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From: Allita
Date: 2/17/02
Time: 4:01:09 PM
Sorry Kari, I did it again. I guess I think that blank line is for the person I'm addressing. LOL! That last post was mine.
From: Jasper
Date: 1/28/02
Time: 8:41:42 AM
A long time ago I posted a message in which I said that the coins found in the back of Nicole's condo were in the garage next to her Jeep. Charlie pointed out my mistake and Maggie or Allita (I'm not sure which) posted pictures that showed exactly where the coins were found. I posted another message in which I asked about a glass heart. Someone else pointed out the fact that the heart was plastic.
As you go through past posts you can see many examples of where one or more of us got something wrong that we were certain we had right. The best example is probably the year of the baseball bat incident. O.J. said that it was in 1984. Everyone else directly related to the case went with the autumn or winter of '85 in Fuhrman's '89 letter to the attorney general. Knowing how bad O.J. was with dates (he even got his birthday wrong) most of us did the same thing. Kari was the only one who got it right and she had a hell of a time convincing the rest of us because we were so deeply entrenched in our belief that '85 was correct.
The Primacy Effect (the tendency to accept the first plausible explanation we get to a question) tells us that once we get attached to an idea it's very difficult to break away from it. No one is immune to the Primacy Effect. That's why so many people were convinced of O.J.'s guilt before the criminal trial and why it's so difficult to turn them around.
The thing that got me thinking about this had to do with our discussions involving Kato's words and actions on the night of the murders and the morning after. Most of us came away from his testimony with some false impressions of what he said and did. Only when you check the transcripts can you see what he actually said, the context in which he said it and the testimony attributed to him by someone else.
It all boils down to clear mental pictures we had early on from a number of ASSOCIATED IDEAS that we didn't question until something forced us to. I now know where I got the idea that the coins were found in the garage. I also think I know where Kari got the idea that Kato was washing a car out front when O.J. went to the recital and Jolana got the idea (or made a typo) that Robert Heidstra was a designer.
I'm a designer. I wrote about Robert Heidstra in Iago in Brentwood. Jolana read the book. Robert Heidstra was a detailer (same two first and last letters as "designer"). He washed cars for a living. Like a car designer, Heidstra could identify different makes and models of cars better than most people could. He testified to knowing O.J.'s Bronco because he saw O.J. and the Bronco when he (not Kato) washed the Salinger's car next door. He didn't give a date when he washed the Salinger's car and saw O.J. and the Bronco but he did testify to seeing a light colored SUV on Bundy that he couldn't identify at the same time Kato said he heard the thumps. See the association?
Associative errors accompanied by clear mental pictures are the easiest errors to make and the hardest ones to correct. I gave only a few examples. I'm sure that you can think of others that you have made. This is a great forum for getting things like this nailed down. I think that the trick is to stay on guard for our own associative errors (very tough) and to stay open to the comment of others who might have seen something that we missed. What do you think? --Jasper