You may want, scroll to the * Burke * to skip this. I'll be talking about my reading this thread first.
I just finished reading all (actually most) of the 83 pages. I really want to learn and discover what other people have to say about this case. Sometimes I wanted to kill my computer. I thought I could tolerate anything; but honestly, it sometimes felt like the Ramsey's legal defense team were here creating subterfuge on this thread. That's when I finally learned how important the ignore feature is. It brings back sanity. To use it means I could miss an important argument, but that's okay because I could predict the argument I was missing. All those objections and counter arguments really didn't seem to add to what I was wanting to learn. This wasn't my first thread and I had seen many of the arguments before.
In reading this, I've come to the conclusion that what the Rs had to say about when they arrived home and what they say they did when the woke-up in the morning, really didn't matter. I really can't believe much about what they had to say. There are too many contradictions in their story. It only gets worse with later interviews. Everyone seems to forget that what they said after they lawyered-up is even more suspect than their early interviews. The lawyers had to be sure it matched their original stories. Do you think the lawyers aren't going to interview them? Do you think that they're not going to be told, "Don't say it that way. Say it this way?" "Don't say that at all. 'You don't remember.'" Just as if you were going to do a show: rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. And when in doubt, "you don't remember." Of course, lawyers will tell them to tell the truth. Right?
The basement bathroom discussion was important to me. I know it's been played-out on other threads, but this room is only a few feet from where the body was found. It was carefully searched. Information about what may have been found in there my still be withheld. Talking about it might give someone like me an idea. It's not a waste of time.
It's also funny to see how a smudge of feces on a box has turned into the whole box being covered or each individual chocolate being covered in poo. I've read so much conflicting info on this. Does anyone know if it was just a smudge or if they've now decided to do a 'South Park' and paint the whole bedroom in poo?
* Burke *
This is where I have something to add about Burke. It's about my past and it's something I really don't want to share, but I think it can provide an important insight. This is also really painful and it hurts to even think about it.
When I was 9, my mother was in her 3rd marriage. I had 2 older half brothers. We weren't very close. The marriage went south and the step father seemed to distance himself from the family. Then my mother attempted suicide. I remember standing in the entry with my brothers watching the police and the paramedics. It was a crazy. There was a lot of commotion with a lot of people. My mother was taken out on a stretcher. And then there seemed to be quiet with me and my brothers there. My stepfather was nowhere to be seen. There was no one else there. My brothers just looked at each other and decided to go sleep-over at their friends house. I decided it was bedtime so I went to bed.
The next day, I got myself up in an empty house and went to school. I absolutely wanted to visit my mother in the hospital only there was no adult around. I had no idea how to do that. I really didn't have anyone to talk to about it at school. I didn't want to either. I found my way home and I don't really remember how I got though the next few days before she came back home. I just went on with my routine. When she came back, we never talked about it...ever. I knew it was something we couldn't talk about. I had an instinct about that.
A couple of weeks went by before it happened again. This time I had the memory of my older brother pulling the shotgun out of the closet and threatening to blow his brains out. My other brother talked him out of it before the cops and the paramedics got there. After everyone left my brothers went off to sleep at their friends house, I decided to go to bed again. This time, I remember my older adult half sister coming into the house to babysit. That somehow made second time it happened a little better. I didn't talk with her about it. She wasn't there in the morning when I got myself off to school. I still didn't have anyone close at school or at home to talk to about it. It seemed too taboo. I just went through the motions of my life holding that bad stuff inside and sharing it with no one.
My point here is that I've seen a lot of people judge Burke. They've said that he was cold and distant. They've said that the picture he painted of his family somehow implicates him. I have no idea what image I would have drawn at that age. It may have been just me and my mother. Maybe I wouldn't have drawn anything at all. He may well have known that there was nothing he could do. The world had gone crazy and he needed to get tough it--to do what was expected of him. At that age, nobody told me how terrible my life was. I really didn't know how to react. The world was falling down and I had no one to rely on so I just did what I thought I was supposed to do and hope for the best.
I don't know if Burke had anything to do with JonBenet's murder. When I was going through all that stuff in my past, someone may have seen me to be just as cold and distant. It just really didn't paint a picture of how I felt then and how I can't bear to remember it now.
And of course, these are my opinions.
