"...a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News uncovered what he
considered "strange" coincidences between our family history and the
JonBenet murder.
The first coincidence: Our daughter, along with her best friend, was
abducted in 1974, when she was 9 years old.
The two girls were lured into a car and driven into the countryside, where
our daughter witnessed the molestation of her friend.
Our daughter probably saved her own life and her friend's by stubbornly
resisting the perpetrator's attempts to force her out of the car so he could
be alone with the other girl.
Finally the man had a change of heart. He wept and said, "The devil
made me do it." He drove the girls back to the edge of town and released
them.
The crime took place on Dec. 26, the same date as JonBenet's murder 22
years later.
The second coincidence: I once wrote a play, "Hey, Rube," about the
torture and murder of a young girl.
Boulder police asked me to come in for interrogation. They took samples
of my handwriting, hair and fingerprints. I handed over a copy of my play.
At first glance the play, written in 1976 and last produced in 1978 in New
York City, seems to have little similarity to the murder of 6-year-old
JonBenet Ramsey.
"Hey, Rube" was suggested by the murder of a teenage girl in
Indianapolis in 1965. The setting is the trial of the woman accused of the
murder.
Through court testimony and flashbacks, the play examines the victim's
last months, asking the basic question: Why did she have to die?
My character, Anna, and her crippled sister were left by their parents,
carnival people, to board with the woman who was eventually found guilty
of Anna's murder.
Anna in some unfathomable way seems to have cooperated in her own
death. There is a strong suggestion of prior incest with her father, which
had left her irreparably damaged and unable to defend herself against the
killers.
In the Indianapolis case, the victim was tortured over a period of months,
and a whole neighborhood was implicated. Five people were convicted.
In my play, the accused murderer says, "She taunted me into killing her.
She wanted to die."
That of course is a subjective judgment. Did the girl "want" to die, or did
she unwillingly become a scapegoat for her killers?
Did she, in the primitive language of the tribe, "deserve to die"?
By the same primitive thinking, has little JonBenet become a scapegoat? "