'preliminary observation'
Please provide a source or link for 'preliminary observation' as that appears to be just your own characterization.
Okay, here goes. From "Perfect Murder, Perfect Town," paperback, pages 535-536, concerning the aftermath of the Secret Service analysis:
The CBI was not pleased with how Beckner was handling things. The police had never bothered to ask Ubowski if he had put his entire analysis of the ransom note into his report and whether it was his final report. Either way, Ubowski was prepared to say, "Patsy wrote the note." The CBI (Ubowski's organization) saw this as one more missed opportunity. I should also point out that, according to Epstein, the Secret Service expert's primary duty is not document examination and it not clear how much actual work he does.
To repeat what I've already said so many times, there is no consensus among ABFDE members that PR wrote the note.
Holdon, document examination is such a contentious field anyway, if every single case needed a consensus of multiple experts to go forward, there would be a whole lot of guilty people walking free right now.
If what you say were even close to being true,
I have good reason to say it is. I'm not out to waste anyone's time with lies. Not yours or anyone else's.
and these 'experts' of yours were ABFDE members,
Several were, but not all.
why is there no public statement of consensus?
Because it's not an exact science, Holdon. It just doesn't work that way. I'm sorry if that seems like a cheap answer, but it's the only one I can give you, and while you may not believe this, I have enough respect for you not to insult your intelligence by trying to pull an explanation from my nether regions. There's no hard-and-fast, tried-and-true, absolutely objective scientific means of analysis that everyone in the field agrees on. If there were, things would be much different, but as it stands now, it's actually far more common to get a widely varying group of opinions than a unanimous "consensus," as you put it. And I'm not just saying that. I've actually spoken to several document examiners (none involved with this case, if you were wondering), and that's what they told me. As much as they have confidence in their own abilities, at the end of the day it's still one person, one opinion. Please, do not ask me who they were, because I promised that I would not reveal their names, and I like to keep my promises whenever I can.
In this instance, it becomes all that much harder because you had a letter that was block printed, which is very difficult to analyze. Add to that it was written with a broad, felt-tip writing implement which was most likely worn down from prior use, which makes it even harder to analyze.
There's another possibility, as well, though I don't know what you might make of it: it could be that some of these experts just flat-out did not want to challenge Howard Rile, one of the Ramsey hired guns. As the examiners told me, (not just them) document analysis is a very small field. When you narrow it down to the ABFDE, it's even smaller. Most of them know one another and respect the others' analyses, and Rile is held up as a particularly tough act to follow among them. He and Gideon Epstein are considered two of the all-time best. Nobody wants to make any waves, in other words. So they parse their findings, hoping that someone else will rise up that they can hide behind. A vicious circle, indeed. Again, take that for what it's worth. But like I said, I wouldn't tell you if I didn't think you were smart enough to know what I was getting at.
You know that if there were, she would've been arrested and tried.
Actually, I'm not convinced of that at all, even if there had been. I refer you to Pete Hofstrom, who said, "so what if she wrote the note? It doesn't prove she killed her kid." Sadly, from a legal standpoint, he's right. It doesn't. It just proves she helped cover it up. (I'm just saying.) The DA's office did not want to take this case on, Holdon. You should remember that.
There wasn't, so she wasn't. And you know it.
