Patty Limerick

[jameson245]

http://www.boulderdailycamera.com/extra/ramsey/1996/12/29-1.html
Details still elusive in slaying
By ALLI KRUPSKI
r
December 29, 1996

Patty Limerick, who lives across the street from the Ramseys, said the murder concerns her as well. She learned of the crime when she returned home Thursday night from her parents' 60th wedding anniversary party in California.

"It's very disturbing because something terrible happened to an innocent human being," she said. "The neighborhood has always been very pleasant, safe and convivial."

So who is she? 

Patty Limerick is the Faculty Director and Chair of the Board of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, where she is also a Professor of History. Limerick has dedicated her career to bridging the gap between academics and the general public and to demonstrating the benefits of applying historical perspective to contemporary dilemmas and conflicts. In January 2016 Governor Hickenlooper named Limerick as the Colorado State Historian. In addition, in January 2016 she was appointed to the National Endowment for the Humanities advisory board, the National Council on the Humanities. Patty was nominated by President Obama in Spring 2015 and was confirmed by the United States Senate in November 2015.

[jameson245]

DOI Page 232

"On December 6, 1997, an article in the New York Times brought an issue to light on the national scene that should have started to unravel the police mask of competence. A University of Colorado history professor, Patricia Limerick, who lived directly across the street from our house at 755 Fifteenth Street, was interviewed. In this particular story Patricia said, "My husband and I have never interviewed by the police. For weeks I assumed it was a measure of how well the police doing. Now, I am not so sure. " Eleven months have passed since the murder, and the neighborhood around our former house had never been completely canvassed. Where were the police? Patricia Limerick was asking the right questions.

A few days later, another telling story hit the newspapers, reporting that the police had been asking our friends if they owned shoes or boots with the brand SAS or Hi-Tec. We did not own either brand, and the police were trying to explain away the footprint they had found in the cellar near JonBenet's body. Obviously, the SAS or Hi-Tech footprint could be an important piece of evidence.

The police also began the task of collecting palm prints and mouth swabs to follow up on the prints and genetic material found in the basement and on JonBenet's body. Our friends and their children were approached by the cops and asked to give samples. It had certainly taken the BPD a long time to get around to gathering this important evidence, Patsy and I thought. Yet we felt sorry for our friends. Many of them had to submit to this kind of examination, which obviously was an annoyance. (We wondered if the police were doing the same sampling on the suspects we had given them.) The police, we were later to learn, were mostly trying to explain away the evidence they had found that contradicted their theory that "the Ramseys did it"," in order to eliminate any defense strategy."