From: Jasper
Date: 5/3/02
Time: 4:21:10 PM
Jean,
I wracked my brain over the 10:03 time for years. My first thought was that it was supposed to set up a false timeline for when O.J. got off his cell phone. Although he actually got off the pone at 10:04 the killer and the Rockingham lookout could not have been that precise about it. A minute or two could be easily dismissed as Nicole's watch being set a little ahead the way Storfer set his TV clock. In American Tragedy, Schiller says the watch was stopped at 10:00. Either one would work just fine for a false timeline.
Then I thought that the people who said the watch wasn't stopped were right, and the photo just happened to be taken at 10:03 the next morning when the only close-up showing Nicole's watch was taken. But at odds of 20 to 1 that the only photo showing a close-up of Nicole's watch would be taken between 10:00 and 10:03 or 60 to 1 that it would be taken at 10:03, I had a hard time buying that particular coincidence in this particular case. After all, what was the point in taking only one photo of her watch if not to show what time it stopped when it made violent contact with the pavement? And the crime scene photos did show the face of her watch against the pavement.
I had to conclude that the killer did set the watch back to 10:03 because nobody else but a Rockingham lookout could have known on the spot that it corresponded to the last minute that O.J. made contact with anyone until after the murders. That, in turn, suggested that their had to be a Rockingham lookout to account for a far more astounding series of coincidences. It was the only thing that could account for O.J.'s cut finger, the blood trail "from Bundy to Rockingham" the glove with no corresponding cut that was left on Bundy and the blood drops on Bundy that could not have come from O.J.'s cut before he left for Chicago.
The fly in the ointment was the fact that the murders had to have been set into motion around a time that Nicole was on Bundy, O.J. was on Rockingham and the people who walked their dogs past Bundy every day would not be in the area. 10:30 to 10:45 was the only interval that fit all of those requirements.
The false timeline had to be set earlier than that to give O.J. time get cleaned up, as he was certain to be, before the limo driver arrived at 10:45, as well as to give the real killer an alibi and to give O.J. the appearance of not having one.
So far so good. But with the calls to the Wiltshire police station and to 911 there was no need to set Nicole's watch back to 10:03… Unless something happened that the killer didn't count on that made it impossible for Nicole to have been killed before 10:30. In that case, the killer had to improvise. He had to throw as much confusion into the timeline as possible to muddy the evidence of whatever that something was in case it came to light. That "something" was Juditha's last talk with Nicole from 10:17 to 10:28.
Now that I know about that call and because I now know how the LAPD and the DA's office worked, I can see why setting the watch back was smart move. As long as they had enough evidence to convict O.J. they could be counted on to hide any evidence that exonerated him. Anything that confused the real timeline, associated O.J. to the killings and created a division in O.J.'s defense team was good. Setting Nicole's watch back to 10:03 killed all three birds with one stone. --Jasper