06-12-2017, 04:43 PM
Before it gets lost, let me share a story that announced my likely demise. I contacted the author and let them know I am still alive and well. Thanks for caring. In the end, I could never decide if the reporter was just lazy or fishing for an interview which I declined to give.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In February 1997, a regular visitor to the popular online discussion forum Usenet had reached his limit. All the talk about JonBenét Ramsey, the six-year-old beauty queen recently found dead in her parents’ basement in Colorado, was driving him crazy. “I have been lurking, and occasionally posting, on this news group for over three years,” he wrote. “I am at the point of abandoning it, because it is *very* difficult to locate anything that is not a Ramsey post, and frankly, I am sick of this morbid crime and speculation.”
“It’ll all go away in a month or so,” counseled another.
/////////clip and onto the internet part//////////////////////
The internet was a different place when the case first broke open. The “World Wide Web”, as people quaintly called the internet in 1996, was more or less made up of text. There was no YouTube. There was no Facebook. There was, however, Usenet, a loose and difficult-to-navigate assortment of message boards. And after the JonBenét Ramsey case became a national obsession, curious minds gathered online to try and solve the case themselves, much in the same way as Serial or Making a Murderer. They uploaded documents and traded theories – and contacted authorities with their findings.
It was, in a sense, America’s first crowd-sourced murder mystery.
Within a month of the Ramsey case going public, journalists and law enforcement in Boulder were already saying they’d been inundated by emails from across the world, people hundreds of miles away who were sure they knew who killed JonBenét. By late 1997, USA Today was reporting that there were more than 2,000 webpages dedicated to solving the Ramsey case.
Digital sleuths
Factions formed quickly. Some unequivocally believed in the Ramseys. Others unequivocally believed the Ramseys were guilty. They pored over physical evidence. They constructed elaborate scenarios that fit just about any theory of the crime. Some were convinced that a servant must have been responsible – “the gardener did it.” Others made any number of claims about the Ramseys: their hobbies, their finances, their friends.
They argued, especially, about the ransom note. At two-and-a-half pages, it is believed by criminal justice experts to be the longest ever recorded. Whoever wrote it – the lettering is shaky and awkward – is believed to have been disguising their handwriting. All of the official handwriting experts who have ever opined in the case have excluded John Ramsey as the author of the note; the majority have never been able to link it to Patsy Ramsey, either. This has not stopped anyone from speculating about that on the internet from an armchair handwriting-analysis perspective.
None of it ever solved the case. Even after weeks of poring over old internet postings and webpages, I wasn’t able to locate a single piece of useful evidence that could definitively be said to have originated with internet users. Instead, the internet obsessives caused problems for officials working on the case, and became the the source of some of its more bizarre narratives.
Three years after the case opened, Bennett appeared on a CBS 48 hours segment about the case to discredit a so-called handwriting expert’s claim that Patsy Ramsey had written the ransom note. It was a curious choice for the television producers to make, given that Bennett herself had no expertise or evidence to counter the findings. She was a civilian, like anyone else who’d followed the Ramsey story – but there she was on national television, presenting herself as an authority. The only difference between Bennett and any other person who’d been closely following the case was that she’d shared her opinions online.
Bennett is just one example. Hundreds of JonBenét case obsessives scoured documents, then developed theories based on any name they came across. Even though their speculations were often deeply far-fetched, they had the power to affect people’s lives, so much so that at least one person took the matter to a court.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In February 1997, a regular visitor to the popular online discussion forum Usenet had reached his limit. All the talk about JonBenét Ramsey, the six-year-old beauty queen recently found dead in her parents’ basement in Colorado, was driving him crazy. “I have been lurking, and occasionally posting, on this news group for over three years,” he wrote. “I am at the point of abandoning it, because it is *very* difficult to locate anything that is not a Ramsey post, and frankly, I am sick of this morbid crime and speculation.”
“It’ll all go away in a month or so,” counseled another.
/////////clip and onto the internet part//////////////////////
The internet was a different place when the case first broke open. The “World Wide Web”, as people quaintly called the internet in 1996, was more or less made up of text. There was no YouTube. There was no Facebook. There was, however, Usenet, a loose and difficult-to-navigate assortment of message boards. And after the JonBenét Ramsey case became a national obsession, curious minds gathered online to try and solve the case themselves, much in the same way as Serial or Making a Murderer. They uploaded documents and traded theories – and contacted authorities with their findings.
It was, in a sense, America’s first crowd-sourced murder mystery.
Within a month of the Ramsey case going public, journalists and law enforcement in Boulder were already saying they’d been inundated by emails from across the world, people hundreds of miles away who were sure they knew who killed JonBenét. By late 1997, USA Today was reporting that there were more than 2,000 webpages dedicated to solving the Ramsey case.
Digital sleuths
Factions formed quickly. Some unequivocally believed in the Ramseys. Others unequivocally believed the Ramseys were guilty. They pored over physical evidence. They constructed elaborate scenarios that fit just about any theory of the crime. Some were convinced that a servant must have been responsible – “the gardener did it.” Others made any number of claims about the Ramseys: their hobbies, their finances, their friends.
They argued, especially, about the ransom note. At two-and-a-half pages, it is believed by criminal justice experts to be the longest ever recorded. Whoever wrote it – the lettering is shaky and awkward – is believed to have been disguising their handwriting. All of the official handwriting experts who have ever opined in the case have excluded John Ramsey as the author of the note; the majority have never been able to link it to Patsy Ramsey, either. This has not stopped anyone from speculating about that on the internet from an armchair handwriting-analysis perspective.
None of it ever solved the case. Even after weeks of poring over old internet postings and webpages, I wasn’t able to locate a single piece of useful evidence that could definitively be said to have originated with internet users. Instead, the internet obsessives caused problems for officials working on the case, and became the the source of some of its more bizarre narratives.
Quote:Take the case of Susan Bennett who went by the alias “Jameson” online. Bennett speculated so prolifically online on the popular Websleuths forum and on pages she herself set up, that she ended up becoming a figure in the case herself. Despite the fact that Bennett was a housewife living in North Carolina with no legal training whatsoever, her prolific online postings established her as an authority in the case. She was quoted in innumerable newspaper articles in the late 1990s and appeared on television. Bennett was the first online amateur sleuth to be given such a prominent platform. (Attempts to reach Bennett, if she is still alive, were unsuccessful. Her website is still up, but her email address is defunct and her common name makes her difficult to locate.)
Three years after the case opened, Bennett appeared on a CBS 48 hours segment about the case to discredit a so-called handwriting expert’s claim that Patsy Ramsey had written the ransom note. It was a curious choice for the television producers to make, given that Bennett herself had no expertise or evidence to counter the findings. She was a civilian, like anyone else who’d followed the Ramsey story – but there she was on national television, presenting herself as an authority. The only difference between Bennett and any other person who’d been closely following the case was that she’d shared her opinions online.
Bennett is just one example. Hundreds of JonBenét case obsessives scoured documents, then developed theories based on any name they came across. Even though their speculations were often deeply far-fetched, they had the power to affect people’s lives, so much so that at least one person took the matter to a court.