Second murder in the JonBenet Ramsey circus?

A few days ago, I was reading a book about unsolved murder cases, pretty standard stuff. There was a short bit in it about the Ramsey murder, but it had a few details I either never knew or had long forgotten - regardless, I had some time on my hands, so I decided to solve the Ramsey case.

Did I? No... I still have my same original thoughts on the matter, and those are of little relevance. I may, however, have come upon a string of coincidence too powerful to ignore. A conspiratorial task force, guilty at the least of being blindly biased and completely not helpful to the investigation, at worst, guilty of murder.

Alright, let's do this.

- JBR was killed late Dec. 25 or early Dec. 26, 1996.
- In 1998, the Boulder police department hired retired investigator Lou Smit to help on the case. Smit had helped solve some similar crimes in the past (or as similar as cases get to this mess).
- After a few months, Smit quit, claiming the BPD was focusing too narrowly on the Ramseys and not enough on his lone outsider theory.
- Smit then took a job working for the Ramseys. It's pretty highly questionable to go from having privileged law enforcement knowledge of the case to working for the two top suspects. "Questionable" here would mean "illegal" in most cases.
- The Ramseys hire quite a few other retired investigators and a few more lawyers, like Ollie Grey, John San Agustin, and Ellis Armistead.
- The Ramseys also hire a famous psychic to help find the murderer. That psychic is Dorothy Allison. She works with police sketch artists to come up with a drawing that looks quite a bit like John Mark Karr. Comparison
- Michael Tracy, professor of journalism at the University of Colorado, makes a number of documentaries about the case, appears in several news interviews, and basically just interjects himself wherever he can into the public limelight over the JBR case. In one documentary, Tracy talks about a prime suspect, but doesn't give a name. The film does, however, show a picture of the case file, with the number clearly visible and easily referenced. This was the first that John Steven Gigax would be tied to the case.
- Gigax was linked to another person of interest in the case, Micheal Helgoth. Helgoth is important.

I need to list a few problems in Lou Smit's theory before moving on. Smit believed that someone knocked JonBenet unconscious with a stun gun, due to two sets of identical abrasions on her body, two small red squares, spaced like that of a stun gun's diodes. For one, no one has been able to come up with anyone ever being knocked unconscious by a stun gun, that's not what they do, and even if it did rarely happen, no one would could expect to use it to that end. Two, the marks on her body don't resemble stun gun burns. Too dark, too deep, and too still. When you get stunned, you jerk around and flail, so stun gun burns are always streaks, never dots.

Smit also liked to rely on evidence that either never existed or was explained in some other way. One example is the foot print on the suitcase. He's the only one who ever saw it, and he saw it in photos only, but it was important to his theory. Also, the palm print on the cellar door, which turned out to belong to JBR's half-sister, is *still* used today by people to rule out her parents as suspects. The Hi-Tec boot prints turned out to be her brother Burke's, but still factored into Smit's theory of a lone outsider.

I'd also like to note that despite the repeated idea that she was killed during a sexual assault, her vaginal abrasions were minimal and her hymen was mostly intact. No foreign DNA was found in or on her body, just her clothing. The slight tear of the hymen is believed to have been caused by the handle of a paint brush, consistent with a staging, not with a sexual assault.

Alright, Michael Helgoth, and the reason I'm writing this post:

Police were introduced to Helgoth when his "friend" John Kenady gave the police a pair of boots like the ones from the JBR case and said he knew who killed her. He said he found them after he had "permission" from the police to investigate the JBR murder. The police obviously deny this.

Here's the good part. Helgoth was already dead. He committed suicide... by shooting himself in the chest... with his left hand... through a pillow... after surrounding himself with 1) his Hi-Tec boots, 2) his stun gun, and 3) a baseball cap his family had never seen before with the letters "S.B.T.C." on it - the signature on the ransom note.

Wow. A right handed guy shoots himself in the chest with his left hand, after surrounding himself with things that no-one but the Ramseys' "special investigators" thought had anything to do with the case. Helgoth's friend, John Gigax, would go on to take the brunt of Michael Tracy's finger-pointing wrath. Well, before it was proven that Gigax was out of the state that Christmas at least.

The coroner never thought there was stun gun. The forensic experts never thought there was a stun gun. The stun gun company experts proved the marks couldn't have been from a stun gun. And stun guns can't knock you unconscious. But that didn't stop Helgoth's stun gun from figuring in prominently to his bizarre, highly suspicious suicide.

An odd remark made by an internet forum poster about Helgoth's death struck me, they mentioned it was odd that he'd shoot himself through a pillow, since he would often discharge weapons freely on his property. Then someone commented that maybe he knew something about forensics and was trying to reduce the blood spatter. Odd for many reasons, but mostly because there was blood spatter - on his left hand, his supposed firing hand, the hand that was on the wrong side of the pillow. Of course, the idea that *whoever* was responsible had some forensic-mindedness is also interesting.

The Helgoth autopsy was very brief. He was quickly cremated, and then his house was torn down, as part of a deal where the city purchased the family's home and junk yard. Helgoth didn't know the Ramseys, the Ramseys didn't know him, the boots weren't a match, and the DNA wasn't a match.

I'm almost done, I promise. Admittedly, this is where it starts to get a little out of hand, so I'll just say stuff and let you work it out for yourself.

Smit retired from the El Paso county sheriff's office, where he used to work with John San Agustin. Ollie Grey was an El Paso private investigator. Smit had worked with Dorothy Allison on the Heather Dawn Church case back in El Paso. Michael Tracy is a professor of journalism at the University of Colorado, and worked along side Bill Reynolds, a UofC journalism professor. Reynolds was a family friend of the Ramseys' and even played Santa for the children in 1996. Tracy claimed to get information from both the BPD and from Lou Smit's team. And sure enough, of all the people in the world who could have exchanged emails, it was Tracy who brought John Mark Karr to the police's attention, over comments made in an email, after the two had been exchanging emails for years. Karr, of course, knew nothing about the case, had the facts wrong, and didn't match the DNA, nor the profile of a violent sadistic pedophile murderer, but instead insisted that he had been in love with JonBenet and basically just wasted police time and money.

Every single weird thing in this case comes back to the same two people, Lou Smit and Michael Tracy. No one takes Tracy seriously anymore after all the times he was so incredibly off-base when trying to force the evidence to force Smit's theory. The fact that the two of them traded information and have collaborated with each other on several documentaries only makes it more suspicious.

Was Karr a long term setup? Maybe. It's shady but I can't say anything for sure.

Helgoth, on the other hand, REEKS of setup. Here's a guy not tied to any of this in any way, other than that he had a criminal record, who ends up killing himself in one of the most awkward ways after setting evidence that would incriminate him, *only* in Smit's version of the events (which have repeatedly been proven false in almost every capacity), within several feet of his final resting position. A lot of people have speculated that Helgoth was killed by a friend, a co-conspirator, or the real murderer. No one seems to have thought the evidence points towards someone who will apparently stop at nothing to see that Lou Smit's theory prevails (and thus the Ramseys' innocence).

There are plenty of odd coincidences left in this case, but I've said what I wanted to say.