Meara,
I believe PR fabricated the note being on the stairs in the first place to point direction away from herself and onto LHP. That is how they communicated. The picture is clearer if the note was already laid out on the floor. Otherwise why is JR crouching on the floor? And why in his underwear? He was already taking a shower when PR got up. She then did her makeup, hair, got dressed, headed to the 2nd floor to fiddle w/JB outfit and then headed downstairs. Read partial note and screamed for JR. JR is still in his underwear after all this time? Okay, sure. Maybe he was shaving but still. It is my belief that had JR handled the note he would have sat down in the den on the couch to read it; not kneeling on the floor. This is pure make believe on her part.
I recently read that Steve Thomas was of the opinion that PR was the only person that was psychotic enough to perform such unspeakable acts on her daughter.
Your retelling of John's marathon shower/prep time is both creepy and very funny. What the heck WAS he doing? Maybe staging something in the master bedroom?
So we agree that the note-on-the-stairs story is bogus. However, I'm not following your train of thought entirely. If the spiral stairs story was meant to direct suspicion towards LHP, why not leave it on the stairs for the police to see? What do you think was the motive for moving it to the floor outside the study?
It’s always informative to see where PR gets most rattled in the police interviews. While writing my post at #109, I reread the “finding the note” portions. As long as PR has some control of the narrative, she's okay; but the harder she's pressed for details of who did what and the exact sequence of events, the more her language unravels. The "I mean, you know"s, incomplete thoughts, vagueness, and self-interruptions multiply until she's approaching incoherence. From the 1997 interview:
TT: Okay. Patsy, do you recall who moved the note from the bottom of the stairs down to where John could read it with the good lighting.
PR: I think he did. I, I (inaudible) . . .
TT: Okay.
PR: . . .don’t remember exactly, but, I mean it was just, I was just, I was just nuts I (inaudible)
The 1998 interview has this bizarre reply :
9 TOM HANEY: Where does John, and we
10 will use a red marker now for John, where does
11 he first appear in there, at least in this
12 diagram, if you can start there?
13 PATSY RAMSEY: He comes down those
14 stairs there. (Indicating) and so we are both
15 like standing here, I am pacing, I said oh, my
16 God, you know there is a note, she's been
17 kidnapped. She is not in her bed, you know.
18 You know, then everything gets really you know,
19 who's on first kind of thing.
What? PR is referencing the famous comedy routine by Abbott and Costello. In it, two characters are trying to talk about baseball but can't understand each other because they're using words that sound alike to refer to two different things; e.g., Who's on first? = Which player is on first base? and = The player on first base is named Who. The wordplay is so clever and witty, it's a comedy classic - and therefore sickeningly out of place in the interview. The first time I read it, I gasped. Saying "then everything gets really you know who's on first kind of thing" is also shockingly arrogant and dismissive, like saying, 'I know you want to solve my daughter's murder, but I can't be bothered to go over all these details [especially since John and I only rehearsed the outline. Stick to the script!]. But why the reference to "Who's on first?" of all things? Why not just say 'everything gets chaotic?' I think this is PR’s unconscious confession that she’s lying to mislead investigators - holding two different versions of events in her mind - and, more twistedly, that, to her, deceiving them is a game. Could this also signal a deep split in PR’s psyche, with different parts having different experiences of the same events and being unable to communicate with each other? Either way, it's a plus for Steve Thomas’s assessment of PR’s psychotic potential.