Newcomers to this blog are advised to begin with the first two posts, Just the Facts, Ma'am and Case Solved, which explain in very general terms why I believe I've solved this case. Some important questions are answered in the following post, Misunderstandings, Misconceptions, Misdirections. After that feel free to browse whatever topics might interest you (see blog archive).

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Notice to readers of my Kindle book: I recently noticed that, on certain devices (though not all), the Table of Contents begins with Chapter One and omits the Introduction and Preface. Since the Introduction is especially important, I urge everyone to make sure to begin reading at the very beginning of the book, not the first chapter in the Table of Contents. Thank you.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

More on Kolar's Book

Despite my disagreement with Kolar's Burke-did-it-with-Mom-and-Dad-covering-for-him theory, I do find much of real value in his book, and find many of his ideas insightful. This is certainly an important case study, at least until he begins fixating on Burke. His debunking of Lou Smit's intruder theory is particularly valuable, especially his meticulous evaluation of the stun gun theory -- bottom line on that one: JonBenet would have screamed bloody murder if that taser had been used on her. He makes it abundantly clear that no one went through that basement window that night. I've made a similar argument many times, but Kolar is a more authoritative source, so his take on this aspect of the case is particularly convincing.

Kolar's discussion of the DNA evidence, and his revelations concerning evidence that had never been made public, are particularly important. He completely dismantles Lacy's interpretation, which looks more and more to me as though it was made under duress, i.e., threat of a lawsuit from litigation-happy lawyer Lin Wood. As has always seemed clear to me, and is now, thanks to Kolar, crystal clear, the DNA evidence is irrelevant.

The bottom line for me is that a real intruder would have left all sorts of evidence, including DNA -- it would have been present in abundance and esoteric means would not have been necessary to retrieve it. For Kolar, the decisive factor is his revelation that six different DNA profiles were retrieved from the victim's clothing. Does that tell us that there were six attackers? He doesn't think so, and neither do I. What it tells us is that there are all sorts of ways DNA can innocently attach itself to anyone at any time for all sorts of reasons.

Kolar was not fooled by John Ramsey and devotes an entire chapter to John's very odd, contradictory and suspicious statements and actions. John reported that he'd seen a suspicious vehicle parked nearby, that he'd seen a suspicious chair blocking the train room, that he'd noticed the train room window open, and then closed it. But these observations were revealed to the authorities only months after the fact. He'd reported nothing of the sort to police officers on the scene at the time.

He is so suspicious of John, and for such excellent reasons, that one would think he'd ultimately have zeroed in on him as the perp. But John was "ruled out," and so Kolar, like Steve Thomas before him, zeroes in on Patsy.

Kolar also makes some factual errors. For one thing, as I've pointed out earlier, he echoes Thomas's assertion that Patsy altered her writing style after the murder.  Allegedly, Patsy used "manuscript a" prior to the murder and "cursive a" afterwards, because manuscript a was used so often in the "ransom" note. So this is of course, in Kolar's eyes, proof positive that she must have written the note and was now altering her style to make it look different. Aside from the fact that such a ploy would not have fooled anyone, it simply isn't true. Patsy used cursive a both before and after the murder, as I demonstrated in an earlier post, Patsy the Patsy.

While assessing the video of the basement window, Kolar points to a shard of glass on the sill, arguing that an intruder would have displaced that glass while squeezing through that tight space. While I fully agree that no one could have passed through that window without leaving many signs of his presence, I recall that Fleet White mentioned picking a piece of glass off the floor and placing it on the window sill. I can't find the explicit reference at the moment, but I feel sure that's what he said, so I think Kolar may have jumped to conclusions regarding that particular piece of evidence. [Added 9-6-12: On a second reading, I realize that I was the one who jumped to conclusions. The glass White mentions was placed on the inner sill, since he found the window closed. The glass in the video is clearly on the outer sill, so that could not have been placed there by White and must have been sitting there since the window was broken. So Kolar is correct in arguing that no one could have gone through that window without displacing that chunk of glass. One more reason to discount Smit's theory.]

Despite his suspicions of all three principals, Kolar naively accepts John and Patsy's official version of what happened just prior to the 911 call, with John kneeling down on the floor reading the note and Patsy beside him, making the call. He's suspicious because Patsy has claimed she only read a few lines of the note before screaming for John. Yet she informed the operator that the note is signed Victory, S.B.T.C. If she initially read only the first few lines and the note is in John's hands as she makes the call, then how would she have known that?

It makes me suspicious also, but for a very different reason. Because I'm not buying the story they've told in their book. It's clearly contradicted by the version Patsy offers in the A & E documentary, where she tells John she's going to call the police and then "runs downstairs" to make the call. My guess is that Patsy read a few lines, panicked, and without reading the note in detail, called for John, ran upstairs where both of them checked on JonBenet and Burke, and then decided to make the call. As she claimed in the documentary, I think she then ran downstairs to where the note may have still been laid out on the steps, and made the call from there. Since the note was laid out page by page, she could easily have leaned over and read the "signature" at the end.

There are many other problems with Kolar's take on the various pieces of evidence and the various observations, statements, etc. made by various people at various times. He makes up his mind too soon and then finds "red flags" going up whenever he sees something that might possibly reinforce what he already believes to be the case. As with so many others who've written about the case, and especially Steve Thomas, his bias is showing, which unfortunately weakens so much that's of real value in his book.

5 comments:

  1. After going through Kolar's book 3 times, I sense he may be asking us to take a closer look at John, now more than ever before. He presented JR more as a primary character in the book than any other connected individual to the case. While he does bring Burke into the theme towards the end of his book with credible information, I feel it may be that this could be an attempt to "flush out" the direct evidence that would be supportive of the Theory of Prosecution, which Kolar presented to Stan Garnett in January 2011.

    Here are comments from the Kolar book:
    1. Prologue, xi: "...I BELIEVE there are still active steps to be taken to achieve resolution and closure in this case."
    (PLEASE REMEMBER HERE, THE CASE REMAINS OPEN AS A MURDER INVESTIGATION, FOR WHICH ONLY AN ADULT SUSPECT COULD BE PROSECUTED)
    2. Pg 444: "I fully realize that some of the information provided herein is, at best, circumstantial, and there currently exists no direct evidence that could be used in a court of law to convict anyone who may have been involved in the death of this child. Regrettably, there are many murders committed in this country that present similar circumstances, and YET, in some fashion, many prosecutors have made the concious decision to leave no stone unturned when pursuing the leads presented for the homicides committed in their jurisdictions."
    3. Pg 440:: "Unfortunately, Stan Garnett inherited all of these problems when he took office in 2009. It was an active homicide ivestigation in which his predecessor had already publically exonerated THE VERY PEOPLE whom LAW ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITIES COULD NEVER CLEAR OF INVOLVEMENT. The investigation had been so thoroughly compromised that it was UNLIKELY" the prosecution of anyone would ever take place."
    (KOLAR WAS CLEAR TO STATE 'UNLIKELY', WHICH SIGNALS TO ME HE DOES NOT FEEL THAT IT IS 'IMPOSSIBLE')

    Kolar states very clearly that deciding to do this book came only after a great deal of anguish, and at the risk of great harm, both physically and emotionally. Now consider this statement of his from the book: Pg 454 - "... is to help prevent child abduction and sexual exploitation, aid in the recovery of missing children, and ASSIST OTHER CHILDREN WHO HAVE BEEN VICTIMIZED BY THESE TYPES OF CRIMES." Kolar then states that a donation from the sales of the book will go to this same org, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

    Is it possible that with this charitable act, Kolar is attempting to provide some offering of benevolence for Burke, as a great deal of information that could incriminate Burke was offered as Kolar presented "discoveries made during my inquiry (pg 454)". While Kolar is clear that his intent was to reveal the truth about this crime, thereby furthering some justice for JB, he also acknowledges that some would have felt he should have continued to maintain his silence.

    While we cannot presume to read anything more into Kolar's book than what is carefully written, we can rely on these facts: The case remains OPEN as a MURDER INVESTIGATION, Kolar has prepared and submitted a Theory of Prosecution (for the second time, at the request of Stan Garnett), and Kolar BELIEVES (he does not 'think', 'guess' or 'hope') the case can come to a resolution.

    If we can trust Mr. Kolars career credentials, then I expect we can join him in remaining convinced there is a justifiable avenue of prosecution for the murder of JonBenet Ramsey.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks so much for this thorough review of some of the essentials of Kolar's book. Very interesting. I'm especially intrigued by the notion that Kolar's intention might be to "flush out" as you say, some additional evidence. By putting so much pressure on Burke, Kolar may be hoping to draw him out. But this is likely only if he is innocent, and eager to set the record straight. We'll see.

      I feel that in the case of both Kolar and Steve Thomas an important strategic error was made. Both books are divided between two sets of data and two arguments. In both cases, convincing arguments against any possible intruder theory are presented, including very convincing refutations of Smit's allegations, and as I see it these aspects of both books are not only important, but highly convincing.

      Then each author makes what I regard as the fatal mistake of attempting to solve the case by singling out a particular murder suspect, in Thomas's case Patsy and in Kolar's case Burke. John would have been more problematic for them since they appear to accept without any reservations the decision to "rule out" John. If they had limited themselves only to the portion of their books dealing with and debunking the intruder theory, then I think they'd have been taken much more seriously and could have had a far greater impact on the case generally.

      As we can see from Carnes' decision, there is really no case to be made against Patsy, and Lin Wood was thereby able to run rings around Thomas, who wound up sounding confused. As we can see from Lacy's reaction to Kolar's theory, there is also no case to be made against Burke, so he winds up sounding almost like a crank when writing on that topic.

      If Thomas and Kolar had focused on debunking the intruder theory, leaving all else aside, they would have been operating from a position of strength, not weakness, and would I'm sure have been taken much more seriously. Once the intruder theory is out of the way, then enormous pressure could be placed on John to either come clean or face prosecution. So I see both these books as missed opportunities.

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  2. One thing that just poped into my head is why didnt the cops ever ask them if they ever had second thoughts about calling them or thinking if they did call them she would've of been beheaded? Why weren't they worried about it ?

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  3. If JR really did do it maybe he meant to leave the body there. Might not have been his first plan tho . What I think happened is he thought jb was asleep he might have tryed to molest her but obviously this hurt especially since she had I think it was a yeast infection ? So she woke up . He tryed to calm her down by offering her pinnapple down stairs to see how she interpreted what happened in the bed room . She was smart so she probably said something she knew would have in criminalized him. He knew if she told pastsy she would believe jb . She would put two and two to together . Thats why she kept taking her to the doc for problems down there . She wanted to know what was causing this. But she never seen john do anything inappropriate. The bed wetting , the clingynesss. She would have figured it out. She probably did love jb and I think def would hsvr believed her. Dhe would choose jb over him. His career would be over his family disgraced probably knew hed get beat in prison. What if he hit her with the flash light thought that killed her his plan maybe was to write the rn to prove there was this " other person " that did this crime since he knew there would be no other prints on her. Only his or patsy and he knew he would look like the guilty one

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  4. He took all this time to write a ransom note and write a certain why as to look as if someone else wrote it . Maybe he thought she would fit through the window at first but realized that rigamortis set in and was to hard to get her out . Maybe burke did get up to a sound that awoke him but got distracted by the pineapple on the table . Could explain why is prints where there . Thats probably why he didnt go out the front door maybe he heard burke . Then maybe started to realize what if someone sees, what if I left car tracks etc. So with little time that he has left before patsy wakes up hes formulates a plan . He had no time to rewrite the rn and he couldn't go through with the beheading so he strangled her to try and match it to the rn to make it look evil that no father would have done this.

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