One more thought about the above. This story doesn't actually make sense in rigorous logical terms. Imagine you walked down the steps one morning, thinking your daughter is tucked away in bed sleeping.
You see three pages spread out at the bottom of the stairs. You immediately notice that this is a long letter, and spread out, not stacked as if to be taken up. Strange...
You start to read it. It becomes even more strange. It has an air of ridiculousness about it -- a foreign faction? They don't respect America? What is this... a foreign terrorist group in Boulder? Hunh? They have my daughter?
All this would be happening in a space of seconds. Wouldn't you be INCREDULOUS -- like, "Hunh? What? Is this a joke??" Perhaps if you'd begun to be scared you might go into denial a little -- "This is definitely a joke, right??"
But you'd KEEP READING! The crucial fact here is that you've only read the FIRST PARAGRAPH OF A THREE PAGE NOTE! Sure, perhaps you wouldn't read the ENTIRE THING -- but it's hard for me to think you'd STOP THERE and bound up the stairs!! Why?
YOU CARE ABOUT YOUR DAUGHTER. And the "small foreign faction" -- at the end of the paragraph PR claims she read to before bounding up the stairs -- has just said that if you want to see your daughter alive, "follow these instructions."
Wouldn't your love for and care for your daughter -- if you were no longer feeling the denial or disbelief most people would be feeling -- lead you to at least read a LITTLE more to see what you had to do to save your daughter?
PR's "hysterical" routine is not very good writing or acting. (We knew she's over the top from the ransom note itself, of course.) She played the hysteric that entire morning and for a decade afterwards... and because most people don't really think how they'd react in these situations, she was believed by many.
But just ask yourself that simple question and you know all there is to know: if you woke up thinking everything was fine and saw a three page note whose first paragraph said in a bizarre way that your child had been kidnapped and to follow these instructions -- wouldn't you keep reading, if just to let your brain catch up with this bizarre new reality? And even if you were able to catch up with this new reality instantly (unlikely) wouldn't your care for your child compel you to see what the kidnappers had instructed?
No. As soon as the note suggested someone had my daughter I'd run to her room. Then I'd read the rest of the note. I would read the entire note before calling police.