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:

 

[bugis]

Patsy Ramsey called 911 to report her daughter missing using language that people would later remark sounds a bit odd and somehow just off.

“we have a kidnapping”

“I’m the mother”

“she’s blond. Six years old.”

“there’s a note left”

“my daughter’s gone” [this one admittedly is less odd to use but people have speculated whether or not her using ‘gone’ hinted at the fact that her daughter was already dead by then]

As it turns out, many of the specific phrases that she used are very similar conceptually and in specific wording to phrases found in the context of murder cases involving clever serial killers targeting women and children in the three detective Alex Cross books by James Patterson that were published at the time of the murder.

As a quick overview, overlap with the content of these three books shows up in the following places in the JonBenét Ramsey murder case:

- Patsy’s language in the 911 call
- the language in the ransom/Ramsey note
- physical evidence on and around JonBenét’s body in the wine cellar
- items retrieved from other places in the Ramsey house that police seem to believe may have been part of staging
- unexplained circumstances in or around the Ramsey house on the night of the 25th and the day of the 26th
- Patsy and John’s language in the CNN interview a week after the murder
- Patsy and John’s language in their police interviews in 1997 and 1998
- Patsy and John’s language in their other (later) media interviews, e.g. their press conference with local media the day after their first police interviews in 1997 and their interviews with Barbara Walters and Paula Woodward in 2000)
- Patsy and John’s language in their 2000 book The Death of Innocence
- team Ramsey’s and Lou Smit’s version of an intruder profile

"WE HAVE A KIDNAPPING"

"I'M THE MOTHER"

"SHE'S BLOND. SIX YEARS OLD."

"MY DAUGHTER'S GONE" "SHE'S NOT HERE"

When police respond to Patsy’s 911 call, they walk into a house in which later that day they discover circumstances (e.g. JonBenét’s body in the wine cellar in the basement) and retrieve items in conspicuous places which are also similar to the circumstances and items which play a part in the chapters from these books whose phrases Patsy’s verbal behavior echoed on her 911 call.

For example, one of the phrases echoed in her 911 call occurs in a part of the story in Along Came A Spider where there is a description of the detective first entering the crime scene of a murder house in which a family has been murdered during Christmas time and where one of the victims, a young child, is found dead in the home wearing hand-me-down pajamas which evokes a lot of sympathy from the detective. JonBenét was found in a pair of worn down pajamas that people suspect were a hand-me-down pair that used to belong to Burke. In the same part of the story, it is mentioned that cutting the lights off before he breaks and enters a home is a signature of the killer because he likes to work in the dark. Police later learn from neighbors that an outside light that was always on at night at the Ramsey home had been seen to be off that night.

But before looking at more overlap between crime scene elements from JonBenét’s murder and the Alex Cross books, let’s first ask why we should believe the Ramseys might have owned a copy of these books. Linda Wilcox, the person who was a housekeeper for the Ramseys from somewhere around early 1993 until the first week of September 1995 before Linda Hoffman-Pugh became the housekeeper, mentions in a radio interview with Peter Boyles on July 21 1998 (found on acandyrose.com) that on “John's side of the bed was usually some kind of suspense-thriller. He tended to buy books by, what I call, by the numbers, I mean whatever's number 1 on the bestseller lists. Occasionally it would be something like the 7 habits of successful people, or financial things or even a [didn't hear] occasionally. But, generally it was some kind of suspense novel.”

Although James Patterson’s first three Alex Cross books appear not quite to have been number one on the bestseller lists yet (he would eventually become the world’s bestselling author), they were definitely bestsellers and huge hits, as also advertised on their covers and as evidenced by the fact that the movie version of Kiss The Girls went into pre-production in April of 1996, more than six months before JonBenét’s death. Along Came A Spider was published early in 1993, around the time Wilcox became the Ramseys’ housekeeper and Kiss The Girls was published early 1995 when she was definitely still working for them. So there is some reason to believe that these were the kind of books that could have ended up in the Ramsey household.

When police arrive at the Ramsey home and get to read the ransom note for themselves, they encounter a note that, it turns out, has some similarities to several themes found in the Alex Cross stories. Indeed, the very notion of a young girl being kidnapped and the kidnapper sending a ransom note to the parents is one of the major plot elements in Along Came A Spider.

The most recent installment of the Alex Cross series at that time, Jack & Jill, released in 1996, has a plotline which revolves around two note-leaving killers who target the rich, famous and elite to punish them for cooperating through their occupations with a corrupted U.S. government who has been oppressing the common folk for far too long. This just so happens to match the main theme of the Ramsey note which has a kidnapper-killer working on behalf of a faction purportedly targeting John to punish him for the (inter)national interests which his ‘bussiness’ serves. A major theme of the story in the book is also that anyone can become a target and the killers are constantly announcing in their notes and messages that there will be more killings to follow (e.g. one note remarks “One useless, thieving, rich *advertiser censored* down So many more to go”), echoed in the Ramsey note by the line stating that John isn’t the only fat cat around so that killing won’t be difficult.

The Ramsey note also contains similarities to the note found by the kidnapped woman in Kiss The Girls, which is the note first introduced in the book with the phrase whose language Patsy echoes on the 911 call:

"THERE'S A NOTE LEFT"

Note that the description of where the note is found in the first excerptis also echoed by Patsy’s claim that she found her note on the stairs that she always is the first to walk down in the morning, where she was sure to see it. This description of a killer’s note being left where it couldn’t be missed is also found in Jack & Jill as well as numerous references to killers having left something to be found in all three books.

How could a kidnapper-killer have known that Patsy would come down those stairs and that she was sure to find it there? The explanation, and in Patsy’s mind the justification for the plausibility of such a thing occurring, is found on the first page of Kiss The Girls:

The killer evidently had been studying the Ramseys for some time before making his move.

Although the note in Kiss The Girls does not have major verbal overlap with the Ramsey note (the way the other sources such as the Lethal Weapon novelization do have), there are a few characteristics that the note does share with the Ramsey note: the note is long and rambling and has a strong focus on laying out rules and conditions that must be obeyed in order to avoid certain death. Indeed, both notes casually invoke the notion of the victim being executed within a short time span (in the Ramsey note “immediate[ly]”) in case of violation.

When police eventually learn later that day where JonBenét had probably been all along all morning, this too echoes the place where the victims of one of the killers in Kiss The Girls were kept: in a cellar, in a dark hidden away place. Not only that, she is found with trauma to both her face and genitals, something which the killer in the long rambling note in the book also threatens his victim with. Facial disfigurement of a six-year-old child victim is also explicitly described in Jack & Jill, with the disfigurement being on the same side of the face where JonBenét’s unexplained marks are found. Furthermore, JonBenét’s body showed signs of having been wiped down in her pelvic/genital area. Casanova in Kiss The Girls “dusts” the genital area of the victims he dumps for the police to find in order not to leave any physical trace evidence.

Also found in the wine cellar where JonBenét was found, was her special “pageant” Barbie nightgown. The women kept prisoner in the underground cellar complex in Kiss The Girls are sometimes taken out of their cells and moved to the bottom room of the complex and asked to dress up in a fancy gown of their choice to create a special night of entertainment for the killer Casanova, the world’s greatest lover (in his own mind).

JonBenét is found with a cord wrapped around her neck, with the cord also being attached to a broken piece of paintbrush from Patsy’s paint supplies. Throughout the story of Kiss The Girls, Casanova is profiled by the detective as being an artist, for whom his torture and mutilation of his victims is akin to producing works of art. Both he and the other main killers from Kiss The Girls and Along Came A Spider also like to play games with the detectives investigating them and sometimes leave clever little clues hinting at their identity through “signature” items.

JonBenét is found with what is described by the coroner as a drawing of a red heart on her palm. The first thing to note is that a heart symbol matches the theme of Casanova, who is the world’s greatest lover. But the other thing to consider, is that when one looks at the available picture of the palm, the shape drawn on JonBenét’s palm actually doesn’t look too much like a heart but actually rather resembles a capital letter ‘C’ (which would match both ‘Casanova’ and ‘Christ’, the latter of which would fit in with my resurrection interpretation of the evidence) or ‘G’ (which would match the name of the other killer in the book, the ‘Gentleman’). Although it is difficult to say something definitive about the drawing based on the limited information from the angle and lighting in the available picture, it is very telling that either of these interpretations (a heart symbol or a capital letter ‘C’ or ‘G’) would fit with the m.o. of the killers described in Kiss The Girls, who leave signature clues at their crime scenes.

Also important to note when considering the possibility that this drawing on the palm was meant as the signature of a killer, is the link with the movie poster for the godfather of all serial killer movies, the 1931 classic M. Thiis German movie (which also had an American remake) is about a notorious child killer terrorizing a city as he targets young children while his identity remains hidden. The iconic movie poster famously shows the palm of a left hand (the same side that JonBenét’s drawing was on) with a red letter ‘M’ (standing for the German word for ‘murder’). Is this just a curious coincidence? Why should we consider that Patsy may have actually had such a forced, far-fetched connection in mind while staging a murder scene under the severe pressure of a time constraint?

It’s because there is another movie novelization from the mid 1990s which mentions the murderer who this particular movie M was based on and which can also be linked with both the way JonBenét’s body was found as well as with Patsy’s famous odd verbal behavior in the CNN interview a week after the murder. The movie novelization I’m speaking of is that of Copycat, which fits the m.o. of using movie novelizations for staging (which as I have argued there is evidence for in at least Lethal Weapon and Dirty Harry) as well as popular mainstream crime books (Catnapped, the Alex Cross books).

In that book, which too revolves around a serial killer who makes art out of his murders, there is a description of a posture that he leaves his main target victim in, which is actually plays an important part in the plot of the book. That posture is very similar to the way in which JonBenét was found by John in the wine cellar:

 

[bugis]

The plot, as the title suggests, revolves around a copycat killer who copies the m.o. of previous famous murderers in his own killings. It is not too difficult, therefore, to imagine how Patsy might have come up with the idea to copy this particular posture for the staging of her daughter’s murder by an intruder. But what’s really interesting is that, as I mentioned, the book also mentions the real-life killer that the movie M (the one with the poster of the palm) was based on.

Central in the story of the book is that the killer uses the main character’s own book that she has written about profiles of famous serial killers for inspiration. But where it gets really interesting is that there is a real-life book, one detailing the profiles, cases and m.o. of real-life murderers (a genre of books that John Ramsey arguably showed interest in as evidenced by him owning the John Douglas Mindhunter book) in which this same murderer that the movie M was based on is also included and could easily be looked up in.

If Patsy really wanted inspiration for a realistic m.o. of a killer, this would have been a convenient source for her to check if the book was available to her that night. And what do we find when we look up the entry for this murderer mentioned in Copycat? First of all it mentions clearly that he was the inspiration for the movie M, which could have made Patsy consider borrowing from it with the palm drawing, and secondly, it uses language very similar to the infamous dramatic warning given by Patsy in the CNN interview a week after the murder:

Also very interesting, and important to consider, is that the Ramseys in later post-crime verbal behavior show signs of also being familiar with some of the other entries in this book which describe other killers. It appears that this book was used post-crime as further inspiration to come up with a realistic profile for their imagined intruder. We will postpone looking at the evidence for this for now.




Let’s get back to the Alex Cross books.



What are some further elements of the crime scene which have long been considered as possibly being relevant to the crime which can also be found in some way in the Alex Cross stories?



One of the first items police recovered when searching the house was a cutting from a magazine with an article about the Esprit awards in which the photos of John and some of the other entrepreneurs had things drawn on them. I have already argued that the ‘YES’/’NO’ markings on the photos that are described and discussed in the police interviews with the Ramseys have their origin in a connection between Healed of Cancer and the NIV study bible which Patsy was relying on to try to bring about JonBenét’s resurrection. But I also have argued that Patsy tried to obey her Lord and simultaneously staged an intruder scenario as a backup plan. So what is the connection with the Alex Cross stories?

The markings on John’s photo are described as follows:

In the 1998 police interviews with Patsy and John, it is suggested that it is 'NO' over the other faces and a 'YES' and heart over John's photo.

In Kiss The Girls the Gentleman is described as being associated with flowers as his signature while Casanova is linked with the theme of being the world’s greatest lover who really believes he has a deep love for the women he rapes, tortures and murders. Both are also described as sometimes leaving clues for sport, including leaving behind photos related to their identity. So precisely the two symbols associated with the two killers in Kiss The Girls are found on John’s photo, which police seem to hint in the interview appeared to be left as staging meant to point to an intruder.

Also brought up in the police interviews are a kitchen knife found in the sink area just outside of JonBenét’s bedroom. The Ramseys have no idea how it got there and consider it out of place. In Kiss The Girls the Gentleman is described as attacking one of his victims in her kitchen, using one of her own kitchen knives which he uses to cut off and collect her panties. JonBenét was found not wearing her own regular-sized panties but instead wearing a pair with a flower pattern on them (the Gentleman’s signature) which was originally made to look as if the panties came from outside the house. Was the kitchen knife meant to hint at a killer who collects panties from his victims? It is not known whether JonBenét’s own regular-sized panties which she presumably had worn to the Whites that night were ever recovered.

Continuing on with the theme of the kitchen as a place of interest to the killer, the Ramseys’ kitchen area is where the flashlight without fingerprints that the Ramseys tried to distance themselves from was found. Casanova is described several time as carrying a flashlight with him when he attacks his victims in their own home. All of the killers are also described constantly as being very careful not to leave fingerprints behind in order to commit “perfect crimes”.

Next in the kitchen theme: in the murder scene in Along Came A Spider in which the boy with the hand-me-down pajamas is described and in which the descriptions of “the mother” as fellow victim (echoing Patsy’s phrase on the 911 call) is described, detective Alex Cross notices an open kitchen door. He asks if it was open when the first responding officer arrived and the answer is no. The implication, upon a quick glance at the passage, appears to be that the killer was still in the house when the first officer arrived and only escaped unseen through the kitchen door afterward before backup police officers arrived (although the passage can also be interpreted differently).

James Kolar describes in Foreign Faction that early in the morning of the 26th, after officer French and some others have already arrived, the butler kitchen door is noticed by John Fernie to be open. It was not observed to be open upon officer French’s first inspection of the house. Nobody could account for how it came to be left open, with people assuming it must have been left open by the crime scene techs after dusting the door for prints or by someone else for an innocent reason. The timing of the discovery of the open door, however, also seems to fit the timeline of Patsy opening it herself before finally settling down in the sunroom after first pacing back and forth about the house somewhat aimlessly as officer French was taking in the scene. She only would have needed a moment of being unnoticed by officer French and sergeant Reichenbach after they had observed the door to be closed while inspecting the house. The concept of an open door is also meaningful for Patsy in the resurrection interpretation since a place in the NIVSB (Colossians 4:10), on the same page in the NIVSB referenced by Healed of Cancer immediately before the line about Jesus resurrecting Lazarus, mentions the Lord opening a (metaphorical) door for the proclamation of the mystery of Christ, under the header of “Further Instructions”. In that interpretation, the 8-10 am window was also the time when she had promised her lord to plead her case with him to ask for JonBenét’s resurrection, which would help further explain why she would be focused on opening that spiritually meaningful door precisely around that time before settling down in the sunroom, which was the room she associated with her connection with her Lord. The connection with the Alex Cross story is that it was precisely a kitchen door of all doors that she could have chosen in the house, because her mind was still focused on a back-up plan of staging an intruder scene as inspired by her reading that night.

Then there is the subsequent focus on the notion of a stun gun being used in the crime, a point hammered on by Lou Smit. Smit in the course of his investigation became close to the Ramseys and it has to be wondered whether he may have been willingly or unwillingly influenced by some of their suggestions. Although he has said that the idea of a stun gun as a weapon used in the crime just suddenly hit him after looking closely at the photos of the marks on JonBenét’s body, it is remarkable how steadfast he and team Ramsey kept maintaining that the marks were due to a stun gun even in the face of evidence refuting the claim. Why was a stun gun such an important part of Smit and team Ramsey’s profile of the killer?

Throughout Kiss The Girls Casanova is described as using a stun gun to incapacitate and gain control over his victims as he attacks and kidnaps them. Not only that, just like Smit and team Ramsey, the book seems to give the impression that a stun gun renders people unconscious and is a convenient tool to use when attacking people in the quiet of their own home. None of the descriptions of the attacks with the stun gun gives any indication about the noise of either the device itself or the screams of the person being shot with it. It is a romanticized, if you will, stylized Hollywood-like account of how a stun gun works.

James Kolar has argued that the marks were made by one of the toy train tracks instead. But even if they were, there is no reason to believe that this would point to Burke. Is it possible Patsy used one of the train tracks to deliberately leave the marks in an attempt to create what she believed stun gun marks should look like? Could this be why team Ramsey has been so adamant that that is what the marks were?

Next, there is the infamous and much-discussed ‘S.B.T.C’ closing of the Ramsey note. I have already argued how the often suspected ‘Saved By The Cross’ interpretation could have come about through the Healed of Cancer/NIV Study Bible connection and makes sense in the context of Patsy hoping for JonBenét’s resurrection. But it is most curious that this precise way of signing the note also has a remarkable overlap with Kiss The Girls: precisely the moniker of the main killer’s name is explicitly given in capitals which spell the reverse of SBTC, including a plausible explanation for why only the letter ‘C’ would not get a dot after it, as has sometimes been pointed out and wondered about.

Casanova signed his rambling letter, the one with the rules that were to be obeyed (with the penalty of facial and genital disfigurement as a threat), with his name starting with a capital ‘C’, without a dot. The Beast of the Southeast, however, was a moniker that, when abbreviated, should get dots between the letters (T.B.S.) so that the whole moniker would be C T.B.S. or S. B. T. C in reverse.

This brings up the fact that the main theme of the book, a Beast hunting for Beauties, would’ve felt relatable and appropriate to Patsy to use for staging an intruder as JonBenét was a beauty queen and the beauties being attacked in Kiss The Girls are targeted because they are the most beautiful of all. And again there is an obvious overlap with another prominent item in the crime scene which has been wondered about as to its possible relevance to the crime: JonBenét’s pillow on her bed was out of place, being found at the foot of the bed.

It just so happens that this pillow had a giant picture on it of the character which Casanova, The Beast of the Southeast, is explicitly compared to in Kiss The Girls: the Beast from Beauty and the Beast. Leaving this item out of place, facing the door to JonBenét’s room, again suggests the notion of an m.o. of a (copycat) killer who deliberately leaves ‘clever’ clues about his identity as a signature.

The basement window as a point of entry for the killer echoes the second page of the book in the first chapter describing how Casanova entered the house of the family that he had been stalking and studying before his first ever assault.

There appears to have been no initial staging by Patsy to make this look like the point of entry but post-crime this certainly became a main focus of team Ramsey’s intruder theory.

The inclusion of the reference to the South, which Patsy and her mother reportedly had a habit of teasing John with, also can be explained by this first chapter in which the killer is described as knowing all the intimate little details about his target family. This may have been what Patsy was trying to convey by including the line, but again the line is also relevant religiously in the resurrrection interpretation in connection with Healed of Cancer.

In addition, the actual line used in the Ramsey note about “good southern common sense” resembles a line from a John Grisham novel about the rape of a father’s young daughter. In Jack & Jill, one of the killers is described as having John Grisham novels at her home (among others).

The daughter being attacked and murdered in the home invasion via the basement window in the first chapter of Kiss The Girls is described as “she looked all innocence”, just before she is attacked by the killer.

The Ramseys named their book about their daughter’s murder The Death of Innocence, making it clear in the book that they are aware that this phrase can be interpreted in two ways in their case, one having to do with the death of their own innocence because of the public’s perception of their guilt, and one having to do with JonBenét’s innocence as a child and her death. In this second interpretation, the “Innocence” from the title of the book therefore refers metonymously to JonBenét herself. In the book in one caption to a photo taken of JonBenét in 1996, she is described as “the picture of innocence. . .”.

Then there is the partial bootprint which was found in the wine cellar of the Ramsey’s home with a brand name (Hi-tec) associated with bootwear conveniently fully legible but with not enough of a print left behind to be able to determine the size of the boot. Investigators later learn that Burke Ramsey owned a pair of boots of that brand in the years prior to the murder, but those boots are never found in the home. A boy-sized boot may thus have been responsible for all the speculation about whether the bootprint found may have been left by a man responsible for killing JonBenét. Again, team Ramsey seemed adamant that this partial bootprint belonged to the killer, as if they knew it was intended to be so.

On the first page of Along Came A Spider, the killer, as a young boy at the Lindbergh kidnapping, is described as deliberately leaving staged footprints of a man to throw off investigators. He uses a different size boot to falsely imply that the prints were left by a man. In both Kiss The Girls and Along Came A Spider the killers are described as wearing boots at various points.

Another possible detail that may have been staged as a ‘clever’ signature by the imagined killer, similar to the flower and heart pattern on John’s photo and the pillow with the picture of the Beast, is the word ‘Korea’ which was on the piece of paintbrush handle of the so-called garrote. Like the partial bootprint, it is a broken/partial piece of an item left behind in the wine cellar that just so happens to have an entire word left intact on it, conveniently legible. How is the term ‘Korea’ echoed in one of the Alex Cross stories? In Along Came A Spider, in a part of the story describing how the killer leaves “artistic touches” at his murder scenes, in which he leaves clues about one murder victim at the crime scene of another of his victims, an “overt message” that is the “signature of signatures”, the victim that he has just murdered and where he leaves such an artistic touch is described as having “a tiny map of Korea hanging from rawhide around her neck”.

The Ramsey note speaks of “The two gentlemen watching over your daughter”. This phrase appears in the context of not going against the kidnapper’s rules which can lead to the victim’s death as punishment for violating his/their rules. The Ramsey note speaks from the perspective that JonBenét is being held prisoner in a place where she is being watched carefully.

In Kiss The Girls one of the main themes of the book is that there are two serial killers who are cooperating with each other and how extraordinary their shared bond is. Throughout the book, they are constantly referred to with some variation of “the two”, e.g. “the two killers”, “the two monsters” etc. One of the two killers is called “the Gentleman Caller” and is constantly referred to as “the Gentleman” for short. In one place in the book, the term ‘watched over me’ is highlighted with quotation marks, making it more prominent in the passage (which also contains “the two” just above). In another passage, the term “watching over” is used as the detective is watching over the woman who had been kidnapped (after she has just escaped), the same woman who had found the long rambling note about the killer’s rules.
One of the killers keeps the women he kidnaps hidden away in an underground cellar complex, where he is described conceptually as constantly watching (over) them, keeping an eye on their every move, with the women being scared to break his rules because of this.

In John Ramsey’s 1998 police interview he is questioned about a torn up Santa Claus letter with a merry Christmas message being found in a trash bin in JonBenét’s room. In Along Came A Spider there is a passage about the killer sending a telegram to the family whose daughter he has kidnapped with the police and FBI wondering if it may be “his way of saying Merry Christmas”. In another passage they wonder if he may have chosen the holiday season to strike in order to ruin everyone’s Christmas. John Ramsey reads the message "Somebody loves you" on the torn up Christmas letter. In Along Came A Spider, the killer has a catchphrase encapsulating his motivation that he keeps repeating throughout the book: "I Want to Be Somebody!" In Jack & Jill one of the killers calls himself 'Nobody' and uses this to refer to himself as a subject in a note he leaves behind: "Nobody is gone". The "Somebody loves you" read by John may have been intended by Patsy as a message from the killer saying about himself that he loves JonBenét (whether or not this was a letter originally sent by Santa Bill).

Admittedly, some of the above conceptual overlap is less convincing than other. But, what evidence is there in the Ramseys’ post-crime verbal behavior that, in addition to Patsy’s 911 call verbal behavior, indicates these books were used as inspiration by the Ramseys, first by Patsy and post-26th also by John, for their intruder theory?

Let’s take a look at the CNN interview one week after the murder. [FOLLOWING SOON]

 

[bugis]

A Smoking Gun Selection for Alex Cross Stories

As Patsy went along with the staging, I believe she became more and more convinced that the Alex Cross stories of Kiss The Girls (KTG), Along Came A Spider (ACAS) and Jack & Jill (JAJ) as well as the Murder and Mayhem (MAM) book with profiles of real killers were the most realistic and best sources to use for her staged intruder scene. This sense of realism is probably what made her increasingly put herself in these stories, as seems to have been her natural inclination to do with stories. I think that in the days, weeks, months and even years after the murder both Patsy and John went back to the stories of these books (John only after being told by Patsy after JonBenét had been found and they had left that she used the books for the staging) to get a grasp of a possible story that could explain why there must have been an intruder that was responsible for the death of their daughter rather than either of them. This is how they came up with the general outline for their intruder theory.

In doing so, I believe some of the effects that Donald Foster described about the incorporation of linguistic elements that are a part of our lives seeped into their language use when speaking on the case, as they went back over these stories in preparation for interviews and during the interviews they recalled parts from them in their minds to try to deal with the tough questions that were being presented to them by police and media. They were placing themselves in these stories and blending fiction with reality. So although I think the effects on the Ramsey note were mostly of a different nature from the one Foster invokes (caused more by short-term, immediate effects of priming and of direct borrowing rather than Foster's slowly acquired passive effect), I think the effect on the Ramseys' use of language and concepts in key moments post-crime was influenced by some such effect that he described. But also some of the short-term effects I think were in play again as they went back over the stories of the books in preparation for big interviews, e.g. the A & E interview in 1998 and their Larry King Live interview in March of 2000, more than a year after the murder and Patsy’s initial staging. This becomes clear when one considers the overlap between the Ramseys’ linguistic behavior and highly specific parts of the stories.

Here we will go over some of the examples that I believe support all of the above claims. If we accept that, as I have tried to argue, Kiss The Girls, Along Came A Spider and Jack & Jill played a very significant role in staging the crime scene (both the ransom note, 911 call and the physical crime scene including JonBenét's body), then it should be considered as very damning evidence against the Ramseys if we can show that their linguistic behavior post-crime shows knowledge of these stories and their language. We've already seen some of these examples in Patsy's 911 call before JonBenét was even found. The CNN interview especially, recorded a week after JonBenét's body was found, is very incriminating in this regard as it seems highly implausible that either Ramsey would spend much of their time so soon after JonBenét's death reading these stories about violent, serial-killing rapists and child-murderers for leisure. They deliberately turned to these stories and mined their content for inspiration for both concepts and words and phrases for their intruder theory and even for framing everything about their daughter’s murder as a story, including their portrayal of their grief for their daughter and their shock at her murder.

Let's start with the CNN interview and look at the overlapping elements between the stories from the books and what the Ramseys say. In some of the material quoted I underline some of the overlapping words and/or concepts. Words are not underlined in the original sources unless explicitly stated ‘[underlined in original]’. An '→' indicates a comment that applies to the last quoted passage above it that has a reference to a page in one of the books.

-ACAS: (p. 296) "Was Maggie Rose still alive? the press wanted to know. I wouldn't say what I thought, which was that she probably wasn't."

BEYOND BELIEF
-JAJ: (p. 345) “That part had been carefully edited from the CNN tape. It was too strong. It was brutal beyond belief. It put Jack and Jill in the worst possible light.”

→ The only occurrence of ‘beyond belief’ in Jack & Jill.

→ This is from a chapter in which one of the killers (Jill) has just shown up dead and had her identity revealed. Police then find out her address and go to her apartment to look for clues about what drove the killers and who the other killer (Jack) might be. Alex Cross is watching a graphic videotape of the murder of a senator which he finds in the home. ‘beyond belief’ here refers to a visceral reaction to the nature of a murder, which is also how John uses it, seemingly triggered by the reporter’s “sickening” which is conceptually similar to what this passage expresses with “It was too strong”.

The two consecutive chapters dealing with this part of the story contain not only multiple overlaps with John’s words in this interview, but also contains some of the other concepts that are suspected, for independent reasons, to be tied to the staging of the crime scene: e.g. it contains the idea that the killer was into movies of all sorts and has the Hitchcock/Notorious reference which can be tied to the Ramsey note through The Dictionary of Film Quotations, it has the mention that the killer (Jill) reads John Grisham, whose book A Time To Kill about a raped and murdered daughter contains a line very similar to the “good southern common sense” line from the Ramsey note, it contains a mention that the killer has a poem on her wall in which “Somebody” (with a capital ‘S’) is implied to be the name of an actual person which can be tied to the torn up Christmas card in JonBenét’s trash bin in her room about which John of his own volition in his police interview mentions that it contains the line that “Somebody loves you”, it contains a description of the crucial piece of evidence (a videotape of a murder) in the fictional case being hidden in a VHS case/box of the Hitchcock movie, which may explain why Patsy is asked in her police interview if a VHS case near JonBenét’s bed looks out of place to her.

→ ‘brutal’ is one of the main words pushed by Lou Smit to associate the crime with as part of his intruder theory. John likes to use it plenty as well. ‘brutal’ is also a recurring description for the nature of the crimes of several of the killers in the Alex Cross stories. Along with the emphasis on the killer using a stun gun, the focus on the basement window being the point of entry, the emphasis on the sexual nature of the crime and the professionalism and competency of the killer, the inclusion of a mysterious blue van in the police file that Lou points out in his deposition (Maggie Rose is kidnapped in a blue van), this is another example of Lou Smit also using elements from the Alex Cross stories to envision and characterize the crime. Although it’s still possible that team Ramsey influenced Smit’s thinking in certain directions without him realizing it, the accumulative weight of pieces of Lou Smit’s theory overlapping with the Ramsey’s method of staging should give us pause to seriously consider the possibility that Lou Smit was brought in on the secret of how the Ramseys staged the crime and purposely helped them because he believed they were not evil murderers but only had covered up an unfortunate accident.

-KTG: (p. 24) “If only he would ungag her. Her mouth was dry, and she was thirsty beyond belief. Perhaps she could actually talk her way out of this—of whatever it was that he had planned.”

→ The only occurrence of ‘beyond belief’ in Kiss The Girls. There are none in Along Came A Spider.



→ The girl who broke the rules and gets taken out of the house into the woods to get killed and mutilated. She is the one who is the example in the story of what the killer means by “or you will be executed within hours”, which is echoed by the Ramsey note’s threat of “immediate execution”.

-ACAS: (p. 402) “I was a little dizzy, and nauseated. It was exactly the way I’d felt for about a year after Maria died. ‘For what it’s worth, I fell in love with you, too, Jezzie. I tried not to, but I did. I just couldn’t have imagined anybody lying to me the way you did. Lying and deceiving. I still can’t believe all the lies.
What about Mike Devine?’ I asked.
Jezzie shrugged her shoulders. That was her only answer. ‘You committed the perfect crime. A masterpiece,' I told her then. 'You created the master crime that Gary Soneji always wanted to commit.’”

→ Maria is Alex Cross’s wife who was murdered. His reaction to her murder was being “nauseated".

-ACAS: (p. 425) “I wiped my face several times on my sleeve. I was sweating bullets. I was also nauseated and dizzy. I had an electric bullhorn and I flicked the power on.
The power was in my hands. I want to be somebody, too. Was that true?”

→ “I want to be somebody” is the killer’s catchphrase describing his motivation. John reads “Somebody loves you” on the torn Christmas card/letter in the trash bin in JonBenét’s room. This utterance about being nauseated is in the context of a face-off with the kidnapper-killer.

The only other references to nausea other than these two in any of the three books is in Kiss The Girls where Kate is described as suffering from nausea after being kidnapped, drugged and raped by Casanova and waking up in a room in his underground (cellar) complex.

TRAGIC THINGS
-JAJ (pp. 94-95) “IT WAS the worst of times; it was the worst of times. On Wednesday morning, just two days after Shanelle Green’s murder, a second murdered child was found in Garfield Park, not far from the Sojourner Truth School. This time the victim was a seven-year-old boy. The crime was similar. The child’s face had been crushed, possibly with a metal club or pipe.
I could walk from my house on Fifth Street to the horrifying murder scene. I did just that, but I dragged my feet. It was the fourth of December and children were already thinking of Christmas. This shouldn’t have been happening. Not ever, but especially not then.
I felt bad for another reason, besides the murder of another innocent child. Unless someone was copycatting the first murder, and that seemed highly unlikely to me, the killer couldn’t have been Emmanuel Perez, couldn’t have been Chop-It-Off-Chucky. Sampson and I had made a mistake. We had run down the wrong child molester. We were partly responsible for his death. […] The news coverage continued to be very limited, but I recognized a few reporters at the tragic scene: Inez Gomez from El Diario and Fern Galperin from CNN. They seemed to cover everything in Washington, occasionally even murders in Southeast. ”

-JAJ (p. 25) “AT EVERY HUMAN TRAGEDY like this one, there is always someone who points. A man stood outside the crime-scene tape and pointed at the murdered child and also at me.”

-JAJ (p. 60) “One of Damon’s schoolmates had died at the Sojourner Truth School. What a horrible tragedy, and yet he had already seen so much of it.”

-JAJ (p. 289) “I was a part of it, and yet I also felt disconnected. I couldn’t help thinking of Dallas, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Dr. King. The past tragedies of our country. Our sorrowful history. I couldn’t take my eyes off Stagecoach.”

-JAJ (p. 290) “Nothing must happen to President Byrnes or Sally Byrnes, I thought— as if an act of will could stop an assassin’s bullet, stop terrible things from happening there in the garage or upstairs in the packed Felt Forum.”

-JAJ (p. 371) “I rose from the piano bench and went to see who was there. After all the bad things that had happened, I almost expected to see the killer Gary Soneji, come to finally get even or at least, to try his luck.”

-JAJ (p. 337) “It may seem odd—but when your life is filled with homicides and other tragedies, you have to learn to take time for yourself. The homicides will still be there. The homicides are always there.”

THAT HAVE HAPPENED
‘happened’ occurs 48 times in Jack & Jill in all sorts of context of eventful shocking developments, most notably the assassination of the president, and 18 more times ‘happening’ occurs.

-JAJ (p. 247) “How in hell can you protect me if I won’t cooperate, won't follow your recommendations? Well, I can’t cooperate anymore. Not if it means sending a message to the world that a couple of psychopaths can completely alter our government. Which is exactly what is happening. It’s happened, folks.”

-JAJ (p. 290) “Nothing must happen to President Byrnes or Sally Byrnes, I thought— as if an act of will could stop an assassin’s bullet, stop terrible things from happening there in the garage or upstairs in the packed Felt Forum.”

-JAJ (p. 296) “I was there when it finally happened. I was so close to President Byrnes.”

-JAJ (p. 300) “Five shots. What had happened up ahead?”

-JAJ (p. 307) “Christine Johnson was in shock, as were her closest friends and most everyone that she knew. The teachers at Sojourner Truth and the children were completely destroyed by what had happened to the President in New York City. It was so horrifying and stark, but also so unbearably sad and unreal. […] She had been watching the nightmarish TV coverage of the assassination attempt from the first moment she got home from school. She still couldn’t believe what had happened. No one could believe it. The President was still alive. No other bulletins were being released. ”

-JAJ (p. 371) “I rose from the piano bench and went to see who was there. After all the bad things that had happened, I almost expected to see the killer Gary Soneji, come to finally get even or at least, to try his luck.”

AMERICA HAS JUST BEEN HURT SO DEEPLY
-JAJ: (p. 335) “I finally closed my eyes, and I tried to push the rushing scenes of murder and chaos out of my mind. I couldn’t do it. The monsters were everywhere that night. They truly were all around me. There are so *advertiser censored* many of them. Wave upon wave, it seems. Young and old, and everything in between. Where are these monsters coming from in America? What has created them?”

-JAJ: (p. 348) “What a strange country we lived in. So many murderers. So many monsters. So many decent people for them to prey on.”

-KTG: (p. 160) "There were several ongoing cases across the country at that time. I read hundreds of detailed FBI briefs on all of them. A killer of gay men in Austin, Texas. A repeat killer of elderly women in Ann Arbor and Kalamazoo, Michigan. Pattern killers in Chicago, North Palm Beach, Long Island, Oakland, and Berkeley."

-KTG: (p. 302) "I had already learned that human monsters can live anywhere; that some of the clever ones chose ordinary all-American-looking houses. Just like the house I was examining now. The monsters are literally everywhere. There is an epidemic running out of control in America, and the statistics are frightening. We have nearly seventy-five percent of the human hunters. Europe has almost all the rest, led by England, Germany, and France. Mass murderers are changing the face of modern homicide investigations in every American city, village, and town."

-KTG: (p. 423) " [']There's a monster working in the city of Chicago right now. Another in Lincoln and Concord, Massachusetts. Someone very evil is taking children in Austin, Texas. Little babies, actually. Repeat killers in Orlando and Minneapolis.'[...] Since 1981, beautiful and intelligent women from all over the South had been abducted by the two monsters and murdered. It was a thirteen-year reign of horror."

-KTG: (p. 425) "I thought of children like my own Damon and Janelle, watching this spectacle in their homes. This was a world they were inheriting. Human monsters roaming the earth, a majority of them in America and Europe. Why was that? Something in the water? In the high-fat fast food? On Saturday morning TV?"

-KTG: (p. 247) "I knew what Kate was feeling. I felt it too. 'He is a monster. Only he’s created himself. So has Casanova. It’s another similarity they share. Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, they wrote only about human monsters roaming the earth. Now we have sickos living out their elaborate fantasies. What a country.'"

DEEPLY
- ‘deeply’ 7 times in Jack & Jill, though mostly about frowning deeply and such.

-JAJ: (p. 271) “Thomas Byrnes lightly patted the edge of the bed, which was kingsize with a partial canopy. Sally came and sat beside him. He reached for her hand, and she gave it to him willingly. She loved to hold hands with her Tom. She always had. She knew she still loved him in spite of past hurts and all their other troubles. She could forgive him for his affairs. She knew they meant nothing to him. She was secure in herself. Sally Byrnes also understood her husband better than anybody else. She knew how disturbed he was right now, how deeply frightened, and how vulnerable.”

-JAJ (p. 353) “The murders and unprecedented violence were everywhere. It was as if a strange, crippling disease were spreading across much of the world, but especially right here in America. I had already witnessed too much of it. I didn’t know how to make the nightmare stop. No one did.”

-JAJ (p. 91) “JACK: For a long time, people like us have sat back and taken the injustices dished out by the elite few in this country. We have been patient and suffering and, for the most part, silent. What is the cynical saying—don’t just do something, sit there? We have waited for the American system of checks and balances to take hold and work for us. But the system has not worked for a long, long time. Nothing seems to work anymore. Does anyone seriously dispute that?”

-JAJ (p. 91) “JILL: Look at what our so-called leaders have done to us. Look at the despair and suffering our leaders are responsible for. Look at the sickness of cynicism they’ve created. The dreams and hopes they have wantonly destroyed. Our leaders are systematically destroying America.”

-JAJ (p. 5) “He planned to capture as much of this as possible on film. This was history in the making. It really was history: America at the end of its century, America at the end of an era, America at the end.”

→ The theme of America being on a downward spiral and the American people going through it is the backdrop to the main theme of child murder and/or (sexual assault and ransom) kidnappings in all three stories. This is also the exact oddly well-reflected combination of themes that Patsy is focused on only a week after her daughter’s death and this odd combination is also written into the Ramsey note (talking about killing someone’s daughter while at the same time talking about matters of “country”).

→ The Ramseys were asked in their police interviews why cameras were left in odd places in the home, including in JonBenét’s room. There appears to be no tape found in their home of the Christmas celebrations from the day before. John says he decided not to film that morning. In the story of Jack & Jill the killers take a copy of one of their killings with them to their own home (Jill’s apartment), where it is hidden in the box for Hitchcock’s Notorious.
Patsy is asked about a photo of JonBenét in the basement found at the crime scene.

-JAJ: (p. 333) “I hugged Christine hard before I left.
She was still trembling. She had suffered a horrible, unspeakable loss. We had both spent a night in hell. ‘I can’t feel anything. Everything is so unreal,’ she told me. ‘I know this isn’t a nightmare, and yet I keep thinking that it has to be one.’
Sampson drove me home at one in the morning. My eyes felt lidless. My brain was still going at a million miles an hour, still buzzing loudly, still overheated.
What was our world coming to? Gary Soneji? Bundy? The Hillside
Strangler? Koresh? McVeigh? On and on and on. Gandhi was asked once
what he thought of western civilization. He replied, ‘I think it could be a good idea.’”

-JAJ (p. 97) “The medical examiner was arranging for an autopsy to determine the cause of death. She looked shaken by the savage attack the child had suffered. The autopsy of a murdered child is as bad as it gets.”

-JAJ: (p. 51) “That was incredibly important to him. Just watching the attractive, round-faced, sandy-haired boy, he could feel how badly this particular kid would be missed and, even better, mourned. He needed to imagine the stories that would bombard the television screens and the thrill of watching them, knowing he was responsible for so much pain and suffering and emergency activity.”

-ACAS: (p. 352) “He said, ‘What happened back then, my one mistake, was I permitted my successes, the applause of millions of admirers, to rush to my head. The applause can be a drug. Katherine Rose suffers from the same disease, you know. Most of the movie people, the sports icons, they do, too. Millions are cheering for them, you understand. They're telling these people how ‘special’ and how ‘brilliant’ they are. And some of the stars forget any limitations they might have, forget the hard work that got them to the plateau originally. I did. At the time. That is precisely why I was caught. I believed I could escape from the McDonald’s! Just as I had always escaped before. I would just dabble in a little ‘spree’ killing, then get away. I wanted to sample all the highimpact crimes, Alex. A little Bundy, a little Geary, a little Manson, Whitman, Gilmore.”

→ The notion of many of the American people all suffering from the same disease (conceptually described as narcissism). The killer in ACAS, too, describes the concept of copycat killing as part of his motivation and m.o.). One one page in the book the animation/live-action movie The Pagemaster is also brought up, which is a movie about literary stories and books coming to life, even some genres becoming anthropomorphic characters. This again somewhat fits the theme of using (literary) books/movies as inspiration for a (copycat) crime. This movie is also a candidate (along with Beauty & The Beast) for a movie case/box that Patsy may have left conspicuously out of place in the house (she is asked about some in one of her police interviews and suggests they were children’s movies).

-JAJ (p. 202) “He had finally gone to see Pulp Fiction the night before. It hadn’t relaxed him, though he’d laughed out loud several times. Sick story; he was even sicker; America was sickest of all.”

-ACAS: (p. 271) "But in this particular instance, because of the suffering of Mr. Goldberg and his family, the wheels have moved very fast. And because of Katherine Rose Dunne and her family, who are famous and rich and very powerful, and who also want their suffering to end. Who can blame them for that? I certainly don't. But NOT AT THE EXPENSE OF THE LIFE OF AN INNOCENT MAN! This man, Gary Murphy, does not deserve to suffer as they have suffered.' Nathan now walked over to where Gary sat. Blond, athletic-looking Gary Murphy, who looked like a grown-up Boy Scout. 'This man is as good a man as you will find anywhere in this courtroom. I'll prove it to you, too.'"

→ 'suffer(ing)' 4 times. Katherine Rose Dunne and her family are famous and are a model for the country's suffering. 'Goldberg and his family' as additional victims next to this famous family as national victims would at the time also have been very reminiscent of Ron Goldman and his family being victims next to the 'main' victim of O.J. Simpson's wife as part of the famous Simpson/(Nicole) Brown family. The names 'Goldberg' and 'Goldman' alone are similar enough in this respect but conceptually there is also some overlap in that they are 'secondary' victims to the famous family's victim. This connotation may have been part of the reason why the O.J. Simpson murder case came to Patsy's mind and why she mentioned it in her drugged mental state.

Patsy in this part of the interview appears to know what she wants to say but she struggles to put it into words. This may be because she is placing herself in the stories and is trying to get the media and the public to see that she is like the people in the stories but she can't say certain parts that come to her mind because the public obviously doesn't know and can’t know that she is comparing the situations.

In this context of her putting herself into stories, the fact that she mentions "the lady who drove her kids into the water" (and who tried to blame the deaths on a mysterious non-existent black man) provides more evidence as to what her own situation may have been, namely, that her daughter had an accident in a car and that part of the story she was trying to come up with to explain it had involved black males (from the revolutionary Rhodesian faction in Dirty Harry’s The Enforcer and the real-life counterpart she had searched for in The Jimmy Carter Public Papers 1979 Book 1).

-JAJ: (p. 36) ““I sure do love a good homicide. Love walking the mean streets in the dead cold of winter,’ Sampson opined as we went past a local dealer’s black-on-black Jeep. It was blaring rap, lots of bass. “Love the suffering, the stench, the funky sounds.” His face was flat. Beyond angry. Philosophical.”

-KTG: (p. 98) "I'M ALIVE. Kate McTiernan slowly forced open her eyes inside a dimly lit room . . . somewhere. For a couple of blinks of her eyes, she believed she was in a hotel that she couldn’t for the life of her remember checking into. A really weird hotel in an even weirder Jim Jarmusch art movie. It didn’t matter, though. At least she wasn’t dead. Suddenly, she remembered being shot point-blank in the chest. She remembered the intruder. Tall... long hair .. . gentle, conversational voice . . . sixth-degree animal. She tried to get up, but thought better of it immediately. 'Whoa there,' she said out loud. Her throat was dry, and her voice sounded raspy as it echoed unpleasantly inside her head. Her tongue felt as if it needed a shave. I’m in hell. In a circle from Dante’s Inferno, with a very low number, she thought, and she began to shiver."

→ Kate first waking up in her cell in Casanova's underground complex after being kidnapped. This is just before she find that there is a note with the house rules that she can’t violate (on punishment of death) which she then starts to read. Patsy is also talking about the moment she finds the Ramsey note.
→ First paragraph of a chapter.
→ The ‘being shot point-blank in the chest’ refers to her being shot with a stun gun that shoots a dart attached to the stun gun.
→ Patsy uses ‘immediately’ a few moments later

-JAJ (p. 10) “Jill turned on her bare heels, and he followed close behind. He watched the slight hitch in her step. Bewitching in its way. He watched her slender figure retreat through a tiny sitting room that was dimly lit by the hallway lamp. This was the way to the flat’s bedroom, he knew.”

-ACAS: (p. 61) "Several computer printouts were taped to the bare library on kidnapping. I started to read down the lists."

'started to' occurs 28 times in KTG and 36 times in ACAS. In Kiss The Girls there is no 'started to read' but in chapter 1 there is a 'Coty started to scream'. This is the girl it appears Patsy has in her mind as part of the model/prototype for explaining what happened to JonBenét. It is the girl from the first chapter described looking as 'all innocence' before being attacked in her own home with her family present by an intruder (Casanova) who entered through a basement window and who has studied the family before attacking, which the Ramseys, I believe, referenced with The Death of Innocence.

-ACAS: (p. 91) " 'We received another message that appears to be from Gary Soneji,' Scorse announced as soon as he was in front of us. He had an odd way of stretching his neck and twisting his head from side to side when he was nervous. He did that a few times as he began to speak. 'I'll read it to you. It's addressed to the Dunnes...' 'Dear Katherine and Tom...['] "

-NIVSB: (p. 1905, introduction to 1 John (the letter I argue Patsy referenced with ‘$118,000’) , under header ‘Recipients’) “IJn 2:12-14,19; 3:1; 5:13 make it clear that this letter was addressed to believers. But the letter itself does not indicate who they were or where they lived. The fact that it mentions no one by name suggests it was a circular letter sent to Christians in a number of places. Evidence from early Christian writers places the apostle John in Ephesus during most of his later years (c. a.d. 70-100). The earliest confirmed use of 1 John was in the province of Asia (in modern Turkey), where Ephesus was located. Clement of Alexandria indicates that John ministered in the various churches scattered throughout that province. It may be assumed, therefore, that 1 John was sent to the churches of the province of Asia (see map No. 12 at the end of the Study Bible).

→ The first page of the book/letter of Ephesians has the footnote with the explicit connection between “familiar with” and “law”, “sin”, “payment of a ransom”, “the death of Christ” and being freed “through his blood”. It is four page flips removed from a verse in Ephesians that Healed of Cancer references, a verse encouraging “to fight for your healing”, which comes immediately after this passage: “Say, ‘Thoughts, line up with the Word of God that says by the stripes of Jesus I am healed. Thoughts, line up with God’s Word that says whatever I ask I receive of Him because I keep His commandments and do those things that are pleasing in His sight. Thoughts, line up with God’s Word, in Jesus’ Name.’ And, praise God, it will come to pass!”

This passage and lone quotation from/reference to Ephesians in Healed of Cancer are one page flip after the second of only two quotations from First John (1 John) in Healed of Cancer. This second First John (1 John) quotation/reference has the same focus on following His commandments: “35. FIRST JOHN 3:21,22: God answers the prayers of those who keep His commandments.” First John (1 John) is all about Jesus being the Word of God.

→ In the story the belief "in my heart" by Kate is about the (other) victims who are still alive and who could be found and rescued. In JonBenét's case of course this is no longer possible as she has already been found dead so the belief "in my heart" becomes about finding not the other victims but the killer.

[CHARACTER LIMIT, CONTINUED BELOW]

 

[bugis]

[CONTINUED DUE TO CHARACTER LIMIT]

JOHN RAMSEY: “Well we have been pretty isolated -- totally isolated -- for the last five days, but we've sensed from our friends that this tragedy has touched not just ourselves and our friends but many people. And we know that there's many people that are praying for us, that are grieving with us. And we want to thank them, to let them know that we are healing, and that we know in our hearts that JonBenét is safe and with God and that the grieving that we all have to do is for ourselves and for our loss, but we want to thank those people that care about us.”

IN MY HEART/IN OUR HEART/IN OUR HEARTS
-KTG: (p. 195) "'First, I would like to say something to all the families and friends who have someone missing. Please, don’t give up hope. The man known as Casanova strikes only if his explicit commands are disobeyed. I broke his rules, and I was badly beaten. But I did manage to escape. There are other women where I was kept captive. My thoughts are with them in ways you can't imagine. I believe in my heart that they are still alive and safe.'
The reporters pressed in closer and closer to Kate McTiernan. Even in her battered condition she was magnetic, her strength shone through. The TV cameras liked her. So would the public, I knew."

→ These are Kate's first words in public after she has become the first victim to escape and she is speaking to the media at a press conference. John and Patsy are speaking in their first public interview, with a national audience, and the last quote above are the very first words from either of them in the interview.

→ “Casanova strikes only if his explicit commands are disobeyed. I broke his rules, and I was badly beaten”, follows the logic of what is supposed to have happened in JonBenét’s case.

-ACAS: (p. 86) “Dennis the Menace was up in northern Jersey these days, still trying to make it to the New York Times. He was never going to accomplish that feat, Jezzie knew in her heart. The only thing Dennis had ever been good at was trying to make Jezzie doubt herself. Dennis had been a real standout in that department. But in the end, she wouldn’t let him beat her down.”

→ Jezzie is one of the child killers.

-JAJ: (p. 273) “IT WAS TIME to prove he was better than Jack and Jill. In his heart, he knew that he was. No contest. Jack and Jill were basically full of crap.
The Cross home stood in dark, shifting shadows on Fifth Street in Washington’s Southeast. It looked as if everyone inside had finally fallen asleep. We’ll soon see. We’ll just see about that, the killer thought to himself.”

-JAJ: (p. 157) “He was so glad to be back in Washington, where he’d lived at various times in the past. He was happy to be back in the game as well. The game of games, he couldn’t help thinking, and believing it in his heart. Code name: Jack and Jill. Intrigue just didn’t get any better than this. It couldn’t.”

-JAJ: (p. 303) “No one would ever know how and why it had happened, or who was really responsible. Just as it had been with JFK in Dallas.
And RFK in Los Angeles.
And Watergate and Whitewater and most every other significant event in our recent history. In truth, our history was not knowing; it was being carefully shielded from the truth. That was the American way.
‘I love you so much,’ his wife whispered breathlessly against the side of his face. ‘You are my hero. You did such a good, brave thing.’
He believed it, too. He knew it deep within his heart.
He wasn’t Jack anymore. Jack no longer existed.”

→ John in his next answer in the interview after his first comment (the last quote above) moments later says “we now have to find out why this happened”.

GRIEVING WITH US/WE ARE HEALING
-JAJ (p. 336) “A day had passed since the long night at the Johnson house, since the even longer morning in New York City. Not nearly enough time for any kind of healing, or even proper grieving. President Edward Mahoney had been sworn in the day before. It was necessary according to law, but it almost seemed indecent to me.”

→ The president has just died from the results of an assassination attempt and a new president has just been sworn in. All the people in the country are grieving together (but not yet healing).

WE KNOW IN OUR HEARTS THAT […] THE GRIEVING THAT WE ALL HAVE TO DO IS FOR OURSELVES AND FOR OUR LOSS, BUT
-JAJ (p. 333) “THE DRAGONSLAYER lives, but how many lives do I have left? Why was I taking chances with my life? Physician, heal thyself.”

→ The passage expresses a wise lesson that Alex Cross realizes (through inner dialogue, John says they “know” it “in our hearts”) that he has to focus on his own healing instead of only on helping others. John expresses that they understand that they need to now focus on their own grief in order to heal but he wants to acknowledge that others are grieving with them and suffering too.

JR: WE HAD SOME INITIAL...REACTIONS AS TO… ...WHO..MIGHT HAVE BEEN..INVOLVED...AND THEY SAID “WELL, THAT’S GOOD BUT WE..WE CA-WE DON’T WANNA DRAW THE FOCUS IN.. TIGHT YET. WE’VE GOT TO LOOK AT EVERYTHING.”

A cluster of verbal and conceptual elements that also show up in Jack & Jill: “initial (reaction)”, “involved”, “that’s good”, NOT RIGHT TIME FOR WIDTH OF FOCUS ON SUSPECT PROFILES, GOT/NEED TO LOOK AT “everything”.

‘initial’ is used four times in Jack & Jill, once with “initial reaction” describing one of the killers’ reaction (with “shame”) to something. Another occurrence is “initial impression” which describes Alex Cross thinking about the profile for the killers Jack & Jill. This is very similar to how John uses his “initial reactions” about who may have been “involved” in JonBenét’s murder. On the same page, Alex Cross wonders whether kinky sex might be “involved” in the case.

But more importantly, the word ‘involved’ is used multiple times in speculation about who all might be involved in the murder spree of Jack & Jill, with all sorts of high-level conspiratorial parties being considered. Although at a quick glance, you might think John’s use of the word is natural because of course a father wants to find out who is responsible for the murder of his daughter. But the word ‘involved’ is a word more suggestive of a complex conspiracy, and in the far-fetched plot of Jack & Jill with killers striking celebrities and even assassinating the president, it is no wonder that this word is used multiple times by Alex Cross to consider who is responsible for the killing spree. But for John to use the word “involved” a week after the murder, as part of their “initial reactions” very shortly after the murder, seems rather odd, especially considering he says in this same interview that by then (a week after the murder) he believes the killer is a single individual. He is using the language that is used frequently throughout the book and applying it to his own situation, which it why it comes off as not really appropriate.

Six page flips after the passage with Alex Cross’s “initial impression” where he describes his preliminary profile of the killers, the word “involved” shows up again in a very noteworthy context: he wonders if an “artist” could be “involved” in the murders. I have already argued that the choice for a paintbrush (with the word ‘Korea’ on it) as part of the garrote was Patsy’s way of trying to mimic the profile of a killer who is an artist and who leaves “artistic touches”. This concept is explicitly found in one way or another in all three Alex Cross stories as well as in Copycat. I think this is why post-crime both Ramseys read up on parts in the Alex Cross books that deal with this idea because the profile of their intruder needed to fit these staged crime scene elements.

The concept of not to “draw the focus in tight yet” is also found in another place where Alex Cross talks about being ordered to give his preliminary profile of the killers but where he considers it “too early” for that.

WHO MIGHT HAVE BEEN INVOLVED
-JAJ: (p. 79) “Here was evidence of kinkiness again, and yet I didn’t quite believe it. Everything was too orderly and arranged. Why would they want us to suspect kinky sex might be involved? Was that something? Were Jack and Jill frustrated lovers? Was Jack impotent? We needed to know whether anyone had sex with the victim. […] My initial impression was that both killers were white, somewhere between the ages of thirty and forty-five—probably closer to the latter, based on the high level of organization in both murders. I suspected well above average intelligence, but also persuasiveness and physical attractiveness. That was particularly telling, and bizarre to me—since the killers had managed to get inside the celebrities’ apartments. It was the best clue we had.”

-JAJ: (p. 90) “The film continued to weave together black-and-white and color footage, but not in a disorderly fashion. Whoever had stitched it together had a decent skill for editing.
One of them is an artist, or at least has strong artistic tendencies, I thought to myself and made a mental note. What kind of artist would be involved in something like this? I was familiar with several theories about links between creativity and psychopaths. Bundy, Dahmer, even Manson, could be considered “creative” killers. On the other hand, Richard Wagner, Degas, Jean Genet, and many other artists had exhibited psychopathic behavior in their lives, but they didn’t kill anyone.”

→ John hesitates after “as to...” before saying “...who might have been involved”, as if first considering formulating a sentence with a different word, perhaps “what kind (of)”, as found in the passage here. I think he wanted to steer police and the public into thinking along such complex profiling lines, where police would begin to think about what kind of person could’ve left all the clever little staged clues left in the Ramsey home. But because this is a line of thought that has to be introduced subtly and was difficult to pull off immediately in the CNN interview, he opts for “who”. But in later interviews he certainly has no trouble trying to steer people into thinking more along these lines of complex profiling questions that consider the kind of person this intruder must have been.

-JAJ: (p. 146) “At a little past five, I stopped by the Sojourner Truth School again. There were several forces strongly pulling me in the direction of the school. The new information about the homeless white man and the constant feeling that just maybe my nemesis Gary Soneji might be involved. That was part of it. Then there was Christine Johnson. Mrs. Johnson.”

-JAJ: (p. 169) “THE MORNING after the murder, I drove eight miles down to Langley, Virginia. I wanted to spend some time with Jeanne Sterling, the CIA’s inspector general and the Agency’s representative on the crisis team. Don Hamerman had made it clear to me that the Agency was involved because there was the possibility a foreign power might be behind Jack and Jill. Even if it were a long shot, it had to be checked. Somehow, I suspected there might be more to the CIA’s involvement than just that. This was my chance to find out.”

→ “a foreign power” being behind two pattern or signature killers is described as being a legit possibility. This either planted or furthered the seed for “a small foreign faction” being mixed with a (multiple of) serial killer(s) m.o. This is of course the very odd and unrealistic combination of crime scene elements that we find in the (clearly staged) JonBenét Ramsey murder crime scene.

-JAJ: (p. 184) “The killer’s initial reaction was to feel shame. He thought he was going to be sick. Throw up or something. He wanted to put his head between his legs. He felt like such a chump to get caught like this.”

-JAJ: (p. 215) “ ‘Mr. President, we have reason to suspect that someone with access into the White House, or possibly with power and influence here, might be involved in all of this. Jack and Jill are certainly getting into high places with the greatest of ease. The people close to you have to be checked, and checked very closely.’”

-JAJ: (p. 216) “I shook my head. I wouldn’t be held off like that. ‘Think about the vice president, and about Senator Glass, too. This is a murder investigation. Please don’t protect someone who might be involved.[‘]”

-JAJ: (p. 224-225) “ ‘No, we don’t have to do better,’ Sampson interrupted him. ‘We need to see your son right now. We’re here on a homicide investigation, Colonel. Two small children have already been killed. Your son may be involved with the murders. We need to see your son.’ […] The three of us went upstairs. We proceeded in single file. I went first, then Colonel Moore, followed by Sampson. I still hadn’t ruled out Franklin Moore as a suspect, as a potential madman, as the killer.”

-JAJ: (p. 362) “President Edward Mahoney delivered a statement at nine. Jack and Jill had wanted Edward Mahoney to be president, I couldn’t help thinking as I watched him address hundreds of millions of people around the world. Maybe he was involved with the shooting; maybe not. But someone had wanted him to be president instead of Thomas Byrnes, and Byrnes had distrusted Mahoney.”

-JAJ: (p. 369) “ ‘You ever hear of the notion—too many logical suspects?’ I asked Kyle as we sipped our beers in the quiet of the Sterling kitchen.
‘Not that specific language, but I can see how it applies here. We have scenarios that could implicate the CIA, the military, maybe big business, maybe even President Mahoney. History rarely moves in straight lines.’
I nodded at Kyle’s answer. As usual, he was a quick study. ‘Thirty-five years after the Kennedy assassination the only thing that’s certain is that there was some kind of conspiracy,’ I said to him.
‘No way to reconcile the physical evidence—ballistic and medical—witone shooter in Dallas,’ Kyle said.
‘So there’s the same *advertiser censored* problem—too many logical suspects. To this day, nobody can rule out the possible involvement of Lyndon Johnson, the Army, a CIA ‘black op,’ the Mafia, your outfit’s old boss. There are such obvious parallels to what’s happened here, Kyle. A possible coup d’état to eliminate a troublemaker in office—with a much friendlier replacement—LBJ, and now Mahoney—waiting in the wings. The CIA and the military were extremely angry at both JFK and Thomas Byrnes. The system fiercely resists change.’”

→ John says he tends to agree with John Douglas’s profile of the killer as being someone who was “very angry” with John.

-JAJ: (p. 26) “We needed to be involved in this case, to do something, to solve the heinous murder quickly.”

→ not used in the same way (about who is involved in the crimes), but the ‘heinous’ mention again is a sign that this book and this author share the same sort of vocabulary and way of talking. The word itself occurs in a lot of books but it’s also the way Patterson uses this and other words to set the scene for his narrative, which is very much like how the Ramseys talk in their interviews about the murder.

THAT’S GOOD
Only two occurrences in Jack & Jill. Both occurrences are in the context of detective Alex Cross approving of police procedure. John uses it in the context of police telling the Ramseys that they are doing something valuable (approving it) to contribute to the search for a child killer by identifying possible suspects.

-JAJ: (p. 239) “I nodded. ‘That’s good. Thanks for coming by and being here for Nana.’”

→ In the context of Sampson telling his partner Alex Cross that a technician (from the police) will come to his house to install a listening device because the killer has possibly called his grandmother at his home. So the utterance is in the context of approving police procedure.

-JAJ: (p. 318) “I nodded and felt a little relief at the choice of a negotiator. ‘That’s good. Losi is tough. He’s good under pressure, too. How is the boy communicating from the house?’”

→ In the context of a detective (Alex Cross) approving of the negotiator police have selected to talk to the killer (boy) responsible for the child murders.

WE’VE GOT TO LOOK AT EVERYTHING
-JAJ: (p. 156) “ ‘What I’m thinking is that every person working here has to be checked out,’ I said. ‘They’ve all been checked, Alex.’
‘I know that. They haven’t been checked by me, though. We need to check them all over again. I’d like each of them run against an interest in poetry or literature, even college degrees in literature; any kind of film-making experience; painting, sculpting, any endeavor requiring creativity. I’d like to know what magazines they subscribe to. Also their charitable contributions.’ […]
‘Yeah, I’m afraid so,’ I went on. ‘While we’re doing those background checks, we need to look at everyone in the crisis group. You can start with me.’ Agent James McLean stared at me for a long moment.
‘You’re *advertiser censored* me, aren’t you?’ he finally spoke his mind.
I spoke my mind, too. ‘I *advertiser censored* you not. This is a murder investigation. This is how it’s done.’”

→ referring to the killer(s) possibly being insiders who are part of the investigation. Police, therefore, shouldn’t narrow down their search too much yet because Alex Cross believes people close to the president who are considered safe might be the killers afterall. He also again brings up the idea of the killer(s) possibly being artistic, even specifically referencing “painting”, the kind of killer “artist” I think Patsy tried to suggest with the paintbrush.

→ So both “involved” and “we’ve got to look at everything” in John’s response above are found in passages bringing up the idea of the killer being an artist.

→ “college degrees in literature” is some supporting evidence for the Dracula/ “stray dog” interpretation. “magazines” also is in line with the idea of the killer using magazines to target people, as also suggested in other passages in the Alex Cross books and in Se7en, and in line with the Esprit awards article being a staging prop.

-JAJ: (p. 344) “I opened each book, then carefully shook it out. There were well over a thousand volumes in the apartment. Maybe a couple of thousand. Lots of books to look through.”

-JAJ: (p. 337) “ ‘First intelligent thing I’ve heard out of your mouth in years,’ Sampson said, ‘but I’m afraid I don’t believe it. You want to know everything. You need to know everything, Alex. That’s why you read four newspapers every damn morning.’”

-JAJ: (p. 338) “Of course I wanted to be there. I had to go. I needed to know everything about Jill, just as Sampson had said I did.”

-JAJ: (p. 346) “Jack was just walking out of a three-story Colonial house. He went to a bright red Ford Bronco that sat in a circular driveway. By then, we knew who he was, where he lived, nearly everything about him. Now we understood a lot more about Jack and Jill. Our eyes had been opened very, very wide.”

-JAJ: (p. 354) “The big house, the whole street, seemed so innocent and appealing. A beautiful, white Colonial stood before us. The house had a big old porch supported by column pedestals. Children’s bikes were neatly stacked on the porch. Everything out here was so neat. Was it all a disguise? Of course it was.”

-JAJ: (p. 355) “I noticed details—everything seemed important, telling, evidence. The bright colors and exuberant style on the inside of the house said ‘American,’ but the accents communicated ‘world travel.’ French etchings. Flemish weavings. Chinese porcelain.
Jill the traveler. Jill the spymaster.
There’s an old saying in classic mysteries, which I’d never felt made much sense—cherchez la femme. Look for the woman. I had my own catchphrase for solving many modern day mysteries—cherchez l’argent. Look for the money.”

WE DON’T WANNA DRAW THE FOCUS IN TIGHT YET
Conceptually:
-JAJ: (p. 75) “Speaking of which, I had been ordered by the chief of detectives to work up ‘one of your famous psych profiles’ on the homicidal couple, if that’s what they really were. I felt the task was futile at this point, but I hadn’t been given a choice by The Jefe. Working at home on my PC, I ran a wide swath through the available Behavioral Science Unit and Violent Criminal Apprehension Program data. Nothing obvious or very useful popped up, as I suspected it wouldn’t. It was too early in the chase, and Jack and Jill were too good.”

→ “TOO EARLY” is used by John in this interview too.

→ Alex Cross here uses the metaphor of SUSPECT POOL = WIDTH to describe conducting a broad search for the killers, using the concept of “a wide swath”, which can cut through data like a scythe to seek out a crop of possible suspects. Alex Cross uses this metaphor to express his sentiment that it is “too early” to narrow the search to only a few suspects.
John in the interview invokes a similar metaphor to describe the (police’s description of the) search for the killer(s), that of tightness, using the concept of focus tightening around possible suspects, which also relies on an underlying metaphor of SUSPECT POOL = WIDTH. He also uses this to express conceptually that it is too early (“just yet) for that. He actually uses the words “too early” elsewhere in the interview.

-KTG: (p. 305) “Carefully, I roamed from room to room. Nothing seemed out of place, even with two small children living there. Strange, strange, very strange. […] I was searching for something specific, but I didn’t know exactly where to look. Down in the basement I saw a heavy oak door. It was unlocked. It led into a small furnace room. I searched the room carefully. On the far side of the furnace room, I found another wooden door. It looked like a door to a closet, to some small, insignificant space. The second door was closed with a hook, which I removed as quietly as I could. I wondered if there could be more rooms in here? Maybe an underground space? Maybe the house of horror? Or a tunnel?
I pushed open the wooden door. Pitch-blackness. I switched on the lights, and entered a single room that must have been twenty-five by forty. My heart skipped a beat. My knees got weak and I felt a little sick.
There were no women in here, no harem, but I had found Wick Sachs’s fantasy room. It was right in his house. Hidden in a secret comer of his basement.”

→ John uses “out of place”, matching the description in the passage in the book. Linda Arndt in her police report says she asked John and Fleet White to “check the house ‘from top to bottom’ to see if anything belonging to JonBenet [SIC] had been taken or had been left behind.” Although this is conceptually very similar of course, it’s not quite the same thing. John is using the language fitting for the story about killers leaving clever clues (out of place) and a detective (Alex Cross) narrating actively looking for such clues.

→ John’s description of “and we’re just looking” is a rephrasing of the book’s description of “I was searching for something specific, but I didn’t know exactly where to look.” (echoed as well in the passage from Ruthless People (p. 113) “The redhead had been searching all morning for clues, though he didn’t have a clue what he was looking for.”, the page I think Patsy is taking inspiration from when she adlibs “hunting for clues...I guess” which is also found on that page in Ruthless People (“to hunt for clues”).

WHEN I OPENED THE DOOR, THERE ARE NO WINDOWS IN THAT ROOM AND I TURNED THE LIGHT ON AND
John follows this up shortly after with a description of what he did that matches the order of concepts found in the passage in Kiss The Girls: 1. open the door 2. it’s dark 3. turn on the light

Although the matter of visibility in the room would become a matter of contention in the case, it really made little sense for John to mention the details of the darkness and his turning on the lights in this interview. In my opinion, these details were inserted because in his mind he’s trying to frame the situation as one like the passage in the book and he (either more or less consciously) copies some of the elements from the story as he’s recalling it.

It is not difficult to see why this particular passage would have been one that stood out to John if he were reading Kiss The Girls looking for inspiration to frame the Ramseys’ intruder theory. The description given here does eerily resemble the wine cellar in the Ramseys’ basement where JonBenét was found. It may or may not have helped give Patsy the idea to leave her daughter there on the night of her staging in the first place.

John’s becoming emotional at the moment of discovery of his daughter’s body is of course understandable and fitting but it also still feels like bad acting to some. This may be because he’s not actually recalling the real moment he discovered her but rather trying to map this event from that early afternoon to the emotional description in the book at this place in the story: “My heart skipped a beat. My knees got weak and I felt a little sick.” If an untrained person is asked to act out such a description, you may end up with a similar sort of tearless emotional performance that John displays in the interview.

Patsy’s interjection that “She was in the room” also adds to the logical order laid out in the book: the next part in the book is “There were no women in here” which Patsy rephrases and converts into the positive version of that statement using the same three conceptual elements “She was in the room” (women → She, There were ...in→ was in, here → the room). She could’ve said “it was our daughter/my baby/JonBenét” or “He found her” or many other things, but she said a statement conceptually more similar to the description in the book. In my opinion, this is because she realizes/recognizes/knows/guesses the passage John is borrowing from and getting in on the act of framing the scene in the way described in the book.

This is also why both John and Patsy describe the dirty wine cellar, that didn’t even have windows, as a “room”, because that’s how it is described in the book. They refer to it as “wine cellar” in later years but not here. Patsy in this interview when talking about entering JonBenét’s room also uses the phrase “pushed open” the/her “door” that is used in this passage. As can be seen from John’s words here, one doesn’t necessarily have to use that particular phrase when describing “opening” a door, but Patsy does use the same phrase that is found in this emotionally heavy passage to describe her own emotion-laden action of discovering that JonBenét is not in her room.

I OPENED THE DOOR […] AND THAT/THERE WAS HER
But John’s own choice of words of “when I opened the door […] and that/there was her.” is not so innocuous itself upon closer inspection. It is difficult to make out whether John says “and that was her.” or “and there was her.” But, either way, it is remarkably similar to the climactic moment in another passage later in Kiss The Girls when Alex Cross has found Casanova’s underground complex and finally finds his kidnapped niece in one of the rooms:

-KTG: (p. 403) “I entered a second hallway at the end of the first. There were more locked doors. Was Naomi here? Was she alive? The pounding in my chest was unbearable.
I opened the first door on the right—and there she was. There was Scootchie. The best sight in the entire world.”

Again, he could’ve said “I saw JonBenét/her” or many other different descriptions but instead he uses language closely matching that in the book. Note also that “the best sight in the entire world” echoes an emotion that John (somewhat unexpectedly) describes in later interviews when talking about what he felt in that moment of first finding his dead daughter: relief, a word also found in the book close to this passage.

ONE ROOM
John’s description of “one room in the basement” in their house also echoes a passage from Along Came A Spider:

-ACAS: (p. 322) “Sometimes, she felt as if she were only a story character she’d made up. Tears filled her eyes. It wasn’t so dark now. Morning was coming. She wouldn’t try to escape again. She hated this, but she never wanted to go under the ground again.
Maggie Rose knew what all the shapes were.
They were children.
All in just one room of the house.
From which there was no escape.”

[MORE EXAMPLES TO FOLLOW]