Excerpt from The Craven Silence #JonBenetRamsey

From the chapter…

Odd Ducks and Duct Tape

On Wednesday, April 19, 2006 John and Patsy Ramsey appeared on a Hawaiian based television show called Connection Point. The couple were interviewed by Pastor Wayne Cordeiro, the founding pastor of New Hope Christian Fellowship in Honolulu.

Cordeiro, a charismatic man of God with a passion for family and Christian family values boasts a weekend attendance of 11,500 members. But were the Ramsey’s – accused by some of murdering their own daughter – really the model American parents Christians ought to turn to for inspiration on Christian parenting?

Were the Ramseys the best folks to give advice on typical family issues such as preparing for pageants, making meals at home, how to deal with bedwetting and shit smearing and their speciality – how to rationalise a botched kidnapping in your own home?

Cordeiro seemed to think having “the most hated parents in America” talk about their faith might inspire and uplift his flock. Perhaps the church is no different from the news – no news is worse than bad news? But by speaking to the Ramseys, Cordeiro was certainly assured of getting a lion’s share of attention for his efforts. Christians and heathens alike were likely to tune into his interview. Perhaps he could gain a few converts among the burgeoning true crime community?

Interestingly in that April interview, Cordeiro – who seems surprised when John says JonBenét was found in their home the same day of her kidnapping – asks Patsy whether the beauty pageants made JonBenét a target.

If this was a conventional case the answer would be conventional too. It would be a simple “yes”, wouldn’t it? The pageants had somehow attracted the wrong sort of attention, and this is what cost the little girl her life. Most people making a cursory examination of the case tend to stumble over this obvious assumption first. But let’s see how Patsy explains the juxtaposition of pageants and a kidnapping.

Patsy defends herself and says “truthfully, we hadn’t done the pageants very much [just two and a shoot in the week before she was murdered]…”

The strange thing is Patsy sees no connection whatsoever. She says the crowds attending these pageants were tiny – a dozen people perhaps. John adds that the people who attended these pageants were hardly killers or kidnappers – they were grandparents and parents.

This is another example of what’s so weird about this case.

While I understand Patsy and John both trying to make the case justifying their own parenting choices, what I don’t understand is how they can continue pushing the routine of a sort of paedophile non-paedophile kidnapper at the same time. If it wasn’t the pageants, if the pageants didn’t attract the unknown intruder to JonBenét, what did?

John Ramsey, deferring to…