to the broken window -- turns out the grate had been lifted by a policeman before the photo had been taken.

A photo showing abrasions on JonBenet's body that seem consistent with stun gun marks, discovered by "master detective" Lou Smit.  This "stun gun evidence" is a perfect example of the lengths to which team Ramsey has gone when constructing their mystery intruder. Since there is no conclusive evidence of any such person, it has been necessary to concoct evidence out of thin air. Anyone can take some marks from a photograph, shop around for something that seems to fit those marks, and then assert that the marks "must have been" made by that object. If Smit hadn't found a stun gun with the necessary measurements he'd have found some other object that filled the bill, something the Ramseys were unlikely to possess, such as a plumber's tool or maybe something only a dentist or optometrist might use. Anything that might prove useful in concocting a reasonable doubt defense.

All the stun gun theory proves is that Lou Smit was not operating as an objective investigator but, on the contrary, a Ramsey advocate. What's most troubling about this whole issue is the way so many reasonable people have taken this absurd theory seriously, to the point of going to considerable trouble to "refute" it. It's not worth refuting. Why bother? There is no stun gun evidence, there was never any reason whatsoever to believe a stun gun was used on JonBenet, it's just a myth concocted to manipulate public opinion.

Other candidates include a wayward baseball bat, some rope in a bag found in the bedroom of John's oldest son, various unsourced fibers, the list goes on and on. All these various items are what can be called "Red Herrings," i.e., the sort of thing any good defense lawyer would come up with when faced with such an obviously open and shut situation, where his clients are clearly the leading and in fact the only suspects. So don't be deceived by this so-called "mountain of evidence." An effective district attorney would have simply laughed and got on with his case. But not Alex Hunter. He was determined to track down every single bit of detritus the Ramsey team might find. So things dragged on forever. And ever. Endlessly.

Oops, I forgot the most important example of "intruder evidence," the notorious DNA. I'll get to that in the next post, but for now I'll leave you with the following observation, from an impeccable source:

 From The Guardian, Jan 17, 2012, CSI Oxford: behind the scenes at Britain's top forensic lab:

Rigour, continuity, integrity of procedure are all. . . Because the thing about DNA evidence, strong as it is, large as it looms in the public's imagination, is that it connects a human and an object. It doesn't prove when the two came into contact. Nor does it necessarily prove they were actually in direct contact at all. "It's not just the finding of the evidence," says Ros Hammond, a senior scientific adviser who has worked on many high-profile cases. "It's how did it get there, and can we rule out any other way it did so? And what does it mean?" (My emphasis, natch)