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From: Jasper
Date: 9/16/00
Time: 11:51:42 AM
Jean,
Time is not a variable. If it is shifted foreword or backward from the actual time by 15 minutes it alters the possibility of what could have happened between the time the Brown party arrived at Mezzaluna and they time they left. A 15 minute shift forward in time makes liars out of everyone in the restaurant who testified about the time the Browns left and sets up all kinds of scenarios to explain WHY they lied.
To pull off the killing, close timing was essential to coordinate the movements of the killer, his lookout at Bundy and the Rockingham observer. In short, the killer had to know ahead of time where O.J., Nicole and Ron were going to be and when they were going to be there and make adjustments for anything that didn't go according to plan. If you apply Donald Freed's "Clock" approach the testimony of Mandel and the Mezzaluna employees you get a timeline that works with the time clock, the credit card receipts and the necessary preparation for the killing and the framing. You get a timeline that says they were telling the truth.
What we're talking about her is a defining characteristic of Mark Fuhrman and the killer - unless Kato, Shipp or someone else acted alone with no long-term preparation. In that case none of Fuhrman's defining characteristics are relevant and 15 minutes one way or another don't mean a thing.
If O.J. said that he talked to Kato at home after the recital before 7:00 he is either right or wrong. If he's right, so is the time clock at Mezzaluna, the adjusted timestamp on Mandel's credit card receipt and the testimony of Tia Gavin regarding the time the Brown party was expected and the time they arrived. The only contrary evidence is in the testimony or Denise Brown, Candice Garvey and the timestamp on the Mezzaluna receipt, which was off by more than 12 hours and didn't correlate to anything that anyone could accurately measure. Denise and Candice estimated the time with nothing to go by but there knowledge of when the recital started and their sense of how long it seemed to last. That leaves the question of how long recitals of the kind Sydney participated in normally last, which matches Denise Brown and Candice Garvey estimate and your considerable personal experience with similar programs. I can only remind you that Lane and Vannatter's considerable personal experience with homicides in general let them to the early and unalterable conclusion that O.J. and O.J. alone could have committed the murders.
A lot of things in this case were different from the norm. All things considered, it seems reasonable to me that the length of the recital was one of them. A longer recital helps support a drug hit theory but it also makes liars and criminals out of people I don't think deserve to be labeled that way.
As for Ron Shipp, I think J. Neil Schulman nailed that one down pretty well in his book Frame of the Century and in his web site. Shipp had no alibi. What he did have were all of the qualifications necessary to serve as a lookout on Rockingham and a patsy for the killing and the frame-up if the frame-up didn't work as planned. --Jasper