From: Jasper
Date: 16 May 2009
Time: 12:38:20 PM
Rovaan – At the risk of driving the point of the Rachel hypothesis into the ground, I can’t resist repeating something you said about following up on it. You said, “While I don't believe my random speculation, the exercise in making and testing the speculation itself was helpful and informative.” This is the hidden part of the iceberg beneath the items that end up in High Points and the Picture Gallery. ................... Proposing a theory should not depend on believing that it’s true. All too often it does. All too often, that’s where it starts and stops. It’s the number one mistake you’ll find in most theories about the O.J. homicide case, in the people who propose it, the people who accept it and the people who reject it without delving beneath the surface. Someone will get an epiphany about an aspect of the case that has not previously been explained to their complete satisfaction. The fresh insight burgeons into a theory as those untidy elements begin to fall neatly into place. The temptation on the part of the person who proposes it or accepts it is to protect it. The temptation on the part of the people who reject it is to pounce on the thing that appears to disqualify it.... The End. .................. The Pavelic connection you found to defense witnesses who could have and should have clarified who did what and when but didn’t, is much bigger than anything we could have learned if the Rachel hypothesis had proven to be correct. ...................I also want to highlight the misinformation about Rachel’s age that you found the net – misinformation that makes it impossible to get anything important about her place in the case right and possible to get a lot of things wrong. ....................I ran into the same kind of problem when I was taking a fresh look at Fuhrman’s 22-day suspension. One source attributed it to the Andy Purdy incident, which couldn’t be true because everyone concerned denied that it happened. Another possibility that Fuhrman got the 22-day suspension because of the choke hold moonlighting incidence with Jarvis Bowers. That wasn’t it, either. Fuhrman got docked one day’s pay for that one. It turned out that I got that one right but I didn’t remember how I did it until I started again from scratch. ................ Getting it right or wrong in the beginning doesn’t matter as long as it takes you step by step to getting it right in the end. Thanks for the reminder Rovaan. –Jasper