Thread by @eugyppius1

After reading an incredible amount of material since Christmas, I have to come to some basic conclusions about this case:

1) The Ramseys hire lawyers in the hours after JonBenét's body is discovered, at which point all their statements become untextured and unhelpful.

This why a rigid, disciplined focus on the early events before 1pm on 26 December is so helpful. You want to pay attention to what the Ramseys do and say then. Everything afterwards is publicity and only important insofar as studying changing narratives can be helpful.

2) The entire investigation was epically, unprecedentedly botched, from the very beginning and consistently all the way through. Some examples: A relative of the Ramseys was allowed to remove boxes of material from the crime scene in the days after the murder.

She was dressed up as a Boulder police officer to escape the notice of the press. Boulder prosecutors regularly leaked investigative material to the tabloids and to the Ramsey attorneys. They also opposed routine warrant applications for telephone and financial records.

The egregious crime scene contamination on the morning of 26 December is but a minor footnote to the scale of the intentional fuckery. This was a deliberately subverted investigation, and the reasons aren't entirely clear.

For us, this means appealing to absence of evidence as evidence of absence is not convincing. Just because detectives couldn't find the source of the duct tape over JonBenét's mouth, or the source of the cord binding her wrists, doesn't mean we're compelled to imagine intruders.

It also means that a lot of the trace DNA evidence, which has been used in a 2008 statement by the Boulder prosecutor to exonerate the Ramseys, is of highly questionable significance.

Finally, you just have to remember that everything about the crime scene is questionable. You must resist the temptation to latch onto specific physical clues. This flashlight, for example – widely speculated to be the weapon that broke JonBenét's skull –

– may have been left by a police office. This is the reluctant conclusion of Boulder detective Steve Thomas, whose book on the case I highly recommend. You just can't believe most of the incidental crime scene evidence.

3) Like a lot of famous cases, the JonBenét murder has accumulated much unreliable analysis. People who interpret gestures, administrators of polygraphs, cursed pSyChoLogiCaL PrOfILERs, all strive to expand the evidence pool in unreliable ways. All this stuff belongs in trash.

So what can we conclude? What evidence is good? I think there are three areas to look at. First is JonBenét's body. She died of asphyxiation from a garotte, twisted with a broken paintbrush handle that belonged to her mother.

Her skull had been broken with a heavy object prior to death, proven by brain haemorrhaging. This injury would have been fatal, but was not the immediate cause of her death. It did not leave readily apparent external injuries and was first discovered at autopsy.

Her lips left a single impression on the duct tape, which suggests it was applied after she was unconscious. The cord around her wrists was not fastened so as to actually bind her. I think both clear signs of staging. Finally, there was some vaginal bleeding and inflammation.

The second area of highly significant evidence, is in the changing statements of John Ramsey. On the morning of 26 December, he insisted to three different police officers that he had personally checked the house was locked before going to bed.

He also repeatedly stated that the broken basement window in the Train Room was from his own break-in months earlier after he forgot his key, and was not evidence of an intruder. Months later all of this changes.

Suddenly he doesn't know if the doors were locked, he thinks the broken basement window may also have been open. Before finding JonBenét's body, John is all about how the house was secure. After finding her body, he is all about how many points of entry there were.

Third, and most important, is the ransom note. Handwriting experts go into my bin of pseudoscientific claptrap, but evidence that Patricia Ramsey wrote it goes well beyond nebulous handwriting analysis and I find it pretty convincing.

If you discard the possibility of an intruder as wildly unlikely, which I do, your theory of the case will hinge on how you interpret its contents. Is it just about staging a kidnapping, or was it crafted for other, secondary purposes? Let's read it together.

I've reviewed various ransom notes. Most are very short and consist of practical instructions for handing over the ransom. Generally they begin with a dramatic statement that they've kidnapped your kid. This one starts with rambling about a 'foreign faction.'

Notably, it's also addressed exclusively to John Ramsey. There was probably no intruder, so we're invited to see this as an attempt to explain the circumstances on the morning of 26 December to John.

Only in the second paragraph do we get the instructions, and they're vague and muddled. The details here appear to be inspired partly by the 1996 movie 'Ransom' and perhaps also by the Lindbergh kidnapping (the subject of a 1996 television movie).

There are various logical problems here that make carrying out the instructions difficult. Is the reference to "tomorrow" from the perspective of the putative kidnapper (meaning the 26th) or from the perspective of the reader (meaning the 27th)?

Do they really expect John Ramsey to get the money before 8am (on Boxing Day)? Is this what they mean by promising to call him earlier if he gets the money earlier? I would rather think he'd be expected to receive their call and then withdraw the money.

Also, $100k in 100-dollar bills and $18k in 20-dollar bills is not a lot of bills, you do not need "an adequate size attaché" for them. You could stuff them with only limited awkwardness in your jacket pockets.

John Ramsey's Christmas bonus from Access Graphics was a little more than $118,000, by the way. A lot has been made of this, but I see it as the only real practical point in the note. A kidnapper could have confidence that Ramsey would be able to raise at least 118k quickly.

The next paragraph is perhaps the most interesting. John Ramsey is not to talk to anyone, or they'll behead his daughter and deny him her remains for proper burial. There are more movie references here, among them to the 1986 comedy 'Ruthless People.'

If we posit that the note was written by one of the Ramseys, perhaps Patricia Ramsey, it seems to indicate a nascent plan – to discard JonBenét's body on 26 December (no "remains for proper burial") & contact the police sometime on 27 December, with a good excuse for the delay.

This makes it vexxing that Patricia Ramsey, who made the 911 phone call, also seems to have written the note. Perhaps John Ramsey insisted she call the police over her misgivings and she went along with it.

The letter concludes with more threats, and a clear allusion to the 1994 movie 'Speed' ("don't try to grow a brain"). No really satisfactory resolutions for "SBTC" have ever been proposed.

Putting all this together, I suggest that John Ramsey was the primary audience of the note. Early on 26 December he was in the dark about what had happened, but had serious misgivings.

He insisted to the police that the house was locked and that the broken basement window was evidence of an intruder. Later he tried to modify this story to allow for an intruder, presumably to shield people close to him.

On the morning of 26 December, he and Patricia Ramsey avoided each other. Patricia spent these hours in the solarium, directly above the wine cellar where JonBenét's body would later be found. After 10:40am, John Ramsey disappeared, purportedly to get the mail.

Around this time, he discovered JonBenét's body in the wine cellar. This is why he told relatives (and the relatives told police) that he found JonBenét's body at 11am. When Det. Arndt saw him again, his mood had shifted visibly – he was trying to decide on a course of action.

He finally decided on a course of action, and pretended to find her body officially at 1pm. He then immediately engaged lawyers – separate attorneys for himself and his wife, suggesting they might have divergent interests – and all cooperation with law enforcement was over.

Beyond that it is very hard to say what happened. Police thought Patricia Ramsey had written the note within hours of reading it (that's how badly she disguised her handwriting); had she been promptly arrested and interrogated, this would not be much of a mystery.

The Burke-did-it hypothesis appeals because it seems to explain why a mother would go to these lengths to hide a murderer and (apparently, at least initially) deceive her husband. But, there is not good objective evidence pointing to Burke specifically.