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From: Jasper
Date: 5/11/03
Time: 3:42:41 PM
Remote Name: 68.73.55.158
Miss Marple,
We can't tell where the conversation ended. However, you have pointed out one of the many reasons I concluded that Park was way off in his estimate of the interval between seeing Kato and O.J. for the first time.
Park is on the phone when she sees Kato approach the driveway, stop, look at him and look somewhere on the driveway. He tells St. John that he thinks somebody is home (because he sees Kato). This had to have taken at least a couple of seconds. No O.J.
Park testifies that he saw the dark figure enter the house within the last 10 to 30 seconds of the call. He doesn’t report what he saw to his boss and we have no further testimony about his phone conversation after he saw O.J. We are left with a twenty-minute gap, by PARK’S estimation, between the time he spotted Kato and the end of the call. This is where it seems most likely to me that he saw O.J.
We are also left with the fact that after he sees O.J. he has no idea where Kato is. Kato had to have been out of his sight. He couldn’t have vanished without Park knowing it if Park hadn’t been distracted for fifteen or twenty seconds. His eyes might have been on Kato for a fraction of a second before he saw O.J. but his mind was somewhere else. His eyes and ears had to be somewhere else, too, for most of that time.
Sudden movement attracts attention and sound carries best at night. All things considered, it seems to me that Park had a twenty-second gap in his memory because he was doing something too trivial during that interval to remember. He then looked up toward the spot where St. John told him to look for O.J. and caught a glimpse of Kato fading into the darkness. “Almost simultaneously” he picked up the sound and movement of O.J. putting down his bags and walking into his house. He didn’t have a context for those observations until Marcia Clark gave him one.
On the evening of June 12, 1994, Allan Park was not thinking about being a witness in a murder trial. He was good at remembering things that concerned his mission (getting O.J. to the airport on time). He simply didn’t pay much attention to anything else. –Jasper