One of the very few who do not think Patsy authored the note is Gerald R. McMenamin an eminent Professor of Linguistics.
Dr. McMenamin has taught various courses and special training seminars in
linguistic stylistics and has worked on more than 250 civil and criminal cases
of questioned authorship. He is the author of several publications in forensic
linguistics, including the book Forensic Stylistics
In his book:
Forensic Linguistics Advances in Forensic Stylistics he uses JonBenet as a case study.
Here is an excerpt from the introduction and concluding paragraphs ...
"....Professor McMenamins choice of the features used in document comparison is arbitrary and subjective, and unmotivated by any empirical research; another set of features could well have been chosen that would have given very different results. His method could not pass the test of independent replicability...."
Geoffrey Nunberg quoted by Carole Chaski in "Best Practices and Admissibility of Forensic Author Identification"
McMenamin states that he chose style-markers for Patsy that contrast with the ransom note--and then later concludes that she is excluded as the author because she doesn't share style-markers with the ransom note writer. Below are Patsy's style-markers according to Gerald McMenamin:
PR 01 Correct spelling of "business"
PR 02 Correct spelling of "possession"
PR 03 Misspelling of "advise" as "advize"
PR 04 Lack of correction in spelling "denied" (She would have had to spell it "din..." and then fixed it)
PR 05 Misspelled "burial" as "buriel" (Got a real chuckle out of that.)
PR 06 Misspelling and correction of "advise" as "advize" with additional correction
PR 07 Misspelling of "scrutiny" as "scruitiny" in passes 1 and 2 (after which she spells it right)
PR 08 Use of capital "S" in "Southern"
PR 09 Presence of periods in "am"
PR 10 Periods (instead of "!") after "Victory" in passes 2 and 3 (and 4, 5)
PR 11 No periods used in "SBTC"
PR 12 "Unharmed" is one word (Uh ahem, excuse me, in pass 5 she writes "un harmed.")
PR 13 Using the correct article in "an earlier"
PR 14 "Pick up" has no hyphen
PR 15 Writes "counter measures" (She writes it as one word in her individual word exemplars)
PR 16 Use of single word for "outsmart"
PR 17 Use of single word for "underestimate"
PR 18A $118,000. has no trailing zeroes
PR 18b $100,000. has no trailing zeroes
PR 18C Wrote "100 dollar" without "$"
PR 18D Wrote "$18,000." with no trailing zeroes in pass 3
PR 18E Use of word "dollar" without "$"
"Lack of correction in spelling 'denied'" is particularly amusing. Does McMenamin really think that correcting the spelling of "denied" is a style-marker for the ransom note writer? That the ransom note writer habitually does that?