From: Jasper
Date: 4/5/02
Time: 2:02:05 PM
Rovaan,
There are too many key misreadings and incorrect assumptions in your post for me to address the post as a whole. I've made links to some of the essentials (Conspirators and Timeline) for ready reference so you won't have to search through 700 pages of text or rely on your memory for what my position is on what happened, when it happened and who did it. You won't be able to follow the logic that supports those key point but you will at least know what they are.
I agree with you wholeheartedly on the brilliant work that Dick Wagner did on his layout of the Heidstra Timeline. It is heads and shoulders above anything I have ever seen on the subject and anything I was ever able to do myself. Between Iago and my old posts on this board you will see that Wagner and I used the same key information to come to the same conclusions about the timeline. Some of what he wrote about these points is almost word for word what I wrote in Iago and on this board so I'm certainly not criticizing that. The problem I have is in the "young engineer" process he used to reach his conclusion. You can do anything if you make it complicated enough. The hard part is making it simple.
As near as I can tell, Wagner did not separate key points from merely impressive-looking ones (unless he did it in his head). The accumulation of these details could have derailed him. It didn't - but it could have.
Errors in this type of investigation are inevitable no matter what you do or don't do to avoid them. If you don't include enough relevant information you shoot right past avenues of inquiry that you have to go back and forth on a few times just to get past the false timelines and red herrings. If you include too much irrelevant information with too many separate operations to combine them, you also get into trouble. You can end up blazing new trails of unproductive inquiry forever or selecting a great deal of information to fit a particular theory and tossing away the rest because you have more than you need to support the theory. If you don't get everything exactly right the whole model can collapse under the weight of new evidence.
A good model must be able to work initially with a "sloppy fit" (some errors) and get "tighter" with every correction and new discovery. That's how you know you have the truth and not just another theory.
What Dick Wagner told you about Heidstra's old Corvette and Darden's nasty insinuations about it can be found in the transcripts. When I wrote that Heidstra owned a Blazer I was, frankly, relying on my memory because I couldn't access the transcripts at that time. I remembered correctly that Heidstra owned a Chevrolet and that Darden asked him about a Blazer at his apartment's garage. But when I forgot about the Corvette all that was left in my mind was Heidstra with a Chevy Blazer.
I made the same memory error with Denise Pilnak's phone call to her mother. Wagner got that one right, too. I said five minutes. The phone record showed three minutes. But just for the record, I did not make that mistake when I was putting together the Heidstra Timeline in Iago. I studied what she said carefully and concluded that her estimate had to be quite close based on the phone call and her timing of her activities after the call. The margin of error came out to a maximum of two minutes (10:28 to 10:33 or 10:35).
These are errors that everybody makes just because of the way the human brain is wired to recall things - by associations. You will find that every book on the O.J. case or almost any complex subject is littered with errors like this. You will find tons of them in the archives with everyone who gets into anything involved. They can usually be disregarded the way you would disregard an ordinary typo because the essence of the message and what it implies does not change significantly with the correction. Sometimes it does matter.
It appears that you may have made this kind of error with your recollection of what I wrote in Iago and on the boards about the start time of the killing. It looks like you confused it with something that somebody else wrote. That's why you were confused about my position on the dog's bloody paws and why I was confused by your question. The first few pages of Chapter 34: and 34 should help you there. I'll address the rest of your comments in another post.
…On second thought, I'll put up one more link to make the "What" part of my What-Who-When triad complete and in one place. Look for it soon at the top of the page. --Jasper