From: Jasper
Date: 9/22/00
Time: 10:15:58 PM
Kari,
Your post contains a discrepancy between the time Arnelle said in the transcripts available to all of us that she got home, and the time you stated in your post. Don't want somebody jumping all over that difference to dispute the credibility of the entire argument that Rosa couldn't have heard Arnelle's voice at 12:00. According to the time you put in your post (12:00), you back up what John said about the voice being Arnelle's and Rosa being confused about the rest of what she thought she heard.
If Rosa said she heard the voices at 12:00 and you say that's what time Arnelle got home, then nothing else matters to someone trying to show that Rosa heard Arnelle. John was using the end time that Rosa said she heard the voices (12:30 - 12:35) to show that there was an overlap between in their accounts that makes Arnelle's arrival (maybe she was talking to herself) the most logical explanation for the overlap. The point of my post was to show that there was a gap - a big enough gap in the start time of Rosa's voices and the time Arnelle said she got home to make it a far less likely that the two events were related than the other way around. Even if you make no adjustments for errors in their estimates, you still have a half-hour gap. If you adjust according to what we know about the context of their statements and what we know about time shifts in estimating duration, the gap gets bigger.
This point is vital because of the "small army" that John accused Jean and me of pulling out of the air to explain something that could more easily be explained by Arnelle's arrival, Rosa's misinterpretation of what she heard and, of course, Mark Fuhrman's innocence and Kato's guilt. This seems to be John's idea of Occam's Razor (or Ockham's, if you prefer). It isn't correct but so many intelligent people think it is that you run into a wall with them the instant you try to show that something did, if fact, happen that was more involve than the simplest explanation they can think of.
Occham's Razor is relative to an objective. Sometimes the simplest possible explanation is, in absolute terms, highly complex. If your objective is to determine whether billions of dollars and an army of physicists, engineers and technicians worked for almost a decade to send men in a spaceship around the moon, OR a cow jumped over the moon, the cow story is a hell of a lot simpler. But it doesn't fit the facts we already know about physics, technology and the physiological limitations of all known cows. Fitting the known facts to the answer that we are trying to find is the first requirement of Occham's Razor. Most people who appeal to Occham's razor either don't now that or don't us it. They cherry pick the facts that fit their theory and fill in the gaps with any simple story that seems to work. If Kato was the killer, John's explanation is the simplest. If it was Fuhrman, it can't get any simpler than ALL of the evidence indicates.
After doing scores of interviews on the Bundy murders I have found that John's misunderstand and misapplication of Occam's Razor is widespread and entrenched in people who know that they are smarter than average. It is so widespread and entrenched in this population that the surest way of getting away with murder is simply to make it more complicated than it needs to be. The more complicated you make it the fewer people will so much as consider the possibility that it might have happened that way. They dismiss it out of hand (usually with a laugh and some clever remarks about how stupid you must be or how stupid anyone has to be to listen to you) and go from there…
Remember D-Day? Remember why the Nazi's were so sure the allies would not begin the invasion on Normandy? Military commandos from Odysseys to the Navy SEALs and Army Rangers in Desert Storm used the same principle. It worked for them. I say it also worked for the ex-Marine who murdered Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson. --Jasper