If we take JR at his word, is it possible he and PR truly did not see / know about the head wound ? I've read here several times that it may have been "invisible" and on the CBS special I think the expert mentioned pretty much the same thing. So could they have found JBR 'dead' (unable to detect a pulse, certainly completely unconscious and un-reviveable) - realized what BR had done (erroneously thinking he might 'merely' have strangled her manually) , and realized they needed to make this a much more grotesque crime to fool the police? I can't see them 'finishing her off' if there was even a chance in a million she was still alive and could be saved with medical care. As much as I dislike BR, I don't see him as a psychopath who would do the garroting part. I think the parents erred in thinking she was dead and felt (in the heat of the moment) that the needed staging was irrelevant with respect to her survival, so why not do it. I will have to delve deeper and see if experts feel she could have potentially survived the head wound and recovered, or was in fact brain-dead. If the former, the Ramsey's must be beyond grief-stricken to know that. Lastly, if they knew he violently bashed her in the head, would they still have protected him? It seems like there's a limit to how much you'd cover for your child. Remember, after the staged 911 call Patsy probably says to BR "what did you do?" (perhaps rhetorically), but if they knew she was bashed in the head from a heavy object it seems especially silly to say that.
jamesrav,
what BR had done (erroneously thinking he might 'merely' have strangled her manually)
Yes, or simply used the cord loosely as a ligature whether tied to something else so to restrain JonBenet, or even play some auto-erotic game where there is intentional restriction of oxygen to the brain?
There are many subtle aspects to BDI, e.g. 911 call, head blow occurrence, etc, and whether there was manual strangulation is another.
I've always assumed there was, and I've reasoned like this: if the parents are ignorant regarding the head blow, then presented to them is JonBenet visibly asphyxiated via the ligature and paintbrush.
So why bother with any staging, why not just remove any incriminating evidence and relocate JonBenet to another location, leaving her more or less as is, including bloodstains but blame the intruder/kidnapper for it all?
As a working assumption I've always assumed that the ligature and paintbrush was pure staging contrived to mask
manual strangulation, else why bother at all, also you run the risk of adding your own forensic evidence, also that the cord was used to restrain JonBenet, either as part of a game or as a prelude to violence?
People
forget that its not the wine-cellar that's been staged its JonBenet herself. Stuff is being hidden so that the R's can evade justice, everything visible need not be by the hand of BR, even if as Kolar suggests
one person did it all!
So to answer your question: yes the parents probably were ignorant regarding the head injury, which raises another subtle aspect, does this mean BR willfully lied to his parents, i.e. concocted some fanciful tale?
As further corroboration that the parents may have been ignorant, why not leave the flashlight
in the wine-cellar, so to explain and mask her head injury sustained in her bedroom or somewhere else say by a lead pipe?
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