Ransom Note

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Last Updated: 11:19 pm, Tuesday, February 18th, 2003
Local professor profiles JonBenet’s ransom note
By Rachelle Treiber

He was not allowed to take photographs while touring the palatial Boulder, Colo. home where a 6-year-old girl had been killed just months earlier.

Scott Community College professor Thomas McAninch, a nationally known crime/criminal mind expert, dissects the JonBenet Ramsey ransom note left at the John and Patsy Ramsey home in Boulder, Colo., in 1996. (Greg Boll/Quad-City Times)

But Thomas McAninch did what any good criminologist would: he carefully committed as many details as possible to his memory.

(SNIP)

He said it was apparent from the beginning of the letter that a crime was being staged to look like something it was not.

“The author says they represent a ‘small foreign faction,’ but no self-respecting terrorist would consider themselves less that representative of the masses,” he said. “It also says ‘we respect your business,’ but would a foreign faction respect your business? You just don’t find this kind of thing in kidnapping notes,” he said.

Furthermore, he believes a sentence that states, “speaking to anyone about your situation will result in your daughter being beheaded,” also is an example of the author trying to speak as they believe a terrorist would.

And terms written in the letter like “fat cat” are idioms that would not be taught to a foreign person learning the language. For those reasons, he said it was easy to eliminate a person from the Middle East as the author of the ransom note.

“A profile does not predict the individual, it predicts the type of person, and more specifically, it eliminates people,” he explained.