From: Jasper
Date: 5/1/02
Time: 3:48:16 AM
Charlie,
Maybe we aren't on the same page after all.
For the record, I say that Karpf rounded the corner of Bundy and Dorothy a shade past 10:47. That means didn't get to his mailbox until 10:51 or 10:52 and he pulled into his driveway no later than 10:48. For an estimate 10:45 is awfully close.
The time that Stein said Karpf got home wasn't important to the prosecution. Hardly anyone could follow the significance of that kind of testimony. As I've said a hundred times, people are very, very, very, very bad with time. They need a good reason to know the time and a reliable way of judging it. Where conflicting timelines are concerned, they don't bother with the details if they like the story.
The prosecution was all over the place with timelines in crafting their story of O.J. the killer but how many people were doing the arithmetic? In Marcia's summation she actually moved the time that Kato heard the thumps to 10:50 and hardly anyone noticed. The important thing was the final IMPRESSION, not the totality of the testimony.
The final impression was that Stein heard the dog start to bark at 10:15. Even now, you and I can't agree that her best guess of how long the dog barked is meaningless. How long does ANYTHING "seem" to last when it's driving you up a wall? I guarantee that you are going to be wrong every time and the duration of the irritant is going to seem CONSIDERABLY longer than it actually was.
Time crawls when you're not having fun.
I say that Stein was right about the time her boyfriend got home - which was hearsay that never should have been allowed. She just repeated what Karpf told her and I say that Karpf was right about that (within three minutes). What he said wasn't hearsay.
Miss Marple noted that Schwab was a problem for the prosecution. He was actually a better defense witness. It is inconceivable to me that Marcia couldn't find him for the grand jury. The man lived in the same apartment as the couple who found the bodies. There was no way she could hide him but there had to be a reason that she tried to.
To me, the reason is obvious. 10:55 is more than a half-hour later than the prosecution was claiming the killings were over but Schwab was saying that the blood he saw on the dog (surface blood) was fresh. If blood took that long to coagulate in any living creature with blood in its veins he, she or it would bleed to death from a tiny scratch. Nicole and Ron did not die of tiny scratches and neither of them was a hemophiliac.
Schwab's observation lets us know that the dog stepped in the blood much closer to 10:55 than 10:20 or 10:25. That, in turn, makes it more likely that the killings ended much closer to the time Schwab found him.
By the way, I can't recall right now when Fenjves said the barking stopped, but Schwab said that the dog barked most furiously at the corner (a round corner?) of Bundy and Gorham a few minutes after 10:55. That's plenty close for an estimate, but it's not an exact fit. --Jasper