On the afternoon of Sunday, November 27, at about 1 p.m., neighbors of the trailer in Olney where Glenn R. Ramey had been residing with Misty Coseboon for the past eight or nine months heard what sounded like thuds and crashes.
A neighbor across the roadway from Ramey’s trailer, who told Disclosure he was just going by “Cliff” (which is probably for the best, as there doesn’t need to be any hounding of the man), said “I thought it was car doors slamming at first. Then it was more than four, so I knew it wasn’t car doors. Then I thought maybe it was Grandma Sue (another resident of the trailer park just to the west of Cliff’s trailer) banging on something.”
So Cliff went to the door to see if he needed to go help Grandma Sue, and he saw a blue 2002 Ford Windstar minivan, which he knew Ramey to have been driving in recent months, being busted up by “a kid, probably in his mid-20s,” Cliff said, “with a reddish-colored aluminum baseball bat.” Cliff described the young man as wearing a net stocking cap with his hair sticking out of it, blue jeans and a dark shirt. Cliff didn’t recognize the man at all; had never seen him before in the trailer park or otherwise.
Cliff said the man was somewhat systematic in swinging the bat and connecting with the windows of the blue minivan, striking many of them until they completely busted out; and then, when he seemed satisfied with his job on that vehicle, he went to the tan Chrysler passenger car and began busting out the windows on that vehicle.
“He was obviously upset,” Cliff said. He noted that the man took off and apparently, authorities were notified.
Upon a little bit of investigation, it was discovered that the guy had seen somewhere on Instagram that someone had posted a photo of the trailer where Ramey resided, with a caption “This is where the monster lives.”
His emotions were understandable. That he took it out on what he believed were Ramey’s vehicles, however, is just more perpetuating of the sickness surrounding the man and the case….because that vehicle wasn’t Ramey’s. As he’d done to the Gibsons in Johnson County, Ramey was driving around in a vehicle belonging to someone else. He was actually supposed to have been repairing the minivan for a man he was employed by to do mechanic work; the vehicle actually belonged to Aaron Hackney, who showed Disclosure his title to prove it on the day Ramey appeared in court, Tuesday, November 29, for the first time.
Cliff volunteered some information about how Ramey had been at his place just six days earlier, on Wednesday, November 23.
“He was here around noon Wednesday talking about what he had to do that day; it was nothing out of the ordinary,” Cliff said; “He wasn’t nervous; he wasn’t anxious. He was just Glenn. He would come over here nearly every day.”
It’s unclear whether Ramey is fully aware of what kind of a predicament he’s in.
What seems to be coming out about the situation, however, is that Ramey may already be playing his “mental” card.
During the Nov. 29 hearing, Ramey, not yet represented by counsel, sat alone at the defense table, shackled and in jail togs, with a county correctional officer behind him to shield Ramey from anyone who might come out of the audience and take a lunge at him.
When Judge Larry Dunn asked Ramey if he had any questions, the man asked one.
“So everybody done made up their mind?” he posited to the judge and a deep-southern Illinois drawl that only added to the tenor of Ramey’s voice, which sounded for all the world like he was sitting there seething anger at the proceedings.
Dunn had to carefully explain to Ramey that that wasn’t the case at all, and that it was his duty as the judge in the case to make sure Ramey understood that he was considered, under the law, innocent until proven guilty.
Ramey didn’t appear as though he believed that, and kept his head down and his expression stony, even after he emerged from the hallway behind the courtroom and entered the elevator.
There, he tucked himself face-first into a far corner, but just before the doors closed, cameras rolling from mainstream television stations caught Ramey glancing over his right shoulder, and it appeared the man allowed a grin to slide over his face.
Was he playing the camera? It’s hard to say. Ramey has a serious scar under one of his eyes, suffered in some kind of altercation years ago that causes some slackness of musculature in his face; it could very easily have been a twisting of those muscles that made it appear as though the man was smiling.
Or it could very easily have been Ramey pulling out the “poor picked on mental guy” that folks like James Gibson and Robert Coil as well as countless others have had to put up with over the years because nobody could “do anything with” Glenn Ramey.
As mentioned previously, Coil didn’t want to comment much, but he did volunteer this assessment of Ramey, and of the situation:
“He’s the best liar you could ever meet,” Coil told Disclosure in a phone interview. “He plays this poor lil mental boy everybody is picking on.”
Coil also opined about the state agencies that either handed Ramey off each time he caused trouble for himself or others, or utterly failed at stopping Ramey at whatever juncture they could.
“They’ve got blood on their hands,” Coil said of the multitude of agencies involved. “They know what they did. I never thought he would ever murder somebody but I was scared to death he was gonna molest a kid. We wanted rid of him, but we never dreamed it’d be this way.”
Regina, who no longer lives in Illinois, and who, if Sabrina had been adopted out to her family, would have a living 8-year-old with her in another state instead of a child now buried in Olney, weighed in with her final comment: “This whole thing just makes me physically sick. But yet the Department of Human Services in Illinois hands them over, whether they can really take care of them or not.”
But probably the most powerful statement in the entire mess was made by a Johnson County official who didn’t wish to be identified for print, as there apparently are still a lot of people in that downstate county who have a serious case of heartache regarding the whole Ramey/Palmer/Gillihand bunch, on both sides of the aisle, for and against…and with the death of Sabrina Stauffenberg and the arrest of and charges against Ramey, wounds have been torn open anew.
The Johnson County official told Disclosure: 
“There are people who make mistakes, based on bad decisions. Those people can be rehabilitated and can change their course in life, and they can get past it all and become successful.
“Then there are evil people: Child pornographers, child molesters, serial murderers. You can’t change them. They can’t be rehabilitated. They’re evil. You have to keep these people out of the public.”
One agency after another in the state of Illinois continually failed to do that with Glenn Ramey. Whether or not he is the person who raped and killed Sabrina Stauffenberg has yet to be determined; however, even if he didn’t, the statement by the Johnson County official stands, because so many others, it’s been proven in courts of law in so many downstate Illinois counties, have been harmed by Glenn Ramey, some of them irretrievably…and most of it could have been completely avoided.
Whether any of these agencies will now change how they handle child abuse, child molestation, or “disabled adult” cases in the state after the death of Sabrina Stauffenberg is unknown.
What is known is that something has to change.
Children are oftentimes afraid to disclose abuse, no matter who commits it; some children are non-verbal and cannot, but sustain injuries that can’t otherwise be explained. That is a ridiculous excuse to not prosecute, and yet that’s exactly how some people get away with hurting children repeatedly. Prosecutors wimp out and don’t follow through on the “tough” cases, which generally aren’t that tough at all and usually only need an application of common sense as opposed to hotshot defense attorneys wrangling someone’s ability to present evidence away from them of a crime that could only have happened a certain way and by a certain person. Agencies wimp out when someone in a position of authority tells them “You don’t need to follow through on that; there’s nothing to it” and it makes their caseload lighter and thus their jobs easier. Mandated reporters (like teachers, doctors, nurses, dentists), frustrated over Illinois’ agencies set up to be “advocates” for children who are victims of abuse of any sort, dread dealing with them and sometimes simply don’t, because the mandated reporters watch as these children sink deeper and deeper into despair and depression because of what they are enduring when they’re away from school.
Illinois has many broken systems. Yet the budgets for these broken ones grow every year, and taxpayers – the ones whose children and grandchildren are the victims, first of the abusers, then of the agencies’ failures – are taxed into insolvency, all the while hoping “the system” will come through for them, that theirs might be that one child that the system can save.
And then, infrequently, there’s that one child that couldn’t be saved. Sabrina Stauffenberg, unfortunately, is only the latest.