Austin Sigg, Vicarious Sacrifice, and the Cross

We don’t know a lot about Austin Sigg or his motives yet. That will come out in court – perhaps.

But here’s what we can speculate quite reasonably. I would give it a confidence level of 90 percent based on the evidence.

One, we know Austin Sigg attended various Christian youth group activities at Warehouse 180, sponsored by Arvada Community Church. That was, according to press accounts, in eighth grade, or approximately four years ago. There he met a young lady, whose pictures for a while (until it seems everything was taken down late last week, probably for legal reasons) he had posted on the internet.

The young lady, whose name Watching Eagle knows but will not disclose for obvious reasons, was interviewed anonymously on Channel 9 about her relationship with him. She sounded like a sweet, evangelical Christian girl who loved Jesus. Perhaps Austin did also four years ago.

Then something changed – dramatically. During the interview “Danni” (her assumed name on Channel 9) expressed shock, bewilderment, and that she was regularly praying for him. Our theory is that perhaps she dumped him, or at minimum they mutually agreed that it wasn’t working.

Fairly typical for young love in eighth grade.

But somehow he carried her torch. Up until last week he still had a picture of himself cheek to cheek with her on Facebook.

According to various press accounts and confessions of his peers, various classmates and associates bullied him. Even a girl or two.

Danni was the only girl in his life who had cared, and possibly she rejected him, or he felt she rejected him. So in wearing the cross, which according to friends he did all through high school, he carried that memory of the one whom he believed had actually cared (even while no one else ever did).

Now we know, Austin Sigg is a “suspect.” His commission of the crime is “alleged,” even though by all press accounts he “confessed.” So just in case Austin Sigg didn’t really do it, let’s assume we have another murderer of Jessica Ridgeway still at large, whom we shall call “Mr. Brown.” Just in case, Austin you’re innocent.

The rest of this post is addressed to the alleged “Mr. Brown”. Mr. Brown, here’s my interrogation room summary of why you did it, just like in the series CSI, with which you were probably fascinated.

Mr. Brown, like Mrs. Robinson, Jesus loves you, and Danni was supposed to love you, but she “didn’t”.

Great rationale in your twisted logic to hate Christians.

So you wear this weird cross, which is shown on the news media and seems to come from southern Mexico, all the time to recall the “good times” in youth group with Danni. But you’re also seething like a sulphrous volcano inside.

So you stab the cross repeatedly. Hence, all the stab marks that some professor on the local news identifies.

You also get heavily involved in teen punk neo-Nazism, and you and your friends all hang out at this local abandoned warehouse in Westminster where you are initiated by other cool “Aryan” types into the mystery of the Hackenkreuz, or swastika, which the one the public sees looks a little like. At least, that’s what your “friends” are telling everyone now. Supposedly, some guy who claims to be a member of the KKK is mentoring you on the true white Aryan secrets of manhood.

You put a “zigzag” slash on the cross. That is the SS lightning bolt, of course. But your surname is “Sigg.” Really cool coincidence. Looks like the stylized “S” in the band name’s KISS. SIGG HEIL.

Oh, and you’re a gamer. So you adopt the gamer name “Dohastvath.”

Too bad, you only get the approximate sounds of Germans, and not the real language.

You’re really into Ramstein, as are all neo-skinhead, neo-nazi, death metal, “Satan, man,” types who think “man, we’re gonna start the white revolution”. The FBI already busted those guys thirty years ago, and now they’ve busted you. C’mon.

So you’re fascinated with the Ramstein song “Du Hast.” Yea, right. Duhastvath? Or Du hast was? (“You have what?”)

Stimmt. The eagle spricht deutsch. The Ramstein song is about a conflicted guy who can’t bring himself to love a woman with whom he’s at the altar, and like all good “hate crime” sorts of songs the “du hast” (German for “you have”, the phrase used in wedding vows in that culture) is transformed into “du hasst” (German for “you hate”). A great pun in German of course, which Ramstein intended. You hate “what”. You’re not sure what you hate. You know you hate Christians, as all good pretentious Aryan punks do.

You’re not sure if you hate Danni, of course. So you play out your ambivalence in first your attempted abduction of the Kettner Lake jogger, then of poor, sweet little Jessica.

Here’s the problem. You can’t really grab her, because you’re a twerp. And you’re also full of yourself, because after all your daddy is a VERY IMPORTANT GUY WITH A BIG HOUSE IN PARKER. We won’t mention him here. We know all about him. And, after all, you’re smart. Why shouldn’t the chicks adore you because you’re so damn smart?

I forgot. You’ve got to prove yourself in the Aryan underground. Every aspiring future Hitler has to do that. In all street gangs someone has to kill someone to be a “member” of the team. You know, “blood in, blood out.”

You’ve got to act fast. After all, Halloween is coming.

And, since you’re so special, you’ve got to actually kill someone to prove your superiority over all those Aryan wanna-be’s who aren’t as smart and self-confident as you. So.

Here comes little Jessica. Easy prey. Quick and fast. No one will even know. The cops surely can’t figure it out. They have no idea how to deal with all those weird symbols and clues you are leaving which only your pubescent Aryan brothers understand.

And little Jessica is a Christian. She’s a great vicarious sacrifice for the woman you loved who you can’t really bring yourself to hate, like your mom.

But your mom overhears you and rats you out. It’s almost like something out of the Big Bang Theory.

The great dark lord is busted by his mama.

How comical! How sick!

Too bad the real dark Lord – is he from Missouri Mr. Brown? – got away this time.

How an eagle watches

Have you ever watched an eagle watch for its prey? The expression “eagle eye” is not a mere metaphor. The amazing sophistication of an eagle’s sensory system, which includes the kinds of retinal resolution a professional photographer would envy and an neural information processing system that Bill Gates would kill for, is a miracle of God and nature.

Have you every watched an eagle catch a fish? It will sit beside a lake or river in complete suspended animation for often hours waiting to catch “sight” of the flick of a shadow in the water hundreds of yards away. It could be a bug, or it could be a fish. It is by neural pattern recognition that “the eagle knows.”

Solving crime is like catching sight of the fish. Most of it is done by pattern recognition of both collected evidence and simple clues that are out there in the public domain. You the public are the “spotters”. The crime solvers are the patient eagle in the tree.

An eagle is different from a duck, a goose, or a pelican. These birds are constantly putting their heads under the water until they see a fish. Then they dive. An eagle spots then swoops at lightning speed.

Crime stopping is crime watching, and crime watching is knowing what you are looking for.
Watching Eagle

Jessica Ridgeway

There is a lot of information about the Jessica Ridgeway murder and abduction about which the public remains in the dark. The reason is not a conspiracy to withhold crucial information on the part of authorities or the press so much as the limitations and tunnel vision of many law enforcement bureaucracies, the strict confidentiality of evidence required by the court system, and the inability of on the spot media reporting often to put two and two together.

Political correctness and the fear of offending some constituency also plays a major role. If you are fed up with the refusal of the Presidential candidates to say anything that would actually show a serious grasp of what needs to be done to solve our many national crises, you should not be at all surprised at what happens when we have a high profile murder like the Ridgeway case.

It seems everyone has wanted “justice for Jessica” all along, but be reminded that the one person who seemed to really know what to do when the going got tough was the suspect’s own mother. She is a rare bird who knew her son and had the grit and courage to turn him in. We’re not sure anyone else has figured it out yet.

Now that they’ve got a suspect, everyone is congratulating the police (as they praised Obama for “killing” bin Laden). The tip line is shut down. And everyone is saying, “whew”, it’s over, and we can rest assured that it won’t happen again. Don’t get overconfident. Don Lindlay, a Regis University criminology professor, says we can expect more of the same.

Obama “got” bin Laden, but Al Qaida is just as strong as ever. At the time the government crowed that they had “cut off the head of the snake,” but it was really just an arm of the centipede. It’s the same for the kind of crime for which a suspect was just apprehended. But it took a massive and unprecedented publicity blitz about the case along with a lot of luck  to bring some “closure”.

Question: how often do moms rat on their own kids without pressure from the cops? Answer: almost never.

For the last twenty-five years there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of cases like this one that have been briefly reported and never solved, and have never had any “Justice For…” mobilization as we’ve seen in this instance. There are some even more puzzling cold cases for which little bands of “justice seekers” can still be found trying to sort through clues and lamenting in some cases the incompetence or indifference of the police in solving the mystery.

The purpose of this blog is to put the pieces together as they are picked up one by one. We will also look at the larger picture, including some of these prominent cold cases.

The Jessica Ridgeway picture puzzle is much more complex than many realize, and we will seek to work with all of you to get the real picture, not the oversimplistic and cartoonish one.
Watching Eagle