Vassar Professor Donald Foster

[jameson245]

From Trip Demuth's presentation

"What do you do about Dr. Foster's opinion that John Ramsey knew nothig about the murder? "

[jameson245]

"London Sunday Times - article on Foster"

September 27 1998 UNITED STATES

Mother 'faked' JonBenet note
by Tom Rhodes
New York

A RANSOM note found in the home of JonBenet Ramsey, the six-year-old beauty queen strangled and bludgeoned to death in Colorado in December 1996, was written by her mother, it was claimed last night. The note said JonBenet, who appeared in beauty pageants wearing exotic costumes, lipstick and eye shadow, had been kidnapped. It demanded $118,000 for her safe return.

The girl's mother, Patsy Ramsey - herself a former beauty queen - claimed to have found the note on her kitchen table early on Boxing Day. She made a frantic telephone call to the police.

JonBenet's father, John Ramsey, then discovered her body in the cellar of their home in Boulder, and carried it upstairs under a white blanket. The note has now been analysed by Professor Donald Foster, a Shakespeare scholar and handwriting expert employed by the FBI. His techniques for identifying authorship include studies of vocabulary, grammar, syntax and style.

According to a report on the ABC television network, he compared the ransom note with Patsy Ramsey's script in a letter from Christmas 1995 and in a photograph caption from 1978. Foster, who helped trap Theodore Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, concluded that all three were written by the same person.

The report will inevitably increase the suspicion that has hung over the Ramsey parents since the murder.

The couple, who now live in Atlanta, Georgia, have refused to speak to Boulder police throughout much of a heavily criticised investigation into the killing. But in a Channel 4 interview earlier this year, they denied any involvement.

Asked whether she had anything to do with JonBenet's death, Patsy Ramsey said: "Absolutely not. I mean, how do you say no any more clearly than no?"

[jameson245]

SCHOLAR FINDS UNLIKELY FAME AS LANGUAGE DETECTIVE

By Amanda Beeler
Tribune Staff Writer
April 19, 1999

Uncommon word usage, unusual punctuation and repeated misspellings might be the sign of a bad writer to some, but in Donald Foster's eyes they are dead giveaways that help solve linguistic puzzles.

A Shakespearean and Renaissance literature professor at Vassar College, Foster has gained unlikely fame as the man who fingered Newsweek columnist Joe Klein as the author of the novel "Primary Colors" and helped bolster the FBI's conclusion that Theodore Kaczynski wrote certain incriminating documents, including the published manifesto, in the Unabomber case.

His role as a sought-after expert in attributing authorship to anonymous works grew out of his scholarly pursuits. He gained worldwide attention in 1995 for having ascribed to Shakespeare an anonymously written 17th Century poem that eulogized a murdered man.

The 48-year-old professor, who says he never intended to become a specialist in textual attribution, described the exploits that have carried him far from the classroom in a lecture Saturday night at the Chicago Vassar Club's 1999 Scholarship Benefit at the Arts Club.

No two people have the same vocabulary or writing style, Foster said, describing individuals as prisoners of their own language.

"As a result, when given an anonymous document, and comprehensive text samples with which to compare it, I can usually locate the nameless author--not because I'm so clever but because a writer's use of language is as distinctive, as inimitable, as unique, as one's DNA," he said.

Foster says his expertise as a detective began when he was a graduate student in the 1980s and was able to identify the authors of anonymous critiques of his Ph.D. dissertation, which centered on the elegy.

A product of the northwest suburbs of Chicago, Foster now receives 40 to 50 requests a week for assistance in identifying suspects or authors and has consulted on such high profile cases as the JonBenet Ramsey murder in Boulder, Colo., and bombings at the Atlanta Olympics and a Birmingham abortion clinic that authorities believe are linked.

Though he is frequently referred to as an expert in computers and handwriting, Foster is quick to point out he is neither.

"There is no magic in my attribution work and no computer wizardry," Foster, a balding, bespectacled man who frequently refers to himself as an absent-minded professor, told the crowd of almost 200 Saturday.

The computer, which he uses frequently for word searches, allows him to do what the human brain cannot: read up to 1 billion words in the time it takes an individual to read a sentence.

And while he might look at the handwriting in a document, Foster is interested in the words themselves: how sentences are put together and what words and phrases a writer uses.

"When I finished ("Primary Colors"), I didn't know what happened in it, but I knew the language," he said.

Foster researched the Bill Clinton roman a clef at the behest of New York Magazine. He says he started by jotting down unusual words in "Primary Colors" and then searching via computer for similarities in blocks of texts written by people suspected of being the author.

"All of us have access to a lot more words than we use in our writing," Foster said. "We have words that are part of our repertoire."

Alarms went off when the computer scanned Klein's Newsweek columns, Foster said. Both Klein and the novel's anonymous author favored adjectives such as "lugubrious" and "puckish" and an Internet search of some coinages, like "tarmac-hopping," were found only in a column by Klein and in "Primary Colors."

But Foster's public discovery was tarnished when Klein flatly denied the attribution.

Saturday evening, Foster imitated Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News reporting that a Vassar College professor had risked his professional reputation by declaring that Klein was the book's author.

"It was not a good moment. Or week. Or semester," Foster said.

By the time Klein admitted penning the book six months later, Foster was too exhausted to toot his own horn.

Foster's temporary discrediting by Klein had a ripple effect in the esoteric world of Elizabethan literature. Many academicians who had earlier supported Foster's declaration that Shakespeare had written "A Funeral Elegy in Memory of the Late Virtuous Master William Peter" did some quick back-pedaling.

At present, while the elegy has been published in several new Shakespeare anthologies, its status as a work of the Bard is still controversial. Even anthology editors who recommended that the funeral poem be included in the books, don't believe the writing is Shakespeare's.

"There is a massive dispute over whether the elegy is really by Shakespeare and the majority of Shakespeareans feel it probably is not," said Jean Howard, an English professor at Columbia University and one of four editors of The Norton Shakespeare.

But Howard wanted the elegy included in the Norton anthology as an example of how attribution studies are performed.

Shakespeareans read the funeral poem with a shock of recognition and dismay over the similarities to Shakespeare, Foster said.

Foster, who admits the funeral poem is rather dull and, if indeed Shakespeare's, doesn't add much to the canon of the playwright's work, had never sought publicity for his attribution.

But six years after his dissertation, "Elegy by W.S.: A Study in Attribution," was published, Shakespeareans organized a discussion of the elegy at a Modern Language Association convention in Chicago in 1995.

"Suddenly it was big news," he said, of the poem he discovered while a student at the University of California-Santa Barbara. "It was big news because it was Shakespeare, not because it's a great poem."

It is Foster's investigation of the not-so-witty poem written to eulogize a man murdered almost 400 years ago that led to his work investigating modern-day crimes.

He is one of the few people to perform such detailed, technically-based comparisons of written documents, according to James Fitzgerald, a supervisory special agent for the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crimes.

"Years ago we mostly only compared (documents) by handwriting or by the typewriter keystrokes," said Fitzgerald, a profiler in the department made famous by the movie "Silence of the Lambs." "Now you'll see that along with more content analysis, statement analysis and behavioral analysis of written work."

Fitzgerald first met Foster after the professor was asked by Theodore Kaczynski's lawyers to help rebut the FBI's analysis of writings that led to the search warrant for Kaczynski's Montana cabin. Foster thought the FBI's analysis was thorough and eventually filed a declaration supporting the affidavit.

"Very few of us are aware that we repeat what we read," Foster said. "If a person is reading a lot of detective fiction or watching sports broadcasts, the language creeps into the prose."

In Kaczynski's case, Foster was able to identify source material from specific out-of-print books and issues of Scientific American that he subsequently learned had been found in Kaczynski's cabin.

Later this month, Foster will travel to FBI offices in Quantico, Va., to teach bureau agents how he does his work. In September he will travel to Ontario to consult with the Ontario Provincial Police, who are establishing a computer database of language and words commonly found in threatening documents. The database is similar in concept to SHAXICON, a computer database Foster is developing containing words and phrases from Elizabethan and Jacobean literature. The database not only helps determine attribution, but can be used to trace source material and identify collaborative works.

Completing SHAXICON as well as a collection of early women writers are projects Foster hopes to tackle in the future instead of paging through police documents and anonymous notes.

"This is not something I want to be doing for the rest of my life," he said his police work.

While Foster is happy that he is no longer known simply as "that `Primary Colors' guy," being in the spotlight has forced him to develop a thick skin.

A recent CBS "48 Hours" broadcast on the JonBenet Ramsey case implied that Foster had identified the wrong killer after reading passages on an Internet chat site that he thought might have been written by JonBenet's brother. The postings had been made by a woman with no connection to the case.

Foster cannot comment on the investigation, but said he stands by the statements he has made for the record in the case.

"Don't believe everything you read in the paper," Foster warned the Arts Club audience.

[jameson245]

Alchetron.com

Donald Wayne Foster
Updated on Oct 13, 2022
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Name  Donald Foster


Role  Professor

Education  University of California, Santa Barbara
Books  Author Unknown, Elegy by W.S.: A Study in Attribution
Nominations  Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime
Donald Wayne Foster (born 1950) is a professor of English at Vassar College in New York. He is known for his work dealing with various issues of Shakespearean authorship through textual analysis. He has also applied these techniques in attempting to uncover mysterious authors of some high-profile contemporary texts. As several of these were in the context of criminal investigations, Foster was sometimes labeled a "forensic linguist". He has been inactive in this arena, however, since Condé Nast settled a defamation lawsuit brought against one of his publications for an undisclosed sum in 2007.




Shakespearean scholarship
Foster first achieved notice for addressing the mystery of the dedication of Shakespeare's sonnets. In the edition published by Thomas Thorpe, a dedication appears to "Mr. W.H." as the "onlie begetter" of the sonnets, and the identity of W.H. has aroused much speculation over the years. While in graduate school at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Foster formulated a theory that it was a typographical error. Though not the first to articulate the possibility, his article appeared in the Publication of the Modern Language Association in 1987, after he joined the Vassar faculty. Foster argued that the initials were meant to read either "W.S." or "W.SH." for Shakespeare himself, the dedication presumably having been written by Thorpe. Foster pointed to Shakespeare's initials being similarly abbreviated in other documents, as well as contemporaneous publications that misspelled authors' initials in the error-filled manuscripts of the time.
While pursuing his research into these initials, Foster came across another work that led him to believe he had identified a previously unknown Shakespeare piece. This was a 1612 poem, A Funerall Elegye in memory of the late Vertuous Maister William Peeter, and would have been the first new Shakespeare identification in over a century. Thorpe, the publisher of the sonnets, had registered this work with the London Stationers, giving the author's initials as "W.S.".
Relying on the internal evidence of the text, Foster argued that Shakespeare could be the author and submitted a manuscript about the Elegy to Oxford University Press, but two experts recommended against publication on the grounds that such evidence was insufficient to establish authorship. Foster was not given their names, following normal practice for peer review, although he later related that he was able to identify the reviewers based on the language of their reports. The book was published instead by the University of Delaware Press in 1989.
Initially Foster did not claim that his identification was definitive, but in 1995 another Shakespeare scholar, Richard Abrams of the University of Southern Maine, published an article strengthening Foster's claims of the Elegy's Shakespearean authorship. Foster then claimed publicly that the Elegy "belongs hereafter with Shakespeare's poems and plays" and gained international media attention. He supported his identification with computer analysis based on a database he called SHAXICON, used to compare the poem's word choice with that of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The Elegy was subsequently included in some editions of Shakespeare's complete works, though with qualifications, and it was never considered to be of great quality.
After considerable debate, Foster's theory was eventually rejected by other Shakespeare scholars. In 2002, Gilles Monsarrat, a translator of Shakespeare into French, published an article arguing that the poem's true author was John Ford, a younger writer whose works Monsarrat had also edited. Foster conceded that Monsarrat had the better case in a post on the SHAKSPER listserv, saying, "No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar." Foster said he had not previously analyzed Ford's works closely enough and had erroneously dismissed him as a possibility.
Literary analysis in contemporary cases



Meanwhile, the publicity surrounding Foster's analytical skills led to him being called upon to track down the authors of various anonymous and pseudonymous texts. Using a mixture of traditional scholarship and computers to perform textual comparisons, Foster looked for unique and unusual usage patterns. Computer-based statistical techniques for textual analysis had been used by historians before Foster, most notably with the Federalist Papers. As Foster has pointed out, however, such methods are not definitive: "The notion has been perpetuated that there's a computer program that can identify authorship, and there isn't".
In 1996, Foster was one of the people who helped reveal Joe Klein as the author of the "anonymous" bestseller Primary Colors. Foster named Klein in an article for New York magazine, following the lead of a former Clinton speechwriter, David Kusnet, who had fingered Klein in the Baltimore Sun a few weeks earlier. Klein objected, partly because the theories cited similarities between the book and Klein's writings on racial issues, and he disliked the way his attitude was being characterized. The matter subsided after additional revelations forced Klein to acknowledge that he wrote the book.
In some instances, Foster has raised arguments challenging whether the person traditionally identified as the author of a text was correct. He has pointed to an obscure Beat writer, Tom Hawkins, as the author of the Wanda Tinasky letters, which some had previously speculated to be the work of Thomas Pynchon. Foster also joined a long-running effort by descendants of Henry Livingston Jr. to show that their ancestor, and not Clement Clarke Moore, wrote the famous poem A Visit from St. Nicholas.
Foster provided his account of sleuthing out these and other identifications in his book Author Unknown (including the Shakespeare-Elegy connection, which he still supported at the time). The chapters on Shakespeare and Klein were praised as particularly lively, although the rest of the book was considered less substantial. One reviewer suggested that he spent too much time on the personal character of the writers he analyzed, such as Klein's alleged "issues" with blacks and women, or Moore's support for slavery. The reviewer still found Foster's arguments about authorship, based on the textual analysis of their writing styles, convincing.
Assistance to criminal investigations
On several occasions, Foster has participated in criminal cases that required literary analysis. He was brought into the case of Theodore Kaczynski to compare the "Unabomber manifesto" with other examples of Kaczynski's writing. Originally approached by defense attorneys, hoping that he might rebut an FBI analysis and the identification of the writing by Kaczynski's brother, Foster ultimately concluded that the evidence of authorship was even stronger than the FBI was claiming.
Ramsey murder case
In 1997, Foster became involved in the investigation of JonBenét Ramsey's murder, a case in which a ransom note played a significant role.
Several books describe his involvement.



In 2000, Detective Steve Thomas wrote a book. He wrote:
First paragraph of chapter 27:

[*]"I finally heard the magic words while seated in the book-lined office of Don Foster, an Elizabethan scholar and professor at Vassar College in upstate New York, who just happened to be a hell of a linguistic detective. 'Steve,' said Foster, 'I believe I am going to conclude the ransom note was the work of a single individual: Patsy Ramsey.'"
On page 281 Thomas described Foster's presentation to the Boulder authorities in March of 1998:

[*]"'In my opinion, it is not possible that any individual except Patsy Ramsey wrote the ransom note,' he told a special briefing in Boulder, adding that she had been unassisted in writing it. With his sterling academic reputation and a track record of 152-0 in deciphering anonymous writings, this should have been a thunderbolt of evidence, but the DA's office, without telling us, had already discredited and discarded the professor. His coming to Boulder was a big waste of time."
On page 284, after outlining Foster's "case", Thomas discusses "a package from an Internet junkie named Susan Bennett...". He wrote that Foster had incorrectly thought that Jameson was John Andrew - - but he did NOT include the FACT that Foster also said Jameson/John Andrew was the killer. At the bottom of page 284, Thomas lamented,

[*]"...Foster was consigned to the DA's junk pile. Losing him was a devastating blow."
From page 331:

[*]"...Don Foster... telephoned... DA's office had just dismissed him.... informed him he was through doing this kind of work... Citing his Internet comments to Jameson when he knew nothing about the case, they declared that his later conclusions, when he knew everything, were unreliable.
...he would be open to impeachment... 'He's cooked here,' said one detective. It was a ridiculous attack on the man's sterling reputation."
From a book by FBI profiler John Douglas, also written in 2000:

[*]"In 1998, Foster announced he had determined that Patsy Ramsey had written the ransom note, which sounded pretty compelling coming from such an established expert, and (Detective) Steve Thomas has written that he placed great weight on Foster's analysis. But then it came out that in the Spring of 1997, he had written to Patsy Ramsey at the Charlevoix, Michigan house to offer his condolences, encouragement and the statement, "I know you are innocent - know it, absolutely and unequivocally. I will stake my personal reputation on it.""



And from a book written by Andrew Hodges:
From Chapter 8 -

[*]"Based on his comparison of Patsy's handwriting with the ransom note, Foster told Hunter that Patsy Ramsey had written the letter. But Foster, as it turned out, had badly compromised himself as an expert witness when, early in the case, he had spontaneously written to Patsy to tell her that his initial opinion was that she was innocent. Not long after that, Foster had also staked his reputation that an internet personality by the name of Jameson was really John Andrew (John Ramsey's son), and that he felt John Andrew was behind the murder. These two factors came to light later after Foster had changed his mind and decided Patsy had written the note. But by then, the damage was done, essentially rendering useless Foster's 100 page report on the ransom note."
Anthrax case
Foster returned to advise the FBI during the investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks. He later wrote an article for Vanity Fair about his investigation of Steven Hatfill, a virologist who had been labeled a "person of interest" by Attorney General John Ashcroft. In an October 2003 article for Vanity Fair, Foster tried to match up Hatfill's travels with the postmarks on the anthrax letters, and analyzed old interviews and an unpublished novel by Hatfill about a bioterrorist attack on the United States. Hatfill was identified as a possible culprit. The Reader's Digest published a condensed version of the article in December 2003. The perpetrator of the anthrax attacks turned out to be another government bio-weapons scientist.
Hatfill subsequently sued Donald Foster, Condé Nast Publications, Vassar College, and The Reader's Digest Association, seeking $10 million in damages, claiming defamation. The case was settled by Condé Nast in 2007 for an undisclosed amount. Foster ceased any public discussion of the case.

[jameson245]

  In April of 1999, in response to Foster going on 20/20 in September of 1998, I went on 48 Hours.  I lso put together a page on Foster that is available at http://www.jameson245.com/goster_page.htm

This is the post I made announcing the page had been published.   

"Foster's own web page"

Posted by jameson on 18:31:27 4/08/99

Message to Donald Foster

You could have stopped this at any time. I wish you had.
You had to know the truth would be told.

I only wish I understood why you let it go so far
=====================================

Foster called my house, he appeared to be a little drunk, and demanded to speak to my husband.  Not happening, I told him.  He said he wanted to advise my husband to get a good lawyer because he was going to sue us for libel, slander and defamation.  I told him it wasn't any of those things, it was the truth and I had all the documents to show that.  He hung up and I never heard from him again.

He didn't think I would stand up to him but it was the right thing to do.  I would do it again.

[jameson245]

CBS 48 Hours
April 8, 1999
Susan "Jameson" Bennett's Only Goal:
To Discredit Donald Foster
Literature Professor at Vassar College in New York


Why was Susan "Jameson" Bennett out to get Donald Foster?
Blackmail? ~ Vendetta? ~ Ego? ~ Control?
Or Was It The Right Thing To Do?

Before this CBS show aired, Susan "Jameson" Bennett posted a thread on the WebbSleuth's Forum for Donald Foster leaving him a personal message as well as a website link to a webpage that Susan "Jameson" Bennett made just for Donald Foster calling it his webpage to continue to discredit him.

This is Susan "Jameson" Bennett's Posting below:
=====================================
"Foster's own web page"
Posted by jameson on 18:31:27 4/08/99

Message to Donald Foster

You could have stopped this at any time. I wish you had.
You had to know the truth would be told.

I only wish I understood why you let it go so far
=====================================


"SO LET THE SHOW BEGIN"
Below are pictures captured from the CBS 48 Hour Show along with the section of transcript when Susan "Jameson" Bennett appeared.

Listen to the RealAudio of this CBS 48Hour
Segment with Susan "Jameson" Bennett (3 min.)


Erian Moriarty: But like everything else in this case the story doesn't end there. We've learned that before Professor Foster started working with the Boulder authorities he had a very different suspect in mind, not Patsy Ramsey but her step-son John Andrew Ramsey. It's a bazaar story that raises questions about Fosters creditability. A story that begins with the Internet and this woman.

Sue Bennett: A stayed home house wife, bakes bread.

Erian Moriarty: Forty seven year old Sue Bennett became fascinated with the Ramsey case and would spend hours online.
[IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE]

Sue Bennett: The threads are the subject that we are talking about for the day

Erian Moriarty: That's where she met professor Foster

Sue Bennett: They're talking about homicide survivors.
[IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE]

Erian Moriarty: Bennett says that in May 1997 a writer using the screen name of Jameson

Sue Bennett: Jameson's Timeline, the Ramsey note is there.

Erian Moriarty: Who seem to know a lot about the murder caught Foster's attention
So what would Donald Foster say on his computer?

Sue Bennett: He only saw posted by "Jameson."
[IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE]

Erian Moriarty: There were literally hundreds of statements posted by Jameson.

Sue Bennett: Jameson didn't mince words, he just comes out and says, 'the Ramsey's are innocent." And Donald Foster saw one word out of a hundred who said the Ramsey's are innocent, I know this.

Erian Moriarty: After spending sometime analyzing Jameson's writings Foster came to a startling conclusion that Jameson was John Andrew Ramsey. More startling that John Andrew might be the killer.

Sue Bennett: I mean it's just it's crazy."
[IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE]

Erian Moriarty; Foster was so sure that in a letter to his literary agent he bragged that he had solved this Colorado crime.

Sue Bennett: His …… was from Vasser, respected professor

Erian Moriarty: How does Sue Bennet know?

Sue Bennett: I'm Jameson, there's never been another Jameson.

Erian Moriarty: That's right, Sue Bennett is Jameson."
[IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE]

Sue Bennett: Somehow this man who can tell everything from analyzing text determined that I could murder a six year old child with a garrote

Erian Moriarty: Foster responded to Bennett's accusations in a letter to 48 Hours saying that he had just been speculating and that he had never publicly accused anybody of anything.

Sue Bennett: If he was wrong with all of my examples I don't believe that there is anyone should give him any creditability now judging Patsy Ramsey.

Erian Moriarty: And Foster's creditability could become crucial if the grand jury acts on his report and indites Patsy Ramsey. At that point the two and a half page ransom note would once again become the crucial piece of evidence.

"END OF THIS SEGMENT OF 48HOURS"

[jameson245]

CBS 48 Hours
April 8, 1999
Susan "Jameson" Bennett's Only Goal:
To Discredit Donald Foster
Literature Professor at Vassar College in New York


Why was Susan "Jameson" Bennett out to get Donald Foster?
Blackmail? ~ Vendetta? ~ Ego? ~ Control?
Or Was It The Right Thing To Do?

Before this CBS show aired, Susan "Jameson" Bennett posted a thread on the WebbSleuth's Forum for Donald Foster leaving him a personal message as well as a website link to a webpage that Susan "Jameson" Bennett made just for Donald Foster calling it his webpage to continue to discredit him.

This is Susan "Jameson" Bennett's Posting below:
=====================================
"Foster's own web page"
Posted by jameson on 18:31:27 4/08/99

Message to Donald Foster

You could have stopped this at any time. I wish you had.
You had to know the truth would be told.

I only wish I understood why you let it go so far
=====================================


"SO LET THE SHOW BEGIN"
Below are pictures captured from the CBS 48 Hour Show along with the section of transcript when Susan "Jameson" Bennett appeared.

Listen to the RealAudio of this CBS 48Hour
Segment with Susan "Jameson" Bennett (3 min.)


Erian Moriarty: But like everything else in this case the story doesn't end there. We've learned that before Professor Foster started working with the Boulder authorities he had a very different suspect in mind, not Patsy Ramsey but her step-son John Andrew Ramsey. It's a bazaar story that raises questions about Fosters creditability. A story that begins with the Internet and this woman.

Sue Bennett: A stayed home house wife, bakes bread.

Erian Moriarty: Forty seven year old Sue Bennett became fascinated with the Ramsey case and would spend hours online.
[IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE]

Sue Bennett: The threads are the subject that we are talking about for the day

Erian Moriarty: That's where she met professor Foster

Sue Bennett: They're talking about homicide survivors.
[IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE]

Erian Moriarty: Bennett says that in May 1997 a writer using the screen name of Jameson

Sue Bennett: Jameson's Timeline, the Ramsey note is there.

Erian Moriarty: Who seem to know a lot about the murder caught Foster's attention
So what would Donald Foster say on his computer?

Sue Bennett: He only saw posted by "Jameson."
[IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE]

Erian Moriarty: There were literally hundreds of statements posted by Jameson.

Sue Bennett: Jameson didn't mince words, he just comes out and says, 'the Ramsey's are innocent." And Donald Foster saw one word out of a hundred who said the Ramsey's are innocent, I know this.

Erian Moriarty: After spending sometime analyzing Jameson's writings Foster came to a startling conclusion that Jameson was John Andrew Ramsey. More startling that John Andrew might be the killer.

Sue Bennett: I mean it's just it's crazy."
[IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE]

Erian Moriarty; Foster was so sure that in a letter to his literary agent he bragged that he had solved this Colorado crime.

Sue Bennett: His …… was from Vasser, respected professor

Erian Moriarty: How does Sue Bennet know?

Sue Bennett: I'm Jameson, there's never been another Jameson.

Erian Moriarty: That's right, Sue Bennett is Jameson."
[IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE]

Sue Bennett: Somehow this man who can tell everything from analyzing text determined that I could murder a six year old child with a garrote

Erian Moriarty: Foster responded to Bennett's accusations in a letter to 48 Hours saying that he had just been speculating and that he had never publicly accused anybody of anything.

Sue Bennett: If he was wrong with all of my examples I don't believe that there is anyone should give him any creditability now judging Patsy Ramsey.

Erian Moriarty: And Foster's creditability could become crucial if the grand jury acts on his report and indites Patsy Ramsey. At that point the two and a half page ransom note would once again become the crucial piece of evidence.

"END OF THIS SEGMENT OF 48HOURS"

[jameson245]

FIRST email from Foster to jameson

Subj: thanks
Date: 97-05-22 14:22:46 EDT
From: foxxxxxx@vassar.edu (Don Foster)
To: jameson245@aol.com

Dear Jams Jameson,

Because of my notoriety as a text analyst, I get asked every day about the Ramsey case. (I'm the Vassar prof. who identified Joe Klein as the author of the best seller *Primary Colors* "by Anonymous," just three weeks after the book was published and six months before Klein confessed; I'm currently serving as an expert witness in the unabom case.) I have no role in the investigation, nor do I expect to be invited to participate, either by the Ramseys or by the police. I'm writing this note for just one reason: to commend you for your internet posts. You're one of the few folks urging restraint - and about the only one who's done so with much intelligence and eloquence. Some of the things being said about the Ramseys on the web are really vile. The lurid imagination of these folks says more about themselves than about the Ramsey family. In our country, people should be innocent until proven guilty - and John and Patsy Ramsey most definitely have not yet been proved guilty of anything. Thanks for reminding these anonymous and pseudonymous voyeurs of that fact...

Best wishes,
Don Foster
Department of English
Vassar College