The American Spectator

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Karr Wreck

8.31.06 @ 12:01AM

RAMSEY GROTESQUERY
Re: William Tucker's Grotesque Ignorance Exposed:

I read of a Colorado ruling where inmates are allowed to have sex changes in prison at taxpayer expense. I believe this is Karr's motive for coming back -- to complete the procedure he started in Thailand.
-- Kram

You act as though it is unusual and/or unreasonable for someone to be "arrested on nothing more than his own words" as though that is a lousy standard for arrest. What kind of moronic district attorney would allow someone to confess to a crime but send them away until they could find sufficient evidence to get an indictment independent of the confession? (Of course, there is no state in the country where a confession wouldn't be sufficient to convict.) I understand that Mr. Karr is possibly delusional, but that doesn't mean you don't cool his heels until you get a handle on whether he did it or not.
-- Timothy S. Comer
Flower Mound, Texas

It seems that Mr. Tucker is the poster child for Grotesque Ignorance in his take on the Ramsey case.

Mr. Tucker seems to think that there is all this incriminating "evidence" in the Ramsey case and falls back on the old media assumptions that made this case a huge fiasco in the first place. Mr. Tucker seems to believe that it is weird that the person that left the ransom note knew that Ramsey was from the South, had his own business, and carried an attache case. What it says to me is that the culprit may very well have been someone that the family was acquainted with. I mean lots of business men carry attache cases, it would not be too hard to find out if a person ran his own business, and I don't think that Georgia drawls are that common in Boulder, Colorado.

As for it being suspicious that the family hired an attorney, I bet Mr. Tucker would have done the same thing if early on in an investigation he was publicly accused by the police of having something to do with the murder of his own child. That would have a huge effect on any interaction with the cops that a reasonable person had with them, as they had decided that one of the parents had committed the murder!

To the matter of John Ramsey finding the body, the cops had access to the room that Jon-Benet was found in before they sent John Ramsey to search the basement for his daughter. They found that the door to the room was stuck and instead of trying to open the door, they just skipped the room. Now if you have a police force that is too damned lazy to pull open a stuck door while searching for a missing child, how much better do you really think the rest of the investigation is going to go?

The cops screwed the case up from the beginning by not trying to immediately interview the Ramsey family, by allowing all sorts of people to come in and out of their crime scene, and by making their decision about guilt without conducting a complete investigation.

Now, sadly it seems that Mr. Tucker has succumbed to the same type of tunnel vision that the Boulder Police had in their "investigation." Mr. Tucker seems to be saying that since he thinks the Ramsey's did it...then they did it! I honestly have come to expect way better than this from TAS and its contributors. This has generally been where I could get well-informed, well-reasoned commentary and this particular article is a disappointment to me.

For a good synopsis of the Jon-Benet Ramsey case, check out one that tells the whole story.
-- The Flagwaver

I am concerned about the social response to the John Mark Karr incident. This man has a reputation for being obsessed with little girls, including JonBenet, and admitted to killing her. Many people are saying we should not have brought this man in for an investigation, but what would these people have us do? Would it better to find a suspect who admits to the crime and then do nothing about it? Such an act would draw even more criticism.

Bringing that man in for questioning was the right thing to do. I believe that those who are critical of the Boulder Police for doing so are simply grinding their axe with hindsight and speculation, an easy thing to do when one is distant from the case itself. Let's stop being so critical of the investigators and thank them for working hard at bringing a killer to justice, even after ten years.
-- Adam Jones
Arlington, Texas

When William Tucker wrote "What the whole incident revealed is the grotesque ignorance of the American press," he gave them too much credit. His statement implies that if the press were only aware of the facts, then they wouldn't have created the Karr fiasco.

Instead, it's not a question of the press' ignorance but rather their whorish predisposition to do absolutely anything for good copy. After all, why let such moldy concepts like truth and virtue get in the way of a story?

What the whole incident revealed is the grotesque appetite of the American people for such reporting.
-- Kitty Myers
Painted Post, New York

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