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From: Jasper
Date: 6/12/03
Time: 4:25:23 AM
Remote Name: 68.74.29.48
John,
Some things in EVERY book on the Bundy murders are wrong. There is no way to avoid it. When you sit down to write a comprehensive book on any complex issue that you have to publish by a certain date you have to make choices that you are not prepared to make. You have only so long after a relevant major event to do it. After that, it’s like trying to sell an old newspaper. Sometimes the time crunch forces you to use a secondary source when you know that better sources will simply take too much time to find. Sometimes the only available information or the most frequently reported is wrong.
When I had to place Heidstra in the right place to hear the “Hey! Hey! Hey!” (almost always reported erroneously as “Hey, hey, hey!”), I relied on Clifford Linedecker’s O.J. A to Z. Linedecker was wrong so I was, too. To identify the breed of dog on Rockingham I picked Evidence Dismissed, the first book at hand where I knew I had seen the answer. Moldea called the dog an Akita so that’s what I called it (it was a Chow). I used 1984 as the year of the baseball bat incident because I used Fuhrman’s letter to the city attorney and frequent references to that time in the criminal trial transcripts to cross-reference it.
Donald Freed made similar errors for similar reasons. You will find a hell of a lot more of them in Evidence Dismissed, The Run of his Life, Frame of the Century, Legacy of Deception, American Tragedy, etc. You have plenty of them on your website with a tiny fraction of the evidence that Freed had to tackle.
You assume that some things can’t be done because you don’t have the expertise or the patience to see how they can be done. When you find evidence that fits your theory you stop looking for evidence that might refute it. You say things like, “…the fact that the five drops of blood at Bundy originated in OJ's body…”
The blood drops that Fung collected on the Rockingham driveway originated in O.J.’s body. They were tested for EDTA and they didn’t have it. The five blood drops at Bundy could have come from Ron or Nicole. The chain of custody was broken. There was a wet transfer stain on one of the bindles that shouldn’t have been there and missing initials on the envelope it came from that should have been there. The lab security system was a joke and NONE of those drops were tested for EDTA. At the very least, isn't that evidence that the original sample COULD HAVE been switched?
You missed the essence of Killing Time. Freed takes the "squish" out of a lot of evidence. He wasn’t out to prove any theory. He gave us a methodology by which various scenarios could be tested objectively. You put a variety of assumptions for the start and stop time of various events on timelines that are supposed to fit the events. Then you see whether the time you can measure with your clocks fit the time required for the event. Where you find an error in fact you can use the same methodology to narrow the possibilities.
Freed made no attempt to identify the killer. He just gave us a tool by which anyone could see that the accused couldn’t have done it and we might be able to find the killer ourselves if we approach the task with an open mind. –Jasper