From: Jasper
Date: 12/4/2004
Time: 12:47:13 PM
Need to clean up a few things in my last post......Brian, ………The fact that the watch was not a huge part of the trial is symptomatic of what was wrong with the trial. Both sides deliberately left open many crucial areas of discovery and documentation to be debated like the number of angels that can stand on the head of a pin instead of nailing them down. ………Neither side checked Fuhrman’s shoe size or his alibi. They didn’t attempt to corroborate or impeach his baseball bat story. They did not get clear photos of exactly where the Rockingham blood drops were located relative to each other or attempt to identify the person who directed those photos be taken at such strategically distorted angles They did not document all of the blood drops. In each case the truth had the potential of damaging both sides. Ditto with Nicole’s wristwatch. ………The only places you will find credible references to Nicole’s watch are in Lawrence Schiller’s American Tragedy (page 223) and Donald Freed’s Killing Time. Unfortunately in one respect and fortunately another, they don’t agree. ……….Schiller says, by way of his recollection of what O.J. private investigator John McNally told him, that McNally and Shapiro saw only a photo of the watch taken at 10:00. According to this account there was no way of telling whether the photo was taken a 10 a.m. or 10 p.m. and no way of telling whether it was running or stopped. The problem here is that the watch had to be somewhere either running or not running and the person who took the photo was available for questioning. ……… I went with Freed’s account because he hired his own investigator Ian Bowater (among others) to interview witness, review evidence and nail down times without trying to slant the evidence for or against O.J. Killing Time gives you Dr. Golden’s complete autopsy reports on Ron and Nicole. The reports say nothing about Nicole’s large-faced, analogue Swiss Army watch. In Lange and Vannatter’s Evidence Dismissed you learn that photos of the “clothed” bodies were taken on the murder scene. The only publicized photos of Nicole’s body shows her left wrist where she wore her watch in contact with the ground where the face of her watch would be face down in a pool of blood. ……….Schiller’s account of the watch shows that someone took a photo of it, away from the murder scene, with the face cleaned up enough to tell the time. Freed says the crystal was broken with a violent force and it was stopped at 10:03. This is the kind of information you get from looking at a photo AND talking to the person who took it. ……….Shapiro wanted to use the watch to mark the time of death because of O.J.’s 10:03 call from Rockingham but the prosecution could have argued that he made he call at Bundy just before he killed Nicole and the dog didn’t start barking until 10:15 because it tried to follow it’s master and didn’t come back to the bodies until then. Therefore, in the end, neither side wanted to know more than they already knew about Nicole’s watch because both sides where afraid of what it might tell them about the killer. –Jasper