From: Jasper
Date: 5/3/02
Time: 1:24:10 AM
John,
You have raised some fundamental points here that need to go in the permanent record. The answers are in Iago. But you have not read it. Now that I know your mindset about what is and isn't possible I think I have a handle of how to go directly to those issues in High Points/Fact, Fiction, Speculation. Naturally you can say whatever you want to about it on your site. The link is at the top.
I have to take this is a few parts. Here is Part One:
Me: "Not true. It's not true that there is no way to parse things down to fractions of a minute..."
I should have added… You really need to read Donald Freed's Killing Time. You owe it to yourself and Kato Kaelin.
You: "Oh, okay, just let me rephrase my statement more precisely: There is no RELIABLE AND/OR BELIEVABLE way to reproduce a timeline down to fractions of a minute without having some kind of mechanical record of the event."
Me: You bet. That's why I tossed out Pablo Fenjves and Eva Stein's 10:15 start time. No "mechanical record" is attached to either of their estimates for at least 15 minutes on the short end of Fenjves' and 20 minutes on the long end of Fenjves'. Fenjves did nothing to reconstruct his estimate of that interval of time to see how far off it might have been. He didn't even know if the news program he based his estimate on was a half-hour or full hour program. Depending on his level of interest in what was going on during the actual interval of time before he heard the barking his sense of time could have been distorted by a considerable amount. What he said about the part of the program where he "usually" loses interest suggest to me that this is a real possibility.
Robert Heidstra, on the other hand, looked at his watch before he left the house so his and the duration of the walk to the point where he heard the barking could be accurately reconstructed from memory alone. When you do anything for a total of forty minutes as many as three times a day every day for over 10 years, you've got to be close in your estimate of how long it takes to get from one point to the next.
But there was no "mechanical record" attached to Heidstra's daily dog-walking routine so it becomes useful only if you can superimpose it on one using the start time of the barking as a zeroing point.
I used multiple mechanical indicators of time (as opposed to records) all synchronized to Denise Pilnak's phone mechanical record with the three minutes that she spoke with her mother and her reenactments of what she did after that to the point that she heard the Akita. She narrowed the barking start time to within a minute on either side of 10:34.
I used Heidstra's watch, Schwab's watch, the Dick Van Dyke Show, the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Danny Mandel's bankcard record as well as Denise Pilnak's phone record. I superimposed Schwab's daily dog-walking habits and Heidstra's daily dog walking habits. Then I superimposed the time reconstruction that Mandel did when he got his bank card statement (he paid for his meal with a credit card just before he and Aaronson's left Mezzaluna) of the time it took to walk to 875 Bundy.
All of these timelines -- Schwab's, Heidstra's, Mandel's, Aaronson's - are in a synchronous orbit around the center of Pilnak's barking dog start time estimate (10:34) to within one minute. For the record I have said that I believe the killing did begin at 10:34 (rounded to the nearest half minute) but for rounding to the nearest five minutes (10:35) is easier to work with.
Assuming for the sake of argument that Mark Storfer's digital display really said 10:38 instead of 10:28 his adjusted estimate of the time he heard the baking comes to 10:30 - assuming it was set, as he said, five minutes ahead as opposed to six or seven. That's only a 3 to 5-minute difference between Schwab, Heidstra, Mandel, Aaronson and Pilnak. Storfer estimated that the barking had been going on for 3 minutes. The irritating nature of the noise could easily have distorted his perception of that duration by a minute and a half or two minutes. When you see which direction the winds of perception are blowing with Storfer in this situation you can see how easily even his testimony can be reconciled with Pilnak's and Heidstra's.
Add to this Juditha Brown's Phone bill showing the 11-minute talk to Nicole from 10:17 to 10:28 and I think you've got some pretty solid evidence for the real timeline.
Because you haven't read Iago you don't know how important a false timeline is to my theses. If I am correct in Iago, there has to be evidence of a false timeline, too, evidence that corresponds to the times Mark Fuhrman gave for his alibi. A false timeline requires a believable façade AND the IMPRESSION of a "mechanical record" that never actually materializes. The timelines on record that end before 10:30 have those qualifications in spades. --Jasper