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From: Jasper
Date: 10/19/02
Time: 10:03:37 PM
Remote Name: 66.72.162.135
Rovaan and Miss Marple,
During the e-mail correspondence section of Iago, you will see that I made the same observation about the cobwebs that you did. But when I was double-checking all of the facts that I could before I started making deductions for the last part of the book I saw an evidence photo of the cobwebs. It was hard to tell for certain if the cobwebs blocked the path to the rear but they did appear to. I had to go back to the e-mail section of the book and put in an editor's note that the cobwebs were there.
So, with the cobwebs in front of him, Kato's guesthouse on his left and the cyclone fence on his right, how did Fuhrman get to the guesthouse in the rear? The pathway was too narrow and the fence was too high, with trees too close together for someone to vault it from the Salinger's side in a panic the way Marcia claimed O.J. did. On the other hand, a 6' 3'' man could climb over the three and a half-foot fence with no trouble. If anyone had asked he could have said that he did climb over the fence. The question remains, why did Fuhrman say he went back that far?
I have two answers that fit the facts we know:
1) To help account for the time he spent on the pathway.
2) To hide the Detective's knowledge of the guesthouse in the rear.
If Fuhrman spent most of his time between the two gates before going through the last one and stumbling upon the glove, he loses his rational for "checking out the thumps" next to the air conditioner. If that was his destination, it couldn't have taken him more than two minutes to get there from the kitchen or the TV room no matter how cautiously he walked.
In his book (unlike his testimony on the witness stand) Fuhrman says much about "the maid's quarters" next to the garage. In the diagram he drew for Murder in Brentwood (page 26), which looks an awful lot like the one Marcia used in court, he doesn't even show the maid's quarters. He does show "Arnelle's room" - in the wrong place.
It is crucial for all of the detectives at Rockingham NOT TO KNOW that the housekeeper stayed in the last bungalow and that she did not normally stay there on the weekends. In Evidence Dismissed (page 23) Vannatter says that he asks Arnelle, "Where's the maid's room?" Arnelle takes them to the unused room behind the garage and says, "This is where the maid lives."
Nonsense.
Arnelle knew that nobody lived in that room and like Michelle before her, Gigi stayed in the bungalow next to hers - the last bungalow marked "Arnelle's room" on Fuhrman's diagram and on Marcia's. Furthermore, Arnelle knew that Gigi did not stay there full time but that O.J. might have asked her to stay the night because he was going out of town. Fuhrman went over the wall supposedly because the detectives were afraid for the maid's life as well as for O.J.'s. Their actions show that they were not at all concerned about anyone who might have lived in the last bungalow. They went so far as to agree that it didn't exist. If any detective had voiced concerned about the maid to Arnelle, you know that Arnelle would have told them where to look for her.
That brings us back to Roberts and the two uniformed officers strategically placed to catch anyone COMING OUT of the property. Why weren't the dectectives concerned about the bungalow in the rear? Because they all knew that Robers had it covered. --Jasper