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From: Jasper
Date: 5/3/03
Time: 11:31:10 AM
Remote Name: 68.73.59.58
Jean,
A couple of years ago I saw a PBS documentary that gave much of the information about Liza (Lizzy) Borden that you just gave, except that the killer was a drifter.
In this documentary, the police reluctantly arrested Lizzy and the prosecutor reluctantly tried her. They had no choice because the circumstantial evidence against her was so strong, she had such a powerful motive and such a weak alibi. She did odd things before the murder that suggested she planed to murder someone, she said and did suspicious things afterward and her statements to the police didn’t make sense.
Many people forget that the jury found Lizzy Borden not guilty, for good reaons. The trouble with the verdict was that nobody wanted to put her on trial in the fist place even if she did do it because she was a sympathetic character and the victims were not.
Lizzy Borden was also the subject of a made-for-television movie in which the writer “proved” that Lizzy did it. Kari, you will appreciate this… The movie starred Elizabeth Montgomery as Lizzy Borden.
Similarly, their have been scores of Jack the Ripper books and movies in which the writer “proved” that the killer was the Prince of Whales, the boyfriend of the last murder victim Marry Kelly, a Masonic physician to the Royal family, the British Secret Service, a crazy Russian immigrant and a woman.
The hardest part of solving cases like these is convincing the public that you’ve actually done it. It gets to be like politics and religion or war and peace. Try convincing a majority of Democrats that a Republican has the right answers to any political question or vice versa. Pick any religious issue and see how it beaks down with Christians, Jews, Moslems, Buddhists, Hindus or Atheists. War and Peace? Same thing with hawks and doves.
To get though with a message that goes against any mindset requires a different standard of “proof” for each particular mindset. What we’re dealing with in the O.J. case is not one or two missing pieces of evidence that will convince any reasonable person, but something that will get people to reason outside of their mindsets. That’s what I tried to do with The Smoking Gun books but they have generated little interest so far.
Maybe a third book in the Smoking Gun series featuring Fuhrman’ Murder in Greenwich move will do it. A long chapter isn’t enough. Maybe the book won’t be, either, but I’m going to write it anyway simply because it proves I was right about the movies I put in the first two books. –Jasper