Purpose of this Site

The purpose of this site is to lay out in narrative form all the key pieces of evidence relevant to the JBR case with appropriate citations and to demonstrate how the major theories of the case fit that evidence. This site therefore can be a resource to the various JBR discussion boards and hopefully both reduce the amount of erroneous information posted on those boards as well as the time/space spent correcting such errors (often repeatedly!). It will therefore free up those boards to serve their intended purpose: to engage in deep and informed discussion about alternative ways of interpreting the body of evidence and explore the merits of alternative theories of the case.

Want to Contribute?

Please email marple.miss@gmail.com or pm Miss Marple at John Douglas Mindhunter.com.

Site Layout

In keeping with the purpose, I have tried to lay out the site so that the "evidence" appears in one location, while interpretations of the evidence and theories of the case appear separately. It would be best if the "evidence sections were restricted to factual claims "John Ramsey stated that he searched the basement at ??? AM..." whereas speculation/theories be reported elsewhere "Some believe John Ramsey found the body much earlier than he stated because X, Y, Z." In the outline I've set up, I've tried to encourage an "Evidence For" "Evidence Against" style of presentation. This allows all sides to air their views and encourages each side to "put their best foot forward" in terms of providing the evidence they believe supports their theory of the case etc. Ad hominem attacks serve no purpose here. If someone puts up an interpretation you disagree with, the appropriate response is to post the evidence or reasons why you disagree, as opposed to attacking the individual posting views you dislike.

How to Post

For the most part, Wikis are pretty intuitive. Just click Edit Page and you immediately can begin making edits. There are icons at the top for simple formatting and you can observe in existing pages how the Header/Sub-header structure works. The other nice thing about the Wiki is how easily you can expand a section into a new page as needed. Just put brackets around a subheader e.g., [] and then click on that subheader and it will immediately take you to a new blank page. You can then cut and paste any material within that subheader on the old page to move it into the new page and delete this material on the original page (otherwise you'll have duplicate content), leaving behind only the original sub-header, which now will be a link to the page you just created. There's a Wiki tour here if my explanation above is not clear enough: http://tour.pbwiki.com/make-your-wiki.html

There's also a page here summarizing formatting conventions:

http://yummy.pbwiki.com/WikiStyle

I encourage you to take the time to "beautify" any links:

You can beautify links by using brackets and |, like [http://pbwiki.com/|PBwiki] to get PBwiki.

How to Create a New Page (3 methods)

1. There is a New Page button at the bottom of every page.

-or-

2. Use [brackets]. You can put [brackets] around any word or words to create a new page. For example, if you wanted a page named cars, you could just type [cars].

-or-

2. Use CamelCase. You can type a word with SeveralCapitalLetters (or even type NewPage), which will automatically create a link to that page! A dashed underline means the page doesn't exist yet.

Uploading Files

The site allows for adding images or files, but let me caution that initially we have 10 MB of storage space. This is ample space for text pages, but will get quickly chewed up by uploading files/photos. I'm prepared to pay the $50 to upgrade to a 1 GB premium site, but would prefer to see how well this collective enterprise goes before making that commitment. From my perspective, there is no good reason to upload a photo here if we can instead point to it with a URL and brief description here of what it contains and why we're pointing to it, e.g.,

A photograph of the Hi-Tech footprint is located here: URL

An artist's portrait of JBR bound on the floor is located here: URL

A map of the first floor is located here: URL

Sourcing Content

The most useful sourcing is what law journals refer to as "pinpoint" sources which point the reader to an exact URL or an exact page within a printed work so that readers can quickly check for themselves the accuracy of a factual claim. Thus, (Schiller 1999a: 23) is much more useful than (Schiller).

Please List Authors Alphabetically

I have seen examples where people use "PMPT" or similar acronyms to source material. I originally thought of letting users create their own acronyms in a similar fashion, but it's clear this could quickly get out of hand since once we got a lengthy source list, it might be hard for people to find a particular article by a Boulder News reporter who may have written 15 stories on the topic. If some users sourced them by author name while others sourced the identical article by some self-selected acronym, we could quickly end up with duplicate sources and a mess. PBWiki doesn't support footnotes and scholars debate the merits of footnotes in any case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Cite_your_sources#Footnotes

So I think that just using "Harvard referencing" (Author Date: page) is the simplest even if it takes slightly more space than footnotes. In the case of authors with more than 1 item, we'd use 1999a, 1999b, 1999c to differentiate these. However, since this is an "organic" project, I think the first instance of an author should just use plain year ( Brown 1999) and the second instance should begin with (Brown 1999a). Otherwise, the poster who added the second 1999 item from a given author would have to systematically go through the entire site and change all the (Brown 1999) citations to (Brown 1999a) before adding (Brown 1999b). The latter approach seems way too cumbersome to me. Purists will just have to live with the fact that this system isn't pure (i.e., mixing 1999's with 1999a, 1999b etc.) and may even be out of chronological order). I'm an academic and can live with this "imperfection" and hope others can too.

Please Number Sources

Within the text, please do not use source numbers rather than Harvard referencing to refer to a particular work. These numbers will change constantly!!! I only use them because they provide a cleaner look to our Source list, allowing readers to quickly see where one source stops and the next begins. It seemed preferable to separating the Sources by a blank line.

Multiple Sources Generally Not Needed

For facts in dispute, multiple sources may be warranted so that users can judge for themselves based on their perceived reliability of various sources, but otherwise, I see no reason that any given fact needs to be sourced more than one timeSources as an example.

Offhand I don't know examples, but surely there may be instances in which different sources disagree on a factual claim, in which case it's preferable to post both claims and their respective sources than to engage in a pitched battle over which source is more reliable.

Happy Posting

Miss Marple