KoldKase,
LOL, an intruder with a Mensa IQ, Come On Down! Applying some CSI, if it was JDI then JonBenet would have been dumped outdoors, check your cases, this is the general outcome where fathers are involved. If it was PDI then accidents are usually claimed to be the cause.
But here we have a staged crime-scene, that is a cover up, a deliberate attempt to confuse invesigators, you have to wonder was Steve Thomas given the job precisely because he lacked prior experience?
Anyway that leaves BDI which IMO is the most consistent theory. It just might be that JonBenet was a victim of of more than one person, just my opionion.
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Thomas wasn't "inexperienced." And he was never fooled by the Ramseys or the evidence.
He had been working in LE for about a decade, if memory serves, and undercover for a while up until the time of the murder.
It's fair to say he was "inexperienced" in murder investigation if you want to delineate investigative protocol to that specifically. Sure it's better to have more experience in that area than less, but Thomas ran circles around Lou Smit, who managed to convince quite a few people he solved hundreds of homicides all by his lonesome in the decades he worked as a detective.
In point of fact, Smit was a relic and most criminals aren't that smart, either. I think anyone who reads Kolar's book will find what has been obvious to many of us all along: Smit was a crank. He couldn't find his butt with a flashlight and a map in the Ramsey murder, so I'm thinking he had a LOT of help in those "hundreds" he took credit for.
In fact, the one case he claimed to be "famous" for solving turned out to be nothing more than a cold case others had worked which he pulled back out as a newly hired supervisor of detectives. Smit wasn't the detective who figured out why the fingerprint that "broke" the murder case never had a hit: it was a younger detective who was familiar with fingerprint databases from state to state and advised Smit to run it in a different way to check in other states. And it got a hit in Texas. I'm not making this up: this story came out of late, with Smit admitting this himself and finally giving credit to the young cop.
Now back to Thomas: in the BPD, he was no more inexperienced than anyone else. Remember Boulder seldom had homicides. JB's was the first that year--on Dec. 26th. So the BPD didn't have a homicide unit. Instead, the detectives all rotated through the various departments. That's why Thomas had been on the drug detective duty: in Boulder, it's probably a busy job.
Thomas was not sent to the Ramsey house that morning, either. It was a few days before he was pulled off his other assignment and put on the JB case. They needed their best, and he was certainly one of their best. One only needs to read his book and watch him question the Ramseys on LKL to see that, IMO.
I think Kolar's book is a perfect companion book-end to Thomas': both these detectives know exactly how to do this job, and they are both excellent at it.
And they both had the very same experience: Team Ramsey shut them down as fast as they could, with two DA's help.
Because they both, independently and years apart, saw where the evidence truly led: straight back to the Ramseys.
JMO, of course.