Stephen Singular's Blog, page 2

JonBenet Ramsey News

            In the spring of 2009, I posted something on my website about Boulder's JonBenet Ramsey murder case, which got a far bigger and more heated response than anything else I've written on a blog. Some readers agreed with what I said, but others vehemently did not; armchair experts from coast to coast e-mailed to tell me how foolish and misguided I was in actually believing that the case remained unsolved -- they'd figured it out years ago. I was surprised by the passions the 12-year-old murder still stirred among those interested in the crime. I was contacted by several people with information possibly related to the case. It came from Florida, Hawaii, New Jersey, Colorado, and abroad. Most of it was about a sexual underground in Boulder and surrounding areas at the time of crime. It involved adult activity, but also child pornography and the sexual abuse of both young boys and girls. Despite all the publicity about the case, virtually none of this information became public during the first few years of the Ramsey investigation. There's been little reason to believe that the Boulder Police Department had ever looked deeply into these leads.

            I've always felt that one reason the homicide was never solved is that Boulder's power structure did not want these underground elements to surface -- unless the local DA could make a successful case against one or two individuals and limit the damage to the city's reputation. Since 1996, JonBenet's murder itself has almost fallen into the background; what's become as prominent and disturbing is why the case wasn't broadly investigated and why so many leads were never seriously pursued.

            Numerous other young victims of sexual abuse remain in the area, but were ignored following the murder. They've spoken with civilian investigators about their experience and provide an unsettling backdrop to Boulder in the years before the Ramsey case erupted. In recent years, several people have come forward and told me about other neglected leads. Since early 2009, some hard information has been passed along to the BPD -- and now, eighteen months later, there's news out of Boulder that the police have been keeping the case alive and conducting new interviews. Let's hope they've started looking at things, and at people, dismissed in the past. When authorities fail to act, only civilians are left to try to move cold cases forward. That isn't how the system is supposed to work, but has it ever come close to working in Boulder regarding this homicide? From the beginning, the Boulder police seemed determined to nail Patsy Ramsey or nobody. Since 1996, they've gotten exactly nobody.

            As for me not solving the case yet when so many others have, it might be good to remember one thing: This is the only known murder in human history in which a body and a ransom note were found in the same location. There are reasons for this odd fact that we're still uncovering -- reasons that don't make it a simple crime.

            Now, in October 2010, new developments are surfacing in the Ramsey murder and the case may lurch forward again. I'll be talking about some of these developments on MSNBC on Monday, October 4, 2010, at 2:15 Eastern time. 

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Columbine/Teaching Non-Violence

April 20, 2009, was the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School, just a few miles from my Denver home. My wife, Joyce, and I visited the school a few days after the shootings and my lasting image of the event was seeing the adults kneel down in the springtime mud and sob, mystified over why our children were killing one another. In recent weeks leading up to this ten-year milestone, America has seen an outburst of mass killings -- in Pittsburgh, Oakland, Seattle, upstate New York, and elsewhere. They've occurred inside a church, a medical facility, and an immigration center. What they all have in common with Columbine is that they've been driven not by any form of personal gain, but purely by emotion. Feelings of rage erupted into gunfire and, in several cases, the killer ended up dead, just like at Columbine. 

            When kids go to school across the United States, they are forced, year after year, to learn about the abstractions of algebra and the complexities of biology or chemistry, but no one teaches them how to manage their emotions. To my knowledge, there are no mandatory classes about dealing with shame, guilt, fear, confusion, abusive comparisons, anger, and jealousy. Students aren't given good alternatives to self-judgment and self-hatred. With a trillion or so dollars on the table to bail out the auto and financial industries, and trillions more spent on the U.S. military, maybe a few bucks devoted to this kind of instruction would save the lives of people we love in the future.

            My 1994 book, Sweet Evil, tells the story of Jennifer Reali, a 28-year-old Colorado Springs wife and mother of two young daughters, who had an affair with Brian Hood, a 32-year-old Prudential salesman, born-again Christian, and father of three young children. During several months, he convinced Jennifer, a sensitive and intelligent woman, that God would never forgive her for their adultery, but wouldn't mind if she dressed up in her husband's army clothes and gunned down his wife, Dianne. Jennifer did just that and two days later walked into the Colorado Springs police station and confessed everything. She got life in prison, while Brian was eligible for parole after a dozen years.

            Prior to the murder, Jennifer had never been in legal trouble or barely had a traffic ticket. She was, according to those who knew her best, a "normal" person who exploded into violence for a few seconds and then returned to herself, crying uncontrollably and apologizing to everyone for what she'd done. It was almost as if she expected the legal system to forgive her after she came to her senses, but it didn't and she's now in the 19th year of her sentence. My wife and I visit her at the Colorado Women's Correctional Facility in Denver and we've gotten to know her and her family. She wants to write about her experience and we're assisting her.

            Over the course of writing ten books about crime, I've come to think of evil not as a person, place or thing, but as a process that ends in tragedy. We're trying to get Jennifer to break down the steps of that process. And to show readers what led her to abuse herself emotionally, first with her husband and then with Brian, and to show how a bright and decent human being can turn into a monster because he or she has no emotional intelligence. Maybe a piece of writing like this could help us understand how someone with no criminal past and no criminal tendencies can gradually turn into a death machine. It might even help deter a future killer. Who knows? Perhaps one day our culture will begin to value this kind of knowledge as much as photosynthesis and higher math.             

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How Lucky We Are

 

               My son is a senior in high school and has been assigned to read a series of Great Books produced by mankind over the past several centuries. One is the 1865 classic, Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. A few weeks ago, he bought a copy and put in on his bedroom floor (he'll read it later in the school year). One evening I picked it up and began perusing the story from page one. I recalled reading the book, or at least parts of it, about 30 years ago, but as often happens I was startled by how little I could remember of what I'd read back in the 1970s. The only thing familiar to me was that the plot followed the adventures of the young Raskolnikov as he made his way around St. Petersburg before committing a murder.

               As I began reading in 2010, I was struck again and again by one aspect of the book: the extreme poverty the author had chronicled on almost every page. The plot is slow by today's standards, and the writing can appear overdone in places, but Dostoevsky was brilliant at describing what it's like to be abjectly poor -- too poor to eat. You feel this condition of the characters, and the feeling accumulates and thickens as you go further into the book. It isn't clear if this was primarily what Dostoevsky was trying to convey to 19th Century readers, but it slams a 21st Century reader in the face. Crime and Punishment had a tone of misery and despair due to poverty that's almost overwhelming.

               Did people really live in such desperate circumstances, you ask yourself, 150 years ago in Russia and Europe? How did they survive with almost nothing in terms of material goods -- only rags for clothing, only one tiny room to themselves, basically no furniture, and constantly in a state of hunger? Then you think about our lives today and all the computers we own, all the cars and all the garages full of tools and other knickknacks, all the Ipods, Ipads, Blackberries, cell phones, flat-screen TVs, and everything else that's sprung up within the past decade and become for many of us virtual necessities. We think nothing of getting on an airplane and flying across the country, or even across the ocean. What we're now doing every day would have been not just unimaginable a century and half ago, but impossible. We aren't merely living like gods, in terms of our recent past, but acting like them when hurtling through the sky at 600 miles an hour. 

               The grinding poverty of Crime and Punishment made a far deeper impression on me than the legal, moral, and religious questions Dostoevsky was painstakingly laying out in the novel -- the things the book is really known for. This is not meant to diminish the poverty that still pervades parts of America and many pockets of humanity around the world. People are dying of hunger every day, and there may be more humans suffering now, in terms of sheer numbers, than in the 1860s. My point has more to do with the intended and unintended value of a work of literature that can survive for a lengthy period of time (history, it's been said, is reflected nowhere so well as in the handful of fictional writings that have lasted and truly captured a given time and place). It's one thing to read a scholarly tome about the conditions in Russia that led up to the revolution of 1917 and produced the Soviet Union. It's quite another to see and to feel a great writer creating or re-creating those same conditions in ways that makes one squirm and feel terribly conscious of the fabulous wealth generated for many people during the past hundred years. Some of us are fortunate beyond belief.

               Dostoevsky has made me appreciate more what I have in my own life, and to focus less on what I think I might be missing. That alone is a religious/spiritual experience, even though it may have never occurred to the author that he'd transmit such a perception/feeling to future generations. All writing is an act of faith -- a belief that it can affect someone you'll never meet, or someone living long after you're dead. What better gift than to be reminded that your life is a wonder that people from past centuries could not have conceived of? After that thought comes a wave of humility and we all need a good dose of that about every other day. 

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How Lucky We Are

               My son is a senior in high school and has been assigned to read a series of Great Books produced by mankind over the past several centuries. One is the 1865 classic, Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. A few weeks ago, he bought a copy and put in on his bedroom floor (he'll read it later in the school year). One evening I picked it up and began perusing the story from page one. I recalled reading the book, or at least parts of it, about 30 years ago, but as often...

How Lucky We Are

My son is a senior in high school and has been assigned to read a series of Great Books produced by mankind over the past several centuries. One is the 1865 classic, Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. A few weeks ago, he bought a copy and put in on his bedroom floor (he doesn't have to read it till later in the school year). One evening I picked it up and began perusing the story from page one. I recalled reading the book, or at least parts of it, about 30 years ago, but as often...

Who Is President Obama?

 

               When Barack Obama was running for President, I kept waiting for him to deliver his vision for the American future. If elected, what did he want the country to look like nationally and internationally in ten to twenty years? What did he want to stop spending money on -- and to start spending money on? What did he feel was the appropriate use of power abroad, with the U.S. currently entangled in an economic crisis and two wars that appeared to have no end? When I...

Who Is President Obama?

               When Barack Obama was running for President, I kept waiting for him to deliver his vision for the American future. What did he want the country to look like nationally and internationally, if he got elected, in ten to twenty years? What did he want to stop spending money on and to start spending money on? What did he feel was the appropriate use of power abroad, with the U.S. currently entangled in two wars that appeared to have no end in sight? When I mentioned all...

The ADD Society

               In the past several weeks, two huge media events have occurred, which isn't to say that everyone is talking about them. In fact, few people who fall within the category of "the mainstream population and media" seem to be discussing them at all. But that's to be expected in today's sound-bite culture; the stories are by now about 15 days old and have long since been replaced by other headlines. The first was "The Washington Post's" publication of its two-year study of...

The ADD Society

In the past few weeks two huge media events have occurred, which is not to say that they are what everyone is talking about. In fact, few people that fall within the category of "the mainstream population and media" seem to be discussing them at all. I guess that's to be expected in today's sound-bite culture; the two stories are by now about 15 days old and have long since been replaced by other headlines. The first was "The Washington Post's" publication of its two-year study of...

Warren Jeffs' Conviction Overturned

It comes as a shock to learn today that the Utah Supreme Court has overturned Warren Jeffs' 2007 conviction of accomplice to rape. The jury had found him guilty of forcing 14 year old Elissa Wall into marrying her first cousin. Jeffs' attorneys had always contended that their client was being persecuted solely for his religious beliefs and that Utah was trying to send a message to the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS) located in the southern part of the state. Most have believed that...