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From: Jasper
Date: 9/21/00
Time: 9:56:18 AM
Charlie,
To lies and exaggeration let me add the power of suggestion, red herrings, two or more ways to tell his story if something went wrong and plausible deniability. All of these traits are characteristic of Fuhrman. All of them are found in that exchange. That's what makes Rosa's account credible. She says things about Fuhrman that we know to be true from his notes, his testimony, his letter to the city attorney, his television appearances, the McKinny tapes and his book. In ruling against the release of the McKinney tapes, Judge Wood called it "puffery." He thought it was and obvious act to inflate his importance so as to impress Laura Hart.
The business about the woman screaming and something horrible happening in O.J.'s backyard was definitely Fuhrman's style.
The story is so goofy that if you hadn't picked up on the patterns of speech and observation that Fuhrman fell into when practicing his tricks of deception, Rosa is the one who would have sounded like the liar - as Kato did describing the artificial thumps. The nonsense about suggesting that a woman had been murdered in O.J.'s backyard without actually saying so not only gives Fuhrman plausible deniability about what he said, it gives him a wide separation from "guilty knowledge" of the facts in case someone did believe her. He could argue that he was talking about Arnelle screaming when she learned about Nicole, which would move the time of the men talking to when he arrived with Phillips, Lange and Vannatter 5:05. He could also argue that he thought the screaming might have come from the maid because she was supposed to be there and nobody knew where she was.
In Iago, I argued that he talked to Rosa and made sure that Roberts did, too, just to see if she could identify their voices. I still think that's what it was about. It certainly wasn't an interview to find out what she might have seen or heard around the time of the killing. He took no notes and asked no questions about that. The question is, why didn't he? Another good question is, why didn't his partner pick up that slack? --Jasper