LAST EDITED ON Aug-30-02 AT 00:34 AM (EST)
 
I have to believe that who(m)ever struck JonBenet that night removed the weapon from the scene. I asked myself early on whether the Ramseys would have left a flashlight out on the kitchen countertop if they had even used it to move around the house that night not to mention having used it as a weapon and the answer seemed obvious to me. Why even use a flashlight? That doesn't make sense. Light switches were everywhere-it would have been much more suspicious to move around in one's own house with only a flashlight wouldn't it have been? There were neighbors up between midnight and two am approximately. Wouldn't they have noticed this?

So that brings me to the next question: if the FL was supposedly the weapon used by who(m)ever WHY WOULD they have had it in their hands? An intruder would more likely have been the user of that type of artificial light not wanting to afford anyone out side the home a good look at them-thru the sw corner sun room-by leaving the lights on.

I had to come to the conclusion that the Maglight is heavy enough at 18 oz. (3-battery version) to do a lot of damage. Now if an intruder/murderer used a FL to move around the house and in a tense moment had to subdue a struggling child that was trying to scream, well yes, they might use what was at hand. But I don't see any reason for a parent to use one or have one in their hand. On the subject of child abuse I think most often the weapons used are fists/hands. Would the Ramsey's have used the FL as a weapon-accidently- then covered up the situation including wiping the entire case and batteries clean of prints and then forgotten to put it back up?

So even assuming the situation above I still have a problem with the way the skull fractured and the way the void in the skull is esentially a symetrical convex shape. I believe if we took this flashlight, either end, and pressed the edge into a "head-shaped" clay bust, the top edge of the impression formed would be slightly different fromn the bottom edge. In other words, if struck from the side with this object, the void in the skull would not be symetrical and the fracture lines would tend to radiate downward with the force of the blow.

The way the fracture line runs front to back makes me think the blow came from behind or in front, not the side, where the FL would have had to have been used.

If the crime scene had been highly "disorganized" I might buy the idea that the perp left it accidentally. But it is quite the opposite, everything here seems to have been planned out and, in my opinion, aimed at setting up the Ramseys. I have to believe that it was left out on purpose as a plant. This type of criminal, if he used a FL to kill the child, would have taken it with him and left one he was sure had nothing to tie him to the crime.

From the beginning, I have felt that we could determine the type of weapon used from the headwound and from that we might trace the killer. I have previously believed that a section of pipe might have been used but having seen the photos and xrays I pretty much have abandoned this idea-the void in the skull is too convex, too symetrical.

Back in February, I came across something that really stood out as being something that would qualify as the device that would produce this type of wound-no blood, tearing of flesh, no sharp edges, heavy-weighted at the end, etc. I am going to repost what I posted that time as I don't believe it got the attention it deserves. Regardless of how improbable it seems to you at first glance, study the wound and study the weapon-then if you think it could be the thing used then ask yourself why?

I believe this fellow was anti-high tech, a "naturalist"/outdoors person. A person who had studied the damage done by this device in history might have picked it as low tech way of baffling investigators.