10-13-2019, 02:26 AM
2000 "The Cases That Haunt Us" by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker
Page 298
"Upon meeting John Ramsey, I informed him who I was, shook his hand, and expressed my sorrow for his loss. As it turned out, there was some significance to the fact that neither he nor Patsy knew who I was. Subsequent to this, several sources, including Detective Steve Thomas, reported that Mindhunter, the first book I wrote with Mark, was on John Ramsey's nightstand. In this book we deal with staging crime scenes, and some speculated that one or both of the Ramseys had read it and "learned" how to outwit investigators to make it look as if someone from outside had killed their child. First, I have to say that they--or anyone else--would not have learned this from reading the book. We didn't write a how-to-course, and any good investigator would see right through such a primitive attempt. Morover, much as we would like to think that everyone has read our books and knows who we are, Mindhunter was not there on John's nightstand or elsewhere in the house, and I looked through the place pretty carefully. Believe me, as an author you learn to spot your books anywhere and everywhere. And it was not on the long police list of items removed from the house, although a "Dave Barry book about cyberspace" was. This is just one small example of the mountain of erroneous information that has come out about this case. While I understand that John read Mindhunter after meeting me, he was completely unfamiliar with my work at the time of the crime."
Page 298
"Upon meeting John Ramsey, I informed him who I was, shook his hand, and expressed my sorrow for his loss. As it turned out, there was some significance to the fact that neither he nor Patsy knew who I was. Subsequent to this, several sources, including Detective Steve Thomas, reported that Mindhunter, the first book I wrote with Mark, was on John Ramsey's nightstand. In this book we deal with staging crime scenes, and some speculated that one or both of the Ramseys had read it and "learned" how to outwit investigators to make it look as if someone from outside had killed their child. First, I have to say that they--or anyone else--would not have learned this from reading the book. We didn't write a how-to-course, and any good investigator would see right through such a primitive attempt. Morover, much as we would like to think that everyone has read our books and knows who we are, Mindhunter was not there on John's nightstand or elsewhere in the house, and I looked through the place pretty carefully. Believe me, as an author you learn to spot your books anywhere and everywhere. And it was not on the long police list of items removed from the house, although a "Dave Barry book about cyberspace" was. This is just one small example of the mountain of erroneous information that has come out about this case. While I understand that John read Mindhunter after meeting me, he was completely unfamiliar with my work at the time of the crime."