Home | Contents | Search Iago Conspirators Timeline Junot
From: Jasper
Date: 2/13/02
Time: 6:31:05 AM
Miss Marple,
The involvement of Brad Roberts in this incident also jumped out at me. His only role seems to have been to confuse McKinnon's story as much as possible by failing to record crucial details. This was a murder investigation the RHD was supposed to be running. Yet, Mark Fuhrman's partner (whom the public didn't know was Fuhrman's partner) somehow gets the call to interview two key timeline witnesses, Schwab and McKinna. In both cases the timeline gets confused. Did McKinna really say he saw a white Bronco at 10:35? How can we know without a record?
Roberts recorded Steven Schwab's first impression of the time he found the dog, which was way off the mark. It appears that Roberts didn't say anything to anyone about McKinna's story until Lange made his report several weeks later.
Unfortunately, we don't really know what McKinna told Roberts or Lange because his statements were filtered through Roberts, Lange and the AP reporter who wrote the story. Reporters have a way of rounding off details to make a more interesting story that's easy for most people to grasp. On the witness stand and in his book, Lange simply got a lot of important things wrong. Therefore, we can't even be sure that McKinna said that he saw a white Bronco. Remember how Darden kept saying that Heidstra saw a white Bronco when he actually said it was a light colored SUV (good eye Jolana)? The media reported what Darden said, not Heidstra.
All we know is that the reporter wrote that he or she read Lange's police report in which Lange said that McKinna said it was a white SUV. It is just as likely that McKinna told Lange or Roberts that it was a light colored SUV. He could also have told Roberts that it was a light colored SUV and after hearing about A.C.'s white Bronco decided that it must have been a Bronco. It's hard to imagine how he could have gotten the first three digits of A.C.'s license if it hadn't been A.C.'s Bronco. But where is the independent verification that the first thee digits matched? As far as we know doesn't exist.
I don't know how we can be sure that the partial plate number that McKinna wrote down did, in fact, match A.C.'s. It seems more likely that Lange told him that they matched as a tactic to get him to "see" a white Bronco. It was still early in the case and the IMAGE of a white Bronco seen by two different people driving erratically with its lights off was more important than the facts. --Jasper