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From: Jasper
Date: 9/26/00
Time: 1:33:21 PM
Kari,
Killing Time is a terrific book. Yes, it has errors. So does Iago. So does If O.J. Didn't…. So does A Problem of Evidence. When you write about anything this complex some errors are going to creep in no matter what you do. But the errors in our books are nowhere near as numerous or significant as the ones in Evidence Dismissed, The Run of His Life, O.J. A to Z, American Tragedy, etc…
What Makes Killing Time so important is that it uses the "clock" approach for the first time ever as a tool for scientific investigation and rational analysis. I used the hell out of it in Iago.
The clock analysis system holds that anything you can use as a standard measure of duration is a clock. The barking Akita is a great example. All of the people who heard a dog bark incessantly on the night of Jun 12th were doing something before during and afterwards. By correlating their actions with the presence or absence of the barking to a universal standard of time like a telephone record, you can take much of the guesswork out of various estimates of time. You can then test theories of who might have done the killing with various scenarios against the known times and determine whether or not there was enough time for that scenario to have played out.
In the brief phone conversation I had last week with Donald Freed, the author of Killing Time, I could tell that he was as open as most of is here are to finding mistakes and correcting them whoever made them. That's the style with which he approaches Killing Time and one of the things that makes it such a valuable asset. --Jasper