Chrishope,
And therein lies the focus on the fallacy.
I take it then that you think considerable time passed between the time JBR was injured and when this was discovered by the Rs? What would you estimate the time to be?
How much time do you think elapsed between the strangulation, and the bash ? (or vice versa?)
How do you imagine the Rs became aware of the situation? I mean, if BDI, did he then run to their room and admit it? Or did he go back to bed and the R's discovered it hours later? What made them get up at say 2am, and discover JBR had been killed?
What do you believe to be the TOD for JBR?
I would place TOD at approx. midnight - though I'll be happy to give a couple hours leeway. If I'm not mistaken she was in full rigor at 1pm when she was "found". Most sources I've seen say full rigor occurs about 12 hours after death - though several variables are involved. That would mean she died around midnight to 1am.
Sure but the object of the exercise is not to identify loose ends, we all expect those, but to find contradictions in the staging logic, e.g. size-12's. A fictional example of this can be found in Columbo's Murder With Too Many Notes which is a staged homicide, where the prime suspect is played by Billy Connolly so appeared a little surreal to me.
If the R's are unaware of some fact and due to ignorance cannot include it in their version of events, this is not a loose end, some oversight. This is information we have regarding facts available to the R's, which goes beyond a mistake or lack of attention to detail.
I'm not making any distinction between loose ends and contradictions. I'm saying they will exist (whatever you want to call them) in any case - murder/ coverup, or actual kidnapping. Every contradiction does not implicate the suspect. It does on TV because there is only an hour to find the killer, but in real life there is just unexplainable "stuff". It seems illogical, but it's there.
Here is another way to consider it: To effect the staging someone decided to redress JonBenet in the size-12's, now whatever the merits of this is, it was hidden, buried beneath the longjohns. Now contrast that detail with her hair-ties, left in full view. Although you can suggest oh they just missed them, its a loose end, is it not a curious one, given JonBenet also has a head injury? Also you would think if the R's knew what occurred when they arrived back from the White's, e.g. if JonBenet had a pineapple snack, then direct evidence of this could be removed.
The R's are going to blame JonBenet's death on the intruder, so why not the sexual assault? Why bother hiding it, then fabricating a version of events that can be contradicted by holes in your own staging?
The loose ends thesis becomes more tenable the later the parents arrive on the crime-scene, otherwise they have approximately 4-hours to setup the staging, then check it over.
In my estimation, they had about 6 hours to stage and re-stage. I don't think the contradictions were due to lack of time, but rather to lack of experience. They had not staged the kidnapping/murder of their own daughter before. They could not think of every detail, nor think calmly and rationally.
As to some of the specifics you mention -
I don't know that the hair ties were a loose end. The overall story they are telling is that the intruder redressed JBR. That, in and of itself, is a contradiction from what I'd expect an intruder to do. (I'd think the intruder would molest her then make a hasty exit from the house) But, if an intruder did redress her (and we know that's not the case) who's to say what he'd put on her? Why not hair ties? It's no more/less senseless than redressing her at all or putting size 12 panties on her.
If they knew of the pineapple snack I'd expect the story to be we came home, JBR had some pineapple, then went to bed. This suggests to me they didn't know. If I recall correctly from the autopsy report, she had eaten about 10 CCs of pineapple. That's what - maybe 2 small cubes of pineapple? She could easily have eaten that amount while her parents were in another room, just for a minute or less.
The size 12s are puzzling on many levels. The size is a contradiction no matter what. Possibly the size was meant to infer that the intruder didn't know the correct size, whereas the parents certainly would? Perhaps they thought the Wednesday feature was of overriding importance?
In all these cases, time, or lack thereof, would not have been the reason for doing/not doing something. IOWs they didn't put hair ties on her because they lacked time. They didn't put 12s on her because they lacked the time to get the correct size out of her dresser drawer. They didn't write a 2 and a half page RN because they'd arrived late on the scene and had to work fast.
If anything I'd lean more to the idea that they had too much time and over-thought things and had time to re-do things, rather than arriving late on the scene and not having time to deal with contradictions.
It's clear that they had to take time to wipe her down, to remove forensic evidence. An intruder might have done the same. Everything else that was done, after wiping her down, was time consuming, not time saving.
Basically nothing they did after wiping her down made any real sense. An intruder would not have redressed her, would not have written a RN post murder (though some people seem to want to believe it was a kidnapping gone bad, thus explaining the note and the body together) would not have placed the body in the WC, would not have wrapped her in a blanket....and so on.
The mistakes were fundamental errors in thinking. Errors in story telling, if you like. They didn't know how to stage it. They didn't know how to tell the story of an intruder/killer. Having no experience in these matters, it wouldn't matter how much time they had. Contradictions emerge from their wrong decisions, not from lack of time. The wrong decisions aren't from time pressure, but rather from not knowing what they were doing.
