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From Lisa Ryckman story
#1
   

For Pam Griffin, a friend of Patsy Ramsey's who designed many of JonBenet's pageant costumes, it has been a year of proving herself a true and loyal friend -- but not without a cost.

This has taken from me a vulnerability I had hoped never to lose,'' said Griffin, who has often found herself as Patsy's lone defender on television talk shows.

A person who always greeted others with a hug, Griffin now tends to keep her distance; trust takes time.

"Now I just don't feel comfortable around a lot of people, and I always felt comfortable around everybody,'' she said. "I resent the tabloid media taking from me the right to be vulnerable if that's what I choose to do. That was something I hoped to keep all my life.''

The endless video loop of JonBenet in pageants, decked out in elaborate costumes designed by Griffin, has brought her some new clients, although she lost more than $30,000 in business from customers who disapproved of her Geraldo appearances. But despite the seemingly universal criticism of kiddie pageantry, the Colorado pageant circuit is booming -- thanks in part to JonBenet.


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#2
That clip from the newspaper article shows a couple things. First, it is clear Pam and her daughter believe it was an intruder who killed JonBenet - second, there was a price to be paid for going against the Ramsey lynch mob (the BORG).
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#3
More from the same article:


Kristine Griffin, JonBenet's 19-year-old modeling coach, sometime-babysitter and dear friend, still suffers from the loss of her protege.

"This has been way too painful for her,'' said her mother, Pam Griffin. "JonBenet just adored Kristine, and the feeling was completely mutual.''

In recent weeks, Kristine has cried at the mention of JonBenet's name on television and has had vivid nightmares about her.

"I need to tell you what happened,'' JonBenet says to Kristine in her dreams. "I don't know who he is, but I saw his shoes.''

"If there was a way to communicate,'' Kristine said, "she might try to do it with me, just because we were so close, and she looked up to me. And maybe she would feel I would be the one she'd want to talk to.''
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#4
Quote:[Image: perfectmurderhardback.gif]1999-02-18: "Perfect Murder, Perfect Town, JonBenet and the City of Boulder"
Written by Lawrence Schiller, February 18, 1999


PMPT Page 25sb

"When Patsy's friend Pam Griffin got home in the early evening after exchanging some Christmas gifts at the Crossroads Mall in Boulder, she found several frantic messages on her answering machine: "I need to talk to you. Call the Ramsey house." The voice sounded like Patsy Ramsey or one of her sisters, Polly or Pam.

Then there was a quieter message, almost a whisper, from Patsy's friend, Priscilla White: "I can't talk to you about it over the phone-please call." Pam called Patsy's house and got her answering machine."



(SNIP)



PMPT Page 29sb

"At 10:00 P.M., Pam Griffin was watching the local news when they said something about the body of a little girl being found in a basement. When JonBenet's picture flashed on the TV screen, Pam grabbed her daughter, Kristine, told her guests she'd be back in a while, and drove to Patsy's house.

Pam and Kristine stood behind the yellow tape in the cold clear winter night and waited for Patsy to come outside. As they watched, a tiny black body bag was wheeled out on a stretcher. Pam asked about Patsy. Detective Larry Mason told her the Ramseys weren't there. Pam told Mason she was a friend of Patsy's-that she made beauty-pageant costumes for JonBenet. Mason asked her to come to police headquarters the next morning. Then Pam and Kristine left for their home in Longmont, twenty miles northeast of Boulder. No one had told them where Patsy was."



(SNIP)



PMPT Page 122sb

"During the winter of 1995 and the first months of 1996, JonBenet had competed in her first pageant, at the Twin Peaks Mall, just twenty minutes from Boulder. The judges ignored her. Not long afterward, Patsy entered JonBenet in the Colorado State All Star pageant in Denver. John, Patsy, Nedra, and Burke were in the audience to cheer her on.

Pam Griffin told the police that when she first spotted JonBenet performing at the All Star pageant, she saw that Patsy didn't know how to apply pageant makeup or style her daughter's hair. When JonBenet presented herself in front of the judges, she mouthed oohs and aahs and rolled her eyes in a very amateurish way. Even so, Pam thought she showed promise. Pam, who was there to watch another six-year-old whose costumes she'd designed, introduced herself to Patsy, and they realized they lived only twenty minutes from each other. Pam suggested that she could make a few alterations to the party dress JonBenet was wearing. Patsy accepted the offer. "Do whatever you need to do to make it look better," she said."



(SNIP)



PMPT Page 123sb

"In all, Pam Griffin made half a dozen outfits for JonBenet, some of which cost as much as $600. Several of the outfits were not typical pageant attire but more like theatrical costumes. One day Patsy's mother, Nedra, who occasionally came to Pam's house with Patsy, showed her a photograph of an outfit with marabou and glitter. Nedra said it was just right for "Patsy's doll baby," as she liked to call JonBenet. She thought it would be perfect for the "Anybody from Hollywood" category at the next pageant, where the children could dress as Shirley Temple or Charlie Chaplin or any other star-or, for example, a Las Vegas Ziegfeld Follies showgirl, which Nedra thought would be perfect for JonBenet."
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#5
Quote:[Image: presumedguilty.jpg]1999-06-00: Presumed Guilty: An Investigation into the Jon Benet Ramsey Case, the Media, and the Culture of Pornography by Stephen Singular (Author)

PG Page 109

"As time went on after the murder, Randy just became hysterical. It was odd because I'd never heard him cry before about anything. He began calling me late at night and saying that people were going to come out to where he lived and kill him. He had a wild, scary sound in his voice. Then he said something that really stopped me."

"What was that"

He said that he didn't have an alibi for the night of last December 25. 'Why do you need an alibi' I asked him. He wouldn't answer that question. I asked him where he was on Christmas night. He said that he didn't want to talk about it. In the past, he's always wanted to talk about everything."



(SNIP)



PG Page 115

"Two days after I spoke with Hunter about Randy Simons, Pam Griffin told me about a photograph Simons had taken of her daughter. It showed Kristine with a kite Simons had made himself. Attached to the kite was a white, nylonlike material bearing some resemblance to the cord that had been tied around JonBenet's wrist. During one of Simons' panicky late-night calls to Griffin, he had asked her if she recognized the material on the girl's wrist."
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#6
1999-10-15: Little girl gets lost in public image of beauty princess

Little girl gets lost in public image of beauty princess
By Cindy Brovsky
Denver Post Staff Writer

Oct. 15, 1999 - She is enshrined in the public's memory as a young, precocious blonde, prancing on the stage during child beauty pageants.

But JonBenet Ramsey was really a pretty typical 6-year-old girl, those who knew her say.

She liked kindergarten and was just starting to excel in math. She asked her family's landscaper questions about thorns on roses. She was eager for Santa Claus to visit on Christmas

"I can tell you that JonBenet was highly intelligent,'' Shirley Brady, a former Ramsey nanny, said Thursday. "Mrs. Ramsey taught her how to answer the phone when she was just 22 months old. I called once and she said, "Hello, who is this?' When I told her "Mrs. Brady,' she said in her tiny little voice, "Who is Mrs. Brady?' She remembered when I told her it was Nanny.''

Brady came to work for JonBenet's parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, when they were living in Atlanta in the late 1980s, before they moved to Boulder in 1991. She initially was hired when the couple's son, Burke, was born, and then she helped raise JonBenet until she was 6 months old.

"In the three years I was in that house, there was never an argument, never voices raised,'' Brady said.

That's why Brady, 72, says she never has wavered in her belief that the Ramseys are innocent - even though they have always been suspects in the girl's murder. On Wednesday, Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter announced that, after a year-long review of the case by a grand jury, no one would be charged in the case.

"I'd like to shake every one of the grand jurors' hands because they know this mother and father couldn't have hurt their child,'' Brady said. "Mrs. Ramsey survived cancer. Why would she kill the only little girl she would ever be able to have?''

In Lawrence Schiller's book "Perfect Murder, Perfect Town,'' friends are quoted saying that JonBenet's life was more than her beauty-pageant competitions.

Landscaper Brian Scott told Schiller how the little girl used to follow him around the family's Boulder yard asking numerous questions.

"Do roses know their thorns can hurt?'' she asked him one day.

Scott also remembers how JonBenet started to cry one day when she said she missed her father when he went on trips. But in the next minute, her playful side emerged.

"I saw JonBenet was scooping up the leaves from the top of the barrel and hurling them over her head into the wind,'' Scott recalled.

Barbara Kostanick's daughter attended school with JonBenet.

"I remember the first time I saw them together - they looked so cute playing on the monkey bars,'' she recalled in Schiller's book.

Pam Griffin, a seamstress who made JonBenet's pageant costumes, said the Ramseys had a loving relationship with their daughter.

"And then there was all the love in JonBenet's eyes when she spoke to her father,'' Griffin said. "Everything he said was important to her.''

Those kinds of memories don't surprise Brady. She said the Ramsey family were thoughtful of each other and very loving.

"The public never met the Ramseys, so they jump to these horrible conclusions that just aren't true,'' Brady said. "They were a loving family who never could have hurt each other. I know that is the truth.''
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#7
"Certain children just have a pageant look," says Pamela Griffin, a dressmaker in Boulder. Patsy Ramsey had asked Mrs Griffin, according to her account, to make JonBenet's outfits for 1997; her daughter, Christine, was teaching her modelling.

Mrs Griffin, for what she said was her first press interview, arrived at a Boulder hotel in a prim jacket suit, with brown hair set perfectly in place. She had brought, as asked, some photographs of her work, commissioned for the little beauty queens of Colorado and beyond. She would not, she said, discuss what JonBenet's mother paid her. In the last two weeks Mrs Griffin has had the searing experience of watching film of "Jon B", as she called her, wearing at least two of her outfits, including a pink "cowboy sweetheart" dress, played and replayed on television.

snip

 JonBenet was laid in her casket with the crown she won at a Christmas pageant shortly before her death. It was at that pageant that Mrs Griffin overheard Mr Ramsey telling his daughter that it was fine to be beautiful, but more important to develop her talent as "a special little girl from the inside out".
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