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.