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+--- Thread: Steve Thomas (/showthread.php?tid=1382)
Steve Thomas - jameson245 - 02-15-2019
Steve Thomas read his theory into the record for his deposition in Wolf v Ramsey. This is what he wrote in his book
20 A. "'I believe she committed the
21 murder' I told Smit and proceeded to lay out
22 what I thought had happened ...
23 "In my hypothesis, and approaching
24 fortieth birthday, the busy holiday season, an
25 exhausting Christmas Day, and an argument with
175
1 JonBenet had left Patsy frazzled. Her
2 beautiful daughter, whom she frequently
3 dressed almost as a twin, had rebelled
4 against wearing the same outfit as her
5 mother.
6 "When they came home, John Ramsey
7 helped Burke put together a Christmas toy.
8 JonBenet, who had not eaten much at the
9 Whites' party, was hungry. Her mother let
10 her have some pineapple, and then the kids
11 were put to bed. John Ramsey read to his
12 little girl. Then he went to bed. Patsy
13 stayed up to prepare for the trip to Michigan
14 the next morning, a trip she admittedly did
15 not particularly want to make.
16 "Later JonBenet awakened after
17 wetting her bed, as indicated by the plastic
18 sheets, the urine stains, the pull-up diaper
19 package hanging halfway out of a cabinet, and
20 the balled-up turtleneck found in the
21 bathroom. I concluded that the little girl
22 had worn the red turtleneck to bed, as her
23 mother originally said, and that it was
24 stripped off when it got wet.
25 "As I told Smith, I never believed
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1 the child was sexually abused for the
2 gratification of the offender but that the
3 vaginal trauma was some sort of corporal
4 punishment. The dark fibers found in her
5 pubic region could have come from the violent
6 wiping of a wet child. Patsy probably yanked
7 out the diaper package in cleaning up
8 JonBenet.
9 "Patsy would not be the first
10 mother to lose control in such a situation.
11 One of the doctors we consulted cited
12 toileting issues as a textbook example of
13 causing a parental rage. So, in my
14 hypothesis, there was some sort of explosive
15 encounter in the child's bathroom sometime
16 prior to one o'clock in the morning, the time
17 suggested by the digestion rate of the
18 pineapple found in the child's stomach. I
19 believed JonBenet was slammed against a hard
20 surface, such as the edge of a tub,
21 inflicting a mortal head wound. She was
22 unconscious, but her heart was still beating.
23 Patsy would not have known that JonBenet was
24 still alive, because the child already
25 appeared to be dead. The massive head trauma
177
1 would have eventually killed her.
2 "It was the critical moment in
3 which she either had to call for help or
4 find an alternative explanation for her
5 daughter's death. It was accidental in the
6 sense that the situation had developed without
7 motive or premeditation. She could have
8 called for help but chose not to. An
9 emergency room doctor probably would have
10 questioned the 'accident' and called the
11 police. Still, little would have happened to
12 Patsy in Boulder. But I believe panic
13 overtook her.
14 "John and Burke continued to sleep
15 while Patsy moved the body of JonBenet down
16 to the basement and hid her in the little
17 room.
18 "As I pictured the scene, her
19 dilemma was that the police would assume the
20 obvious if a six- year old child was found
21 dead in a private home without any
22 satisfactory explanation. Patsy needed a
23 diversion and planned the way she thought a
24 kidnapping should look.
25 "She returned upstairs to the
178
1 kitchen and grabbed her tablet and a
2 felt-tipped pen," and flipping "to the middle
3 of the tablet, and started a ransom note,
4 drafting one that ended on page 25. For
5 some reason she discarded that one and ripped
6 pages 17-25 from the tablet. Police never
7 found those pages.
8 "On page 26, she began the
9 'Mr. and Mrs. I,' then also abandoned that
10 false start. At some point she drafted the
11 long ransom note. By doing so, she created
12 the government's best piece of evidence.
13 "She then faced the major problem
14 of what to do with the body. Leaving the
15 house carried the risk of John or Burke
16 awakening at the sounds and possibly being
17 seen by a passerby or a neighbor. Leaving
18 the body in the distant, almost inaccessible,
19 basement room was the best option.
20 "As I envisioned it, Patsy
21 returned to the basement, a woman caught up
22 in panic, where she could have seen--perhaps
23 by detecting a faint heartbeat or a sound or
24 a slight movement--that although completely
25 unconscious, JonBenet was not dead. Others
179
1 might argue that Patsy did not know the child
2 was still alive. In my hypothesis, she took
3 the next step, looking for the closest
4 available items in ... desperation. Only
5 feet away was her paint tote. She grabbed a
6 paint brush and broke it to fashion the
7 garrote with some cord." She then -- "then
8 she looped the cord around the girl's neck.
9 "In my scenario, she choked
10 JonBenet from behind, with a grip on her
11 broken paintbrush handle, pulling the
12 ligature. JonBenet, still unconscious, would
13 never have felt it. There are only four
14 ways to die: suicide, natural, accidental,
15 or homicide. This accident, in my opinion,
16 had just become a murder.
17 "Then the staging continued to
18 make it look like a kidnapping. Patsy tied
19 the girl's wrists in front, not in" the
20 "back, for otherwise the arms would not have
21 been in" the "overhead position. But with a
22 fifteen-inch length of cord between the wrists
23 and the knot tied loosely over the clothing,
24 there was no way such a binding would have
25 restrained a live child. It was a symbolic
180
1 act to make it appear the child had been
2 bound.
3 "Patsy took considerable time with
4 her daughter, wrapping her carefully in the
5 blanket and leaving her with a favorite pink
6 nightgown." As "the FBI had told us ... a
7 stranger would not have taken such care.
8 "As I told Lou, I thought that
9 throughout the coming hours, Patsy worked on
10 her staging, such as placing the ransom note
11 where she would be sure to 'find' it the
12 next morning. She placed the tablet on the
13 countertop right beside the stairs and" put
14 "the pen in the cup.
15 "While going through the drawers"
16 and "under the countertop" -- "While going
17 through the drawers under the countertop where
18 the tablet had been, she found rolls of tape.
19 She placed a strip from a roll of duct tape
20 across JonBenet's mouth. There was bloody
21 mucous under the tape, and a perfect set of
22 the child's lip prints, which did not
23 indicate a tongue impression or resistance.
24 "I theorized that Patsy, trying to
25 cover her tracks, took the remaining cord,
181
1 tape, and the first ransom note out of the
2 house that night, perhaps dropping them into
3 a nearby storm sewer or among the Christmas
4 debris in wrappings in a neighbor's trash
5 can.
6 "She was running out of time.
7 The household was scheduled to wake up early
8 to fly to Michigan, and in her haste, Patsy
9 Ramsey did not change clothes, a vital
10 mistake. With the clock ticking, and hearing
11 her husband moving around upstairs, she
12 stepped over the edge.
13 "The way I envisioned it, Patsy
14 screamed, and John Ramsey, coming out of the
15 shower, responded, totally unaware of what had
16 occurred. Burke, awakened by the noise
17 shortly before six o'clock in the morning,
18 came down to find out what had happened and
19 was sent back to bed as his mother talked to
20 the 911 emergency dispatcher.
21 "Patsy Ramsey opened the door to
22 Officer Rick French at about 5:55 a.m. on the
23 morning of December 26, 1996, wearing a red
24 turtleneck sweater and black pants, the same
25 things she had worn to a party the night
182
1 before. Her hair was done, and her makeup
2 was on. In my opinion, she had never been
3 to bed.
4 "The diversion worked for seven
5 hours as the Boulder police thought they were
6 dealing with a kidnapping.
7 "John Ramsey, in my hypothetical
8 scenario, probably first grew suspicious while
9 reading the ransom note that morning, which
10 was why he was unusually quiet. He must
11 have seen his wife's writing mannerisms all
12 over it, everything but her signature. But
13 where was his daughter?
14 "He said in his police interview
15 that he went down to the basement when
16 Detective Arndt noticed him missing. I
17 suggested that Ramsey found JonBenet at that
18 time and was faced with the dilemma of his
19 life. During the next few hours, his
20 behavior changed markedly as he desperately
21 considered his few options--submit to the
22 authorities or try to control the situation.
23 He had already lost one child, Beth, and now
24 JonBenet was gone too. Now Patsy was
25 possibly in jeopardy.
183
1 "The stress increased steadily
2 during the morning, for Patsy, in my theory,
3 knew that no kidnapper was going to call by
4 ten o'clock, and after John found the body,
5 he knew that too. So when Detective Linda
6 Arndt told him to search the house, he used
7 the opportunity and made a beeline for the
8 basement.
9 "Then tormented as he might be, he
10 chose to protect his wife. Within a few
11 hours, the first of his many lawyers was in
12 motion, the private investigators a day later.
13 "That's the way I see it, I said
14 to Lou Smit." That's how evidence -- "That's
15 how the evidence fits to me. She made
16 mistakes, and that's how we solve crimes,
17 right? I reminded him of his own favorite
18 saying: 'Murders are usually what they
19 seem.'".