seen vague reference to this......... but has this been established?
if so, another thing that doesn't look good on PR
IRMI (Steve Thomas):
While I steered Don Paugh into a conversation about taxes, Gosage sought some unrehearsed writings by Patsy and struck gold. “If Patsy didn’t write the [ransom] note, why not offer some handwriting to prove it?” he asked Nedra. She defiantly thrust a piece of paper at him and declared, “Patsy wrote that just this morning.”
As we drove away, Ron examined the list of addresses and telephone numbers Patsy had written. It included the name of her friend Barbara Fernie with an important, telltale correction.
In the 376-word ransom note, the small letter “a” was printed in manuscript style 109 times and written in cursive lowercase style only 5 times. The entry on Fernie contained just such a printed manuscript “a” as the second letter of the word Barbara, but it had been boldly written over with a black felt-tip pen and made into the cursive-style “a.”
We had noticed earlier that in prehomicide writings, Patsy consistently used the manuscript “a,” but posthomicide, it disappeared from her samples of writing. This was a major find, for it looked as if she was consciously changing her lettering. She had more handwriting styles than a class of sixth graders and was seemingly able to change as easily as turning on and off different computer fonts.
I thought about how big a mistake it had been to provide the defense lawyers with a copy of the note. A suspect could study it prior to giving writing samples and consciously avoid certain characteristics, such as the style of writing the first letter of the alphabet.
The Colorado Bureau of Investigation, after studying several of Patsy’s handwriting exemplars, noted “evidence which indicates the questioned handwritten note may have been written by [Patricia Ramsey], but the evidence falls short of that necessary to support a definite conclusion.” Chet Ubowski of the CBI, who was being asked to make the call of a lifetime, couldn’t do it with courtroom certainty. Privately, however, Ubowski, who had made the early discovery that Patsy’s handwriting was consistent with the ransom note on twenty-four of the twenty-six alphabet letters, had recently told one detective, “I believe she wrote it.”
Ubowski also pointed out that the tablet contained only seven fingerprints in all: five belonging to Patsy, one from the police sergeant who handled the pad, and one from a laboratory examiner.
To me, the evidence was mounting. There was only one person who looked good as the author of the note, whose pen and pad were used to write it, and whom we could place in the home at the time of the murder—Patsy Ramsey—and the DA’s office still would not call her a suspect.
The problem was demonstrated once again when I called Trip DeMuth about our handwriting find from Nedra Paugh and found the prosecutor unimpressed. “She probably doesn’t want to make her ‘a’ like that anymore because she knows we are looking at her handwriting and the ransom note,” he said.
“Yes, Trip,” I agreed. “You’re probably right.” I hung up the phone very gently to keep from throwing it against the wall. How could someone simultaneously understand and misunderstand that important point?
...and later in the book:
The professor (Don Foster) examined the construction of the letter “a” in the ransom note and in Patsy’s handwriting and noted how her writing changed abruptly after the death of JonBenét.
In the decade prior to the homicide, Patsy freely inter-changed the manuscript “a” and the cursive “a.” But in the months prior to December 1996, she exhibited a marked preference for the manuscript “a.” The ransom note contained such a manuscript “a” 109 times and the cursive version only 5 times. But after the Ramseys were given a copy of the ransom note, Foster found only a single manuscript “a” in her writing, while the cursive “a” now appeared 1,404 times!
That lone exception was in the sample that her mother had unexpectedly handed to Detective Gosage in Atlanta.
Not only did certain letters change, but her entire writing style seemed to have been transformed after the homicide. There were new ways of indenting, spelling, and writing out long numbers that contrasted with her earlier examples, and she was the only suspect who altered her usual preferences when supplying writing samples to the police.
