Steven Grant
09-30-2006, 11:20 AM
Okay, remember that guy a couple months ago who was picked up in Thailand and confessed to the murder of Jon Benet Ramsey? Since shown to not have been her killer and extradicted to Oregon for other crimes. Can't remember his name off the top of my head, if there was any real "15 minutes of fame"r, he was it. But...
One of the reasons they were so eager to extradict him - and I suspect he confessed just to make sure he'd get back to the USA instead of langushing in a Thai prison - was that he knew details of the crime they'd never released to the press. (This is a standard ruse of police so they have a control by which to measure confessions, since many crimes, particularly major ones, end up with a lot of false confessors, who are mainly people seeking notoriety or attention.) They stopped mentioning this after the other evidence failed to place him at the scene of the crime.
But it seemed pretty obvious to me that, if their original statements were accurate and he really did know unrevealed details of the crime, either this guy was pretty good at intuiting missing information from existing data (it's not as hard as it sounds) or he had been in contact with the real killer.
So... cut to a couple days ago... a different guy, 53, with a gun marches into a school outside Denver and takes a class hostage for no apparent reason. He lets students out in groups but keeps a small group behind, and he "sexually abuses" them, whatever that means (I'm thinking it must mean rape, but they didn't specify). This prompts the cops to go in ahead of his 4PM deadline, whereupon, behind a barrier than has been erected, he murders a girl then kills himself. No one has any idea what prompted the incident.
I listened to a brief report on HNN, and don't really remember the specifics of what they said, at first I wasn't even paying that much attention, but...
Right toward the end of the report, I suddenly start getting this sort of Tetris game in my head, watching little fragments of data fall into place, and abruptly I think:
"This is the guy who murdered Jon Benet Ramsey!"
Like I say, I don't specifically remember that triggered that. He's a lifelong Denver resident, a rapist-murderer, with an obviously theatrical flair - I know that's pretty sketchy, but there was something else they said and I can't for the life of me remember what it was - and I could see him deciding to go out in this sort of blaze of glory, considering the other guy would know who he was and, facing the reality of a long imprisonment, would inevitably start playing every bargaining chip he had.
I know it's a ridiculous hypothesis and probably would never hold up, but...
- Grant
(Plus I'm perfectly capable of living down the shame of getting it wrong, but if it turns out I'm right I want credit for getting there first.)
One of the reasons they were so eager to extradict him - and I suspect he confessed just to make sure he'd get back to the USA instead of langushing in a Thai prison - was that he knew details of the crime they'd never released to the press. (This is a standard ruse of police so they have a control by which to measure confessions, since many crimes, particularly major ones, end up with a lot of false confessors, who are mainly people seeking notoriety or attention.) They stopped mentioning this after the other evidence failed to place him at the scene of the crime.
But it seemed pretty obvious to me that, if their original statements were accurate and he really did know unrevealed details of the crime, either this guy was pretty good at intuiting missing information from existing data (it's not as hard as it sounds) or he had been in contact with the real killer.
So... cut to a couple days ago... a different guy, 53, with a gun marches into a school outside Denver and takes a class hostage for no apparent reason. He lets students out in groups but keeps a small group behind, and he "sexually abuses" them, whatever that means (I'm thinking it must mean rape, but they didn't specify). This prompts the cops to go in ahead of his 4PM deadline, whereupon, behind a barrier than has been erected, he murders a girl then kills himself. No one has any idea what prompted the incident.
I listened to a brief report on HNN, and don't really remember the specifics of what they said, at first I wasn't even paying that much attention, but...
Right toward the end of the report, I suddenly start getting this sort of Tetris game in my head, watching little fragments of data fall into place, and abruptly I think:
"This is the guy who murdered Jon Benet Ramsey!"
Like I say, I don't specifically remember that triggered that. He's a lifelong Denver resident, a rapist-murderer, with an obviously theatrical flair - I know that's pretty sketchy, but there was something else they said and I can't for the life of me remember what it was - and I could see him deciding to go out in this sort of blaze of glory, considering the other guy would know who he was and, facing the reality of a long imprisonment, would inevitably start playing every bargaining chip he had.
I know it's a ridiculous hypothesis and probably would never hold up, but...
- Grant
(Plus I'm perfectly capable of living down the shame of getting it wrong, but if it turns out I'm right I want credit for getting there first.)