From: Jasper
Date: 7/10/04
Time: 5:45:19 PM
Remote Name: 68.255.166.81
In my most recent discussions with Rose and John, I realized that I didn’t make myself clear about the difference between my references to theories and certainties in particular circumstances. I’ve said much of this before, but to make the criticism of my animations and the rebuttals easier to follow here it is again in one place …
I made hundreds of sketches and drawings of the Rockingham estate before I thought of doing the animations. You can’ tell what you are going to get before you start constructing a complex working model of anything and you always get surprises. I started with the parking angle of the Bronco and the discrepancy between the photos and Fuhrman’s preliminary trial testimony that the rear end was sticking out “maybe a foot” farther than the front. The “funny angle” was crucial to Fuhrman’s examination of the vehicle and the subsequent events that led him to Kato’s thumps.
My job at that time in Ford Design and Engineering required me to locate a part on a clay model car that a stylist had moved but hadn’t measured. On my computer graphics program I had to put it within a fraction of a millimeter to where it was on the clay model but the clay model was not available. All I had to work with were photos of the vehicle with the part in its new location. It was not a difficult task because I had done it successfully many times before. If you have enough reference points to work with along with the correct plains and angles, you can’t miss. I had everything I needed.
None of the diagrams I saw of the Rockingham estate matched what I saw in the photos and videos. But there were enough photos to tell me that I could draw the correct features and calculate the correct angles. Once I did that I could measure the angle of the Bronco (exactly 2-degrees) and figure out whether O.J.’s story of how it got there or the prosecution’s story made more sense (at the time I believed the killer drove it). In the prosecution’s diagram it wasn’t even possible for the Bronco to fit on the driveway much less make the turn off of it that O.J. said he made. Then I noticed that the size and placement of the cars on the driveway and the proportions of the garage couldn’t be right. Therefore nothing that involved their relationship to each other could be right.
In the end, I had a scale drawing I could use to test the possibilities, the probabilities and the certainties involved in various scenarios of Allan Park spotting Kato and O.J. That’s what design and engineering model-making is all about – putting five pounds of stuff in five pound bags. You don’t always know what you are going to get when you start moving things around within the parameters you have to deal with but you can test the variables and know what you can’t get and what you have to get. That’s what I did with the animations using the clock as a standard rate of movement.
Model makers have a saying, “You can’t do one thing.” It means that everything you do has implications for everything you CAN and CANNOT do next. You can’t cheat with a working model made to the correct scale and proportion. In the process of construing it you invariably make mistakes. You get lines that don’t meet, proportions that distort other proportions and features that don’t match your reference. These errors tell you what you did wrong and what you have to do to fix it. Where time is a fixed component of the model and testimony sets the moving parts motion you set the clock to a known time and work forward and backward from there. Errors in the testimony will then show up as inconsistencies in the time and motion. The closer you come to resolving the inconsistencies the closer you will be to the truth. --Jasper