It's always seemed peculiar to me how many people find it hard to believe that an intruder sat down in their house and took the time to write the longest ransom note anyone's ever seen, but they somehow find it easy to believe that a mother, whose adored 6 year old baby girl has JUST been brutally murdered in her own home, sat down at her kitchen table and took the time to compose a lengthy, action-movie-reference-filled, over-the-top virtual manifesto of a fake ransom note, all the while knowing that her beloved child lay dead on the floor of their dark, damp basement alone and, again, dead. Dead. Her child.
No matter how she came to be dead, by whose hand, even if it's by the mother's hand herself, I would think it would be next to impossible for anyone to believe that mother would be able to write this thing at that moment, in that style. But it seems many people have no problem believing that somehow. But they have a big problem with the also-unlikely act of an intruder waiting til he's in the home of the victim to write it.
Well, to me, both of these stories are hard to believe, but I know I personally find it easier to believe that an intruder wrote it in the home than to believe that a devastated mother wrote it at all. Especially when that mother has no outrageous, awful acts in her known past, when to all who knew her, she seemed always to be nothing but a loving, law-abiding, relatively mentally stable person... Contrast that to an intruder who by definition is a person of criminal tendencies, who has committed a depraved and inhuman act against a defenseless little girl, who we might safely assume has all kinds of shocking and bizarre things always going through his mind and who probably regularly does things that would seem to a normal person to be illogical, irrational, nonsensical etc., one of which that night may have been his decision to sit down and write a crazy-long ransom note which was obviously the product of a disturbed and unconventional mind, either before or after brutally murdering a sweet child in her own home. I'm certain that this hypothetical person has done many things that would shock you more than him being the one who wrote that note would. We can't understand why a person like that does whatever they might do. They probably do a lot of things that don't seem normal or expected, things that don't make sense to us. Because we thankfully aren't like them, and our minds don't work like the mind of someone who would murder a child. We shouldn't be surprised to find out something they did in the course of a murder seems to us to have no reason, no motive, goes against what any normal person would decide to do. Because this person is not normal! They do abnormal things! Things you can't believe.
Because you're not like that. If you can relate to anyone in this scenario, I would assume you relate to the mother more than the intruder. She may not be you, but she's more like you than the intruder. I hope. And just like I think we shouldn't be so surprised to learn that an intruder would do something so abnormal like writing this note right there in their house, I also think we should be appalled to think of any mother writing it right after having to face the fact of her baby's death. There was never a time in Patsy's life until this happened when anyone ever suspected her of being capable of murdering a child or even of covering up the murder of her child by her husband or her son.
How can it be easier to believe she did this than to believe some deranged person with a sick, disordered, abnormal mind did?
And this is coming from a person (me!) who has long believed it was done by someone in the family too young to be prosecuted for it and covered up by his parents, including writing of the note by the mother herself. I can't say what changed my mind, but once I started thinking of it in the way that I TRIED to explain (probably not very well) above, I found it impossible to believe that anymore. No explanation is easy to believe in this case, but some things are easier than others, and this is one of them. To think Patsy went from her child's dead body to immediately sit and write this crazy ransom note... I just can't believe that anymore.