"But he didn't come to that conclusion at least by the time he had written his book. He blames all of the attacks on the fact that he had sold personal information about Boulder detectives to the tabloids. If any other possibility had occurred to him, he did not mention it."
Maybe so. I didn't say definitively that it wasn't related, did I? Just offering an alternative. Maybe he was a bit hasty. I never said he was perfect. But if the machine gun attack had been intended to kill someone, why stop after one unsuccessful attempt? I mean, from what we can gather, there was only one incident for each officer. Why stop there? In for a penny, in for a pound, right?
"I don't remember seeing this, and am curious as to what made you change. Would you mind repeating it?"
You didn't see it, Irishmist, because I have yet to post it here. No, I don't mind.
I really didn't start following this case until around mid-1998, and even then, it was only a dabbling, you know? I swallowed the first Tracey crock like gospel. By early 1999, I was a die-hard RST.
I remember the first chinks in the armor started to appear about a year later, with the now-legendary confrontation between ST and the Rs on Larry King. It was very difficult for me as a Ramsey supporter to watch that! Patsy was doped up to the hilt, and John looked like a cringing, squirming rat. Even then, I had to admit that ST made them look bad. That feeling was intensified by the resignation of Ellis Armistead around the same time, citing that incident as one reason why he couldn't stay on. But I remained true to my belief. Even then, though, I disagreed with the lawsuit against ST. I was brought up to believe that when two gentlemen have a dispute of honor, they settle it between themselves in a sporting manner. The old-fashioned way.
By summer of 2001, the chinks had become large dents. By then, I had become the owner of a stun gun (still have it!) and, in an ironic twist of fate, that was the year Lou Smit went on his basement window mystery tour. In a move that was designed to help the Ramseys, it did the exact opposite in my case! Watching Smit, a skinny man with no winter clothing, shift and shimmy and slide through that window, taking half of the sill with him, then looking at an actual crime-scene photo of said window well and seeing just how little dirt and debris had been disturbed shook me to the bone. A later experiment with said stunner (which I would rather not repeat!) showed that the stun gun theory was pretty ridiculous. (Looked like I'd been stung by a bee with a tattoo needle for a stinger!)
I drifted for a while. In the late part of that year, the Rs were deposed in the now-infamous libel case, where John admitted, contrary to his earlier assertions, that his PIs were never tracking down other leads, but were conducting a smear campaign against potential witnesses to, as John put it, keep him and Patsy out of prison. Even then, my brain told me that a person without the kind of finances that they had would not be able to do that. Indeed, it was just wrong, as far as I was concerned. That was another dent among many that would soon follow.
Finally, came mid-2002. This was in the midst of the Danielle Van Dam case and the many child abductions and murders that followed. And I couldn't help but notice one thing: none of those cases even REMOTELY resembled this one! The final nail in the coffin came when a certain forum (we know who), which had been my rock for several years, who would shout Ramsey innocence from the mountain tops, did the SAME THING against the Van Dams that they had accused the so-called "BORG" of doing. I didn't need that kind of hypocrisy, and I told the boss there so!
My defection was not taken well. Let's leave it at that.
That was it for me. It had all piled up. I'd read the books, read the articles, gone over the interviews and documents like the Zapruder film. And, to borrow a phrase:
Resistance was futile.
I became one with the BORG! (lol) At first, I didn't particularly like that little nickname. Now, it's a badge of honor!
That's my story.