Autopsy

JONBENET RAMSEY AUTOPSY What is *THIS* Mark? WARNING GRAPHIC IMAGES

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The strangest mark in the Ramsey case is a large, dark red blotch high up on little JonBenet’s chest, more accurately where the chest ends and the neck and throat begins.

What is it?

From this angle we get a good idea about a lot of what was going on. We see one of those round abrasions, which here looks quite large and is there a twin but smaller abrasion just above her hair a few inches away?

We also see how the nylon cord has gotten mixed up in JonBenet’s hair, as well as the gold necklace she got for Christmas that year. On top of that, we see how the nylon cord initially made bruising lower down, and then as it tightened, it rode up to find the narrowest and softest part of the little girls’ throat.

Beside her open mouth we see mucous that appears to have flowed down one side of her face but not the other, suggesting how she was found [lying on her back] and how she was left [on her side or on her front] is part of the staging as well. It’s also possible that JonBenet initially died on her stomach, perhaps trying to crawl away which would also have given the perpetrator the ability to hit her on the top of her head.

What’s less clear about this image is that it appears JonBenet’s head is facing the ceiling, when the autopsy describes her head as turned to the right, something you’d do lying on your stomach, but not something you’d do lying on your back.

From this angle we have a much clearer view of the nylon cord and the gold necklace combining to form an almost single thread. We can also see very fine marks on her throat above and below the nylon, perhaps were JonBenet tried to dig her fingernails into her own skin and under the cord.

Is it possible that someone used some implement that was nearby, perhaps a knife or even a finger, maybe a key or even the front of a scissors, to try to wedge under the nylon string? If so, it was the gold chain that defeated this effort. If the string could theoretically be snipped, the chain would be a lot harder, especially given the way it was savagely digging into the soft skin of her neck.

It does make one wonder if that red blemish is a sign that someone made an effort to save JonBenet, a theory that holds hands with an electrified railway track being used – clumsily, and ineffectively of course – as a resuscitation device.

The image above provides yet another angle of the red blemish, and also reveals the terrible depth of the gouge created by the nylon cord.

Of course there is another possibility, and that’s if JonBenet was turned on all fours and struck on the head, she may have collapsed against something that was already lying on the floor, and that then created the mark. A shoe, a Christmas decoration, a toy train carriage, perhaps the remote control to a VCR.

If one of the last things JonBenet tried to do was remove the nylon cord around her neck, and if she died trying, one would imagine her fingers and hands would have been frozen in line with her chin and neck. Well, her hands are significantly higher, and above her head.

It’s tempting to imagine the little girl was bound and forced to lie supine, prone, vulnerable in this position, with her hands over her head, except it would have been impossible to strike her skull where it was struck if she was lying like this, flat on her back.

So how did her hands and arms end up in this position?

There are at least a couple of possibilities:

  1. When JonBenet was wiped down and her clothing changed, for example the big bloomers put on her, she was no longer alive so whoever did this may have needed someone else to hold her up. The wiping down may also have occurred after her body was initially discovered and touched , and after consultation with the book Mindhunter, which provided blueprints for how investigators search for microscopic evidence. So one possibility is that someone, perhaps wearing gloves and protective clothing, held JonBenet up under her arms, while someone else undressed, wiped her down and redressed her.
  2. Another less likely possibility is that JonBenet died on her front, and she was later dragged on the floor from point A to B, resulting in her hands and arms being pulled away from the body.
  3. A final possibility is that when John Ramsey carried JonBenet upstairs, he carried her stiff body in such a way that it sort of pushed her arms from whichever position they were in, stiffened by rigor mortis, to a slightly different position. In THE DEATH OF INNOCENCE John Ramsey describes picking JonBenet off the wine cellar floor “under her arms”.

Interestingly in the book John describes briefly trying to get a tight knot undone. This mirrors what we have been saying about someone trying but failing to undo something else – the cord. So that’s an interesting detail John puts in there. In the words of the autopsy however:

EXTERNAL EXAM:The decedent is clothed in a long sleeved whit knit collarless shirt, the mid anterior chest area of which contains an embroidered silver star decorate with silver sequins. Tied loosely around the right wrist, overlying the sleeve of the shirt is a white cord.

I’m confused. Where is this “tight knot” John is referring to? And why on Earth would some savage child predator tie a cord around JonBenet’s wrist “loosely”?

Now, if someone had tried to undo the ligature, they could have done with whatever tool the coroner used, because this is precisely what the coroner did to investigate the injury. He cut the cord.

Wrapped around the neck with a double knot in the midline of the posterior neck is a length of white cord similar to that described as being tied around the right wrist. This ligature cord is cut on the right side of the neck and removed.

So now an interesting question emerges – if the same cord was used around the wrist as the neck, and if the cord around both wrists was tied loosely, wasn’t the cord around the neck also tied loosely, as well. One can imagine in an accidental scenario, if JonBenet was unexpectedly wounded or frightened, and moved or reacted suddenly, the cord around her neck which theoretically held no danger, could tighten, and tighten in one direction, especially if a startled JonBenet or someone else stood on the other end of the toggle rope, or if JonBenet jerked suddenly while someone held the other end, the stick, and the string then suddenly tightened. The type of knot meant it would only tighten in one direction, and of course the nasty curveball of the situation was the gold necklace making a salvage of the situation almost impossible.

The autopsy also describes the unusual roughly triangular abrasion of unknown origin:

The area of abrasion and petechial hemorrhage of the skin of the anterior neck includes on the lower left neck, just to the left of the midline, a roughly triangular, parchment-like rust colored abrasion which measures 1.5 inches in length with a maximum width of 0.75 inches. This roughly triangular shaped abrasion is obliquely oriented with the apex superior and lateral.

What do you think it was? Do you think JonBenet’s killer tried to save her? And what if the killer had succeeded in removing the ligature, could she have survived the blow to her skull?

The Quoirins have requested a Second Autopsy, and still believe there was a “Criminal Element” in Nora’s Death

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Months after Nora Quoirin’s disappearance and death [from exposure and starvation] in the Malaysian jungle, the Quoirin’s are back in the news, demanding an inquest. This is something of a mismatch when, following Nora’s tragic death, the family asked for privacy, and demanded an end to speculation. When the offer was made to do a second autopsy, they rejected it.

But then they conducted one in Ireland. The results are still outstanding. Curiously in their statement to the media they’re doing the same thing the McCanns did – blaming the police for acting too slowly, and accusing the authorities of a botched investigation. If Nora was missing for 10 days, then an investigation delayed by ten minutes or ten hours wasn’t going to make much difference. They still have nine days to find her.

And while the Quoirins demanded the authorities focus their search far afield, Nora was ultimately found very close to the hotel, in a location that to date has still not been definitively identified and demarcated.

SEREMBAN, 9 Ogos — Pasukan mencari dan menyelamat (SAR) meneliti peta bagi mencari dan menyelamat Nora Anne Quoirin, 15, remaja perempuan warga Ireland yang dilaporkan hilang sejak Ahad lepas di susur Sungai Berembun, Kampung Pantai, hari ini. 
Ahad lepas, remaja perempuan yang mengalami masalah pembelajaran itu dilapor hilang selepas tiba bersama ibu bapanya dari London pada hari Sabtu untuk percutian dua minggu di resort The Dusun.
Remaja berkenaan disedari hilang dari bilik penginapannya oleh keluarganya pada pukul 8.00 pagi.
–fotoBERNAMA (2019) HAK CIPTA TERPELIHARA
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Sanghwan Jung/Shutterstock (10358910k) Members of a police team conduct a search and rescue operation for a missing British girl, Nora Quoirin 15-year-old at the forest in Seremban, Negeri Sembilan British teenager Nora Quoirin missing in Malaysia – 10 Aug 2019 Nora disappeared while on a holiday with her family at The Dusun resort in a nature reserve near Seremban, about 80 km south of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Nora has been missing in her bedroom on 04 August 2019

Nora Qoirin: Is the plot thickening?

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Typically, autopsies take two to four hours, and preliminary results are usually available within 24 hours. A full report might take 6 weeks to compile. The fact that Nora Quoirin’s autopsy has taken three to four times longer than a standard autopsy, suggests a complicated crime scene in terms of the victimology.

If Nora did wander the woods for a long time, she may have suffered extensive bruising, cuts and other injuries. Her remains may also have been interfered with by wild animals – a factor that cannot be excluded in a rural, tropical setting over a period of 10 days.

What may make the autopsy difficult is if the remains had been washed several times by successive downpours, or if it fell into water and was put through intermittent cycles of rushing groundwater. This scenario would need to be separated from a cause of death by drowning, for example.

What I would like to know is whether the crime scene where the body was recovered was not covered previously by search teams, earlier in the week. Which is to say, was the area initially excluded, and the body later discovered there by a volunteer, or had the particular area never been searched? The latter is difficult to imagine since it was just 1.6 miles from the resort, with hundreds of trained searchers combing the area, day and night for ten consecutive days.

Search for Nora Quoirin from London, who is currently missing in Malaysiamalaysia

Post-mortem on Nora Quoirin’s remains continues, statement tomorrow – Straits Times

SEREMBAN: The post-mortem examination of the remains of Irish teen Nora Anne Quoirin has turned into a marathon of sorts. The examination, by a team of senior pathologists led by Dr Siew Sheue Feng from Kuala Lumpur Hospital, is still going on, nine hours after it began at 11.45am.

A press conference scheduled for 5pm to announce the initial results of the examination was postponed to 8pm, but as that hour came and went, there was still no sign of senior police officers to update the media.

When deputy state police chief Senior Assistant Commissioner Che Zakaria Othman finally appeared, he said the post-mortem examination was still on-going. He said police could not release any details as yet because of this. “I made a decision based on the instruction of state police chief (Datuk Mohamad Mat Yusop) that a statement will only be issued at a time to be advised tomorrow. There is also no new development at the scene (where Nora Anne’s body was found) that I have to report,” he told a horde of reporters who had been stationed outside the Tuanku Ja’afar Hospital mortuary, some from as early as 6.30am.

Che Zakaria declined to answer any questions. While post-mortem examinations generally take a long time, the fact that this one has taken so long has left many questions lingering in the minds of all following the case.

At 2:45 in the clip below, the former spindoctor for the McCanns [who were once prime suspects in the disappearance and possible death of their daughter] Clarence Mitchell explains why it’s good practice to alert the media when a child abduction happens.

There’s also another issue to address, which was the speed at which the family got a media apparatus up and running. I won’t deal with that aspect just yet, except to point out what this achieves.

At 2:45 in the clip below, Clarence Mitchell, the McCanns’ ex-spin doctor explains why it’s essential to keep a missing persons case alive in the media, especially when these incidents occur in foreign countries.

Mitchell’s spiel is that by alerting international media, pressure is brought to bear on law enforcement, especially external pressure. The suggestion is that without this pressure, the police wouldn’t do their job.

But one could clearly also make the argument that in a scenario where one or both parents are involved in the death of their child, it would theoretically suit them to have some outside entity exerting enormous pressure on the authorities, while leveraging public sympathy to their own benefit. This is a subtle but powerful way to manipulate an investigation, and from the beginning, this was one – the Nora Quoirin disappearance – did experience precisely that kind of external buffeting.

In the McCann case massive external pressure and some of the most high-profile media exposure in the history of true crime was brought to bear. What this did was it pressurized the investigation all right, ultimately leading to a number of court cases, almost all to do with defamation, book deals, and the defense of book deals. No one was charged in the Madeleine McCann case, and the lead investigator soon lost his job because of something he said to the media.

Within the idiosyncracies of the McCann case, Portuguese law has certain privacy constraints as a matter of course when conducting a criminal investigation. The British media and flouted these. Soon investigators were in effect bullied into towing the line and paying homage to the narrative as set out in the media. Much of the tone of this line was orchestrated by the parents themselves, using public fundraising money to pay for PR folks like Clarence Mitchell.

Mitchell has also worked for the disgraced data mining company Cambridge Analytica. Why, when there is a missing child case like this one, is he still being called as a credible spokesman to pontificate on how these cases should be handled? If anything, investigation via PR is how it should not be handled.

THE CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA CRISIS : COMMENT

Cambridge Analytica finally speak to Channel 4 News

Cambridge Analytica approached “tens” of PR agencies for crisis comms support during the Facebook data breach scandal, and every agency refused, says a former senior executive at the firm.

Not So Bright ‘Titanic of a PR’ Clarence Mitchell moves on from a series of toxic clients and becomes spokesman for Cambridge Analytica