MISSING POSTER

[ellebee]

Jul 11, 2018 15:38:29 GMT warren said:

An interesting parallel:

About a million years ago when BTK was on the loose, I was on the Kansas.com forum (the main BTK forum, and what a zoo that was!). One night, on the forum, I was accussed of being BTK's lawyer and that I had an actual picture of him (people on that forum knew I was a lawyer). Rapidly, it morphed into - that I was BTK!
There were like 600 posts that evening about me being BTK, but I hadn't been on the forum that night. They were all deleted by morning, and I only heard about it through PMs. Thought it was funny as hell, but then the thought started creeping in, "When do they start crashing the door in?" Not a good feeling.

Not at all a parallel.  We know that the man suspected to be EAR/ONS is a specific person, whose name is Joseph James DeAngelo, Jr.  We know where he currently is; he is in jail. 

No one knew who BTK was at the time you mention, so in your case this may well have been defamation or libel.  But you can't defame or libel person X by saying that person X is also person Y when the identity of person Y is known.  Either person X and person Y are the same person, or they aren't.  If they are, everything said about person Y that is true is also true of person X, so no defamation or libel.  And if they aren't, then person X can easily prove these things are not relevant to him/her by simply identifying him/herself.  Once again, all the bad stuff is squarely on the shoulders of person Y, who is known.  Person X was never defamed. 


No one in their right mind is going to say to person X, "someone thought this anonymous screen name you used belonged to a person who did bad things. Now that we know that was YOUR screen name, and therefore know you aren't him and, by extension, aren't the person who did the horrible things he is accused of, we're going to fire you or think less of you." 

I can't see any attorney taking on this kind of case.  

Why this is so hard for people to grasp I don't understand.  

[rkz]

Jul 11, 2018 17:43:09 GMT ellebee said:

Jul 11, 2018 15:38:29 GMT warren said:

An interesting parallel:

About a million years ago when BTK was on the loose, I was on the Kansas.com forum (the main BTK forum, and what a zoo that was!). One night, on the forum, I was accussed of being BTK's lawyer and that I had an actual picture of him (people on that forum knew I was a lawyer). Rapidly, it morphed into - that I was BTK!
There were like 600 posts that evening about me being BTK, but I hadn't been on the forum that night. They were all deleted by morning, and I only heard about it through PMs. Thought it was funny as hell, but then the thought started creeping in, "When do they start crashing the door in?" Not a good feeling.

Not at all a parallel.  We know that the man suspected to be EAR/ONS is a specific person, whose name is Joseph James DeAngelo, Jr.  We know where he currently is- in jail.  No one knew who BTK was at the time you mention, so in your case this may well have been defamation or libel.  But you can't defame or libel person X by saying that person X is also person Y when the identity of person Y is known.  Either person X and person Y are the same person, or they aren't.  If they are, everything said about person Y that is true is also true of person X, so no defamation or libel.  And if they aren't, then person X can easily prove these things are not relevant to him/her by simply identifying him/herself.  Once again, all the bad stuff is squarely on the shoulders of person Y, who is known.  Person X was never defamed. 


No one in their right mind is going to say to person X, "someone thought this anonymous screen name you used belonged to a person who did bad things. Now that we know that was YOUR screen name, and therefore know you aren't him and, by extension, aren't the person who did the horrible things he is accused of, we're going to fire you or think less of you." 

I can't see any attorney taking on this kind of case.  

Why this is so hard for people to grasp I don't understand.  

I think the parallel this poster was referring to was how in both cases lots and lots of people jumped or are jumping to conclusions.

[ellebee]

Jul 11, 2018 17:53:05 GMT rkz said:

Jul 11, 2018 17:43:09 GMT ellebee said:

Not at all a parallel.  We know that the man suspected to be EAR/ONS is a specific person, whose name is Joseph James DeAngelo, Jr.  We know where he currently is- in jail.  No one knew who BTK was at the time you mention, so in your case this may well have been defamation or libel.  But you can't defame or libel person X by saying that person X is also person Y when the identity of person Y is known.  Either person X and person Y are the same person, or they aren't.  If they are, everything said about person Y that is true is also true of person X, so no defamation or libel.  And if they aren't, then person X can easily prove these things are not relevant to him/her by simply identifying him/herself.  Once again, all the bad stuff is squarely on the shoulders of person Y, who is known.  Person X was never defamed. 


No one in their right mind is going to say to person X, "someone thought this anonymous screen name you used belonged to a person who did bad things. Now that we know that was YOUR screen name, and therefore know you aren't him and, by extension, aren't the person who did the horrible things he is accused of, we're going to fire you or think less of you." 

I can't see any attorney taking on this kind of case.  

Why this is so hard for people to grasp I don't understand.  

I think the parallel this poster was referring to was how in both cases lots and lots of people jumped or are jumping to conclusions.

Well, that could be.  As for me, I find the idea intriguing but I think we can't say one way or the other without further info.  So I'll wait and see.  

[Deleted]

Jul 11, 2018 17:54:16 GMT ellebee said:

Jul 11, 2018 17:53:05 GMT rkz said:

I think the parallel this poster was referring to was how in both cases lots and lots of people jumped or are jumping to conclusions.

Well, that could be.  As for me, I find the idea intriguing but I think we can't say one way or the other without further info.  So I'll wait and see.  

IMHO the simplest explanation is simply JJD=cbd, and the mods, or at least the top-dog admin, are aware of this fact. Thus there is a 0% chance of somebody suing. OTOH, it is not possible for the mods to come clean and tell us about it, nor is this in any way necessary. This is possible evidence that can be used in trials where they might well have a shortage of evidence.

[newcastle1988]

Jul 11, 2018 17:43:09 GMT ellebee said:

Why this is so hard for people to grasp I don't understand.  

For real. Never has something been explained so clearly by so many and been so wilfully misunderstood!

Also I find it funny that people are claiming it is ‘incredibly unlikely’ that CBK is JJD without anything to back it up- if someone was told the entire story of GSK as if it was a movie plot, they would call it incredibly unlikely. The notion that JJD was monitoring and occasionally posting on this forum is plainly not incredibly unlikely at all.

[ellebee]

Jul 11, 2018 21:51:09 GMT newcastle1988 said:

Jul 11, 2018 17:43:09 GMT ellebee said:

Why this is so hard for people to grasp I don't understand.  

For real. Never has something been explained so clearly by so many and been so wilfully misunderstood!

Also I find it funny that people are claiming it is ‘incredibly unlikely’ that CBK is JJD without anything to back it up- if someone was told the entire story of GSK as if it was a movie plot, they would call it incredibly unlikely. The notion that JJD was monitoring and occasionally posting on this forum is plainly not incredibly unlikely at all.

I agree.  As I said earlier today in the shoutbox, I think that it would have been very hard for him to resist looking himself up online and reliving his crimes that way, assuming he knew how to operate a computer.  And, since there was a computer in his home that was functioning at the time of his arrest, per Paul Holes, we can eliminate the idea that he was computer illiterate.  I have friends older than he is who use sophisticated software on their computers to enhance their photographs because photography is a serious retirement hobby.  I'm older, though not quite that old, and I've been working with computers since the early 80's.  The stereotype of older people being completely unable to function on a computer is not really true for many of us old timers.  

[walter]

Jul 11, 2018 21:51:09 GMT newcastle1988 said:

Jul 11, 2018 17:43:09 GMT ellebee said:

Why this is so hard for people to grasp I don't understand.  

For real. Never has something been explained so clearly by so many and been so wilfully misunderstood!

Also I find it funny that people are claiming it is ‘incredibly unlikely’ that CBK is JJD without anything to back it up- if someone was told the entire story of GSK as if it was a movie plot, they would call it incredibly unlikely. The notion that JJD was monitoring and occasionally posting on this forum is plainly not incredibly unlikely at all.

Because the onus isn’t on people to prove he isn’t. It’s for people to prove he is. And so far no one has produced a single thing that even slightly would make anyone serious even turn their head.

If they could quote something pretty suggestive I’d be on board but so far no one has at all.

[rkz]

Jul 11, 2018 22:27:45 GMT walter said:

Jul 11, 2018 21:51:09 GMT newcastle1988 said:

For real. Never has something been explained so clearly by so many and been so wilfully misunderstood!

Also I find it funny that people are claiming it is ‘incredibly unlikely’ that CBK is JJD without anything to back it up- if someone was told the entire story of GSK as if it was a movie plot, they would call it incredibly unlikely. The notion that JJD was monitoring and occasionally posting on this forum is plainly not incredibly unlikely at all.

Because the onus isn’t on people to prove he isn’t. It’s for people to prove he is. And so far no one has produced a single thing that even slightly would make anyone serious even turn their head.

The problem with anomalous events is that people often mistake their surprise appearance for the starting point of a trend. JJD's life narrative was unlikely. That doesn't mean everything else associated with him by definition or necessity HAS to be a similar bolt from the blue.

cbk stopped posting on the day JJD was arrested. That is LITERALLY the most compelling piece of evidence that cbk is JJD. It's not enough.

[ellebee]

Jul 11, 2018 22:39:27 GMT rkz said:

Jul 11, 2018 22:27:45 GMT walter said:

Because the onus isn’t on people to prove he isn’t. It’s for people to prove he is. And so far no one has produced a single thing that even slightly would make anyone serious even turn their head.

The problem with anomalous events is that people often mistake their surprise appearance as the starting point of a trend. JJD's life narrative was unlikely. That doesn't mean everything else associated with him by definition or necessity HAS to be a similar bolt from the blue.

cbk stopped posting on the day JJD was arrested. That is LITERALLY the most compelling piece of evidence that cbk is JJD. It's not enough.

This is pretty much true of all the speculation we did before he was arrested.  No one had anything definitive, but we all talked a lot, anyway  

[evangeline]

Jul 11, 2018 22:39:27 GMT rkz said:

cbk stopped posting on the day JJD was arrested. That is LITERALLY the most compelling piece of evidence that cbk is JJD. It's not enough.

Certainly not conclusive, but we're not expecting to get a conclusive answer unless law enforcement confirms.  You are not wrong that the most compelling evidence is the timing of the posts, but it is that evidence viewed in context with some reasonable assumptions that make the speculation that CBK = JJD quite sound.  You need to start with the premise that JJD was likely reading these forums, which is a premise I agree with.  We have no reason to think he was not proficient with the Internet, other than his age, but most his age can generally figure out how to do what they want/need to do.  My main hesitation is if he was even aware of message boards, because I find that the world of online forums attract only a subset of the population.  But then the boards may have turned up in google searches, and if not, Michelle McNamara's book references them, so he could have found out that way. 

We also know there is no way for him to log in after his arrest (would investigators have logged him in when investigating his seized laptop? I don't know how it works, but let's work with that premise).  Out of members who have over 100 posts, there is only 1 possible user from the search that was done.  So then two possibilities remain -- he lurked/posted less than 100 times, or he's CBK.  I certainly think it's likely that he posted less than 100 times or never created an account in the first place and just lurked, though I think posting could be somewhat addictive.  But then you have to consider the puzzling fact that CBK didn't log in after the arrest, when 100+ posts demonstrate a significant interest in this case. As was mentioned before, that fact has 3 possibilities -- he's JJD, he's law enforcement, or he's a random person who just lost interest and/or had tragedy strike on that exact date.  While I don't find the argument that law enforcement wouldn't have asked the type of questions that CBK did to be persuasive, I do find it persuasive that law enforcement wouldn't interact with a sock puppet account.  So eliminate that option.  Then you have the random poster possibility. Even if someone loses interest after an arrest, I think there is still sufficient interest to at least learn what mysteries remain after the identification by DNA -- there are relatively few crimes connected by DNA compared to the crimes attributed to him.  While always possible that someone could just lose interest, I don't think that is the likely answer, and speculating that a random poster has a tragedy occur the evening of or day after the arrest is also never going to be a likely answer.  I have also noted the silence of the mods.

So, the evidence, while not conclusive, I do find persuasive. 

[rkz]

Jul 11, 2018 23:18:29 GMT ellebee said:

Jul 11, 2018 22:39:27 GMT rkz said:

The problem with anomalous events is that people often mistake their surprise appearance as the starting point of a trend. JJD's life narrative was unlikely. That doesn't mean everything else associated with him by definition or necessity HAS to be a similar bolt from the blue.

cbk stopped posting on the day JJD was arrested. That is LITERALLY the most compelling piece of evidence that cbk is JJD. It's not enough.

This is pretty much true of all the speculation we did before he was arrested.  No one had anything definitive, but we all talked a lot, anyway  

Well....yeah! The way I'm seeing this particular quest is that it seems to me like a lot of people get very very into the mystery aspect of EAR research and when EAR was identified it was like having a house full of snacks and beer and then the NFL announces it's cancelling football this season. BUT WHAT ABOUT MY SNACKS AND BEER?! People need an outlet for that kind of inquisitiveness once it's been primed and teased for so long, and so I see the quest to find cbk as a natural extension of trying to find EAR. It's a mystery within a mystery, and I get why people find that mystery compelling. I seriously do! And it would indeed be a GREAT campfire ghost story if it turns out JJD really was stalking the boards.

I get that psychologically, people kinda need this cbk stuff right now because the bigger mystery has been solved and there's all this unfulfilled GOTTA SOLVE THIS THING! energy floating around. Which is totally fine, it seems harmless, I'm not worried about cbk suing anyone or anything like that. I get that everyone's just speculating like they were pre-4/25. I'm just puzzled as to where the seeming certainty about cbk comes from that I keep seeing. It's as if people are embracing something that ought to be self-evident, but to me it's invisible. To my mind, there's just very little that suggests cbk is JJD. If there's something more compelling than just the fact that he stopped posting the day JJD got arrested, I'd love to know what it is. I've read and re-read everything I could find by him and his posts don't suggest anything to me besides the fact that he was taking guesses about things just like the rest of us.

[rkz]

Jul 11, 2018 23:36:35 GMT evangeline said:

Jul 11, 2018 22:39:27 GMT rkz said:

cbk stopped posting on the day JJD was arrested. That is LITERALLY the most compelling piece of evidence that cbk is JJD. It's not enough.

 You need to start with the premise that JJD was likely reading these forums, which is a premise I agree with.

Okay, this is the crux of the biscuit right here. I DON'T start with that premise. Everything else that people are speculating about is predicated on that premise. If you DON'T start with it then obviously the rest of these possibilities become more remote.

I start with the premise that cbk was merely a poster named cbk who had nothing to do with JJD. And then from that premise, I look for any evidence that cbk could have been JJD, and that my original premise might be wrong. If there was more in the way of evidence in that direction, THEN I'd start looking at whether we can locate this cbk character. And if no one can locate him, THEN I can sorta kinda buy the possibility that cbk was JJD.

If you start off from this premise rather than the first, then the first premise begins to seem less likely. If you've ALREADY arrived at the conclusion that JJD used the internet to look for info about his crimes, then I can see that it must seem like there could be a connection. But we don't actually know any of this stuff and people are already acting like it's a slam dunk. Hell, even *I* don't know for sure if cbk wasn't JJD (he could be!), I'm just trying to see things the way its seems others are seeing them, and I'm just not seeing what they see. Probably because, like you pointed out, we are starting from different premises. I'm trying to find ANY evidence that cbk might have been JJD, while it seems like others have already arrived at that conclusion and are trying to make the evidence fit the conclusion.

I mean...if *I* had stopped posting here the same day JJD got arrested, then people going through MY old posting history could dredge up all kinds of suggestive things that could point to ME being JJD. If you view cbk's posts without the overlay of "CBK IS JJD!!" then those posts appear quite harmless and innocent. If you observe them with your mind already made up that cbk was JJD, then OF COURSE those posts are going to look like they're full of suggestive things.

[evangeline]

Jul 11, 2018 23:53:14 GMT rkz said:

Jul 11, 2018 23:36:35 GMT evangeline said:

 You need to start with the premise that JJD was likely reading these forums, which is a premise I agree with.

Okay, this is the crux of the biscuit right here. I DON'T start with that premise. Everything else that people are speculating about is predicated on that premise. If you DON'T start with it then obviously the rest of these possibilities become more remote.

Agreed.

[Fairoaks]

I won't ever forget checking the forum and seeing that there was an imminent arrest. This place was hopping. Wish there was a way for me to have saved every single post that day cause it was amazing. I'm a very unsavy computer user but managed to find this forum just with a google search for EAR. Think it's like the top 10 a couple of weeks before the arrest. Figure if I can find it and post odds are he could have also. He would have a stronger reason to follow any possible developments I would imagine

[rkz]

Jul 12, 2018 0:07:48 GMT evangeline said:

Jul 11, 2018 23:53:14 GMT rkz said:

Okay, this is the crux of the biscuit right here. I DON'T start with that premise. Everything else that people are speculating about is predicated on that premise. If you DON'T start with it then obviously the rest of these possibilities become more remote.

Agreed.

Thanks for understanding that I wasn't attacking you!