From: Jasper
Date: 5/1/02
Time: 1:49:58 AM
Charlie,
I find it highly unlikely that Schwab lied about the leash or anything else.
When I pulled up a map for the murder scene and the area surrounding it, I punched in Schwab's address and got a location much closer to San Vicente than Bundy. That didn't square with his testimony or Marcia's map with all of the barking-dog witnesses houses on it so I pulled up anther map from another site and got that same result, so I went with it.
By dividing Schwab's normal rout and time into equal five-minute segments as I did with Heidstra, I could see that his testimony matched the time zones pretty well. In his testimony and in my model he was at the corner of Gorham and Gretna Green at 10:37; at 10:55 he was near the corner of Dorothy and Bundy. At 11 o'clock he was home. But when I tried to model his rout and time on the night of the murders, things started to get awfully complicated. That's a bad sign. A good model should be simple no matter how much you have to strain your brain to make it happen
I could match Schwab's testimony to the model but I had to do a considerable amount of guessing and adjusting to do it. In the end, I wasn't comfortable with what I had when I went to bed. The adjustments I had to make looked too much like "cheating" to me. Either Schwab AND Heidstra were less certain about some things than they claimed to be, or something was wrong with the model. When I got up I went to work on the model.
The first thing I did was move Schwab's starting point closer to Bundy as he said it was in his testimony. He said that he lived about three houses from the corner so I put his starting point as close to that area as I could get it and recalculated the time zones.
Suddenly, everything popped into place. Schwab's testimony and Heidstra's testimony were reconciled with no adjustments and no guessing about the time Schwab spent with the couple on Gorham and the dog and the cop on Bundy to fill in the gaps. The model and the testimony of Schwab and Heidstra agreed. That could happen in only one of three ways:
1) It was one of the most remarkable coincidences of all time.
2) Schwab and Heidstra did a bang up job of conspiring to make their stories agree.
3) The model is correct and Schwab and Heidstra told it the way it was.
I expect to have the latest diagrams up in Merging Timelines soon. They should be good tools for seeing a lot of things that we couldn't see before. -- Jasper