From: Jasper
Date: 9/9/03
Time: 12:15:29 AM
Remote Name: 68.73.57.163
Charlie,
It’s still early so we don’t know how much weight to give much of the information we’re getting – although the identity of the witness gives us something to go on. We now know that he could move freely in the gated community of Bell Haven because he lived there. His black friends could do likewise because they were with him. The Negroid hair could belong to any of the three (or the cop – or somebody else we haven’t heard about).
If the story of finding the clubs (plural) is true, it doesn’t explain who rounded them up and put them outside. I believe that Rushton still had the woods mixed in with some of his clubs (or he though he did)but all of the irons, except for the one that was found in the house and the pieces of the one that were found on the murder scene were missing.
A few things about the “caveman-style” attack story bother me: In Fuhrman’s movie he has kids running around smashing Jack O’ Lanterns with baseball bats. If that were actually part of what happened that night, wouldn’t a baseball bat have been more easily accessible to the kids than a golf club they happened to see on the ground? Wouldn’t a baseball bat be more in keeping with the stereotype of a clave man hitting a woman over the head and dragging her away by her hair? Martha was dragged away by her feet. Her panties were pulled down but she was not raped.
Moreover, I have to agree with Fuhrman’s analysis that Martha was attacked with a golf club at least two separate times in different location. The first time she was on the north side of her driveway south of Walsh lane (site 1) a hundred yards from where her friend found her body under a pine tree (site 3). Police found pieces of the head of the six-iron along with broken pieces of the shaft at this sight (not in the big pool of blood that Fuhrman shows in his movie). Blood streaks and other drag marks followed a zigzag path southwest across the driveway to the Japanese elm (site 2) where the huge pool of blood was found. This is where it appears that the killer struck Martha in the back of the head three more times (four blunt-force wounds in all – NOT a rage killing).
Question: If “the” club was shattered in the first attack, how could police have assumed that it was used in the second attack? They had to have figured that two golf clubs were used or at least considered the possibility. Doesn’t this tend to support the story attributed to Tony Bryant? But it also supports the idea that Martha caught her attacker stealing several clubs and that he gave some thought to killing her after she walked away.
Martha was stabbed in the throat with a broken peace of the shaft at least a half-hour after she was hit four times in the head near the Japanese elm. Where did the stabbing happen? I don’t know, yet, who this piece of information hurts the most but everything we learn seems to reinforce the fact that Michael Skakel didn’t do it.
Wouldn’t it be something if the cops believed early on that black kids did it and didn’t go after them because they were afraid of being accused of racism? When you let race drive your thinking, you’re bound to get into trouble. When you put any goal ahead of learning the truth it can only hinder you from learning the truth. --Jasper