Nix Film

[Tracy Riddle]

Really? They say things like, "Sadly, in this case, we have to rely more on eyewitnesses than we should because the ballistic/forensic/document/photographic evidence is not kosher"?

And just because the lone-nutters say something doesn't mean it isn't true. If John McAdams insists that the world is round, do we have to take the opposite position and insist that it's flat?

John McAdams wouldn't know the truth if it jumped up and bit him in the arse.

Bob, my point is that you can try to reconcile all of the eyewitness/earwitness statements in DP that day and it won't work. Believe me, I've tried. And it's not because all of the photographic evidence has been faked, or because half of the witnesses are lying, but it's because people perceive and remember events in different ways.

This may be true, Tracy, but the general pattern for witnesses perceiving and remembering things in different ways is for those witnesses to bring forth equally different accounts of the event in question.

When you have witnesses perceiving and remembering an event and producing accounts of that event that are markedly similar to each other, that is an entirely different matter. For instance, the number of witnesses standing atop the Triple Underpass that heard a shot from the Grassy Knoll and saw what appeared to be smoke from a rifle. They could all be mistaken yet, the odds of them all making identical mistakes in recollection are slim indeed.

That's true, depending on the event. For example, an overwhelming number of witnesses heard the last two shots come very close together. You can't ignore that. Unfortunately, a large majority of witnesses also only heard three shots. Yes, there were probably silencers at work. But only a small number of witnesses saw smoke.

It's when we get to the personal level of witnesses remembering where they were standing/where the car was when they heard a particular shot - stuff like that becomes impossible to sort out because of the problems I mentioned earlier.