Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Commitmentphobia

When Anthony and I first started dating, the concept of a commitment was terrifying. What if I wanted to be with someone else and screwed it all up for a quick meaningless fling? What if I got annoyed by being with him all the time? But now, it's been almost eight months, we've spent entire days together, he's met my family (and now hopefully my mom will shut up about it), he's teaching me martial arts, he's started taking time off of work to be with me (and he's a total workaholic) and I can't imagine my life without him. I will still need my space, but at least he seems to understand that. I can talk to him about how I feel without worrying about how he will react, because I know he will at least make an effort to understand. A healthy, satisfying relationship, with the great job interview I had this morning, and I'm dangerously close to being content with my life.
Now for the crime story of the moment. John and Patsy Ramsay have been cleared by DNA evidence in the death of their daughter, JonBenet. This was a muddled mess of an investigation from the start, with many law enforcement officials so fixated on implicating the Ramsays that they may have ignored crucial evidence. True, when a child is killed, particularly in his or her own home, the parents are the first suspects, but that the police in this case seemed determined to arrest the Ramsays. Former FBI profiler John Douglas, after interviewing the Ramsays and studying the evidence, came to the conclusion that John and Patsy did not murder their daughter. But Boulder officials continued to think they did, and some crime watchers, despite the DNA, still think the Ramsays were involved. The reason for this? John and Patsy's "demeanor." Few things annoy me more than when someone is implicated in a crime because their reaction doesn't "seem right" for someone whose loved one has been killed. Not everyone wears their grief on their sleeve. John Douglas described John Ramsay as a proud and stoic man, not the type to cry in public. That doesn't mean he killed his daughter, just that he could be dealing with his pain in a more private manner. While those who have studied crime and police procedure know that family members are intensly investigated when a murder has taken place, the Ramsays may not have known that, and felt offended when police questioned them, stonewalling the investigation for the worse in the process. It wasn't a smart move, but understandable. In a TV show about Arthur Shawcross, who terrorized prostitutes in Rochester in the 1980s, a sister of one of the victims did an interview next to her dead sister's grave. I found this far more disturbing than the behavior of John and Patsy Ramsay, almost like she was advertising her sister's death and her own grief. Clearly, John and Patsy Ramsay were not perfect parents, since they put their daughter in those very creepy child beauty pageants. But that doesn't mean they killed her. The killer of JonBenet Ramsay is still out there, if he isn't dead or in prison for another crime.

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