Fact – Fiction – Theory

Separating fact from fiction and theory in the O.J. Simpson case is a huge chore but not an impossible one. The only way to avoid a headache trying to tie the relevant pieces of evidence and testimony together is to start with your conclusions and cherry pick your way backward to the evidence that supports them.

That's what lawyers do when they battle it out in court.

We are not going to do what lawyers do. The adversarial approach to fact finding is the fundamental problem left to us by a justice system that didn't actually replace the feudal system of trial by combat. It merely  gave the champions for each side new clothes and different weapons to fight with.

Once a police investigation turns up a prime suspect for a murder the police routinely stop looking for other suspects and begin gathering evidence that they believe is sufficient to bring to the prosecutor. Prosecutors see if they have enough evidence against the accused to win a conviction. When they think they can win, the accused is indicted. He is now a defendant. The prosecutors then use all of the resources at their command to fill as many holes in their case as possible to bring the defendant to trial. It's the job of the defense to find weaknesses in the prosecution's case and the job of the jury to decide who wins.

Once upon a time there was an institution called a grand jury, not to be confused with the rubber stamp for the prosecution known by that name today. The grand jury stood between the police and the prosecution in the process of deciding whether or not a defendant should be bound over for trial. These were ordinary citizens like us who did their own investigating, not to convict or acquit but to find the truth.

We are going to be doing what a grand jury used to do a long time ago.

The approach we will take here is a systematic process of elimination that begins with alternatives to the question at issue but does not end with a conclusion until all rational alternatives to a particular answer have been exhausted.

We will rely heavily on an analytical tool pioneered by Donald Freed in his book Killing Time. The essence of his tool is that time makes some things possible and other things impossible. By using various events of known duration as "clocks" he created timelines for alternate scenarios that occupy that time. Each scenario could thus be tested against valid "clocks" to rule in the possible and to eliminate the impossible without relying on subjective impressions of when an event began and when it ended. A sound experiment he did with the Bronco, for instance, shows that it would have been impossible for anyone to drive up to the place where it was photographed on the 13th, and opened or closed the door without Allan Park hearing it during the time he was waiting for O.J. to answer the buzzer.

We will also lean heavily on relevant sequences of events using information from a number of primary sources. We will use the primary sources in books, television interviews, documentaries and the trial transcripts (thanks to Jack Walraven). This is how the animations and the time overlays on the Merging Timeline maps were developed.

Please note that the transcripts contain many shifts forward and backward in time resulting in broken continuity and sequence confusion. Some of this time shifting is a deliberate strategy used by detectives and lawyers to make a suspect or witness appear to be inconsistent, confused or deceptive. Some of it is due to faulty recollection because of common association errors, divided attention or sheer lack of attention to detail. Witnesses sometimes recalled a sequence of events in the wrong order, attributed statements and actions to the wrong people and misinterpreted what they saw or heard based upon what they expected to see or hear. No one is immune to errors like these, which you will see in abundance if you follow the various threads on the Iago Discussion Board.

The transcripts also contain an abundance of misstatements, omissions and errors that the witnesses later corrected or statements that can be seen to be incorrect by the context in which they appear.

Of special note is the consistency with which witnesses confronted with news of the murders for the first time gave wildly incorrect estimates of the time that a significant event occurred. Most of these witness went back and diligently reconstructed the time in question using reliable markers for time (phone bills, bank card receipts, etc.) and timed reenactments of their activities. These are the times we used in our reconstructions.

Wherever we are forced to rely on supposition, Occam's Razor, the rules of logic and the laws of probability will apply.

When you see something listed here as fact or fiction you should also see enough supporting evidence to make that claim absolute. In cases where there are dissenting views those views will be shown in full. --Jasper