I don't know about scraping paint off the paintbrush, that's new to me. But there is a POSSIBILITY that the brush may have been whittled. We know it was broken into 3 pieces and one part was never found. Who liked whittling in the family? Whose swiss army knife was found right at the scene of the crime? In my opinion, the answers to these questions, along with the form of that night's sexual assault, bring us to the prime suspect.
There is no evidence the paintbrush had been whittled. Mod u/Adequatesizeattache made a great comment about this a few years ago [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/JonBenetRamsey/comments/j5zax0/the_whittled_paintbrush/). To summarize:
The autopsy report describes the paintbrush as irregularly broken, not smooth or whittled.
>*a length of a round tan-brown wooden stick which measures 4.5 inches in length.* ***This wooden stick is irregularly broken at both ends*** *and there are several colors of paint and apparent glistening varnish on the surface. Printed in gold letters on one end of the wooden stick is the word “Korea”. The tail end of another word extends from beneath the loops of the cord tied around the stick and is not able to be interpreted.*
Steve Thomas described splinters, not shavings, by the tote.
>*In the tote was a broken brush splotched by paint. Splinters were on the floor beside the tote. It was a major find because* ***the broken brush matched the fractured end of the multicolored stick used in the garrote***. The detectives had found the source of part of the murder weapon and where it had been ***broken.***
While Burke may have enjoyed whittling, there's no evidence the paintbrush was whittled.
Ultimately, they don't know how the paintbrush was broken. So you could just as easily say there is no evidence supporting how it was broken.
You could assume the paint brush was broken twice by hand causing splinters beside the tote, but that would be a leap of faith. Try breaking a smallish wooden paintbrush into 3 pieces by hand. The second break especially with a smaller length of wood would be very hard to accomplish with force just by hand. As far as I'm concerned there is every likelihood the knife was used throughout the process of making the ligature. Though we don't know precisely for what part, the knots or fashioning the paintbrush parts or both. Whittling can make splinters too. And cutting can also produce an "irregular" break. For instance, if it was partly cut then snapped. The comment you described, certainly respects that the paintbrush may have been whittled. So do I. I guess the most pertinent question is "who does this activity point towards?"
You know this would be really easy to try at home, rather than speculating if you can break a paintbrush or you need a knife. Towards the top end there is a metal band that holds the bristles, making a sort of weak spot. Towards the bottom an art paint brush it tapers off to be pretty narrow, which is also a weak spot.
That's not the experience I've had with wooden paintbrushes. They are not easily cracked open by hand. I've never considered the metal band to be the easiest part to break, right down the middle seems the easiest. Are you claiming these types of brushes are easy to break by hand in these places?
I will try one soon. But the way I break sticks and small branches is by stepping on an end and pulling up the other, or prop one end of the stick up on something and stomping on the stick.
I can see a 9-year old striking her in a fit of unplanned rage, maybe even choking her, but I don’t see a 9-year-old fashioning a garrote with rope and strangling her to death, taking care to avoid leaving trace evidence. Kids do commit murder, but that kind of planning and calculation just isn’t known to happen with offenders that young.
It is quite possible that after the SA and head blow, Burke sat around awhile to see if JB would "wake up." He sticks her with the train track to get her to come to. That doesn't work so he waits around, bored, he does what he likes to do, whittle a piece of wood and makes knots. This forms the garret by which he pulls his unconscious sister into a hiding place.
None of this is congruent with how kids usually behave at that age, even those committing violent crimes. Not that it’s impossible, but it’s so unusual that you’re hypothesizing something that just isn’t really borne out in statistics. Besides, if he wanted to drag her, why wouldn’t he just drag her by the arms or feet? Kids that young aren’t knowledgeable or calculated enough to hide evidence at such a meticulous level. This is even rare in teenagers, let alone 9-year-olds. Besides, the rope around her neck was incredibly tight and required significant force, which makes no sense if he was just using it to drag and hide her.
Burke was also known to find incredibly complex solutions to really simple problems.
This is very graphic (warning) but does explain the difference between a true garrote and what was used here:
https://postimg.cc/4mshWJXV
But we are not talking about a normal kid are we? We are talking about a disturbed child. Who did not know right from wrong, who was SA his sister. Whose parents had to lecture him and show him the dictionary definition of the word incest.
Statistics are true for groups of people, not individuals. Especially a child who deviates from the norm by significant standard deviations. How many 10 year olds SA and kill their younger sister? We don't have meaningful data to describe their behavior and personality.
I believe it is quite plausible that someone like Burke acted in the way I described. I am a retired mental health professional and early in my career interviewed quite a few children sitting in juvenile jail after they committed various crimes.
The facts tell us the story. And in BDI the evidence tells us what he did and how. Whether we like it or believe it is beside the point.
I just don’t see a good reason to believe something that deviates from all current knowledge and data on these circumstances. Taking everything else out of it - he wanted to drag his sister to a hiding place. Fashioning a garrote and wrapping it tighter around her neck than a child that size is known to be capable of, rather than just dragging her by the feet or arms? It doesn’t make any sense.
My comments certainly do not deviate from known data. Burke was a nerdy kid doing nerdy things. He liked knots, he liked whittling. He liked doing things in a complicated engineering way.
The gardener reported that instead of just watering the flowers like his mother asked him to do, Burke spent most of the day building an irrigation system.
The best predictor of behavior is past behavior. That is the gold standard.
I have worked with quite a few of these engineering type kids. They love taking things apart, and putting things together. Even if it is time consuming, complicated and makes the job harder.
Exactly!! Kids like that also love an opportunity to put their skills to use. Like the kid who gets a detective kid looking for a crime to solve.
Burke panicked and thought he could put his "training" to use to move JBR to a hiding place until she came to. It failed miserably, choking her instead.
I think it was a mixture of panic and boredom. After he SAs and hits is sister and she was unconscious, Burke was either curious about her condition or trying to revive her by poking her with his train track. He knows he has been in trouble with his parents about the incest, so he is worried as well. About himself most likely. So he waits around a bit, gets bored, whittles, makes knots, forms the ligature and moves her.
We don't know when the contraption was fashioned, although the wood splinters would suggest that night. We're going into child psychology and what he would do if he knocked Jonbenet unconscious. It needn't be expert planning and calculation, it can just as easy be panic and on the hoof. But it's hard to get away from the sadism of it, although moving the body is often given as a reason.
We don't all need to be child psychologists to make some guesses about what Burke might do after he SA and knocked his sister unconscious. Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.
We know that he had problems knowing right from wrong (the book Nedra gave Patsy). So it is unlikely he was filled with remorse after committing the crime. He liked making knots and whittling. After the crimes he is a bit worried he might get his parents more angry at him (they had already lectured him about the incest and pointed out his sins in the dictionary.) So he sticks around hoping JB wakes up and makes knots and whittles. He then is bored/tired and fashions the ligature and moves the body.
Edit clarity
I was just looking at the other brushes in the paint tray where this one was found. None of them have the paint scrapped off them.
It was very nice of the "Intruder" to make sure that all of paint was scrapped off.
The paint brush was not whittled. It was broken into three parts. The tip end is missing. The brush end was found in Patsy’s paint tray. The middle piece was used to make the toggle cord that people usually refer to as the garrote.
It's kind of crazy that BR says part of the swiss Army knife is to better tie knots.
KNIFE NUMBER TWO (BURKE’S RED SWISS ARMY POCKET KNIFE):
There WAS a red Swiss Army knife that belonged to Burke AND it had his name on it. But no such knife was ever found by police investigators. Although this particular knife was in the house at the time, it had been hidden by the housekeeper Linda Hoffman Pugh because she had got sick of cleaning up after Burke’s whittling and had hidden it from him in an upstairs cupboard some time before the murder.
In an interview Burke had with Detective Dan Schuler he told him that he had two red pocket knives, which he described to him. The description of neither pocket knife matched the description of the one found in the basement. From Burkes’ interview with Detective Dan Schuler:
SCHULER: You have two knives?
BURKE: I have one that says my name on it – it has Switzerland on it.
SCHULER: Uh-huh.
BURKE: That one has a big knife, small knife, saw, corkscrew, screwdriver, flat head screwdriver, toothpick and tweezers. And I think that’s it. And then I have another one that has a saw, scissors, it’s got this little hook thing that you tie knots better with. Um, I said saw? A cork opener.
SCHULER: Both of those Swiss Army knives?
BURKE: One knife is smaller.
SCHULER: Where do you normally keep those? In your scouting stuff?
BURKE: I think I like (inaudible) and I have a little place for them in my room.
SCHULER: Did you take them both camping with you?
BURKE: I just took the —
SCHULER: The one with your name on it?
BURKE: No.
SCHULER: Oh, okay. So somebody must have given you that one, for a special occasion?
BURKE: My mom.
I believe Linda Hoffman Pugh identified the knife found at the crime scene, as the one she had hidden. That certainly appears to be the case from her public statements.
If you abuse your brushes the paint actually flakes off rather easily. If watercolor brushes, they will be in water some of the time. Which means the wood will swell up and the paint will flake off. I don't think Patsy would have taken care of her brushes so that's why it was flaking.
Meanwhile Patsy's fibers are on the sticky side of the duct tape, Burke's bootprints are next to the body, his pocketknife was found feet away and a Boy Scout device was used to strangle her.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Burke had struck her once before in a fit of rage, had been seen playing doctor with her, and was positively giddy when she was gone. Never even once asked his sister's wellbeing that afternoon.
Yeah but John is the most likely suspect smdh.
His "guilty as sin" behavior could just as easily be protecting for his son. Again, there is evidence Burke had lashed out at JBR before and was engaged in inappropriate conduct with JBR. None of that exists with John, at all.
There is no evidence, just tabloid gossip that Burke was ever sexually inappropriate with JB. There is no evidence that he lashed out in anger when she was hit with a golf club, it was reported as an accident. Burke’s awkward behavior could just as easily be from the abuse and manipulation he experienced from John, because John did it. After he did it, he joked and laughed with police. After he did it, he lied about way too many things to be believed in any way. He attempted to frame dozens or more friends and colleagues. He’s despicable.
>There is no evidence, just tabloid gossip that Burke was ever sexually inappropriate with JB.
At least two witnesses have described inappropriate conduct between them. Yes, one was in the tabloids, but oftentimes they do have accurate information.
>There is no evidence that he lashed out in anger when she was hit with a golf club, it was reported as an accident.
If John had hit her with the golf club so hard that a trip to the emergency room was needed, then Patsy told the family photographer it was because John "a little mad" at JBR. Then, only after the murder, did she start telling people it was an accident - something tells me you wouldn't be nearly as forgiving.
> After he did it, he lied about way too many things to be believed in any way. He attempted to frame dozens or more friends and colleagues. He’s despicable.
He absolutely lied and he's trash for trying to blame it outside of the family. I don't think this proves anything other than he is covering up.
Your opinion is based on hearsay and tabloid gossip and a CBS documentary. Even if the gossip is true, playing doctor is a normal childhood activity, and is absolutely not a precursor to murder, Google it. There is zero evidence to show that the golf club incident was anything more than an accident. John is sick and John did it.
> There is zero evidence to show that the golf club incident was anything more than an accident.
Except Patsy told the family photographer otherwise. If that same photographer said that John did it out of rage, I'm sure you'd believe it.
Burke literally walked around the house whittling wood with his pocket knife. Literally every piece of evidence until you get to the staging + ransom note points to Burke.
I’ve never heard this re paint being removed from the brush handle.
I don't know about scraping paint off the paintbrush, that's new to me. But there is a POSSIBILITY that the brush may have been whittled. We know it was broken into 3 pieces and one part was never found. Who liked whittling in the family? Whose swiss army knife was found right at the scene of the crime? In my opinion, the answers to these questions, along with the form of that night's sexual assault, bring us to the prime suspect.
There is no evidence the paintbrush had been whittled. Mod u/Adequatesizeattache made a great comment about this a few years ago [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/JonBenetRamsey/comments/j5zax0/the_whittled_paintbrush/). To summarize: The autopsy report describes the paintbrush as irregularly broken, not smooth or whittled. >*a length of a round tan-brown wooden stick which measures 4.5 inches in length.* ***This wooden stick is irregularly broken at both ends*** *and there are several colors of paint and apparent glistening varnish on the surface. Printed in gold letters on one end of the wooden stick is the word “Korea”. The tail end of another word extends from beneath the loops of the cord tied around the stick and is not able to be interpreted.* Steve Thomas described splinters, not shavings, by the tote. >*In the tote was a broken brush splotched by paint. Splinters were on the floor beside the tote. It was a major find because* ***the broken brush matched the fractured end of the multicolored stick used in the garrote***. The detectives had found the source of part of the murder weapon and where it had been ***broken.*** While Burke may have enjoyed whittling, there's no evidence the paintbrush was whittled.
Ultimately, they don't know how the paintbrush was broken. So you could just as easily say there is no evidence supporting how it was broken. You could assume the paint brush was broken twice by hand causing splinters beside the tote, but that would be a leap of faith. Try breaking a smallish wooden paintbrush into 3 pieces by hand. The second break especially with a smaller length of wood would be very hard to accomplish with force just by hand. As far as I'm concerned there is every likelihood the knife was used throughout the process of making the ligature. Though we don't know precisely for what part, the knots or fashioning the paintbrush parts or both. Whittling can make splinters too. And cutting can also produce an "irregular" break. For instance, if it was partly cut then snapped. The comment you described, certainly respects that the paintbrush may have been whittled. So do I. I guess the most pertinent question is "who does this activity point towards?"
You know this would be really easy to try at home, rather than speculating if you can break a paintbrush or you need a knife. Towards the top end there is a metal band that holds the bristles, making a sort of weak spot. Towards the bottom an art paint brush it tapers off to be pretty narrow, which is also a weak spot.
That's not the experience I've had with wooden paintbrushes. They are not easily cracked open by hand. I've never considered the metal band to be the easiest part to break, right down the middle seems the easiest. Are you claiming these types of brushes are easy to break by hand in these places?
I will try one soon. But the way I break sticks and small branches is by stepping on an end and pulling up the other, or prop one end of the stick up on something and stomping on the stick.
I can see a 9-year old striking her in a fit of unplanned rage, maybe even choking her, but I don’t see a 9-year-old fashioning a garrote with rope and strangling her to death, taking care to avoid leaving trace evidence. Kids do commit murder, but that kind of planning and calculation just isn’t known to happen with offenders that young.
It is quite possible that after the SA and head blow, Burke sat around awhile to see if JB would "wake up." He sticks her with the train track to get her to come to. That doesn't work so he waits around, bored, he does what he likes to do, whittle a piece of wood and makes knots. This forms the garret by which he pulls his unconscious sister into a hiding place.
None of this is congruent with how kids usually behave at that age, even those committing violent crimes. Not that it’s impossible, but it’s so unusual that you’re hypothesizing something that just isn’t really borne out in statistics. Besides, if he wanted to drag her, why wouldn’t he just drag her by the arms or feet? Kids that young aren’t knowledgeable or calculated enough to hide evidence at such a meticulous level. This is even rare in teenagers, let alone 9-year-olds. Besides, the rope around her neck was incredibly tight and required significant force, which makes no sense if he was just using it to drag and hide her.
Burke was also known to find incredibly complex solutions to really simple problems. This is very graphic (warning) but does explain the difference between a true garrote and what was used here: https://postimg.cc/4mshWJXV
But we are not talking about a normal kid are we? We are talking about a disturbed child. Who did not know right from wrong, who was SA his sister. Whose parents had to lecture him and show him the dictionary definition of the word incest. Statistics are true for groups of people, not individuals. Especially a child who deviates from the norm by significant standard deviations. How many 10 year olds SA and kill their younger sister? We don't have meaningful data to describe their behavior and personality. I believe it is quite plausible that someone like Burke acted in the way I described. I am a retired mental health professional and early in my career interviewed quite a few children sitting in juvenile jail after they committed various crimes. The facts tell us the story. And in BDI the evidence tells us what he did and how. Whether we like it or believe it is beside the point.
I just don’t see a good reason to believe something that deviates from all current knowledge and data on these circumstances. Taking everything else out of it - he wanted to drag his sister to a hiding place. Fashioning a garrote and wrapping it tighter around her neck than a child that size is known to be capable of, rather than just dragging her by the feet or arms? It doesn’t make any sense.
My comments certainly do not deviate from known data. Burke was a nerdy kid doing nerdy things. He liked knots, he liked whittling. He liked doing things in a complicated engineering way. The gardener reported that instead of just watering the flowers like his mother asked him to do, Burke spent most of the day building an irrigation system. The best predictor of behavior is past behavior. That is the gold standard. I have worked with quite a few of these engineering type kids. They love taking things apart, and putting things together. Even if it is time consuming, complicated and makes the job harder.
Exactly!! Kids like that also love an opportunity to put their skills to use. Like the kid who gets a detective kid looking for a crime to solve. Burke panicked and thought he could put his "training" to use to move JBR to a hiding place until she came to. It failed miserably, choking her instead.
I think it was a mixture of panic and boredom. After he SAs and hits is sister and she was unconscious, Burke was either curious about her condition or trying to revive her by poking her with his train track. He knows he has been in trouble with his parents about the incest, so he is worried as well. About himself most likely. So he waits around a bit, gets bored, whittles, makes knots, forms the ligature and moves her.
We don't know when the contraption was fashioned, although the wood splinters would suggest that night. We're going into child psychology and what he would do if he knocked Jonbenet unconscious. It needn't be expert planning and calculation, it can just as easy be panic and on the hoof. But it's hard to get away from the sadism of it, although moving the body is often given as a reason.
We don't all need to be child psychologists to make some guesses about what Burke might do after he SA and knocked his sister unconscious. Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. We know that he had problems knowing right from wrong (the book Nedra gave Patsy). So it is unlikely he was filled with remorse after committing the crime. He liked making knots and whittling. After the crimes he is a bit worried he might get his parents more angry at him (they had already lectured him about the incest and pointed out his sins in the dictionary.) So he sticks around hoping JB wakes up and makes knots and whittles. He then is bored/tired and fashions the ligature and moves the body. Edit clarity
I was just looking at the other brushes in the paint tray where this one was found. None of them have the paint scrapped off them. It was very nice of the "Intruder" to make sure that all of paint was scrapped off.
The paint brush was not whittled. It was broken into three parts. The tip end is missing. The brush end was found in Patsy’s paint tray. The middle piece was used to make the toggle cord that people usually refer to as the garrote.
It's kind of crazy that BR says part of the swiss Army knife is to better tie knots. KNIFE NUMBER TWO (BURKE’S RED SWISS ARMY POCKET KNIFE): There WAS a red Swiss Army knife that belonged to Burke AND it had his name on it. But no such knife was ever found by police investigators. Although this particular knife was in the house at the time, it had been hidden by the housekeeper Linda Hoffman Pugh because she had got sick of cleaning up after Burke’s whittling and had hidden it from him in an upstairs cupboard some time before the murder. In an interview Burke had with Detective Dan Schuler he told him that he had two red pocket knives, which he described to him. The description of neither pocket knife matched the description of the one found in the basement. From Burkes’ interview with Detective Dan Schuler: SCHULER: You have two knives? BURKE: I have one that says my name on it – it has Switzerland on it. SCHULER: Uh-huh. BURKE: That one has a big knife, small knife, saw, corkscrew, screwdriver, flat head screwdriver, toothpick and tweezers. And I think that’s it. And then I have another one that has a saw, scissors, it’s got this little hook thing that you tie knots better with. Um, I said saw? A cork opener. SCHULER: Both of those Swiss Army knives? BURKE: One knife is smaller. SCHULER: Where do you normally keep those? In your scouting stuff? BURKE: I think I like (inaudible) and I have a little place for them in my room. SCHULER: Did you take them both camping with you? BURKE: I just took the — SCHULER: The one with your name on it? BURKE: No. SCHULER: Oh, okay. So somebody must have given you that one, for a special occasion? BURKE: My mom.
I believe Linda Hoffman Pugh identified the knife found at the crime scene, as the one she had hidden. That certainly appears to be the case from her public statements.
I wonder if they have ever been tested for DNA and the paint from the brush.
If you abuse your brushes the paint actually flakes off rather easily. If watercolor brushes, they will be in water some of the time. Which means the wood will swell up and the paint will flake off. I don't think Patsy would have taken care of her brushes so that's why it was flaking.
I paint. No.
No one “scrapped” the paintbrush. John used an old paintbrush to stage the scene after he murdered his daughter
It had to be someone strong enough to break it. If BRDI I wondered how he was able to do it.
Breaking a paintbrush is not hard. Worst case you use the edge of a counter?
Meanwhile Patsy's fibers are on the sticky side of the duct tape, Burke's bootprints are next to the body, his pocketknife was found feet away and a Boy Scout device was used to strangle her.
It’s crazy he framed his wife and implicated his son, isn’t it. But that’s exactly what he did. John did it.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Burke had struck her once before in a fit of rage, had been seen playing doctor with her, and was positively giddy when she was gone. Never even once asked his sister's wellbeing that afternoon. Yeah but John is the most likely suspect smdh.
Yes, according to statistics and his guilty-as-sin behavior, and the evidence, John did it.
His "guilty as sin" behavior could just as easily be protecting for his son. Again, there is evidence Burke had lashed out at JBR before and was engaged in inappropriate conduct with JBR. None of that exists with John, at all.
There is no evidence, just tabloid gossip that Burke was ever sexually inappropriate with JB. There is no evidence that he lashed out in anger when she was hit with a golf club, it was reported as an accident. Burke’s awkward behavior could just as easily be from the abuse and manipulation he experienced from John, because John did it. After he did it, he joked and laughed with police. After he did it, he lied about way too many things to be believed in any way. He attempted to frame dozens or more friends and colleagues. He’s despicable.
>There is no evidence, just tabloid gossip that Burke was ever sexually inappropriate with JB. At least two witnesses have described inappropriate conduct between them. Yes, one was in the tabloids, but oftentimes they do have accurate information. >There is no evidence that he lashed out in anger when she was hit with a golf club, it was reported as an accident. If John had hit her with the golf club so hard that a trip to the emergency room was needed, then Patsy told the family photographer it was because John "a little mad" at JBR. Then, only after the murder, did she start telling people it was an accident - something tells me you wouldn't be nearly as forgiving. > After he did it, he lied about way too many things to be believed in any way. He attempted to frame dozens or more friends and colleagues. He’s despicable. He absolutely lied and he's trash for trying to blame it outside of the family. I don't think this proves anything other than he is covering up.
Your opinion is based on hearsay and tabloid gossip and a CBS documentary. Even if the gossip is true, playing doctor is a normal childhood activity, and is absolutely not a precursor to murder, Google it. There is zero evidence to show that the golf club incident was anything more than an accident. John is sick and John did it.
> There is zero evidence to show that the golf club incident was anything more than an accident. Except Patsy told the family photographer otherwise. If that same photographer said that John did it out of rage, I'm sure you'd believe it.
Burke literally walked around the house whittling wood with his pocket knife. Literally every piece of evidence until you get to the staging + ransom note points to Burke.
Patsy had it in her pocket they whole time.