Patsy and the 911 Call

[BlueCrab]

Where do you read this? If you look at the floor plans, you will see that while they were certainly close with Patsy at the kitchen phone and John in the hallway by the den, I don't think she was reading over his shoulder. Neither JR nor PR has ever suggested that this was the case to my knowledge...

Voice of Reason,

The phone cord easily reached the spot on the floor where John, in his underwear, was supposedly on his hands and knees reading the ransom note. Patsy has stated somewhere (I can't find it right now) that she read the note over John's shoulder during the 911 call.

Of course, the enhanced 911 call with Burke's voice on it revealed the Ramseys were already lying about the whereabouts of Burke at 5:52 AM. Therefore, the credibility of everything else the Ramseys say that took place that morning is under question.

BlueCrab

 

[Nuisanceposter]

That's not the only thing they lied about...and if this was an intruder, why would they need to lie at all?

 

[aussiesheila]

Something that happened during the 911 call recently made me wonder. About halfway through the call, the following exchange took place between Patsy and the dispatcher:

911: Does it say who took her?
PR: What?
911: Does it say who took her?
PR: No I don’t know it’s there...there is a ransom note here.
911: It’s a ransom note.
PR: It says S.B.T.C. Victory...please


One would assume that Patsy read "S.B.T.C. Victory" right off the ransom note and had it while she was on the phone. However, there is a problem with this assumption. In numerous interviews (see the depos and interviews over at acandyrose), both Patsy and John talked about how while Patsy was calling 911, John was on the floor reading the note which was spread out on the floor. Therefore, my question becomes, how did Patsy get S.B.T.C. Victory from the ransom note? Here are the explanations I can think of, and my thoughts following each...

(1) She remembered what the note said...Patsy has also suggested that prior to making the 911 call, she did not read the ransom note carefully and did not read it in its entirety. I can't imagine she would have remembered this.

(2) She asked John and/or looked at the note...The audio of the 911 call does not indicate that John told her what it said, nor does it sound like she retrieved this information from the note during the phone call. I could be wrong on that second one, but I would think you might hear a pause, a rustling of paper(s), or John asking her what she is doing while he is trying to read the note.

(3) John wasn't actually on the floor reading the note at this time...This seems to be the most innocent explanation, but why would the Ramseys make up this somewhat odd detail if it weren't true?

(4) Patsy was well aware of the note's detailed contents because she either wrote it or had seen it for much longer than she suggested in her interviews...to me, this explanation is the most logical.

Has this ever struck anyone else as odd?

I'm not quite sure what you mean by odd, Voice of Reason. The way it strikes me is there is nothing at all odd about it at all. Patsy's behaviour is precisely that of a person who is perpetrating a giant deception IMO. There are not too many people who can do this, but some people are able to and become very skilled at it.

IMO your explanation (4) is the correct one ie Patsy knows that JonBenet has not been kidnapped and she knows exactly what is in the note because she wrote it. And now she is pretending that she has just found the note and is pretending she thinks it was written by an intruder who has kidnapped JonBenet. It is quite obvious to me that Patsy is lying the whole time. When a person is lying they have to be very careful not to give themselves away with anything they say and Patsy uses all the tricks available to help her through.

911: Does it say who took her?
PR: What?

Here she pretends not to have heard the question and gets the dispatcher to repeat it. This gives her more time to think up an answer.

911: Does it say who took her?
PR: No I don’t know it’s there...there is a ransom note here.

When she does answer, she doesn't address the question. "No I don’t know it’s there" What kind of answer is that what does the "it's" refer to? It could be anything. I think this is called giving yourself some wiggle room with your answer.

Then she continues "...there is a ransom note here" She has already told the dispatcher this, she doesn't need to say it again, but she does because it is safer than saying something different. If she said something different there is more chance she might inadvertantly give away some information that might incriminate her.

911: It’s a ransom note.
PR: It says S.B.T.C. Victory...please

Although the dispatcher tries to calm Patsy down so that she will be able to pass on some useful information, Patsy makes sure she keeps up the pretence of being the panicked and out-of-her-mind crazed mother. This way she can avoid having to make up a logical explanation for things. She knows the safest way to get away with the whole deception is to reveal as little as she can, so if she is forced to say something she makes sure she comes out with something nonsensical.

 

[BlueCrab]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by odd, Voice of Reason. The way it strikes me is there is nothing at all odd about it at all. Patsy's behaviour is precisely that of a person who is perpetrating a giant deception IMO. There are not too many people who can do this, but some people are able to and become very skilled at it.

IMO your explanation (4) is the correct one ie Patsy knows that JonBenet has not been kidnapped and she knows exactly what is in the note because she wrote it. And now she is pretending that she has just found the note and is pretending she thinks it was written by an intruder who has kidnapped JonBenet. It is quite obvious to me that Patsy is lying the whole time. When a person is lying they have to be very careful not to give themselves away with anything they say and Patsy uses all the tricks available to help her through.

911: Does it say who took her?
PR: What?

Here she pretends not to have heard the question and gets the dispatcher to repeat it. This gives her more time to think up an answer.

911: Does it say who took her?
PR: No I don?t know it?s there...there is a ransom note here.

When she does answer, she doesn't address the question. "No I don?t know it?s there" What kind of answer is that what does the "it's" refer to? It could be anything. I think this is called giving yourself some wiggle room with your answer.

Then she continues "...there is a ransom note here" She has already told the dispatcher this, she doesn't need to say it again, but she does because it is safer than saying something different. If she said something different there is more chance she might inadvertantly give away some information that might incriminate her.

911: It?s a ransom note.
PR: It says S.B.T.C. Victory...please

Although the dispatcher tries to calm Patsy down so that she will be able to pass on some useful information, Patsy makes sure she keeps up the pretence of being the panicked and out-of-her-mind crazed mother. This way she can avoid having to make up a logical explanation for things. She knows the safest way to get away with the whole deception is to reveal as little as she can, so if she is forced to say something she makes sure she comes out with something nonsensical.

And to make sure she doesn't accidentally reveal a clue to the truth, PATSY ABRUPTLY HANGS UP THE PHONE.

 

[Cranberry]

And calls her friends over who can vouch that JBR was alive the night before.

 

[UKGuy]

(2) She asked John and/or looked at the note...The audio of the 911 call does not indicate that John told her what it said, nor does it sound like she retrieved this information from the note during the phone call. I could be wrong on that second one, but I would think you might hear a pause, a rustling of paper(s), or John asking her what she is doing while he is trying to read the note.

Has this ever struck anyone else as odd?

Voice of Reason,

No not really odd. IMO its all consistent with a then, recent change of plan. Patsy has from memory 3 or 4 different versions of what happened when she arose that morning. All were recounted post the 911 call.

So why should her memory have lapses and lacunae if everything had been planned in advance? Although we may not expect her to relate a consistent sequence of events, without some kind of error or mistake, we would expect her general outline to hang together, and as you suggest here we are at Step One, and already uncertainty and doubt is on display.

Now you could interpret this in many ways e.g. Patsy deferring to John, or a verbal smokescreen to limit evidential leakage etc. Also it could reveal that a recent change in plans has scrambled her brains, and she is having to repeatedly relate steps or events that never really happened with those that did, whilst simultaneously avoid mentioning anything to do with whatever preconcieved plan that was intended to explain away whatever did occur?

A consequence of this interpretation is that John was aware at this point in time of precisely what Patsy's intention was on the phone, e.g. to communicate to the listener that their daughter is abducted and we have a ransom note!

So the 911 call is another example of how aware the Ramsey's were to avoiding contributing towards the forensic evidence. Neither of their fingerprints are to be found on the Ransom Note, since the intruder helpfully spread it out for them to read, and as you remark John is silent!

Given the circumstances you would expect her to ask John who it is signed off by? After all he is reading it. Curiously Patsy's reply 'PR: It says S.B.T.C. Victory...please' is not in the singular e.g. S.B.T.C. which you may expect, as in all my souces relating to the Ransom Note, it is actually signed off:

Victory!
S.B.T.C.

and as BlueCrab intimates:

The phone cord easily reached the spot on the floor where John, in his underwear, was supposedly on his hands and knees reading the ransom note. Patsy has stated somewhere (I can't find it right now) that she read the note over John's shoulder during the 911 call.

So in spite of reading directly she transposes the words!


In my mind these verbal 911 oddities reinforce my belief that there were multiple stagings that night, and that the phone call was public Step No. 1, in the final version.

In this version there were a few things, lets say out of character, possibly understood, if its all for real. Firstly as has been mentioned many times before Patsy breaks her cardinal rule and redresses in clothing worn the night before, and she makes the 911 call, I would have expected John to make the call, CEO and all that.

 

[Shanny]

I wonder why when Patsy seen the part where it says " We have your daughter"
she thought that they meant Beth?
Beth is not her daughter and Beth been dead for 4 years......

 

[aussiesheila]

Susan Stine has copped a lot of flack for being the person who turned the police away at the door but I haven't heard of FW copping anything for having been the person who made the call in the first place.

Did anyone actually see FW make the call? Presumably if he used the kitchen phone someone would have seen him, or perhaps he had crept off into one of the rooms upstairs and that was where the call was made from.

My guess is that it wasn't FW who made the call at all anyway. I think it was one of the children who made the call, an older boy,*********** who might have been trying to protect JonBenet from the advances of a sexual predator, which by my reckoning there were three invited ones present that night.

Maybe FW grabbed the phone from ******** and slammed it back in the cradle. In the ensuing kerfuffle maybe *** found out from ******** that he was the one who made the call and to calm the waters she answered the police when they knocked at the door.

So who did the police question about that call and what sort of questions did they ask? Did they ask any of the children present at the party about it? Did they ask SS or DP or Santa about it? Did they ask FW from which phone in which room of the house he made the call? Probably not I'd say.

 

[Nuisanceposter]

Here's what it says in DOI, pb, pg 101 (and this is all the Rs say about it.)

During the party Fleet White used our phone to make a series of calls, trying to get some medicine to his mother in a hospital in Aspen, Colorado. Apparently he dialed wrong and got 911. The police called back, but after checking with Fleet and the rest of the people in the house, Susan Stine informed them that the call was a mistake. The 911 call remains somewhat of a mystery.

 

[Eagle1]

Personally, I've always held the opinion that JonBenet herself tried to make a call to 911 and FW or someone grabbed the phone away from her, because, allegedly she'd been crying, probably about being molested and none of the grownups caring. (It's been discussed here and there that FW's mother actually was partying that night, but I can't right now remember source. At the time JR wrote that, I guess they thought she was hospitalized.)

Were there actually any older boy children there? If so it's possible, of course that one tried to protect JonBenet, but if one was that interested, would he have let the adults silence him? In the almost 10 yrs since then, wouldn't one of them have said something somewhere? Unanswerable, I know.

 

[tumble]

Is there an uncompressed version of the 911 call available somewhere? Like uncompressed wav, aiff, riff...

I have only seen mp3 versions and as they are compressed I think sounds like those on the end of the tape get distorted bythe compression.

And ofcourse I don't mean a mp3 converted to wav but a uncompressed wav file recording from the original tape of enought sampling frequency not to the distort the original.

 

[Jayelles]

The problem with amateurs like us "analysing" the 911 tape is that:-

1) We don't have a clean first generational copy of the recording.
2) We don't have the powerful equipment required for analysing the tape.
3) It's unlikely that we have the powerful equipment required for listening to the tape.

I've done quite a bit of research into this and somehwere along the way, I was lucky enough to make the acquaintanceship of a *real* expert - someone who knows about forensic audio analysis and (more importantly) - forensic audio analysis standards!

Here's how it was explained to me:-

Digital data is stored as 1s and 0s. These are called binary digits (or bits). If you have one bit of storage, you can store either a 1 or a 0 in it - so that would be TWO different pieces of data. Black and white graphics only need one bit per pixel - to store either black or white (as a 1 or a 0).

If you have 2 bits, then you can store 4 colours which can be represented as 00,01,10,11. If you have 3 bits, you can store 8 colours - represented as 000,001,010,011,101,110,111. The formula to work out the number of colours is '2 to the power of the number of bits'.

Therefore, if you have 8 bits, you can store 256 colours (2 to the power 8 = 256).

If you create a graphic using 8 bits (256 colours) and then try to open it in a machine which uses only 4 bits for colour (16 colours), then you will lose the ability to store 240 of the colours in your graphic. The computer will often alter the colour to the nearest - so 10 different shades of pink would default to the same shade of pink. Try it out in a graphics program that permits the reducing of the number of colours.

OK that's graphics - sound works in exactly the same way - except that instead of storing different shades of colour, we store different sounds. If you record a sound on a computer which uses 8 bits for each sound "sample", then you can store 256 different sounds. If you then save that sound clip on a computer which only uses 4 bits to store each sound sample (16 sounds), the sound clip will lose a lot of its quality. Also, when a sound or graphic is compressed - the compression algorithm removes sounds which are very high or low frequency, sounds which are drowned out by other sounds and sounds which are inaudible to the human ear.

Only analogue sound is pure and contains all of the "data". Converting to digital involves "sampling" and some of the original soundclip will be discarded as a result. The more samples which are taken, the better will be the quality of the digital sound. Also, the more bits used to store each sample, the better will be the quality of the digital sound. However, it's usually a pay off between quality and filesize because the best quality sound clips are huge. Compression is required to make them manageable and we know - compression involves discarding some of the data.

So you see, one wouldn't necessarily expect the background sounds which were allegedly on the original tape to still be present on a third generational recording of that tape. We don't know anything about the specification of the interim recordings and there is every likelihood that compression software would have discarded the sound as inaudible "noise".

Remember - Mary Keenan went to great lengths to avoid a lawsuit from the Ramseys - I don't believe for one moment that she would issue a copy of the tape if Burke's voice could be clearly heard on it and risk another lawsuit. Plus, she showed her cards when she attended Patsy's funeral - she's not unbiased.

 

[Jayelles]

Is there an uncompressed version of the 911 call available somewhere? Like uncompressed wav, aiff, riff...

I have only seen mp3 versions and as they are compressed I think sounds like those on the end of the tape get distorted bythe compression.

And ofcourse I don't mean a mp3 converted to wav but a uncompressed wav file recording from the original tape of enought sampling frequency not to the distort the original.

Sorry, we posted at the same time (I took a lunch break mid post!)

There is a tape version of the tape - but we've never heard the enahnced version of the tape. THAT is what I'd really be interested in hearing.

 

[tumble]

Thank you very much for your answer Jayelles.

I know quite abit of sampling and I have seen some analyses of the mp3 file which I don't think is meaningful.
The sampling theorem says that sampling with enought frequency will give you all the frequences in the signal if the signal is 'bandlimited' which always can be accomplished in reality.

So sampling the tape(with a frequency greater than twice the signal bandwith) to a wav file should give us good data for our own analyses.

The enchancing is not too hard, I think even I can do it. Getting hold of good data is always hard

Maybe the mp3 file available is almost lossless in compression, then the file should lend itself to being analysed.
You should always be sceptical of compressed data.

 

[Jayelles]

Thank you very much for your answer Jayelles.

I know quite abit of sampling and I have seen some analyses of the mp3 file which I don't think is meaningful.
The sampling theorem says that sampling with enought frequency will give you all the frequences in the signal if the signal is 'bandlimited' which always can be accomplished in reality.

So sampling the tape(with a frequency greater than twice the signal bandwith) to a wav file should give us good data for our own analyses.

The enchancing is not too hard, I think even I can do it. Getting hold of good data is always hard

Maybe the mp3 file available is almost lossless in compression, then the file should lend itself to being analysed.
You should always be sceptical of compressed data.

We don't know the degree of compression or the sampling frequency/depth. Spectrography is required to analyse the recording for variations in background sound. I once started a thread to demonstrate this using a graphic. Digital bit patterns can show variations which humans cannot detect.

Here is a message for you:-

http://websleuths.com/forums/showthread.php?p=917520&highlight=911+graphic#post917520

 

[tumble]

Thanks for the link Jayelles.

You make my point very clear with this post. Those sounds that the ear can not hear very well are exactly those the mp3 encoder is design to remove.

Normally you don't want to waste disk space to store data you can not hear.
mp3 compression is designed to compress in a psychoacustic way. This compression may very well remove data at the end of the tape and introduce artifacts such as echos and ringing noices.
The sounds from the 911 operators keyboard are typically sound that gets distorted by mp3.

This is why we need uncompressed data to analyse.

 

[BBB167893]

They talked about this about three years ago on Dan Abrams:

KANE: It had a lot of his stuff in there, and he was a backpacker, and the fact that there was a sack-it was a rucksack is what it was, with a rope in it. I don't know if that's necessarily inconsistent with that. As far as the tape goes, I don't know where that tape came from. It was probably released by Mr. Wood. And I don't know in the hands of the police department.

KANE: ... I've listened to the original tape and I have talked to the experts that have also looked at that tape and to suggest that there's nothing on that tape at the end, there is clearly something on that tape.

SCHILLER: Well, Mr. Wood, you know, who I respect as an attorney and represents his clients well is being at this point guilty of the same thing he’s laying at the feet of everybody else. He is editing the facts so that the public perceives something a certain way. In fact, the Boulder Police Department did take either the original tape, I believe, or a first generation tape and did send it to the FBI and there was no results. They did send it to the Secret Service and there were no results, only to discover that really there was more advance technology in a company in El Segundo, California that was in the aerospace business and dealt with these type of sound problems and they took the tape to El Segundo, California and there that company analyzed the tape and came up with what they believe was dialogue that continued a short time later after the phone was supposedly hung up. Now, based upon the El Segundo Aerospace Industry’s report, the police then took another look at the situation and compared it to the statements that Patsy and John Ramsey...

SCHILLER: The tapes that NBC saw and the tapes that other people recently saw are not first generation or original tapes. They’re third and fourth generation tapes and that’s where the difference is.

 

[tumble]

Thanks for the info SD,

that makes the case even worse. And here we sit with mp3 compressed versions of third of possibly fouth generation tape data and tries to make out background noices to keyboard tapping, :laugh:

Just getting hold of some uncompressed, sampled data from the tapes would mean alot.

 

[Camper]

Remarkable study on the 911 call Dec 27, 1996, good job Jayelles.

I have not done any intricate work on the 911 call, other than reading what others have posted, AND we had a link at one time that we could hear the call, which left me fuddled as to clarity. The TV audio of the 911 call was not clear.

The one glaring fact is that there was enough extraneous sounds to indicate ANOTHER person present near the phone when heck broke loose in the R household, it was not PR nor JR.

Burke was sleeping at that 'moment' according to the R's own words, BUT years later the Ramnesia kicked in and well er, uh, we musta been a little mistaken about whether he was awake or not. So be it.

THEN who was the 3rd garbled er uh, unidentified, er identified, BUT even the DA donut know, person?

Besides all the technical part of the listening and identifying, another pure fact emerges, that being by the time the R's decided 'they' were mistaken bout when Burke slept er when he was not sleeping, the R's had had some successful suits against folk claiming OR inferring that B did it etc.

WHO was the third person THAT morning heard on the 911 tape?

I should think any Boulder DA would be EXTREMELY INTERESTED IN identifying the UNKNOWN voice. Which only points to an obvious supposition, that being, it WAS Burke, and why cover that tidbit up, IF he was indeed innocent?

.

 

[tumble]

Yes, I think we can believe Hickman and the Aerospace crew who had the original tape and good equipment to analyse it with.

It's just that, hearing it yourself is another thing, isn't it

Burke was sleeping at that 'moment' according to the R's own words, BUT years later the Ramnesia kicked in and well er, uh, we musta been a little mistaken about whether he was awake or not. So be it.

Intersting Camper, the R's actually went back on a statement