Concerned about what? The police not finding the body would make them concerned? Why??? If anything, it would work to their favor. Not finding a body would make it look like an actual kidnapping, and make their alleged fake note far less "clumsy." If someone accidentally kills their daughter and wants to conceal the crime, I have a hard time seeing how they would be concerned if the police didn't find the body.
So then they'd have a body to get rid of. Unless you are suggesting they should leave it rotting in the cellar.
I understand you don't see the evidence the same way I do. But you can't discount JR finding the body here by saying it doesn't make sense. When people stage a crime scene to cover up the accidental killing of their child (a not that rare of an event, sadly) you have people acting rashly, not necessarily rationally. If you stage the scene and expect the police to discover the scene you set up and they don't, you wouldn't reevaluate your plan, you'd find a way to have the scene discovered.
He could make his reaction authentic without finding the body himself. All finding the body himself does is cast suspicion upon himself.
And yet it has the opposite effect on your assessment.
Again I ask you: What scenario in which John Ramsey finds or is involved in finding the body would not be consistent with him "knowing where to look"? As far as I can tell, this is circular logic: John Ramsey found the body because he knew where to look. And the proof that he knew where to look is that he found the body.
I agree in and of itself, finding the body is not evidence of guilt. However, finding the body was consistent with knowing where it was.
It makes a lot of sense, particularly if the whole thing was a kidnapping gone bad. The items not found were consistent with what somebody would bring for a kidnapping: the duct tape, and the rope.
But not the paintbrushes. And not taking the child to the basement instead of out of the house. And not taking the time to fashion an elaborate garrote. And not smashing the kid's head and strangling the child. And not writing the ransom note including writing it twice. Why leave the body? Either you murder the kid and leave, or write the ransom note and take the child, dead or alive with you. Or you have a bizarre sex fantasy involving the garrote and you take the child to a location where you will have privacy and time. Why go to a middle room in the basement as well? That's like purposefully fleeing down a dead end.
You can take any number of single pieces of evidence here and say this isn't logical if [X] committed the murder. But when you look at the entire picture, there is no outsider hypothesis that fits all the evidence better than a family murder covered up.
Would an outsider murder the child in the bedroom? Upstairs where other family members were? It makes a bit of noise to crack a person's skull as badly as JBR's skull was fractured. Do you think the guy took the kid to the basement instead of going out the door? There was no murder scene found. So that means the killer had time to erase traces of the scene. That's not a guy in a hurry to leave. Why would he even bother given he was leaving the body behind?
The garrote was not made and brought to the room. JBR's hair was threaded through it. That means it was fashioned around the child's neck, not made and then wrapped around the neck.
I'd like to hear your hypothesis of how an outsider would have proceeded through the house, what occurred where and when that makes more sense than an accidental killing during physical abuse and a subsequent staged crime scene to cover it up. It's not hard, if you put the parents in as murderer and accomplice in the cover up. But try to do it with an intruder and you need a lot of stretching of the probable.
If there is "only one likely explanation" then we wouldn't be having this discussion. The reality is, the evidence is at least as consistent, if not more consistent, with an intruder. There is an obvious entry and exit point, items used in the crime not found in the house, DNA evidence found in three separate places both on the outside and in the panties of JonBenet's clothing, and so on. Lou Smit, a veteran detective hired by the Boulder Police to head the investigation team, looked at the evidence and believes it convincingly points to an intruder. John Douglas, a veteran FBI agent and serial killer expert, says the same. Judge Julie Carnes, a Federal Judge and former prosecutor, ruled there is "virtually no evidence" that the Ramseys murdered their child. Etc.
Some of that is political. Defense attorneys can always produce experts who say there's no evidence. The Ramsey's had some influence in that police department which could explain the opinions you note.
The DNA evidence of an unknown male was too small to also make sense. If he had gloves on, you wouldn't find it in the places it was found. If he didn't you'd have a lot more of it and maybe fingerprints. The amount of DNA we are talking about here is consistent with contamination from any number of sources, most likely on JBR's dirty hands.
Did the police find finger or glove prints? So did the guy wipe everything off he touched? That's a lot of cleanup.
The tape and rope being pieces within the house but not on their original spools is not hard to imagine. The Ramseys tossing the tape roll and/or rope source is not implausible.
I'm not going to stay it is an open and shut case either way, but claiming that there is "only one likely explanation" that fits the evidence is absurd.
We have different opinions on this.
