If you got here by following a link in my most recent english paper congratulations on solving the riddle.  Also, as a note to Dr. Craven, please excuse the fact that I defied the citation rules to include the links you needed to get here, but I needed to get them in there somehow.  Anyway, this version includes an extended look at the past of JP that includes information that most likely won't even found in the book or the paper, and to all my readers, enjoy some backstory.

     Not many people have a child by 19, certainly not an 9 year old girl.  How is that even possible?  The FBI is a bit curious about that themselves.  They’re curious because they suspect he kidnapped her from her foster home in late 2007, then transported her across state lines in an attempt to evade capture.  How did this happen; why?  Lets start at the beginning.
     Julius Pierce, the second child of Melonie and Jeff Pierce, was born January 26th, 1990 in Colorado.  The first three years of his life were fairly pleasant, though his parent’s relationship was starting to show signs of strain after his father discovered his wife’s prior affair. This void grew in 1993, when Jeff discovered not only that was he sterile, but he had been born that way.  That’s news to any father of two, and made the controversy about Melonie’s affair severe to the point that his controlling behavior and verbal abuse turned into escalating physical violence.  Julius was spared from this, but not his father’s contempt, nor the environment it created in the household. 
     By the time he was five years old Julius was spending more and more time outside of his home, running away any time the fighting got bad.  However, when two gunshots rang out in his childhood home later that year, he was right there.  He watched as his father’s corpse was wheeled out of the house; he watched as his mother was tucked into a squad car.
     It was over a week after this before he spoke his first words since his father’s body dropped.  By then he had been transferred into the children’s ward of a state mental institution for observation.  A psychologist recorded his first words and said this about him, “He asked if I knew if his dog was ok.  I asked him if he wanted to know about anyone else, hoping he would ask about his family.  He only repeated the question, looking down this time and sounding a little frustrated.”  To her this was the first clue of his detachment from the incident.  Her later examinations said he felt isolated (beyond what is to be expected of a child in an institution) and showed evidence of resentment of his father.
     During his stay, his brother was adopted from a foster home by a man named Benjamin Lloyd, who was identified as his biological father by a paternity test.  Julius’ absence meant he was not tested and not identified as the Ben’s second son, which was indirectly proven after Ben‘s early death in 2008, at which time a blood test proved that Julius and Dean were full brothers.  At the time of the adoption Ben didn’t believe that Julius was indeed his son, and never went to the trouble of returning to have him tested.  Julius was never told, and may have grown to resent his brothers uncanny luck in being adopted so quickly.
     After two months of observation and treatment he was sent to live with his Aunt and Uncle in North Carolina.  They had taken him because they had always wanted children but ovarian cancer had made this difficult.  Despite their best efforts they decided that he was too much trouble for them and sent him into the North Carolina foster care system and was then transferred into the Colorado system hoping that the return home help his state of mind. 
     From 6 - 10 he bounced around the Colorado foster care system.  Though he seemed to be adjusting well, he never stayed in any home for much over a year during that period.  Just before he turned eleven he was moved to a group home for troubled children in Nevada and shortly after a “rehabilitated” Julius was adopted by a couple living near Las Vegas.  Though it was an unlikely fit for any foster child, he had finally found a place he could call home. 
     The marriage of the couple whom he stayed with there was failing, and though there was no abuse in the household, it was not a ideal home to raise a child in, but the way the foster care system saw it, Julius wasn’t an ideal child and anyone who wanted him could take him.  Maybe it was the troubled environment, but Julius seemed to be more comfortable here than in any of his previous homes and there were none of the complaints that the foster parents usually had about him.  One possible explanation is that the turbulent atmosphere comforted him by reminding him of home, but more likely it was his growing social life, which had him out of the house as much as in.
     It was a local teen named Murphy that introduced him to the area’s abundant street life.  Murphy, nicknamed Murder (apparently an ironic reference to his mellow temperament) was three years older than him, and lived in the same apartment as Julius and his new foster parents after being they took him in from living on the streets.  According to Murphy, he was an escaped orphan from upstate, though he never told anyone more than that.  It was something that Julius could relate to, and they seemed to get along well. 
If  it was a chaotic environment that he desired, the streets around that area were perfect.  Inside the hard music, hard drugs façade was a culture of broken homes and broken lives that was inescapable, and these elements were the therapy they so much needed, and this seemed to especially true for Julius.  Despite the risky and sometimes illegal nature of his life during this time he seemed to be  healthier there and grew stronger because of it.        
  He was sixteen when he started his first successful romantic relationship with a girl named Willow.  This lasted for almost a year and a half before drug fueled indiscretions took their relationship into an uncomfortable place and they agreed to break up.  Julius quickly realized that his reaction to the situation was immature and was more the fault of their lifestyles than either of them.  Surprisingly, the person who seemed to take this the hardest was Willow’s parents who had Julius arrested for trespassing when he later came to her house to try and fix things.  After getting out of jail he returned to his family in North Carolina while he went through the process of having himself removed from his former home and put back into the Colorado foster care system.  Unfortunately, Willow never had a chance to explain that she had nothing to do with the arrest.  He remained in North Carolina for two months after his release.
Late in the summer of 2007 he made a fateful move to a wealthy suburb in the small town of Foxton, Colorado.  Here he met his last set of foster parents and a quiet little girl named Britany. 
Just over five months later the police arrived on a cold January night to check on a security alarm and a witnesses report of “several figures moving suspiciously on the property, both before and after the alarm was triggered.”.  Immediately they noticed a broken pane of glass on the front door that appeared to indicate a point of entry.  Inside, they spoke to Daniel, Julius’ and Britany’s foster father, who pointed out several expensive missing items on the second floor, but police noted that the thief “appeared to take his time… in an attempt to avoid suspicion.”
Officers found the most disturbing evidence upstairs; three rooms had showed more obvious signs of a robbery.  The rooms were each “visibly disturbed, but not torn apart”.  Among them was a den and two bedrooms.  What the police found even more shocking was that the residents of the two rooms, Julius and Britany, had seemingly disappeared, something Daniel had forgotten to mention. 
It didn’t take long for back-up to arrive with the possibility of a double kidnapping.  At that time, the evidence began to take a turn for the weird.  In an odd coincidence, it was discovered that it was Britany’s birthday earlier that day, a clue that didn’t seem to matter at the time, but stuck in detective’s minds.  The most chilling piece of evidence came next, a bloody shirt and a small pair of bloody underwear found hastily tucked under the mattress in Britany’s room. 
Efforts doubled as the police considered both the possibility of adding murder or rape to the list of crimes.  Working tirelessly, it wasn’t much longer until the police found a piece of evidence they believed would be crucial, a shard of bloody glass near the front door.
With this evidence the police brought the remains of the family in for questioning, which yielded little new information.  In the morning only Daniel’s wife and biological son were allowed to leave the police station for the motel they would be staying at until the completion of the physical investigation, while at the same time retaining Daniel, who was shaping up to be their first subject, for further questioning.
Daniel was released, but within a week he was arrested, after semen on a bed sheet found on the top of a pile of clothes in the laundry room, but missing from Britany’s bed was identified to be his.  He was tried and quickly convicted of rape, but police failed to connect him to the missing children or seemingly faked burglary in more than a circumstancial way.
With no one in jail for those crimes, and no bodies, three theories began to surface, each naming a different suspect.  The most unlikely is that some unnamed robber broke into the house without setting off the alarm, stole as many small, valuable items as he could from the bottom floor and on the second floor ran into either Julius or Britany and then took them with him out of necessity.  Despite the fact that it is only weakly supported by evidence, this theory has never been completely ruled out.
Then there’s the police’s first suspect, Daniel.  Evidence proves that he raped Britany on the night of her eighth birthday.  Further there is his suspicious activity with the arrival of the police which, his defenders say, just as easily points to his failed attempt to cover up the rape.  The most popular version of this theory says that Julius discovered him raping the girl earlier in the night, at which point he incapacitated both of them, most likely with a blunt object (some suggest his son’s baseball bat, the most surprising item to be found missing after the robbery).  According to theorists, he then hid both bodies, returned to the house and staged the robbery to cover his tracks.  However, there is one crucial piece of evidence that seems to point almost directly to a third culprit.  The blood of Julius Pierce on a broken shard of glass found just inside the house.
The final, and in my opinion, most convincing, theory is that Julius himself, upon discovering the rape, fled with the girl and is now living under an assumed identity somewhere in the country.  The theory goes that shortly after her rape, Britany told Julius what had happened, which is evidenced by a trail of her blood found linking their two rooms.  Julius then staged the robbery, while in the process hiding evidence of the rape so that it could later be found by police, before leaving.  The blood on the glass suggests that as he left he punched through the door to trigger the alarm.  Also, with the money he could’ve collected by pawning the stolen items, he would’ve been able to make it out of the state and easily start over with the girl elsewhere.  To top it all off, he had little of his old life left and therefore, nothing to lose.
Maybe I like the last theory because it suggests a level of heroism and sacrifice you don’t see everyday.  Maybe I just want them to be alive and well.  Only time, if anything, will tell.


Also, these are the other links I snuck into the work cited page.


Criminal or Victim: Julius Before the Kidnapping

The Julius Connection

Shrink speaks about Suspect's Mental Breakdown