M for Murder: The Death of JonBenét Ramsey Reexamined

[bugis]

There are several concepts and terms invoked in the Ramsey note that people have remarked, independent of my theory, were odd to include in the way that they were:

- the concept of announcing in the note that instructions about delivery would follow a day later by phone rather than just stating them in the ransom note itself
- the concept of being monitored while getting the money from the bank
- the concept of splitting the money in two different denominations for no apparent reason (given that the relatively small amount is supposed to be divided among a group of faction members)
- the concept of switching from an attaché to a “brown paper” bag for no apparent reason
- the concept of possibly setting up the meeting earlier despite the fact that the note’s author tries to come off as very well prepared, being in complete control and knowing exactly what to do
- mentioning the concept of the delivery being “exhausting” for the victim and emphasizing the importance of a good night’s sleep
- the use of the words ‘and hence’ in a kidnapping note
- the concept (and word) of returning “home” from the bank, as if speaking from the victim’s perspective rather than that of the kidnapper’s
- the concept of not only the “family’’ but also “the authorities” being under constant scrutiny
- the concept of “between 8 and 10 am” as the time frame for the action to begin/plot to unfold
- the explicit emphasis on the death of the kidnapped victim if police or FBI are involved

All of these concepts and terms can also be found in the context of a kidnapping-for-ransom-with-FBI-involvement story in another book that is also part of a franchise that was turned into movies, fitting a similar sort of genre as that of the Dirty Harry and Lethal Weapon novelizations: Catnapped! The Further Adventures of Undercover Cat, by the Gordons (a husband and wife duo).

This book came out when Patsy was 17, a period in her life when she was known to be actively reading stories of fiction (which not much later she used successfully as inspiration for performing dramatizations during the talent portion of her beauty pageant contests).

The story in the book revolves around a young woman close in age to Patsy’s age when the book was released and whose name is similar to hers (Patti) and who shares similar interests to the ones Patsy had at the time (she works as a model compared to Patsy competing in beauty pageants). A person like Patsy was at the time arguably part of the target audience for such a story.

Although the plot involves the silly notion (used in a humorous genre) of a cat being ‘catnapped’/kidnapped for ransom, the story also mixes in elements that are intended to be more ‘realistic’, providing the excitement of a grim crime story, as one of its authors had been in the real-life FBI.

In the Ramsey note, the kidnapper states that “I will call you between 8 and 10 am tomorrow to instruct you on delivery”.

In Catnapped! the kidnapper tells the target (Patti) that “I’ll call you tomorrow night and tell you where to bring the money.”

In Catnapped! an FBI agent is described as telling Patti in the context of delivery of the ransom that he “instructed Patti to proceed directly from the house to the Beverly Hills brokerage firm”. Elsewhere in the book the verb “instructed” is also used of the kidnapper giving his demands for the ransom delivery.

In Catnapped! the “operation” of the ransom “delivery” starts at “9 A.M.”, which is precisely in the middle of the Ramsey note’s “8 and 10 am”.

In the Ramsey note, after mentioning the need to go to “the bank” and just before using the words “instruct you on delivery”, the kidnapper uses the words “When you get home” to describe what happens after coming back from collecting the ransom money.

In Catnapped! the passage about ‘instructing’ Patti follows immediately after a paragraph where the FBI agent tells Patti what to do “when you get home” in the context of returning from the trip to get the ransom money and just before mentioning that they assumed “that the kidnapper would not submit instructions for the ransom delivery until she had collected the money from the bank. He would not want to give the FBI and the police, if they were working the case, more advance notice than necessary.”

In the Ramsey note the kidnapper states that “if we monitor you getting the money early, we might call you early to arrange an earlier delivery of the money and hence a earlier delivery pick-up of your daughter.”

In Catnapped! it is described that Patti “had expected the kidnapper to call before this” and that “if the kidnapper had followed her, he would have known that at 2:50 that afternoon she had picked up the package at the Beverly Hills bank”. This mimicks the concept of monitoring the target getting the money from the bank in the context of assessing the time when the kidnapper should be expected to call with his instructions.

These descriptions occur in a short paragraph that also mentions:

1. the concept of “a dummy money package” in which “several top bills on each stack were genuine, and the bills underneath the kind sold by theatrical supply houses”, echoing the Ramsey note’s description of “if the money is in any way marked or tampered with”.
2. the dummy package is “about the size of a woman’s suit box and wrapped in brown paper”, echoing the Ramsey note’s concern with the “size” of the container for the money (with both the description in the book and in the Ramsey note being somewhat subjective and vague) and the specification of “brown paper” as part of the container for the money for no clear reason.
3. a split denomination of the money in which “[t]he real money totaled $2,500, which he said the Bureau had put up, $1,500 in $50 bills, and $1,000 in $100s.”, compared to the Ramsey note’s “$100,000 will be in $100 bills and the remaining $18,000 in $20 bills". Earlier in the story, the kidnapper also asks for “[t]hree hundred thousand dollars in twenties and fifties.”

In Catnapped! the FBI agent, when going over the operation of the ransom delivery and anticipating the kidnapper’s possible actions, says that “[…]we’ll have a half hour to set our strategy after we learn the location of the rendez-vous-- provided he follows through on the timetable he has set up. He may not, though, and for that reason I want every one on stand-by from one o’clock on. He may pull a switch and set the meeting up earlier.” Both the Ramsey note and the book use the word “earlier” in a very similar specific context and the Ramsey note uses a synonym (“arrange”) for the story’s “set […] up”. In the book this line is on the same page as the mention of the “9 A.M.” time of the operation for the ransom delivery and the description that “sleepless nights had taken their toll” on the FBI agent.

In Catnapped! the word ‘monitor’ is used in the context of the kidnapper possibly checking actively for police/FBI involvement: “The police would keep the house under surveillance, Amos said. They would watch through binoculars from a tall bank building on Ventura Boulevard. They could send a helicopter over occasionally, but he thought that would frighten the subject. ‘We want him to feel free to move. He likes to be daring and we don't want to discourage him.’ The police would monitor the phone with Patti's permission, and she need not report a call. As was his custom, Zeke would come by for breakfast. ‘Since the subject's been watching you, he's got to know Zeke drops by— and he doesn't care since he knows this is not a federal crime.’”

In the Ramsey note, there is a grammatical mistake in writing “a earlier delivery pick-up” instead of “an earlier”. In the above passage from Catnapped! the words “a half hour” are used (correctly). When these same words are used in a different arrangement in English (as they sometimes are), the correct usage would be “half an hour”. A person not entirely comfortable with the minutiae of minor grammatical rules might get confused by encountering one of the two forms. The Ramsey note uses the correct way (“an earlier delivery”) and the incorrect way (“a earlier delivery pick-up”) in the same sentence. This could of course be explained too by appealing to time pressure leading to sloppiness but it’s interesting that the grammatical rule is also at play in the passage of the expected source for the concepts and words in this part of the note.

The passage about the kidnapper possibly (twice using “may” to express this uncertainty) setting up the delivery “earlier” comes immediately after the description that the kidnapper “might harm one or both” of the sisters of the targeted family. The Ramsey note uses “might call you early”.

The page with this passage about the ransom delivery uses in the context of police actions terms and concepts like “Operation Cat got underway”, “moving type of operation”, “set our strategy”, “outline the latest developments”, “organizing his material” and elsewhere there is the description that the FBI agent “[…] outlined the preparations for the ransom payment. He had charts, much like football coaches use, showing the location of Control and the FBI cars. The cars, he said, would proceed in a ‘moving surveillance’”. The Ramsey note uses the concepts of “law enforcement countermeasures and tactics”.

The Ramsey note (famously) uses “and hence a earlier delivery pick-up of your daughter” in the passage about a possible earlier delivery/pick-up.

In Catnapped! one page flip before the passage about a possible earlier set-up by the kidnapper of the ransom delivery, there is a description of the kidnapper by the FBI agent: “‘We’re dealing with an angry, wild, volcanic, quixotic mind. He’s not normal, and hence, not logical.’”

This line is on the facing page of a note by the kidnapper, attached to a bag with the dead body of another cat (sent to the family’s home as a warning and a threat to pay the money), which he starts by saying “SEE HOW EASY IT IS.” The Ramsey note contains the line “[...]don’t think that killing will be difficult.”

One page before this line from the kidnapper’s note is revealed, Patti, having just seen the dead cat and initially thinking it is her cat, informs her neighbor that “ ‘The kidnapper killed D.C.-- and sent a cab to deliver his body to us.’ She indicated the case. ‘He left it at the front door and then took off.[’]”.

The Ramsey note first uses the concept of the (dead) body being delivered (if instructions aren’t followed) before correcting it to the more plausible “pick-up”.

The Ramsey note implies that the kidnapper is watching the Ramsey’s every move somehow (“if we monitor you”, “if we catch you talking to”, “you and your family are under constant scrutiny”), despite this obviously being a very difficult thing to accomplish for any real-life kidnapper.

In Catnapped!, Patti, just after first being called by the kidnapper and first learning of the kidnapping, worries that “[h]e may be outside listening. He may have the phone bugged.”, similarly assuming very easily that a kidnapper can accomplish such a feat.

In that first phone call, the kidnapper threatens Patti with what will happen if he doesn’t get the money: “I’m going to strangle him, squeeze his little neck until he’s dead if I don’t get it […]”.

JonBenét died from asphyxiation and was found with a strangulation device (so-called ‘garrote’) around her neck.

Similar to Lethal Weapon, Catnapped! too has the kidnapper warning about not involving police or FBI and similar to Dirty Harry there is a repetition of explicit warnings of death as punishment: “[…] if you run to the police or the FBI your cat’s dead, you’re dead, your sister’s dead.”

The Ramsey note states that “[t]he delivery will be exhausting […]”. Although many of the suspected sources for the Ramsey note contain lines about the need for sleep (Dirty Harry for example also has lines about this concept in the context of ransom delivery), Catnapped! specifically describes Patti as being “exhausted” after going through the ransom delivery: “He opened the door, and like an obedient child, she got in and fell exhausted on the back seat. He took an agent aside. ‘Stay with her and don't let her out of the car— under any circumstances’.”

The Ramsey note has the line “You and your family are under constant scrutiny as well as the authorities.”

Catnapped! has the passage “‘The kidnapping. And don't tell me you haven't got one because we know you have. The FBI got us to promise six months ago we wouldn't break a snatch story until it was over and the victim returned safely— and you promised—you promised’— his blood pressure rose— ‘you'd keep us posted along with the other Los Angeles papers on every development, hour by hour, so when the victim was safely back home, we could break the story with a full account in the next edition.’ An agreement of this nature was routine in kidnapping cases— to protect the party abducted. Even if reporters dug up the story on their own, which was fairly easy with so many people involved, the kidnapper was inclined to believe the victim's family had talked with the FBI or police. The victim's life depended in many cases on the strictest secrecy being maintained by the newspapers as well as the family and authorities.”

Not only does this last sentence use the same idiosyncratic collection of concepts and terms (‘as well as’, ‘family’, ‘authorities’, ‘the’) together (rearranged slightly), the passage also echoes the logic that many people have suspected was part of the reason for Patsy writing the ransom note: to explain why her daughter ended up dead, with the reason being that she involved police against kidnapper instructions, which, while bad, could be considered a regrettable but understandable mistake made in panic and which would at least still have a third outside party responsible for the actual murder rather than Patsy herself.

Note also that the line in the Ramsey note mentioning “You and your family […] as well as the authorities” comes right after a line mentioning “a 100% chance of getting her back”. This concept (and word) of getting the victim “back” (“safely”) also appears in the passage in the book right before mentioning “as well as”, “family” and “authorities” together, in the same context as in the Ramsey note (not alerting the kidnapper that the target is cooperating with police/FBI).

This is itself right after the FBI agent has a conversation with his supervisor in which he mentions that the kidnapper didn’t show up for the initial delivery of the ransom because, as he expects, it may have been a test or “dry run” to see if the target was being followed by police or FBI. The FBI was indeed following the target and when the supervisor asks if the kidnapper may have spotted them, the FBI agent answers with “Not a chance.”

This conversation is on the facing page of a paragraph where the kidnapper’s stipulations are again described as “instructions” and which itself follows a few lines after the notion of a test run is first described as: “ ‘I think he was running a test. It's not uncommon in kidnappings. To see if you'd show up alone, as he instructed, and to determine if you were being tailed, and to wear you down to a point where you're so shot you're nothing more than a robot.’ ”

We see here the idea that the concepts of scrutiny of the target by the kidnapper (described with that word in the Ramsey note) and of an exhausting delivery are “not uncommon in kidnappings”. The “scrutiny” line in the Ramsey note is delivered in the line matching the verbatim elements of the book (“as well as”, “authorities", “family”).

Note also that the Ramsey note is addressed in a personal way to John, but that that line in the note mentions “you and your family”. Throughout the book, and in this part especially, there is a lot of emphasis on Patti’s family members, particularly her sister, because FBI believe that the family members themselves too may be in danger and Patti’s sister is taking an active role in the whole ordeal, with plans even being considered for her to deliver the ransom money for the family’s cat.

The personal tone addressed to John in the Ramsey note also has parallel in the book, when the kidnapper says in a tape recording addressed to the victim: "'Dear Patti— I'm going to call you Patti because I know you. I've been following you around. You didn't know that, did you?'"

The line in the Ramsey note about a “chance” of getting their daughter “back” also reiterates that it is dependent on following “instructions”.

A little further on after the passage with “as well as”, on the same page in the book, there is a discussion between the FBI agent and a newspaper editor where the FBI agent stresses the risk to the victim’s survival if they publish about the kidnapping: “He stressed the danger to the Randall family if a newspaper should break the story. Not only might such a story result in the death of the cat but possibly in the death of one or both of the Randall girls.” and “‘But in view of the danger to the Randall girls— forget the cat— you will hold this in confidence?’” and “‘I want your promise, when you get the victim back— that's what you called the cat, wasn't it?— the victim— craziest thing I ever heard— when you get him back, phone me immediately.[’]”

Both the Ramsey note and this part of the book talk about ‘get[ting] [the victim] back’ just after considering the “chance” of getting caught secretly trying to go against kidnapper instructions.

The Ramsey note says that John "will be scanned for electronic devices" in order to detect possible police assistance.

In Catnapped! one of the ways the FBI tries to help the target is described as: "The moment the door closed, Patti returned to the bedroom, trailed by Inky and Mike. She picked up her purse where she had left it by the door, and took out a sending device that Zeke had given her. It was the size of a package of cigarettes. She flipped the 'on' switch, and said into the device, 'I'd like to talk with Agent Kelso, please.'"

One of the major odd features of the Ramsey note that has often been pointed out as making it very implausible as being written by a real kidnapper is that the note seems to shift in perspective (or seemingly even genre) mid-ransom note. Whereas the note starts by writing from a ‘we’-perspective (as a representative of a small foreign faction) in the first paragraph, the note switches to a more intimate ‘I’-perspective in the second paragraph (before switching back to speaking from a group’s ‘we’-perspective).

As described before, the first lines with a ‘we’-perspective in the Ramsey note closely resemble lines from the Lethal Weapon novelization, which speak from a ‘we’-perspective as the story involves a group of kidnappers who are mercenaries. The switch to an ‘I’-perspective in the note coincides with the start of material in the note resembling concepts and words in Catnapped!, which involves a kidnapper mostly operating on his own and who speaks from an ‘I’-perspective when talking to the target and threatening her.

The hypothesis that Catnapped! was used as a source of inspiration by Patsy for writing the Ramsey note can account for many of the idiosyncrasies of the note that have been pointed out by people, independent of my theory that these particular books were used as sources. Although one could appeal to coincidence if there were only one or two such odd similarities between the story and the note, when there are this many conceptually, verbally and structurally overlapping features, and overlapping to this degree, in a book that fits a similar genre of other stories that have their own highly idiosyncratic similarities to the Ramsey note, assuming a causal relationship seems to me to be more plausible than explaining away the overlap as all being coincidences while leaving the odd features of the note otherwise unexplained as inexplicable quirks of Patsy’s mind.

[MORE TO FOLLOW]

 

[cenazoic]

I can’t tell if this is one of the more elaborate trolls I’ve seen online or…something else.

 

[Cryptic]

I can’t tell if this is one of the more elaborate trolls I’ve seen online or…something else.

Neither can I.

But... I do believe that the ransom note (of "War and Peace" length, replete missing scratch copies) was not produced in a vacuam. Rather, it matches the personal backgrounds, life experiences, culture, and education levels of the parents to a "t".

 

[proust20]

It is impossible to know the inner workings of another's mind. One can always find far-flung similarities when trying to make a certain suspect fit in with a particular theory. IMHO that is inverted logic. That Patsy wrote the RN has long been assumed by many without indulging in complex hermeneutics, however well-meaning.

The proposed scenario above is so involved that it is difficult to make comment upon it.

 

[bugis]

Many people have stated that the line in the Ramsey note ‘Don’t try to grow a brain’ is very similar to the line in the movie Speed “Do not attempt to grow a brain” and have assumed that the movie was the inspiration for the line.

The combination of the concept [ATTEMPT] with the idiom ‘grow a brain’ does indeed appear to be highly idiosyncratic and not commonly (or even at all) found elsewhere pre-1997, making it rather unlikely that the movie wasn’t somehow inspiration for the line.

Many movie buff theorists have tended to just assume that the line must have been stored in the ransom note author’s mind, waiting to be recalled, but slightly altered, when it became convenient to do so for the ransom note writer in order to try to stage a kidnapping.

The line from the movie wasn’t necessarily a particularly iconic or much-discussed line prior to the Ramsey note. It was just a line by the bad guy in the popular action blockbuster of the 1990s.​

The movie Speed had been released only two-and-a-half years before JonBenét’s murder and before the Ramsey note was written.

The first Speed movie, as far as I can tell, did not have a movie novelization (although its sequel, incidentally, did have a novelization which was first published about a week after JonBenét’s death).

In late 1996, when the internet was still in its infancy, it was not at all common for most movies without a novelization to have the words from its screenplay be available to a mass audience. Although a few movies may have had their screenplays published as a book, this was not at all common and does not appear to have been done for Speed prior to 1997.

The most obvious way for a lay person (meaning not a Hollywood insider or some such person with an occupational interest in screenplays) to have access to written versions of the exact words and phrases from popular movies at the time of JonBenét’s murder was through a coffee table style book of movie quotes, which was a somewhat established genre in the mid-1990s with several competing books available for people with such an interest. This kind of book was indeed commonly available in many bookstores of a decent size as it is the kind of book that makes sense as a safe, fun gift for people who are into movies, which is many people.

Books of this genre tend to focus more on classic movie lines, or at least on lines from movies that are considered to have attained a certain status in the film canon. Because of this, most movies included in these books tend to have been released a considerable period of time before the book is compiled and published.

Although there were several books of this genre published by late 1996, the genre is obviously not so big that dozens (or even one) of such books were published every year.

Given the above facts, it wasn’t necessarily to be expected that Speed, released in mid-1994, should have some of its verbatim lines readily available to a person interested in finding such a thing at the time the Ramsey note was written.

It could easily have happened that no significant new dictionary of film quotations had been released between the movie’s release and the day of JonBenét’s death. It could easily have happened that any new such dictionary would not have included Speed among its selections, as the movie had only been out for a relatively short time and not had time yet to grow to be as iconic as it is today. And of course the movie could just not have seemed to be worthy of inclusion for whatever reason.

But it just so happens that there was such a dictionary released in the two-and-a-half year window between the movie’s release and the discovery of the Ramsey note, in June of 1995 (four days short of the one-year anniversary of Speed’s release), and it just so happens that it did include ten quotes from Speed.

Even so, even being informed of that fact, it should not be obvious that the ‘grow a brain’ line would be among these ten quotes included in the book. There are plenty of witty, arguably more memorable or iconic, lines from the movie that are not included among these ten quotes in the book. For example, the lines “Pop quiz, hotshot. There’s a bomb on a bus. [...] What do you do? What do you do?” is often shown in brief clips of the movie or spun into something similar in spoofs. The “Pop quiz, hotshot” line has arguably achieved iconic status in our time. But it is not in the book. Instead, a different line where the bad guy uses “Pop quiz, . […] What do you do? What do you do?” is included.

To illustrate this point, if we take a look at moviequotes.com, it describes itself as follows:

“Not only do we love movies, but we love the famous quotes associated with movies. We wanted Moviequotes.com to be free, fun and an awesome resource for the most famous (and not so famous!) movie quotes from the past and present. […] The Movie Quotes site is visited by teens, students, teachers, writers, motivational and life coaches and all those people who are looking for inspiration or simply for that one movie quote they forgot about many years ago!

The site is one of a kind and we are proud of being online since 1998.”

The website of course has an entry for Speed too and it contains 15 quotes, five more than are found in the book. But the ‘grow a brain’ line is not one of them. The “Pop quiz, hotshot [...]What do you do?” quote is listed. So the ‘grow a brain’ line, even despite its additional exposure due to the JonBenét case, is not deemed so iconic or memorable to make sure that it is included in such a selection.

But it just so happens that the film quotations dictionary does include the ‘grow a brain’ line:

Not only does this offer a more plausible explanation for how the Ramsey note’s writer could have “recalled” the line at the opportune moment when it was needed, it also can give an arguably better explanation for why the Ramsey note uses “try to” rather than the movie’s “attempt”. It’s because this cognate term was used right below the verbatim quote in the description that Patsy came to blend the bits of the verbatim quote with the synonym “try to”. If you have just looked at this quote and the description a short while ago, one can be expected to confuse/mix up some of these elements as our memory tends to use conceptual shortcuts to remember content. If Patsy was flipping through pages of books and a short while later recalling some of this material, she would be expected to get some verbatim elements right but also to get some wrong and filling these bits out with other words/phrases that had just been primed in her brain through exposure. If one reasons that the line in the actual movie stood out so much to Patsy that she made some effort to remember it, it would be a bit curious that she would remember the highly specific combination of [ATTEMPT]/’to grow a brain’ so perfectly but did not (care to) remember the mere three words starting the quote. If the words from the quote were indeed so memorable for her to remember them for a long time in her long term memory, one would expect that the short line would be recalled or quoted more perfectly. If she recalled the quote not because it made such a huge impression on her, but simply because she had just been exposed to it a short while before writing down the words of the note after hurriedly going through books looking for credible inspiration, one would expect exactly this sort of effect of half-correctly remembered/quoted content to occur.

In addition, the line of description underneath the quote in the book not only shows overlap with the “try to” element from the Ramsey note, it also has the additional overlap of using the concept and words of the bad guy “advising [TARGET] not to”, which is also used by the Ramsey note author with “I advise you” being used once and “I advise you not to” being used once. In the book’s descriptive line, what the target (“Reeves”) being advised “not to” “try” is “anything smart”. The Ramsey note threatens repercussions “if you try to outsmart” us. To be fair, the actual word “outsmart” is used in another hypothesized source so that word appearing in the Ramsey note wouldn’t necessarily be directly due to this descriptive line under the quote but perhaps the concept helped cue paying attention to words and concepts of this sort in other sources.

Although people will (understandably) quickly appeal to the concept of coincidence when evaluating any degree of overlap between the Ramsey note/case and a given source, and of course some arbitrary degree of overlap can (and does) occur by coincidence, it deserves to be pointed out that the concept of coincidence also requires that it is perfectly possible (and it should happen) for any potential source not to show overlap with the Ramsey note/case regarding some aspect. This means that if a source shows overlap with the Ramsey note regarding one particular phrase, line or aspect from the note, or a fact related to the case, it does not mean that we should expect to find some other aspect of the note or fact from the case to also show overlap with that same source. To the degree that such additional overlap does occur, we should start to become less convinced that an appeal to coincidence is necessarily the best explanation for the initially discovered piece of overlap.

With that in mind, knowing that the ‘grow a brain’ line from the Ramsey note could have been sourced from the dictionary of film quotations, if one wants to explain this away as coincidence, one should not necessarily expect this same hypothesized source to show additional curious overlap with facts related to the Ramsey note or case.

But such additional curious overlap is what we do find:

Although the term ‘immediate execution’ is not so strange that we shouldn’t expect to find it in any other text/book before the Ramsey note, it is idiosyncratic enough that for any given random English book one wouldn’t expect to find that it contained the term.

For comparison: Stephen King is one of the most prolific English language writers ever (the Ramseys, it happens to be known, had a copy of one of his books in their home too, Pet Sematary). In a 50-year career he has written dozens of books, thousands of pages and millions of words to create all sorts of stories, many of them macabre ones dealing with death and killing. He has never, not once, used the words ‘immediate execution’ together in any of his books, not before JonBenét’s death nor after it. This is despite the fact that plenty of his books do use either or both of the words, so individually they are at least part of his active writing vocabulary, as is probably true for most writers since these are fairly common words. But Stephen King has never used the two words together, not in any sense in which the words can be used together. Even the one book by him which is all about death row and people waiting for their execution (The Green Mile), which incidentally was published in 1996 and which does contain a significantly higher number of occurrences of the word ‘execution’ in it than his other books (no less than 40 times it is used), does not contain ‘immediate execution’. So it wouldn’t have been odd or unexpected at all if The Dictionary of Film Quotations had not contained this specific combination of words either. And yet it does contain these words.

The two-and-a-half page, handwritten Ramsey note, less than 400 words long, of course does contain the combination of these two words. And so does the one book known to have been available to the public at the time with the ‘grow a brain’ line from Speed in it.

The term is actually used in a different sense than in the Ramsey note, with execution not referring to ‘killing’ but being used in its more abstract meaning of ‘something being carried out’. But, again, this sort of effect of mixing/combining words and concepts is something that is to be expected as a result of ‘priming’ if Patsy had indeed been skimming through books for inspiration and written the actual words of the Ramsey note a short while later. But how could we possibly detect that Patsy had indeed been skimming through the book and was likely to have chanced upon these particular words in the book? This brings us to yet another, third, independent major coincidence that a skeptic would have to believe in.

Not only is the fact that the term ‘immediate execution’ occurs at all (once) in the book something that wouldn’t necessarily be expected or obvious, the place in the book where it occurs should also give one pause. In a 400+ page book, where is the one page containing ‘immediate execution’ located? It is one page before the page with the entry for Dirty Harry, the movie arguably most often (and credibly) associated with the Ramsey note as a source for inspiration due to similarities to it.

I argue elsewhere that Dirty Harry was indeed used as inspiration for the Ramsey note, but through its novelization, not the actual movie itself. If that is true, then going through a novelization of Dirty Harry and, when additionally going through a book with movie quotes for inspiration, looking up the entry for Dirty Harry for lines from the actual movie, seem to be very much compatible actions suggesting the same m.o. for writing the ransom note. I consider this converging evidence. Different lines of investigation point to the same direction. Investigating the lines from the Ramsey note commonly perceived as deriving from Dirty Harry, point to a book where these lines conveniently could have been found. Investigating the line from the Ramsey note commonly perceived as deriving from Speed, also points to a book where this line conveniently could have been found. And that second book, too, shows signs of Dirty Harry being looked up in it.

As we will see shortly, there is more of such converging evidence found in this book. The ‘(attempt/try to) grow a brain’ and ‘immediate execution’ phrases aren’t the only ones showing overlap with the Ramsey note. At what point would a person appealing to coincidence stop expecting to find more (near) verbatim matches with the Ramsey note in a single book? If such a person had to bet money or something valuable, say their life, and they were told that in this book that contained the ‘grow a brain’ line from Speed and the ‘immediate execution’ phrase right before the Dirty Harry entry, which by that person were supposed to be entirely due to coincidence, that they would have to bet whether some additional odd bit of phrasing from the Ramsey note also could be found in the book, would they really be comfortable in betting their life that this phrase, too, would obviously be expected to show up in the book? Or would they start to worry and think about the likelihood of any particular phrase or combination of words being found in a given book? Would they start to consider that if a given book has already been found to match with a number of idiosyncratic phrases from the note, that the likelihood of finding additional matches with uncommon phrases should start to decrease if the two texts were really independent?

Or, put in a different way, we may expect that some books or texts out of all the ones in the world published by the time the Ramsey note was found will contain by chance some of the same phrases or will use a shared vocabulary of a number of words. But we shouldn’t necessarily expect that some of the least common phrases, such as ‘(attempt/try to) grow a brain’, occur in the same book in which some of the other less common phrases (e.g. ‘immediate execution’) occur. If two exceedingly rare unrelated diseases only affect a few people in the world, say 10 each, you wouldn’t bet money that a single person was so unlucky to be one of those ten people for both diseases. In fact, if we were to learn this, a scientist should want to take a closer look at this person to see if the diseases aren’t somehow related after all. That is not to say that such bad luck is impossible, but that perhaps, all other things being equal, the assumption that the diseases are unrelated might not be the simplest explanation for the phenomenon. Similarly, a person who strikes the super mega jackpot worth more than $100,000,000 twice a few years apart, is probably going to be met with an investigation into the circumstances of both wins.

Likewise, although some coincidental overlap between phrasing in the Ramsey note and books is to be expected, the unlikelier the overlap, the more we should take a close look at the source in relation to the note. As already mentioned, it is difficult to argue that the similarity to the Speed line is coincidental and because that particular line from Speed is so unlikely to have appeared as readily accessible in another written text at the time, we should pay extra attention to any additional overlap with the Ramsey note.

So what other overlap do we find? The phrase ‘particularly like’ is used in the Ramsey note (“the two gentlemen watching over your daughter do not particularly like you”) and it is also found in The Dictionary of Film Quotations.

Although the phrase ‘(don’t/do not) particularly like’ is perhaps not as uncommon as ‘immediate execution’ or ‘grow a brain’ (meaning we can expect it to show up in a fair number of books), it is certainly also not so common as to expect it to show up in just about every book. But it does (again) show up in the quotations dictionary that already had the rare ‘grow a brain’ (linked to the actual quote in Speed) and ‘immediate execution’ (linked to Dirty Harry) phrases.

Using Stephen King’s output as a reference again: in all of his books in all of his career he appears to have used ‘particularly like’ only twice, once in two different books each (1977’s Rage and 1991’s The Stand). Only one of these two has it with the present tense negation: “We don’t particularly like the idea of shooting you.” (admittedly this book, too, has ‘gentleman’ not far off, on the previous page, and “I wouldn’t advise you to try.” two sentences after the one with ‘particularly like’). But there are no compelling reasons to believe this book was used as a source. Instead, what it shows us is that out of the 50+ books King has written, when picking at random from his oeuvre you are unlikely to pick one of the only two books with ‘particularly like’ in it. So the fact that this phrase from the film quotations dictionary is an additional verbatim match with the Ramsey note should not be taken for granted. Perhaps also interesting to point out: although the page in the dictionary with this quotation does not have ‘advise’ on it (which King’s Rage, for example, does, as does the Ramsey note in the same sentence in which it uses ‘particularly like’), the film quotations dictionary does use ‘advise’ four times and ‘advising’ 12 times (mostly in the descriptions under the quotes), so a total of 16 times in a 434 page book. Out of those 16 times, the one most closely matching the Ramsey note’s verbiage (“I advise you not to provoke them”) is a quote that reads “[…] I advise you to use it sparingly and seldom, lest it seal your own doom.” So it has ‘I advise you to’ compared to the Ramsey note’s ‘I advise you not to’. Arguably, despite this not being in the same place as ‘particularly like’ as in King’s Rage, this already is a closer verbatim match than King’s ‘I wouldn’t advise you to’. Where do we happen to find this best matching occurrence of ‘advise’ in the film quotations dictionary? On a page that at the top has the last quotation from its The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (based on the book Patsy performed dramatic interpretations from in her pageant days) entry, the quote about “the crème de la crème” which the main character likes to use and which people have often pointed out mirrors Patsy’s and the Ramsey note author’s penchant for French terms. Perhaps just a coincidence?

Although the way Patsy may have ended up looking at the page in the book with 'particularly like' could be explained a number of different ways, and is therefore probably a little more difficult to interpret than ‘immediate execution’ showing up right before Dirty Harry, it is at least noteworthy that a few quotes above this quotation with ‘don’t particularly like’, there is also a quote about “gentlemen” possibly being in the act of killing the speaker’s child.

I want to offer here at least one of the possible ways Patsy landing on this page could be explained, in order to give another example of the converging evidence that I mentioned before. The quote with ‘don’t particularly like’ occurs in the entry for North By Northwest by Alfred Hitchcock and one of the two other movies whose entry is on that same page happens to be another film by Hitchcock, the movie Notorious. Hitchcock’s movies, and this movie Notorious in particular, are mentioned in one of the three Alex Cross books (Jack & Jill) that I have claimed were used as inspiration by Patsy for staging the intruder theory. Note that the reasons I had for believing those books were used were independent of trying to explain this phrase ‘particularly like’. The book with the Notorious reference, and the two other Alex Cross books by Patterson, can in fact explain other important phrases from the case, such as phrases used by Patsy in her 911 call and media interviews. In the book, the mention of Hitchcock and Notorious are in relation to finding a snuff movie hidden in the movie’s container in which the killers are seen killing a U.S. senator, which is part of the major theme in the book in which the killers target big shots (fat cats if you will) who are punished for having worked with the corrupted U.S. government, very similar in theme to the Ramsey note also. So one way of explaining Patsy landing on this specific page, able to see and be influenced by ‘(don’t) particularly like’ is that she was using that story for inspiration.

I did not have these two books picked out as sources and then try to find as many connections between the two as I could. Instead, when using one book to explain a phenomenon unrelated to the phenomena I was using the other book for, I found that a piece of data in the one book made more sense when interpreted in light of some data found in the other book. The verbatim matches of several non-trivial words from the Ramsey note with the film quotations dictionary occur only in quotes from a few movies on a few pages from the 400+ page book. And it just so happens that one of those movies, a movie that although made by a beloved director is not exactly mentioned all the time in every other book one reads, plays a crucial role in the plot line of a story that was believed to have been used as inspiration for staging the crime scene for entirely different reasons.

Then there is that other word in the sentence in the Ramsey note containing ‘particularly like’, the word ‘provoke’. That word is found only a single time in The Dictionary of Film Quotations. What is the quote and where is it found?

This quote, dealing with murder and found on a page listed in the index under the entry for ‘murder’, is from a movie (Witness for the Prosecution) based on an Agatha Christie novel/play, one of only three movies included in the book listed with such a distinction. The Ramseys of course had a movie poster of Christie’s Death on the Nile.

What is really interesting, however, is that the ‘particularly like’ phrase was found in the dictionary in a quote containing “I don’t particularly like” and that ‘provoke’ is found in the dictionary in a quote containing “do not provoke”. It also contains ‘I advise you to’ without the negation ‘not’. The Ramsey note has “do [INSERTION MARK] not particularly like you so I advise you not to”. These quotes from the book are incongruent in their use of ‘don’t/do not’ and the Ramsey note’s author appears to have made a mistake in forgetting to add ‘not’ at first. What could make a person slip up at precisely this word? Perhaps when hesitating to choose between either ‘don’t’ or ‘do not’. If one first plans to write ‘don’t’ but changes one’s mind at the last moment, a hurried brain under pressure (from staging an intrusion that led to murder before it gets light outside and all) might mix up the signal to abort writing the ‘n apostrophe t’ with the signal that the person has arrived at the end of the word and is ready to write the next word that was planned.

A final (perhaps minor or less convincing) overlap is ‘You’re not the only ...’. The Ramsey note of course has “You are not the only fat cat around ...” which, again, conceptually matches the story of Jack & Jill in which everyone in the country who is famous or a big shot becomes terrified at possibly becoming the killers’ next target. In the quotations dictionary we find a quote with “You’re not the only one.”

Although this phrase may seem somewhat less uncommon, it is still not so common that we should expect to find it in just about every other book. Stephen King’s Rage, for instance, which had ‘particularly like’ and ‘advise’ closely together, does not have it (nor, again, do many of his other books, including The Stand, which was his other book which has ‘particularly like’. It does have “not the only” several times but not with ‘you’).

What is noteworthy about the location of this page of the book? Perhaps that it is again close to the entry for Dirty Harry (three page flips removed). Or perhaps that is on the facing page of the entry for Dracula, which is based on the novel and monster which is also mentioned as a theme for the killers in several of the other suspected sources used for staging the crime scene (including one of the Alex Cross stories). The novel Dracula contains that other odd phrase from the Ramsey note: “stray dog”. And it uses it in the context of a wicked unknown monster kidnapping and killing young children at night who are then found dead the next morning with mysterious unexplained wounds/marks on their throat, marks made by canine-like teeth (which tend to be triangularly shaped).

I’ll end for now by pointing out that there is one other curious piece of data which can provide some evidence that the Ramseys really did have this quotations dictionary and that Patsy really was in the habit of using it. In her 1995 Christmas letter (six months after The Dictionary of Film Quotations was published) she used “All work and no play make John a dull boy […]”. People have debated whether Patsy may have borrowed this from The Shining (with ‘John’ replacing ‘Jack’) or whether she just knew it as a general popular phrase. The latter is of course possible and the quote does not appear under the entry for The Shining but it’s rather noteworthy that this quote, too, does show up in The Dictionary of Film Quotations, under the entry for The Bridge on the River Kwai.

On some versions of the movie poster for The Devil At 4 O’Clock, the kind of old movie John loved and a poster of which was in the Ramseys’ basement, it is mentioned that it is in the same vein as The Bridge on the River Kwai.

 

[bugis]

Just as a bonus here (I couldn't attach more than 10 images in one post), I'll show a few pictures of the covers of just a few pre-1997 editions of Dracula, a novel which also has resurrection from the dead and the symbolism of the cross as themes and which may have played a part in Patsy looking to Dracula for inspiration for her staging. The theme of resurrection mirrors the other part of my theory which claims that Patsy was preoccupied that night and morning with resurrecting JonBenét like Lazarus as recommended by Osteen and that she believed the power of Jesus/the cross was going to help her.

Spoiler: WARNING: TRIGGERING IMAGE WITH ARTISTICALLY RENDERED BLOOD ON NECK

A quote from James Patterson's Kiss The Girls likening the killers' terror to that of Dracula's.

An excerpt from the novelization of Se7en (Seven), a book which uses "proper burial" in the context of a killer threatening to withhold the bodies of victims from their families, in which here on one page we find the idea of a killer performing "ritualistic slayings based on arcane medieval literature" and just below it the mention that "Dracula rose from his grave and started stalking the countryside for blood". On the facing page there is also the idea that the killer reads a book called Murderers and Madmen for inspiration. I argue elsewhere that the comparable real-life book Murder and Mayhem was used by Patsy (and in the weeks and months after the murder also by John) as inspiration for staging an intruder story and that this is reflected in their language.

Compare the first cover to some of the portrayals of Lazarus: