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From: Jasper
Date: 12/27/00
Time: 1:57:28 PM
Jean,
I have to confess that I am little peeved at Linedecker for some of the careless mistakes he made in O.J. A to Z. I'm even more put out with myself for accepting a key piece of information from that book for Iago without cross-referencing it for accuracy.
It was from his book O.J. A to Z that I got the false idea that Robert Heidstra was in the ally behind Nicole's condo. That's exactly what Linedecker says about Heidstra on page 110. I was scrambling to meet a deadline of Thanksgiving 1998 (I'd spent thousands of dollars in publicity expecting that the book would be in print by then - which it should have been) and made the same mistake everyone does when they are in a hurry. I made an unfounded assumption. Linedecker had gathered so much information so quickly from so many different sources that I made the mistake of ASSUMING that he had seen the diagram that we had only heard about.
I can't blame it all on Linedecker or my time crunch because of all the other mistakes he made in that one paragraph, which told me what little attention he gave to Heidstra's testimony. He listed things as facts that I knew where wrong. He said that Heidstra heard the men's voices at 10:35, and that he saw a Jeep-like vehicle hurrying away "moments later." The key points in Heidstra's testimony happened at roughly five-minute intervals. Heidstra heard two dogs. He heard the first one at about 10:35, the second one at about 10:40, just before he heard the "Hey! Hey! Hey!" and he saw the vehicle going south at 10:45.
Linedecker got the sequence of the barking dogs, the voices and clanging gate exactly backward and he did not mention the direction in which the vehicle headed - a critical point in determining whether or not the vehicle could have been O.J.'s Bronco. O.J. lived north. Fuhrman lived south. Linedecker mentioned only one barking dog.
In his description of Dr. Henry Lee he offers high praise but chooses to highlight his statement that he never said the bloody imprints he talked about on Bundy were shoeprints, suggesting that Bodziak was right and there was only one set of shoeprints. Linedecker uses his description of Collin Yamauchi to trash Dr. Lee thoroughly over his handling of the socks without wearing gloves. He left out the fact that the evidence was already so contaminated by then that it made no difference. Linedecker said the "police" found the socks. Fuhrman said the he and Brad Roberts did. When you coordinate Fuhrman's story with Vannatter's, Lange's, Willie Ford's, Burt Luper's and Dennis Fung's, you know that it had to be Fuhrman and Roberts because they where the first detectives in O.J.'s bedroom.
Linedecker did a tremendous amount of work in a short amount of time - but the speed shows. His book is a good reference source for a lot of very basic information. I used it for Iago and I still use it but I do so with extreme caution. Some of the details in his book, like calling O.J. a "Spartan" in his definition of U.S.C., are unimportant in themselves but they tell you that you have to watch out for the details that are important. They combine to tilt the weight of judgement against O.J. Many of them are just plain wrong. --Jasper