Open Letter to Stanley Garnett, Boulder County DA

Dear Mr. Garnett,

I can understand your reluctance to pursue the JonBenet Ramsey case after so many years of futility and frustration. You see no point in pursuing the case any further until new evidence emerges and I agree. This case has all the markings of an insoluble conundrum, leading from one dead end to another. So, without anything more to go on than what you already have, it seems pointless to continue. And yet the sexual assault and violent murder of a child remains unsolved and her attacker walks free. The continued failure to close this case must weigh very heavily on you and your colleagues.


While I have no new evidence to offer, I would nevertheless like to propose a fresh strategy in dealing with all the old evidence. As I understand it, John Ramsey was the original suspect, which made a great deal of sense. As the only mature male in the house that night, he was by far the most likely to have sexually assaulted the victim. Since it is unlikely that an intruder would have waited to write a ransom note until he was already in the house, or would have wanted to leave such a note without actually taking his victim, it seemed likely from the start that this was a staged kidnapping gone wrong -- and that the person most likely to be responsible for the staging was John Ramsey.

Shortly after the murder, Ramsey hired a legal team, which, under the umbrella of lawyer-client privilege, hired two leading forensic documentation examiners, who proceeded to compare the handwriting on the note to exemplars by John and Patsy. After only a few hours spent comparing these documents (as reported in the book, Perfect Murder Perfect Town), they proceeded to rule John out as writer of the note, something they were unable to do for Patsy. This finding was promptly leaked to the media, and shortly thereafter reported in a Newsweek article, which informed the world that John Ramsey could not have written the note. Amazingly, a team of four independent forensic doc. examiners, working in cooperation with the original pair, accepted their assessment: John must be "ruled out."

This surprising and in fact outrageous conclusion, questioned by exactly no one, promptly threw the investigation into a tailspin. If there was no intruder, which seemed more than likely, and John could not have written the note, all suspicion fell on Patsy Ramsey. As you well know, suspicion of Patsy set off a veritable feeding frenzy among a wide range of individuals, from law enforcement professionals and handwriting "experts" to every type of amateur, Hell bent on "proving" Patsy wrote the ransom note. This despite the fact that the look of her writing style is radically different from that of the note, as is her prose style, notably free of the sort of technical jargon, quotes from male-oriented movies, and percentage figures found in the note.

The failure of the various "experts" to agree on Patsy's handwriting, plus the fact that there was no evidence whatsoever linking her to the crime, nor any likely motive for her to have either committed it or participated in a coverup, made the case impossible to pursue. Thus there seemed no choice but to look endlessly for evidence of some sort of intruder, however unlikely it is that any intruder could or would have wanted to do all that was done. The original suspect, John Ramsey, quietly faded into the background. Where he remains.

What I'm proposing is very simple. I feel sure it was John who wrote that note after all and that the "experts" who ruled him out were, very simply, in error. Not surprising, given the fact that 1. only a relatively short amount of time and effort went into these handwriting comparisons; 2. there are no scientific standards by which it is possible to either rule in or rule out anyone in a case where deliberate deception is involved. It is not at all clear what standards these "experts" were using in any case, and in all these years it would seem as though their findings, unlike all other findings related to this case, were never challenged or even questioned.

What I suggest you do is, very quietly and discreetly, reopen this aspect of the case. Call in as many of these "experts" as you can and question them regarding the standards they were using, and the scientific basis for their conclusions. As I'm sure you are aware, the opinions of such "experts" are often not admissible in court, due to perfectly valid questions regarding the reliability of their methods. Try to learn what investigative tools they were using, and what their reasoning was. Call in, also, some independent forensic document examiners and ask them what sort of standards they would use in a case like this, and whether they consider it even possible to absolutely positively rule anyone out.

I have a feeling that when you have completed your investigation you will emerge convinced there was never any reason to rule John Ramsey out as writer of the note. And once John is ruled back in, then the nature of the case in almost all its aspects changes radically, meaning the investigation should be reopened and reconsidered with this possibility in mind. Once the investigators are free to pursue the case without being hobbled by the presumed "innocence" of the leading suspect, I feel sure the culpability of this suspect will become as clear as day. Hopefully some of the thinking presented on this blog will prove useful in this endeavor.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Dr. G